The National Cancer Institute, with the help of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, is launching a program to give teens one more option if they want to kick the habit.

The program, called SmokefreeTXT, is a new service that will help teens by sending them useful texts before, during and after they take their last drag.

Teens can sign up by texting QUIT to IQUIT (47848) from their mobile device, or heading to the website and signing up there. The service is free, but they suggest that you think twice about signing up if you don’t have a texting plan. Once you answer a couple basic questions, you will be officially enrolled in the program.

Participants then select their “quit date,” and can receive messages up to a month before that deadline. SmokefreeTXT will continue to send encouraging messages for a month and a half after the quit date, and may also send follow-up texts a couple months down the road.

According to the NCI 20% of American teens are smokers, and that first 6 weeks after quitting is the hardest time.

Here are some sample texts that participants might receive:

Wow, 2 weeks smokefree! Have you rewarded yourself for not smoking? Use your extra cash for that new app, music, movie, or concert tickets.

What makes you wanna smoke? Stress? Boredom? Parties? Write down your top 3 smoking triggers. Knowing ur triggers is the only way to avoid them!

Nicotine is just as addictive as heroin or cocaine. It tricks your mind & body into thinking you need it. Good thing you know you don’t.

In between texts from the program, you can send your own if you’re feeling particularly stressed or tempted:

It’s tough to quit smoking. And it’s really tough to quit when you factor in peer pressure and that carefree attitude that comes with youth. Could some frequent texts really help a 16-year-old kid stop smoking? Who knows. But it sure doesn’t hurt to have someone point out that you’re doing it right – even if that person is just an automated text.

In a study yet to be published in the Journal of Business Ethics, researchers found that people are much more likely to lie if they are behind the text wall as opposed to communicating face-to-face or even talking on the phone.

Here’s how the research was conducted:

140 students were gathered to interact in a sort of role-playing game that put them in a situation where lying would prove fortuitous. One student was given the role of a stockbroker and the other student played the prospective stock buyer. The stockbrokers were told that the stock they were trying to sell would depreciate in value 50% in the next week. They then “gave the stockbroker a financial incentive to sell as much of the bad stock to the buyer as possible,” says the LA Times.

What they found shouldn’t come as a massive shock to anyone. The stockbrokers were more likely to lie or “engage in duplicitous behavior” if they talked about the sale via text message, as opposed to other more personal methods of conversation.

When you think about it, it makes sense. With a text message, you don’t have to look the person you’re lying to in the eye. Hell, you don’t even have to hear their voice. It’s easier to lie when they other person can’t see that you’re nervous – that your palms or sweaty or you’re stumbling over your words.

The counterintuitive find from the study deals with people’s reaction to being lied to. The buyers reported being more angry when they were lied to via text message.

Of course, this flies in the face of the common wisdom that one of the worst things you can do to a person is look them right in the eye and lie to them.

“What we speculated was going on is there is some instant rapport-building, and some quick trust that happens when you talk to someone face to face, and it acts as a buffer and an inoculation — almost like a vaccine — against negative reactions. People are still angry or upset if they are lied to face to face, but when they are lied to in the leaner communications, they are more angry,” said researcher Ronald Cenfetelli.

I wonder if these findings translate to emails as well. I guess it really might piss people off more when they are deceived in an email. My mother did always say, “If a person looks me square in the eye and lies to me, at least I know it had to be worth it.”

The use of text messaging is highest among teens – particularly female teens – as well. Teens sent an average of 3,417 SMS/MMS messages per month in the third quarter of this year, with girls sending an average of nearly 200 more messages than boys.

Interestingly, voice usage is actually down among teens, who say they find messaging faster, easier, and more fun that voice calling. The study shows they used an average of just over 100 fewer minutes this year than in the same period last year.

These results are part of Nielsen’s broader State of the Media: The Mobile Media Report Q3 2011 (PDF). Another part of the study focused on smartphone ownership and app usage across various age groups. They found that the majority of people in the 18-24 (53%) and 24-34 (64%) age groups owned smartphones. Meanwhile 40% of the 13-17 age group owned smartphones, a number which surely contributed to the dramatic increase in data usage in the same age bracket. The study also found and that 62% of smartphone owners had downloaded apps within the past 30 days.

Sure, the BlackBerry outage inconvenienced tons of people, but could it have saved lives? That’s what the police in the United Arab Emirates are claim. They’re reporting that traffic accidents dropped by a staggering 40% in Abu Dhabi, and 20% in Dubai this past week. Their reasoning: driver’s BlackBerry’s weren’t working so drivers couldn’t text or check email forcing them to concentrate on driving.

Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the chief of Dubai Police, and Brig Gen Hussein Al Harethi, the director of the Abu Dhabi Police traffic department, both told The National newspaper:

“Absolutely nothing has happened in the past week in terms of killings on the road and we’re really glad about that … People are slowly starting to realise the dangers of using their phone while driving. The roads became much safer when BlackBerry stopped working.”

It’s likely that the BlackBerry outage did cause some drivers to concentrate solely on driving, but their might be another explanation to those stats, as Naked Security points out.

In late September a talented UAE soccer player by the name of Theyab Awana, died in a car accident when he crashed into a stationary lorry on the Eastern Road near Sheikh Zayed Bridge. Awana’s own father, Awana Ahmad Al Mosabi, said that his son was sending messages on his BlackBerry the time of the accident. Mosabi issued a statement asking drivers to be careful and not use electronic devices while driving:

“There were no skid marks on the road, and Theyab’s friend who was driving behind him said he didn’t see Theyab brake before crashing into the lorry,” Mr Al Mosabi said. “We are not certain that he was using his BlackBerry, but that’s what everything indicates. Too many people are texting while driving, so I ask all drivers not to use their mobile phones or other electronics while driving.”

It goes without saying that texting, emailing, or doing anything with your phone while driving is incredibly dangerous… so don’t do it. What happened to common sense?

What are your thoughts? Do you think the BlackBerry outage played a part in the reduction of traffic accidents? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

And she thinks that Twitter and text messaging is helping our kids with the art of poetry.

Talking to the Telegraph, the 55-year-old poet said that “the poem is a form of texting…it’s the original text.”

Her argument in support of social media and mobile communication stems from the fact that poetry and Twitter have a lot in common. They are both forms of communication that rely on economy of language – saying what you want to say with less.

“[Poetry is] a perfecting of a feeling in language – it’s a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

We are reading less now than we did and a lot of young people spend a lot of time in front of a computer on Facebook or tweeting.

We’ve got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them.”

She says that poetry is the literary form most suited to survive the “age of Twitter and Blackberry” because it is about brevity, and therefore more accessible.

I’m with you, Carol. I, for one, have been know to make use of the 140 character limit to showcase some of my awesome haiku skills.

Let’s think about your basic txtspk.

“Y r u doin that bro?”

“I kno rite? srsly, its fukkin dum”

It all seems to be a descendant of Shakespeare or Milton or Yeats. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day // yo, word.”

And this, my friends, must be the work of a modern day poet –

But in all seriousness, does Duffy have a point? Poetry is all about creating emotion and conveying complex ideas with sparse language – showing not telling. Is all that Tweeting and Texting allowing people to practice their poetry, without even knowing it?

It’s true that studying poetry helps you to be a better prose writer, as you learn how to be concise and how to use only 5 words when you want to use 15. In the same way, Twitter teaches us to use 140 characters when we might want to use 500.

Is poetry being kept alive by social media and texting? Let us know how you feel.

Pinger, a mobile application, recently announced that it would be extending its free mobile communication services to Europe. Beginning in Germany later this summer, the company will allow users to send and receive text messages and phone calls for free. This is quite an achievement given the heavily regulated European market.

As Joe Sipher, the Chief Product/Marketing Officer and Co-founder of Pinger, explained to WebProNews, the capitalist system and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 helped to keep prices down in the U.S.

“It’s cheap enough where we can actually make money on our advertising model and still pay for every text and pay for every phone number,” he said of the system in the U.S.

It’s quite the opposite in Europe since the costs associated with sending and receiving a text to a carrier are 700-800 times more than costs in America. For example, the carriers in European countries, such as Germany, pay each other when a customer sends a text.

In other words, if a customer with Carrier A sends a text to a customer with Carrier B, Carrier A has to pay Carrier B a specified amount. However, if the customer with Carrier B responds to the customer with Carrier A, Carrier B will also have to pay Carrier A the same amount. So, basically, the back-and-forth transactions cancel each other out. The carriers still make money though, because they are charging their customers more than the amount that they have to pay out.

Pinger’s patent-pending technology is a symmetry model that neutralizes these high costs by ensuring that no user sends more texts than he receives.

“The real cost of sending and receiving texts in Europe is zero,” said Sipher. “As long as you send as many messages as you receive, there really is no cost; and then, we can layer our advertising model right on top of it.”

To make this model work, it incorporates a gaming factor that gives each user a meter with 100 points. Once a user sends a text, his meter shows it has 90 points. If he receives a text in return, his meter goes back up to 100 points. If a user begins to run low on his points, he can send a message via his email or Facebook wall to encourage friends to text him to push his points back up, an aspect that Pinger learned from its sister company Zynga.

“It fits right into the existing model,” said Sipher. “We’re just entering in as another carrier.”

There are plenty of companies that create great services and offer them for free initially, but then decide to charge its customers. When asked about this trend, Sipher told us that Pinger would not follow suit.

“The difference between us and the people that say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna charge later,’ is that we’ve made free profitable for us,” he said.

He believes that their model will help them expand into multiple other countries and not only simplify mobile communications, but also reduce the cost of them for all users.

“I think we can take this model into many, many parts of the world,” said Sipher.

On the flip-side, what if you were in a meeting and needed to get a message to someone. The whispering softly into the mouthpiece thing won’t usually fly. So you decide to text. But what if they don’t have text messaging capabilities? Your texts could be converted to audible speech for them.

These scenarios are just some of the many ways in which text-to-speech and speech-to text technology could be used in the future. According to Patently Apple, future iPhones are likely to provide these services.

One embodiment of the invention is directed to an iPhone which establishes an audio connection with a far-end user via a communication network. The communication device receives text input from a near-end user, and converts the text input into speech signals. The speech signals are transmitted to the far-end user using the established audio connection while muting audio input to its audio receiving component.

In one embodiment, the communication device detects the noise level at the near end. When the noise level is above a threshold, the communication device could automatically activate or prompt the near-end user to activate text-to-speech conversion at any point of a communication such as a phone call. Alternatively, the communication device may playback a pre-recorded message to inform the far-end user of the near-end user’s inability to speak due to the excessive noise at the near end.

In another embodiment, the near-end user can activate text-to-speech conversion whenever necessary regardless of the detected noise level. The near-end user could enter a text message, which is converted into speech signals for transmission via the established audio connection to the far-end user.

In yet another embodiment, the communication device could also perform speech-to-text conversion to convert the far-end user’s speech into text for display on the communication device. This feature could be used when the far-end communication device cannot, or is not enabled to, send or receive text messages. The speech-to-text conversion and the text-to-speech conversion could be activated at the same time, or could be activated independent of each other. The far-end communication device communicates with the near-end communication device in audio signals, regardless of whether the speech-to-text conversion or the text-to-speech conversion is activated.

Though it is probably unlikely that speech-to-text and vice versa would appear on the upcoming iPhone 5, future models may well carry the capability. And if you are unaware of the rumors surrounding the iPhone 5, check out our rumor roundup.

How useful would these functions be? Would you be happy to see them come to the iPhone?

 Starting March 1 through April 5, the “Find a Cure” text donation campaign invites people to text “DontGiveUp” to 85944 to donate $5 to The V Foundation, with all of the money going to fund cancer research.

“Crown and Corona are committed to giving back to such a deserving cause, and it’s our end goal to reach as many consumers as possible – both on-premise and online – to contribute a sizeable donation to further cancer research,” said Bill Hackett, president of Crown Imports, Corona’s exclusive U.S. importer.

“The ‘Find a Cure’ text donation campaign is just another part of our ongoing partnership with The V Foundation – helping to raise awareness and funds for such an important cause.”

In addition to donating via text, people can also visit the Corona and Corona Light Facebook pages to contribute to The V Foundation and share the “Find A Cure” promotion with others. In its first promotion with The V Foundation last December, Corona Light brand fans helped raise $20,000 for the organization as part of an awareness campaign via the brand’s Facebook fan page.

“We are so excited to be teaming up again with Crown and Corona to progress my brother Jim’s dream of finding a cure for cancer,” said Nick Valvano, chief executive officer of The V Foundation.
 

In fact, such bans are associated with a slight increase in the frequency of insurance claims filed under collision coverage for damage to vehicles in crashes. This finding is based on comparisons of claims in 4 states before and after texting ban, compared with patterns of claims in nearby states.

HLDI researchers calculated rates of collision claims for vehicles up to 9 years old during the months immediately before and after driver texting was banned in California (January 2009), Louisiana (July 2008), Minnesota (August 2008), and Washington (January 2008).

“Texting bans haven’t reduced crashes at all. In a perverse twist, crashes increased in 3 of the 4 states we studied after bans were enacted,” said Adrian Lund, president of both HLDI and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. 

“It’s an indication that texting bans might even increase the risk of texting for drivers who continue to do so despite the laws."

 Month-to-month fluctuations in the rates of collision claims in HLDI’s 4 study states with texting bans for all drivers didn’t change much from before to after the bans were enacted. Neither did the patterns differ much from those in nearby states that didn’t ban texting for all drivers during the study period. To the extent that the crash patterns did change in the study states, they went up, not down, after the bans took effect. Increases varied from 1 percent more crashes in Washington to about 9 percent more in Minnesota.

Not surprisingly, young drivers are more likely than older people to text while driving. In all 4 of the study states, crashes increased among drivers younger than 25 after the all-driver bans took effect. In California, Louisiana, and Washington, the increases for young drivers were greater than for drivers 25 and older. The largest crash increase of all (12 percent) following enactment of a texting ban was among young drivers in California.

Noncompliance is a likely reason texting bans aren’t reducing crashes. Survey results indicate that many drivers, especially younger ones, shrug off these bans. Among 18-24 year-olds, the group most likely to text, 45 percent reported doing so anyway in states that bar all drivers from texting. This is just shy of the 48 percent of drivers who reported texting in states without bans. Many respondents who knew it was illegal to text said they didn’t think police were strongly enforcing the bans.

"But this doesn’t explain why crashes increased after texting bans," Lund points out.

"If drivers were disregarding the bans, then the crash patterns should have remained steady. So clearly drivers did respond to the bans somehow, and what they might have been doing was moving their phones down and out of sight when they texted, in recognition that what they were doing was illegal. This could exacerbate the risk of texting by taking drivers’ eyes further from the road and for a longer time."
 

Among 14-17 years olds who intend to have or already have a driver’s license, the survey found 36 percent strongly agree that if they regulary text and drive it could lead to a fatality. In contrast, more than half (55%) of teens strongly agree that drinking while driving could be fatal.

The survey also showed that teens think the chances of getting into an accident are still higher when drinking while driving versus texting while driving. In the survey, of these same teens, 63 percent strongly agree they could get into an accident if they text and drive. This compares with 78 percent who strongly agree they could get into an accident if they drink and drive.

"Some teens still think the consequences of reaching for a cell phone are less severe than reaching for a beer bottle," said Laurette Stiles, vice president of Strategic Resources at State Farm.

"We have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to helping teens understand that texting while driving can be every bit as dangerous as drinking while driving. It’s an awareness gap that must be addressed."

Among teens that have never texted while driving, 73 percent strongly agree they will get into an accident if they text and drive. Yet among teens that admit to texting while driving, only 52 percent strongly agree they will get into an accident as a result of the practice.

Current teen drivers also think their chances of narrowly avoiding an accident are better texting while driving versus drinking while driving. With texting while driving, 55 percent of these teens agree they will have some situations when they almost get into an accident but will recover just in time. This compares to 36 percent of these teens who agree they can recover just in time in situations where they are drinking and driving.