The opening drops the reader into the story of Captain "Sully" Sullenberger and Co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles as they take off on their fateful flight in February of 2009. What is likely a familiar story is given new life via quotes from the flight recordings interspersed with a vivid retelling of the scene and their lightning-fast decisions. The first section ends with a cliffhanger: Captain Sully’s famous words: “Brace for impact.” The remainder of the chapter is a journey through vivid examples of technology paired with human stories: from the effects on aviation safety after terrain detectors were mandated to the unexpected tragedies when the detectors "cried wolf" too often.

Signal Detection may sound like a dry topic, albeit one Nate Silver wrote an entire bestseller about (The signal and the noise). This chapter starts with a conversation between myself and my friend Abby about her abysmal luck in online dating. Her luck and strategies become the core of the chapter and are used to explain what happens when we miss signals (i.e., Mr. Right) or accidentally keep dating Mr. Wrong for way too long. My friend Seth is a counterpoint: he is too cautious to date the number of women it will take him to find Ms. Right. Fortunately, the site OkCupid was also interested in this kind of signal detection and published their data in blog posts and in Dataclysm: Love, sex, race, and identity - What our online lives tell us about our offline selves. I input their data into a signal detection analysis, showing just how we know whether Abby and Seth will ever find love (with chart). From here, the examples turn more serious: medical misdiagnosis, DNA analysis freeing the wrongly convicted, false alarms resulting in painful biopsies, and of course the unending arms race between terrorists, the TSA, and the family that just wants to get a full tube of toothpaste to Disney World. Even animals participate in signal detection: The US government attached trained pigeons to the underside of helicopters because of their capacity to find capsized sailors floating in the ocean and giant rats are learning minefields in Cambodia and Mozambique. These sections close with a “how to” guide to improving signal detection, both through training and helpful automated systems.

Our workplace has changed so dramatically that a new term for this chapter was created to describe it, electronicized. This chapter will focus on the associated issues of distraction due to personal electronic devices (PEDs), electronic medical records (EMRs), EMR’s OR equivalent, anesthesia information management systems (AIMS), and alarms. The digital distraction due to the combination of these devices will be described. Specific concerns will be raised regarding PED’s ubiquity as a distinct threat to vigilance that has the potential to be significantly disruptive and potentially injurious. Alarm fatigue due to the quantity and large number of false alarms will also be reviewed in detail