HEALTH & SCIENCE

COMING SOON? THE WAR AGAINST BLACKBERRYS

INDEPENDENT, UK - British employers are being warned they could face
multi-million-pound legal actions from Blackberry-addicted staff on a
similar scale as class law-suits taken against tobacco companies.
Research by the University of Northampton has revealed that one-third of
Blackberry users showed signs of addictive behavior similar to an
alcoholic being unable to pass a pub without a drink.

The report found that some Blackberry users displayed textbook addictive
symptoms - denial, withdrawal and antisocial behavior - and that time
with their families was being taken up with Blackberry-checking, even at
the dinner table. . .

In one case in the US, a female business consultant claimed that her
marriage fell apart because she was constantly checking messages. She
ended up losing custody of her children and sued her employer for
damages. . .

The Blackberry backlash has already begun in the US, where firms are
settling out of court to avoid negative publicity. The Independent on
Sunday has learnt that, in one recent case, an employer had to pay
substantial damages to a woman who was so distracted by her Blackberry
while driving that she crashed and killed a motorcyclist. In another, a
woman took action after putting cleaning fluid on her baby's nappy
instead of baby oil because she was distracted by her Blackberry. . .

Experts are increasingly warning that they are as addictive as drugs and
alcohol. They have even been dubbed "crackberries" because some users
say they make them feel compelled to check messages constantly.
This comes as a new study reveals that nine out of every 10 users have a
compulsive need to check for messages and that nearly half experience
long-term negative consequences associated with carrying a BlackBerry. A
survey of business workers by researchers at the Sloan School of
Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US found that
employees were constantly tired because they were waking up in the
middle of the night to check or send messages. One interviewee likened
the sense of potential gain from staying in touch with work to "pulling
the lever of a slot machine".

Melissa Mazmanian, one of the report's authors, described the Blackberry
as a "comfort blanket", which fulfils the human need to reach out to
others but also maintains a sense of control, unlike a telephone
conversation. "Spouses find it frustrating and aggravating and to avoid
problems couples have to negotiate rules and boundaries over use," said
Ms Mazmanian. . .

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article1777821.ece

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THINGS WE WISHED WE HAD KNOWN LONG AGO

ERICA GOODE, NEW YORK TIMES, 2000 - People who do things badly, [Dr.
David A. Dunning] has found in studies conducted with a graduate
student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their
abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well. .
. One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully
self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for
competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.
The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper
appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology.

"Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate
choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,"
wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois,
and Dunning.

This deficiency in "self-monitoring skills," the researchers said, helps
explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes
that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market --
and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue
holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.
. .

Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study,
Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their competence.
The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of
information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects
assumed that others were performing as well as they were - a phenomenon
psychologists term the "false consensus effect."

When high-scoring subjects were asked to "grade" the grammar tests of
their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their
own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored
badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others;
some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own
abilities. "Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize
competence in others," the researchers concluded. . .

The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's
assertion that "he who knows best knows how little he knows."

And the research meshes neatly with other work indicating that
overconfidence is common; studies have found, for example, that the vast
majority of people rate themselves as "above average" on a wide array of
abilities -- though such an abundance of talent would be impossible in
statistical terms. This overestimation, studies indicate, is more likely
for tasks that are difficult than for those that are easy.

Such studies are not without critics. Dr. David C. Funder, a psychology
professor at the University of California at Riverside, for example,
said he suspects that most lay people have only a vague idea of the
meaning of "average" in statistical terms.

"I'm not sure the average person thinks of `average' or `percentile' in
quite that literal a sense," Funder said, "so `above average' might mean
to them `pretty good,' or `OK,' or `doing all right.' And if, in fact,
people mean something subjective when they use the word, then it's
really hard to evaluate whether they're right or wrong, using the
statistical criterion."

But Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated there
are many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their competency
and not be aware of it.

In various situations, feedback is absent, or at least ambiguous; even a
humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite laughter.
And faced with incompetence, social norms prevent most people from
blurting out "You stink!" -- truthful though this assessment may be

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/18/
MN73840.DTL

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MANY MEN WITH EMERGENCIES WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE GAME TO GO TO HOSPITAL

REUTERS - University of Maryland emergency physician David Jerrard
tracked nearly 800 regular season college and professional football,
baseball and basketball games in the state over three years and found
there always was an increase in the number of men who checked into
emergency rooms after these events. Jerrard's study, to be presented on
Sunday at the annual meeting of the American College of Emergency
Physicians Research Forum in New Orleans, showed about 50 percent more
men registered in emergency rooms after a football game than during the
event itself. Thirty to 40 percent more men sought care following a
baseball game. . . Men checked in after a game with "similar symptoms to
what any emergency department sees on a daily basis" such as chest
pains, abdominal pains, headaches and various injuries, Jerrard told
Reuters. . . "Men should not risk their health by putting off going to
the emergency room because they want to see the final results of a
football game. It could be the last game they ever see," Jerrard said.

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyid=
2006-10-11T115453Z_01_N10234904_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEN-SPORTS-ODD.xml

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