Paul Statt Communications

New York Times July 19, 2009

“How dangerous is driving while texting?” That question raises important issues for public health law and research. How much do we really know about the danger, and does the issue call for a legislative solution? Political resistance to such a ban is strong, as evidenced by the reaction of the Department of Transportation earlier this year to its own research, and more convincing data will be needed to overcome it. An analysis of the research and researchers mentioned in the Times demonstrates that pubic health professionals still need the support of further research as they convince governments to ban this dangerous multi-tasking practice.

The research presented in the Times series “Driven to Distraction” points to the importance of accumulating enough data to effect changes to laws. The best data available, it seems, are about the dangers of trying to do many things at once. Such “multi-tasking” does include texting while driving, but much research deals with the larger question, “How much distraction can the human brain handle?” This research is neither explicitly about driving, nor explicitly about texting. David Strayer and his University of Utah Applied Cognition Laboratory, featured in the Times story, are the only group doing such explicit research.

Writing in the Times on July 19 , Matt Richtel, formerly a reporter on the video gaming industry, cited many other research studies. But the key document, and the news “hook” for this story, was an unpublished U.S. Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study commissioned in 2003, to assess the safety risk of cellphone use while driving. This study and its suppression by the Department of Transportation was the main topic of Richtel’s follow-up story in the Times on July 21.

Richtel’s story claims that the NTSB chose not to publish the results, under political pressure not to upset the telecommunications industry with a call to ban driver cellphone use. Transportation department officials claim that they chose not to publish the research because the data was too inconclusive. One way or the other, more research–and more research that explicitly addresses the safety of texting while driving–is needed.

Research and researchers mentioned:

The suppressed National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study did produce an extensive bibliography in 2008 that cites NHTSA studies (6), journal articles (78), conference proceedings (42), technical reports (39) and other research (9) from the mid-1990s until 2005.

Another key quotation in Richtel’s July 19 story is this: “A 2003 Harvard study estimated that cellphone distractions caused 2,600 traffic deaths every year, and 330,000 accidents that result in moderate or severe injuries.” Lacking a citation, the reader might turn to the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. (http://www.hcra.harvard.edu/). The only relevant publication is a paper by J. T. Cohen and J. D. Graham, “A revised economic analysis of restrictions on the use of cell phones while driving,” in Risk Analysis. This cost-benefit analysis “raises substantial uncertainty in the estimates of several important inputs, including the extent to which cell phone use increases a driver’s risk of being involved in a crash, the amount of time drivers spend using cell phones (and hence their aggregate contribution to crashes, injuries, and fatalities), and the incremental value to users of being able to make calls while driving.”

Nationwide Mutual Insurance, a car insurance company, surveys drivers annually about cell-phone use, and also about other distractions while driving. NMI is an advocate of a cellphone ban, and its surveys indicate broad public support for it. The most recent data are from August 2009. This publication also provides several links to academic studies.

Robert D. Foss, the director of the Highway Safety Research Center, University of North Carolina, is quoted saying that laws alone will not change behavior–a subject in which he speaks with authority. His research interests include the role of alcohol in auto accidents and the high crash risks of teen drivers.

The most pertinent research cited in the Times is the work of David Strayer and his University of Utah Applied Cognition Laboratory. Strayer’s group investigates “the impact of using advanced in-car technologies on driving performance and traffic safety. Our research addresses three specific goals limited to the most prominent communication technology, the cellular phone.” They claim to provide unambiguous scientific evidence demonstrating that cell phone conversations disrupt driving performance, to compare the increased risk of cell phone use to other activities, and to provide a theoretical account of the disruption.

Steven Yantis, Johns Hopkins University, psychological and brain sciences also investigates the broader topics of human visual attention and cognitive control.

David E. Meyer, who directs the University of Michigan Brain Cognition and Action Laboratory, is also interested in fundamental aspects of human perception, attention, movement production, reaction time, multitasking, executive mental control and human-computer interaction.

John Ratey, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is not quoted for his research, which has been mainly in autism and ADHD. His contribution to the story is perhaps his Harvard connection or the title of a 2008 book he co-authored, “Driven to Distraction.

###

This study is worth considering just because it calls Facebook a “nonymous online environment.”

Isn’t that a great word? Sherri Grasmuck, a Temple University sociologist, analyzed the contents of 63 Facebook accounts, and found ” that the identities produced in this nonymous environment differ from those constructed in the anonymous online environments previously reported.”

“Facebook users predominantly claim their identities implicitly rather than explicitly; they “show rather than tell” and stress group and consumer identities over personally narrated ones.”

Enough said.

ZHAO, S., GRASMUCK, S., & MARTIN, J. (2008). Identity construction on Facebook: Digital empowerment in anchored relationships Computers in Human Behavior, 24 (5), 1816-1836 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2008.02.012

Potti, S., Milli, M., Jeronis, S., Gaughan, J., & Rose, M. (2009). Self-perceptions of body size in women at an inner-city family-planning clinic American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 200 (5) DOI: 10.1016/j.ajog.2008.11.027

While the flashy coral reefs get all the attention–at least from the ecologically-minded–some strange creatures have found ways to thrive at “cold seeps” and “hydrothermal vents” in the deep oceans. Simple tubeworms often work as eco-system engineers, making an inhospitable environment friendlier to other kinds of life.

The possibilities that suggests to the human species? “The deep sea is the largest habitable space on earth,” says Erik Cordes, a professor of biology at Temple University. “But not so very long ago, most scientists believed that the very deep sea was pretty much a huge flat mud plain, empty of life. Not until we got access to these environments did we realize how complex and diverse it really is. We’ve only started to appreciate how varied the terrain is and how that affects its diversity.”

As Cordes wrote in the abstract: “Shortly after the discovery of chemosynthetic ecosystems at deep-sea hydrothermal vents, similar ecosystems were found at cold seeps in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the past two decades, these sites have become model systems for understanding the physiology of the symbiont-containing megafauna and the ecology of seep communities worldwide.”

Cordes, E., Bergquist, D., & Fisher, C. (2009). Macro-Ecology of Gulf of Mexico Cold Seeps Annual Review of Marine Science, 1 (1), 143-168 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.marine.010908.163912

This is the kind of research that might be easy to make light of: “a fat old man snoring” pretty much sums up what most of us imagine sleep apnea looks like. But it’s serious:  a new study in Diabetes Care found that the disorder is widely undiagnosed among obese individuals with type 2 diabetes: nearly 87 percent of participants reported symptoms, but were never diagnosed.

“Doctors who have obese patients with type 2 diabetes need to be aware of the possibility of sleep apnea, even if no symptoms are present, especially in cases where the patient has a high BMI or waist circumference,” said Gary Foster,the study’s lead author and director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple University.

Currently, more than half of obese or overweight individuals have diabetes, the seventh leading cause of death in the United States.

Other authors were Kelley Borradaile (Temple); Mark Sanders, Anne Newman and  David Kelley, (University of Pittsburgh); Richard Millman and Rena Wing (Brown University); Garry Zammit (Clinilabs); Thomas Wadden, Valerie Darcey and Samuel Kuna, (University of Pennsylvania); F. Xavier Pi SUnyer (Columbia University); and the Sleep AHEAD Research Group.  Funding was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health:  National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Foster, G., Sanders, M., Millman, R., Zammit, G., Borradaile, K., Newman, A., Wadden, T., Kelley, D., Wing, R., Pi Sunyer, F., Darcey, V., Kuna, S., & , . (2009). Obstructive Sleep Apnea Among Obese Patients With Type 2 Diabetes Diabetes Care, 32 (6), 1017-1019 DOI: 10.2337/dc08-1776

“AIDS dementia” is real: the decline in mental function is sometimes the first sign that a patient has been infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). AIDS dementia is one of the few conditions caused directly by the virus. But how does it affect the brain?

A team at the Temple University School of Medicine, led by Bassel E. Sawaya, associate professor of neurology, has discovered a mechanism: it’s a viral protein (vPr) produced by HIV, that can activate an “oxidative stress pathway” in the brain, which can lead to cell death. 

This research improves understanding of how HIV works in the brain, and promises to improve treatment of AIDS dementia. It was conducted in the Temple University Center for Neurovirology in collaboration with researchers from Temple’s Departments of Neuroscience and Biology. It was funded through grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Deshmane, S., Mukerjee, R., Fan, S., Del Valle, L., Michiels, C., Sweet, T., Rom, I., Khalili, K., Rappaport, J., Amini, S., & Sawaya, B. (2008). Activation of the Oxidative Stress Pathway by HIV-1 Vpr Leads to Induction of Hypoxia-inducible Factor 1 Expression Journal of Biological Chemistry, 284 (17), 11364-11373 DOI: 10.1074/jbc.M809266200

Illumination Magazine | Spring 2009

Posted using ShareThis 

This was the best-looking university research magazine in the country: designed and printed to a standard that made it an argument for printed publications. Now it’s “web-only.”

Why journalists deserve low pay | csmonitor.com

Posted using ShareThis 

Richard Picard might be chanting, “The journalist is dead; Long live the journalist.”

Picard defines a journalist as a person with “the capabilities to access sources, to search through information and determine its significance, and to convey it effectively.” Until shockingly recently, you needed the support of an institution to enjoy such powers. Now you can do this at home, so the “value added” has to be added differently.

His suggestions for daily newspapers are sound, I think. “[E]mphasize uniqueness. The Boston Globe, for example, could become the national leader in education and health reporting because of the multitude of higher education and medical institutions in its coverage area. Not only would it make the paper more valuable to readers, but it could sell that coverage to other publications. Similarly, The Dallas Morning News could provide specialized coverage of oil and energy, The Des Moines Register could become the leader in agricultural news; and the Chicago Tribune in airline and aircraft coverage. Every paper will have to be the undisputed leader in terms of their quality and quantity of local news.”

Of course, it’s hard even to get the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post to divvy culture, business and politics rationally among themselves. It’s not easy to convince the beat reporter that “Journalists are not professionals with a unique base of knowledge such as professors or electricians,” although they likely would agree after the third beer.

I also offer this criticism of Picard, who is “a professor of media economics at Sweden’s Jonkoping University, a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, and the author and editor of 23 books, including “The Economics and Financing of Media Companies”.” The “unique base of knowledge” of an electrician, brain surgeon or jet pilot is more valuable than that of most professors.

Hired News: Will P.R. pros take the baton of investigative journalism? – Reason Magazine

I always knew the libertarians were onto something: I’ve been saying for years–the years since I left “journalism” for “communications”–that the PR pros are the new reporters.

Posted using ShareThis

Starbucks bank is already operating
Published: May 8 2009 03:00 | Last updated: May 8 2009 03:00
From Mr Paul S. Statt

Sir, John Gapper’s suggestion that “Starbucks should start banking” (blog, May 5) may be ridiculous, but it is already happening.

I am no fan of the coffee at Starbucks, but it is a convenient place for internet access where I work. Every month I deposit $20 in a Starbucks account, which is registered on my “Stabucks Card”.

Starbucks gets to use my money, I get to use Starbucks’ Wifi. That might be called the “interest” I receive.

I slowly spend the $20 on an occasional cup of tea, which Starbucks brews with boiling, not merely hot, water.

Oddly enough, I prefer the coffee at the ING Cafe in Philadelphia.

Paul S. Statt
Philadelphia, PA, US

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009