Is it Safe to Drive a Bus?

Bus Drivers sustain more on the job injuries than any other workers.  They sustain 735 injuries per 10,000 workers according to Bureau of Labor Statistics as reported by Seth Fiegerman.  Not surprisingly, the Police are on the list, as are EMTs and Paramedics, but the police sustain only 603 injuries and EMTs/Paramedics 510 on the job injuries per 10,000 workers.  Surprisingly, it is more dangerous to be a Nurses Aide (4th most dangerous) than it is Corrections Officer (5th), or a Fire Fighter (6th).  And Garbage Collectors (7th) are more at risk than Truck Drivers (8th) , Laborers and Movers(9th) and Construction Workers (10th).

I was curious how this correlated with salaries, so I did a bit of research on SimplyHired.com.  This is by no means scientific, and I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the statistics on that site, but it’s interesting.  The average salary for most of the jobs I searched ranged from $38,000 to 45,000, hardly rolling in money, especially for the most dangerous professions.  The average salary for the police and fire fighters also varies a great deal according to rank.  The cop walking the beat is keeping that figure low.  He’s by no means rolling in money.

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Is Multitasking Making it Hard for You to Think?

Read it and gloat. Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.

You know what this means. This means that the people around you — the husband who’s tapping the computer keys during an important phone conversation with you, the S.U.V. driver with the grande latte and the cellphone, the dinner companion with the roving eye and twitching thumbs — are not only irritating, they are (let’s not be fainthearted) incompetent.

via The Mediocre Multitasker – NYTimes.com.

Ouch!  Leave it to the New York Times to put it so directly and sarcastically.  They are also exaggerating a bit.  The Standford study did not so so far as to find anyone incompetent.  Nonetheless, if other research backs the Stanford research up, it is disturbing stuff.  Basically what the study found was that people who multitask are not very good at it.  People who don’t do it regularly are better appear to do it better.

Even more strangely, regular multitasking seems to impact the multitaskers ability in a whole range of cognitive functions!  The research dealt with media multitaksers, i.e. people who have lots of windows open on their computer, say one for chat, one for browsing, etc., even as music is playing, or the tv is on.

(So what was I going to write next?  I forgot.  I had to answer an email and then the movie caught my attention for a bit.  Oh yeah, I was looking for a quotation from the article.)
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Eyal Ophir, the study’s lead investigator and a researcher at Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, said: “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”

The study’s results were so strong and unexpected that the researchers are planning a series of follow-up experiments. “It keeps me up late at night,” Professor Nass said. “I worry about both the short-term and long-term effects of multitasking. We’re going to be testing the heck out of high and low multitaskers.”

To the rest of the world, though, the people who trudge through life excited and unnerved by an occasional cellphone call while walking or watching the sun set (isn’t that multitasking?), the study’s findings aren’t quite so shocking. A constant state of stress, deluges of ever-changing information, the frenzied, nanosecond-fast hustle and bustle — this is bad for you? It’s surprising and it’s news that it’s bad for you? Before they lie down to take a well-deserved and uninterrupted nap, the trudgers of the world would like to say, “We told you so!”

via The Mediocre Multitasker – NYTimes.com.

As a frequent, very frequent, multitasker, this is all scary stuff.

There is a more detailed report on the study on the Stanford University Web site.  Read the abstract and full study here.

A Week in the Fog

It has been such an odd week!  Literally on the flights back from London I came down with some sort of respiratory virus that caused a sore throat and a nasty cough.  Not H1N1, thank heaven.  It was relatively mild, no fever, and the sore throat and other nasal/head symptoms went away quickly.  The cough is still with me, however, and it got worse.

So I have also not been feeling well, and I am drowsy most of the day, in part because of the medication and in part because of the sickness.The cough can leave me quite breathless.

Settling back to work has been a bit strange, too.  I came back from vacation, but now my boss is on vacation, as are a few of my colleagues.   And, of course, I left, I had just finished my last major event of the year.  Everything else is now in planning. It’s that time of year.  So while I have been at work, busy, and managing to catch up, it has been an odd week, a week of transition!

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So this whole week has been surpassing strange.  Nine days that feel at once like a one long night and like a month.  It’s been busy.  I’ve gotten a lot done.  And yet it feels like I’ve done nothing but sleep.  So very odd!