Eideard

In a survey of hair professionals, some reported that they look at customers’ face, scalp and neck for suspicious skin lesions, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of Dermatology…

Elizabeth E. Bailey, M.D…and colleagues conducted a survey of 304 hair professionals from 17 salons in a single chain in the greater Houston area…which included questions on the frequency with which they observed their customers’ scalp, neck and face for abnormal moles during the previous month.

Of the 203 respondents, 69 percent reported being “somewhat” or “very likely” to give customers a skin cancer information pamphlet during an appointment; 49 percent reported they were “very” or “extremely” interested in participating in a skin cancer education program; and 25 percent share general health information with customers “often” or “always.” Most respondents (71.9 percent) also reported they had not received a course on skin cancer but a modest number were educating their customers and observing for suspicious lesions.

When answering questions about observing suspicious skin lesions during the previous month, 73 participants (37.1 percent) reported looking at more than 50 percent of their customers’ scalps; 56 (28.8 percent) reported looking at more than 50 percent of their customers’ necks; and 30 (15.3 percent) reported looking at more than 50 percent of their customers’ faces. Additionally, 58 percent of participants reported they had recommended at least once that a customer see a health professional for an abnormal mole…

“In conclusion, this study provides evidence that hair professionals are currently acting as lay health advisors for skin cancer detection and prevention and are willing to become more involved in skin cancer education in the salon,” the authors write.

“Future research should focus on creating a program that provides hair professionals with expert training and effective health communication tools to become confident and skilled lay skin cancer educators.”

Many medical professionals don’t realize the benefits of adding those few seconds of examination for a problem which only continues to increase in a population which spends more and more time outdoors. I may holler about sedentary Americans; but, a significant and expanding minority is getting off their rusty dusty and exercising outdoors in some manner or other. Michelle Obama’s advocacy for children is starting to have an effect.

It became clear his detection rate exceeded “normal” stats and he was among the first to press for expanded exams.

Millions of office workers may be arriving at their desks earlier than ever to impress their bosses during these tough economic times, but it would appear most are not actually doing any work.

The first 31 minutes of every worker’s day is spent gossiping, drinking coffee, debating last night’s television and reading the paper, rather than actually turning on his or her computer and doing anything constructive, according to a survey.

The time wasted equates to a paid day off every three weeks – or 16 extra holiday days a year, the survey for officebroker, an online commercial property broker, estimated.

Many of the office workers appear keen and dedicated by eating their breakfast at their desk, giving the impression that getting to their place of work early is more important than precious time at home with their families.

But this is just a ruse, the study suggested. More than nine out of ten workers admitted they got down to work later than their contracted starting time. More than a third, 37 per cent, of those surveyed said they regularly ate at their desks before starting work.

Other popular activities that office workers undertake to warm themselves before earning money for their employer included logging onto Facebook or other social networking sites and reading newspapers’ websites.

Official statistics suggest that these delaying tactics may, in fact, help workers warm up before undertaking a very productive day. The Office for National Statistics has indicated that productivity per worker – the amount of GDP created by each person in employment – has increased following the recession, as fewer workers left in employment undertake more tasks at each company.

Whining about newspaper reading seems especially counter-productive. If you’re in any sort of position requiring interaction with the local public, knowing what is going on in the region is useful as all get-out.

I convinced the boss at the last construction company I worked for to get a subscription delivered to the office early every morning. It was there waiting for me when I opened the office. I read it while having my first coffee and always found a few leads. In any case, I had a better idea of what was going on in the community than competitors who simply relied on local radio or television.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8304062/31-minutes-at-office-before-we-start-working.html

Anthony Dubber, from Hertfordshire, quit his job working in a hotel to spend two 18 month periods as a chef with the Survey team located at Halley in Antarctica.

He braved 45mph winds and -35 degree temperatures as well as surviving 105 days of total darkness…

In September 2007 he wrote: “The start of September bought the last shimmers of light during the night. It would be the finale of the Aurora Australis, and very soon the last sightings of Antarctica’s night star constellations, as the daylight starts rapidly taking grasp over the darkness of night.

“As the nights are quickly drawing to an end, I find myself reminiscing about the luminous starry skies that glistened above us, during our siege of 24 hour darkness.”

The Aurora Australis or Southern Lights are mesmerizing, dynamic displays of light that appear in the Antarctic skies in winter. Aurora results from the interaction of the solar wind with the Earth’s magnetic field.

Lovely photo, must have been a lifetime experience.

I’ve only known a few folks who spent significant time living and working in Antarctica. One, in fact, an Iranian-American who spent the original International Geophysical Year – which was two years long – working and defining what became known as ice geology. Not a garrulous type, I still managed to get him aside once in a while and draw out tales of nature and beauty and the very early science being derived from ice cores.

Britons find being older than 52 is nothing to laugh about because that’s the age when they start becoming grumpy, according to a survey released on Friday.

The poll of 2,000 Britons found those over 50 laughed far less than their younger counterparts and complained far more.

While infants laughed up to 300 times a day, that figure had fallen to an average of six laughs by teenage years and only 2.5 daily chuckles for those over 60, the survey for cable TV channel Dave found.

Men were also found to be grumpier than women.

One reason for the decline in mirth might be the lack of joke-telling skills. The study found the average Briton only knows two jokes.

And, uh, how many jokes do you know?

“Where exactly in the contract did it say that we were your friend?”

36% said they do not feel obligated to report incompetent colleagues

A doctor survey study published online Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. suggests that workplace monitoring of impaired or incompetent physicians is not what you’d call common.

Conducted by a team from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the study used data from a 2009 national survey of close to 3,000 physicians practicing in anesthesiology, cardiology, family practice, general surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics and psychiatry.

Physicians were questioned in three areas: about their responsibility to report physicians who were incompetent or impaired by drugs or alcohol, about their preparedness and comfort level in doing so, and about their experiences with colleagues with these issues…

About 70% of physicians said they feel prepared to report impaired physicians, and 64% said they were prepared to report incompetent ones. But more than one-third, 36%, said they do not feel obligated by professional commitment to do so.

Physicians with less experience, 10 years or fewer, were most willing to report impaired or incompetent colleagues. Those with greater experience, 20 years or more, were less likely to feel that it was their responsibility to do so…

Said DesRoches, “It’s concerning that there’s this somewhat large portion of physicians that don’t agree with the commitment to report when they have direct personal knowledge of a colleague that is in need.”…

Uh, yeah. But isn’t it interesting that the impaired physician is depicted as in need, rather than his victims patients.

The next time you’re low on cash and need to get a quick read on the public’s feeling on politics or current events, consider sampling Twitter.

According to a new report out of Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department, sentiments expressed via the millions of daily tweets strongly correlate with well-established public opinion polls, such as the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) and Gallup polls. The data analysis methodology still needs some tweaking, but the researchers still believe that Twitter posts could act as a “cheap, rapid means of gauging public opinion.”

Assistant professor Noah Smith and his team collected 1 billion Twitter messages posted in 2008 and 2009 and analyzed them for topic (politics versus economy) and sentiment (positive or negative). They compared the consumer confidence tweets against ICS data from the same period as well as Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index. Tweets about President Obama were compared against Gallup’s daily tracking polls from that time period, and tweets about the election were compared against 46 polls created by Pollster…

Smith and the team acknowledged that natural language processing would have to be improved before Twitter could be used to predict things like elections, and a number of other considerations should be taken into account when using tweets for analysis. For example, should retweets or news headlines count in the data? Still, even with so much noise in the average Twitter stream, the researchers were pleased to have extracted some signal that apparently shows something useful.

One of the polling outfits with a superb track record – Harris Polls – is taking the report to heart.

They’re even asking folks to note info about blogs and online forums they participate in.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Residents of major world cities cite climate change as the most pressing global issue, except residents of large U.S. cities who list the economy as the bigger problem, according to a survey by HSBC Bank.

Climate change topped the list of concerns by some two-thirds of Hong Kong residents polled as well as majorities of residents of London, Paris, Sao Paolo, Toronto, Vancouver and Sydney, according to the poll of 2,044 urban residents around the world.

Residents of U.S. cities, however, ranked the economy as the biggest global issue, closely followed by terrorism with climate change ranking third…

“When you look at what the impact of the recent global downturn has been, U.S. individuals had a larger percent of their portfolio or a larger percentage of their wealth negatively affected,” said Andy Ireland, head of premier banking for HSBC Bank NA. “I think there may be a correlation between the two.”

Think so, eh?

U.S. respondents were hardest hit by the economic downturn with 56 percent reporting a decrease in their portfolio value.

Fifty five percent of Paris residents said their portfolios dropped in value and 45 percent of Londoners reported a decrease. However, just 19 percent of Hong Kong respondents said their portfolios lost value.

I wonder if they took into account the idea that Americans think we are the only victims in the world?

Six in 10 companies in a survey plan to skip the purchase of Microsoft Corp’s Windows 7 computer operating system, many of them to pinch pennies and others over concern about compatibility with their existing applications.

Windows 7 will be released October 22, but has already garnered good reviews, in contrast to its disappointing current version, Windows Vista.

Many of the more than 1,000 companies that responded to a survey by ScriptLogic Corp say they have economized by cutting back on software updates and lack the resources to deploy Microsoft’s latest offering.

I think the active definition is that they’re “unwilling” to deploy those resources. And that’s something that Microsoft has had to face increasingly since XP. Simply planking the next-gen Windows OS on retail PC’s and waiting for corporate IT depts to begin support – is over and done with.

ScriptLogic Corp, which provides help to companies in managing their Microsoft Windows-based networks, sent out 20,000 surveys to information technology administrators to learn the state of the market…

The survey found about 60 percent of those surveyed have no plans to deploy Windows 7, 34 percent will deploy it by the end of 2010 and only 5.4 percent will deploy by year’s end…

But there were reasons other than money for staying away from Windows 7. Another 39 percent of those surveyed said they had concern about the compatibility of Windows 7 with existing applications.

IT departments want to wait for the deployment of the 1st Service Pack – to back away from stability worries.

There are many industries where the XP-based software they’re running – or even older – does everything they need just fine. Why spend the money for bells and whistles that aren’t required to kee their systems happy?

It’s hard to believe that we’re approaching the two-year anniversary of the original iPhone. I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that the iPhone has completely transformed the mobile computing space. This is especially clear when evaluating mobile Wi-Fi usage data.

Today, Boingo Wireless released a data snapshot of mobile device access on its airport network of Wi-Fi hotspots. According to Boingo, airports are the number one venue for Wi-Fi access worldwide, so they make for a good data point when evaluating Wi-Fi usage.

For the past 24-months, Boingo has tracked its airport Wi-Fi data and the increase in mobile device uptake is astonishing. It’s also driven almost entirely by the iPhone and the iPod touch.

Since May 2007, mobile device usage has gone from accounting for 0.1% of Boingo’s airport Wi-Fi connections to 26.1%. In two years, the smartphone has gone from a non-entity to accounting for 1/4 of all of Boingo’s connections.

Boingo has also tracked what type of devices associate with Boingo operated airport Wi-Fi hotspots. In 2007, the first year the iPhone was available, the iPhone only accounted for 1% of all mobile devices. Windows CE (Windows Mobile), was the leader in 2007, with 66% of mobile device connections. In 2008, the iPhone accounted for 51.7% of all mobile devices, with the iPod touch coming in second with 42.4%. For the first five months of 2009, the iPhone has taken an astounding 89.2% of all mobile devices accessing Boingo’s airport hotspots. The iPod touch has dipped to 4.7%. I talked to Jeremy Pepper from Boingo PR and he said that they think the drop in the price of the iPhone is the reason iPod touch access figures have dipped, with the iPhone taking its place.

Although these figures are only from one Wi-Fi access source, the number of users that access Wi-Fi at the airport provides what I consider a good sample for data collection. In two years, not only has the mobile access space increased 261x, the iPhone OS accounts for nearly 94% of all mobile connections.

No wonder every other phone manufacturer is desperately trying to play catch-up!

Cripes. Even I’m surprised. I have to chuckle over all the naysayers and geek whiners who predicted this product was a guaranteed fail.

The Catlin Arctic Survey, a gruelling 10-week expedition to measure the thickness of sea ice, has ended…slightly ahead of schedule to ensure a safe pick up…

It also reinforces a new forecast, by a leading UK scientist, who says that the Arctic sea ice could vanish in summertime far sooner than predicted…

“In our time here we have captured around 16,000 observations and [taken] 1,500 measurements of the thickness of the ice and snow as well as its density,” he said…”[The data] seems to suggest it was almost all first-year ice,” Pen Hadow said…

“Our science advisors had told us to expect thicker, older ice on at least part of the route, so it is something of a mystery where that older ice has gone. It’ll be interesting to see what scientists think about this…”

At the same time, Peter Wadhams, head of the polar ocean physics group at the University of Cambridge has brought forward his estimate for the demise of summer sea-ice in the Arctic.

He believes the ice, which has been a permanent feature for at least 100,000 years, is now so thin that almost all of it will disappear in about a decade. He says it will become seasonal, forming only during the winter…

Although this bleak forecast is reinforced by the survey team’s data, Professor Wadham’s new assessment is based on analysis of nearly 40 years of sonar data gathered on Royal Navy submarines patrolling beneath the ice.

Until recently, most climate forecasts suggested that the Arctic Ocean would have ice-free summers only towards the end of the century.

Ain’t any good news for nutball reactionaries.

What qualifies for good would be politicians getting off their collective dusty butts and fighting for cleaner alternative energy sources.