We're Sorry This Is Late ... We Really Meant To Post It Sooner: Research Into Procrastination Shows Surprising Findings

ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2007) — A University of Calgary professor in the Haskayne School of Business has recently published his magnum opus on the subject of procrastination -- and it's only taken him 10 years.

Joking aside, Dr. Piers Steel is probably the world's foremost expert on the subject of putting off until tomorrow what should be done today. His comprehensive analysis of procrastination research, published in the recent edition of the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin, presents some surprising conclusions on the subject, such as:

• Most people's New Year's resolutions are doomed to failure
• Most self-help books have it completely wrong when they say perfectionism is at the root of procrastination, and
• Procrastination can be explained by a single mathematical equation

"Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task," Steel says. "Perfectionism is not the culprit. In fact, perfectionists actually procrastinate less, but they worry about it more."
Other predictors of procrastination include: task aversiveness, impulsiveness, distractibility, and how much a person is motivated to achieve. Not all delays can be considered procrastination; the key is that a person must believe it would be better to start working on given tasks immediately, but still not start.
It's estimated that about 15-20 per cent of the general population are procrastinators. And the costs of procrastinating can add up well beyond poor work performance, especially for those who delay filing their taxes or planning their retirement.
Steel says motivational failures such as difficulty in sticking to diets and exercise regimes -- frequently the focus of New Year's resolutions -- are related to procrastination because impulsiveness is often at the root of the failure. "Temptations that are close at hand are difficult to resist. Addicts often relapse after returning from treatment facilities because drugs and alcohol become easily available and daily habits reassert themselves. Or we load up on bread in the restaurant before the meal is served. Or we check our email 10 times an hour instead of completing a project."
The good news is that willpower has an unusual capacity. "The old saying is true: 'Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're probably right'," Steel says. "And as you get better at self control, your expectancy about whether you can resist goes up and thus improves your ability to resist."
Steel has also come up with the E=mc2 of procrastination, a formula he's dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (Γ) and the person's sensitivity to delay (D).
It looks like this and uses the Greek letter Γ (capital gamma): Utility = E x V / ΓD
It's still unclear why some people may be more prone to developing procrastination behaviour, but some evidence suggests it may be genetic. Steel concludes: "Continued research into procrastination should not be delayed, especially because its prevalence seems to be growing."
The title of the paper is "The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure." The American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin is arguably the top academic journal for the social sciences. Steel's research on the subject is referred to as a meta-analysis, in which he distills and synthesizes the evidence on procrastination from 691 other research sources.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070110090851.htm

Perceptions: Go Ahead, Put the Water Bottle Down

Perceptions: Go Ahead, Put the Water Bottle Down
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Drinking a lot of water is supposed to be healthy, but there is apparently little scientific support for the belief. A review of clinical studies has found no evidence that drinking eight glasses of water a day, the usual recommendation, is beneficial to a healthy person.
Numerous claims have been made about water — that it prevents headaches, removes dangerous “poisons,” improves the function of various organs and is associated with reduced risk for various diseases. But none of these is supported by scientific evidence. The authors were not even able to find a study leading to the “eight glasses a day” rule, whose origin remains unknown.
The researchers, in the June issue of The Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, say some studies have found evidence that drinking extra water helps the kidneys clear sodium, and long-term sodium retention might increase the risk of hypertension, but no clinical significance for the phenomenon has been established. Water also helps clear urea, but urea is not a toxin.
There is “intriguing” evidence that water might help decrease appetite and control weight gain, write the authors, who say this might be worth more research.
“Under normal circumstances,” said Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a co-author and a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, “drinking extra water is unnecessary. I want to relieve people of the burden of schlepping water bottles around all day long.”

Misled by Interpreter's Joke, Sharapova Wanted to Open Tennis Center in Vietnam

According to Vietnam's media, Russia's tennis star Maria Sharapova planned to establish a tennis training center in Vietnam in early 2007. Misled by her interpreter, Sharapova took mosquito-catching rackets for tennis rackets, TTO news agency reported.
When travelling in private in southern Vietnam, Sharapova asked the driver to avoid major streets. He chose a country road surrounded by gardens. There, Sharapova saw the locals playing tennis without a ball. Maria was surprised by the absence of balls and asked the interpreter. But the interpreter didn't explain that she saw not the tennis rackets but special catching rackets against mosquitoes. The answer was that the locals were too poor to afford the balls. A month later, the Tennis Federation of Vietnam received a letter from Sharapova that spelled out her project for launching a tennis training center there. No response followed and Maria sent her assistant to find out why she had been ignored by Vietnam's agencies.
http://www.kommersant.com/p-12105/r_530/Sharapova_Vietnam/

East and West Part Ways in Test of Facial Expressions

East and West Part Ways in Test of Facial Expresss
From The New York Times

Magically Delicious: Breakfast Keeps Teens Lean

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Teenagers who regularly eat breakfast tend to weigh less, exercise more and eat a more healthful diet than their breakfast-skipping peers, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
The study involved 2,216 adolescents in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area of Minnesota whose eating patterns, weight and other lifestyle issues were tracked for five years. They were just under 15 years old when they entered the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics. The more regularly the teens ate breakfast, the lower their body mass index was, according to the study. BMI is a measure of body weight relative to height. Those who always skipped breakfast on average weighed about 5 pounds (2.3 kg) more than their peers who ate the meal every day.
"What we found in the study was that kids who eat breakfast frequently, and especially every day, they're more healthy overall in terms of their lifestyle," Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
"They're much more physically active and they have a better diet overall. So they have lower fat intake, lower cholesterol intake, higher fiber intake."
An estimated 25 percent of U.S. children regularly skip breakfast, the researchers said. This comes amid rising obesity rates among young people.
It may seem counterintuitive that people who regularly skip a meal are fatter than those who eat it all the time.
Pereira theorized that by filling their bellies in the morning, breakfast eaters may control their appetite better throughout the day. It might also prevent food binges at lunch or dinner, he added.
By touting the merits of breakfast, Pereira may not be encouraging young people to grab a chocolate-coated doughnut or dig into sugary cereal loaded with marshmallows.
"In general, there's lots of opportunities within the context of a breakfast meal to make healthy choices," he said.
"Ready-to-eat breakfast cereals can be high in sugar, but they also can be high in fiber and nutrients. And they can be consumed with low-fat milk and maybe some fruit or fruit juice. On the other hand, there's opportunities, just like there always is with every meal, to make poor choices."

By WILL DUNHAM March 3, 2008
Reuters

Quackdown (India's fake doctors)

Feb 21st 2008 DELHI From The Economist print edition

The high cost of medicines bought on the cheap
BAREFOOT labourers, skinny housewives and half-naked, snuffling toddlers wait outside a corrugated-iron and plywood shack in a Delhi slum to see "the Bengali doctor". Noor Muhammed, the nattily dressed 30-something inside, is indeed Bengali, but, as he cheerfully admits, not a doctor. Yet as he makes quick temperature and blood-pressure checks and hands out tablets—many of them antibiotics—his patients nod respectfully, and pay.
Last month the discovery that an unqualified "doctor", Amit Kumar, had run a lucrative organ racket for nearly a decade caused a furore in India. Operating from Gurgaon, a booming Delhi satellite, Mr Kumar is accused of having paid or forced hundreds of poor people to provide wealthy clients with kidneys. Organ-trading has been illegal since 1994. But India has done little to curb its "quacks", as medical impostors are known.
India has more fake than genuine doctors, according to K.K. Kohli, who chairs the anti-quackery committee of the Delhi Medical Council. In Delhi alone there are around 40,000. In the teeming slums where up to a third of the capital's population of 14m live, requests for directions to a doctor will lead to one of many dingy clinic-shacks, where a man who looks more prosperous than his neighbours plies his trade with a stethoscope, a thermometer and a big pile of pills.
"They take acute patients and make them chronic," says Dr Kohli, citing quacks who misdiagnose, prescribe steroids as pick-me-ups, mix their own remedies and buy cheap, out-of-date antibiotics. Their most common error is prescribing and selling antibiotics unnecessarily. Sandeep Guleria, a professor at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, says quacks have helped cause the high levels of drug resistance in India.
Ten years ago Delhi's state government drew up an "Anti-Quackery Bill" of which nothing more was heard. But the real problem is less the quacks themselves than the health-care vacuum in which they flourish. India's private health business is booming, importing flashy technology to serve a growing middle class and foreign "medical tourists". But the public health system remains skeletal. There are only 60 doctors for every 100,000 people in India, compared with 257 per 100,000 in America. In slums, sick poor people go to quacks because government-run clinics are too far away and the queues too long. In many rural areas, there are no clinics.
Indeed, so essential are quacks to India's health-care system that the National AIDS Control Organisation says it is planning to include them in its AIDS-control programme, training them in basic care and counselling of people with sexually transmitted diseases. Some quacks, of course, may be perfectly responsible. Mr Noor, for example, swears that he refers all "serious cases" to government hospitals. How he diagnoses them is not clear.