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E-mail and other
monsters
THERE is as much to hate about e-mail as there is to love. Unsolicited
attachments in mail can spread nasty viruses such as the recent Explorezip horror that is
wiping out hard disks around the world.
But it gets worse. Now some US boffins have declared that e-mail can make you fat. The
Australian Internet research company www.consult sent out a newsletter last week spelling
out some bizarre findings from research at the elite Stanford University.
"People who spend a mere two minutes per hour of each workday transmitting e-mails to
colleagues and associates may build up the caloric equivalent of 11 pounds (nearly 5kg) of
body fat over a 10-year period," the www.consult newsletter warned. The Stanford
University research follows findings summarised in this column last week about the
disruptions caused by the modern wired workplace.
In the UK, 38 per cent of workers are distracted every 10 minutes by communication tools,
including telephones, e-mails and faxes. US workers are said to wade through an average
171 e-mails a day. And the amount of commercial e-mail in the US has been estimated to be
in the realm of 7.2 billion items a day, of which more than 96 per cent is junk e-mail, or
spam.
And all those people risk getting fatter, if the Stanford research can be believed.
What to do? Obviously you could abandon the Net and e-mail totally. But that would be too
luddite to contemplate in this modern world. The Web might hold the answer. Why not do
something really useful such as trying to spot the Loch Ness monster?
You do not have to go to Scotland to do it because Web-cams have been set up around the
famous loch. These allow Web users to watch the water for signs of beasties any time
of the day. The images from the Web-cams are refreshed every second.
One couple from Texas, perhaps having abandoned e-mail for the day, claim they saw the
monster earlier this month. Their screen shot of what they saw is not all that convincing.
Their "monster" could be almost anything . . . a boat, a swimmer, a big
wellington boot.
Nora and Mike Jones from Galveston say they saw a dark shape on the water. "We saw a
head and neck appear in front of the castle and it was travelling fairly fast, with a
v-shaped wake behind it. We watched till she swam off screen," Ms Jones told Scotland
Online, which hosts the Loch Ness site.
Scotland Online is taking the Jones's sighting seriously. "It's very far out in the
loch, we actually have a local expert in our office he comes from Drumnadrochit on the
shores of the loch and he says no one would moor their boat that far out, so it looks like
humps but then most sightings do look that way, but Nora Jones is certainly
convinced," Alan Matheson, Scotland Online editor, told the BBC last week.
Loch Ness monster spotting could prove the perfect anecdote to dealing with harmful
e-mail.
Mind you, if you become too absorbed at watching the mysterious waters you might find you
become sedentary . . . and risk becoming fat.
All articles Copyright: © West Australian Newspapers |
