Insurance companies want us to be healthy. Really, they do. They have our interests at heart, and they defend those interests with an unusual zeal. This is why I am wondering which details might be missing from the tale of Natalie Blanchard.
According to the Associated Press, Blanchard, a 29-year-old IBM employee from Bromont, Quebec, was suffering from depression and took time away from work, relying on sick-leave benefits from her insurer, Manulife Financial.
The monthly payments were suddenly halted. When she called Manulife to ask why, she says she was told that it had espied photos on her Facebook page that showed her cheerful. Ergo, the argument allegedly went, she was able to work. Which led to the second ergo: no more payments.
The pictures, about which I am sure you are already wondering, were of her at a show featuring those tensing torsos, the Chippendales, as well as at a birthday party and on a beach holiday.
Depression is a nasty business. Cures are not exactly logical. And Blanchard says she went on three trips, each of a four-day duration, after consulting with her psychiatrist.
Manulife, while confirming (footage from Sky News embedded here) that it does use social-networking sites to, well, check up on its customers, also said, "We would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on Web sites such as Facebook."
Perhaps you, too, have some questions. What sort of a life is it when you spend your days trawling social-networking sites to sniff around your customers' personal existence? How is it that Manulife observed Blanchard's photos? Did she leave her Facebook page entirely open, or could it be that she had her insurance agent as one of her Facebook friends? Was she, indeed, already under suspicion before the Facebook trawling began?
December 8, this case will be heard in the Quebec Superior Court. Surely, we will learn a little more about Natalie Blanchard and a little more about Manulife. Perhaps Facebook could provide a live feed from the proceedings?
I have nothing against smoking, save for the difficult odor that emanates from every part, breath, and piece of clothing belonging to a smoker. I could no more live with a smoker than I could live with a third ear perched off the end of my nose.
However, I am embalmed in a curious sympathy after reading a report from The Consumerist concerning two Mac users whose AppleCare warranties appear to have been voided due to the presence of cigarette smoke in their homes.
One, named Derek, recounts the tale of his overheating black MacBook. He took it into the Apple store in Jordan Creek, West Des Moines.
He told The Consumerist: "Today, April, 28, 2008, the Apple store called and informed me that due to the computer having been used in a house where there was smoking, that has voided the warranty and they refuse to work on the machine, due to 'health risks of secondhand smoke.'"
He continued: "Nowhere in your AppleCare terms of service can I find anything mentioning being used in a smoking environment as voiding the warranty."
Derek's resulting appeal to the office of Steve Jobs bore him no joy, so he resorted to blowing some compressed air at the machine, leading it to restart its wondrous functions.
Then along came Ruth, who took her son's iMac to an authorized repair center. After five days, they apparently told her they couldn't work on it because it was contaminated with cigarette smoke and was therefore a bio-hazard.
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Sex is wasted on the young. Or was that youth? I can't quite remember.
In any case, the youth of the United Kingdom seem to be so keen on unprotected sex that local health authorities are offering various tech gadgets as incentives for STD testing.
According to the Daily Mail, medical professionals believe that 10 percent of those between the ages of 16 and 24 in the U.K. have chlamydia, a nasty bacterial infection that appears to be spreading faster than foreclosures.
The big problem with chlamydia is that it doesn't generally come with sores, cankers, or pain. This means that sufferers can carry it for many years entirely undetected.
Local health authorities are therefore attempting to bribe callow youths into their clinics in order to be tested.
And what better way to bribe them than with gadgets?
If you commit to an inspection in Camden, North London, you could win an iPod.
In Northamptonshire, your prize could be a Nintendo Wii.
Whereas in Nottinghamshire, they really feel the need to offer something more meaningful to counteract the after-effects of a night of meaningless sex. Yes, you could be the proud owner of a Fujitsu laptop.
If caught early, chlamydia can be treated with a relatively straightforward course of antibiotics. However, if it is allowed to take up long-term residence, it can lead to infertility and other problems.
Of course, any number of tech incentives cannot substitute for something rather more simple--a little education.
"Unless you change primary behavior and you teach the young that the only safe sex you can have is with someone you know well enough to trust, then treatment is just a sticking plaster solution," Dr. Trevor Stammers, a spokesman for the Family Education Trust told the Mail.
Still, it's heartening to know that iPods and Wiis are doing their little bit to help young Brits not pay too high a price for their undisciplined ways. I blame the colonial heritage.
Technological progress always comes with a hefty price. (Unless it's a PC, I suppose)
So I must admit to feeling a little heartskip at hearing that the search to commune with aliens in the outer beyond will leave humans looking like, well, porky aliens.
According to a report in the Telegraph, scientists believe that long flights into space will not have beautifying effects on the star-crossed trekkers of the future.
In fact, they will make them short, fat, and bald.
I wish I could find more comforting words to describe their fate. Just as I wish that more people would realize that "bald" does not equate to "ugly."
A long time spent up in near zero gravity will mean that humans will not have to make an effort to get off the couch. They won't have to do anything to stay warm either. And no exercise means, well, blubber.
The otherworldly atmosphere will also mean that humans won't exactly grow, as muscles and bones will not develop in the way they do here in the gyms of the earth.
Astrobiologist Dr. Lewis Dartnell from University College, London, also said that fluid will pool in humans' skulls and there will be no need for protecting yourself from the cold. Which means your face will bloat and your hair will fall out. Oh, and don't forget that you'll be fat, too.
"With little effort required to move around in microgravity and an environment that is never too hot or cold, future spacemen and women are likely to become pretty chubby," he said.
But here is what Dr. Dartnell did not conceive.
On every future long-haul space flight there will be plastic surgeons ready to nip, tuck, and weave you back to beauty in a perfectly painless, weightless environment. Jowls too puffy? Let's pop that air out. Hair dropping out? Let's graft a little from your other regions.
Yes, it will be not unlike the masseuses on the original Virgin Atlantic Airways.
We must never think negatively about technological progress. Science will always find a way to keep us just as beautiful as we are today. I mean, what else do we need science for?
If you're the sort of person who faints at the sight of blood, gore, corpses or people with missing limbs, please look away now.
Because I want to tell you the story of Jerry Jalava, a software developer from Helsinki, Finland. Jerry bought himself a gleaming new Ducati motorbike. He crashed it just a week later.
He was rushed to hospital. The doctors couldn't save half of his finger, but they saved his ingenuity.
The doctors were Finnish, so they had a sense of humor. They told Jerry he should fill the gap at the top of his hand with a 'USB finger drive."
It's not that Jerry always takes things so literally. Software developers rarely do. But, in this case, he made an exception. He built himself a prosthetic finger. With a USB drive embedded inside.
This is just a coincidence, right. But I wonder if it gives a tingling feeling when it strokes someone.
(Credit: CC Molotalk)For those of you who might be feeling a bit queasy at this point, may I say that the USB drive is detachable and not permanently sewn into his body.
"It is a removable prosthetic which has USB memorystick inside it," Jerry told the "Telegraph". "When I'm using the USB, I just leave my finger inside the slot and pick it up after I'm ready."
You will be relieved, if you haven't already relieved yourself of your deli sandwich, that Jerry is already thinking of an upgrade.
"I'm planning to use another prosthetic as a shell for the next version, which will have removable fingertip and an RFID tag," he said.
This story should be fair warning to Ray Kurzweil and his friends. While you are trying to make robots be humans, we humans are fighting back. We will become robots and defeat your robots at the Day of Robot Reckoning.
Perhaps you, too, have friends who go nowhere without their hand sanitizer. Perhaps you, too, laugh at them beneath your clenched top lip.
However, researchers at Ondokiz Mayis University in Turkey are discovering that germs lurk everywhere. Especially in cell phones belonging to doctors and nurses, according to an Agence France Presse report. In fact, these phones may be a significant source of infections such as MRSA, which seems to have become an increasing danger in hospitals all over the world.
In researching the cell phones and dominant hands of 200 doctors and nurses, the researchers found that 95 percent of the phones were home to at least one bacterium. Nearly 35 percent hosted two. And 11 percent enjoyed three or more bugs of various descriptions.
What is perhaps most stunning is that 1 in 8 were found to harbor the potentially deadly MRSA bug, which is said to be the cause of 60 percent of all hospital infections.
(Credit:
Cc Jurvetson)
It's something that few people think about, but how often does anyone clean their cell phone? We're all being told relentlessly to wash our hands. Especially if we're employees of the restaurant in which the restroom that carries the notice is housed.
But cell phones sit in fluff-filled pockets, on dirty train tables, in scarcely pristine meeting rooms, on car seats that may have recently been vacated by the bottom of someone not necessarily as anally retentive as ourselves, and then we put them to our fingers, our ears, and our mouths.
Of course, cell phones are vital tools in hospitals. The question now might be: how do you get those over-stressed, over-partied doctors to clean their cell phones with alcohol-based disinfectants?
Perhaps they could just breathe on them.
I know most people in the world have already made major changes to their fitness regimen to avoid a nasty case of Wii knee.
You'll all remember Wii knee. This was the condition, caused by excessive Wii console waggling, that was discovered, quite miraculously, just before the Christmas shopping season.
Now doctors are warning all PlayStation obsessives not to grip their consoles so tightly. If you do, you may be at risk of PlayStation palmar hidradenitis.
This is a skin disorder that is characterized by painful lumps on your palms. And you just thought you were holding your four-iron too tightly.
Vincent Piguet and his colleagues at University Hospitals and Medical School of Geneva revealed their gripping discovery in the British Journal of Dermatology. They liken the condition to patches that appear on children's feet after too much hopping, skipping, and jumping or whatever.
This may be the first case of PlayStation hand worm. Doctors are suggesting the cause is simply not removing your hand from the console for a period of five years.
(Credit: Cc Schizoform)Perhaps you, the people who treat your PlayStation with loving reverence, will be a touch skeptical about PlayStation Palm Lumps. Sony is already there, putting its arms around you and telling you that the mad people will be captured shortly.
... Read moreBiology is an extremely messy thing. It makes you do things you regret in the morning--and sometimes things you regret seconds after you've been arrested.
Yet according to psychologist Dr. Aric Sigman, biology may be a crucial reason why too much time on Facebook and MySpace might leave you at greater risk of deathly diseases like cancer and dementia.
Apparently, if you spend too many hours interacting (socially) alone, your immune system, your hormone levels--in short, the whole chemical box of your entrails--gets just a little messed up. And when the chemicals start to misconcoct, bad things can happen.
Dr. Sigman believes that society as a whole has experienced a significant reduction in face-to-face time over the last 20 years. Writing in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology, he is very clear about the cuddle chemical.
Its technical name is oxytocin (not to be at all confused with OxyContin). And it's a fine hormone that, in your fellow man's physical presence, encourages you to hug him, your fellow woman or, indeed, your fellow rottweiler.
Dr. Sigman insists that cuddle chemical levels radically change (not for the better) when you're agreeing to send your life savings to Ludmila, the Deland, Fla., native you may have just met on MySpace.
"There does seem to be a difference between 'real presence' and the virtual variety," Dr. Sigman told the Daily Mail.
This is what happens when your cuddle chemicals desert you. (That's what I imagine, anyway)
(Credit: CC R Marin)I am not in a position to question Dr. Sigman. I am alone in a New York hotel room, praying that my Golden State Warriors can somehow force the Lakers' Phil Jackson to regrow his mustache live on TV. However, my evident chemical imbalance has allowed me to discover some more of Dr. Sigman's work.
In 2005, he appears to have penned a piece for the Daily Mail entitled "How TV is (quite literally) killing us." Reading it made my cuddle chemicals curdle, as the doctor declared that watching "even moderate amounts of television" may lead to "damaged brain cell development and function."
Dr. Sigman also points out that TV "is the only adult pastime from the ages of 20 to 60 positively linked to developing Alzheimer's disease." (Ah, that had slipped my mind.)
Oh, and it seems quite clear that it's also "a direct cause of obesity--a bigger factor even than eating junk food or taking too little exercise." (I will run all the way up Madison Ave., straight after the game.) And let's not forget that TV "may biologically trigger premature puberty." (Too late.)
I suddenly want to cuddle Dr. Sigman for a prolonged period of time. It may be the only way to prevent him from altering my chemicals (not for the better) any further.
In my weekly attempt to learn long technical words, I was browsing New Scientist when I came across a concept that made me cough to a splutter.
E-cigarettes.
Powered by batteries, they look vaguely like a cigarette, the end furthest from your lips glows red, they emit smoke, and they give you something of a nicotine hit with every drag.
However, because they don't burn, they are not classified as, well, cigarettes. And because they don't make a health claim, they're not classified as, you know, medicine. Which means that you can sit at a bar and e-puff.
Here's the strange thing. They are being marketed as devices that will help you quit smoking. Just as the condom was marketed as a device to quit sex, you might think. But the theory is that you get a similar amount of nicotine as you do from a patch.
The World Health Organization believes any therapeutic claims by e-cigarette manufacturers are mere smoke and mirrors.
Researchers at a company called Health New Zealand are not so sure. Apparently, each drag only gives you a third of the nicotine of a suck on your American Spirit. And the potential for passive inhalation is minimal.
Murray Laugesen, a public health researcher from New Zealand, told New Scientist: "All pointers so far show the device is safe. Whether it will be a successful smoking cessation device in the future depends on whether governments wrap it in cotton-wool regulations or allow smokers to buy it with a modicum of reasonable safety checks."
So might any of you be prepared to try the e-fag, as they call it in the UK? Or might some of you be holding out for the researchers to create another "healthy" product: John E-Walker?
It is said by those who know (and those who merely have a sniff of the facts) that cocaine is quite a popular entertainment for many a technical mind.
I am told that it provides a temporary feeling of invincibility, one that can be useful when networking, selling a less than watertight notion or attempting to persuade a member of your target sex that you are, indeed, a person worth sharing combining notions with.
Now the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany has found good reason for coke users to toss aside their guilt and let their parents snort it whole.
The technically wise will see that these are, in fact, 10,000 chip capacitors.
(Credit: CC DISC0STU)According to the Institute's Professor Rainer Spanagel coke addicts carry a gene that makes them 25% more likely to march to a chemically-induced egotistical tune.
"If you are a carrier of this gene variant, the likelihood of getting addicted to cocaine is higher, the Professor told the Guardian.
Apparently, scientists are beginning to conclude that perhaps 70% of cocaine addiction is attributable to elements handed down by Moms and Dads.
So the next time you are in a bar or at a Web 2.0 shindig and some tech luminary wanders out of the restroom swearing that he is King Midas, or, perhaps a cross between Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Stephen Hawking, please first examine his nasal tract.
If there are traces of a substance not entirely dissimilar to washing powder, or if he seems to be enjoying a sudden synapse of the sinuses, please feel free to turn to the person next to you and whisper: "I blame the parents."
