Workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana, a British study shows.

The constant interruptions reduce productivity and leave people feeling tired and lethargic, according to a survey carried out by TNS Research and commissioned by Hewlett Packard.

The survey of 1,100 Britons showed:

-Almost two out three people check their electronic messages out of office hours and when on holiday

-Half of all workers respond to an e-mail within 60 minutes of receiving one

-One in five will break off from a business or social engagement to respond to a message.

-Nine out of 10 people thought colleagues who answered messages during face-to-face meetings were rude, while three out of 10 believed it was not only acceptable, but a sign of diligence and efficiency.

This survey is a little scary. I thought technology was here to help us, not hurt us.

EBay’s new program, Rethink Initiative, will now help you to recycle on computers and cell phones.

The online auction giant spearheaded Rethink earlier this year to confront the growing problem of “e-waste.” For instance, an amazing 133,000 PCs are junked every day, according to industry analyst Gartner. Add to that the thousands of cell phones, printers, monitors, and other electronics, and you can see how the junk pile could overwhelm landfills.

While the sheer bulk of e-waste is an ecological nightmare alone, it’s the hazardous materials they contain that cause the most alarm: Plastics, lead, cadmium, chromium, and mercury are among the poisons that leech into the soil and eventually contaminate our water.

Backed by Intel, Rethink coordinates the recycling programs of more than two dozen major computer manufacturers, retailers, and cell phone companies–as well as government agencies, environmental groups, and charities–and conveniently links to all of them on one site. Previously you had to dig deep on each company or organization’s Web site just to find its recycling program–if there was one.

Now the home page of the Rethink Initiative provides easy access to the wide array of responsible ways to dump your unwanted equipment. Of course, EBay would love for you to sell your unwanted stuff on its site, but the Rethink location also tells you about convenient local drop-off options, trade-in programs, and ways to donate to local charities.

Maybe if you should try to sell your old stuff on Ebay first. If that doesn’t work, you can always recycle it.

Afghanistan said it will open its mobile phone market in 2006 to two new companies, allowing more competition in one of the few booming sectors in the country.

Investors will have from May 15 to July 16 to bid for licenses to operate in Afghanistan, where few people have landlines but over 800,000 wealthier locals as well as diplomats and foreign aid workers have subscribed for mobile phones.

“It is expected these new licenses will generate a large amount of revenue for the government in license fees,” Afghanistan’s Ministry of Communication said in a statement.

The new licenses will “attract more than 200 million dollars in new foreign direct investment and create thousands of skilled, well-paying jobs,” it added.

Currently two major mobile companies operate in Afghanistan: Roshan, which is owned by the Aga Khan Development Network, and Afghan Wireless Communication Co., a joint venture between the government and New Jersey-based Telephone Systems International Inc.

I’m glad that the new companies with allow the Afghans to have more jobs.

Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering broke ground last week on the new Duke Smart House — a 4,500-square-foot undergraduate live-in engineering research laboratory.

The highly automated, two-story house will include such features as systems to filter out unwanted background noise; lights, music and temperatures that are powered by voice commands; efficient cooling systems; monitors to measure power consumption on a room-by-room basis; security cameras to perform facial recognition analysis; and indoor environmental quality monitors to create a low-toxin, low-pathogen environment. The house will have a “green roof” to control water runoff and use embedded fiber optic strands and acoustic emission sensors throughout the structure and foundation to detect any movement, cracks or breaks over time.

The Duke Smart House project provides undergraduate students a chance to gain practical design experience, as well as learn about project management and team-building. Pratt Dean Kristina M. Johnson said she hopes the Smart House will serve as a catalyst for outreach to the community and a broad range of industry.

I thought smart houses only existed in movies. It’s so cool that it’s so close to home.

OneWorld International, a Kenyan firm, is offering a mobile phone text messaging service that advertises jobs and allows candidates to apply from wherever they are.

“It’s relatively easy. All you need is access to a mobile phone with a Safaricom connection,” said Antony Mwaniki, OneWorld International’s business manager.

“The moment we get a job advertisement and put it on the system, it is automatically sent to the subscriber’s phone as a text message,” he told Reuters.

Safaricom, one of Kenya’s two mobile phone service providers, is a subsidiary of state-owned Telkom Kenya and Vodafone Group Plc, whose charitable arm helped set up the service.

The text message costs just 3 Kenya shillings (4 U.S. cents). The Internet, often slow and unreliable in Kenya, is at least 10 shillings, with an additional per-minute charge of one shilling.

Yahoo Inc. said on Thursday it has launched an online photo service with Target Corp. that will enable consumers to order prints of their digital pictures for pick up at a Target store.

The site, Target Yahoo Photos (http://www.target.com/yahoophotos), extends Yahoo’s existing online photo site.

The new site gives consumers unlimited photo storage and tools for sharing pictures via e-mail and other means. Users will have the option of picking up their photos, printing them at home or having them delivered by mail.

I think I might take advantage of this in the future.

Pope Benedict XVI sent his first text message to Italian cellphone users — “Let us go forth.”

“Let us go forth in the joy of the risen Lord and trusting in his permanent help,” read the message sent to all TIM cellphone users who subscribe to a service of the pope’s daily messages.

The “thought of the day” service was launched two years ago, bringing messages of the late John Paul II who died April 2.

Remote Bangladeshi farmer Mir Jahid Hussein can now ensure he gets the best price for his seasonal jute seeds with the use of a cellular phone.

As it is for tens of millions of poor rural-dwellers in developing countries from Bangladesh to Botswana, mobile phone technology is revolutionising Hussein’s life for the better, enabling him to cut out cheating middlemen and deal directly with buyers from district markets.

What 10 years ago was mostly a trendy gadget for savvy urbanites in wealthier countries, is now a vital tool of trade in some of the world’s most remote areas, many of which had never previously had access to landlines or other means of long distance communication.

The march of the mobile phone phenomenon is relentless, with 1.65 billion cellular connections worldwide at the end of 2004 and forecast to rise up to 10 percent annually to 2.32 billion in 2008, according to US research group Gartner Inc.

Pretty soon cell phones will be in the deepest, darkest jungles and other remote places.

Cingular Wireless will debut new music singles from top artists as cell phone “ringtones” on its network before the songs make their radio debut.

Cingular said it will launch the “Cingular Sounds” program with the new Coldplay track “Speed of Sound.” The song does not release to radio until April 18 and the band’s new album is not due until early June.

The ringtone market has exploded as a revenue stream for both wireless carriers and record labels, which see phones ringing with 30-second clips of their artists’ songs as an easy and potentially lucrative way to promote music. The global ringtone market is estimated at around $3 billion.

I don’t know if these ringtones will sell as well as other ones. I know that I decide the ringtones I want AFTER I’ve heard it played on the radio.

Intel, AT&T and other corporations are throwing their weight behind a new wireless Internet service powerful enough to send a signal more than 5 miles.

WiMax is essentially high-powered Wi-Fi, the kind of wireless Internet now common in coffee shops. Wi-Fi’s range is much shorter, usually enough to cover only one or two buildings.

A single WiMax antenna can beam high-speed Internet to entire neighborhoods. That means it could:

•Bring high-speed Internet to hard-to-reach areas. It’s expensive to run broadband cable to homes and businesses in rural areas. WiMax can be an alternative. Qwest, for example, has run WiMax tests in rural markets, including Rio Rancho, N.M.

•Give a wired broadband alternative. TowerStream has already set up WiMax networks in a few cities for business-grade Internet access. AT&T is testing it as a backup for companies.

•Offer access on the go. WiMax initially will act much like wired broadband. The chip Intel is announcing, for example, is the “brain” for the broadband modem boxes customers get when signing up for Internet service. Most customers put these boxes on their desks and hook their PCs to them.

But Intel is working on a future chip that will go into laptops allowing them to hop onto a WiMax network anywhere there’s a signal. WiMax may also incorporate Internet phone-calling technology, turning it into a land-line and cellular-like phone service.

This internet will be good for people on the go, but what happens when you exit the five mile range? Will the strength get less and less or will it just automatically cut off?

Martha Stewart is creating a 24-hour channel featuring cooking, entertaining and gardening programming for women on Sirius Satellite Radio.

As with all her ventures, she’s going to name it after herself: Martha Stewart Living Radio. She boasts that she is again breaking new ground, just as she pioneered lifestyle magazines and TV shows.

“This will be the first ‘around the clock’ channel devoted entirely to areas of interest for women,” she said in a statement. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Stewart will be a regular presence on the channel, which is expected to launch this year. The deal comes six weeks after her release from prison after being convicted of lying about a stock sale.

She already is working on a Martha version of The Apprentice and a syndicated how-to show, although she’s still under house arrest. She has returned to her magazine’s cover and is writing a new column.

Wow! It almost seems as if Martha were never in jail.

Hewitt Packard and Infinity Broadcasting are teaming together to allow cell phone operators to listen to local FM radio on their cell phone and get extra data about the broadcast delivered to their phones.

The service, called Visual Radio, is a move to help radio broadcasters fight the competitive threat of satellite radio. HP and Infinity will announce their plans at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas this week.

So many different items are being added on to the cell phone. I wonder what will be added next!

Internet Journalism fits into the marketplace of ideas because anybody who has an idea of any kind can post it online at a low cost. People can set up their own websites and weblogs that taylor to the needs and interests of everybody. Blogs especially fit into the marketplace because they are designed and run by individuals that post their personal views and objectives, like in a diary. They also can be very persuasive and powerful because information can spread quickly from one blogger to the next by simply clicking on a link. When bloggers coincide they can change major events. For example, when CBS was caught presenting false information about the President bloggers banned together and posted a lot of information that proved CBS wrong.

The marketplace metaphor alters our understanding of what journalism is and who journalists are, by allowing anybody and everybody to, in a sense, become a journalist. With or without an education in journalism the average person can post what they see as news with little difficulty and with few financial resources. This is how Matt Drudge got his start in Internet Journalism. Respected Journalists working with huge companies do not consider Drudge to be a journalist because he is somewhat biased toward the conservative side, doesn’t have a degree in journalism, and they say that he publishes things that are not accurate. However, Drudge does not use an editor, and no journalist has ever gotten everything completely correct.

Recent blogswarms over Dan Rather, Jeff Gannon and Eason Jordan fit in the metaphor because they are all classic examples of how powerful and persuasive bloggers can truly be. When they coincide they can change a potential outcome by exposing the truth, which is what journalism is supposed to do. When bloggers want their voices to be heard they post information for all to see with links to support their beliefs. Other bloggers bein to see what more bloggers wrote, and the information keeps growing until enough people have read it and do something about the situation, such as the ones with CBS and Dan Rather.

The chaos and cacophony of Internet speech strengthens the marketplace because it gives you another source of news besides the television networks and the newspapers. Some people have the misconception that all internet journalism is unreliable simply because it is on the internet. The information in the marketplace gives you several options to choose from in the search for finding what you believe to be the truth. That is the beauty of it, you get to decide what is and isn’t true, whether it is biased or unbiased. You aren’t spoon fed what a network believes is true, you get to sift through everything posted and figure it out for yourself.

Internet speech should not be controlled at all because you pick the websites and articles that you want to read. Nobody forces you to read anything that you don’t want to. It is our first amendment right of freedom of speech, and the internet should be treated no differently. People say that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” which also rings true for this instance also, except that beauty is not the issue that is being judged. The idea of what is acceptable to a broad audience of readers and what is not, is now under a microscope. The internet is a great source for finding news, and much more information that should not be censored in any way, because it would limit the amount of knowledge that would become available to the public.

According to Bruno Giussani, a Swiss journalist who lives in the Italian part of Switzerland, there are three concepts that outline the contours of internet journalism. They are diversity, community, and movement. He also states that most people assume that oral communication is the main form of communication, however, photography, graphics, and virtual spaces apeal strongly to emotions, our ability to reason, and our intelligence. He set up Webdo which is the first online Swiss newspaper.

There were half of million people at the swearing in of President Bush along Pennsylvania avenue from the capital to the white house. An interesting fact in this article was that Bush has the lowest approval rate of any recent second term president by forty nine percent. He is also the first wartime president since Nixon. I personally like President Bush and agree with just about everything he does, and I look forward to seeing what he will do in his second term as President.