Kids: Don’t play Doctors and Nurses with your iPod. Using earbuds as a play stethoscope could seriously damage your granny’s health.
So say the real doctors at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston, who recently finished up pushing eight different models of magnet-laden earbuds up against the pacemakers and defibrillators embedded in the chests of patients. They found that, if the ‘buds are placed within 1.2 inches of a pacemaker, it will make it send a signal to the heart whether it was supposed to or not.
In the case of implanted defibrillators, the magnets could cause them to shut down. In both cases, the implants go back to normal as soon as the headphones are removed to a safe distance.
Here are the numbers: of 60 patients tested, 14 were affected — just under a quarter. Defibrillators were twice as likely to suffer a glitch. So, roughly, if you have a pacemaker, you have a one in 15 chance of your heart skipping a beat when you press your headphones right up against your chest, and then only until you remove them (this assumes a 50/50 split between pacemaker and defibrillator patients in the study).
We’d file this in the “Unlikely” category. It reminds us of the joke about the man who tells his doctor “It hurts when I do this“. The doctor replies “Well, don’t do it, then”.
MP3 player headphones may hinder pacemakers: study [Reuters]
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Tags: doctor-replies, facebook, GearFactor, headphones, heart, israel, joke, media players, medicine, pacemakers, patients-tested, your-headphones
UK tech mag T3 (nee Tomorrow’s Technology, Today) reports that the lucky brits are to get a Compaq-branded version of the nifty looking Mini 1000, the new Atom based netbook from HP.
Not only will the Compaq version be £100 ($160) cheaper than the HP’s £400 ($635), it will also have an integrated HSDPA radio. There are, however, some discrepancies in the reports we’ve read. First, the resolution of the Compaq Mini 700 is claimed to be a rather odd 1024 x 576 pixels (against the HP Mini 1000’s 1024 x 600). Second, the Compaq has “700″ in its name, making it much more likely that this is a clone of the smaller of HP’s new netbooks, the HP Mini 700, which would mean that this is a simple rebranding of the cheaper model, and not a bargain basement clone of the bigger one.
The confusion continues. The normally trustworthy Trusted Reviews pictures both machines, and the Compaq does indeed look like the 10″ HP (below). We won’t know until Compaq officially posts the product on its UK site.
HP Mini 1000 now official, joined by HP Compaq Mini 700 [T3 via Trusted Reviews and Engadget]
You’re standing around the water cooler chatting with your co-workers, and someone makes a racist (sexist, homophobic, or otherwise stereotype-based) joke. What do you do? Call him or her out on it and risk your work relationship? Don’t say a thing (and imply that it’s ok)? Over at the Brazen Careerist blog, race and culture consultant Carmen Van Kerckhove says:
My recommendation? Play dumb. Put on a bewildered expression, act as if you don’t understand the joke, and ask your co-worker to explain it to you. He will not be able to explain why the joke is funny without evoking a racist stereotype. You can then question the veracity of this stereotype, thus pointing out the racism of the joke, without being confrontational and without humiliating your co-worker. Racist jokes rely on an unspoken, shared knowledge of racist stereotypes. Without the stereotypes, there is no humor.
Everyone’s been in this uncomfortable situation before. How have you dealt with it? Tell us your advice in the comments, then hit the link below to see the rest of Van Kerckhove’s beyond-diversity-training tips on race at work.
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