Junk Mail over the Top

This story in Newsweek, “Dear Junk Mailers: Leave My Son Alone,” speaks volumes about the junk mail industry in our society. Thirteen years after the death of a seven year old boy, advertisers still target him with offers of tuxedos and snack cakes.

Gary Wiener, writing in Newsweek: “When his 18th birthday arrived, my son, Jacob, became awfully popular. The U.S. Navy wanted him. "Before you find your place in the world, maybe you should see it first," it urged. A local menswear shop offered him 50 percent off a tuxedo package for high-school graduation. And a razor company sent him a free razor, hoping, I suppose, to make a lifelong customer out of him. Their only miscalculation was that Jacob didn't shave. Nor was it likely that any of the armed forces would gain Jacob's services. And he certainly wouldn't graduate from high school. Jacob, you see, died in 1993. He was only 7 years old when a cancerous brain tumor stole him from us.”

“As much as we loved Jacob, that period of our lives is still incredibly painful to remember. Yet, years after his death, letters addressed to Jacob find their way into our mailbox. Early on, I was driven almost to tears by these inducements for our son to attend a ritzy local private school or to sample a particular snack cake. I knew my wife would be devastated by such mail, and I tried to get to the mailbox first so that she would never be affronted by envelopes addressed to her dead first child. Much later, I realized she had been doing the same thing, hastily throwing out mail addressed to Jake so I wouldn't have to endure the epistolary abuse.”

The Spam Plague Heightens

“Spam is back – in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone's minds. Of late, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide, spam volumes have doubled from last year,” according to Ironport, a spam-filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than nine out of every 10 e-mails sent over the Internet.

“Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 percent to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day,” Ironport says.

The High Cost of Noise

“The high noise of modern life may affect speech and language development in the very young, according to a study that found the auditory parts of the brains of young mice are slower to organize properly in the presence of continuous sounds. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, reared a group of rats in an environment of continuous background noise and found that their brain circuits that receive and interpret sound did not develop at the same rate as animals that were raised in a quieter environment.

Edward F. Chang and Michael Merzenich, co-authors of the study appearing in the journal Science, said that the continuous noise delayed the organization of auditory neurons during a critical two- to three-week period after the rat pups were born. Although the rat is not a perfect model for what happens in humans, the authors note, the study does suggest that high levels of noise might possibly affect some language learning in infants.

"These findings suggest that environmental noise, which is commonly present in contemporary child-rearing environments, can potentially contribute to auditory and language-related development delays," the authors write in Science. The authors noted that although the brain development was delayed in rats exposed to the noise, “their brains did eventually mature normally.”

Too Much Info to Get Started?

Dr. Piers Steel, an expert on the subject of putting off until tomorrow what should be done today, has distilled information on procrastination from 691 other research sources, and estimated that 95% of the population procrastinates sometimes, and about 15% to 20% are chronic procrastinators.

"Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task," he says. "Perfectionism is not the culprit. In fact, perfectionists actually procrastinate less, but they worry about it more."