In a survey of 1,800 Note to Self listeners earlier this month, nearly 80 percent of respondents told us that sometimes they get headaches, insomnia or eye twitches as a result of information overload — but they still continue consuming more.
Gloria Mark, informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine, has found that the habit is a self-perpetuating cycle.
She uses sensors — Fitbit-like “acto-graphs,” lightweight cameras, heart rate monitors and regular “probes” — to measure how our bodies and emotions react when we spend time online. And her lab’s findings have been fairly consistent: Interruptions stress us out and keep us from properly concentrating, which stresses us out further, disrupting our concentration further, and on and on.
Read the full story on the NPR website.
Informatics professor Alfred Kobsa has received a Mercator Fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the largest research funding organization in Germany. The Mercator fellowship will enable Kobsa—whose research focuses on the areas of user modeling and personalized systems, privacy, support for personal health maintenance, and information visualization—to participate in “intensive, long-term project-based collaboration between researchers from both domestic and foreign institutions,” according to the