America's Healthiest Airports?

Health Magazine has picked America's top ten "Healthiest Airports," but you'll have to decide the merits of the selections.

The Fear of Speaking

A clarification!: It has been said that speaking before a group is the number one fear of adults – a statement which daily is widely misinterpreted. The number one social fear of adult is speaking before groups.

Given the choice of speaking before a group or trying to scale a 500-foot vertical sheet of solid rock, being operated on for a brain tumor, or being held-up at gunpoint, most adults find speaking before a group to be far less frightening.

Learning at Any Age

Matthew Blakeslee writing for Discover says, "If old dogs haven’t been able to learn new tricks, maybe that’s because no one has known how to teach them properly. Until quite recently orthodox neuroscience held that only the brains of young children are resilient, malleable, and morphable—in a word, plastic."

"This neuroplasticity, as it is called, seems to fade steadily as the brain congeals into its fixed adult configuration. Infants can sustain massive brain damage, up to the loss of an entire cerebral hemisphere, and still develop into nearly normal adults; any adult who loses half the brain, by contrast, is a goner. Adults can’t learn to speak new languages without an accent, can’t take up piano in their fifties then go on to play Carnegie Hall, and often suffer strokes that lead to permanent paralysis or cognitive deficiencies. The mature brain, scientists concluded, can only decline."

"It turns out this theory is not just wrong, it is spectacularly wrong. Two new books, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Ballantine Books, $24.95) by science journalist Sharon Begley and The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking, $24.95) by psychiatrist Norman Doidge, offer masterfully guided tours through the burgeoning field of neuroplasticity research. Each has its own style and emphasis; both are excellent."

Exhausted Audiences

"For years, sleep researchers have been preaching the dangers of lost sleep: People who are fatigued can't pay attention to routine tasks, have trouble learning and are prone to a laundry list of health problems, from depression to high blood pressure," says Kathleen Facklemann in USA Today

"New research suggests an added risk to losing sleep day after day: Humans and animals that have chronic sleep deprivation might reach a point at which the very ability to catch up on lost sleep is damaged, according to Fred Turek, a sleep researcher at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois."

"His research on sleep patterns in rats appeared this summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That, together with findings from a human study, suggests people who lose sleep night after night might not recover the alertness they need to perform well during the day. So far the studies don't tell researchers whether the damage is permanent. But they do suggest that people who go to work fatigued day after day might perform consistently at a subpar level."

The upshot for speakers and meeting planners: more than half of what your audiences require from a presentation is high energy.

Meetings with Decorum

"The Week" reports that the Indianapolis Public School system is warning parents not to cheer when their child's name is read out at this year's high school graduation ceremonies. A letter from superintendent Eugene White reminds families that attending a graduation ceremony is a privilege, not a right, and warns that up to 30 police officers will be present at each ceremony to ensure good order. Graduation "is a joyous time, a proud time, and a formal time," writes White. "It is not a party. It is not a pep rally."

Amen. I've personally witnessed graduation ceremonies that have turned into pseudo-popularity contests with raucous cheering for some students.

The State of the Meeting Industry

The 2005 State of the Industry Report a 22 page .pdf report produced by Successful Meetings offer “an in-depth look at where the industry is today and where it's likely to go in the future,” based on responses “from more than 1,500 corporate, association, and independent planners.”

Rising Air Travel Costs

Air Travel Costs Take a Jump: MeetingsNet reports that the Air Travel Price Index, released last week by the U.S. Department of Transportation, rose 10.3 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year – the biggest year-to-year jump since the index numbers were first published in 1995.

Cell-phone Free Meetings

All the more reason to have cell-phone free conferences and retreats:

Study: Cell phones tied to family tension

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- The round-the-clock availability that cell phones and pagers have brought to people's lives may be taking a toll on family life, a new study suggests.

The study, which followed more than 1,300 adults over 2 years, found that those who consistently used a mobile phone or pager throughout the study period were more likely to report negative "spillover" between work and home life -- and, in turn, less satisfaction with their family life.