The Boston Globe asked readers for their favorite work catchphrases in yesterday’s paper, and this one really got me:

“Can’t get nine women to have a baby in a month” is the standard answer to when some exec asks for an unreasonable amount of work to be done in a week and thinks they have the solution by hiring a bunch of consultants.—Liz Clauser, South Boston

Another good one was:

“Do the red one!” in the same tone as the car commercial where the kids are watching the guy wreck cars. It means [Quality Assurance] has to test the software again.”—Jim Fritts, North Reading.

We don’t have any work catchphrases here that I can think of, but maybe I’ll try to implement a few now that I’m feeling inspired.

The Centers for Disease Control now wants airlines, travel agents, and online reservations systems to collect a lot of information—e-mail address, cellphone number, traveling companions’ names, your name, your address, and your emergency contacts name, address, and phone number—to help control the spread of disease during a bird flu pandemic, according to Government Health IT.

Battling a pandemic disease such as avian flu requires the ability to quickly track sick people and anyone they have contacted.

In response, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials have proposed new federal regulations to electronically track more than 600 million U.S. airline passengers a year traveling on more than 7 million flights through 67 hub airports.

The new regulations, which are available on the CDC’s Web site and will be posted for a 60-day comment period in the Federal Register starting Nov. 30, would require airlines, travel agents and global reservations systems to collect personal information that exceeds the quantity of information currently collected by the Transportation Security Administration or the Homeland Security Department.

I am totally torn on this one. On one hand, it could help prevent a huge outbreak. On the other, it’s an absolute invasion of privacy. Is this OK in the name of health, but not for security reasons? Or vice versa? I guess, if it came down to it, I could learn to live with it, as long as the information is guarded like Fort Knox, only better.

While I was walking the dogs before work this morning, all kinds of strange things kept popping into my head: My old roommate’s name (wonder what Guy’s doing these days?), the theme song to “Bewitched,” the taste of breadfruit, how scary “Fatal Attraction” was when it first came out—you get the drift. My mind is an endless stream of irrelevant trivia. Which doesn’t bode well for my IQ, according to this article.

Basically, it says that researchers at the University of Oregon did some brain-measuring to figure out what makes people score high on visual working memory tests (those with good visual working memories also tend to score high on cognitive tests, it says). Turns out that they aren’t just stuffing more info into their heads; instead, they have the ability to ignore the irrelevant.

The findings turn upside down the popular concept that a person’s memory capacity, which is strongly related to intelligence, is solely dependent upon the amount of information you can cram into your head at one time. These results have broad implications and may lead to developing more effective ways to optimize memory as well as improved diagnosis and treatment of cognitive deficits associated with attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia…

“People differed systematically, and dramatically, in their ability to keep irrelevant items out of awareness,” Vogel said. “This doesn’t mean people with low capacity are cognitively impaired. There may be advantages to having a lot of seemingly irrelevant information coming to mind. Being a bit scattered tends to be a trait of highly imaginative people.”

So I guess there’s some hope for people like me after all. Now, can someone get the jingle for Foxwoods out of my head?

Update: According to the New Scientist, maybe all I need to improve my memory is more coffee.

Most meeting planners and hospitality folks I’ve met appear to be extroverts, meaning that they get their energy from other people and the world around them. And that’s good, because extroverts tend to be rewarded in this society (U.S.). From an article on Yahoo:

The attitude that there’s something wrong with introverted people is widely shared in society, where fast talk and snap decisions are often valued over listening, deliberation and careful planning. Extroverts seem to rule the world or, at least, the USA, which hasn’t elected an introverted president for three decades, since Jimmy Carter.

“The signals we get from the world agree that extroversion is valued,” says Sanford Cohn, an associate professor in curriculum and instruction at Arizona State University. “A lot of the messages we get from society have to do with being social, and in order to be social you have to behave a certain way.”

Being a hard-core introvert myself, I tend to get pretty drained from the stuff so many planners seem to thrive on, and need down time to regroup and re-energize (I wonder how many closet introverts we have among planners, who like me collapse after a long day of interacting with people?). I’ve always seen this as a fault, something I need to “work on” and try to “get over” to fit what in the U.S. is the cultural norm of extroversion. But I yam what I yam (sorry, Thanksgiving leftovers tend to creep in), and introvert I remain.

So I was glad to read this bit in the article:

Researchers using brain scans have found introverts have more brain activity in general, and specifically in the frontal lobes. When these areas are activated, introverts are energized by retrieving long-term memories, problem solving, introspection, complex thinking and planning.

Extroverts enjoy the external world of things, people and activities. They have more activity in brain areas involved in processing the sensory information we’re bombarded with daily. Because extroverts have less internally generated brain activity, they search for more external stimuli to energize them.

So there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, after all—whew! While most meetings are geared toward extrovert-friendly activities, please keep us busy-brained introverts in mind, too, and give us some ways to get some quiet time to recharge and process. You never know what we might come up with, when we’re given an opportunity to interact in ways that mesh with our way of thinking.

Update: Jennifer Warwick has a great networking survival guide for us introverted types. Thanks, Jennifer! I’ll try out some of your tips at my next meeting.

OK, I’m having too much fun with this warning label generator site. I don’t of any way to relate this to meetings, but it’s just fun. Enjoy!

(Thanks to High Context Consulting for the pointer.)

It’s funny how often meeting and event planning are showing up in Donald Trump’s TV show The Apprentice. Next up is an episode that features Microsoft’s Live Meeting Web conferencing software. From the promo site:

Considered more closely, the product choice isn’t much of a surprise. It actually appears to be part of a broader promotional arrangement. The Live Meeting service, which came from Microsoft’s 2003 acquisition of PlaceWare, already has a number of marketing ties to the “Apprentice” show. Executive producer Mark Burnett and past contestants took part in a related Microsoft product launch earlier this year. And the Live Meeting group has been promoting the service with virtual conferences after each episode featuring the person who was fired the previous night. (Link via Gretchen Ledgard.)

I haven’t been watching it much this season, but I might have to check next week’s show out to see what they do with it—could be interesting.

(Thanks to Stephanie Downs at the ConferBlog for the pointer.)

Someone with way too much time on their hands has invented a handy little device that can measure how the beer stash is holding up, the blood alcohol level of drinkers, and some other interesting data, according to The Inquirer.

Wakerly has built a microcontroller that directs a valve and a flow meter, and spliced both into the tap line of an everyday keg fridge. Then he wrote custom software for an attached Linux computer that can look up drinkers in a database and post their pour total to the Web.

According to Kegbot, each approved drinker gets a digital ID button with a unique 64-bit code. You need this to pour a drink.

A microcontroller reads the code and sends it to the Linux computer, which matches it to your entry in the database and checks any restrictions on your drinking.

While this could be a good way to rein in those who tend to overindulge at the office holiday party, it’s all a little too Big Brother for me. What will they think of next?

Not one, probably, but 92 or so would put me down, according to deathbycaffeine, a Web site that calculates just how much of your favorite beverage you can drink without going belly-up. Nothing about how much turkey you can eat in a sitting without exploding, unfortunately. I could have used that on Thanksgiving, when I definitely was in mortal danger of a gobbler overdose.

With more holiday food on the horizon, it is good to know that it would take 10,237.50 Hershey Kisses to have me pushing up daisies, though…

(Thanks to Anne Taylor-Vaisey for the pointer!)

Here’s a little holiday video that may make you want to try that tofu turkey alternate…

That’s the question The Economist tackled recently. It evaluated 127 cities around the world on a number of factors, which, according to the Times Online, include:

the quality of public transport, the availability of high-quality hotels, the extent of social and religious restrictions and the quality of healthcare in the city. One of the more unusual factors used to assess business cities is the cost of buying Time magazine or an equivalent.

The methodology reflects the Economist’s belief that the cost of being in a city is no longer the only factor. Many business travel indices rank cities on the basis of average per diem rates paid to business travellers visiting the city, given that it is the traveller’s company who is footing the bill.

Three Canadian cities top the list: Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto. The top U.S. cities were a little surprising: Honolulu (#5, OK, that’s not a big surprise), Cleveland (6), Pittsburgh (11), Atlanta (13), and Boston (15). New York barely squeaked into the top 50 (tied with Madrid in the 47th spot). Anyway, it’s pretty interesting. You can download the list from a link in the Times Online article.