Public relations people tend to be inveterate data hounds, because the intelligence provided to us by research can help us communicate with our clients’ stakeholders at the times, and in the places, that they are most likely to be receptive to PR messages.

So I was very intrigued recently by a nifty interactive chart in The New York Times. Based on the U.S. Department of Labor’s American Time Use Survey, it shows how Americans spend their days. While it’s not comprehensive, I found it very interesting.

Click on the image above. Then, scroll back and forth to see who’s doing what, when. Click on the chart in any activity area to minimize it and get an interesting factoid. Change the demographics to compare and contrast.

Did you know that the majority (53%) of people with advanced degrees wake up between 6:50 and 7:00 am? Not this PR person, alas. I am however one of the very elite two percent of Americans who are already hard at work on the computer at 8:20am.

Mending a Broken Heart

Contrary to popular belief, the human heart has the capacity to regenerate itself.

A team of researchers, led by Dr. Jonas Frisén at the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, has discovered that about half of the heart’s muscle cells are replaced over the course of a normal lifetime. (About 1% of the cells are replaced every year at age 25, with the rate gradually falling to less than 0.5% per year by age 75.)

“I think this will be one of the most important papers in cardiovascular medicine in years,” says Dr. Charles Murray, a heart researcher at the University of Washington, The New York Times reports.

In 1987, Dr. Piero Anversa, now director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Harvard Medical School, suggested that that heart muscle cells are renewed so fast that at 80, a person has replaced his heart four times over.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. If scientists are able to discover how the regeneration of heart muscle cells is regulated, it may be possible for the pharma industry to develop a whole new range of cardiovascular drugs to help fix wounded hearts.

Productivity Linked to WILB

Technology has blessed us with many benefits. It has made a world of information available to us, enhanced collaboration, made research easier and replaced voicemail with the infinitely less odious email. In fact, I like my high-tech distractions so much, that I’ve started to feel a bit guilty. Should I be “wasting” this much time idly tooling around the internet?

Good news. According to a recent University of Melbourne study, individuals who WILB — in other words, people who surf the Internet for fun at work — are about 9% more productive than those who don’t. It appears that taking short breaks in your routine, including a quick bit of WILB, enables the mind to rest itself, restoring your ability to concentrate.

It’s important that no more than 20% of the workday be spent in WILB, says Dr. Brent Coker of the University of Melbourne’s Department of Management and Marketing, because internet addiction can have the reverse effect, causing workers who are online to become irritable if they are interrupted.

So, WILB — in moderation — it’s good for you and your business.

Multiplying the Power of Pharma Research

There’s been an interesting new development in the space where pharmaceutical research and technology intersect. It’s called Sage, and it’s designed to “revolutionize how researchers approach the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease” by giving them access to a rich research database and the high-tech tools to collaborate on “evolving, integrated networks of biological data.”

John Wilbanks, a founding director of Sage, writes in his Common Knowledge blog that Merck, the global research-driven pharmaceutical company, has pledge to donate a vast amount of data about the biology of disease to the nonprofit.

Wilbanks writes, “Sage means that we are now on the path to a world in which scientists working on HIV in Brazilian non-profit research institutes (like my mother-in-law) will be able to use the same powerful computational disease biology tools as those inside Merck. I'm very much looking forward to living in that world,” he adds.

So am I. While it will take an estimated three to five years to see the first fruits of this project, it’s exciting to think of the intellectual power that will unleashed by using technology to tap the great global brain.

DST: A Sinister Plot to Toy with Our Biorhythms?

It’s almost here. The time of the year I hate most. The day on which I am robbed of a precious, precious hour of sleep … Daylight Saving Time. This year in the U.S., DST begins on Sunday, March 8, at 2:00 am, when clocks are adjusted forward one hour. Time doesn’t revert to normal again until November, when clocks are set back (and I get my hour of lost sleep back again.)

I’m a public relations consultant. I work for a leading business-to-business (B2B) PR firm based in New York City. Our unique positioning is the “power of specialized thinking” — so I have to be able to think. How can I think when, every spring, my bio-clock is being messed with by some Time Lord with a nonsensical agenda?

Here are the three top reasons I think we should do away with DST. (I’ve got more if you want them.)

1. It makes for less efficient workers. Studies estimate that that sleep deprivation costs U.S. businesses an estimated $150 billion a year in absenteeism and reduced productivity.
2. It’s not green. A 2008 study that examined billing data in Indiana before and after it adopted DST three years ago found that DST increased residential electricity consumption by 1% to 4%.

3. It takes time to change clocks. And as more high-tech devices contain clocks, more time is spent changing them. (I avoid this problem by leaving my watch on standard time all year-round. For the six months of DST, I simply add an hour in my head.)

In his My Three Cents blog, Ken Makovsky has written that “outstanding productivity in business depends on executives who are awake.” He suggests power napping as a solution. I say, put an end to Daylight Saving Time.

Investment Banking: PR Hits the Skids at Lehman Brothers

Talk about bad investment banking public relations: Lehman Brothers was caught red-handed, having plagiarized parts of a Sanford Bernstein report on virtualization technology, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Susanne Craig. Known for its research excellence, Bernstein is headquartered in New York.

A research report produced earlier this year by a Lehman analyst — who has since moved on to greener pastures — contained passages that were surprisingly similar to several notes written earlier by Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi.

In a letter sent last week to its clients, Lehman acknowledged the plagiarism. “The material was not sourced to Bernstein and was used without the firm's permission,” Lehman wrote. “We sincerely apologize to Bernstein, the authors of the reports, and our clients for this incident.”

The apology was accepted, but this was a crisis that should never have happened.

Because Mr. Sacconaghi is an extremely well-regarded analyst, whose work is closely followed and widely quoted, it was almost inevitable that this misappropriation of intellectual property would be uncovered. What makes this an especially unfortunate PR issue for the investment banking sector is the fact that this scandal comes at a time when Wall Street firms are trying to rebuild the public confidence in the credibility of their research departments.