Teens that hardly stop talking on their mobile phones are more prone to disrupted sleep, stress, fatigue and restlessness, finds a new international survey.

This in turn is leading to poorer performance at school, and emotional health, including a higher risk of developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The finding is based on two studies that will be presented at the at the Sleep 2008 meeting of Associated Sleep Societies in the US this week.

The first study was conducted by researchers at Sweden’s Sahlgren Academy, who found that adolescents who made more than 15 phone calls and sent more than 15 text messages in a day not only slept poorly, but when compared to kids who made did the same less than five times a day, they were also leading more careless lifestyles, including spending more time on their computers, drinking more alcohol and caffeinated drinks.

Based on this, lead author Dr Gaby Badre, said that mobile addiction could compromise a teen’s health, reports the Daily Telegraph.

The second study was conducted in the US by Fred Danner at the University of Kentucky.

He found that teens that were addicted to their phones slept less than eight hours a night, and as a result got poorer marks at school. In addition to this, he also found that such kids had a higher level of emotional disturbance and risk of developing ADHD.

You really wish to drive customers away from your e-commerce site? Follow this handy guide of six techniques for push-away web visitors. 

1. Make your web site hazy with lots of really large image files and flash animation clips. Don’t bother categorizing what the pictures are for or how they relate to your core business, and make sure they are as large as possible, so they slow down the browsers of anyone who dares show up at your URL with a 56K modem. What’s more, try to make watching a splash screen or flash animation video requisite for entry into the site. Sure, go ahead and post a message that allows users to bypass your intro video, but don’t make this “skip” mark too obvious — use a font that’s the same color as the video or photograph. 

2. Try to avoid good navigability. Put all of the critical information about your small business on one page and don’t include easy to use scroll bars. Instead of creating a separate landing page for each key phrase for your Pay Per Click small business advertising campaign, create one master page — your homepage — and mis-title and mis-direct all the traffic that comes through. 

3. Disregard all grammatical, factual, and spelling errors. If your writing is clear, concise, and descriptive of your service, chances are that visitors might stick around to see what your small business is about. To put a check on this, disguise your small business’s purpose by writing flowery and un-descriptive language, making illogical statements, or simply writing no verbal clues at all and leaving your visitors to navigate on their own. 

4. Include lots of pop up ads and banner ads all over your site. People come to a small business web site to get bombarded by ads, right? They don’t want to get clean, easy to understand shopping cart directions — they want to get blasted off their computers by blizzards of shiny, flashy, obnoxious pop ups. 

5. Make it as tricky as possible for your visitors to contact a customer service representative. If you have a 1-800 number or even a local toll number that provides access to your customer service department, hide this number in some backwater landing page. Or better yet, don’t include contact information at all. Instead, include a generic email address, and either ignore the emails that come to you, or write back to your clients three or four weeks after they submit questions. 

 6. Never revise the content, graphics, or contact information on your site. Once you’ve created your ecommerce platform, seal it in stone for all eternity.

 

Hey… what do you think a computer is? A male or a female?  Let’s check it out….