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Wednesday Buzz: The Impact of Jet Lag

Learn why the L.A. to New York red-eye may be worse than you think—according to an analysis of pro baseball players. Also: Twitter debuts new weapons in its ongoing battle to fight harassment.

Do you worry about jet lag when you travel? You should!

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that traveling from west to east may take a toll on your performance—at least that’s the case for professional baseball players.

The study analyzed the performance of Major League Baseball teams, where the eastward-traveling team played a game in a city that was at least a two-hour shift from their internal clocks. Researchers found that jet lag negatively affected both the offense and defense significantly.

However, traveling east to west doesn’t have as much of an effect, according to a Northwestern University news release.

“This is a strong argument that the effect is due to the circadian clock, not the travel itself,” Dr. Ravi Allada, lead researcher, said.

So, if you’re traveling to the East Coast to deliver an important presentation or participate in a big meeting, you may want to arrive a day or two ahead of time so you can be at the top of your game.

Twitter Continues Fight Against Trolls

Twitter has a well-known troll problem, but it’s working on it. Recently, the platform made a public pledge to fight the abuse, hate speech, and harassment delivered by some of its users.

In November, they debuted three features to battle bad behavior, including the ability to mute particular accounts.

And yesterday, they went a step further by unveiling more new features meant to make the platform safer.

As Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel reports: “Twitter is implementing a stricter policy that will ‘identify people who have been permanently suspended and stop them from creating new accounts.’”

Users now have the option to conduct a “safe search,” meaning search returns will filter out “potentially sensitive” content and tweets from blocked or muted accounts.

Also, “Twitter is changing its timeline to identify ‘potentially abusive and low-quality replies’: It’s created a mechanism that collapses them,” writes Warzel. Users will still be able to see all of the potentially offensive tweets, but they’ll have to click an extra button to do so.

Troll, heal thyself:  MIT Technology Review reports that even the nicest among us can exhibit troll behavior online.

Give the people what they want: Want to serve relevant content to your audience? Abila’s blog recommends taking a cue from Amazon and Netflix.

Need to know: Omnipress’ Big Ideas Blog lists the five essential reports you need to be pulling from Google Analytics.

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Raegan Johnson

By Raegan Johnson

Raegan Johnson is a contributor to Associations Now. MORE

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