Experts sometimes trip over their own expertise. So concludes Philip Smith, an engineering professor at Ohio State University, who recently studied the problem-solving techniques of airline pilots. Given a puzzle within the range of their expertise, his subjects did better than non-experts at solving it. But when presented with one that was beyond the limits of their expertise, those same fly boys tended to plow straight ahead, confident that their ”special knowledge” would make them winners, even when they didn`t really have any ready at hand. A little knowledge, notes Smith, can indeed be a dangerous thing.
Home brewed
Attention beer lovers: If you want to get good and schnockered, fetch a brew out of your own refrigerator rather than heading off for the corner tap. So notes the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, which recently published a comparative survey of the booze contents of alcoholic beverages. From his own stock, the average beer drinker pop-tops himself a 12-ounce suds service that has a .54 ounce alcoholic content. But out for a night on the town, the bartender sets in front of that same beer fancier, on average, a 10.78 ounce drink with only .49 ounce of alcohol. The council`s statistics also show that it is easier to build a beer belly at home than on the road:
Out of the frig, the average beer drinker takes 148 calories per serving of his favorite brand; across a bar top he gets only 133 calories per drink of potential additions to his waist line.
Water cooler tip
If you want to hang onto your job, spend more time at the water cooler. So advises Marilyn Moats Kennedy, author of the recently published white-collar-survival manual, ”Office Warfare” (Fawcett/Crest, $3.95). According to Kennedy, who doubles as Glamour magazine`s career columnist, many a job is lost because the victims paid too much attention to getting the job done, not enough to the office-politics battles taking place all around them.
”Companies don`t victimize people randomly,” says Kennedy. The active players chew up the innocents who think they can remain above the battle–and still draw a paycheck.
Losing battle
According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, America is losing its much-publicized war on cancer. According to a Harvard University research team, 280,000 Americans died from cancer in 1962, but 435,000 died in 1982. As a result, say the Harvard researchers, the nation`s massively expensive campaign against cancer has to be considered ”a qualified failure.”
