Diversions April 26, 2012

App Tells You When and How Much Coffee Is Right for You

It’s 2:30 p.m., and you’re wondering: Have a cup of coffee and perk up? Or will you be too wired to sleep that night?

Reported by

A new app can help demystify how much caffeine to consume—and when to consume it—to ensure that optimal wide-awake feeling without shredding your night’s sleep.

“Many people don’t understand how caffeine levels in their bloodstream go up and how they go down,” said Frank Ritter, professor of information sciences and technology, psychology and computer science and engineering at Penn State.

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Ritter and other Penn State researchers have developed Caffeine Zone, a true “coffee talk” app, which integrates information on caffeine consumption and its effects to produce a graph of how the caffeine affects a user over the course of a day.

“It’s important to understand the effect that caffeine can have at these various levels,” Ritter said.

The point of the app is to help people determine when caffeine may give them a mental boost and when it could hurt their sleep patterns.

(Cont’d)

The app’s developers point out that that the speed at which caffeine is consumed is also important. If drunk rapidly, a cup of coffee can cause a spike in mental alertness, but enough of the drug can linger in the bloodstream to cause sleep problems hours later, said Ritter, who worked with Kuo-Chuan (Martin) Yeh, assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

People who drink too much caffeine too quickly may face other problems, the researchers said. A spike of caffeine above the optimal level can cause nausea and nervousness.

Peer-reviewed studies were used as input data to determine that caffeine drinkers with between 200 and 400 milligrams of caffeine in their bloodstream are in a zone of optimal mental alertness. For sleep, they set a lower threshold of 100 milligrams. Coffee drinkers may have sleep problems if they remain above this.

To plot caffeine’s effect, customize the app’s settings. First, unless you’re from the euro zone, find an online conversion to translate your weight into kilograms. Enter your weight. Choose your caffeine consumption and how quickly you drink it. There’s no choice for caffeinated sodas, but you can enter a custom caffeine dose. You can’t store custom settings, but the history will store them for you and they can be reused.

Then check the graph and watch the line creep up to the optimal green zone for alertness. When you want to make sure you’re set for sleep (the blue zone at the bottom of the screen), stop drinking caffeine. Or make sure your headphones are on: the app sends occasional alerts warning you when your caffeine is about to run low.

The app is available on iTunes for free with advertisements or for purchase without ads. It works only on Apple devices—the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Compliance April 25, 2012

Cellular Company Owner Accused of Misusing ESOP

The U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit seeking to recover losses suffered by participants in the Parrot Cellular Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).

Reported by

Rebecca Moore

The suit alleges that the defendants caused or permitted the ESOP to purchase the parent company’s stock for more than fair market value and that Dennis Webb, the principal owner of Entrepreneurial Ventures Inc., which operates Parrot Cellular telephone retail stores in northern and central California and is the sponsor of the retirement plan, enriched himself by millions of dollars at the expense of the plan and its participants.

In addition to Webb, the suit names as defendants EVI executives Matthew Fidiam and J. Robert Gallucci and Consulting Fiduciaries Inc., an Illinois company that served as the independent fiduciary and investment manager for the ESOP during a November 2002 stock purchase by the ESOP.

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Investigators determined that the ESOP purchased approximately 90% of EVI stock for more than $28 million. Around the same time as the stock purchase, EVI also set aside $4 million pursuant to a deferred compensation agreement with Webb and entered into a second executive compensation agreement with Webb for $12 million. The department alleges in the suit that a reasonable value for the company as of November 2002 was far less than the amounts paid for the company stock and the total deferred compensation agreements entered into with Webb.

The defendants allegedly violated the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) by rejecting their fiduciary duties of loyalty and prudence to the plan, engaging in self-dealing, permitting or engaging in prohibited transactions, and failing to monitor the performance of the plan’s appraiser. In addition to seeking the recovery of all losses to the ESOP resulting from the above violations, the Labor Department’s suit seeks the disgorgement of unjust profits from Webb that he received from the two deferred compensation agreements and from his sale of EVI stock to the ESOP.