Researchers at San Diego State University attend parties to observe student drinking habits

While many students were drunkenly celebrating New Year’s Eve, California scholars were busy putting finishing touches on research that shed light on none other than college students and their prodigious drinking habits.

The study, led by researchers at the Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Studies and Services at San Diego State University, found correlations between drinking games and higher levels of drunkenness.

Drinking games encouraged higher levels of drunkenness because of the large amounts of alcohol consumed over a small amount of time. Interestingly, the levels of alcohol consumption decreased when parties grew in size, but this was speculated simply to be the result of alcohol running dry before everyone has the chance to drink their fill.

The study was groundbreaking in its method of collecting data and increasing accuracy.

“Rather than relying on students’ reports of the environment, researchers actually gained access to college student parties and made detailed observations about the characteristics of these parties,” said James A. Cranford, research assistant professor at the University of Michigan in an interview for the Science Daily.

Cell phone drivers slow down traffic, according to the University of Utah

Drinking games cause college students to become drunk faster? Did that surprise you? Well how about this one: Researchers at the University of Utah found that driving while using a cell phone impairs the driver.

The lead researcher made some heavy accusations against those who chat on their cell phones while cruising down the highway in a press release from the University of Utah.

“That SOB on the cell phone is slowing you down and making you late,” University of Utah professor Dave Strayer said.

Their research shows that drivers talking on cell phones change lanes less and drive at slower speeds, an effect that ends up slowing down everyone’s commute time. The actual act of driving slower might be safer, but the act of talking on a cell phone also means drivers are not paying attention to road conditions where it might be better to speed up and pass a slow-moving oversize vehicle.

“If you get two or three people gumming up the system, it starts to cascade and slows everybody’s commute,” Strayer said.

Whether a driver uses a hands-free cell phone was irrelevant. All of the participants in the study used hands-free cell phones to produce the slower traffic results the researchers found.

Violent election overflows to Kenyan universities

The news on the international scene should remind American students of the relative safety on their own campuses.

In Kenya, the violent fallout from the national elections in December has also had implications for the University of Eastern Africa, where rioters were demanding specific ethnic groups to immediately leave the campus.

As reported by the BBC, there were nearly 1,000 demonstrators outside the campus gates as of Friday, Jan. 4.

“All of them are armed with machetes, bows and arrows,” said Caesar Wamalika, a Seventh-Day Adventist chaplain at the University of Eastern Africa, in the BBC report. “Some are drunk and others baying for blood. I have never seen anything like this.”

The disastrous scene comes amid election disputes that have provoked countrywide violence, leaving many dead and creating refugees in a country ironically known to harbor refugees from unstable neighboring states such as Uganda and Sudan.

The elections have largely polarized Kenyans along ethnic lines, pitting two of the largest groups against each other in a country whose demographics indicate the existence of dozens of ethnic units.

[Reach columnist Andrew Doughman at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]