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A Kansas State University researcher studied cyberloafing — wasting time at work on the Internet — and the effects of Internet use policies and punishment on reducing cyberloafing.

Joseph Ugrin, assistant professor of accounting at Kansas State University, and John Pearson, associate professor of management at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, found that company policies are not enough to stop workers from wasting time at work and that sanctions with policies must be consistently enforced for policies to be effective.

The study will be published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

Cyberloafing results in lost productivity and could put companies in legal trouble when workers conduct illegal activity or unacceptable behavior like viewing pornography on work computers. Between 60 and 80 percent of people’s time on the Internet at work has nothing to do with work.

Although organizations benefit from positive aspects of the Internet like improved communication, some have trouble addressing cyberloafing, Ugrin said. Companies spend time, money and effort trying to monitor computer usage, detect what employees are doing online and write policies for employees on acceptable Internet behavior.

The researchers, who surveyed office workers and university students, found that both older and younger workers find ways to waste time on the Internet — but in different ways.

“Older people are doing things like managing their finances, while young people found it much more acceptable to spend time on social networking sites like Facebook,” said Ugrin, who studies behavioral and ethical issues related to accounting and information systems.

Threats of termination and detection mechanisms are effective deterrents against activities such as viewing pornography, managing personal finances and personal shopping, according to the study. However, that may not be enough.

Policies must be enforced to discourage activities like excessive personal emailing and social networking.

“We found that that for young people, it was hard to get them to think that social networking was unacceptable behavior,” Ugrin said. “Just having a policy in place did not change their attitudes or behavior at all. Even when they knew they were being monitored, they still did not care.”

The experts said that the memo, first obtained by NBC News, threatened constitutional rights and dangerously expanded the definition of national self-defense and of what constitutes an imminent attack.

“Anyone should be concerned when the president and his lawyers make up their own interpretation of the law or their own rules,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and an authority on international law and the use of force.

“This is a very, very dangerous thing that the president has done,” she added.

The memo, made public Monday, provides detail about the administration’s controversial expansion of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens.

And with snowfall set to continue at least until the end of the week, the authorities are bracing for more chaos on the roads.

“There hasn’t been such a winter in 100 years,” Pyotr Biryukov, deputy mayor for residential issues, said Tuesday in comments carried by Interfax. “The snow this year has already reached one and a half times the climatic norm,” he said.

The capital has seen 216 centimeters of snow fall since the beginning of winter, Biryukov said.

With Dell trading at a low valuation relative to other technology companies, the board of directors should not have approved a leveraged buyout at that price, they said. Dell is paying $13.65 per share in cash for the stock, which ended on Tuesday at $13.42, up 1.1 percent.

“Do the directors think Michael Dell is crazy and shareholders are lucky to lose their ownership to him?” asked Frederick E. “Shad” Rowe, general partner of Greenbrier Partners and a trustee of the $22 billion Texas Employees Retirement System. “Or do they think that the plans and projections make sense and they’re leaving shareholders in the dust?”

Rowe said he dumped about 400,000 shares of Dell on Tuesday. “I was so irritated I didn’t want to think about it anymore,” he said.

The $24.4 billion deal, which requires shareholder approval, would end an almost quarter-century run on the public markets for a company that was conceived in Dell’s college dorm room and quickly rose to the top of the global personal computer business – only to be rendered an also-ran over the past decade as PC prices crumbled and customers moved to smartphones and tablets.

Dell executives said the company will stick to a strategy of expanding software and services offerings for large companies, with the goal of becoming a full-service provider of corporate computing services in the mold of the highly profitable IBM . They downplayed speculation that Dell might spin off the low-margin PC business on which it made its name.

But some investors were not interested in pronouncements on strategy.

A report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that some 61 percent of Facebook users had taken a hiatus of at least several weeks for myriad reasons, whether they were weary from an onslaught of gossip, or for the more pious, the arrival of Lent.

Yet the use of Facebook, whether constant or not, is pervasive in America.

Of the American adults who use the Internet, 67 percent are on Facebook, Pew found. That compares with 20 percent who use LinkedIn and 16 percent who are on Twitter.

And who better to write the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, designed to protect Big Ag and Big Energy, than the lawyers on the Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force at the corporate-funded and infamous American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The measure has some worried that by the system claiming ownership to the work of others, creativity could be stifled and there would be little incentive to come up with innovative ways to educate students. Some have questioned the legality of the proposal as it relates to students.

“There is something inherently wrong with that,” David Cahn, an education activist who regularly attends county school board meetings, said before the board’s vote to consider the policy. “There are better ways to do this than to take away a person’s rights.”

If the policy is approved, the county would become the only jurisdiction in the Washington region where the school board assumes ownership of work done by the school system’s staff and students.

They are the first to use the state-of-the-art handheld tiny surveillance helicopters, which relay reliable full motion video and still images back to the devices’ handlers in the battlefield.