Or perhaps you enjoy celebrity gossip.

Equities research analysts at FBN Securities upgraded shares of Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) from a “sell” rating to an “outperform” rating in a research note to clients and investors on Tuesday.

Separately, analysts at BNP Paribas (EPA: BNP) downgraded shares of Research In Motion from an “outperform” rating to a “neutral” rating in a research note to investors on Monday.

Research In Motion Limited (RIM) is a designer, manufacturer and marketer of wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information, including e-mail, phone, short message service (SMS), Internet and intranet-based applications. RIM’s portfolio of products, services and embedded technologies are used by organizations worldwide and include the BlackBerry wireless solution, the RIM Wireless Handheld product line, software development tools and other software and hardware. Its subsidiaries include Research In Motion Corporation, Research In Motion UK Limited and RIM Finance, LLC. On June 2, 2010, Harman International sold its software operating systems unit, QNX Software Systems, to the Company.

Shares of Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) traded down 2.38% during mid-day trading on Wednesday, hitting $59.01. Research In Motion has a 52 week low of $42.53 and a 52 week high of $76.95. The stock’s 50-day moving average is $58.48 and its 200-day moving average is $53.50. On average, analysts predict that Research In Motion will post $1.61 EPS next quarter. The company has a market cap of $30.846 billion and a price-to-earnings ratio of 11.64.

BY ADAM GORLICK

Flu season is here. And with every social interaction comes a game of chance: Does the person you're talking to, shaking hands with or kissing have a bug? And if they do, what are the odds you'll catch it?

Doctors and public health experts try to make mingling with the sick safer. They develop vaccines, promote the need for frequent handwashing and enforce other common-sense measures to keep coughs, sniffles and sneezes from spreading.

But in order to follow and better understand how infectious diseases spread through real-life social networks, a group of Stanford researchers used wireless sensors to track high school students, teachers and staff members throughout one day during the height of last January's swine flu outbreak.

"Do you know how many contacts you have with infectious people on a daily basis? Do you know how many contacts you have with anybody on a daily basis?" said James Holland Jones, an associate professor of anthropology and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. "Very often, those are the things we know the least about because they're the hardest to measure."

Epidemiologists have always tried to answer those questions through pen-and-paper surveys, asking individuals to recall who they were in contact with on any given day. They've been forced to rely on shaky memories and vague recollections for their data.

Jones and his colleagues – led by Marcel Salathé, a former postdoctoral researcher at Stanford – used the wireless sensors to design a better method for tracking interactions in order to study how a flu outbreak might be headed off in a school. Their work is detailed in an article published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers outfitted each teacher, student and staff member at an unnamed American high school with credit card-size gadgets that transmitted and received radio signals every 20 seconds during one day.

The devices logged more than 760,000 incidents when two people were within 10 feet of each other, roughly the maximum distance that a disease can be transmitted through a cough or sneeze.

"The enormous amount of interactions that occur in a single day is mind-blowing," said Salathé, who is now an assistant professor of biology at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Pennsylvania State University.

So are the chances to catch a cold.

After collecting the electronic tracking data, the researchers ran thousands of simulations of what would happen if there were a flu outbreak in the school.

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