Rest Easy: Your Guide to Better Sleep

A good night's rest makes everything else in your life easier. Along with good nutrition and mental well-being, optimal sleep fuels us to live our best lives. The following information provides insight into how sleep affects our health and how good sleep habits can provide just what you need to sleep like a baby once again.
Our bodies turn their energy inward when we sleep. Instead of expending energy to walk, talk, eat, exercise and digest, our bodies focus on repairing damaged cells and tissues, recharging the immune system and giving our minds some well-deserved time to wander freely through our dreams. Without time to sleep each night, bad things start to happen -- and fast!

The cost of undersleeping
A recent survey by the National Sleep Foundation found that on average people sleep one and a half hours less per night than they did a century ago. While most of those in the poll said they feel best if they've had at least eight hours of sleep each night, the number reporting actually getting eight or more hours of sleep per night fell from 38 percent in 2001 to 28 percent in 2008.

Insufficient sleep over time has been linked to depression, decreased cognitive performance, immune suppression, blood sugar imbalance and even obesity. Just one night of poor sleep can cause fatigue, memory loss and decreased mental capacity.

The bottom line? Sleep should be kept at the top of your to-do list each day. In the same way that making conscious choices about the food you eat helps to put you on the path to optimal health, getting sound, solid sleep each night can go a long way toward promoting your best quality of life.

Six tips for optimal sleep
Running around frantically just before slamming your head onto your pillow is not an effective way to achieve optimal sleep patterns for most people. Getting into a pattern of consistent, optimal sleep takes some time and can be greatly helped by following some basic sleep hygiene tips. Take a look at the list below and consider integrating a few into your routine for the next week to see if you can complete the following optimal-sleep challenge: Fall asleep within five minutes of lying down, sleep through the night without waking, and rise the next morning feeling rested and refreshed.

1. Shut down your computer and turn off your cell phone and television 30 minutes prior to sleep. Create an environment that is quiet and calm.

2. Remove stimulants (television, stereo, computer, bright lights) from your sleeping area. Keep the bedroom clear from clutter -- remove any unnecessary furniture, piles of clothes, papers and books so things are kept out of sight and the space looks and feels calm and simple.

3. Make sure your sleeping area is as dark and quiet as possible. Consider a fan or other source of white noise to create a consistent environment.

4. Keep a notebook and writing utensil next to the bed. Use them to clear racing thoughts, calm the mind and promote peaceful sleep.

5. Dab a drop of essential oil behind the ears. It should be a scent you've chosen only for sleep time, not something you might associate with your shampoo, dryer sheets, hand lotion, etc. The idea is to associate this scent with the sensation of feeling relaxed and tired.

6. Establish a set sleeping time and try your best to stick to it -- even if your work schedule requires that you work odd hours and even if that means you're sleeping each day from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m.

Creating a sleep diary
Once you've chosen a selection of sleep habits to follow, you can track your improvement in sleep patterns by creating a sleep diary. On a piece of blank paper create a grid with seven columns. Label the columns from left to right across the top of the grid, noting the date, time to bed, time to sleep, number of times awake during the night, number of times getting up to go to the bathroom, time spent awake, and time spent feeling groggy (1 = not at all; 10 = extremely). Keep this diary next to your bed with your notebook and a pen or pencil. Complete a row on your grid each morning before you get up. Over time, you can track your progress and identify specific aspects that are preventing you from reaching an optimal sleep cycle.

Just as we all need air, water and food to survive, we also need sleep to be healthy. By making optimal sleep a priority in your life, you may be amazed at the positive impact you can have on your mental and physical outlook. With a few simple rituals in place, you lay the foundation for attaining optimal wellness.

Dr. Keegan Sheridan is a licensed naturopathic physician and Kashi's Natural Food and Lifestyle Expert. Her mission at Kashi is to be an evangelist for the benefits of a natural, healthy lifestyle.

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Newtown Council

Dear Householder,
Recycling in your area
Are you doing all you can to recycle your rubbish? It only takes a minute to recycle and help reduce domestic waste as well as the costs of waste management. Here are some ideas to get you started.
Town Clerk
A NEVER THROW AWAY VEGETABLE MATTER: START A COMPOST BIN IN YOUR GARDEN OR ON YOUR BALCONY. YOU'LL BE AMAZED HOW MUCH THIS CAN REDUCE THE BULK OF YOUR RUBBISH AND IT'S GREAT FOR THE GARDEN TOO.

B DON'T THROW USED CONTAINERS IN THE RUBBISH. GET INTO THE HABIT OF SORTING THEM INTO RECYCLING CATEGORIES: GLASS, ALUMINIUM, PLASTIC AND PAPER,

С GLASS CONTAINERS CAN BE PLACED IN THE BOTTLE BANKS AT SUPERMARKET CAR PARKS THROUGHOUT THE CITY. LOOK FOR THE BIG GREEN BENS. ALTERNATIVELY LEAVE YOUR BOTTLES OUT FOR COLLECTION ON MONDAY MORNING.

D ALUMINIUM CANS CAN EARN YOU CASH SO DON'T JUST THROW THEM AWAY - SAVE THEM AND SAVE MONEY. RING YOUR COUNCIL TO FIND OUT WHEN THEY COLLECT.

E PAPER IS EASILY RECYCLED. WEEKLY COLLECTIONS ARE COMMON IN MOST AREAS. MAKE SURE YOU PLACE RECYCLABLE PAPER IN THE BLACK BINS PROVIDED. ASK AT THE COUNCIL OFFICES IF YOU DON'T ALREADY HAVE A BIN. BUT REMEMBER, WAXED PAPER IS NOT ACCEPTED.

F MOST PLASTIC BOTTLES AND CONTAINERS CAN BE RECYCLED. LOOK ON THE BOTTOM OF THE CONTAINER FOR THE IDENTIFICATION CODE,

MORE RECYCLING TIPS

The Council now includes vinyl bottles in their curbside collection scheme. Here are some facts about vinyl. Vinyl (or PVC) is one of the three most commonly used plastics. About 80 per cent of the 180,000 tones of vinyl currently used in this country each year goes into long-life applications such as pipe and cable. About ten per cent is used in short-life products such as bottles and film wrap. Clear vinyl bottles are used for liquids such as fruit juice, mineral water and cooking oil. Colored vinyl is used for products such as detergents and cosmetics. The identification code for vinyl is 13
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The Pursuit of Happiness

New research uncovers some anti-intuitive insights into how many people are happy and why. Compared with misery, happiness is relatively unexplored terrain for social scientists, Between 1967 and 1994, 46,380 articles indexed in Psychological Abstracts mentioned depression, 36,851 anxiety, and 5,099 anger. Only 2,389 spoke of happiness, 2,340 life satisfactions, and 405 joys.

Recently we and other researchers have begun a systematic study of happiness. During the past two decades, dozens of investigators throughout the world have asked several hundred thousand representatively sampled people to reflect on their happiness and satisfaction with life - or what psychologists call "subjective well-being". In the US the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has surveyed a representative sample of roughly 1,500 people a year since 1957; the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan has carried out similar studies on a less regular basis, as has the Gallup Organization. Government funded efforts have also probed the moods of European countries,

We have uncovered some surprising findings. People are happier than one might expect, and happiness does not appear to depend significantly on external circumstances. Although viewing life as a tragedy has a long and honorable history, the responses of random samples of people around the world about their happiness paints a much rosier picture. In the University of Chicago surveys, three in 10 Americans say they are very happy, for example. Only one in 10 chooses the most negative description "not too happy". The majority describe themselves as "pretty happy",

How can social scientists measure something as hard to pin down as happiness? Most researchers simply ask people to report their feelings of happiness or unhappiness and to assess how satisfying their lives are. Such self-reported well-being is moderately consistent over years of retesting. Furthermore, those who say they are happy and satisfied seem happy to their close friends and family members and to a psychologist-interviewer. Their daily mood ratings reveal more positive emotions, and they smile more than those who call themselves unhappy. Self-reported happiness also predicts other indicators of well-being. Compared with the depressed, happy people are less self focused, less hostile and abusive, and less susceptible to disease.

We have found that the even distribution of happiness cuts across almost all demographic classifications of age, economic class, race and educational level. In addition, almost all strategies for assessing subjective well being – including those that sample people's experience by polling them at random times with beepers - turn up similar findings.

Interviews with representative samples of people of all ages, for example, reveal that no time of life is notably happier or unhappier. Similarly, men and women are equally likely to declare themselves "very happy" and "satisfied" with life, according to a statistical digest of 146 studies by Marilyn J, Haring, William Stock and Morris A, Okun, all then at Arizona State University.

,,, Wealth is also a poor predictor of happiness. People have not become happier over time as their cultures have become more affluent. Even though Americans earn twice as much in today's dollars as they did in 1957, the proportion of those telling surveyors from the National Opinion Research Center that they are "very happy" has declined from 35 to 29 percent.

Even very rich people - those surveyed among Forbes magazine's 100 wealthiest Americans - are only slightly happier than the average American. Those whose income has increased over a 10-year period are not happier than those whose income is stagnant. Indeed, in most nations the correlation between income and happiness is negligible - only in the poorest countries, such as Bangladesh and India, is income a good measure of emotional wellbeing,

Are people in rich countries happier, by and large, than people in not so rich countries? It appears in general that they are, but the margin may be slim. In Portugal, for example, only one in 10 people reports being very happy, whereas in the much more prosperous Netherlands the proportion of very happy is four in 10. Yet there are curious reversals in this correlation between national wealth and well-being the Irish during the 1980s consistently reported greater life satisfaction than the wealthier West Germans. Furthermore, other factors, such as civil rights, literacy and duration of democratic government, all of which also promote reported life satisfaction, tend to go hand in hand with national wealth, As a result, it is impossible to tell whether the happiness of people in wealthier nations is based on money or is a by-product of other felicities.

Although happiness is not easy to predict from material circumstances, it seems consistent for those who have it, In one National Institute on Aging study of 5,000 adults, the happiest people in 1973 were still relatively happy a decade later, despite changes in work, residence and family status,
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Computerized Face-Recognition Technology Is Still Easily Foiled by Cosmetic Surgery

In the first test of face-recognition technology vs. cosmetic surgery, face recognition losesFor years, developers of face-recognition algorithms have been battling the effects of awkward poses, facial expressions, and disguises like hats, wigs, and fake moustaches. They’ve had some success, but they may be meeting their match in plastic surgery.

Systematic studies have tested face-recognition algorithms in a variety of challenging situations—bad lighting, for example—”but none of those conditions had nearly the effect of plastic surgery,” says Afzel Noore, a computer science and electrical engineering professor at West Virginia University, in Morgantown. In June, Noore reported the results of the first experimental study to quantify the effect of plastic surgery on face-recognition systems, at the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference, in Miami. His team of collaborators is based in West Virginia and at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, in India.

Using a database containing before-and-after images from 506 plastic surgery patients, Noore and his colleagues tested six of the most widely used face-recognition algorithms. Even in pictures where the subject was facing forward and the lighting was ideal, the best of the algorithms matched a person’s pre- and postsurgery images no more than about 40 percent of the time. The researchers found that for local alterations—say, a nose job, getting rid of a double chin, or removing the wrinkles around the eyes—today’s systems could make a match roughly one-third of the time. For more global changes like a face-lift, the results were dismal: a match rate of just 2 percent.

”We have to devise systems for security applications knowing that people will aim to circumvent them,” says Noore. In particular, researchers must examine a further complication of the plastic surgery problem—the compounding effects of a series of surgeries over time.

Meanwhile, Noore and his coauthors are testing a game-changing hypothesis: that even after plastic surgery, there are features beneath the skin but still observable that remain unchanged. Read More......

Looking for a Market among Adolescents

A In 1992, the most recent year for which data are available, the US tobacco industry spent $5 billion on domestic marketing. That figure represents a huge increase from the approximate £250-million budget in 1971, when tobacco advertising was banned from television and radio. The current expenditure translates to about $75 for every adult smoker or to $4,500 for every adolescent who became a smoker that year. This apparently high cost to attract a new smoker is very likely recouped over the average 25 years that this teen will smoke.В In the first half of this century, leaders of the tobacco companies boasted that innovative mass-marketing strategies built the industry. Recently, however, the tobacco business has maintained that its advertising is geared to draw established smokers to particular brands. But public health advocates insist that such advertising plays a role in generating new demand, with adolescents being the primary target. To explore the issue, we examined several marketing campaigns undertaken over the years and correlated them with the ages smokers say they began their habit. We find that, historically, there is considerable evidence that such campaigns led to an increase in cigarette smoking among adolescents of the targeted group.

С National surveys collected the ages at which people started smoking. The 1955 Current Population Survey (CPS) was the first to query respondents for this information, although only summary data survive. Beginning in 1970, however,the National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS) included this question in some polls. Answers from all the surveys were combined to produce a sample of more than 165,000 individuals. Using a respondent's age at the time of the survey and the reported age of initiation, [age they started smoking],the year the person began smoking could be determined. Dividing the number of adolescents (defined as those 12 to 17 years old)who started smoking during a particular interval by the number who were "eligible “to begin at the start of the interval set the initiation rate for that group.

D Mass-marketing campaigns began as early as the 1880s, which boosted tobacco consumption six fold by 1900.Much of the rise was attributed to a greater number of people smoking cigarettes, as opposed to using cigars, pipes, snuff or chewing tobacco. Marketing strategies included painted billboards and an extensive distribution of coupons, which a recipient could redeem for free cigarettes.... Some brands included soft-porn pictures of women in the packages. Such tactics inspired outcry from educational leaders concerned about their corrupting influence on teenage boys. Thirteen percent of the males surveyed in 1955 who reached adolescence between i 890 and 1910 commenced smoking by 18 years of age, compared with almost no females.
E The power of targeted advertising is more apparent if one considers the men born between 1890 and 1899. In 1912, when many of these men were teenagers, the R.J. Reynolds Company launched the Camel brand of cigarettes with a revolutionary approach. ... Every city in the country was bombarded with print advertising. According to the 1955 CPS, initiation by age 18 for males in this group jumped to 21.6 percent, a two thirds increase over those born before 1890. The NHIS initiation rate also reflected this change. For adolescent males it went up from .9 percent between 1910 and 1912 to 4.9 percent between 1918 and 1921.

F It was not until the mid-1920s that social mores permitted cigarette advertising to focus on women. ... In 1926 a poster depicted women imploring smokers of Chesterfield cigarettes to "Blow Some My Way". The most successful crusade, however, was for Lucky Strikes, which urged women to "Reach for a Lucky instead of a Sweet." The 1955 CPS data showed that 7 percent of the women who were adolescents during the mid-1920s had started smoking by age 18, compared with only 2 percent in the preceding generation of female adolescents. Initiation rates from the NHIS data for adolescent girls were observed to increase threefold, from 0.6 percent between 1922 and 1925 to 1.8 percent between 1930 and 1933. In contrast, rates for males rose only slightly.

G The next major boost in smoking initiation in adolescent females occurred in the late 1960s. In 1967 the tobacco industry launched "niche" brands aimed exclusively at women. The most popular was Virginia Slims. The visuals of this campaign emphasized a woman who was strong, independent and very thin. ... Initiation in female adolescents nearly doubled, from 3.7 percent between 1964 and 1967 to 6.2 percent between 1972 and 1975 (NHIS data). During the same period, rates for adolescent males remained stable.

H Thus, in four distinct instances over the past 100 years, innovative and directed tobacco marketing campaigns was associated with marked surges in primary demand from adolescents only in the target group. The first two were directed at males and the second two at females. Of course, other factors helped to entrench smoking in society. ... Yet it is clear from the data that advertising has been an overwhelming force in attracting new users.
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Creating Artificial Reefs

In the coastal waters of the US, a nation's leftovers have been discarded. Derelict ships, concrete blocks, scrapped cars, army tanks, tires filled with concrete and redundant planes litter the sea floor. However, this is not waste disposal, but part of a coordinated, state-run program. To recently arrived fish, plants and other sea organisms, these artificial reefs are an ideal home, offering food and shelter.Sea-dumping incites widespread condemnation. Little surprise when oceans are seen as 'convenient' dumping grounds for the rubbish we have created but would rather forget. However, scientific evidence suggests that if we dump the right things, sea life can actually be enhanced. And more recently, purpose built structures of steel or concrete have been employed - some the size of small apartment blocks principally to increase fish harvests.

The choice of design and materials for an artificial reef depends on where it is going to be placed. In areas of strong currents, for example, a solid concrete structure will be more appropriate than ballasted tires. It also depends on what species are to be attracted. It is pointless creating high-rise structures for fish that prefer flat or low-relief habitat. But the most important consideration is the purpose of the reef.

In the US, where there are a national reef plan using cleaned up rigs and tanks, artificial reefs have mainly been used to attract fish for recreational fishing or sport-diving. But there are many other ways in which they can be used to manage the marine habitat. For as well as protecting existing habitat, providing purpose-built accommodation for commercial species (such as lobsters and octopi) and acting as sea defenses, they can be an effective way of improving fish harvests.

Japan, for example, has created vast areas of artificial habitat - rather than isolated reefs - to increase its fish stocks. In fact, the cultural and historical importance of seafood in Japan is reflected by the fact that it is a world leader in reef technology; what's more, those who construct and deploy reefs have sole rights to the harvest.

In Europe, artificial reefs have been mainly employed to protect habitat. Particularly so in the Mediterranean where reefs have been sunk as physical obstacles to stop illegal trawling, which is destroying sea grass beds and the marine life that depends on them. If you want to protect areas of the seabed, you need something that will stop trawlers dead in their tracks,' says Dr Antony Jensen of the Southampton Oceanography Centre.

Italy boasts considerable artificial reef activity. It deployed its first scientifically planned reef using concrete cubes assembled in pyramid forms in 1974 to enhance fisheries and stop trawling. And Spain has built nearly 50 reefs in its waters, mainly to discourage trawling and enhance the productivity of fisheries. Meanwhile, Britain established its first quarried rock artificial reef in 1984 off the Scottish coast, to assess its potential for attracting commercial species.

But while the scientific study of these structures is a little over a quarter of a century old, artificial reefs made out of readily available materials such as bamboo and coconuts have been used by fishermen for centuries. And the benefits have been enormous. By placing reefs close to home, fishermen can save time and fuel. But unless they are carefully managed, these areas can become over fished. In the Philippines, for example, where artificial reef programs have been instigated in response to declining fish populations, catches are often allowed to exceed the maximum potential new production of the artificial reef because there is no proper management control.

There is no doubt that artificial reefs have lots to offer. And while purpose-built structures are effective, the real challenge now is to develop environmentally safe ways of using recycled waste to increase marine diversity. This will require more scientific research. For example, the lactates from one of the most commonly used reef materials, tires, could potentially be harmful to the creatures and plants that they are supposed to attract. Yet few extensive studies have been undertaken into the long term effects of disposing of tires at sea. And at the moment, there is little consensus about what is environmentally acceptable to dump at sea, especially when it comes to oil and gas rigs. Clearly, the challenge is to develop environmentally acceptable ways of disposing of our rubbish while enhancing marine life too. What we must never be allowed to do is have an excuse for dumping anything we like at sea.
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