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,
ะก 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
Read More......
Friday, June 25, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
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,
Read More......
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,
Read More......
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
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......
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......
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