The minimum age for buying tobacco is to be raised from 16 to 18 in an effort to cut the number of teenage smokers, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
The measure to place cigarettes on the same legal footing as alcohol will affect hundreds of thousands of smokers: up to 60 per cent of 16-year-olds are estimated to have tried cigarettes.
3o2bal 3enna
Scientists identify how women’s figures have changed in 50 years
The fashion industry is ignoring the changing shapes of women’s bodies, a study claims today. Designers and manufacturers still insist on making clothes that fit the traditional hourglass figure, when women’s shapes are more likely to be top-heavy, rectangular or pear-shaped.
The research found that although only 8 per cent of women now had the sort of hourglass figure flaunted by curvaceous 1950s film stars such as Sophia Loren, designers and manufacturers continued to make clothes to fit a slim-line version of that figure.
[Via The Independent]
As long as they continue making clothes for those 8% I have no problem…
This is the second email I receive from Convergence about Bird Flu. William Thomas suggests that bird flu was another “Saddam” Washington created to collect money.
Note: I haven’t done my homework, yet. I’m going to read about it while you scratch your head and ponder.
Flu Mongers
A Convergence Weekly update on Washington’s vaccine scams
by William Thomas
11/25/05
Fueled by apocalyptic pronouncements from a fundamentalist White House, and an unquestioning corporate press, the ongoing asian bird flu scare is already netting millions for shareholders of a useless vaccine—including Donald Rumsfeld, former CEO of the company that created it. Read more on Washington’s vaccine scams.
It works every time: Instill fear. Offer solutions. Sign here.
And people do, lining up en masse to eagerly relinquish their rights and reason to slick salesmen and saviors (and a few female accomplices) who promise to protect them from threats manufactured by mass media mesmerizers paid by the same corporations supplying “fixes” that never resolve anything but only ensure further disasters-and-profitable responses in an endless cycle money traders call “movement”—meaning the mass migration of money from your pocket to theirs.
Real pandemics like the infamous “Black Plague”, and the 1918 Spanish Flu recently traced to US Army typhoid vaccinations have infected human populations in the past. And no doubt they will again as overcrowded megaslums, chronic malnutrition, rapid climate shifts, and reckless germ warfare labs in Canada, the USA, Britain and various apartment sinks incubate microbes that might re-inherit the Earth they once ruled before fish walked out of the sea and shrews climbed down from the trees to become people.
But not bird flu. Not this time. And probably not tomorrow.
BANK JOBS
As repeated apocalyptic warnings from a fundamentalist White House foretell a worldwide flu pandemic, the same flumongers who sold Americans on a similar threat from Saddam continue to decant the heavily mortgaged US Treasury into offshore accounts already flush with their share of hundreds of billions of dollars looted from the people of Iraq and the USA.
This brazen robbery of America’s money and morals is shamelessly personified by an aptly titled “vice” president who headed Halliburton when that huge supplier of services and logistics cashed in on the destruction of Vietnam, Burma and Bosnia—before assuming his top post in a White House handing “no-bid” contracts to Halliburton to rebuild the look-alike ruins of Iraq and the US Gulf Coast.
And whatever comes next.
During that same period of Dick Cheney’s reign at Halliburton, Donald Rumsfeld served as chairman of Gilead Sciences Inc. Coming onboard in 1997, a year after this California biotech firm developed and patented the Tamiflu vaccine, the former salesman of nuclear reactors to North Korea remained at his lucrative post until joining the Bush coup in 2001.
Today, Tamiflu is the most sought-after drug on the planet. Said to protect against a flu bug that annihilates chickens, along with a handful of Asian handlers sharing foul, windowless warehouses even worse than Abu Ghraib, the unproven vaccine has made America’s Secretary of Permanent War and Torture even richer. Still holding Gilead shares valued in Fortune magazine as high as $25 million, Rumsfeld’s dividends have reportedly made him more than a million dollars over the past six months of White House flumongering. 2005 sales for Tamiflu are forecast at $1 billion—up from $258 million in 2004.
OPPORTUNITIES AND OPPORTUNISTS
The vaccine scam really got rolling in 1996, when a team of representatives from the world’s leading drug pushers got together with the Pentagon to inaugurate a Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program.
The first closed-door meetings between White House officials and this insider pharma Task Force on Emergency Preparedness foreshadowed subsequent get-togethers at the Clinton White House, when a first-time “outbreak” of modified West Nile fever surfaced suspiciously in Queens, New York in October 2000. Most likely originating among birds dying outside the nearby Plum Island biowarfare lab, this “emergency” saw Clinton command a crash program to stockpile millions of doses of an unproven antidote marketed by a company called OraVax.
Never mind that a bug unleashing all the symptoms of a mild flu only killed four people. As one reporter put it, “The real emergency was that OraVax was going broke.”
[Continue]
Related tags: bird flu, health, science, flu, avian flu, H5N1
In ancient Greece, Helen of Troy, the instigator of the Trojan War, was the paragon of beauty, exuding a physical
brilliance that would put Cindy Crawford to shame. Indeed, she was the toast of Athens, celebrated not for her kindness or her intellect, but for her physical perfection. But why did the Greek men find Helen, and other beautiful women, so intoxicating?
In an attempt to answer this question, the philosophers of the day devoted a great deal of time to this conundrum. Plato wrote of so-called “golden proportions,” in which, amongst other things, the width of an ideal face would be two-thirds its length, while a nose would be no longer than the distance between the eyes. Plato’s golden proportions, however, haven’t quite held up to the rigors of modern psychological and biological research — though there is credence in the ancient Greeks’ attempts to determine a fundamental symmetry that humans find attractive.
Symmetry is attractive to the human eye
Today, this symmetry has been scientifically proven to be inherently attractive to the human eye. It has been defined not with proportions, but rather with similarity between the left and right sides of the face Thus, the Greeks were only partially correct.
By applying the stringent conditions of the scientific method, researchers now believe symmetry is the answer the Greeks were looking for.
Babies spend more time staring at pictures of symmetric individuals than they do at photos of asymmetric ones. Moreover, when several faces are averaged to create a composite — thus covering up the asymmetries that any one individual may have — a panel of judges deemed the composite more attractive than the individual pictures (continue)
Beauty beyond symmetry
However, John Manning of the University of Liverpool in England cautions against over-generalization, especially by Western scientists. “Darwin thought that there were few universals of physical beauty because there was much variance in appearance and preference across human groups,” Manning explained in email interview. For example, Chinese men used to prefer women with small feet. In Shakespearean England, ankles were the rage. In some African tribal cultures, men like women who insert large discs in their lips.
Indeed, “we need more cross-cultural studies to show that what is true in Westernized societies is also true in traditional groups,” Manning said his 1999 article.
Aside from symmetry, males in Western cultures generally prefer females with a small jaw, a small nose, large eyes, and defined cheekbones - features often described as “baby faced”, that resemble an infant’s. Females, however, have a preference for males who look more mature — generally heart-shaped, small-chinned faces with full lips and fair skin. But during menstruation, females prefer a soft-featured male to a masculine one. Indeed, researchers found that female perceptions of beauty actually change throughout the month.
When viewing profiles, both males and females prefer a face in which the forehead and jaw are in vertical alignment. Altogether, the preference for youthful and even infant-like, features, especially by menstruating women, suggest people with these features have more long-term potential as mates as well as an increased level of reproductive fitness.
Scientists have also found that the body’s proportions play an important role in perceptions of beauty as well. In general, men have a preference for women with low waist-to-hip ratios (WHRs), that is, more adipose is deposited on the hips and buttocks than on the waist. Research shows that women with high WHRs (whose bodies are more tube-shaped) are more likely to suffer from health maladies, including infertility and diabetes. However, as is often the case, there are exceptions to the rule.
Psychologists at Newcastle University in England have shown that an indigenous people located in southeast Peru, who have had little contact with the Western world, actually have a preference for high WHRs. These psychologists assert that a general preference for low WHRs is a byproduct of Western culture.
Beauty and choosing a mate
Psychological research suggests that people generally choose mates with a similar level of attractiveness. The evolutionary theory is that by mating with someone who has similar genes, one’s own genes are conserved. Moreover, a person’s demeanor and personality also influences how others perceive his or her beauty. (continue)
The halo effect
In society, attractive people tend to be more intelligent, better adjusted, and more popular. This is described as the halo effect - due to the perfection associated with angels. Research shows attractive people also have more occupational success and more dating experience than their unattractive counterparts. One theory behind this halo effect is that it is accurate — attractive people are indeed more successful. (continue)
Related (you must check these out):
Try out FacePrint
ABC News: Faces Like Our Own are the most Attractive
BBC News: Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder
Brain Study Shows Difference Between Beauty, Desire
Related tags: beauty, psychology, philosophy
According to a survey conducted by the WHO in 2004:
About 46% of the survey respondents stated that they had never smoked. 20% reported having successfully quit smoking, 7% smoked occasionally and only 27% smoked regularly. Those who smoked regularly consumed 19 cigarettes a day on average. Those who smoked occasionally smoked an average of 10 cigarettes per day. Among smokers who named a preferred brand, Viceroy and Marlboro were the most popular, named by 25% and 22% of respondents respectively. Rothmans and LM followed, at 10% each. The proportion of smokers among male respondents was almost twice as high as among female respondents, at 36.3% versus 19.3% respectively.
And on helping out patients by providing counselling, medications and assisting materials:
Physicians in Jordan agreed that health professionals should be and indeed are role models in their attitude to smoking. When combining the responses of those who “strongly agreed” and those who “agreed”, the opinion was nearly the same among smokers and non-smokers. Treated separately, agreement among non-smokers was stronger. There was a slight difference in agreement over the statement that physicians who smoke are less likely to advise their patients against smoking. While 77% of non-smokers “agreed” with this statement, only 70% of occasional or regular smokers did so.
On the availability of interventions to help patients stop smoking, counselling was the option reported as most available. Other interventions, such as medication or self-help materials were less readily available, with 3.3% and 21% of respondents reporting them as available, respectively. However, uptake, defined as use where available, was high for all three. The high uptake levels (69% for medications, 94% for self-help and 97% for counselling) suggest that health professionals use self-help, counselling and medication for their patients when they are available.
Health professionals’ assessment of their preparedness to offer smoking cessation counselling is a powerful predictor of whether they will offer it to patients. Among those who reported feeling “prepared” to counsel their patients on how to quit smoking, 86% did counsel their patients on the subject, 23% provided them with self-help material and 8% used medication. Of those who reported feeling “not at all prepared” to counsel their patients on smoking cessation, 36% counselled them, 10% provided self-help material and 4% used medication.
And what was the result of the survey?
Physicians in Jordan have excellent knowledge of the harms of smoking. They recognize the importance of non-smoking health professionals as role models to assist patients in quitting smoking. They also recognize the role models that health professionals represent to others.
When interventions are available, which was not usually the case in the survey, physicians offered a range of effective smoking cessation interventions to their patients. Expanding access to medication and self-help, coupled with improved smoking cessation counselling training for physicians, would expand coverage of effective smoking cessation interventions in Jordan.More than 75% of health professionals in Jordan, both smokers and non-smokers, consistently agreed with the need to implement the elements of comprehensive tobacco control. For all but price increases, support was virtually unanimous. Thus, physicians (especially non-smokers) in Jordan are well positioned to advocate for and support the implementation of comprehensive tobacco control.
The Sharjah Municipality will despatch a veterinarian the moment it gets a call on the hotline number 993 especially set up for pet owners to report any dead or sick bird, a senior executive said yesterday.
Municipal officials on Sunday night also set up a special meeting with the Friends of Birds organisation to warn them to keep pigeons and falcons caged until further notice.
There are seven chakras in our body. They control our emotions, mental attitudes that can cause or reflect and imbalance within that particular center. The first step in color healing through chakras is to determine which chakra is out of balance. This can be determine by a self evaluation of our condition and comparing it with a chart of the chakras such as given elsewhere. Once we determine the chakra(s) most likely to have been adversely affected, we can then take measures to correct them. Color therapy is simple and effective in this process.
Colors can be used to balance and strengthen the chakras on a daily basis. One way of doing this is through color breathing. Another method is through making colored slides and sitting in front of a slide projector while the color is projected upon us.
One of the easiest ways of accomplishing this is with simple colored swatches of fabrics. Felt or other cloth squares can be found in all the colors of the rainbow. They can be used to balance the seven chakras. This is an inexpensive tool for quick daily chakra therapy and color healing.
Once we have acquired the necessary tools, here is a very simple method of balancing our chakras:
Correcting Chakras Which are Out of Balance
1. Select a quiet place where you will not be disturbed for about fifteen to twenty minutes.
2. Lie down on your back on the floor or on your bed. Have seven cloth swatches corresponding to the rainbow colors with you (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet), one for each of the seven major chakras.
3. Close your eyes and relax. Take several slow, deep breaths.
4. As you begin to relax, look back over the day’s events, in reverse order. Start with the moment you laid down and review the day backward until the moment you woke up.
5. Identify the major emotions and attitudes that you experienced or were exposed to in other people. What chakras were most likely to have been affected by them? Use the table if necessary.
6. When you have completed this evaluation, take the color swatches for the chakra(s) you have identified, and lay them on the part of the body associated with the chakra.
7. As you lie there, with the color swatch upon your chakra point, visualize the color being absorbed and drawn through the chakra and into the body. Let your awareness focus on the fact that, as you lie there, the chakra is being balanced, along with all organs and systems of the body associated with it.
8. Take several deep breaths, focusing on drawing the color through the swatch into the chakra and restoring balance. Continue this for three to five minutes, or until you feel it is balanced.
Repeat these steps with any and all other chakra you have determined may be out of balance.
Full Chakra Color Therapy
Now that we have balanced all chakras, that were unbalanced, we need to strengthen all the chakras with color therapy. This is how we do this:
1. Place all seven color swatches upon the chakra points of the body.
2. Breathe deeply and simply allow your body to absorb the rainbow energies.
3. As you lie there and breathe in the colors, let your awareness focus on the fact that each chakra is being strengthened, balanced, and harmonized with the others. Know, feel and experience that your entire energy system is strengthening. Feel yourself coming into complete balance. Know that all of the physiological aspects of your body are being balanced and healed as you absorb these colors through your chakra centers.
4. Leave the swatches on for five to ten minutes or until you feel yourself fully balanced, charged, and aligned.
Polyphasic sleep is a sleep pattern specification intended to compress sleep time to 2-5 hours daily. This is achieved by spreading out sleep into short (around 20-45 minute) naps throughout the day. This allows for more waking hours with relatively high alertness.
The method uses natural human sleep mechanisms to maximize alertness when sleep time needs to be minimized. However, it requires a rigid schedule which makes it unfeasible for most people. It can work well for people who cannot afford sleep (e.g. sailors).
The theory is that ordinary monophasic sleep consists of many phases, only a few of which are needed for survival. REM sleep, occurring quite late in the sequence, is commonly believed to be one such necessary phase. It is believed that after being deprived of sleep during an adjustment period, the brain will start to enter the required stages much quicker - with the result that each short nap consists almost solely of REM sleep. Some theories of sleep suggest that REM is largely responsible for the mental rejuvenation effects of sleep, but the role of REM sleep has in recent years been disputed. It has been documented that depriving rats of REM sleep specifically leads to death in 3 to 8 weeks (which doesn’t happen with depriving test animals of other specific sleep phases), but it has also been documented that humans survive without REM sleep. Since polyphasic sleepers get a lot of Stage 4 NREM and REM sleep, they may achieve higher alertness levels than those who do not know the art of catnapping.
Some critics of the theory have expressed concern about the possible long-term effects of suppressing the other sleep stages, although such effects have been undocumented as of yet. Some negative effects may be unrelated to this particular schedule, but more related to the general lack of sleep this method entails. It has been shown that a lack of sleep weakens the immune system, decreases the amount of growth hormone produced, and decreases the ability of the body to metabolize sugar. However, polyphasic sleep is different from unmanaged sleep deprivation, so it unclear whether these side effects would still be present.
Several famous people applied catnapping to a large extent. These include Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison and Buckminster Fuller. Other figures said to be associated with polyphasic sleep experimentation include Nikola Tesla, Napoleon, and Winston Churchill. This method was also popularized on Seinfeld, where the character Cosmo Kramer attempted to adapt to a polyphasic sleeping pattern.
Boat racers use this technique to avoid dangers at sea. Astronauts use this technique during extended crises, and military personnel, especially marines, use this technique in training.
One of the leading advocates of polyphasic sleep research is Dr. Claudio Stampi (Founder and Director of the Chronobiology Research Institute in Boston, Massachusetts).
Via Green Data
I remember that Sienfeld episode lol…no wonder I used to sleep so little in previous Ramadans and always finish reading the Qura’an even though I used to watch TV more, help in the kitchen sometimes and study! I used to take lots of naps which results in a couple of hours of sleep every day.
Tags:Sleep, REM, health and science
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