Smoking decrease by county in the US, attitudes towards Russia in breakaway provinces

Two interesting pages for the statistically inclined:

This one from the New York Times showing smoking rates by county between 1996 and 2012 in the United States. While many parts of the country still smoke heavily, I still haven't been able to find a single county where the rate has stayed the same or risen since 1996. Can you? Feel free to find out for usif you have the time to mouseover every single county in the US.

This one from the Washington Post on attitudes towards Russia in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria. Transnistria is particularly important at the moment. I wonder though if Russia wouldn't be doing Moldova a (unintended) favour were it to annex Transnistria, which unlike Crimea has never really been under Moldovan control. Moldova only loses 12% of its area without Transnistria, and the remainder would be mostly Moldovan, Ukrainian, and Gagauz. The Russian percentage drops from 9.4 to 1.68 when Transnistria is removed, and this becomes a larger possibility.

Read more...

Would Korean smokers quit if prices were raised to 4,500 won?

A few days ago I referenced a poll of Korean smokers about whether they would quit if cigarette prices were raised to 10,000 won, but since the current price of about 2500 won is nowhere near that and no plans exist to raise it to four times its current price, this poll is probably more meaningful. It asks smokers what they intend to do if prices are raised by 2000 won, which is exactly what a bill in parliament intends to do.

When smokers were asked what they would do if tobacco prices were raised from 2500 to 4500 won, 39% said they would quit, 47% said they would continue to smoke, and 14% reserved judgment.

(In comparison, for 10,000 won 54% said they would quit and 33% said they would still smoke).

Among those that smoked under 10 cigarettes a day 44% said they would quit, while 41% of those who smoked 11-20 a day said they would quit. For those who smoked over 21 a day, only 19% said they would.

Read more...

Would Korean smokers quit if prices were raised to 10,000 won?

That's the question asked by Gallup Korea last month to Korean smokers. Right now tobacco prices are about 2500 to 3000 won a pack ($2.5 - $3), while 10,000 won is almost $10.

"What would you do if tobacco prices were raised to 10,000 won a pack?"

54% - I would quit
33% - I would still smoke
14% - Not sure / refused to answer

Other data from the survey: 52% of those surveyed (now not just smokers) approved of raising prices by 2000 won, 39% were opposed. 88% were in favour of banning smoking in large bars and restaurants, 10% were opposed.

43% of Korean males smoked, 4% of females, for 23% in total. Smokers smoked on average 18 cigarettes a day.

Read more...

Portugal to ban all smoking in public places by 2020, plus cars with children

From here in Portuguese:

The Portuguese government will put an end to smoking areas by 2020, according to a project by the Minister of Health that would prohibit the installation of these spaces in new establishments and provide a period of eight years to do away with existing ones.

The ministry is finalizing a set of proposals for "minor alterations" to the Tobacco act to guarantee a lower exposure of passive smoking, proposals that are to be presented "very soon".

"Our idea is to create a mechanism that prevents the installation of new places for smokers. Those that now have a place for smokers will have a moratorium to make it possible to amortize the investment, before applying the law barring smoking in all public places".

The prohibition on smoking in cars transporting children is another change desired by the Government: "It has been demonstrated that the concentration of smoke in the back of the vehicle is very large, and that plastics are embedded with carcinogenic material that is slowly released."

Eurobarometer data shows that 23% of Portuguese citizens are smokers. In the European Union this number is 28%. 70% of ex-smokers acquired the habit before turning 18.

The survey also concluded that the number of cigarettes smoked per days is 14.2, which represents a slight decrease from the 14.4 in the previous study in 2009. Half the population of the EU has never smoked and 61% of current smokers have tried to quit smoking before.

Read more...

Link roundup for 16 March 2012

Here are my most interesting open tabs at the moment.

--- I'm not sure if I mentioned this one before, but even if I did it deserves another mention - a long, long page about sleep patterns in the British isles before the Industrial Revolution. Most notable is the existence of a "second sleep", which used to be the norm: a first sleep after sunset, then an hour or two of wakefulness in the middle of the night, and then a second sleep. The page has a total of 181 results for the term dream.

--- An article here in the New York Times on what having a Korean son-in-law means to parents in Vietnam. Korea is right on the verge of having its first grown-up generation of half-Korean half-Vietnamese citizens, who mostly live in the southwest part of the country but certainly will begin to move to Seoul and other large cities to attend university, work, etc.

--- An interview with a native Esperanto speaker.

--- New York Times again, in an article on the nightlife of Curaçao. Papiamentu and Curaçao's general cultural and ethnic mix is mentioned there.

--- Evidence builds that meditation strengthens the brain.

--- An article on which languages are studied in Oklahoma. It comes with a helpful graph, according to which the following languages are studied the most: Spanish (54.96%), French (14.17%), Italian (7.05%), German (7.02%), Chinese (4.79%), Japanese (4.74%), Arabic (3.89%), Russian (2.53%), Hebrew (0.85%). Strangely, Native American languages count as anthropology so they are not ranked.

Read more...

Aubrey de Grey's Ted.com video on living to be 1000

I finally got around to watching this video by Aubrey de Grey on his work to extend life past 1000 or so. The point he makes in the beginning is that he is not claiming that we are on the verge of finding a way to suddenly live to 1000, but rather that once we learn to extend life by 20-30 years or so, that extra amount of time will give research the leeway to extend it by another few decades, and another few, and eventually further refinements will bring it into the hundreds and 1000+ years.

In the beginning he brings up some of the arguments that those opposed to his work give for why we simply shouldn't live to a few hundred and 1000+ years. Now, I do agree with him that we should work on life extension and that there should be no problem with trying to live as long as possible.

That said, I do have an actual argument against it (a devil's advocate-type argument): extending life into the thousands of years would essentially guarantee everyone a violent death. Instead of death taking place at around 80-100 on the bed in one's sleep, we would live such long lives that the way we would usually end up dying would be through violence, drowning, falling off cliffs, starving with our arms stuck under a boulder, what have you. All fictional stories about immortals deals with this issue, and that's why we have Highlander with death only taking place with a lopped off head, or vampires who can live almost forever but end up dying in burning pain when tricked into being led into the sun, and so on.

Read more...

More French smokers now intend to cut down or quit

From here in French today:

Smoking in public places in France has been illegal since 2008, and there are more French smokers that intend to quit now in 2011 than in September 2006, when the last Tabac poll was taken. 64% of those who answered said so this time, compared to 49% five years ago...interestingly, 49% of smokers said that they had reduced their tobacco consumption since the new law was put in place.

Read more...

Link roundup for 29 May 2011 - high speed trains in Norway, the morning commute and depression, another movie translated into Sambahsa...

Time to get rid of a few tabs I've had up for a week or so that I haven't found the desire to write a full post about. The first one is:

this article in Norwegian from today on high-speed rail linking Norway, Sweden and Denmark. It seems Norway wants to see a train that goes at 330 kph, but Sweden is not interested in one over 250. The argument behind the faster train is that it would not be possible to get to Copenhagen within 3 hours, and 3 hours is thought to be a magic number - under 3 hours and people will prefer to use the train, over 3 hours and they tend to remain in favour of flying. The train between Oslo and Stockholm might end up going 330 kph within Norway, then slowing down to 250 kph after entering Sweden since the tracks will be incapable of maintaining the higher speed. The Norwegian side seems to be surprised that Sweden is not interested in anything over 250 kph, and maybe a more informed reader can tell us why this is.

Another film has been translated into Sambahsa. It's called Kaydara and is about an hour long, seems to be heavily based on The Matrix, and to see the subtitles in Sambahsa you have to choose Serbian since only previously approved languages can be selected. The movie already has subtitles in Croatian so the Sambahsa subtitles won't keep any Serbs from watching and enjoying the movie. I was supposed to watch it by now but it's longer than I thought (I guessed about 25 minutes) and now my time is limited due to working full time.

Your commute is killing you - an article on the link between long commutes and depression, obesity, etc.

Die Burger - an article on the Afrikaans newspaper and how its success. Its motto is Lees die Burger en praat saam.

A statement by Frank L. Culbertson (commander of the International Space Station for a time) to a Congress subcommittee where he defends the role of the ISS and the research done there.

Read more...

How to cure insomnia (okay, how I did)

The Globe and Mail has an article here today on sleep deprivation and its effect on society - basically that far too many adults believe that they don't need a full night's sleep in order to function and end up falling asleep at their jobs, making bad decisions, etc. etc. I was quite an insomniac until my mid-teens, but this went away after about a few months training myself to dream lucidly.

Most now know what lucid dreaming is but in case you don't, it is simply dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming, instead of dreaming under the impression that you're still awake, no matter how weird the dream may be. You're at home and a pack of rabid wolves begins breaking down the door and you're afraid even though it makes absolutely no sense that wolves would do such a thing, or you get on the bus and realize that you forgot your pants and are embarrassed even though there's absolutely no way you would make it to the bus stop without realizing that you have no pants, etc.

Moments like this are keys to lucid dreaming, as you can teach yourself to constantly check for events that don't make sense, upon which you become lucid within the dream. The dream continues as usual, but now you know that it's a dream and can do what you want. You may decide that you've had enough of the wolves and will now just ignore them, or you might decide that you don't care that you don't have any pants on the bus, or look around for a pair to put on, or may just jump out the window and begin flying (though sometimes staying in flight is a bit tough).

However, before getting to this point there is a preliminary step: writing down your dreams. This is because there is no sense in learning to dream lucidly if you still don't remember most of them, and the best way to remember them is to write them as soon as you wake up. Without doing so they will tend to vanish within just a few minutes of waking up, and if you do something unrelated to your dreams as soon as you get up (check your email, begin making breakfast...) then you'll almost certainly forget most of them.

So how did this cure my insomnia? Easy: it turned the dream world from a daily chore into a more complete world of its own that I began to look forward to entering every night, and instead of lying down and thinking "okay, now stay still and stop thinking and get X hours of sleep" I began to think about the recurring places in my dreams that I might explore in further detail that night, and that seems to have a preparatory effect in bringing your mind away from the physical world and towards the next. I can't guarantee that this will cure insomnia in others, but this is what worked for me. Mind you, I did not begin attempting to dream lucidly with this goal in mind (I never really minded being an insomniac), it was simply a side effect. It would be interesting to hear if anyone else has done the same thing.

Read more...

Tobacco sales plunge by 35% in January in Spain after tax increases and new prohibitions on smoking in bars and restaurants

An article here in El Economista tells of a sharp decline in tobacco sales in Spain in January. Info from the article:

Never before has a slump in sales in tobacco happened as that which happened in January, with a plunge of 35 percent. A tax increase in Spain took place in December, and the entry into force of a law that prohibits smoking in all bars and restaurants have resulted in sales of just 3.85 billion cigarettes, about 2 billion fewer than last January.

According to industry data, the largest decline was for Japan Tobacco (owner of Camel and Winston), at 43%. After that were Imperial Tobacco (36.3%), Philp Moris (29.4%), and British American Tobacco (27.2%).

This means a fall in overall revenue of 21%, to 715 million euros. At this rate it will result in a loss of 160 million euros for the country.

Although sales are falling, consumption itself is not falling at the same rate due to an increase in smuggling especially in Andalcía and the coast. There is also an increase in the numbe of people that go to Gibraltar to buy tobacco at half the price.

View Larger Map

As for the effects of decreased consumption on health, see this article from 2010. According to that article, out of the 100 billion euros in health expenses, 15% is from health problems related to tobacco. Heart disease is the largest at 3.6 billion euros, then chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (3 billion), cerebrovascular disorders (710 million), asthma (267 million), and lung cancer (163 million). Those are the top five, but there are a total of 29 which all together make up the total 15% (15.336 billion euros in 2009). Health costs from second-hand smoking also make up an extra 530 million euros on top of that. In total, Eurostat estimates that costs from tobacco (health and social spending) make up about 1.7% of GDP.

And finally, at the end of the article is a comparison of revenues raised from smoking vs. health and social costs: taxes raised from tobacco during 2009 reached 7.718 billion euros, meaning that for every euro raised in tobacco taxes two euros were spent on health and social costs resulting from smoking it.

Read more...

One out of three cancer diagnoses is avoidable

An article from Welt today gives a few numbers on the lives that could be saved in Germany from cancer with better health and more active prevention. According to the article total of 180,000 fewer cases could be reduced each year, or 70,000 lives. Some info from the article:

-----

With exercise, a healthy diet and no smoking, Germany would end up with 180,000 fewer (out of 450,000) cancer diagnoses per year. The leading causes of cancer are tobacco consumption, too much alcohol, overexposure to the sun, and obesity.

The article has a few charts that are easy enough to understand even if you don't know German, but the basic information from them is as follows:

Chart 1: 36% of men smoked in 1995, in 2009 this was 33.2%. For women it was 21.6% in 1995, 22.3% in 2009. A slight increase overall but nothing to celebrate. The chart shows smoking rates by state as well.

Chart 2: cases of teenagers going to the hospital for alcohol consumption continue to rise. 159 in 2004, then 199, 203, 244, 274, and finally 290 cases in 2009. No improvement whatsoever.

Chart 3: shows the number of fitness clubs in Germany and members. In 1992 there were 2 million fitness club members, now it is 7.07 million. Number of fitness clubs has also increased from 421 in 1992 to 1191 now.

Chart 4: obesity by state. The east is more obese on average, least obese parts of the country are Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen.

Chart 5: Uninteressant.

Chart 6: payment for health care as a percent of the budget by country. Germany is at 10.5%. The US tops the list at 16%, France is next at 11.2%.

Read more...

Norwegian app makes it possible to get organ donor card by cellphone

Some news in Norwegian from NRK here on organ donation that seems easily doable in other countries as well. There is actually nothing radically different about this donor card compared to one using paper except that it makes it easier to carry around and inform the next of kin. It looks like this:

Some info from the article:

-----

Would you want your organs to live on when you die?

Only 0.5% of all deaths are relevant to organ donation. And it is your own attitude that decides whether your organs are given away or not, whether through what you've said to your loved ones or through carrying a donor card on you.

Until now donor cards have been paper documents that you must carry with you. But Stiftelsen Organ Donation has launched a card as an iPhone and Android application.

"The card is easier to carry with you, but the most important thing is that it makes it easier to inform your loved ones", says information consultant Troels N. Mathisen.

The point of a donor card is to show that you have informed your relatives that you are okay with organ donation.

"It is the families that have to answer for the dead, but in practice it can be difficult to have that conversation", says Mathisen. "The mobile donor card is not activated until you have added two relatives from your telephone list. When you activate the card, they are sent an automatic SMS, which becomes the starting point for the conversation."

The SMS it sends out looks like this:

«Hei! Jeg har fått meg elektronisk donorkort og sier ja til organdonasjon. Du er oppført som pårørende. Les mer om donorkort her: http://www.donorkort.no»

= "Hey! I have gotten an electronic donor card and said yes to organ donation. You are listed as next of kin. Read more about donor cards here: http://www.donorkort.no"

The donor card can be made easily visible on the phone even if it is locked. But Mathisen notes that "from our experience we can say that the most important thing isn't carrying the card with you, it's that the next of kin know what you want. If you are the victim of an accident, the ambulane personnel aren't going to be spending time looking for a donor card, they'll be spending time trying to save your life. If the situation is such that organ donation is appropriate, then the next of kin get the question "what did this person think about organ donation?" It's good to have a clear answer on that."

Organ donation is only applicable with 0.4 to 0.5% of deaths. There are now not enough donors to help everyone on waiting lists. Every year 30 people die while waiting in line for new organs.



There is also an info chart on the right, with the following (among other points):

- Only people who die of head trauma can be donors.
- If your body is applicable to organ donation, your next of kin answer as to what you would want.
- You can choose whether you want to donate any applicable organs, or whether you only want to donate certain organs. But you can't choose who will get them.

Read more...

Bicycle sales up 350% in the UK last year, total usage in London up 91% over the last decade

Here's an article in Spanish I noticed on Meneame today about a huge increase in bicycle sales in London in 2009, the year when the economy was particularly bad. According to the article the bicycle market in 2010 increased to 698 million pounds, or 834 million euros / $1.1 billion (here's an English article on that).

In 2009 there was a 350% in growth of sales, apparently helped by the government's Cycle to Work program which gives tax benefits to those that are employed and rent a bicycle. Apparently the program works by taking a small cut in salary, and then after it's over the bicycle returns to the market at a reduced price.

Three more numbers: cycling in London has increased by 91% over the past decade, and for each new cyclist there is 423 euros (yearly?) in savings due to improvements in health, pollution and congestion. Also, for each euro spent on bicycles the UK receives 4 euros in benefits.

Read more...

American Transportation Secretary: Americans are sick of being stuck in traffic

An article here goes over the Transportation Secretary's plans to focus more on bicycle and pedestrian routes in order to make that option more attractive to Americans, who he says are "sick of being stuck in their automobiles" and thus would be interested in another option. I'm always partial to the idea of getting more people out of their cars and into other means of transportation, because I live in a place where traffic can be laughably bad. Here's the traffic here in Seoul from the 2nd story of a Starbucks I frequented often in 2007:



Fewer things are more frustrating than being in a car while going at a slower speed than even the pedestrians on the side of the road.

So how far are American commuting every day now? An article here shows the difference between commutes now and almost 20 years ago: in 1983 the average commute was 14 km, and in 2008 it was 19.5 km.

Other issues related to transportation are health and national security: health because more walking and biking = less obesity and greater overall health which means savings in health care, and national security because walking and biking requires no gasoline.

Luckily, on a more local level the issue is much less complex, and policy can be decided on simple practicality and fairness issues alone. Are bicyclists in a city forced into a kind of no-man's land where they aren't really given any leeway on streets and are technically forbidden to be on the sidewalk? Are there a lot of separate green spaces that would make great commuting routes if they were simply joined together with a bridge or pathway?

Seoul has been working on a lot of these simple and common sense changes over the past few years. At intersections like this:


View Larger Map

it is common practice for there to be a set of staircases leading underneath the road for pedestrians, and cars own the intersection as there are no areas for pedestrians to cross above. It's not too bad if you're young and healthy and the shade in the summer is nice, but the elderly don't enjoy having to descend and ascend a flight of steps just to cross the road, and it makes it hard on bicyclists too as a rail separates the road from the walkways and there is often no way to move from one to the other. So in recent years a lot of these intersections have seen lights for pedestrians added to let them cross without having to descend the flight of stairs they otherwise have had to use all this time.

Read more...

Julian Treasure recommends listening to birds singing at least 5 minutes a day

Here's a nice (but too short IMO) video from Ted I found yesterday on how sound affects us:



Subtitles thus far for this video are Arabic, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, and Spanish.

Regarding sound and productivity, if I had to recommend one album for those who want to increase their own productivity it would be FSOL's Lifeforms. Oh, and ISDN. YouTube has three videos from Lifeforms here, here and here.

Read more...

How to save your eyes when working on the computer at night

Look what I found! It's something called F.lux, a very simple piece of software that changes the brightness and colour settings of your screen based on the time of day. During the day when the sun is out the screen is a normal blue-white, but then at night it becomes a softer orangish kind of colour. The background on that page is what a white background becomes at night when it's activated.

Astronomers will be familiar with this concept, because they always take red flashlights with them when going out to observe the sky as red light doesn't cause a person's eyes to become unused to the night sky again. Stellarium also has a mode that works in red light only for those that are actively using it to observe the night sky.

Read more...

Dan Buettner on how to live to 100

Here's a video from Ted.com that was recently uploaded on how to live to 100, or more specifically how certain cultures have a relatively large number of people that live to that age. I noticed it as it is also the most recently translated work, once again into Bulgarian, so at the moment this video can only be understood by those that know English or Bulgarian. I'm sure Spanish will be added soon.



Two other interesting parts from the video is the inclusion of Sardinia (where Sardinian, the most conservative Romance language is spoken), and the word ikigai from Okinawa that he brings up a few times. Ikigai is written 生き甲斐 (and often just 生きがい) and comes from the gerund of ikiru (to live) + gai, which makes a noun that means "the value/worth of (verb)". Take the verb hanasu (talk) for example and you might get a sentence like this:

なんて話し甲斐のないやつだ

(nante hanashigai no nai yatsu da)

which means "what a useless guy to talk to".

Read more...

How H1N1 helps to prevent the spread of other diseases

This is a similar post to this one I wrote back in May, now that we've had a few months to see what effect H1N1 has had on countries throughout the world. As the charts there show, the first time H1N1 was announced the search engine traffic for the terms handwashing and hand washing skyrocketed, even more than the annual traffic the term receives due to Global Handwashing Day (October 15th).

Since May when the outbreak was first mentioned in the news, Korea (where I live) has changed quite a bit. Until this year bathrooms have been just as often as not without soap, and most people (men at least) didn't bother to wash their hands. Now it's common to find a spray bottle with disinfectant next to the sink, and places like COEX (a big mall in Gangnam with the trade tower and a number of other important buildings) have installed new soap dispensers as well as disinfectant machines at the doors that a lot of people can be seen using as they enter or leave.

Media attention is also very concentrated, with news stories like these every day.



An article here can also be read on the differences in behavior in the United States that have come about since H1N1 appeared.

The reason why this is so beneficial is because of the number of other diseases that can be transmitted in the same way, because a changing of a country's habits towards washing hands and keeping food and water sanitary can go a long way towards fighting these diseases as well. An image here has recently been circulating the internet with the number of deaths so far for H1N1 compared to the yearly deaths for other diseases. H1N1 is a bit below 6000 whereas some others are over a million. Let's take a look at a few of the most common infectious diseases and see if changes in one's habits can help:

AIDS - 2,734,371 deaths. Not spread through simple contact so no help there. AIDS stays the same.

Diarrheal communicable diseases - 1,649,779 deaths. Common ones are cholera, bacillary dysentery and typhoid. These diseases are usually spread through the following: "flying insects feeding on feces may occasionally transfer the bacteria through poor hygiene habits and public sanitation conditions. Public education campaigns encouraging people to wash their hands after defecating and before handling food are an important component in controlling spread of the disease." Lots of help there.

Tuberculosis - 1,381,755 deaths. Spread through the air from coughing and whatnot. H1N1 campaigns at the moment involving school closures, avoiding public spaces etc. right now help against TB as well but the effect won't be permanent.

Child cluster diseases - 989,231 deaths. That includes polio, diphtheria, measles, and tetanus. These diseases
are also spread through food, water, sneezing and coughing and so on.


There are a few diseases after those as well, but this should suffice to show what a benefit the media attention should be bringing. H1N1 seems to be a bit like the disease version of the narco subs used by drug traders to bring cocaine into the US, because it allows authorities to practice and train against a relatively smaller threat (cocaine compared to something more vicious like bombs) which should benefit in the struggle against a much larger one.

Read more...

Study concludes that parents should teach their children to drink properly

Found this here in French, but it's a study from the University of Liverpool so there's certainly an English link out there too...ah, here's one. The idea behind it is that teenagers are prone to binge drinking when gathering alone, so in order to alleviate this parents should permit them to drink in the home with them around, which would lower the frequency and amount, and also take off a great deal of the allure. To take off some more of the allure, bring in some of the friends of the parents as well.

In a way it seems kind of reminiscent of the second part of this Onion video with the fake ads geared towards female smokers (be warned that the video's a bit NSFW). There's no better anti-smoking/drinking ad campaign than something that ties children in to something they dislike. The best anti-drinking ad might not be one that focuses on the damage excess drinking it can cause but rather just some grizzled guy in his late 40s or 50s that works for minimum wage somewhere and you know will never progress any higher up the career ladder than that (basically a guy that no teen would ever want to end up being as an adult) talking sincerely about how awesome it is to drink every day. Sure he has no career prospects and no dreams and has already lived out half his life, but he has alcohol! If done in complete sincerity (no DO YOU WANT TO END UP LIKE THIS MAN? at the end which would be too obvious) it could make for a very effective ad.


New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens 'It's Gay To Smoke'

Read more...

Great discussion on health care on Morning Joe with Congressman Anthony Weiner

You may have noticed that it's difficult to find good video clips online right now that actually deal with health care reform the way it should be dealt, by actually talking about how to reform the system instead of silliness about death panels and pulling the plug on grandma and whatnot. Morning Joe this morning though has a surprisingly good discussion with Congressman Anthony Weiner that you should definitely take a look at if at all interested in the subject. Apparently he'll be back for another session in an hour or so, and if he does then I'll embed that video as well.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Edit: part 2 can be found on this video - at around 4:30 there's a tiny bit more discussion, then 90 seconds of news, and back to the discussion at 6:00.

Read more...