Sleep Deprivation: Gadgets blamed!

In the good old days evenings were dark, undemanding and quiet. Pastimes were slow moving and relaxing e.g. watching the sun set, playing charades, shadow puppets, card games like bridge and simple activities such as cave-painting, bead-making, etc.

Fast-forward to today. PCs and consumer electronics provide us with a staggering number of things to do at night, all night. Video games, TV, social networking, chatting with friends, editing pictures, writing blogs, catching up on work, etc. These things are compelling and addictive. Getting a good night's sleep has become a challenge and a discipline, something that are not easy and we are not good at.

Poor sleep, or what they call " junk sleep" (sleep compromised by constant waking), is said to affect younger people, teens and twenty-somethings, in particular and who are developing the habit of rarely sleeping well. The truth is that this is the generation brought up on gadgets, global awareness and always-on technology.

Sleep problems hit travelers, too. Jetlag, time zones, unfamiliar /uncomfortable hotel beds /rooms, dodgy drinking water, strange foods that disturb the acid balance of the stomach and other unavoidable realities of travel, can make it very hard to sleep well and rise refreshed, consistently.

Current anxiety about the future and the ongoing effects of the recession is also making sleep more challenging. People are lying awake at night with troublesome thoughts about their 401(k)s, layoffs and the other stressful financial realities we all face.

Unfortunately, a lack of sleep or even a lack of uninterrupted quality sleep, can cause serious problems with your health. Bad sleeping practice is not only inconvenient but it harms overall physical and mental performance, and impacts your memory. What's interesting about this is that sufferers are usually blind to the symptoms, and they think they're doing fine. Bad sleep also triggers an insulin reaction similar to eating a lot of sugar, contributing to weight gain, diabetes and obesity. In conjunction with a sedentary lifestyle, this is a very serious situation and can result in life-threatening obesity.

Arguably, gadgets are contributing to this problem but gadgets can help solve it, too. Electronic sleep helpers have been around for quite a while but a new generation of products is claiming to be better than anything that's come before. In honour of the month of May, which has been designated Better Sleep Month (who comes up with these things?), here are some of the newest and most interesting electronic sleep helpers.

New 'Help U Sleep' Gadgets

• Cell phones are actually very nice sleep devices. If calming music helps you sleep, you should know that some phones have the ability to turn themselves off after a while, so you can use your phone to listen to music as you doze off. For example, on the iPhone, you can use the normal timer to " sleep iPhone" instead of setting it to ring an alarm.
• Taking that a step further, there's a new iPhone app called A Good Night's Sleep. You can set a series of sounds, including peaceful music or "nature sounds" like rain or ocean waves, followed by silence. One of the settings is called "Night hypnosis," where a voice hypnotizes you into sleeping. You can set the duration and sound volume of each sound separately. A Good Night's Sleep also has a wake-up feature, where you set wake-up sounds that play in a series.
• Sleeptracker wristwatches monitor and track your sleep patterns. You can upload the data via a USB cable to analyze the quality and quantity of your own sleep. The benefit here is that you can find out if you're getting restful sleep or if you're constantly waking in the night. The watches also come with alarm clocks built in.
• Another newish offering is Pzizz, an application that helps you create personalized sleeping soundtracks on your Mac or PC and then import them to your mobile device so you can listen to them in bed. The makers of Pzizz claim that sleep improves the more you use their product. Pzizz helps you sleep at night and also get a quick-but-satisfying power nap during the day.
• Most of the new high-tech sleep aids involve listening to music or other sounds, but wearing headphones and earbuds probably doesn't help you fall asleep. Regular speakers might work fine. You can also buy pillows with speakers built in, such as the Audio Pillow.
• Makers of the Verilux TwiLight Ultra Blue Light Therapy System claim that their product uses light to convince your body to stop producing a hormone called melatonin. The idea is to regulate your body's circadian rhythms so that when it's time for you to sleep, you do so easily.
  

Of course, the best advice for getting sleep is to be disciplined and establish a good bedtime routine. Optimise your diet, get some exercise and take steps to relieve stress. If that's not enough, these gadgets might be able to help you enjoy all the sleep benefits that people enjoyed 100 years ago.

Airport Swine Flu (H1N1) Detectors - Smoke and Mirrors

WHEN aviation officials chose Mexico City for a meeting to discuss their response to pandemic outbreaks, they could scarcely have predicted swine flu would intervene. "The irony was amazing," says Tony Evans of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in Montreal, Canada. "The meeting will probably go ahead in June unless we get another wave of H1N1."

Future pandemics will almost certainly be spread via air travel, with flights capable of carrying a pathogen across the world in hours. The UN's Convention on International Civil Aviation requires nations to "prevent the spread of communicable diseases by means of air navigation". That is easier said than done, given the confined space of modern aircraft and the use of re-cycled unscrubbed cabin air on all flights, as a fuel and cost saving measure.

CAPSCA - the Cooperative Arrangement for the Prevention of the Spread of Communicable diseases by Air travel.

CAPSCA aims to help airports in developing nations prepare for a pandemic, and its schemes are now getting off the ground in the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Africa. They will be expected to install US manufactured devices and follow the advice of their consultants.

Optimistically CAPSCA state; "When an aircraft arrives with a suspected disease case on board, CAPSCA will make sure you've thought about where you are going to park the plane, how you will deal with the luggage and how are you going to keep in touch with the passengers that haven't got any symptoms (when they boarded the plane)."

All this does is extend the time by which the other passengers and air crew are exposed to the virus and increase the likelihood of them contracting the disease, if they have not already done so on the flight.

Evans says. "You also have to work out which people on the plane are most likely to be infected (if not all) and whether they need prophylactic treatment or admission to hospital. How will you protect air crew and customs officers? Careful planning is crucial and CAPSCA will promote that", Evans explains.

Frankly, this is nothing but hype, rhetoric and grandstanding

Frankly, this is nothing but hype, rhetoric and grandstanding. People who gather in confined spaces and share the same breathing air for hours on end, will contract the disease. Air crew, airport staff and customs officers, will contract the disease.

Immunisation with Tamiflu and other so-called anti-viral inoculations, is less than effective and will not act as a 'barrier' for air crew and airport staff. The virus, by its nature, mutates regularly and the time taken to develop effective anti-viral drugs and put them into large scale production, is 4 - 6 months. The same time taken for the pandemic to burn itself out, without any human or pharmaceutical intervention. Again, it is the nature if viruses.

In the case of an increasing pandemic, effective anti-viral drugs will only be available on a priority basis. Those who decide the priority, will be the first to receive the drugs. The second priority will be given to the forces that will protect the decisions and decision makers. This is what is meant by 'careful planning'. Everyone else should prepare for a long wait.

Type A and Type B personality theory

The Type A and Type B personality theory is a personality type theory that describes a pattern of behaviours that were once considered to be a risk factor for coronary heart disease.

Since its inception in the 1950s, the theory has been widely popularised and also widely criticised for its scientific shortcomings.

Type A individuals can be described as impatient, excessively time-conscious, insecure about their status, highly competitive, over-ambitious, business-like, hostile, aggressive, incapable of relaxation in taking the smallest issues too seriously; and are somewhat disliked for the way that they're always rushing and demanding other people to serve to their standards of satisfaction.

They are often high and over-achieving workaholics who multi-task, drive themselves with deadlines, and are unhappy about the smallest of delays. So, because of these characteristics, Type A individuals are often described as "stress junkies."

Type B Personality
Type B individuals, in contrast, are described as patient, relaxed, and easy-going. There is also a Type AB mixed profile for people who cannot be clearly categorised.

In his 1996 book, Type A Behaviour: Its Diagnosis and Treatment, Meyer Friedman suggests that Type A behaviour is expressed in three major symptoms. One of these symptoms is believed to be covert and therefore less observable, whereas the other two are more overt.

Symptoms of Type A Behaviour

1. An intrinsic insecurity or insufficient level of self-esteem, considered to be the root cause of the syndrome. This is believed to be covert and therefore less observable.
   
2. Time urgency and impatience, which causes irritation and exasperation.
3. Free floating hostility, which can be triggered by even minor incidents.

Criticism of this Theory
Type A/B theory has been criticised on a number of grounds. For example, statisticians have argued that the original study by Friedman and Rosenman had serious limitations, including large and unequal sample sizes, and less than 1% of the variance in relationship explained by Type A personality.

Psychometrically, the behaviours that define the syndrome are not highly correlated, indicating that this is a grouping of separate tendencies, not a coherent pattern or type. Type theories in general have been criticised as overly simplistic and incapable of assessing the degrees of difference in human personality.

Researchers have also found that Type A behaviour is not a good predictor of coronary heart disease. According to research by Redford Williams of Duke University, the hostility component of Type A personality is the only significant risk factor. Thus, it may be a high level of expressed anger and hostility, not the other elements of Type A behaviour, that constitute the problem.

Therefore, Type A theory is considered to be obsolete by many researchers in contemporary health psychology and personality psychology but, make up your own mind.

H1N1: The Hidden or Concealed Pandemic

H1N1 swine flu continues to roam the planet. In the US, cases are thought to be in the hundreds of thousands. In Japan, hundreds of teenagers have caught it, despite no obvious connections with Mexico or the US.

Yet in Europe, health authorities are not testing widely for it and are prescribing drugs as though they could still contain it. And in Geneva, health ministers have fought this week to keep the World Health Organization from following its own rules and calling this a pandemic.

There has been a phenomenal mismatch between quite sensible rules about how to declare a flu pandemic, and equally sensible rules about how to respond. The mismatch was wholly predictable, yet somehow no one saw this coming.

The WHO rules for declaring different degrees of flu pandemic threat are based on epidemiology (how the virus is spreading) for good reasons. This is because any new flu virus to which most of the world has little immunity, and which spreads well enough person-to-person to escape its continent of origin, is very likely to go global, and to cause more sickness and death than flu usually does. That is the definition of a flu pandemic.

The virus's ability to spread is what matters. H5N1 bird flu has travelled across Eurasia, mainly in birds, but it hasn't spread readily in people, so it isn't a pandemic.

The Mexican swine flu H1N1, however, has. When it spread across the Americas, the WHO followed its rules and declared it a level 5 situation; one down from a pandemic. When it starts spreading outside the Americas, through "community transmission" - meaning it crops up generally, not just in people who have visited Mexico or New York recently or their contacts - that means it's got a foothold globally.

A flu that can do that is very unlikely to stop there. The WHO rules make that a full-blown level 6 pandemic.

And frankly, that is starting to happen. As I write, the number of confirmed cases in Japan (and that's just people sick enough to see a doctor and get tested) has jumped by 35 in the past 24 hours, to nearly 300, mostly due to that perennial vector of flu, the gregarious teenager. The main cluster started without any known links to the Americas.

In Europe, countries are deliberately not testing cases that could be community acquired, almost as if someone doesn't want to trigger - 'LEVEL 6'

In fact, Britain, Japan and other countries spent this past week pleading with the WHO not to go to level 6 yet, at least while the virus is still causing mostly mild disease. WHO boss Margaret Chan has now agreed to make the call when she sees "more signals coming from the virus itself or the spread of the disease, including severity."

The problem is, countries have pandemic plans that, rightly, prepare for the worst. Until recently we were worried about H5N1 (we still are) and there seemed a good chance that if it went pandemic, it might start off severe, necessitating major controls from the start.

28% taking smartphones and laptops to bed for work: survey

More than a quarter of 329 London workers surveyed admit they routinely take their laptop or other mobile computing device to bed to do work.

The same survey indicated that 57% of bedmates found it "a very annoying habit."

More than half of those who do work in bed did so for between two to six hours every week, according to the recent survey.

Eight percent of the respondents also confessed to spending more time on their mobile devices during the evening than talking to their partners.

When asked the question, "What is the last thing you do before going to sleep?" 96% did say it was to kiss their partners goodnight. The remaining 4% (71% of whom were male, according to the survey) confessed to completing work and checking e-mail.

According to the survey, more than half of the workers are routinely uploading and downloading sensitive corporate information to their mobile device while in bed, and most are using a wireless network, with a fifth admitting their network was not secure as they tapped away answering e-mail and other tasks.

In a list of five tips that included good admonitions to use encryption, strong passwords and the like, the last tip was: "Use your bedroom for what it's designed for and if you're not feeling sleepy, your laptop is the last thing you should be turning to!"

Simon says but loses his right to criticise

IF YOU have ever been tempted to call alternative medicine "bogus", chose your words with care. You could be sued for defamation. That's the message from a ruling in the High Court in London that censured science writer Simon Singh for claiming that the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) promoted "bogus" treatments.

I am a big fan of Simon Singh's books and have just finished his excellent book Fermat's Last Theorem. I have also had some good and some bad experiences with chiropractors in the past but I would defend anyone's right to criticise, not only alternative but also established clinical medicine. In this way refinement, development and progress can be achieved.

Chiropractice is a system of alternative and complementary medicine that treats illnesses by manipulating the spine. Singh made the comment in an article in London newspaper The Guardian in April 2008. The BCA asked him to retract the statement, which it said was wrong and damaging to its reputation. Singh refused, so the BCA sued him for libel.

In a pre-trial hearing last week, the judge ruled that Singh was saying the BCA had knowingly made false claims. He rejected Singh's defence that it was fair comment. "The judge has given us a meaning [of bogus] that is very extreme and that I never intended."

The judge has given us a meaning of bogus that is very extreme and that I never intended

Some lawyers and bloggers see the ruling as a landmark as it could restrict freedom of speech to criticise alternative medicine, and not just in England. People from all over the world are using English libel law to silence their critics (see "Don't criticise, or we'll sue").

BCA president Tony Metcalf said he was delighted that the judge had protected the BCA's integrity.

Gauge your future prospects by the singing in the lifeboats

"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want."

Whether you are a believer in inspirational quotes or not, you have to admit that they do have their moments. So, from the one provided we can gather that 'Experience' is a bit of a consolation prize.

If you have reached a cynical stage in your career then you should visit Despair.com and view the Demotivator's Calendar. A refreshingly silly five-minutes of your life you won't get back.

For the more serious minded classical students amongst you, here is a quote from the 18th-century French philosopher, wit and raconteur, Voltaire; "Life may be a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing heartily in the lifeboats." Now does that not crystallise what life is like in this current recession, with just a hint of optimism and stoicism. Very French!

From previous blogs, you will know that I am in favour of establishing strong leadership skills in these troubled times by developing the potential and talent already visible in the new executives. Perhaps a hint of that same lifeboat spirit would help strengthen the resolve of our future leaders and younger executives.

There are difficult questions to be asked. Are you using your current business challenges as a learning experience? Are you addressing the difficult decisions leaders must make to adjust to this dynamic ever-changing environment?

It is so easy to let the development and management of talented performers sink to the bottom of the priority list, especially for many companies today. Remember, the next generation of leaders is developing around you, whether you want them to or not and whether your helping them or not. The risk is that those who "self-select" into leadership roles aren't necessarily qualified enough to succeed in their aims, certainly not without strong guidance and/or appropriate mentoring.

This crippled economy, wrecked on the reef of bad management and greed, is giving the emerging IT leaders of tomorrow some unprecedented opportunities to stand out and step forward. In turn, we must remember it is our role to keep the chorus going in the lifeboats, loud and strong.

The leadersof tomorrow should be true captains of industry, able to plot a safe course for tomorrow's adventure and navigate the dangerous shallows of short term gains and diminishing returns.