The National Sleep Foundation has released their annual study this week on American’s sleeping habits, and once again concluded that technology is ruining our sleep.
Says vice chairman Russell Rosenberg:
Unfortunately, cell phones and computers, which make our lives more productive and enjoyable, may be abused to the point that they contribute to getting less sleep at night leaving millions of Americans functioning poorly the next day.
95 percent of those in the study said they used some electronic device within one hour of sleep, and 65 percent admitted they do not get enough sleep during the week.
Exposure to artificial light within one hour of bed can “increase alertness and suppress the release of melatonin, a sleep-promoting hormone,” says Charles Czeisler, of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Continues Czeisler (via Reuters):
Technology has invaded the bedroom. Invasion of such alerting technologies into the bedroom may contribute to the high proportion of respondents who reported they routinely get less sleep than they need.
“Baby Boomers,” adults aged 45-64, had the biggest percentage of those watching TV before bed while 61 percent of all admitted to using their computers at least a few nights each week.
Result for: proportion
Analyst Colin McGranahan of Bernstein Research has said today the Apple iPad is the fastest selling gadget of all-time, with an estimated 8.5 million units sold since launch in April.
Leading to the strong sales is the fact that consumers seem to replacing new computer purchases with tablet purchases.
NPD says that 13 percent of iPad owners would have instead purchased a new computer had the tablet not been available.
McGranahan calls the iPad a “runaway success of unprecedented proportion.”
Apple has recently made the tablet available via Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart so sales are expected to spike over the holiday season.
Result for: proportion
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) being brokered by the U.S. government on behalf of the entertainment industry has caught the attention of the European Data Protection Supervisor, Peter Hustinx. He authored an opinion paper on several topics that include ACTA, and said he was concerned that it violated the legal rights of citizens in nations across Europe.
“The EDPS strongly encourages the European Commission to establish a public and transparent dialogue on ACTA, possibly by means of a public consultation, which would also help ensuring that the measures to be adopted are compliant with EU privacy and data protection law requirements,” Hustinx writes in his opinion piece. ACTA has already found itself in the line of fire from the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for some of its provisions.
There are fears that ACTA includes measures to enable warrantless searches of citizens and destruction of devices containing potentially pirated content. Recently in the UK, Junior business minister David Lammy said documents related to ACTA will not be put in the House of Commons library, due to the desire for other countries to keep the negotiations secret.
The European Commission said recently that ACTA will not go any further than current EU policies related to copyright infringement, and dismissed fears that ACTA will lead to border searches of iPods and other gadgets in case they contain pirated multimedia content.
“EU customs, frequently confronted with traffics of drugs, weapons or people, do neither have the time nor the legal basis to look for a couple of pirated songs on an iPod music player or laptop computer, and there is no intention to change this,” the Commission said at the time.
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