xkcd - Hand Sanitiser

20,000 for those who can't be bothered working it out.

How do you sleep at night?

The eminent Robert Phipps, a body language 'expert' has been commissioned to produce some research on peoples' sleeping positions.

Really!

Lets hear what Robert has to say for himself first:

Robert's services have been called upon by some of the world's largest corporations, his media appearances number well over 100 TV shows and hundreds if not thousands of comments for newspapers, magazines and radio stations.
Due to popularity most of these courses get booked quite early, especially as they are often restricted to just 25 delegates per course.

Golly!

Back to the research... From The Telegraph:

The results, he claims, can identify how stressful your day was, how much you worry and how much control you have over your life.

It is said to reveal traits such as stubbornness, bossiness and fanciful dreaming, as well as how self-critical a person is or whether they feel in control of life.  

Of course. Naturally. How could it not?

According to his research, more than half of British adults sleep in the “foetal” position, curled up on their side with knees tucked in. This stance, favoured by worriers, is said to show the sleeper is seeking to return to their comfort zone after a stressful day. 

Utter bollocks.

The log position, with a straight body and limbs at the sides, shows a person is inflexible and rigid in thinking, set in their ways and stubborn.  

More bollocks

A quarter of people taking part in the study classed themselves as “yearners”, sleeping with their arms stretched out in front as though they are chasing their dreams or being chased. 

He got paid to produce this?

A further 17 per cent of respondents classed themselves as “freefallers”, sleeping face down with their arms outstretched.
Often clutching their pillow, they can appearing to be “holding on for dear life” in what is thought to be the most uncomfortable sleeping position for adults. 

Enough! Who commissioned this piece of self-promoting bollocks?

The research, for budget hotel chain Premier Inn, revealed the “log” as the second most popular position, adopted by nearly three in every ten people.  

Ah - thought so - an advert.

CALM - suicidal young men

As reported by the PA, and other media:

A quarter of adults in England and Wales have considered suicide, research suggests.
Suicidal thoughts are most common in those aged 45 to 54, with just over a third (31%) saying they had contemplated taking their own life, according to the research [...]

While men and women are both likely to feel suicidal, more men actually commit suicide, the campaign group said.
Calm chief executive Jane Powell said that 75.5% of the 4,517 people who committed suicide in 2010 were men.
She said that gender should be at the heart of Government's suicide-prevention policy.

Ah, so more taxpayers' money to be spent on... suicides. For men. (Or rather to reduce them.) Wonder where this money should be being spent?

And who conducted this research? From the PA article:

[...]according to the research conducted by the Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm).

Calm is a fake-charity in the UK, who out of their  £153k income for 2011, £152k (of which £98k was deferred to 2012) came from Primary Care Trusts. Which is the NHS. Which is taxpayers' money.

They describe themselves as:

The campaign against living miserably (CALM) was set up to reduce the high suicide rate amongst men under 35, currently the single biggest killer of young men in the UK

In other words: Charity that depends on taxpayers' money demands that more taxpayers' money be spent on primary reason for said charity to exist.

Sun Life - funerals

From The Telegraph, carehome.co.uk, marketwatch, and other media outlets, we have some 'research' into funeral costs in the UK co-conducted by the University of Bath and another partner:

• Almost half of 69,000 applications for a Funeral Payment (FP) rejected(2) 
• So-called "pauper's funerals" (Public Health Funerals) expected to rise as it becomes "too expensive for poor people to die" 
• Funeral Payment applicants forced into debt by committing to funeral cost of GBP 1,000s prior to finding out if they will receive state support

Gosh. What a sorry state of affairs. Who helped the University of Bath conduct their research? Another impartial group of people?

From MarketWatch:

A new Cost of Dying Special Report into Social Fund Funeral Payments from Sun Life Direct and the University of Bath reveals that the Funeral Payment scheme, intended to contribute to the cost of funerals for the most vulnerable in society, is failing to meet mounting demand.

[...]

Simon Cox, head of life planning at Sun Life Direct, says: "We have to ask ourselves whether the current infrastructure for end of life support is fit for purpose. Something must be done, and quickly.

Ah. Company that sells funeral plans seemingly encourages public, through scare tactics, to buy funeral plans. Or this is possibly a run-up to suggesting that the government use a private company (can you think of one?) to take over the Funeral Payments system in order to get their hands on tax-payers' money.

In no way is this an advertisement. Not at all.

ASA going after the wrong people?

Seems a few people are in a tizzy over the above advert and have complained to the ASA about it being posted to Bishop Cranmer's blog (linked.)

Quite why this is seen as homophobic, and not persecution towards a blogger, is beyond a few people.

Dry ice and CGI smoke are dangerous!!!!one

The latest in the UK Government's nanny-statism, this time pushing the myth of damaging non-first-hand smoke.

[Dry ice flowing over a sofa]

[Dry ice flowing over net curtains]

[Dry ice flowing over some child's bricks on the floor]

[CGI smoke wafting all over the room with a sleeping child in a baby seat]

[Closeup of child's feet, then hands, then feet.]

[Mum smoking by window while stood in the room]

Over 80% of cigarette smoke is invisible,[1]

[Mum now outside smoking][2]

so no matter how

[Mum back inside the room][2]

careful you are, they still breathe in the harmful poisons.

[Room without dry ice and CGI smoke showing the child again.]

If you could see what's really there, you wouldn't smoke.

Text invisible to 63818 for a Smokefree Kit.

[1] 80% of *smoke* is invisible? I'm sure it isn't.

[2] And I thought the continuity editors had it hard during films lasting 120 minutes or more - I can only imagine how hard it must be when you're doing a 30 second advert.

Quite why the government is persisting in stating that second-hand smoke is apparently, given the rhetoric, even more damaging to others than the first-hand smoke is to the smoker, despite there being little to no scientific evidence of said harm, isn't really a mystery.

We even have the Chief Medical Officer attributing middle ear infections (wot?), lung infections, asthma and 40 cot deaths per year to passive smoking and pushing for a ban on smoking in cars.

While smoke (or any other particulate matter in the air) may start an asthmatic off, I seriously doubt (nor can find any evidence of) passive smoking caused the asthma to start with.

Cot deaths, aka Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, is the name attributed to the death of a baby where the reasons are unknown. If 40 cot deaths were actually caused by passive smoking then they wouldn't be called 'cot deaths.'

And the money spent on this advert is on top of the ~£.5 million pounds of tax-payers money currently being spent by an off-shoot of the UK government in the South West of England to lobby other parts of the government for plain packaging while the government is in the middle of a 'consultation' over said packaging.

Predictor: Pregnancy tests

[Couple with the 'father' standing behind an obviously pregnant 'mother' both looking happily surprsied at a pregnancy test]

[Box of 'Predictor']

When you want to be sure.

A must-have item to see if you're pregnant, even when if it's painfully obvious that you are - indeed - pregnant.