Just a reminder, Daylight Savings Time ends in a few hours. We get an "extra" hour this weekend. Yay! So, turn your clocks back some time this morning or when you get up. Also, watch your electronic clock devices for glitches.
http://www.wktv.com/news/local/10841066.htmlDaylight Savings Time Reminder: Turn Back Your Clocks On November 4Just a reminder for our readers and viewers that with the new Daylight Savings Time system you are supposed to turn your clocks back on
November 4 at 2:00 AM. http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20071024/hl_hsn/bodysclockneveradjuststodaylightsavingstimeBody's Clock Never Adjusts to Daylight Savings TimeBy Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
Wed Oct 24, 7:00 PM ET
WEDNESDAY, Oct. 24 (HealthDay News) -- Changing to daylight savings time may give people an hour more of sunlight, but it appears that their internal body clocks never really adjusts to the change, German researchers report.
In fact, daylight savings time can cause a significant seasonal disruption that might have other effects on our bodies, according to the report in the Oct. 24 online edition of Current Biology.
"When you change clocks to daylight savings time, you don't change anything related to sun time," explained lead researcher Till Roenneberg of Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. "This is one of those human arrogances -- that we can do whatever we want as long as we are disciplined. We forget that there is a biological clock that is as old as living organisms, a clock that cannot be fooled. The pure social change of time cannot fool the clock."
People's circadian rhythm -- the body's internal clock -- follows the sun and changes depending on where you live. It actually changes in four-minute intervals, exactly the time it takes for the sun to cross one line of longitude, Roenneberg explained.
"The circadian clock does not change to the social change," Roenneberg said. "During the winter, there is a beautiful tracking of dawn in human sleep behavior, which is completely and immediately interrupted when daylight savings time is introduced in March," he said. It returns to normal this year when standard time returns on Nov. 4, he added.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071102/ap_on_sc/time_change_accidentsStudy ties time shift, pedestrian deathsBy SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
Fri Nov 2, 6:04 PM ET
WASHINGTON - After clocks are turned back this weekend, pedestrians walking during the evening rush hour are nearly three times more likely to be struck and killed by cars than before the time change, two scientists calculate.
Ending daylight savings time translates into about 37 more U.S. pedestrian deaths around 6 p.m. in November compared to October, the researchers report. Their study of risk to pedestrians is preliminary, but confirms previous findings of higher deaths after clocks are set back in fall.
It's not the darkness itself, but the adjustment to earlier nighttime that's the killer, said professors Paul Fischbeck and David Gerard, both of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Fischbeck, who regularly walks with his 4-year-old twins around 6 p.m., is worried enough that he'll be more cautious starting Monday. "A three times increase in the risk is really dramatic, and because of that we're carrying a flashlight," he said.
Fischbeck and Gerard conducted a preliminary study of seven years of federal traffic fatalities and calculated risk per mile walked for pedestrians. They found that per-mile risk jumps 186 percent from October to November, but then drops 21 percent in December. They said the drop-off in deaths by December indicates the risk is caused by the trouble both drivers and pedestrians have adjusting when darkness suddenly comes an hour earlier.
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_Savings_TimeDaylight saving time
Although DST is common in Europe and North America, most of the world's people do not use it. Daylight saving time (DST; also summer time in British English) is the convention of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn; several ancient cultures lengthened each summer daylight hour instead. Modern DST was first proposed in 1907 by William Willett, and saw its first widespread use in 1916 as a wartime measure aimed at conserving coal. Despite controversy, many countries have used it since then; details vary by location and change occasionally.
Adding daylight to afternoons generally benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but it can cause problems for farmers and others whose hours depend on the sun. Extra afternoon daylight appears to cut traffic fatalities; its effect on health and crime is less clear. DST is said to save electricity by reducing the need for artificial evening lighting, but the evidence for this is weak, and DST can boost peak demand, increasing overall electricity costs.<6>DST's clock shifts complicate timekeeping and can disrupt meetings, travel, billing, recordkeeping, medical devices, and heavy equipment; they also serve as twice-yearly fire safety reminders.<8> Many computer-based systems can adjust their clocks automatically, but this can be limited and error-prone, particularly when DST rules change.
William Willett invented DST and advocated it tirelessly. In 1905, the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett was inspired to invent DST during one of his pre-breakfast horseback rides, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through the best part of a summer day. An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later. He lobbied unsuccessfully for the proposal until his death in 1915; see Politics for more details. Wartime Germany, its allies, and their occupied zones were the first European countries to use DST, starting 1916-04-30. Britain, most other belligerents, and many European neutrals soon followed suit, but Russia and a few other countries waited until the next year, and the United States did not use it until 1918. Since then the world has seen many enactments, adjustments, and repeals.
Benefits and drawbacks- snip -
Energy useDelaying the nominal time of sunrise and sunset increases the use of artificial light in the morning and reduces it in the evening. As Franklin's 1784 satire pointed out, energy is conserved if the evening reduction outweighs the morning increase, which can happen if more people need evening light than morning. However, statistically significant evidence for any such effect has proved elusive. The U.S. Dept. of Transportation (DOT) concluded in 1975 that DST might reduce the country's electricity usage by 1% during March and April, but the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) reviewed the DOT study in 1976 and found no significant energy savings.<5> In 2000 when parts of Australia began DST in late winter, overall electricity consumption did not decrease, but the morning peak load and prices increased. A 2007 simulation estimated that introducing DST to Japan would increase energy use in Osaka residences by 0.13%, with a 0.02% decrease due to less lighting more than outweighed by a 0.15% increase due to extra cooling; the simulation did not examine non-residential buildings. In North America, there was no clear evidence that electricity would be saved by the extra DST introduced in 2007, and although one utility did report a decrease in March 2007, five others did not.
DST may increase gasoline consumption: U.S. gasoline demand grew an extra 1% during the newly introduced DST in March 2007.- snip -
PoliticsDaylight saving has caused controversy since it began. Winston Churchill argued that it enlarges "the opportunities for the pursuit of health and happiness among the millions of people who live in this country".] Robertson Davies, however, detected "the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." Historically, retailing, sports and tourism interests have favored daylight saving, while agricultural and evening entertainment interests have opposed it, and a war or economic crisis is often associated with its adoption.
- snip -
Wilson's successor Warren G. Harding opposed DST as a "deception". Reasoning that people should instead get up and go to work earlier in the summer, he ordered District of Columbia federal employees to start work at 08:00 rather than 09:00 during summer 1922. Many businesses followed suit though many others did not, and critics gave the scheduling mess names like "Ragtime" and "Daylight Slaving Time"; the experiment was not repeated. More recent economic theory suggests that general agreement about the day's layout confers so many advantages that a standard DST schedule usually outranks ad hoc efforts to get up earlier, even for people who personally dislike the DST schedule.
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