Courtesy City of Port Coquitlam

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) While Metro Vancouvers new organic food scrap ban kicks in January 1st, most people will actually have until 2017 before its strictly enforced.

Starting in the new year large restaurants, hotels and supermarkets need to separate the scraps from their garbage but theyll have a six-month grace period.

Andrew Marr with Metro Vancouver says it will be phased in for everyone else.

Obviously the inspectors will start looking harder for smaller quantities of food scraps. So the quantity theyre looking for will go down in 2016 and then itll go down again in 2017.

It will be up to the people bringing in the loads to make sure they are clean, or theyll be fined.

We have people who randomly inspect loads of garbage when theyre arriving at our facilities and so they just do a visual inspection. Its a very simple thing, they dont open bags or anything like that. So theyre just looking really for large obvious quantities of food scraps.

Metro Vancouver feels the phase approach will help to resolve any initial issues.

Continued here:
Metro Vancouver organic food scrap ban to be phased in

uchar/iStockphoto

In movies and on TV we often see surgeons turn on some music during a procedure, but does it actually improve the success-rate of the surgery in real life?

According to a new report in the British Medical Journal, music is played 62-72 percent of the time in the operating room (mostly classical), and roughly 80 percent of operating room staff say that music benefits cooperation between team members, reduces anxiety levels and improves efficiency. A surgeons task focus is also improved, according to the research.

Depending on how you work in your daily life, this might make total sense, or you might think that music would be distracting for such an important job. Surgeons from the University Hospital of Wales think music makes a big difference.

Surgeons will inevitably continue to use music as a calming and familiar adjunct to their daily practice, David Bosanquet, James Glasbey and Raphael Chavez wrote in the paper. We embrace music in the operating theater whenever the situation allows it.

Its not just music in general though relaxing music and melodies that mimic the resting heart rate are more effective during a procedure, even more than giving a patient certain anti-anxiety medications before anesthesia, according to a2009 study of 372 patients. Research suggests that this calming, positive affect makes a difference even after a patient leaves the operating room.

The Huffington Post pointed out some of the background behind this idea:

A growing body of research has also suggested that musics healing properties extend to pain relief. A 2012 study from the Pain Research Center at the University of Utahfound that participants who actively focused on various melodies while receiving mildly painful electric shocks reduced pain levels by 17 percent. Research conducted in Singapore also found that palliative care patients who participated in live music therapy reported relief from persistent pain.

Active music engagement allowed the patients to reconnect with the healthy parts of themselves, even in the face of a debilitating condition or disease-related suffering,the studys co-author, music therapist Melanie Kwan of the Association for Music Therapy, Singapore, told the American Psychological Association. When their acute pain symptoms were relieved, patients were finally able to rest.

The staff surveyed in the BMJ piece had some ideas for dos and donts on a surgeons playlist. (Clearly these folks had a sense of humor about the subject.)

Here is the original post:
The genre of music your doctor listens to during surgery could affect the outcome

YANGON, Myanmar, Dec. 15 (UPI) -- Owners of a Yangon, Myanmar, bar who allegedly offended Buddha by depicting him in an advertisement in headphones will face charges this week.

The general manager of the V Gastro bar, New Zealand national Phillip Blackwood, and two business partners, Tun Thurein and Htut Lo Ko Lwin were charged last week under a Myanmar law outlawing words or images that could deliberately offend religion. In a Facebook advertisement for the bar, an image of Buddha is seen with DJ-styled headphones, his eyes closed and surrounded by garish colors and the term "Buddha.bar." The three were detained under broad and vaguely written section of Myanmar's penal code, and could receive two-year sentences.

Their arrest began with a complaint from the government's religious department.

The law has been commonly used to detain political prisoners, a 2009 report by the activist group Human Rights Watch said.

The bar owners replaced the advertisement with an apology saying, in part, the ad was "was never to cause offense to anyone or toward any religious group. Our ignorance is embarrassing for us and we will attempt to correct it by learning more about Myanmar's religions, culture and history."

While Buddha statues and images are common in Western culture, as fashion accessories or as garden decorations, Asian Buddhists regard such displays as blasphemous, Buddhism scholar Dr. Paul Fuller told Voice of America.

"I think we're seeing it (outrage over perceived blasphemy) more and more because these fundamentalist Buddhist movements are fostering a sense of Buddhist identity tied in with national identity. Buddhism has always had a very privileged place within the western romantic understanding."

Related UPI Stories

2014 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.

See the original post:
Three charged in Myanmar with insulting Buddhism