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NEW YORK – Smokers who kick the habit appear to benefit from an improved mood, according to a new review of past studies.

On average, quitting smoking was associated with improvements in mental health similar to taking an antidepressant drug, a team of UK researchers found.

“The main message is that when people stop smoking, they feel better than they did when they were smoking,” Dr Paul Aveyard, one of the review’s authors, told Reuters Health.

“People who quit smoking may feel grumpy, irritable and bad — those feelings are similar to feelings of stress and people conflate the two,” Aveyard, from the University of Oxford, said.

“For clinicians like myself, when we see people who smoke who also have mental health difficulties, there’s often a feeling that we are depriving them of a way to deal with the stress,” he said. “But in fact we are helping these people to get better.”

It is widely known that quitting smoking has saved lives. But it’s nearly impossible to prove that smoking causes specific health problems, or that quitting prevents them, because of other differences that exist between smokers and non-smokers that could impact health and well-being.

With that in mind, “the claim of this paper that quitting is as good as drugs needs more research,” Dr Prabhat Jha, of the University of Toronto Centre for Global Health Research in Canada, wrote in an email to Reuters Health. Jha was not part of the new analysis.

For their review, the researchers examined data from 26 studies of smoking cessation. Some studies included smokers in the general public and others focused on people in psychiatric hospitals. Participants smoked an average of 20 cigarettes per day initially.

All of the studies assessed participants’ mental health before quitting smoking and about six months later, on average.

Compared to people who continued to smoke, the studies showed drops in anxiety, depression and stress and improvements in psychological quality of life among quitters.

Other explanations related to mood improvements among quitters need to be considered, the researchers write in the British medical journal BMJ. For example, it’s possible that life events improved people’s mood, leading them to quit smoking.

Still, there is “an entrenched belief in our culture that smoking ‘calms the nerves’ and can help alleviate stressful situations,” psychiatry researcher Benjamin Le Cook of the Cambridge Health Alliance in Somerville, Massachusetts told Reuters Health in an e-mail. He said this message has met little resistance from public health, mental health and medical communities so far.

The current review serves as a reminder that tobacco withdrawal symptoms like anxiety can easily be confused with mental health problems, said Brian Hitsman of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Both he and Le Cook were not involved in the review.

HANOVER, Germany – Internet users may before long have a secure solution to the modern plague of passwords, in which they can use visual patterns or even their own body parts to identify themselves.

Developers at the world’s biggest high-tech fair, CeBIT, say that one of the biggest frustrations of having a smartphone and a computer is memorising dozens of sufficiently airtight passwords for all their devices and accounts.

“The problem of passwords is that they are very weak, they are always getting hacked, and also from a user point of view, they are too complicated, everybody has 20, 30, 60 passwords,” said Steven Hope, managing director of Winfrasoft from Britain, the fair’s guest country this year.

“They all have to be different, no one can remember them, so everybody writes them down or resets them every time they log in. They don’t work in the real world today.”

Passwords have proliferated so much that it’s a daily struggle for users to cope with so many of them.

And as millions of Internet users have learned the hard way, no password is safe when hackers can net them en masse from banks, e-mail services, retailers or social media websites that fail to fully protect their servers.

Many simply throw in the towel and use no-brainer codes like “123456” and “password” –– which are still the most common despite how easily they can be cracked, CeBIT spokesman Hartwig von Sass said at the event in the northern German city of Hanover.

In response to the vulnerabilities and hassles of the antiquated username-and-password formula, Winfrasoft has developed an alternative based on a four-colour grid with numbers inside that resembles a Sudoku puzzle.

Users select a pattern on the grid as their “password” and because the numbers inside the boxes change once per minute, the code changes too, making it far harder to hack.

“There is no way anybody could see which numbers you are looking at. You see typing numbers but you don’t know what the pattern is because each number is here six times,” Hope said during a demonstration.

Backup from body parts 

Biometric data offers another alternative to seas of numbers, letters and symbols.

US giant Apple has already equipped its latest generation iPhone with a fingerprint reader to boost its security profile.

But a group of European hackers, the Hamburg-based Chaos Computer Club, demonstrated that the system could be pirated using a sophisticated “fake” fingerprint made of latex.

Japan’s Fujitsu turned to the other end of the hand and has developed an identification system based on each person’s unique vein pattern.

At its CeBIT stand, the company was showing off its PalmSecure technology on its new ultra-light laptop computer which has a small sensor built in.

Meanwhile Swiss firm KeyLemon has developed a face recognition system using a webcam.

The computer registers parts of the face, “the eyes, the eyebrows, the shape of your nose, your cheekbones, the chin...” a company spokesman said.

The person must then only sit in front of the screen to be recognised and gain access to the computer.

The system, already used by some three million people according to the company, still has a few kinks however so users must remember to take off their eyeglasses, for example, or have consistent lighting in order to pass the identity test.

“Face recognition and fingerprint recognition are additional safety security features; they will never have only face recognition or fingerprint recognition” but rather use them as a crucial backup to passwords, he said.

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo is cribbing from Yelp’s online reviews of local merchants to soup up its search engine.

Ratings and excerpts from Yelp’s merchant reviews began to appear in Yahoo’s search results on Wednesday.

Financial terms of the partnership weren’t disclosed. News of the deal first leaked out last month, so it didn’t come as a surprise. Yahoo’s stock dipped seven cents to $37.49 in afternoon trading while Yelp’s shares gained $2.48, or nearly 3 per cent, to $92.48.

Yahoo Inc. is hoping the snippets from Yelp Inc.’s popular service will spur more people to rely on its search engine when they’re looking for information about a specific city. Yelp could generate more revenue and polish its brand by having its content featured in Yahoo’s search results.

Boosting search traffic is a high priority for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer because the queries spawn insights into users’ interests. That knowledge can then be used to sell advertising.

Yahoo ranks a distant third in Internet search behind Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Bing.

Neither of those search engines will be able to highlight Yelp’s material in the same way that Yahoo now can.

Google had been showing Yelp snippets it in its search engine a few years ago, prompting Yelp to complain that it was being cheated out of revenue and traffic. After US antitrust regulators opened an investigation in 2011 into whether Google was trying to stifle competition, the company stopped using Yelp’s reviews in its local search results.

Yahoo’s search market share has been steadily slipping since the Sunnyvale, California, company began relying on Microsoft’s technology to produce most of its results in 2010. That alliance still gives Yahoo the flexibility to add other features to its search results.

Microsoft also helps sells some of the advertising displayed alongside Yahoo’s search results. Ad revenue initially slumped after Microsoft and Yahoo joined forces, but the numbers have been looking better during the past two years. After subtracting ad commissions, Yahoo’s search revenue last year rose 6 per cent to $1.7 billion.

Yelp’s revenue last year totalled $233 million, a 69 per cent increase from the previous year.

The days are gone where one device would connect to the web via a simple modem supplied by the telecoms. Now a WiFi router has become a must in any home that has an ADSL subscription. Installing and managing it can be a breeze or a nightmare. It all depends on what you expect from it and to which extend you are, or are not, tech-minded. In any case, however, the device will prove extremely useful.

In the most common setup a WiFi router is an additional, small digital network and communication device that takes the Internet signal from the modem and can then make it available to countless wireless computer-like devices: tablets, smartphones and others, without the need for cables, as the name implies. Moreover, and perhaps as interestingly, the router creates an internal wireless network that enables all these digital devices to communicate and exchange data and files between them all, regardless of the Internet; hence its usefulness. In other words, even if your Internet connection is down, a wireless router still has a useful role to play!

A simple, “dummy” ADSL modem is not enough anymore for many a reason, and they all make perfect sense. First comes mobility. Even assuming that you only have one “poor lonesome” laptop computer in your home that you want to connect to the web, a modem wouldn’t be practical enough for you need to move around, free of wires. Typically, with one laptop and one standard, unsophisticated modem, the connection is made through an Ethernet or network cable. The need to move your single laptop from one room to another implies adding and installing a wireless router.

From the moment you have, in addition to a computer, at least one tablet or one smartphone at home, which by today’s standards is a rather common situation, a router becomes an absolute necessity, just after water, electricity and food; and this hardly an exaggeration. Some try to live without the device by relying on the 3G network of their mobile phone service provider. But till now 3G doesn’t provide the same kind of performance as ADSL, be it in the download speed or in the available monthly download quota, or even pricing.

New, modern routers offer a wealth of features. Admitted, some are complex to understand and manage but if you are not particularly a tech-head you can always ask a friend (or a smart teen-ager, as usual) to help. Besides you would normally need to tackle the sophisticated part of the setup only once. Other than that the basic features are not difficult at all to set if one is willing to read the user manual.

With a WiFi, or wireless router you can decide to give full access to your home devices and restricted access to those guests who come to visit and who want to use your network from their smartphone for example, this by assigning different access passwords. You can also easily set various levels of parental control in a very flexible manner. You can block specific sites to specific devices in the house. A good wireless router will also act as a media server, allowing you to playback the music or video stored on any device on the network, from any other device on the network, wirelessly of course. This alone is worth the purchase and the trouble.

Even better, most new models come with a USB port where you can plug an external storage device, a USB flash drive or an external hard disk. This unit then becomes a convenient common storage area that all devices in the house can share and use. For instance, save photos and music there and make them accessible to every tablet, laptop or smartphone in the premises. Or use it to make automated, programmed backup sets for security.

The best-selling brands of wireless routers are Cisco, Linksys (a Cisco sub-brand), Trendnet, Asus, D-Link and Netgear. For JD50 to JD100 you get a decent wireless router in Amman, and JD100 to JD200 will buy you a very sophisticated one. The speed or performance is indicated with the letters b, g, n or AC. The first two are old, slow and practically obsolete, while “n” is a faster one. AC is the latest and provides unprecedented performance.

NEW YORK – Preschoolers who sing, tell stories and eat dinner with their families tend to be emotionally healthier and better adjusted socially than kids who don't have such routines, a recent study has found.

Researchers examined the number of daily routines that more than 8,500 children practiced with their families. They found each ritual was linked to a 47 per cent increase in the odds that children would have high so-called social-emotional health, which indicates good emotional and social skills.

Social-emotional health "allows children to express their feelings, understand others' emotions and develop and sustain healthy relationships with peers and adults," said Dr Elisa Muniz, the study's lead author and a paediatrician at Bronx Lebanon Hospital in New York.

Such development plays a key role in enabling kids to thrive in the classroom, researchers said.

"There is strong scientific evidence that children who possess these abilities to a greater degree are more likely to succeed in school," Muniz said.

The researchers used data from a long-term study conducted by the National Centre for Education Statistics to gather information about kids and their families as it relates to childhood development and readiness for school.

Children in the study were taken from a national sample of those born in 2001, and data about them were collected from questionnaires, childhood assessments and interviews of the child's main caregiver. The study followed children from birth until they began kindergarten. The recent report used information about the children that had been collected when they were preschool-aged.

Researchers examined how often children participated in five family routines: having dinner as a family at least five times a week; reading, storytelling or singing at least three times a week; and playing at least a few times a week.

Kids' mothers also rated their child's social-emotional health using a 24-item survey. The children were an average of just over four-years-old.

Muniz and colleagues found that about 17 per cent of the children had high levels of social-emotional health, and that children who took part in more family routines were more likely to be socially and emotionally advanced. The exception was reading, which was not clearly linked to social-emotional health.

For example, 11 per cent of the children who had no family routines had high social-emotional health, compared to 25 per cent of those whose families engaged in all five routines. Three quarters of the children participated in at least three family routines.

The study was published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioural Paediatrics.

Researchers said the results weren't surprising given how important ongoing nurturing interactions with caregivers are to young children's health and development.

"When you are happy and secure, you are much more able to learn and interact in healthy ways," said Dr. Claire McCarthy, a paediatrician at Boston Children's Hospital who was not involved in the study.

"When (children) are unhappy, insecure or unsure of their environment, energy goes into dealing with that, and not into learning," she told Reuters Health.

Family routines also help build skills that are crucial for success in academic and social settings, she noted.

"The routines in the study can help with what we call 'executive function': skills like problem-solving, negotiation, planning and delayed gratification. Having good executive function skills is absolutely important for school success," said McCarthy.

Parents can foster kids' social-emotional health in many ways, including practicing the routines in the study. Yet the goal - spending time together to foster communication and loving relationships - can also be achieved through other activities that suit each family's schedule and interests, researchers said. These include taking family walks, making dinner together or having a family movie night.

"Every family is different, and every family knows best what will work for them," said McCarthy.

The thing is, after living for three years in Jordan, I am getting quite used to the idea now. Which one? Well, of getting mistaken for a Jordanian. Initially, when I was a brand new resident of the Hashemite Kingdom, I would correct strangers immediately when they jumped to conclusions. 

They would talk to me in Arabic and when I said I did not understand the language, they would look confused. I used to enlighten them about my home country India, but they would insist that I looked more Middle Eastern. “Is your father or mother Jordanian?” they would ask hopefully.

Seeing their disappointed expression I would reassure them by saying that maybe my ancestors were from here. This bit of exaggerated information was enough to cheer them up. 

Over the years I realised that what they really wanted was to claim me as theirs. And so slowly, I sopped making such an unnecessary fuss. I mean, here I was: an ageing, imperfect and flawed lady. And still, if the residents of my host country wanted to adopt me, who was I to complain? And why? Honestly! It did not make sense. 

With that subconscious decision I started behaving more like the locals here. I loved their food, the music, the obsession with football and fashion, and even the distinctive manner in which the women kohl lined their eyes. With a spattering of Arabic words delivered in a distinctive manner I could easily get by as an eccentric Jordanian. 

Only two things I found very difficult to embrace, which are inherent if one wants to be called a true native of this land. One is the incessant smoking that everyone, just about everyone indulges in. And the second is their careless and rash manner of driving. 

In this country, very few people, a minuscule of the entire population, uses regular walking as a means of transporting themselves from one place to another. The result is that the beautiful city of Amman has no pedestrian walkways. 

The very few that are around, have been blocked with huge trees that are planted within a short distance from each other. They look pretty but are a nuisance for the walkers, who have to get down from the walkway onto the main road, to get around them. And with the cars driving at full speed, it is a potential health hazard to even step on the road. 

The zebra crossings are very few and for the drivers in their fast cars they are invisible anyway. Crossing a road on foot is tantamount to inviting a huge catastrophe. It is a good idea to draft one’s will and testament before one undertakes such a task. In my initial years in Jordan, my most frequently asked question was, how do you cross the road? With the passage of time I acclimatised myself and when there was a drop in traffic, I would just close my eyes and dash across.

On my flight to London the other day a charming lady was sitting next to me. 

“I have been living in the UK for 25 years,” she confided. 

“You are British?” I asked. 

“Same, like you are Jordanian,” she smiled. 

“I am very Jordanian now,” I agreed. 

“Can I ask you a persoquestion?” she inquired.

“Go ahead,” I assured. 

“How do you cross the roads in Amman?” she probed. 

“Ah, let me tell you a long story,” I said, settling back. 

WASHINGTON — The Vietnamese creator of Flappy Bird says he’s thinking of resurrecting the smash-hit free game that he abruptly took offline a month ago — albeit with a warning about its addictive qualities.

In his first interview since he pulled the app from the Apple and Android app stores, citing the pressure its success put on his “simple life”, Nguyen Ha Dong told Rolling Stone magazine he now feels a sense of “relief”.

But asked if Flappy Bird will ever fly again on mobile devices, Nguyen responded: “I’m considering it.” 

While he is not working on a new version, he said any sequel would come with a warning to users to “please take a break.”

With its 2D retro-style graphics, Flappy Bird — in which gamers try to direct a flying bird between oncoming sets of pipes without touching them — was wildly popular.

When Nguyen, 28, announced on Twitter that he was about to take it down, 10 million people downloaded it in just 22 hours — and one month on, clone versions still pop up.

Nguyen told Rolling Stone he was upset not only by the fame that surrounded his Flappy Bird success, but also by messages from people telling him how the game caused them to flunk exams and lose jobs.

Now enjoying a quieter life, he told Rolling Stone he is busy creating other games, including a cowboy-themed shooter, a vertical flying game and an “action chess game” — one of which he will release this month.

Vietnam has a small but thriving software and games development sector and the global publicity surrounding Flappy Bird is likely to help it grow, technology experts have said.

Rolling Stone posted its interview with Nguyen on its website Tuesday ahead of publication in its March 27 issue.

LONDON — The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, called on Wednesday for bill of rights to protect freedom of speech on the Internet and users‘ rights after leaks about government surveillance of online activity.

Exactly 25 years since the London-born computer scientist invented the web, Berners-Lee said there was a need for a charter like England‘s historic Magna Carta to help guarantee fundamental principles online.

Web privacy and freedom have come under scrutiny since former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year leaked a raft of secret documents revealing a vast US government system for monitoring phone and Internet data.

Accusations that NSA was mining personal data of users of Google, Facebook, Skype and other US companies prompted President Barack Obama to announce reforms in January to scale back the NSA programme and ban eavesdropping on the leaders of close friends and allies of the United States.

Berners-Lee said it was time for a communal decision as he warned that growing surveillance and censorship, in countries such as China, threatened the future of democracy.

“Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control — more and more surveillance?” he told BBC Radio on Wednesday.

“Or are we going to set up something like a Magna Carta for the world wide web and say, actually, now it‘s so important, so much part of our lives, that it becomes on a level with human rights?” he said, referring to the 1215 English charter.

While acknowledging the state needed the power to tackle criminals using the Internet, he has called for greater oversight over spy agencies such Britain‘s GCHQ and the NSA, and over any organisations collecting data on private individuals.

He has previously spoken in support of Snowden, saying his actions were “in the public interest”.

Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium, a global community with a mission to lead the web to its full potential,  have launched a year of action for a campaign called the Web We Want, urging people to push for an Internet “bill of rights” for every country.

“Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the web back into our own hands and define the web we want for the next 25 years,” he told the Guardian newspaper.

TORONTO – New smartphone apps that link to hearing aids are helping people with impaired hearing to pump up the volume on their devices or to use them as headphones to stream phone calls, YouTube videos and music.

About 36 million American adults have some hearing loss, according to the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. But only a fifth of people who could benefit from a hearing aid wear one.

“People will always need really good hearing aids, but moving forward, what will differentiate competitors will be connectivity (to smartphones), and it will need apps,” Lars Viksmoen, chief executive of GN ReSound, a maker of hearing aids based in Denmark, said in a telephone interview.

The company’s new, free app, ReSound Smart for the iPhone, turns hearing aids into headphones and allows users to remotely configure settings on their aids — such as volume, treble and bass. It also remembers particular settings for different venues.

“Let’s say you’re in a place you go to all the time, such as a coffee shop. You can make an adjustment and then it will geotag your location, so the next time you walk in, it will remember your settings,” said Laurel Christensen, the company’s chief audiology officer.

In noisy locations, a selection on the app can convert the iPhone into a microphone, streaming conversation into the hearing aids for better clarity. It also helps people find their aids, if they misplace them.

“As you walk around your house, the signal bars get stronger as you get closer to them, and it’s like a game of hot and cold,” Christensen said.

The company produces hearing aids, called ReSound LiNX, that cost around $6,000 for a pair and can be used with or without an iPhone.

“I think we’re going to see an explosion in this area because of baby boomers. They’re into technology and they want to be connected,” she said.

Other apps connect hearing aids to smartphones through an intermediary device, including miniTek Remote App for Android which links to Siemens’ line of hearing aids via a streamer.

Steve Aiken, associate professor of audiology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, said the apps were beneficial as they link hearing aids to other technology already integrated into people’s lives.

Still, there are some risks, he said.

“One is that people could damage their hearing further if they adjust the settings incorrectly. And the other is that they miss out on the benefits if they’re not configured properly because it takes people’s brains a while to acclimatise to sounds they haven’t heard in a long time,” he said.   

HANOVER, Germany – A “toddler” robot that sees red, a digital master chef and a suitcase that never gets lost — new technology at the world’s biggest high-tech fair has the potential to change lives.

The gadgetry ranged from time-saving to life-saving in the buzzing CeBIT halls in the northern German city of Hanover.

Robots never fail to pull in the crowds, and they set the scene at the official opening of the five-day showcase of what’s new and ueber-hot in the IT and high-tech world.

RoboThespian, a life-sized humanoid robot, delivered an articulate welcome address to guests, among them Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Both leaders went on to shake the bionic i-limb hand that has 24 different grips, produced by prosthetics company Touch Bionics, on a joint tour of the stands from CeBIT’s 2014 partner country, Britain.

While pole-dancing robots “Lexy” and “Tess” were on hand for pure entertainment, two others, including one-year-old “Roboy”, which has bones and muscles, pave the way for possible future developments in medicine or even Moon exploration.

“I can be happy,” says Roboy, pulling the appropriate facial expression. “I can be angry,” it says, its face turning red.

Resembling a small child, Roboy can move its limbs thanks to its 48 muscles, which are being further developed by the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence of the University of Zurich and the EU research project Myorobotics.

“It was built in nine months like a human baby,” project manager Rafael Hostettler said.

The goal is to simply better understand how we work and use the lesson to improve industrial production, he said.

“There might be applications in prosthetics,” Hostettler said, saying simulating illnesses could help to bring down the cost of teaching doctors.

‘Back in 10’

Meanwhile “Charlie”, an ape-like robot with an flexible spine and feet that “feel”, can crawl and balance on a tilting surface.

Developed by the German Centre for Artificial Intelligence with Bremen University, it raises hopes that Charlie’s descendants will one day explore craters on the Moon.

Back down to earth and “Kochbot” (German for “cook-bot”) not only selects a recipe from among its library of 30,000 to suit whatever ingredients the cook has at home, but also reads it aloud and monitors the cooking time.

The Kochbot app means that sticky fingerprints on the pages of recipe books are a thing of the past and it will even repeat quantities or detailed prepping notes.

Further hands-free gadgetry at CeBIT gave new hope for frequent travellers.

At a mock-up of an Airbus cabin, there was a close-up look at “Bag2Go”, a suitcase that is equipped with a SIM card, transmission module and display, to ensure it never gets lost.

“You always know where the bag is because you have an app, you can control it by GPS,” said Torsten Chudobba, account executive for Airbus group, which together with T-Systems and luggage company Rimowa, is behind “Bag2Go”.

Good news perhaps for skiers comes in the form of “Airwriting”, developed by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, which will mean not having to take off your gloves to write a short message via a mobile phone.

“Home in 10 minutes” for example can simply be spelled out on the palm of the user’s hand and a sensor attached to the wrist records the hand movements for a computer to write out the message.

And with the soccer World Cup on the horizon, software giant SAP has the ultimate in analysing the beautiful game.

It has teamed up with the German national football squad to produce a touch screen tool with a panoramic view of past matches that digitally analyses team and individual performances, such as distances between players, passing frequency or possession of the ball.

“Here you can see the tactic, whether it works, how the opponent reacts,” explained project manager Christoph Jungkind.

“So this is the basis for a good performance evaluation.”