Many winter programs are highlighted in this newsletter. Calling ahead and registering for a program helps us in two ways. Primarily, it helps us provide program materials for every one in attendance and secondly, we have a list to call in case winter weather requires us to make a change in the schedule. Please call the office at 333-7672 if you are ever in doubt about the weather and scheduled programs.

Best wishes to you as we begin 2005. May the year be filled with educational opportunities for you to enjoy and learn.

- Marilyn Brengle

The cold winds and snow of Midwest winters make it obvious to many rural homeowners that windbreaks are a good investment, especially when heating bills are high. Installing windbreaks can help ease the wind's impact and leave fewer snowdrifts to shovel. More importantly, with the rising costs of heating, windbreaks can also help reduce energy demand.

Studies have shown that owners of older, poorly insulated homes, such as many farmhouses, could save as much as 30 percent in heating costs with a mature windbreak. Concerns about the costs of installation should be weighed against the benefits of operation efficiency around the buildings, reduction in energy demand, and convenience of less snow handling.

Use the winter months to plan a windbreak design. That way, you'll be ready for tree planting in the spring. Although it may be a cold job, monitoring the wind and snow drifts around the property on some windy winter days can help in the planning process.

The first step is determining the proper design and location. Since prevailing winter winds are normally from the northwest, the windbreak should usually be located on the north and west sides of the area to be protected. Usually the most effective design is an L-shaped planting that makes two "legs."

The most protection from the windbreak will be in a zone about as wide as 8 to 10 times the height of the tallest trees. In general, windbreaks should be located 50 to 100 feet from the house and buildings that you want to protect, with 100 feet being preferred. The most snow accumulation will occur within the first 50 feet of the innermost row of trees. Beyond 15 to 20 times the height of the windbreak, the wind velocity picks back up as though no windbreak was present. For maximum effectiveness, the legs of the windbreak should extend at least 50 feet beyond the area to be protected in both directions.

Ideally, three rows of evergreen trees with the trees in the middle row alternately spaced between the trees in the outside rows are recommended. The rows should be at least 16 feet apart and the trees should be spaced about 16 feet apart on center within each row. Although numerous varieties of trees can be used, Douglas fir and Norway spruce have proven to be quite successful for windbreaks, with little insect or disease problems. These species also have a fairly rapid rate of growth under good conditions.

When selecting trees for your windbreak, consider locally grown plants. Nursery stock grown within the local climate range often adapts easier and grows well. When planting ball and burlap stock, remove any wire or string from around the trunk. In addition to the trees, you can include plants that provide some color or other aesthetics to the windbreak, as well as plants that produce berries for birds to eat.

For more information on planting windbreaks, visit the Illinois Virtual Forest. http://ilvirtualforest.nres.uiuc.edu/

Driving with one hand on the wheel and another on a cell phone has led to legal restrictions and proposals to require drivers to use hands-free phones.

Researchers at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign have tested the hands-free approach and found that drivers, young and old, struggled to see dangerous scenarios appearing in front of them.

The experiments, reported in the Fall 2004 issue of the journal Human Factors, were conducted in a virtual reality suite at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Eye-tracking techniques allowed researchers to see the effects of distractions.

"With younger adults, everything got worse," said Arthur F. Kramer, a professor of psychology. "What we found was that both young adults and older adults tended to show deficits in performance. They made more errors in detecting important changes and they took longer to react to the changes." The impaired reactions, he said, were "in terms of seconds, not just milliseconds, which means many yards in terms of stopping distances."

For the experiment, 14 young licensed drivers (mean age 21.4) with at least one year behind the wheel and 14 older, experienced drivers (mean age 68.4) actively engaged in a casual hands-free phone conversation.

As they talked, they faced a flickering 6-foot-by-3.5-foot screen on which digitally manipulated images of Chicago traffic and architecture continually changed. Each flicker, which simulated eye movements, resulted in a change of scenery that might or might not be important to a driver – a child running into a driver's path, a simple change in a theater sign or bright or subtle color changes.

The older adults were able to detect changes related to salience, such as colors becoming brighter. However, their ability to detect changes that should be important to a driver dipped significantly.

"For the older adults, it was quite scary in that contextual restraints no longer drove their eye-scanning strategies," Kramer said. "When they were in a conversation on a cell phone, they were no longer any faster or any more accurate in their ability to detect meaningful changes, such as a little girl running between cars in traffic, than they were able to detect changes that were not meaningful to driving safely."

Younger subjects did detect relevant changes more readily and with fewer errors than older adults, but their reaction times were slowed. "When you are driving, you often don't have extra seconds to react," Kramer said.

In another experiment, the researchers found no significant negative impairments among participants who simply listened on hands-free phones as others carried on a conversation.

Kramer theorized that the requirement to comprehend and generate speech during a conversation results in interference with the scanning of driving scenes. Comprehension, in the absence of the need to generate coherent responses, requires fewer mental resources and, therefore, does not interfere with change detection in driving scenes.

Looking at your spending habits can help you "find" money to put toward your goals. We often develop spending habits that cost us more than we think they do! Habits like stopping on the way to work to buy a cup of coffee, or picking up a magazine at the grocery store, cost us more than we think they do.

Look how it adds up!

1 soft drink per day at $0.75 each = $273.75 per year

1 gourmet coffee per day at $1.20 each = $469.56 per year

1 magazine per week at $2.95 each = $153.40 per year

Once you know where your money is going, you can start to spend it differently. Ask yourself, "Can I spend less for coffee, or can I read my magazine at the library? Can I prepare food at home more often instead of stopping to pick up fast food?" When you find the areas of spending to change, you'll find money to help you reach your goals. You can be in control of your spending, and you'll be telling your money where to go instead of asking where it went!

Health educators and dietitians ought to be more precise the next time they advise Americans that "vegetables and fruit are good for you," according to a study by a nutritional expert at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

That's because a person who likes vegetables tends to have different food tastes and social habits from a person who prefers fruits. Lumping the two groups together may undercut the effectiveness of "better-health" educational campaigns that seek to reduce America's over-consumption of processed snacks, desserts and fatty foods.

The study by Brian Wansink, a professor of nutritional science and of marketing at UI, was published in the November issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

It found that adults who preferred vegetables to fruits ate more spicy foods, drank wine more frequently with dinner, cooked more elaborate meals and liked to try new recipes.

Fruit lovers not only had a greater hankering for sweets, but were less adventurous in the kitchen, entertained fewer guests and ate desserts more often after dinner.

"A vegetable-lover's taste for savory or bitter taste sensations is consistent with an attraction to spicy foods and tannic red wine, and a fruit-lover's sweet tooth is consistent with an attraction to desserts," Wansink wrote.

By knowing the different cooking habits and food preferences of these two groups, a dietitian or health professional can better tailor healthier eating recommendations. "You can show them, for example, how fruits are healthy replacements for desserts or candy, and how fruits can offer an easy way to complement a meal without requiring much time or talent," Wansink said in an interview.

Conversely, a person with a predilection for spicy foods and entertaining could be encouraged to try different spices with vegetables rather than meats and impress dinner guests with the right choice of wine.

"For health professionals and educators, the importance of targeting different messages to differently predisposed target markets can mean the difference between a cost-effective program and a wasted effort," Wansink concluded.

The study was based on a random selection of 2,000 adults who were mailed a survey. The 770 people (38 percent) who completed the survey had an average of 1.6 children living at home, were 37 years old and had a median household income of $38,000. Seventy percent of the respondents were Anglo-American, and 61 percent were women.

Of these, 508 could be categorized as either prone to vegetables or fruit by using a cross-classification technique based on their preference ratings for fruits and vegetables and by their self-perceptions.

The study was co-written by Kyoungmi Lee, a graduate student at UI. Wansink is the director of the Food & Brand Lab at Illinois. The paper is titled, "Cooking Habits Provide a Key to 'Five-a-Day' Success," five-a-day referring to a better-health campaign sponsored by the National Cancer Institute.