Tiny new tobacco smoke sensor developed

Scientists have developed a breakthrough device, smaller and lighter than a cellphone, that can immediately detect the presence of secondhand and even third-hand smoke. Dartmouth researchers developed the device using polymer films to collect and measure nicotine in the air. A sensor chip then records the data on hands free access.

"We have developed the first ever tobacco smoke sensor that is sufficiently sensitive to measure secondhand smoke and record its presence in real time," said Professor of Chemistry Joseph BelBruno, whose Dartmouth lab conducted the research. "This is a leap forward in secondhand smoke exposure detection technology and can be considered the first step in reducing the risk of health effects," BelBruno said.

"The intent of the project isn't to make them stop smoking, but it is to make them stop exposing their children to smoke. On the other hand, if they are worried about their children, demonstrating these exposures may be an incentive for them to stop," BelBruno said.

Secondhand smoke comes from the burning end of a cigarette or from smoke exhaled by the smoker. Third-hand smoke, also a potential health hazard, according to the Mayo Clinic, is nicotine residue that remains on clothing, furniture, car seats, and other material after the air has cleared.

While the current device is a patent-pending prototype, BelBruno foresees the eventual availability of an affordable consumer version that will incorporate a computer processor, reusable polymer films, and a rechargeable battery.

It may even incorporate an LED panel to provide instantaneous readouts. In addition to its uses in safeguarding childhood health, there are commercial applications for these unique detectors. Installed in rental cars, hotel rooms, and restaurants, this device could help enforce owner and operator smoking bans through an alert system, much like existing, ceiling-mounted smoke detectors. The technology is described in a new study published in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

“The lads dug very deep and it was impressive to see them get a winning try against the wind after I went off. It’s a vital win, but I still think we need at least two more wins from our last four games to be safe.

“It’s going to be very tight as a lot of the teams at the bottom are playing each other. Before the game I had targeted a bonus-point win, but that just wasn’t possible in those conditions.”

With the Memorial Field pitch deemed unfit for play, Spalding were forced to switch the game to Thorney RFC on Friday morning.

Heavy snow on Saturday then threatened the clash, but both teams were determined to get the game on. However, it was soon clear that whichever team had the wind in their favour would be the ones to score

Spalding, who started the game one point behind their relegation rivals, were the first team to get points on the board. The referee ruled Peterborough’s backs offside and awarded the ‘hosts’ a penalty in front of the posts. Dave Hankinson had no problem and after eight minutes his side went 3-0 ahead.

Two more penalty kicks at goal were then offered up to Town, but the weather ensured Hankinson’s attempts flew wide of the posts. As the half progressed Spalding tried to keep Peterborough on the defensive and were largely successful, as another three points were added to their tally.

A Town kick took them into the Borough five metre area. They won the line out and fed the ball across the field – and with the visitors again ruled to be offside, another Hankinson penalty made it 6-0 at the break. With the elements now in Peterborough’s favour, Spalding were up against it in the second period.

An early Hankinson penalty went wide, but at the other end the away side got points on the board when Ben Chan made it 6-3 with rtls.

Peterborough then went ahead when Adam Peel raced over for a try with 55 minutes gone. With Chan converting, Borough looked odds on to complete the victory.

Spalding captain Sharman and Borough’s Levan Stapleton saw red soon after as a mass brawl broke out.

However, Town refused to accept defeat as they defied the elements to grab one of the biggest tries in their recent history. A costly mistake from Frankie Cook allowed Williamson to collect Hankinson’s kick forward – and he touched down to clinch valuable points in the race for survival.

Dell Latitude 10 Windows 8 tablet

Dell's Latitude 10 is a Windows 8-based tablet that is aimed at business users who need touchscreen functionality within a Windows environment. It's not a very powerful tablet, but it's useful for running non-CPU-intensive apps and it should benefit field workers who need something simple with which to enter data. Its big draw cards are strong build quality, built-in ports, long battery life, and a battery that can also be easily swapped — further increasing its field rtls.

Physically, the Latitude 10 has a 10in, 1366x768-pixel screen that's protected by Gorilla Glass, and the tablet overall is 11mm thick. It feels good to hold thanks to a slightly textured back, and at 690g it also feels very light. Unlike many other Windows 8 tablets we've seen, the buttons on this model are rubberised and they are hard to press. That means you will never accidentally end up switching off the screen or changing volume, but at the same time you might be frustrated with how much force you have to apply to press them. These buttons, the Gorilla Glass, and a magnesium alloy frame all combine to give this tablet more of a rugged feel than others we've tested to date.

One of the best aspects of the Latitude 10 is its connectivity. It has a USB 2.0 port built into it, which means you don't have to use an adapter or drop it in a dock to plug in any external devices. It can even be charged by USB thanks to the micro-USB port that resides next to its docking connector. You can easily charge this tablet with a phone charger or by connecting it to a laptop or desktop PC. You also get a full-sized SD card slot, a combination headphone/microphone port and mini-HDMI. All this stuff makes the Latitude 10 one of the most convenient Atom-powered, Windows 8-based business tablets on the Australian market.

The 10.1in touchscreen of the Latitude 10 was accurate and responsive in our tests. Windows 8 swipe-in gestures worked first go every time and the Windows 8 Start screen was a pleasure to use. As with all Windows 8 tablets, the touch experience isn't great when using the Desktop, especially for browsing the Web. To that end, we preferred to browse the Web through the Start screen's native Internet Explorer 10 browser in full-screen mode. This provided the best browsing experience for us, especially because the keyboard appears automatically as soon as you put the cursor in a text field (on a desktop browser like Firefox, the keyboard has to be invoked manually).

The screen's 1366x768-pixel resolution is higher than that of the competing HP ElitePad 900, and it looks a lot sharper than that tablet. Colours looked vibrant and the screen brightness was adequate. However, with Gorilla Glass on the front, reflections did become annoying, especially when we used it in the office. An ambient light sensor is built in to the tablet, and it worked much better than the sensor on many other Windows 8 tablets that we've seen to date.

As far as its performance is concerned, don't expect to be quick. In our Blender 3D and MP3 encoding tests, the Latitude 10 with its Intel Atom Z2760 CPU and 2GB of RAM recorded 3min 16sec and 5min 44sec, respectively. Its Blender 3D time is one second slower than the time recorded by the HP ElitePad 900, which is HP's Atom-based business tablet, and the Dell was also three seconds slower in the iTunes test. This performance is a little faster than what we've seen from some of the consumer Atom-based tablets such as the ASUS VivoTab 810 and HP Envy X2.

Basically, the Latitude 10's performance is good enough for basic tasks such as Web browsing and document creation (as long as you have a keyboard and dock for the tablet), and it can also be used for the playback of local video files. It isn't designed to be used for multitasking, nor for running CPU-intensive applications, and it's best suited to running one application at a time only.

It can sometimes struggle with Web sites that have a lot of Flash elements. Indeed, sites that required a lot of CPU usage for their Flash elements made the tablet slow down to a crawl, and this was manifested through unresponsive scrolling actions and an unresponsive on-screen keyboard. There is not enough grunt from the CPU to run many Web-based video streams. For example, we had poor experiences with Vimeo HD files, and high-quality NBA.TV streams were also sluggish, but most YouTube clips we tried, even at 1080p, worked well.

Storage is handled by a 64GB solid state drive (SSD), which has a formatted capacity of 52.2GB, but only just over 32GB of space was left for us to use. There is an SD card slot that allows more data to be stored, if needed. The SSD put up read and write rates of 80.34 megabytes per second (MBps) and 33.16MBps in CrystalDiskMark, respectively, which is similar to what we've seen from other Atom-based tablets such as the HP Envy X2 and Samsung indoor positioning system.

Battery life was excellent during our tests, especially when the ambient light sensor was enabled. In our rundown tests, in which we maximise screen brightness, enable Wi-Fi and loop an Xvid-encoded video file, the tablet lasted 6hr 42min, which is very good. When we did the same test with the ambient light sensor enabled, it lasted 7hr 40min.

Because it's aimed at business users, the Latitude 10 comes with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM 1.2) and it also has options for fingerprint and smartcard security, as well as data encryption. Other business features include Windows 8 Pro (rather than the standard version of Windows 8, which can be found on consumer models), an option for a productivity dock that allows for the tablet to sit upright on a desk and gives it more ports, and also an option for a Wacom active stylus for handwriting and more accurate navigation. We also feel that the built-in USB port and SD card slot are great productivity features — on some other tablets such as the ElitePad 900, we've had to go hunting for a USB adapter, which has been inconvenient.

Progressives, But The ASCE Infrastructure Grade

Ideological boosters for trillions of dollars in new federal infrastructure spending often prefer to ignore realities. Streetsblog’s Tanya Snyder, with whom I often completely disagree but who is generally a thoughtful Smart Growth advocate, highlights some of the ASCE report’s limitations. After all, these civil engineers constantly complain about not spending enough, but rarely do they focus on maximizing return on investment.

Now, Snyder and the rest of the anti-car, forced density gang don’t really care about return on investment (at least not in real measures of network efficiency) — but they do care a lot about where the money is going, specifically to ideologically preferred low-value projects like streetcars and bike trails. So, while I think this group of advocates is completely lost in the clouds, at least there’s a logical path you can follow to reach their incorrect conclusions.

However, not all responses to the ASCE report have been thoughtful or even coherent. In fact, some have been fact-free political spin. The most bizarre interpretation I’ve seen comes from Travis Waldron, a blogger for the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Think Progress website, which largely functions as the Obama administration’s cartoonish house organ. Here’s how Waldron opens.

Everyday, technology gets another foothold in our lives. There was a time that a cell phone or even a computer was considered a luxury - now they're seen as necessities. With the yet-to-be-seen iWatch and the forthcoming Google Glass, wearable technology is likely going to become commonplace. Meanwhile, businesses everywhere are trying to cash in on the convenience craze that today's smartphones are allowing for. If there's some way to make our lives easier with tech, chances are they can make money off of indoor positioning system.

Besides the "coolness factor" involved in using your phone to scan your groceries, Walmart pushes another perk to it's iPhone app: keeping you under budget. Using the built-in Smart Shopping List, you can plan your grocery trip ahead of time, getting a confirmation on the aisle number of the item and whether or not your local store even has it. As you scan items, they get crossed off your list.

About the only strange thing in the whole experience is the fact that you can't actually pay for your items using the smartphone app, but I suspect this is more to ensure that at least one set of employee eyes verify that you've paid for your groceries before heading out the door.

A current listing of Scan-and-Go-ready stores doesn't show Oklahoma on the list, but another report says that Walmart will indeed be bringing the service to Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Walmart reports that more than half of the Scan and Go shoppers use the app again.

Additional options include wireless metadata input and variable frame rates. The PX5000G features wireless and wired connectivity with Wi-Fi, USB and Gigabit Ethernet, including wireless control of key camera functions from a smart phone. In addition, an option will support operational integration with live video uplink transmitter devices from partners, LiveU, AVIWEST, Streambox and TVU Networks.

Weighing just over eight pounds, the PX5000G is the first P2 HD camcorder with built-in slots for the company’s new microP2 cards, which have an SD card from factor. The PX5000G has two microP2 slots and two standard P2 card slots, as well as an SD card slot for proxy/metadata recording.

The camcorder will be equipped with chromatic aberration compensation to maximize lens performance; dynamic range stretch function to help compensate for wide variations in lighting; and a highly accurate flash band detection and compensation algorithm that minimizes this effect. The PX5000G is said to deliver seven-mode gamma selection and extensive digital image settings.

House Panel Debate About 'Smart Justice' Bill Turns Into Battle

A Florida House panel has cleared a bill that seeks to keep non-violent offenders from re-offending and going back to prison. But, while most provisions had much approval, the discussion later devolved into a matter between public vs. private operation of the inmate re-entry facilities.

Making sure eligible nonviolent offenders do not go back to prison and are treated at a re-entry facility through the state’s drug treatment programs is the goal of the legislation. Convicts would get treatment while in prison and while on probation outside of prison. The bill’s House sponsor is Republican Representative Dennis Baxley in his capacity as chair of the House Judiciary Committee, the panel that vetted the bill Wednesday.

“This is designed to get those inmates that have not committed any violent offense, but have a substance abuse problem—the treatment they need for successful re-entry back into society,” said hands free access.


One provision in the bill allows for the state to provide identification cards for these inmates free of charge. Baxley says one of the biggest obstacles ex-inmates face is trying to get ID cards, upon their release from prison. So, he wants to provide a way to make it easier for these former offenders.

“An ID card is absolutely needed if they’re going to get a job, if they’re going to get a place to live, and if they’re going to successfully re-enter into society,” said Barney Bishop.

Bishop is with the Florida Smart Justice Alliance, an initiative that grew out of an idea by a number of business leaders to find cost-effective ways to improve public safety.

Later, after he started praising the bill, he brought up contrasts between the Department of Corrections and private providers, like Bridges of America, a group he’s associated with.

“You brought up something that hasn’t been mentioned at all: the word private, which really indicates what’s happening here, I think, and so, am I correct in assuming this is in fact privatization," asked Schwartz.

“Representative, no it’s not! Because these programs already exist. And, any deep analysis of this bill would show you that there is no privatization here. There is no increase in privatization,” replied Bishop.

But, according to the Legislature’s analysis of the bill, it does allow the department to “establish incentives for the reentry program to promote participation by private sector employers within the program.”

And, a representative from Bridges of America, Jim DeBeaugrine, also testified before the committee, recommending that the re-entry services should be provided in a facility dedicated to that purpose.

“And, that is why we have proposed separately that you consider the Governor’s recommendations to reopen the reentry centers, those empty 400-bed facilities. There’s one in Gadsden County, Baker County, and South Miami-Dade. And, we will argue to the Appropriations Committee that one of those facilities should be operated by private providers who have direct experience doing this," DeBeaugrine.

But, Ron Silver with the Teamsters Union, a group that represents thousands of correctional officers, says he has a huge problem with that

“Let’s keep it within the Department of Corrections. Let’s give the Department of Corrections the resources to do the job because they’re the ones that are experts in our security situation. They’re trained in security.  I don’t know what private corporations are trained in as far as security is concerned, but they don’t have the certification of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, like our Department of Corrections people do,” said Silver.

“I am excited to help these inmates be more prepared to re-enter society. I do not see this bill privatizing our prisons, and that’s what I feel like I heard today and that’s why I’m a little frustrated," said Coley.

They’re the troika of mandarins who have shepherded Australia into unchartered economic territory: imposing a price on a common pollutant. Their fingers are all over climate policy, from the carbon price to mass rural tree-planting. They are Martin Parkinson, Blair Comley and Ross Garnaut – and together these card-carrying economists jointly take top spot as the most powerful drivers of Australia’s low-carbon economy.

This Power Index list has profiled business figures, lawyers, regulators and inventors (politicians were excluded). Why give the top spot to bureaucrats?

The low-carbon economy is emerging; its rules are still being written. If you want to know who by, read on. A market in its regulatory phase is a time for bureaucrats to shine, and these three policy wonks have done a fair bit of the thinking, much of the drafting, designing and modelling, and most of the grunt work in getting Labor’s controversial climate policy off the ground.

The Power Index couldn’t pick between them. Climate elder Garnaut wielded heavy influence early, but his star has waned. Parkinson and Comley are ex-heads of the Climate Change Department and remain in senior climate-related posts. Parkinson made climate policy happen but his attention is now divided; Comley has current influence and may be tomorrow’s chief.

Children of illegal immigrants deserve opportunity

My family had just moved from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs. I was in fifth grade. Fort Collins was even whiter then than it is now, so seeing brown faces in my classroom was kind of a new experience. Donna was one of those kids.

She was nice, friendly; she lived a few blocks up the hands free access in a white-and-black tri-level. I used to go to her house and listen to music in her basement. I don’t remember anything about her family, whether she had siblings or what her mother looked like or what her father did for a living. I do, however, remember that at some point, during the course of a routine conversation, she told me her dad didn’t have his green card.

I didn’t know what that meant, so later that day, around the dinner table, I asked my parents about a green card, because Donna’s dad didn’t have one, I said, and what did that mean.

They said it meant Donna’s dad — maybe even Donna, probably even Donna — were in the country illegally.

Donna and I stayed friends for a little while but drifted apart in junior high when boys became more interesting. We barely even knew each other by the time we were seniors in high school. I never saw her again after we graduated.

I thought about her this week, though, when I heard the Colorado House had approved a bill that would allow in-state tuition for students who were brought by their parents into the U.S. illegally. What had Donna’s adulthood been like? Did she go to college? Get a good job? A green card? Citizenship? Did she ever vote?

After I graduated from college, I moved to the San Luis Valley, a beautiful and fascinating part of our state that pulls its economy from the ground with the potato crop. The farms down there, like farms everywhere, depend on migrant crews to get through harvest. The operators said they checked the documentation of everyone who worked on their crews, but often the workers looked over their shoulders when they were approached by a reporter and refused to give their full names.

Illegal immigration is a huge and hugely complex problem for the United States. No one wants to ignore the violation of U.S. laws or encourage people to circumvent those laws on their way across the border. But we can’t continue to deny the fact that so much of our economy is based on immigrant laborers, illegal or otherwise. Undocumented workers are not only in the potato fields near Alamosa and the beet fields in Greeley, but they’re in all facets of the service sector — hotels, restaurants, child care, construction, day labor — and beyond.

By some estimations, there are as many as 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. If we could even force that many workers out of the country, which, of course, we can’t, our economy would crumble. It’s a convenient fantasy to think that long lines of unemployed Americans would be working if only others had followed the rules.

By some estimations, there are as many as 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. If we could even force that many workers out of the country, which, of course, we can’t, our economy would crumble. It’s a convenient fantasy to think that long lines of unemployed Americans would be working if only others had followed the rules.

But the truth is it’s time for the United States to quit pretending and address this issue.

My friend Donna was a smart, talented girl who had more to offer the world than just a welcoming smile to a new kid. It would be a tragedy to think her talents were shut down because of decisions her parents made that she had no control over.

The Colorado Legislature should be congratulated for taking that first nascent step and recognizing that there are so many other kids like Donna who could just use a hand up from their home state.

One of the most pernicious simplifications in mainstream politics is the "credit card" analogy. You know the one: the British economy is like a maxed-out credit card, and we have a responsibility to pay it off.

It's pernicious because the British economy is nothing like a credit card, maxed-out or not. Britain has control of the very currency in which it owes debt; it can print money to pay bills. On top of that, its effect on the economy which is its revenue source is so large that if it scrimps and saves in order to pay down its debt, there's a very real chance its income will drop by even more.

But Peterson says it's a positive development that service providers are getting creative using techniques such as SMS and smartphones, devices users want to carry and that help two-factor scale.

"It's nice to see that some of these hurdles are being cleared," he said. But today there is a lot of "silver bullet frenzy" around the topic.

Jeff Stollman, principal at Secure Identity Computing, says the details around two-factor authentication are not always clearly explained and that leads to poor decisions.

"Deployment is often pushed by regulators, but how it should be done is not defined," he said.

In-band factors, such as answering security questions, are notably weak, given they are prone to man-in-the-middle attacks. And answers to the personal questions they ask often can easily be discovered online or in social media accounts.

"Two factor needs to be out-of-band, either a token or a mobile phone," says Stollman. On a scale of 1 to 10, if authentication is a one, out-of-band two-factor can increase security to a three or a four, he says.

With these methods, users are sent a code to enter to complete log-in or they acquire a token, a bit of data to prove who they are, that is presented to complete authentication.

Of course, mobile devices are a blessing and a curse. They diminish out-of-band methods given that users may be logging into services via their phone, therefore, negating the second factor

"The smartphone has the ability to simultaneously weaken two-factor because you are going to be using Facebook, Google, Twitter from that device and is that really another factor if you are pushing your credential back through it," says Peterson. "Just because that happens on another channel is that really as secure as something like a smart card."

Social networks change the ways we change the world

It turns out this conundrum of being compassionate, philanthropic and ready to get involved — but less-than-wealthy — is a common one. But some individuals haven’t let this be a barrier to their charitable impulses. When a yogi in southern California desperately wanted to help after the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, she decided to donate her skills to help raise money, offering yoga lessons to benefit victims.

Her ingenuity was the inspiration for Causora.com, a one-year-old startup created with the idea that whatever your qualifications or skills are, you can turn them into charity. “[My friend] raised money by doing what she loved to do, and got new customers for her own business,” says Causora founder Kai Buehler about the aforementioned yogi, who wishes to remain anonymous. “We started looking around at the marketplace for it, and couldn’t find anything.”

Buehler only launched Causora during the 2012 holiday season, but she already has recruited celebrities to help raise hands free access for the new platform. In addition to all the yoga, massage, search engine optimization help services and technical support offered on behalf of various causes on the site, Marc Anthony is offering tickets and backstage passes to his benefit concert for Maestro Cares, a non-profit Anthony founded to create safer and healthier environments for Latin American children.

Causora joins an ever-growing space in new media focused on activism, community involvement and philanthropy facilitated by Web sites and social networks. Before platforms like Causora, its unrelated cousins including Fundly, Causes.com, Crowdrise, StartSomeGood and Razoo (among many others) cropped up to address a similar question: what is the best way, or an alternative way, for people to give back, when donating money is the status quo?

Crowdrise, out of Detroit, offers incentive-based giving with a gameification twist: whomever raises the most for their particular cause receives a prize (whatever that might be). It’s their own way of opening up the world of philanthropy for more people. “It’s not just about top donor,” says co-founder Robert Wolfe. “It’s about who tries the hardest. You don’t have to have a million Twitter followers or millions of dollars.”

Unlike a lot of startups, Crowdrise wasn’t trying to fill a gap in the market. Its mission when it emerged two-and-a-half years ago was to make the philanthropic space more fun. This is one key to getting people more involved more often, Wolfe believes.

“If you get an email from one person raising money for cancer research, and another [similar] email from a someone saying they will dye their hair blue when they reach their goal,” he says, “you’re definitely donating to the one who said they’d dye their hair blue.”

Social networks focused on philanthropy or activism also offer a way for people to demonstrate that they live a charitable life. For example, each Crowdrise member gets a profile where he or she can catalog and comment on their various activities.

“It’s an interesting combination,” Mahan says. “On the one hand it’s a basic fact of human nature that people want to be involved and make a difference, but the reason for the explosion now is that technology is rapidly growing and it’s easier and easier to put out an app, a Web site, a platform. Everyone is a publisher and everyone has a voice.”

Fundamentally changing the way people participate in the world around them will take more than just changing the tools they use to take action. Making a difference from the bottom-up is a daunting task, Mahan admits. For now, though, he views the rise of people taking to the Internet to get involved as a great start.

“New tech allows people to get involved who otherwise probably would not, that’s the hopeful side of this,” he says. “In a world dominated by top-down communication and in an ever-growing and complicated world, we feel small and powerless. Newer technology has given a glimmer of hope: I can participate, I can learn more, things are more transparent, and it’s better than getting home to a mailbox full of donation solicitations.”

Are you tired of feeding meters and getting parking tickets? Starting Wednesday and for the next three months, you can pay the parking meter just by using your cell phone.

Deputy Director of Planning & Community Development, Wendy Thomas, says, “time and time again, and perfectly understandably, people complain about getting parking tickets and most people get parking tickets are for meter time violations”. Now Great Falls is jumping aboard the technology train and trying a new way to pay for meter parking. Thomas explains, “you can pull into a parking space, pull up an app on your smart phone and actually pay for your parking”.

This is a three month trial kicking off Wednesday. All the meters will have stickers with scanable barcodes and an assigned zone and space number. Your cell can even remind you when your time is up in hopes to cut down on parking tickets. Thomas explains, “when you pay you will have a countdown on your phone and you will actually be messaged when you have 15 minutes left on your meter”.

The city has looked at other ways to make downtown parking user friendly, such as swiping a credit card for meter parking, which proved way too expensive. Thomas says, “it was an incredible investment in infrastructure that meant new meter heads and new machines that would be paid by block”.