Horizontal Perspective 横顾天下

In a recent criminal case, the defendant successfully applied to used activities in social networking sites to provide an alibi.

The message on Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, posted at 11:49 a.m. on Oct. 17, asked where his pancakes were. The words were typed from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem. At the time, the sentence, written in street slang, was just another navel-gazing Facebook status update — meaningless to anyone besides Mr. Bradford. But when Rodney , 19, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery in Brooklyn, the words took on greater importance. They became his alibi.

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A start-up called Saltworks Technologies by 2 Canadian engineers has pioneered a process that uses saline gradients to do the heavy lifting of desalination, thus uses less energy than the currently available desalination technologies.

Existing desalination plants that uses reverse-osmosis technology (using high-pressure pumps to force fresh water from sea water through a membrane that is impermeable to salt) require 3.7 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy or more to produce 1,000 litres of drinking water.  The Canadian engineers believe they can produce that much fresh water with less than 1 kWh of electricity, and no other paid-for source of power is needed. Their process is fuelled by concentration gradients of salinity between different vessels of brine. These different salinities are brought about by evaporation.

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Back in January 2007, Jennifer Strange, a 28 years old mother-of-three drank so much water in a contest run by a radio station that she died. In the competition – “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” – contestants were given 225-ml bottles to drink every 15 minutes without going to the toilet. Ms Strange is believed to have drunk nearly two gallons (7.5 litres) in the hope of winning the games console for her children.

She died a few hours after the end of the contest due to acute water intoxication, which occurs when the normal balance of electrolytes in the body is drastically altered by a rapid intake of water. This can eventually cause the brain to swell, stopping it regulating vital functions such as breathing, and causing death.

While she did not win the Nintendo Wii, her surviving family was awarded US$ 16 million in compensation by a California court, which found Sacramento radio station KDND-FM and its owner liable for her death. The organisers did not face criminal charges, but 10 employees of the radio station were subsequently sacked.

Do women want to discuss their skin problems with online strangers? Philips, the Dutch lighting, health care and electronics company, is betting they do. Social networking about skin care is a key element in the company’s new consumer product, Crystalize.

Female consumers are often stymied when it comes to buying skin care products, at times encountering company representatives in department stores with vested interests in pushing certain goods. To make the buying decision easier and more accurate, the Crystalize service uses a specially modified video camera normally used for medical purposes to take close-up (really close-up) pictures of various parts of the face. Then, software analyzes the skin for four conditions: skin type, redness, sun damage, and smoothness. Depending on where you fall on the scale for each, a series of products in a variety of price ranges is recommended.

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You’ve heard of silverware and plasticware, but what about greenware or bioware? This is the use of biological material in manufactures (like our ancestors had been doing for centuries) with a new twist. The operative word is biodegradable rather than non-synthetic. Lately green algae, the photosynthetic organism used as a biofuel, has been put to use as sustainable bioplastic.

Sustainable plastic manufacturer Cereplast announced that it can turn algae into a sustainable bioplastic resin, to be put to use in water bottles, plasticware and other applications. [Pictured: Samsung’s E200Eco mobile phone, which is partially made of  corn-based bioplastic]. Cereplast’s algae-based bioplastic is still under development, but the company expects to make commercial algae bioplastic resin available by the end of next year.

The company, which already manufactures plastic from corn, potatoes, tapioca and wheat, says algae-based plastic could replace up to 50 percent of petroleum content found in traditional plastic resin. That’s a big deal, since more than 15 billion pounds of plastic film are manufactured each year in the US alone, a $12 billion industry.

But algae must still be sourced. Cereplast plans to get it from companies that use algae to minimize carbon dioxide emissions from polluting smokestacks. In this case, the algae serves as a biopolymer on the opposite end of the manufacturing pipeline — instead of reducing pollution from the creation of traditional plastic, it’s helping create less-polluting plastic from the get-go.

“Based on our own efforts, as well as recent commitments by major players in the algae field, we believe that algae has the potential to become one of the most important “green” feedstocks for biofuels, as well as bioplastics. However, for our algae-based resins to be successful, we require the production of substantial quantities of algae feedstock.

Vitamin D, of milk fame, is known for helping with calcium absorption and for building strong bones, which is why it’s routinely added to milk. But there is more and more evidence that vitamin D is a critical player in numerous other aspects of metabolism. A new study suggests many Americans aren’t getting anywhere nearly enough of the vitamin, and it may be affecting their heart health.

In the study, researchers looked at tens of thousands of healthy adults 50 and older whose vitamin D levels had been measured during routine checkups. A majority, they found, were deficient in the vitamin. About two-thirds had less vitamin D in their bloodstreams than the authors considered healthy, and many were extremely deficient. (more…)

Ever break your leg and had to use crutches to get around? Aside from the difficulty of moving around, it’s awfully hard on the underarms.

Forward Mobility has the solution to do away with crutches completely. The Edmonds, Washington-based company, which originally began as a bicycle manufacturing outfit in the 1990s, has designed and manufactured a line of medical mobility products that includes a collapsible wheelchair and a seated scooter for lower-body injuries. But it’s the Freedom Leg, released this October, that’s got people truly excited.

Functioning like a hands-free brace, the 2.5-lb. Freedom Leg is an off-loading prosthetic that allows for full mobility without assistance, all while strengthening the upper muscles of the injured leg.

So how’s it work? It’s supposed to transfer the body’s weight away from the injured part of a person’s leg and toward the upper, uninjured part. [See Demonstration Video1 and Video2]. It’s not quite a knee brace, but it does the trick. [Note: The prosthetic is not suitable for injuries or fracture of the upper leg.] It’s expected to retail for about US$350.

The intentions of the product match the company’s philosophy. The company uses an organization in Vietnam called Kids First Enterprise to manufacture its devices. Twenty percent of that organization’s workforce has disabilities, and all of its profits go to projects that support the disabled and disadvantaged.

Source :
• Edmonds’ Forward Mobility, a medical device maker, vies for development grant
• Edmonds-based Forward Mobility wins $50,000 grant

This week the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists published its new guidelines for cervical cancer screening. The advice is that women should delay their first Pap test until age 21, and be screened less often than recommended previously.  The advice is meant to decrease unnecessary testing and potentially harmful treatment, particularly in teenagers and young women. The previous guidelines had recommended yearly testing for young women, starting within three years of their first sexual intercourse, but no later than age 21. (more…)

Just seven years ago, the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended that women have mammograms every one to two years starting at age 40.  In a dramatic reversal last week the group issued a new set of guidelines in the Annals of Internal Medicine, recommending that women should start regular breast cancer screening at age 50, not 40. It also recommend that women age 50 to 74 should have mammograms less frequently — every two years, rather than every year; and that doctors should stop teaching women to examine their breasts on a regular basis.

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You might have noticed that there were lapses in my postings this month. I have been having problems with my PC (specifically the Windows Vista that came with the eye movement-controlled PC that my wife Gi got for me).

To be honest the PC had been trouble free for a long while. But as more patches (Microsoft calls them fixes) were released and applied, the system gets slower and less stable. It began to get real flaky in the past 5 months. Random hand-ups, missing devices, failure during boot-up, software configuration errors were increasingly frequent. Then came the Service Pack 2 in mid October. My experience with the earlier  Service Pack 1 was less than positive, so I wasn’t looking forward to it. After putting it off for a week, I finally went ahead with it on the 22nd. After some 25 minutes, Windows Update reported that “Update successfully applied” and urged a system reboot. So I rebooted. After 50 minutes and 6 spontaneous reboots, the system ended in ‘safe mode’ with a 640×480 screen  resolution and most devices turned incognito. As none of devices worked, I was reduced to watching Gi sieving through numerous CDs to find the required software drivers (as the Ethernet adapter doesn’t work. we can’, search online). We gave up after some 2~3 hours and attempted a System Restore. Thank heaven THAT worked and I was back on square one after 6 hours. Needless to say we were not in the slightest bit impressed.

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