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(ScienceDaily, April 5, 2010) — A new technique for revealing images of hidden objects may one day allow pilots to peer through fog and doctors to see more precisely into the human body without surgery.  Developed by Princeton engineers, the method relies on the surprising ability to clarify an image using rays of light that would typically make the image unrecognizable, such as those scattered by clouds, human tissue or murky water.  In their experiments, the researchers restored an obscured image into a clear pattern of numbers and lines. The process was akin to improving poor TV reception using the distorted, or “noisy,” part of the broadcast signal.  “Normally, noise is considered a bad thing,” said Jason Fleischer, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton. “But sometimes noise and signal can interact, and the energy from the noise can be used to amplify the signal. For weak signals, such as distant or dark images, actually adding noise can improve their quality.” Click here to read more…

(EPA, April 5, 2010) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has awarded $2.38 million to 34 small businesses to develop innovative, sustainable technologies to protect human health and the environment. These efforts will help improve air quality, protect our water, work to decrease the effects of climate change, and support green jobs.   “Innovation is the lifeline of progress — and scientific and technological innovation are essential to the progress we seek to make in protecting people and the planet,” said Dr. Paul T. Anastas, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “These small businesses are key to helping us reach that goal.”  Today’s awards to businesses in 16 states focus on ten key environmental research areas: increasing the efficiency of green building materials and systems; manufacturing innovation; prevention, monitoring, and control using nanotechnology; reducing greenhouse gases; new treatment technologies for drinking water; improving water infrastructure; reducing emissions from small air pollution sources and vehicles and biofuels production facilities; new approaches for cleaning up and monitoring hazardous waste sites; and new tools for homeland security systems.  Click here to read more…

(EPA, April 1, 2010) Responding to one of the first major directives of the Obama Administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today jointly established historic new federal rules that set the first-ever national greenhouse gas emissions standards and will significantly increase the fuel economy of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules could potentially save the average buyer of a 2016 model year car $3,000 over the life of the vehicle and, nationally, will conserve about 1.8 billion barrels of oil and reduce nearly a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the lives of the vehicles covered.  This action is one important step in fulfilling the Obama Administration’s commitment to moving towards a clean energy, climate friendly economy.  “These historic new standards set ambitious, but achievable, fuel economy requirements for the automotive industry that will also encourage new and emerging technologies,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “We will be helping American motorists save money at the pump, while putting less pollution in the air.” Click here to read more…

NSCOR and VNSCOR for Space Radiation Solid Cancer Risks – Closing Date: May 28, 2010 – This National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Johnson Space Center will release a NASA Research Announcement (NRA) for NASA Specialized Centers of Research (NSCOR) in support of the Space Radiation Program Element within the Human Research Program. An NSCOR consists of a team of investigators who have complementary skills and who work together to solve a closely focused set of research questions and which includes strong undergraduate, graduate or post-graduate training components. In addition to soliciting for NSCORs, NASA is seeking to form a virtual NSCOR (denoted as VNSCOR) where NASA aligns a set of individual awards into an NSCOR-like team project.  The research will be conducted using ground-based irradiation facilities developed for NASA at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, NY.  RFP will be available April 21, 2010 at www.http://nspires.nasaprs.com/.  Response Date: May 28, 2010.

Posted Date: April 5, 2010

Solicitation Number: NNJ10ZSA002N

—————————————————————————————

Science Technology and Research Support Services II – The NASA, Langley Research Center (LaRC) is preparing to issue a Draft RFP for a single award Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ), Cost Plus Award Fee (CPAF) contract. The general scope of the support services is for the Contractor to furnish all personnel, facilities, equipment, supplies, and materials, not provided by the Government, necessary to support the NASA Langley Research Center science programs and related engineering activities.  Work requirements encompass the broad scope of the missions and responsibilities of the Langley Research Center’s science, technology, research and related applications programs. Award Ceiling: $425M.  Eligibility: Small Business (under 1000 employees).  The anticipated release date of the draft RFP is on or before April 30, 2010 with the Final RFP issued on or before June 10, 2010 with proposals due on or before July 12,2010.

Posted Date: April 5, 2010

Solicitation Number: NNL10310923J

Published April 5, 2010
By Hillary Whittier, KNDU TV

Some supporters are calling it the most significant change to college lending in a generation., after congress approved some major changes to the student loan program.

Starting in July the new law will force commercial banks out of the federal student loan market by ending federal subsidies to banks and private lenders.

Other changes expected down the road include expanding Pell Grants to keep up with inflation. In 2014, there will be limits on annual payments on a student loan to 10 percent of the borrowers yearly income.

Also with the education centerpiece comes more help to lower-income graduates to get out from student debt. Overall the Congressional Budget Office says the new lending approach will save taxpayers about 61-billion dollars over 10 years.

Published April 4, 2010
Letter to the Editor – Tri-City Herald

The purpose of this letter is to recommend to your readers a movie that will soon be shown at Columbia Basin College, titled Inside Islam. The movie was shown a month or so ago in Kennewick to a standing room only audience. And due to the amount of interest in the movie, it will be shown again.

Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think will be presented at at 7 p.m. April 27 at the Gjerde Center at CBC. The movie is about an hour long and will be followed by a discussion by a panel of local Muslims who will discuss their thoughts on the movie and then answer questions from the audience.

If you follow the news and wonder about all of the things you read, hear and see on TV about Islam, you should attend this important event. I attended the Kennewick showing and it was very informative, so much so that I plan to attend the second showing as well.

For questions, call Daniel Vickoren at 547-0511, ext. 2227.

TOM ROACH, Pasco

Additional news stories can be accessed online at the Tri-City Herald.

Published April 1, 2010
By the Tri-City Herald staff

Learn how to start a business or grow an existing one at a series of free small-business seminars offered from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Thursdays in Room X124 at the Columbia Basin College Access Center, 1620 N. 20th Ave., Pasco.

All six seminars will be taught in Spanish and English.

The dates and classes are: April 15, Customer & Competitor Analysis; April 22, Screening Your Business Ideas; April 29, Starting a New Business, legal issues; May 6, Basic Accounting Principles; May 13, Basic Marketing Principles; May 20, How to Get Started, review and business financing overview.

The seminars are presented by Numerica Credit Union and the Tri-Cities Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Additional news stories can be accessed online at the Tri-City Herald.

We’ll take it… or we’ll drink it

Sulfuric Acid sludge is a problem to many…but not to Stauffer!

If you can pour it or pump it or get it in a tank car…

send it to Stauffer. We’ll “unsludge” it

and send it back to you … 98% pure H2S04.

If you have no sludge and just need Sulfuric Acid, we have that, too. Available in tank trucks or tank cars of 6 to 100 tons capacity and barges of 800 to 1500 tons… wherever and whenever you want it in unlimited supply of all commercial grades.

STAUFFER CHEMICAL COMPANY 380 Madison Avenue, New York 17, N. Y.

Telephone: OXford 7-0600

New Toothbrush Has Rubber Disks
SANITARY rubber disks are now used in a new toothbrush which is very easy to keep clean. The disks are thin enough to enter easily between the teeth.

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Sets Trans-Atlantic Record

Europa’s Maiden Crossing WHEN the giant North German Lloyd liner S.S. Europa steamed past Ambrose Light in New York Harbor a new record for speedy trans-Atlantic crossings was established. The Europa cut 18 minutes from the mark of 4 days, 17 hours and 24 minutes set by her sister ship, the Bremen, last October.

The Europa, like the Bremen, has the bulbous bow, a device which creates “dead water” at the propellers, giving to them a push which they could not get if the water were rushing by. Her exterior appearance, except for minor details, is identical with that of her sister ship. Her engines are high pressure steam turbines, the latest development in construction of high-speed vessels.

The overall length is 936 feet and breadth 101 feet. She will carry 2,200 passengers, as well as a crew of 975 men.

An unusual feature is her name in electric lights on starboard and port sides amidships. The letters are 6 feet high, illuminated by 1,200 bulbs which flash alternately. Flags also can be illuminated.

There are seven compartments for boiler and engine plants. The auxiliary machinery as well as generators and dynamos are located aft the main engine room. The main plant consists of two sets of turbines forward and two aft, each set, consisting of high, intermediate and low pressure turbines, being connected with one of the screws through single reduction gears which reduce the turbine speed of 2,100 r.p.m, to 210 r.p.m, of the propellers. The turbines are completely insulated against loss of teeth.

Steam is generated in oil fired water-tube boilers and electric power is generated by four large Diesel-driven dynamos supplying current to some 800 motors of various kinds. For emergency the plants are supplemented by 2 Diesel-driven dynamos.

Home Scientists Banish Wash Day Blues

THIS WASHBOARD represents a whole laundry in itself. It is designed for small apartments, camping trailers and other locations where economy of space is desirable. The washboard contains soap rack, wringer and a self-supporting back rest. It can be used in a tub or in a small basin.

THIS TIME SWITCH modernizes old washing machines by making them automatic. Listed on the dial is the water temperature and washing time necessary for fabrics.

CAN-OPENER FOR LIQUIDS such as juices and oils acts as a spigot. When the tubes are pushed into a can, rubber washers seal the holes. Then, as air enters one tube the liquid is poured out the other. Sealing washers make tubes air tight.

AIR CONDITIONED REFRIGERATOR keeps bread and cakes fresh for weeks at a temperature of 40 to 50 degrees. No frost forms in the compartment, and food such as bananas, cauliflower, and celery can be left uncovered.

HERE IS A BATTERY CHARGING WASHING MACHINE. In rural homes where electricity is not available, this new washing machine charges the radio battery while doing the weekly laundry. The generator is mounted on the motor platform and uses a belt drive. It does not affect the motor power.

Gov’t Mule — Beautifully Broken (When Doves Cry).

What’s on your mind?

Renault is making getting in and out of its New Clio easier for Europeans with the introduction of Europe’s first original equipment swivel seat. Comprising a swivel base located beneath the original front passenger seat the optional swivel seat turns through 75 degrees at the pull of a lever situated underneath it. The seat locks automatically into place to ensure the passenger isn’t doing the twist as the vehicle is being driven…

Tags: Europe,
Renault,
Seat

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Wayward drivers could soon be getting a nudge in the right direction thanks to a computer program created by researchers from North Carolina State University. The program allows a computer to understand what a camera is looking at and makes decisions based on what it sees. If a car strays from its lane the program will detect the lane change and set the car back on course without human control…

Tags: Autonomous,
Driver,
Safety

Related Articles:

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• The Baby Emotion Detector: can a computer program analyze a baby’s cry?

Let’s start by saying Gizmag doesn’t condone any form of smoking – they’re all bad for you. But we recognize that millions of people do, and it’s not just the extra cost on the community for smoking-related illnesses that irks most non-smokers, it’s also the trillions of cigarette butts that end up littering our sidewalks, roadways, parks, etc., many of which end up in our waterways. Greenbutts wants to tackle the problem with a 100 percent biodegradable cigarette filter… with extra benefits. The manufacturers say when a green butt is placed under a thin layer of soil it sprouts into green grass shoots or even blooming flowers…

Tags: Environmental,
Smoking

Related Articles:

• Snowball Launcher prevents pitcher’s elbow
• Harm-reduction gadget helps smokers quit
• SuperSmoker electronic cigarette launched in UK
• NEC develops white LED-based LCD module covering 100% of the Adobe RGB Color Range
• VK2000 pushes the boundaries of mobile phone size
• Sony Car Cradle offers more than charging on the move

Twitter is very useful for figuring out “what is happening right now.” For example, Twitter has been used to figure out where an earthquake is happening. But instead of what’s happening now, can it also be useful for telling what will happen in the future? Two researchers at HP Labs, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman, postulate that Twitter can actually be used to predict future box office results for movies. By building a computer model around the tweets for 24 movies, they claimed were able to predict the opening weekend box office results with 97.3% accuracy. An accuracy of around 97% seems unnaturally high, so I dug a little further into the actual report and found that both of these numbers were a result of combining each approach with the number of theaters associated with each release. Without taking into account the number of theaters in the release, tweets alone were able to predict at 93%. According to Asur, the correlation between theater counts alone and box office results is a paltry 39%. Considering that theater counts are probably a good indication of how well a studio thinks a film is going to perform, it seems that Hollywood should take notice of these forecasts.

The supposed gold-standard of box office predictions is Hollywood Stock Exchange, a prediction market. The researchers found that HSX had a 96.5% accuracy (when also combined with number of theaters). It’s impressive that HSX gets a fair amount of accuracy despite it using “fake” currency. HSX is currently awaiting a ruling from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission that will allow it to trade using real money. When that happens, the accuracy of its prediction market should increase. At that point it may be interesting to see how much more closely the two prediction systems compare, since the apparent edge that the Twitter algorithm has right now seems too small to be significant.

In any case, with Twitter, since it’s also a communications medium, tweets about a movie not only indicate interest, but also can ultimately influence a movie’s sales at the box office. However, this effect seems distinctly different than the traditional notion of “observer effect,” since the act of measuring the interest in a movie can actually occur without directly participating in the Twitter conversation. That said, if it becomes common practice to predict box office success by analyzing Twitter, the incentive to exploit this by spamming Twitter with tweets about an upcoming movie increases greatly. After all, the many predictions that foretold that Avatar would break box office records certainly played a self-fulfilling part in its breaking of those box office records. Furthermore, Tweets were taken for the 7 days before the weekend — which means there would not be enough time to make any adjustment to any marketing (in the event of a dire prediction), and certainly not to production budgets, which have already been spent.

So, while, in their report, Asur and Huberman conclude:

While in this study we focused on the problem of predicting box office revenues of movies for the sake of having a clear metric of comparison with other methods, this method can be extended to a large panoply of topics, ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election outcomes. At a deeper level, this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.

The simple fact is that there is still quite a chasm to cross before Twitter can be used practically for any type of prediction or forecasting activity.

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When a reader sent me his video of Discovery shooting to the stars in the middle of the night—for mission STS-131—I thought it was a comet blazing through the sky. Or an alien invasion. Whatever. It’s absolutely spectacular. More »

China has been struggling to deal with severe drought in its southwest, which has now gone on for six months. Despite efforts to create artificial rain and divert water resources, the situation remains challenging.

Worse yet, it’s not just China that is feeling the effects.

Southeast Asia is increasingly suffering, with over 10% of Thailand’s population in Thai drought-afflicted areas.

IPS:

The sight of dry, cracked earth and sandy stretches of riverbed is now common in north-east Thailand and Laos down to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. China’s south-west Yunnan province, where its Mekong dams are located, is itself hurting from the drought.

“It is as if the river has gone mad,” said Niwat Roykaew of the Chiang Khong Conservation Group in northern Thailand.

Thus many both inside and outside China are beginning to re-question the effects of Chinese dam building on the flow of the Mekong River.

Peter Gleick, of the Pacific Institute, believes that we’ve only seen just the beginning of what will be a water crisis in the region.

SFGate:

Now, tensions are rising rapidly. Part of the problem is that China is building massive dams — as many as fifteen are planned — on its portion of the river for hydropower, water storage, and other uses, and they have refused to consult with the downstream nations about their projects. One of these Chinese dams, Xiowan, will be the world’s tallest ever, and its storage capacity will be larger than all other dams in Southeast Asia combined. These dams, along with projects in other countries, will massively alter the flows of the Mekong and threaten to destroy the ecosystems and the livelihoods for millions that depend on the river’s fisheries, flood season for irrigation, and other natural benefits.

Another part of the current problem is natural drought, perhaps worsened by climate change. In parts of the basin, the current drought is the worst of the century, but downstream nations are accusing upstream nations of contributing to the problem by holding back flows in some of the newly built dams. And there is growing concern that long-term climate changes will worsen the challenges the region faces.

Some are even wondering whether Southeast Asia is already being deprived of water due to Beijing stocking up, upstream, in order to battle China’s drought in the southwest.

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