Article of the Week about
 (CC) Photo: Lauren Brown Mexico City smog in 2006 Smog is the hazy, unhealthy polluted air which accumulates over cities and other regions under certain conditions.
Modern smog is derived primarily from precursor chemical pollutants, emitted to the atmosphere from vehicular internal combustion engines and industrial plants, that react in the atmosphere with sunlight to produce secondary chemical pollutants that also combine with the precursor emissions to form the components of what is called photochemical smog.
The word smog is a linguistic blend of the words smoke and fog. Coinage of the term is generally attributed to Dr. Henry Antoine des Voeux in his 1905 paper, "Fog and Smoke" for a meeting of the Public Health Congress in London. The July 26, 1905 edition of the Daily Graphic, a London newspaper, quoted des Voeux: "... he said it required no science to see that there was something produced in great cities which was not found in the country, and that was smoky fog, or what was known as 'smog'." The next day, the Globe newspaper remarked that "Dr. des Voeux did a public service in coining a new word for the London fog."
Originally, Dr. des Voeux's term smog referred to a mixture of smoke, sulfur dioxide (SO2) and fog that was once prevalent in London when coal with a high sulfur content was widely used throughout the city as heating fuel. The dark, sulfurous London smog caused reduced visibility, respiratory problems and had a noticeable deleterious affect on human health. The Great Smog of 1952 darkened the streets of London and killed approximately 4,000 people in a 4 day period (another 8,000 died from its effects in the following months). The type of smog experienced in London many decades ago is no longer encountered since other fuels have largely replaced the wide-spread use of high-sulfur coal for heating. (Read more...)
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New Draft of the Week about
 Tom Cruise in Minority Report (2002) using gestures similar to those used in Multi-Touch Technology A multi-touch interface is a human-computer interface allowing users to compute without input devices such as a mouse or mechanical keyboard. Instead, the user interacts with the computer by touching and making gestures on a specialized touch-sensitive display surface that can detect multiple points of contact (touches) and can recognize certain gestures. This differs from a classic laptop mouse pad or ATM machine that recognizes only one touch at a time.
After several decades of research by universities, companies, and research groups, Multi-Touch Technology (MTT) exploded onto the commercial scene in 2007 with the release of both Apple's iPhone and Microsoft Surface tablets. Even before smart phones made multi-touch ubiquitous, films and television began depicting multi-touch in shows like CSI, NCIS, or Fringe, where large wall touch displays are used to scan through criminal evidence. Multi-touch screens also began to be used by weathermen, ESPN (March Madness Selection Sunday), and news reporters (2008 Presidential Election). The application of multi-touch is now expanding rapidly across a variety of industries.
(Read more...)
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