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Infrared heat detectors: Cut your home energy costs using this device and a few simple techniques
An infrared heat detector can give you a thorough understanding of where your home is losing heat in winter, or gaining it in summer. The more you know about where heat is entering or leaving your home, the more effective you’ll be at controlling energy waste. With an infrared gun, you just wander around the inside and outside of your house on a hot summer day or a cold winter evening, and point and shoot at windows, outside doors, walls, or wherever else heat may leak through. The detector quickly gives you a complete picture of problems with insulation, sealing, or windows in need of replacement. Professional home energy auditors often use infrared imaging to show you where you’re gaining or losing heat, but thermal imaging devices are expensive and the audit itself can cost you over $200. An infrared point-and-shoot thermometer doesn’t provide the same pretty graphic printout, but they sell for about $50, so they put this detailed information within reach of the average homeowner. Most infrared guns come with a beam angle of 1:12, which means that if you point the gun at a wall 12 feet away, then take a reading, you’ll get a reading for a one square foot section of the wall. They also have a laser beam so you can see exactly what spot the reading was done from. I suggest starting your thermal leak audit from outside. Standing 12 feet back, take repeated measurements with your infrared gun to get an idea of what the reference temperature is. You are looking for the coldest reading in winter, or the warmest in summer when the AC is running. Don’t take readings on a sunlit wall, because it can skew your results. Rather, wait for overcast weather, for evening, or for the sun to move. Note each measurement on a sketch of the wall or in note form. Pay particular attention to window temperatures, because windows are big areas of thermal leakage in both hot and cold weather. You may want an inside helper to close shades and curtains after your first reading so you can then note the impact of these window coverings on stopping thermal leaks. Where readings are much worse than your baseline (hotter in winter, colder in hot weather), take more readings nearby, to locate the extent of the thermal leak. You may have missing or settled insulation, cracks or even holes in the wall, or a gap in a window or door. Next do an indoor thermal audit of the exterior walls, floor, and ceiling of each room. Choose an interior wall as your reference temperature; exterior wall readings should be cooler than the reference in cold weather, or warmer in hot weather. Again, you are looking for thermal leaks on window panes, around windows and doors, through ceiling light fixtures, in cracks in drywall or plaster, or anywhere that is touching an exterior wall. Take close-up readings of any wall outlets or light switches that are close to the exterior, even if they are on an inside wall. Take readings of top floor ceilings, as insulation, especially blown in insulation, can get disturbed or matted down in leaky attics. For hot weather readings, do your ceiling readings twice: once in the early morning before the sun has warmed the attic space, and once in the afternoon when the attic is hot, so you can determine how much of that heat leaks into your living space. You will probably find that windows without their window coverings are your biggest heat leaks, as even the most efficient windows have a much lower thermal barrier capability than walls or ceilings. You can either replace old windows with more efficient ones, add thermal curtains or shades, or apply thermal barrier window film to the window pane itself. You will also probably find drafts in walls, particularly at light fixtures or where wires or pipes enter the house. You want to seal these as best you can, as drafts can be major contributors to home energy costs. Caulk around the edges of window frames; use wall outlet insulating foam to prevent air from flowing through the outlets. Your bricks may need tuck pointing, or you may have a more severe problem: settled blown-in insulation between wall studs, in which case the only remedy is to gut the room from within and put in new insulation and drywall. If you have no insulation whatsoever you at least have the option to inject foam insulation, which is a cheaper option. It makes a lot of sense to do your own mini-audit with your infrared heat detector first, and ask for contractor estimates later. If you know where your thermal leaks are, you’ll be able to ask each contractor what approach they recommend for your situation. Calling a contractor over and just telling them the house gets too cold in winter, or too hot in hot weather, means inviting major repairs that might not do any good. You can use an infrared heat detector for countless other measurements around the house, such as checking hot water pipe temperature before and after adding pipe wrap; measuring the temperature coming out of forced air registers and going into the air return register, if you have central AC, to gauge air conditioner efficiency; measuring frying temperatures on your stove; or finding the ideal location in your basement for a wine cellar. Whatever model infrared point-and-shoot thermometer you choose, you are sure to get many hours of use out of it, locating the hotspots and cold spots in your walls, floors and ceilings, your garage, your fridge, freezer, your car engine – anywhere you want to know the surface temperature. You can even use it to measure the temperature of your compost heap – without getting your hands dirty! Robin Green runs Green-Energy-Efficient-Homes.com, a website that helps people save energy in their homes. For more on doing your own thermal assessment, see Infrared heat guns on Green Energy Efficient Homes.
What Does This Mean…………….;?
The Green GenerationTM is open to everyone: people of all ages and all nationalities, consumers who are committed to buying green; community leaders who are focused on greening their communities; parents and teachers who work to provide healthy foods and green schools for their children; those who work in green jobs; academics whose research is focused on innovative products and services; scientists and engineers who develop new green technologies; and governments that seek to implement policies and support research that will build a green economy and healthy population, and the religious community who are committed to a vision of a just, sustainable, green planet. Corporations will play a key leadership role in the Green Generation campaign, particularly those that recognize that their future success is tied to sustainable products and socially just endeavors.
Anyone Intrested In Writing A Two Page Summary Of This?
FIBER KEEPS ITS PROMISE BY GEORGE GILDER “Today, I await the death of television, telephony, VCRs, and analog cameras with utter confidence as Moore’s law unfolds.” Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, John Malone, are you listening?” Get ready. Bandwidth will triple each year for the next 25, creating trillions in new wealth. Editor’s note: Four years ago, Forbes ASAP published its first issue with a stunning prophecy by contributing editor George Gilder. Fiber optics, said George, had the potential to carry 25 trillion bits per second down a single strand. This represented a ten-thousandfold leap in carrying capacity over the 2.5 billion bits “barrier” long assumed by most experts in the field. What did George see that others had missed? One, a little-recognized (at the time) breakthrough called an erbium-doped amplifier, which keeps optical signals pure and strong over long distances. The other was a deep technical shift, with roots in the 1940s-era work of information theory pioneer Claude Shannon. If you believed Shannon, his logic dictated a new messaging scheme called wave division multiplexing. Though scorned by the experts four years ago, WDM now is emerging as the winner George had prophesied. The real winners will be all of us, as the coming world of cheap, unlimited bandwidth unfolds and at last fulfills the true potential of the information age. Here is George with an update. IMAGINE THAT IN 1975 YOU KNEW that Moore’s law–the Intel chairman’s projection of the doubling of the number of transistors on a microchip every 18 months–would hold for the rest of your lifetime. What if you knew that these transistors would run cooler, faster, better, and cheaper as they got smaller and were crammed more closely together? Suppose you knew the law of the microcosm: that the cost-effectiveness of any number of “n” transistors on a single silicon sliver would rise by the square of the increase in “n.” As an investor knowing this Moore’s law trajectory, you would have been able to predict and exploit a long series of developments: the emergence of the PC; its dominance over all other computer form factors; the success of companies making chips, disk drives, peripherals, and software for this machine. With a slight effort of intellect, you could have extended the insight and prophesied the digitization of watches, records (CDs), cellular phones, cameras, TVs, broadcast satellites, and other devices that can use miniaturized computer power. If you did not know precisely when each of these benisons would flourish, you would have known that each one was essentially inevitable. To calculate approximate dates, you had only to guess the product’s optimal price of popularization and then match its need for mips (millions of instructions per second) of computer power with the cost of those mips as defined by Moore’s law. Merely by using this technique of Moore’s law matching–and holding to it with unshakable conviction for nearly 20 years–I became known as a “futurist.” Today I await the death of television, telephony, VCRs, and analog cameras with utter confidence as Moore’s law unfolds. You can tell me about the 98% penetration of TVs in American homes, the continuing popularity of couch-potato entertainments, the effectiveness of broadcast advertising, and the profound and unbridgeable chasm between the office appliance and the living-room tube. But I will pay no attention. Just you wait–Jack Welch, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, John Malone, and David Jennings–the TV will die and you may be too late for the Net. It is now 1997, and a stream of dramatic events certifies that another law, as powerful and fateful and inexorable as Moore’s, is gaining a similar sway over the future of technology. It is what I have termed the law of the telecosm. Its physical base lies in the same quantum realm of eigenstates and band gaps that governs the performance of transistors and also makes photons leap and lase. But the telecosm reaches beyond components to systems, combining the science of the electromagnetic spectrum with Claude Shannon’s information theory. In essence, as frequencies rise and wavelengths drop, digital performance improves exponentially. Bandwidth rises, power usage sinks, antenna size shrinks, interference collapses, error rates plummet. The law of the telecosm ordains that the total bandwidth of communications systems will triple every year for the next 25 years. As communicators move up-spectrum, they can use bandwidth as a substitute for power, memory, and switching. This results in far cheaper and more efficient systems. In 1996, the new fiber paradigm emerged in full force. Parallel communications in all-optical networks became the dominant source of new bandwidth in telecom. Like Moore’s law, the law of the telecosm will reshape the entire world of information technology. It defines the direction of technological advance, the vectors of growth, the sweet spots for finance. AMERICA’S DARK SECRET FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, American companies have been laying optical fiber strands at a pace of some 4,000 miles a day, for a total of more than 25 million strand miles. Five years ago, the top 10% of U.S. homes and businesses were, on average, a thousand households away from a fiber node; now they are a hundred households away. However, the imperial advance of this technology conceals a dark secret, which has led to a pervasive underestimation of the long-term impact of photonics. Sixty percent of the fiber remains “dark” (unused for communications) and even the leading-edge “lit” fiber is being used at less than one ten-thousandth of its intrinsic capacity. This problem has prompted leaders in the industry, from Bill Gates and Andy Grove to Bob Metcalfe and Mitch Kapor, to underrate drastically the impact of fiber optics. Restricting the speed and cost-effectiveness of fiber has been an electronic bottleneck and a regulatory noose. In order for the signal to be amplified, regenerated, or switched, the light pulses had to be transformed into electronic pulses by optoelectronic converters. For all the talk of the speed of light, fiber-optic systems therefore could pass bits no faster than the switching speed of transistors, which tops out at a cycle time of between 2.5 and 10 gigahertz. Meanwhile, telecom companies could not deploy new low-cost fiber products any faster than the switching speed of politicians and regulators, which tops out roughly at a cycle time of between 2.5 years and a rate of evolution measurable only by means of carbon 14. Nonetheless, the intrinsic capacity of every fiber line is not 2.5 gigahertz. Nor is it even 25 gigahertz, which is roughly the capacity of all the frequencies commonly used in the air, from AM radio to kA band satellite. The intrinsic capacity of every fiber thread, as thin as a human hair, is at the least one thousand times the capacity of what we call the “air.” One thread could carry all the calls in America on the peak moment of Mother’s Day. One fiber thread could carry 25 times more bits than last year’s average traffic load of all the world’s communications networks put together: an estimated terabit (trillion bits) a second. Over the last five years, technological breakthroughs and legislative loopholes have begun to open up this immense capacity to possible use. Following concepts pioneered and patented by David Payne at the University of Southampton in England, a Bell Laboratories group led by Emmanuel Desurvire and Randy Giles developed a workable all-optical device. They showed that a short stretch of fiber doped with erbium, a rare earth mineral, and excited by a cheap laser diode can function as a powerful amplifier over fully 4,500 gigahertz of the 25,000 gigahertz span. Introduced by Pirelli of Italy and popularized by Ciena Corporation of Savage, Maryland, and by Lucent and Alcatel, today such photonic amplifiers are a practical reality. Put in packages between two and three cubic inches in size, the erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) fit anywhere in an optical network for enhancing signals without electronics. This invention overcame the most fundamental disadvantage of optical networks compared to electronic networks. You can tap into an electronic network as often as desired without eroding the voltage signal. Although resistance and capacitance will leach away the current, there are no splitting losses in a voltage divider. Photonic signals, by contrast, suffer splitting losses every time they are tapped; they lose photons until eventually there are none left. The cheap and compact all-optical amplifier solves this problem. It is an invention comparable in importance to the integrated circuit. Just as the integrated circuit made it possible to put an entire computer system on a single sliver of silicon, the all-optical amplifier makes it possible to put an entire system on a seamless seine of silica–glass. Unleashing the law of the telecosm, it makes possible a new global economy of bandwidth abundance. Five years ago when I first celebrated the radical implications of erbium-doped amplifiers, skepticism reigned. I was summoned to Bellcore, where the first optical networks had been built and then abandoned, to learn the acute limits of the technology from Charles Brackett and his team. I had offered the vision of a broadband fibersphere–a worldwide web of glass and light–where computer users could tune into favored frequencies as readily as radios tune into frequencies in the atmosphere today. But Brackett and other Bellcore experts told me that my basic assumption was false. It was no simpler, they said, to tune into one of scores of frequencies on a fiber than to select time slots in a time-division-multiplexed (TDM) bitstream. Indeed, electronic switching technology was moving faster than optical technology. In the face of the momentum and installed base of electronic switching and multiplexing, the fibersphere with hundreds of tunable frequencies would remain a fantasy, like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu. In 1997 the fantasy is coming true around the world. Xanadu has become the World Wide Web. The erbium-doped fiber amplifier is an explosively growing $250 million business. Electronic TDM seems to have topped out at 2.5 gigabits a second. TDM gear has suffered a series of delays and nagging defects and so far has failed in the market. Electronic TDM failed not only because it pushed the envelope of electronics but also because it violated the new paradigm. In single-mode fiber, the two key impediments are nonlinearities in the glass and chromatic dispersion (the blurring of bit pulses because even in a single band different frequencies move at different speeds). Chromatic dispersion increases by the square of the bit rate, and the impact of nonlinearities rises with the power of the signal. High-powered, high-bit-rate TDM flunked both telecosm tests. By contrast, wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) follows the laws of the telecosm; it succeeds by wasting bandwidth and stinting on power. WDM takes some 33% more bandwidth per bit than TDM, but it reduces power to combat nonlinearity and divides the bitstream into multiple frequencies in order to combat dispersion. Thus it can extend the distance or increase capacity by a factor of four or more today and can lay the foundations for the fibersphere tomorrow. In 1996 the new fiber paradigm emerged in full force. Parallel communications in all-optical networks, long depicted as a broadband pipe dream, crushed all competitors and became the dominant source of new bandwidth in the world telecom network. The year began with a trifold explosion at the Conference on Optical Fiber Communication in San Jose when three companies–Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs, NTT Labs, and Fujitsu–all announced terabit-per-second WDM transmissions down a single fiber. Sprint confirmed the significance of the laboratory breakthroughs by announcing deployment of Ciena’s MultiWave 1600 WDM system, so called because it can increase the capacity of a single fiber thread by 1,600%. The revolution continues in 1997. At the beginning of January, NEC declared that by increasing the number of bits per hertz from one to three, it had raised the laboratory WDM record to three terabits per second. During 1996, MCI had increased the speed of its Internet backbone by a factor of 25, from 45 megabits a second to 1.2 gigabits. On January 6, Fred Briggs, chief engineering officer at MCI, announced that his company is in the process of installing new WDM equipment from Hitachi and Pirelli that increases the speed of its phone network backbone to 40 gigabits per second. Accelerating MCI’s previous plans by some two years, the new system will use a more limited form of wavelength-division multiplexing to put four 10-gigabit in-cause formation streams on a single fiber thread. The first deployment will use existing facilities on a 275-mile route between Chicago and St. Louis, but the technology will be extended to the entire network. This move will consummate a nearly thousandfold upgrade of the MCI backbone, from 45 megabits per second to 40 gigabits, within some 36 months. Ciena, meanwhile, has announced technology that allows transmission of 100 gigabits per second. Its February IPO was the most important since Netscape (market cap at the end of the first trading day: $3.4 billion). Why? Ciena is the industry leader in open standard WDM gear. During the first six months the MultiWave 1600 was available, through October 1996, the firm achieved $54.8 million in sales and $15 million in net income. (Lucent is believed to be the overall leader with more than $100 million of mostly proprietary AT&T systems.) At the same time, the trans-Pacific consortium announced that it would deploy 100-gigabit-per-second fiber in its new link between the United States and Asia. A powerful new player in these markets will be Tellabs, currently the fastest-growing supplier of electronic digital cross-connect switches and other optical switching gear. In a further coup, following its purchase of broadband digital radio pioneer Steinbrecher, Tellabs has signed up all 12 principals in IBM’s all-optical team. Headed by Paul Green, recent chairman of the IEEE Communications Society and author of the leading text on fiber networks, and by Rajiv Ramaswami, coauthor of a new 1997 text on the subject, the IBM group built the world’s first fully functioning all-optical networks (AONs), the Rainbow series. Tellabs now owns the 11 AON patents and 100 listed technology disclosures of the group. The implications of the WDM paradigm go beyond simple data pipes. The greatest impact of all-optical technology will likely come in consumer markets. A portent is Artel Video Systems of Marlborough, Massachusetts, which recently introduced a fiber-based WDM system that can transmit 48 digital video channels, 288 CD-quality audio bitstreams, and 64 data channels on one fiber line. Aggregating contributions from a variety of content sources–each on different fiber wavelengths–and delivering them to consumers who tune into favored frequencies on conventional cable, the Artel system represents a key step into the fibersphere. It can be used for new services by either cable TV companies or telcos. The deeper significance of the Artel product, however, is its use of bandwidth as a replacement for transistors and switches. The Artel system works on dark fiber without compression. The video uses 200-megabit-per-second bitstreams (compare MPEG2 at 4 to 6 megabytes per second) that permit lossless transmissions suitable for medical imaging, and obviate dedicated processing of compression codes at the two ends. A move to massively parallel communications analogous to the move to parallel computers, all-optical networks promise nearly boundless bandwidth in fiber. According to Ewart Lowe of British Telecom, whose labs at Martlesham Heath in Ipswich have been a fount of all-optical technology, the new paradigm will reduce the cost of transport by a factor of 10. For example, the optoelectronic amplifiers previously used in fiber networks entailed nine power-hungry bipolar microchips for each wavelength, rather than a simple loop of doped silica that covers scores of wavelengths. As these systems move down through the network hierarchy, the growth of network bandwidth and cost-effectiveness will not only outpace Moore’s law, it will also excel the rise in bandwidth within computers–their internal “buses” connecting their microprocessors to memory and input-output. While MCI and Sprint move to deploy technology that functions at 40 gigabits a second, current computers and workstations command buses that run at a rate of close to 1 gigabit a second. This change in the relationship between the bandwidth of networks and the bandwidth of computers will transform the architecture of information technology. As Robert Lucky of Bellcore puts it, “Perhaps we should transmit signals thousands of miles to avoid even the simplest processing function.” Lucky implies that the law of the telecosm eclipses the law of the microcosm. Actually, the law of the microcosm makes distributed computers (smart terminals) more efficient regardless of the cost of linking them together. The law of the telecosm makes broadband networks more efficient regardless of how numerous and smart are the terminals. Working together, however, these two laws of wires and switches impel ever more widely distributed information systems, with processing and memory in the optimal locations. WHAT SHOULD THE MAJOR PLAYERS DO NOW? FOR THE TELEPHONE COMPANIES, the age of ever smarter terminals mandates the emergence of ever dumber networks. Telephone companies may complain of the large costs of the transformation of their system, but they command capital budgets as large as the total revenues of the cable industry. Telcos may recoil in horror at the idea of dark fiber, but they command webs of the stuff 10 times larger than any other industry. Dumb and dark networks may not fit the phone company self-image or advertising posture. But they promise larger markets than the current phone company plan to choke off their own future in the labyrinthine nets of an “intelligent switching fabric” always behind schedule and full of software bugs. Telephone switches (now 80% software) are already too complex to keep pace with the efflorescence of the Internet. While computers become ever more lean and mean, turning to reduced instruction-set processors and Java stations, networks need to adopt reduced instruction-set architectures. The ultimate in dumb and dark is the fibersphere now incubating in their magnificent laboratories. The entrepreneurial folk in the computer industry may view this wrenching phone company adjustment with some satisfaction. But computer firms must also adjust. Now addicted to the use of transistors to solve the problems of limited bandwidth, the computer industry must use transistors to exploit the nearly unlimited bandwidth. When home-based machines are optimized for manipulating high-resolution digital video at high speeds, they will necessarily command what are now called supercomputer powers. This will mean that the dominant computer technology will first emerge not in the office market but in the consumer market. The major challenge for the computer industry is to change its focus from a few hundred million offices already full of computer technology to a billion living rooms now nearly devoid of it. Cable companies possess the advantage of already owning dumb networks based on the essentials of the all-optical model of broadcast and select–of customers seeking wavelengths or frequencies rather than switching circuits. Cable companies already provide all the programs to all the terminals and allow them to tune in to the desired messages. But the cable industry cannot become a full-service supplier of telecommunications unless the regulators give up their ridiculous two-wire dream in which everyone competes with cable and no one makes any money. Cash-poor and bandwidth-rich, cable companies need to collaborate with telcos–which are cash-rich and bandwidth-poor–in a joint effort to create broadband systems in their own regions. In all eras, companies tend to prevail by maximizing the use of the cheapest resources. In the age of the fibersphere, they will use the huge intrinsic bandwidth of fiber, all 25,000 gigahertz or more, to simplify everything else. This means replacing nearly all the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of switches, bridges, routers, converters, codecs, compressors, error correctors, and other devices, together with the trillions of lines of software code, that pervade the intelligent switching fabric of both telephone and computer networks. The makers of all this equipment will resist mightily. But there is no chance that the old regime can prevail by fighting cheap and simple optics with costly and complex electronics and software. The all-optical network will triumph for the same reason that the integrated circuit triumphed: It is incomparably cheaper than the competition. Today, measured by the admittedly rough metric of mips per dollar, a personal computer is more than 2,000 times more cost-effective than a mainframe. Within 10 years, the all-optical network will be thousands of times more cost-effective than electronic networks. Just as the electron rules in computers, the photon will rule the waves of communication.
This Is My Essay For My Esl Writing Class. Can Anyone Give Me Any Advice? Thank You Very Much.?
My siblings and I are crazy about shopping online. Every other week a package is delivered in front of our door. Buying online provides us much simpler to find anything what we need and is easy to compare with other similar products. I usually scan my favorite webpage to find out their new products rather than spending half day to go to the mall. According to a research report, ‘How Do People Evaluate a Web Site’s Credibility?’ by Stanford University and Consumer Web Watch states, “With more than 50 percent of the U.S. population having Internet access, the World Wide Web has become an important channel for providing information and services.” (2002) Therefore, the companies put a lot of resources to create an attractive and useful webpage in order to keep their consumers to stay and browse their websites. A good retailer website all contains the effective elements on it such as organizing categories, the ability to read, the ability to search items, and ability to realize the item from the picture. The two retailer web sites I am going to evaluate are The Body Shop website (TBS) and The Bath and Body Work website (BBW). As a consumer, I realize TBS is more successful, because of its pleasing visual appeal, smooth easy access, and understandable information. TBS has better visual appeal than BBW web. Visual appeal is the setting of pictures, color tones and graphic presentations which always give us the first impression. A web design expert, Tom Dahm states, “Color is also important for emphasizing the most important parts of our page. Remember that the purpose of Web design is to draw the visitor’s eye to key page elements.” (2001). TBS keep using green consistently to highlight its natural ingredients, so the basic colors of website are green, white and black. On the homepage, it presents the products in front of the leaves with the black background. The clear background colors are not only for emphasizing TBS’s natural idea but also for highlighting of the soft color of its skin product’s image. TBS impacts visitors to have a positive impression about its natural products by using leaves in the background to make a color contrast with its products’ surface tone. In addition, there is a big rectangular picture in the middle of the website and three small rectangular pictures on its bottom. For all pictures, it shows the products on the left and descriptions on the right. Using this simple design can help the consumer to discover the products and the promotion at same time. The heading also defines the important promotion explicitly, and makes consumer easily to get into the sale event. In contrast, BBW is using a light brown color in autumn. The color of BBW’s homepage is changed many times with the seasons. The brown is not a right choice, because it does not match its colorful products. BBW uses flash pictures to show three different products which are home fragrance, body care, and anti-bacterial soap. In this way, it may introduce several products once to the visitor; unfortunately, it does not make strong impression to us. TBS has more incredible attraction than BBW because the visual appeal is organized and clear. Easy access is another reason to show TBS is better than BBW beside visual appeal. It accomplishes helping customers to find its products, if the website is organized. On TBS, there is a green scroll bar with white text on the top of the big picture. While the visitor places the mouse on any title of the green bar, it will scroll down with other subtitles. We can find the product quickly by selecting the subtitle on the scroll bar. On the other hand, BBW website does not provide a scrolling system. It has only a white bar with thin black text. When we want to find an item we have to click on the section, and then it will bring us to another page. On the second page it uses another setting by showing the small subjects on the vertical column on the left side. Moreover, there are the products’ brands (BBW sells different brands) by using several groups of subtitles under different titles on vertical column. For example, if I want to buy a lip gloss, I just click a button, “Lip gloss” under “Make Up” using the green scroll bar on the TBS homepage. However, I need to do more steps to find a lip gloss: firstly click the “Face & Hair”, secondly select a brand under “Makeup Brands”, then I will see some lip gloss on the third page. We might get bothered and unfocused when we go to too many pages to look for an item. The arrangement of BBW is more difficult for the visitor’s eyes to follow. If anyone is not the BBW’s coustomer, he will spend more time to figure out its complex setting. TBS is more successful by having more outstanding access, when it compares with BBW webpage. TBS website is more particular than BBW by providing good information. TBS and BBW carry many skin products. I have an experience of ordering an eye cream form BBW website. Indeed, it is easier if buying the item in
What To Konw About Ethanol Industry ? And The Result Of This Political Idea? Another State Plan ?
Each year in early October my grandfather summoned my entire family to come to his farm and harvest potatoes. Hunched over on all fours, each person quietly filled their buckets with these “earth apples.” Each year he used a different field for his crop. One year he would plant potatoes, the next year beets or wheat. The potato replaced the grain diet on the European continent. It became survival food, especially during the two World Wars. Dumplings, potato salad and mashed potatoes are only a few potato dishes found in a long list in the European cuisine. The easy adaptability of the potato to grow almost anywhere in the world can produce an annual crop of 322 million tons of potatoes. Many African countries greatly benefit from growing the potatoes because they make them more self-sufficient in their food production. In the age of nation building, stamping out of global warming, and driving for energy self-sufficiency, the new state appointed rival of the potato is maize, which is better known as corn – the yellow cob-born grain used in the production of ethanol fuel. As a blend with gasoline, biofuel powers automobiles and farm equipment. Its environmental friendly side effect is to reduce greenhouse gases, and some say it is the key to everlasting energy security in the future. Ethanol fuel production received its first stimulus after the Arab oil crisis in 1973. During 1978 the US federal government sealed the project with the Energy Tax Act authorizing tax exemptions by blending gasoline with 10 percent ethanol. A floodgate of free money opened up for farmers and ethanol producers as the energy and agricultural departments spent billions of dollars on subsidies. This year’s estimates are between $5.5 billion to $7.3 billion of our tax dollars to be handed out to corn growers. The incentives for farmers to grow corn in the US is not to meet the needs of a market that entails a healthy profit. Instead, they plant corn because they get paid to do so by a federal government interested in ethanol production. And as it turns out, producing ethanol is an expensive process. Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM) out of Illinois, one of the largest producers of ethanol, received as much as $10 billion in subsidies between 1980 through 1997 along with favorable tax breaks costing taxpayers an average of $30 for every dollar ADM earns in profits. Add to that the $500 of federal and state subsidies it takes to reduce one metric ton of CO2-equivalent, one can literarily say that it is governments who heat up the globe by burning cash. This year corn production has already increased by 15 percent over last year. Even President Bush, not a green lover but excited about ethanol, is expecting that farmers will plant 90.5 millions of acres of corn in 2007 in order to meet the demands of ethanol production of 132 billion liters by 2017. Corn prices already went up by 50 percent. The average price per bushel of $1.95, which had held steady over the past eight years, jumped up to $3.05 in January of this year, and is expected to rise as high as $3.40. Corn is feedstock. It is consumed not only by humans but also by hogs, chickens and cattle. The drastic side-effect of higher corn prices is now reflected in the higher prices in the grocery store. The price of food went up 3.9 percent last year – faster than the inflation rate, which ranges around 2.7 in 2007. In particular, pork, beef, milk, eggs and poultry show drastic increases in their prices. So do fruits and vegetables. Considering that most people spend an average of 10 percent of their disposable income on food, higher prices in grocery reduces the spending on cars, homes or clothing. Health Nazis should also be concerned, since these higher prices drive people to cheaper processed foods that add to increased health risks in the poor segment of the population. The US Federal Government’s targeted goal is to replace gasoline with corn-based fuel as an alternative energy source. This has caught the attention of poorer countries. Mexico, for example, is gradually replacing agave, a spiky-leaved, large plant which grows on high and arid land and takes eight years to reach maturity, with corn. Agave is the main ingredient for Tequila. Mexico produced 25 to 35 percent less agave this year and farmers take less care of their agave crop in favor of higher corn prices. The World Food Program (WFP), which recently stated that it can no longer feed the poor due to the impact of biofuel demand on food prices, is foolishly encouraging African and Latin American countries to take advantage of the rising demand of biofuels by planting corn; a popular world practice that is now devastating 900 million of the world’s poorest which rely on the UN feeding program. It is quite clear that the state-inflated demand for corn is causing a global imbalance in food production. Farmers are replacing a variety of vegetables and fruits with corn due to the higher profit-per-acre corn brings. The two-year practice of crop rotation for corn drains the soil and requires more fertilizers on the following soybean crop. The additional cost ends up with the consumer. As food prices rise, it is the poor who suffer most from this inflated demand for biofuel. It is a burden that most people cannot afford as inflation keeps rising because of irresponsible spending and government debt. The federal budget for the fiscal year beginning this October called for $2.9 trillion dollars in government spending. It includes increases for all the various cabinet-level departments. Among them were a 5.4 percent increase for the Department of Energy and 3.6 percent increase for Agriculture. According to Richard M. Ebeling, President of The Freeman, the average US household would have to shell out approximately $25,845 in taxes to cover the budget. Include with it the US federal government’s pre-existing liabilities of several trillion, and the average US household would have to pay an additional $31,000 a year for 75 years to pay off the debt already incurred by government spending. How can an average income household cover the basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter when tax burdens already devour the wages of a lower income population? Poor people only become poorer as spending continues. Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul seems to be the only congressional member who understands the global effects of subsidies. During his second presidential debate the question came up about oil profits. His response was: “I don’t think the profits are the issue. The profits are okay if they’re legitimately earned in a free market. What I object to are subsidies to big corporations when we subsidize them and give them R&D (Research & Development) money. I don’t think that should be that way. They should take it out of the funds that they earn…” Here lies the answer to many of the energy questions. Let the private sector find a solution to new energy sources. Already technology advances at a rapid speed and its products remain ultimately competitive on the market where prices drop and become affordable to the average consumer. Just think of recent changes from VCRs and phonograph records to DVD’s and CD players, and the addition of cell phones and portable computers to modern life. All are now available at reasonable prices to low-income households. Industry continually comes up with new inventions that contribute highly to communication, organization and entertainment. The only sectors that remain high in cost with outrageous prices are sectors that are under government regulation and control: health care, medicine, education, housing, and now food prices. It would be a life-saving act of mercy to close these various departments of government, if people want to have a future for the next generation. The trouble caused on the global market by the federal government’s sponsored ethanol industry increasingly outweighs the good it does. The idea of sacrificing food production in the name of biofuel as a future source of energy is an irrational concept. The consequence of higher food prices due to corn production hasn’t come from consumer choice but from government coercion. If the demand for energy is increasing, and biofuel is the answer, then where will the world grow its food? The big believers in a government supported biofuel industry might have to prepare for another big tsunami to hit the shores of Third World countries and at home if this insanity isn’t stopped. Just don’t blame capitalism if and when it comes. July 21, 2007 Sabine Barnhart
How To Produce Electricity With Green Energy – Check This !
If you are tired of electric bills and you’ve come across our site while checking into the topic of how to produce electricity with green energy be sure to read this article – you are sure to find it of interest. First of all, how about being able to produce an unlimited amount of power supply for your home’s entire needs, without outside assistance, and without spending a fortune – too good to be true? Just listen to the facts and discover the amazing possibilities. The majority of people purchase the electricity they use from the power company; they proceed to dutifully pay unreasonable bills and say good-bye to the hard-earned money they spend on such a household staple. On the other hand, there are people who decided that enough is enough, they discovered they didn’t have to waste all that money – what they wanted is absolutely free and unlimited power supply that would actually last them forever. As you proceed with your research in the area of how to produce electricity with green energy please note that it is indeed possible for you to start generating your own power; in just a few short days, you can start enjoying your new, no-cost power supply – you just have to take that first step. I guess that by now you are already full of curiosity as to how this is possible; it happens to be a simple matter of generating free and abundant electricity from sources that are found everywhere in nature. Can you believe that it’s both possible and easy for people to build their own solar and wind power supply system very quickly and easily on their own property? Although you might just be starting to look into how to produce electricity with green energy you must realize that it is very feasible to make a system for solar and/or wind power that can drastically reduce your power bills or even eliminate them entirely. You’re probably thinking that sounds great but must be way too expensive; just recently the whole thing has gotten much more accessible – leading the way is an expert in harnessing the unlimited power of the sun and wind who is willing to share his vast experience to benefit all of us. Enjoy FREE and UNLIMITED electricity?forever! Watch this SHOCKING Video! Visit: EasyFreeEnergy.com
Which Step In This Process Can You Impact The Most By Using Green Living Principles?
HARVESTING of raw materials. can include timber, agriculture, aquaculture, mining. MANUFACTURING of raw materials into usable products. can include assembling, processing, smelting, pulpmaking. PACKAGING of product. can include paper, plastic, metals, styrofoam. DISTRIBUTING products to consumers. can include trucking, shipping, air, railway, manpower. CONSUMPTION of product by user. DISPOSAL of waste and unused product by consumer. can include landfills, storage, re-use, recycling. ___________________________________ each step requires energy. each step is a choice. which step in this chain can YOU impact the most by living a greener lifestyle? how can changing one of these steps also affect the others? are there techniques available to help concerned individuals affect ALL of the steps involved?