Supentown Dual Mist  Humidifier

What type of humidifier should I use?  Cool-mist or warm?

As a Family Doctor, I am often asked the above question.  First, it must be understood that any humidifier will put moisture back in the air.

During the winter months, many  use heaters, leaving the home’s air dry.  This can not only dry out plants, furniture but also our bodies.  The end result is dehydration and dryer skin.

When I was in medical school, I simply placed a bowl of water in my room which acted as a poor-man’s humidifier.  However, there are times when “real humidifiers” are also beneficial.

Humidifiers are traditionally used to help  a person breathe better during an upper respiratory infection, asthma attack, cough or sinus infection.  They are thought to help break up mucous during these infectious times.

Traditionally, there are two types of humidifiers. These include a warm-mist humidifier or a cool-mist humidifier, also known as an evaporative cooler.

The cool-mist humidifiers are broken consists of two types- ultrasonic humidifiers and evaporative coolers. Otherwise, aside from personal preference, there really is not a big scientific reason to use one versus the other.

Cool Mist humidifiers are recommended when the humidifier is being used by a child or in a child’s room.  This is by far the safest option as it will prevent hot water and steam burns should the child get too close to the unit.

Further, these units are usually less expensive to operate since they do not use as much electricity.  The ultrasonic humidifiers are nice and quiet as they use an ultrasonic mechanism to dispense moisture into the air.

Warm-Mist humidifiers have the advantage of heating the air before being inhaled.  However, if placed more than a few feet from the user,  there may not be much of a temperature difference  upon inhaling as the moisture rapidly cools as it travels across the room.

Further, since the unit heats up the water, there are additional electricity costs  associated with a warm-mist humidifier.

My recommendation is to try a cool-mist humidifier first. If this does not appear to meet your needs, you can consider a warm mist unit.

Regards,

Dr.  E. Madrid

=======================================

To view specific humidifiers, visit ehealthsupplies.com . Use Discount Code: humidifier7  during check-out and save 7% on your humidfier purchase.

Use discount code ion5 to get 5% off your purchase from eHealthSupplies.com

Dr. Gabor Lantos, Professional Engineer and Occupational Health Physician states; “As the airborne concentrations of viruses or bacteria are reduced, the risks of contracting diseases through inhalation are significantly reduced.” (see the studies) . A recent report on NPR also showed that in addition to Light Therapy, Negative Ions can help with Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Negative Ions are molecules that have gained an extra electron. These are beneficial to the environment because they help attract dust, cigarette smoke, pet dander, pollen, mold spores, viruses, and bacteria; thus, helping eliminate them from the air you breathe. Have you ever noticed how fresh air smells after a rainfall or near a waterfall? If so, then you have experienced ionization in its grandest form.

There are over 700 scientific articles on the benefits of negative ions. In addition, negative ionization has been shown to elevate mood and reduce stress. Scientists at Columbia University showed that negative ions can also combat depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

Birthmarks, be damned: the FBI has officially started rolling out a state-of-the-art face recognition project that will assist in their effort to accumulate and archive information about each and every American at a cost of a billion dollars.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reached a milestone in the development of their Next Generation Identification (NGI) program and is now implementing the intelligence database in unidentified locales across the country, New Scientist reports in an article this week. The FBI first outlined the project back in 2005, explaining to the Justice Department in an August 2006 document (.pdf) that their new system will eventually serve as an upgrade to the current Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) that keeps track of citizens with criminal records across America .

“The NGI Program is a compilation of initiatives that will either improve or expand existing biometric identification services,” its administrator explained to the Department of Justice at the time, adding that  the project, “will accommodate increased information processing and sharing demands in support of anti-terrorism.”

“The NGI Program Office mission is to reduce terrorist and criminal activities by improving and expanding biometric identification and criminal history information services through research, evaluation and implementation of advanced technology within the IAFIS environment.”

The agency insists, “As a result of the NGI initiatives, the FBI will be able to provide services to enhance interoperability between stakeholders at all levels of government, including local, state, federal, and international partners.” In doing as such, though, the government is now going ahead with linking a database of images and personally identifiable information of anyone in their records with departments around the world thanks to technology that makes fingerprint tracking seem like kids’ stuff.

According to their 2006 report, the NGI program utilizes “specialized requirements in the Latent Services, Facial Recognition and Multi-modal Biometrics areas” that “will allow the FnewBI to establish a terrorist fingerprint identification system that is compatible with other systems; increase the accessibility and number of the IAFIS terrorist fingerprint records; and provide latent palm print search capabilities.”

Is that just all, though? During a 2010 presentation (.pdf) made by the FBI’s Biometric Center of Intelligence, the agency identified why facial recognition technology needs to be embraced. Specifically, the FBI said that the technology could be used for “Identifying subjects in public datasets,” as well as “conducting automated surveillance at lookout locations” and “tracking subject movements,” meaning NGI is more than just a database of mug shots mixed up with fingerprints — the FBI has admitted that this their intent with the technology surpasses just searching for criminals but includes spectacular surveillance capabilities. Together, it’s a system unheard of outside of science fiction.

New Scientist reports that a 2010 study found technology used by NGI to be accurate in picking out suspects from a pool of 1.6 million mug shots 92 percent of the time. The system was tested on a trial basis in the state of Michigan earlier this year, and has already been cleared for pilot runs in Washington, Florida and North Carolina. Now according to this week’s New Scientist report, the full rollout of the program has begun and the FBI expects its intelligence infrastructure to be in place across the United States by 2014.

In 2008, the FBI announced that it awarded Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions, one of the Defense Department’s most favored contractors, with the authorization to design, develop, test and deploy the NGI System. Thomas E. Bush III, the former FBI agent who helped develop the NGI’s system requirements, tells NextGov.com, “The idea was to be able to plug and play with these identifiers and biometrics.” With those items being collected without much oversight being admitted, though, putting the personal facts pertaining to millions of Americans into the hands of some playful Pentagon staffers only begins to open up civil liberties issues.

Jim Harper, director of information policy at the Cato Institute, adds to NextGov that investigators pair facial recognition technology with publically available social networks in order to build bigger profiles. Facial recognition “is more accurate with a Google or a Facebook, because they will have anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen pictures of an individual, whereas I imagine the FBI has one or two mug shots,” he says. When these files are then fed to law enforcement agencies on local, federal and international levels, intelligence databases that include everything from close-ups of eyeballs and irises to online interests could be shared among offices.

The FBI expects the NGI system to include as many as 14 million photographs by the time the project is in full swing in only two years, but the pace of technology and the new connections constantly created by law enforcement agencies could allow for a database that dwarfs that estimate. As RT reported earlier this week, the city of Los Angeles now considers photography in public space “suspicious,” and authorizes LAPD officers to file reports if they have reason to believe a suspect is up to no good. Those reports, which may not necessarily involve any arrests, crimes, charges or even interviews with the suspect, can then be filed, analyzed, stored and shared with federal and local agencies connected across the country to massive data fusion centers. Similarly, live video transmissions from thousands of surveillance cameras across the country are believed to be sent to the same fusion centers as part of TrapWire, a global eye-in-the-sky endeavor that RT first exposed earlier this year.

“Facial recognition creates acute privacy concerns that fingerprints do not,” US Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) told the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law earlier this year. “Once someone has your faceprint, they can get your name, they can find your social networking account and they can find and track you in the street, in the stores you visit, the government buildings you enter, and the photos your friends post online.”

In his own testimony, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Alessandro Acquisti said to Sen. Franken, “the convergence of face recognition, online social networks and data mining has made it possible to use publicly available data and inexpensive technologies to produce sensitive inferences merely starting from an anonymous face.”

“Face recognition, like other information technologies, can be source of both benefits and costs to society and its individual members,” Prof. Acquisti added. “However, the combination of face recognition, social networks data and data mining can significant undermine our current notions and expectations of privacy and anonymity.”

With the latest report suggesting the NGI program is now a reality in America, though, it might be too late to try and keep the FBI from interfering with seemingly every aspect of life in the US, both private and public. As of July 18, 2012, the FBI reports, “The NGI program … is on scope, on schedule, on cost, and 60 percent deployed.”

The hackers released a statement  Tuesday claiming that it had obtained detailed information on some 12 million iphone users, taken from an FBI agent’s laptop.

The group, long associated with the more notorious Anonymous hacktivist organisation, released 1 million iOS device IDs to back up its claims.

With some identifying information removed, the data proves, according to Antisec, that

“F****** FBI IS USING YOUR DEVICE INFO FOR A TRACKING PEOPLE PROJECT OR SOME S***”

read more… 

Now, there’s yet another story about police brutality brewing. At least five police officers are under investigation after a woman died during a violent arrest in which an officer stomped on her genitals, police Chief Charlie Beck said.

“I take all in-custody death investigations very seriously,” LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said Thursday in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “I am confident we will get to the truth no matter where that leads us.”… read more

The United States is arguably the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism, although we call it “self defense” and fighting “humanitarian” wars.

But when other people – especially brown-skinned people who wear funny clothes – do the same things that we do, we label it as terrorism.

Mark Selden - Bartle Professor of History and Sociology at Binghamton University – explains:

American politicians and most social scientists definitionally exclude actions and policies of the United States and its allies” as terrorism.

For example, the American military  indiscriminately kills innocent civilians (and see this),  calling it “carefully targeted strikes”.  When others do it, we rightfully label it terrorism.

When Al Qaeda, Syrians or white supremacists target  people attending funerals of those killed – or those attempting to rescue people who have been injured by –   previous attacks, we rightfully label it terrorism.  But the U.S. government does exactly the same thing, without any criticism by government apologists…read more here