Inside Breezy Point: An inferno in a flood

REPORTERS' NOTEBOOK

By Keturah Gray and Jim Dubreuil

When we were sent out on Monday afternoon to report on the "holdouts" of Hurricane Sandy - those who refused to leave their homes despite New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's mandatory evacuation orders - we expected winds and rain, but thought it was nothing that we couldn't handle.

We had our bottled water, our rain gear, our chips and were ready to tough out the storm with the citizens of Breezy Point, a beach town in Queens on the far end of New York City, and a place where Jim has family.

We were two of the last to arrive over the Marine Parkway Bridge before it closed to the public at 2 p.m. ET, and we joined up pretty quickly with 30-year-old Mary Lepera. She gave us a tour of the neighborhood and explained why she, like so many others, planned to stick out Hurricane Sandy at home: She'd spent her whole life there and wasn't about to abandon her home.

"We're sticking it out," she said. "Even if we have to go up on our roof, we'll do it."

A lot of people kind of felt that they had jumped through hoops for Irene, and this time, they weren't going to do it. And there was just this feeling that the storm was going to be like any other storm that hits the East Coast. It wasn't going to be the Super Storm that had been portrayed - but that's not what happened.

Over the course of the next few hours, though, Breezy Point became a literal lightning rod in the storm, battered by winds, rain and fire. At least 80 homes were destroyed in the beachfront neighborhood and we got caught in the chaos.

The last thing anyone imagines is a fire breaking out. But that's exactly what happened.

Jim DuBreuil: I remember looking out the window around 8:30 at night, and all of a sudden, we just saw this ? it seemed like we were in a national forest where you see all those fires with timbers flying around. It was off in the distance and at 8:20 at night, I wasn't thinking this is going to affect us. But as each hour progressed, the storm, the fire was just coming closer and closer and God, you [Keturah Gray] looked at me and said, "We're getting the hell out of here," and I was like, "Yeah, let's go." I got a trash can and we threw in garbage bags and all of our camera equipment in it. The family we were with did the same and we were out the door.

Keturah Gray: I just remember when I first saw that fire thinking we have water on one side of the house, we have a TON of water on the back side of the house, and we have a fire that is inevitably going to get closer because of all of the winds. I was just like, "What do we do? Where do we even begin? Do we take this route or this route?" I was so worried about the people that I knew, because we had been down that beach earlier that afternoon. There were a lot of people in that line of fire, and I just didn't know how they were going to get out.

Jim DuBreuil: I kind of think where we got lucky was the tide started going down. The water was much higher at 8 o'clock and then by 9 o'clock and 10 o'clock it was just easier to get around. Where the water would've been up to our chins, the water was finally at our waist. We put on our backpacks and got our trashcan and headed out of there.

Keturah Gray: I think I was the first one that was like, we need an escape plan, but I also didn't know if I was going to be strong enough to walk through the water.

Jim DuBreuil: Timbers are flying and there's 80 mph winds coming at you as you're going through the waves. You're trying to get through the flood and the fire's behind you and I just remember looking at you and going "don't look back, don't look back."

Keturah Gray: The water was receding, but the fire was becoming stronger. We were walking against the current, which was really hard, and we're carrying a trash can and a lot of other people had babies they were carrying and bags.

Jim DuBreuil: I think it could've been absolutely chaotic and hell on earth at one point, but everyone got together. People were helping each other and going "OK, we're going to get you out." We were moving from one spot to the next. When we got to our first evacuation spot, which was maybe 100 meters away from the first house we were at, I could smell kerosene. They told us there's a gas pump nearby. At that point, the fire has moved and the embers are now coming in to the fire and Keturah looked at me again and was like, "Let's get the out of here." It just seemed the fire was following us. We finally got to a Roman Catholic Church and, for me, that was the moment when I was like, "We're going to be all right. These people are going to be all right and we're going to get out of here."

Keturah Gray: That's when they said nobody can stay. You are leaving this time. And everybody that we were with, for the most part, were happy to hear those words.

Jim DuBreuil: I think it's easy to look at people like this and say, "Gosh, why didn't they heed the warning," but I think these people just love their community so much and they take care of each other, that they just didn't want to leave and they didn't think it was going to be bad and I think they realized that they made a mistake. But again, they could've never predicted a huge fire. The people of Breezy Point will come back and rebuild.

Also Read

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/inside-breezy-point-inferno-flood-002046120--abc-news-topstories.html

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Sharp announces first TVs with Moth-Eye technology: the AQUOS XL series

Sharp may look like it's in trouble, but that's not stopping it bringing new displays to the market, including today's announcement of the AQUOS Quattron 3D XL TV line. Behind the mouthful of acronyms, these LED-backlit LCD panels are the first to feature Sharp's Moth-Eye technology, designed to reduce glare and pump out bright colors, as well as a deep black. The company's 'four primary color' tech is partly responsible for the rich output, which squeezes a yellow sub-pixel in with the standard R, G and B. All the panels run at 1,920 x 1,080, as you'd expect, sport a 10 million to 1 contrast ratio and use five speakers to deliver audio. Prices aren't fixed, but the 46-, 52- and 80-inch models will be released in Japan on December 15th, while the 60- and 70-inch variants will come slightly earlier, on November 30th. You're going to have to be quick on launch day, though -- only 10,000 units are expected to be available in the first month.

Filed under: Displays, HD

Sharp announces first TVs with Moth-Eye technology: the AQUOS XL series originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Oct 2012 04:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/JAtsstJfYNw/

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Mystery Glow of Dark Matter Halos Fueled by Extragalactic Stars

Stars ripped from their home galaxies as they collide with other galaxies can get slung into giant invisible cocoons of dark matter, researchers say, which might explain mysterious radiation pervading the sky.

These findings suggest the halos of?dark matter?surrounding galaxies are not completely dark after all, but contain a small number of stars, investigators added.

In recent decades, satellite telescopes have detected more infrared light emanating from the sky than known galaxies could account for. Scientists had suggested this strange glow might come from sources too dim for observatories to see directly ? for instance, the earliest, most distant galaxies. If such primordial galaxies were responsible for this radiation, that might suggest far more of them existed than before thought, potentially radically altering notions of how the cosmos evolved.

Now, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have viewed a sufficiently large enough patch of sky to help shed light on this infrared glow. The researchers found that neither primordial galaxies nor faint dwarf galaxies could explain fluctuations in this excess radiation seen across space.

"We have made new measurements of the glow and found it to be brighter in intensity by several orders of magnitude than the first galaxies," study lead author Asantha Cooray, a cosmologist at the University of California, Irvine, told SPACE.com.

Instead, the researchers suggest wandering stars in the gargantuan spherical halos of dark matter enveloping their home galaxies might be responsible for this mysterious light. Physicists think invisible, as-yet-unidentified dark matter makes up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe.

"These diffuse stripped halo stars explain the missing infrared glow," Cooray said.

These stars were likely torn from the main bodies of their galaxies during epic collisions with other galaxies. They may have also been stripped away from their original homes by other galaxies pulling at them with their gravity, just as the moon's gravity tugs at Earth's oceans to generate tides. [Photos of Great Galaxy Crashes]

"For a typical Milky Way-sized galaxy, the intensity of light coming from these halo stars is about 1 percent of the total light from that galaxy," Cooray said. "That fraction grows rapidly, to as high as 20 percent, in denser galaxy environments like galaxy groups and clusters, as collisions and tidal stripping are more frequent in dense regions of the universe."

Mostly, these stars were only exiled to the most distant outskirts of their home galaxies instead of getting hurled out into intergalactic space, trapped as they were by the gravitational pull of the dark matter halos surrounding their galaxies. Galaxies exist in dark matter halos that are much larger than the galaxies; when galaxies merge together, stars and gas sink to the middle of the resulting combined halo.

"If I sum all of the galaxies out to about a billion years since the Big Bang from today, the stripped diffuse stars contribute about 10 percent of the total infrared light intensity seen by Spitzer ? the rest is the light from galaxies," Cooray said. "The previous explanation attributed that 10 percent of unexplained intensity to primordial galaxies and stars, but the most recent estimates by a variety of authors, not just my group, are that the primordial galaxies contribute at most 0.5 percent."

Future research can see whether data from other telescopes and experiments will confirm the research team's model.

"These halo stars, while bright in the infrared, should also emit visible optical light," Cooray said. As such, the Hubble Space Telescope should be able to see these stars as well, he explained.

The scientists detailed their findings in the Oct. 25 issue of the journal Nature.

Follow SPACE.com on Twitter?@Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook?&?Google+.

Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mystery-glow-dark-matter-halos-fueled-extragalactic-stars-171003300.html

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Family of Teenager Killed by Energy Drink Files Suit

? Fourteen-year-old Anais Fournier was at home watching a movie when she suffered a heart attack last December. Doctors put Anais in an induced coma to reduce her brain swelling, but to no avail. She lived for six more days and then her family made the heartbreaking decision to remove her from life support. According to the autopsy, the cause of death was caffeine toxicity from an ?energy drink.?

Anais had drunk two 24-oz. Monster Energy drinks in a 24-hour period, up to just hours before her death. Combined, the two drinks contained 480 milligrams of caffeine, the equivalent of almost 14 cans of cola. The FDA requires that soft drinks contain no more than 71.5 mg of caffeine per 12 oz drink. However, the caffeine content of so-called ?energy drinks? such as Red Bull, Rockstar and Monster Energy is not regulated by the FDA because it is considered a ?dietary supplement? and not a food and not subject to the FDA?s caffeine restrictions. These energy drinks also contain guarana and taurine, stimulants that contain caffeine or produce similar effects on the cardiac muscles.

The R. Rex Parris Law Firm of Lancaster, California filed suit on behalf of the family on October 17th against Monster Energy for failing to warn about the product?s dangers. The case was filed in the Superior Court of California for the County of Riverside, Case No. RIC 1215551, Wendy Crossland and Richard Fournier, as surviving parents of Anais Fournier v. Monster Beverage Corporation. Among other claims, the lawsuit alleges strict product liability, failure to warn and negligence in the design, sale and manufacturing of the product. ?These energy drinks contain highly dangerous levels of caffeine and can be extremely harmful, but these grave health dangers are not clearly marked on the cans,? said Alexander R. Wheeler, a lawyer at the R. Rex Parris Law Firm. ?Anais?s family wants to make sure another family doesn?t have to endure the same tragedy as they have.?

Wendy Crossland, Anais? mother, said: ?I was shocked to learn the FDA can regulate caffeine in a can of soda, but not these huge energy drinks. With their bright colors and names like Monster, Rockstar, and Full Throttle, these drinks are targeting teenagers with no oversight or accountability. These drinks are death traps for young, developing girls and boys, like my daughter, Anais. Nothing will replace the love and vitality of Anais. I just want Monster Energy to know their product can kill. I want Anais? life to send a loud and clear message to today?s youth that energy drinks can kill. I would like nothing more than to have these drinks regulated by the FDA and ban the sale to minors.?

In the eight years between 2004 and 2012, sales of energy drinks have gone up 240%, and the FDA has reported six deaths and 18 hospitalizations associated with Monster Energy drinks. A report issued last year by the U.S. Department of Health and Services cited ten times as many emergency room visits associated with energy drinks between 2004 and 2009, totaling more than 16,000 visits in 2008 alone, leading some states such as Virginia to ban the use of the drinks during student athletic events.

?Monster, with their targeted marketing practices and promotion of energy drinks to teenagers, put profits over the safety of America?s youth,? said Kevin I. Goldberg, of Goldberg, Finnegan, and Mester, in Silver Spring, Maryland, a lawyer also representing the family. ?Nothing can bring Anais back, but we can tell the world these energy drinks are harmful. Our hope is discovery in this case will shed light on Monster Corporation?s practices regarding what they do or do not tell the public and FDA about the safety of their products.? Attorney Goldberg will be appearing pro hac vice in the case, along with Baltimore attorneys Michael A. Brown, Joseph W. Hovermill and Michael E. Blumenfeld of Miles & Stockbridge, P.C.

Fourteen-year-old Anais passed away December 23, 2011. She was an organ donor and her last acts were to save the life of a 40-year-old woman through the gifts of her kidney and pancreas, and giving sight to the blind through donation of her corneas. She is survived by her parents, her twin brother, Dorian, and younger sister, Jade.

Source: http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/18173/monster-energy-drink-lawsuit.html?ref=rss

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Five Simple Tools that Make it Crazy Easy Integrate Mobile Into Your ...

With more and more people using their phones to browse the Internet, it?s imperative that companies focus on developing mobile tools that can best showcase their products. This means being able to both create a strong brand identity, while being able to demonstrate excellent customer service and an understanding of individual user needs.

Some of the best mobile tools that can contribute to this effect include analytics like Tello, online pay services such as Obopay, and mobile interface builders like Hootsuite. These tools, and more, can significantly boost your business without costing a fortune.

What follows are five of the top tools you can use to

Tool #1: Tello. Tello is a tool that can help you gather information on customers. It uses a realtime feedback system whereby messages and quality reports can be added from different locations. Tello can help to boost and sharpen your marketing push by allowing you to respond to criticism, while building on positive feedback. The simple interface similarly means that you can tailor the tool to your particular business.

Tool #2: Obopay. An online pay tool that?s ideal for mobile phones, Obopay has been running since 2005, and makes it straightforward to set up and process transactions. This kind of tool is excellent for small to medium sized businesses that want potential customers to be able to buy from them in a safe and efficient way. Even better, Obopay is designed to be easily used by non-profits, and includes convenience fees, rather than transaction fees, as a core part of its appeal. Individual tools include widgets, text links, and web page buttons.

Tool #3: Tweetvite. Make use of the marketing potential of Tweetvite to communicate an event or product launch on a major scale. Tweetvite, also used for social gatherings, allows you to create a promotional page and launch address for events that can be sent out to all followers. RSPVs can also retweet the invite to their followers through hashtags, creating the potential to reach a huge number of people with a simple, low cost marketing tool.

Tool #4: Hootsuite: This tool is ideal for monitoring different social networks at the same time and feeding back mentions and conversions in realtime to a single dashboard. Recently added features like Hootsuite Conversations make it possible to create single chats and IMs across different social networks. The main strength of something like Hootsuite is that it enables you to much more effectively deal with different levels of traffic from social networks in a way that doesn?t overload you with information.

Tool #5: MobiCart. A tool that allows you to create your own mobile web storefront, MobiCat represents a straightforward way of adding an online shopping feature for your products. A template enables you to customize a storefront to your products and branding, with the further advantage of providing support outside of a traditional website. Other features include checkouts and self designed apps that can be integrated into an overall shopfront. Excellent if you just want to create a reliable mobile storefront for your business that doesn?t require a lot of technical knowledge.

Author Bio: Liam Ohm is a regular technology blogger with an interest in helping people make money. He highly recommends using cloud services as a great way of helping your business to become more efficient and organized.

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Source: http://60secondmarketer.com/blog/2012/10/23/mobile-business-tools/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mobile-business-tools

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Home Improvement Videos by The Handyguys

Moving to Home Improvement Videos?and Youtube

Then Handyguys Podcast is now moving primarily to a video format. To get all of our latest content and to see our home improvement videos, please subscribe to our youtube channel.? We will begin uploading new content in the next week or so and have already filmed 5 new episodes in the updated Handyguys Productions studio.

Why the Change?

We moved to home improvement videos?because our content benefits from our ability to visually demonstrate our topic at hand. We tried to make the move to video a couple of years ago but we did not have the resources or organization necessary at the time to make the leap. We now have a production crew, a wardrobe, set, lights and access to multiple cameras. Of course that requires significant capital investment. We hope to recoup some of that cost through youtube?s monetization system but also through other video production ventures. ?We think that our new-found ability to help out both our regular listeners and occasional visitors through short, targeted home improvement videos will benefit the DIY community. Get ready for shows on pneumatic nailers, garage shelving and cabinets, Ipe Decking, cutting the cable and more! ?As always, we encourage our listeners to provide feedback for our content. If you have?questions?or would like us to cover a specific topic, please use the contact form. As always?thank you for listening viewing the Handyguys Podacast and enjoy the show.

Tagged as: DIY, handyguys, home improvement, How to, Tools, Video Podcasts

Source: http://www.handyguyspodcast.com/2962/home-improvement-videos/

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Wine and fracking don't mix, say vineyard owners

Fred Frank poses for a photo in his vineyard at Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars in Hammondsport, N.Y., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. Frank, grandson of Dr. Konstantin Frank, worries the region's carefully tended reputation is in danger if tourists who make the long trip up from the New York City area and elsewhere have to deal with traffic created by gas drilling. (AP Photo/David Duprey)

Fred Frank poses for a photo in his vineyard at Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars in Hammondsport, N.Y., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. Frank, grandson of Dr. Konstantin Frank, worries the region's carefully tended reputation is in danger if tourists who make the long trip up from the New York City area and elsewhere have to deal with traffic created by gas drilling. (AP Photo/David Duprey)

Fred Frank poses for a photo in his vineyard at Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars in Hammondsport, N.Y., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. Frank, grandson of Dr. Konstantin Frank, worries the region's carefully tended reputation is in danger if tourists who make the long trip up from the New York City area and elsewhere have to deal with traffic created by gas drilling. (AP Photo/David Duprey)

Fred Frank poses for a photo in his vineyard at Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars in Hammondsport, N.Y., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. Frank, grandson of Dr. Konstantin Frank, worries the region's carefully tended reputation is in danger if tourists who make the long trip up from the New York City area and elsewhere have to deal with traffic created by gas drilling. (AP Photo/David Duprey)

Fred Frank poses for a photo in his vineyard at Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars in Hammondsport, N.Y., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. Frank, grandson of Dr. Konstantin Frank, worries the region's carefully tended reputation is in danger if tourists who make the long trip up from the New York City area and elsewhere have to deal with traffic created by gas drilling. (AP Photo/David Duprey)

The hillside vineyards of New York's Finger Lakes region make money producing fine Rieslings and inviting tourists to sip white wine by the water's edge. Now winery owners are worried about the prospect of a grittier kind of economic development: gas drilling.

Some grape growers fear that if shale gas drilling, or fracking, is allowed in this region of postcard-perfect hills and crystal-clear lakes, the muddy well sites and rumbling trucks will not only endanger the environment but threaten the Finger Lakes' reputation for pristine beauty.

In their view, wine does not pair well with drilling.

"If they allow hydro-fracking anywhere near us, tourism will be over and the industry will be done," said Art Hunt of Hunt Country Vineyards near Keuka Lake, N.Y.

Hunt owns one of the roughly 100 wineries that dot the gently sloping hills around the Finger Lakes, which has a grape-friendly micro-climate created by the deep, slender, hill-framed waters.

The upstate wine region about 200 miles northwest of New York City does not have the cachet of California's famous valleys, but it has garnered a global reputation over the past decade for its Rieslings. Many of the wineries are small operations and depend heavily on business from tourists who make their way from vineyard to vineyard along the scenic roads.

One prominent winery, Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars near Keuka Lake, averages 70,000 visitors a year. Dr. Frank was a World War II refugee from the Ukraine who brought the Finger Lakes into the modern era by successfully cultivating vinifera grapes in a region where winter temperatures commonly drop to 15 below zero.

His grandson Fred Frank worries the region's carefully tended reputation will be in danger if tourists who make the long trip up from the New York City area and elsewhere have to deal with traffic created by gas drilling.

"If they're in on traffic coming up a steep hill behind two or three tanker trucks crawling around at 5 mph, they're perhaps less likely to come back," Frank said.

The Finger Lakes sit atop the Utica shale formation and on the northern fringe of the Marcellus Shale formation, which is being tapped just across the state line in Pennsylvania through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The process involves the injection of massive amounts of chemically treated water into wells and is denounced by many environmentalists as a danger to drinking water supplies.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration is reviewing the environmental and health effects of fracking and will decide whether it can go forward in New York. It is unclear how long the review will take.

Fracking is a polarizing issue that pits residents eager for new economic activity in a job-hungry region against those with environmental concerns. More than 110 upstate New York municipalities have passed moratoriums or outright bans on gas drilling.

The sweet spot for fracking in New York is south of many Finger Lakes wineries, and some of them would be protected by local bans. But winery operators say an entire lake could be polluted with one spill of chemical-laden water. They say that would create not only an environmental hazard, but a public relations nightmare.

"If the drilling does come to the Finger Lakes, what I can see happening in a heartbeat given a couple of accidents, all of the sudden the consumers are going to say, 'Are your vineyards near any wells?'" said Peter Saltonstall of King Ferry Winery by Cayuga Lake. "If people start thinking something is wrong with it, then we are sunk. That's something I stay up nights and worry about."

The advocacy group New Yorkers Against Fracking lists dozens of Finger Lakes wineries that want fracking banned.

A spokesman for the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York, a trade group, said fears of a forest of rigs and roads choked with trucks are unfounded. The buildup in New York is expected to be slow, wells will be spaced far apart, and water used in the process will be drawn from nearby ponds, lakes and streams when possible, instead of being brought in by truck, spokesman Jim Smith said.

"The industry and tourism in general have coexisted very well in New York, and our expectation is that it will continue to do so and that when we look back on this, the tourism industry will see this as a benefit to their business," Smith said.

Allied with the drilling companies are hundreds of residents looking forward to new jobs or big profits from leasing their land to drillers. Some farmers are among those who would welcome the economic jolt.

"The drilling operation is temporary and then all there is is a pad and pipe sticking out of the ground," said Gerald Urda, who grows organic vegetables and fruit, including grapes, southeast of the Finger Lakes in Windsor, N.Y. "I think the two can coexist. It's not going to be drilling forever, and it's not going to be the whole area at once."

___

Hill reported from Albany, N.Y.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-10-23-Drilling%20vs%20Wine/id-92d8858393654223af12e9d87da50ffb

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