To backtrack, in 1871, the idea came from local wine merchant Alfred Speer, who patented the first “endless-travelling sidewalk”—his idea was to build an elevated one moving along Broadway. It was suggested that boring “stop ‘n’ chats” would become a thing of the past as one would just have to “step on the passing sidewalk to be carried rapidly beyond sight or hearing of his tormentor.” Cause of death on this one: no financial backer.

New Scientist reports that by 1902 New Yorkers were fed up with the rush hour crush; one commuter calling it a “daily torture.” So Bridge Commissioner Gustav Lindenthal figured some high-speed moving walkways oughta do the trick, and proposed a looping system with 4 walkways on the Brooklyn Bridge, the fastest containing benches that would whisk pedestrians across the river. It’s suspected that Brooklyn Rapid Transit had a hand in burying the idea, as they had a monopoly on the borough’s public transit at the time.

Still, proposals came in, with moving sidewalks suggested for the Williamsburg Bridge, Wall Street, and as mentioned, in the subway system. The New York Times even wondered “why this improvement was not considered when this present [subway] system… was built”. And in 1932 a similar idea involving an elevated tube system was proposed.

Take a look at the moving sidewalk in action, in Paris in 1900. And if you think the idea of incorporating those into the city is crazy, check out what the world thought 2008 would look like back in 1968.

Source
gothamist.com

NEW YORK (WABC) — An Eyewitness News investigation talks to a police officer who reveals the pressure they are under to make quotas.
When Officer Adil Polanco dreamed of becoming a cop, it was out of a desire to help people not, he says, to harass them.
“I’m not going to keep arresting innocent people, I’m not going to keep searching people for no reason, I’m not going to keep writing people for no reason, I’m tired of this,” said Adil Polanco, an NYPD Officer.
Officer Polanco says One Police Plaza’s obsession with keeping crime stats down has gotten out of control. He claims Precinct Commanders relentlessly pressure cops on the street to make more arrests, and give out more summonses, all to show headquarters they have a tight grip on their neighborhoods.

“Our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them?” said Officer Polanco.

Eyewitness News asked, “Why do it?”

“They have to meet a quota. One arrest and twenty summonses,” said Officer Polanco.

This audio recording exclusively obtained by Eyewitness News seems to back up Officer Polanco’s assertion of a quota. You can listen to one officer as he lectures his rank and file officers during roll call at the 41st precinct.

“Things are not going to get any better. It’s going to get a lot worse,” said a police officer.

He lays out clearly that they need to bring in the numbers.

“If you think 1 and 20 is breaking your balls, guess what you’re going to be doing. You’re gong to be doing a lot more, a lot more than what they’re saying,” said the officer.

In another recording, the 41st Precinct Patrol Supervisor appears to step up the pressure to write more and more summonses:

“Next week, 25 &1, 35 & 1, and until you decide to quit this job to go to work at a Pizza Hut , this is what you’re going to be doing till then. Do you understand?” asked the patrol officer.

“He’s being clear, the only choice that we have is to do it,” said Officer Polanco.

Eyewitness News asked, “Are you telling me they’re stopping people for no reason, is that what you’re saying?”

“We are stopping kids walking upstairs to their house, stopping kids going to the store, young adults. In order to keep the quota,” answered Officer Polanco.

“Yeah, they locked us up for nothing,” said Zebulun Colbourne.

The Colbourne brothers say they and three other friends were the victims of quotas. All were arrested a few months ago after one of them had fallen while racing each other.

Eyewitness News asked, “You fell and that’s how you hurt your eye?”

“Yeah, and they just wanted to arrest us. I told them I fell but that didn’t matter to them,” said Elijah Colbourne.

All five were accused of engaging in tumultuous and violent conduct that caused public alarm, given a summons for unlawful assembly and locked up overnight.

Eyewitness News asked, “So you’re locked up waiting to see the judge, right?”

“Yeah,” answered the Colbourne brothers.

Eyewitness News asked, “Then what do they do?”

“We don’t see the judge, they let us out the back door after they kept us for a day and some change,” said Elijah Colbourne.

The charges were dropped, but Officer Polanco says the patrolman still got 5 summonses toward their monthly quota.

“At the end of the night you have to come back with something. You have to write somebody, you have to arrest somebody, even if the crime is not committed, the number’s there. So our choice is to come up with the number,” said Officer Polanco.

One Police Plaza declined our requests to interview the 41st precinct commander. But, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said, “Police Officers like others who receive compensation are provided productivity goals and they are expected to work.”

Officer Polanco says if they are just goals, why are officers who fail to make them, re-assigned to different shifts or relocated far from home.

It’s the consequences of not making the numbers or quotas, he says, that forces officers to give out bogus summonses.

“I cannot be more honest than I’ve been. There’s no reason for me to lie, there’s no reason for me to get into the trouble I am, cause I just could’ve kept quiet and made the money,” said Officer Polanco.

If you have a tip about this or any other issue you’d like investigated, please give our tipline a call at 877-TIP-NEWS. You may also e-mail us at the.investigators@abc.com and follow Jim Hoffer on Twitter at twitter.com/nycinvestigates

Source
abc.com
(Copyright ©2010 WABC-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)

“Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” said Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. (See pictures of the Pacific Ocean trash vortex.)

“But this issue has essentially been ignored in the Atlantic.”

The newly described garbage patch sits hundreds of miles off the North American coast. Although its east-west span is unknown, the patch covers a region between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—roughly the distance from Cuba to Virginia (see a U.S. map).

As with the Pacific garbage patch, plastic can circulate in this part of the Atlantic Ocean for years, posing health risks to fish, seabirds, and other marine animals that accidentally eat the litter.

Elusive Ocean Trash

To get a clear picture of the Atlantic garbage patch, Law drew on 22 years of data collected by students participating in her association’s SEA Semester academic program.

As part of this program, more than 7,000 students have gone on research cruises, deploying thousands of fine-meshed plankton nets to meticulously catalog bits of plastic enmeshed with the drifting plants and animals.

Tiny pieces of trash, each less than a tenth the weight of a paper clip, make up most of the debris, Law said February 23 at the American Geophysical Union’s 2010 Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, Oregon.

In some places the students found more than 200,000 bits of trash per square kilometer (520,000 bits per square mile). The vast majority of these fragments come from consumer products that were blown out of open landfills or were tossed out by litterbugs.

Similar surface trawls in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have found as many as 750,000 bits of plastic per square kilometer (1.9 million bits per square mile), noted marine chemist Giora Proskurowski, also with the Sea Education Association.

But that’s only a portion of the total, he said, because waves often carry plastic as deep as 65 feet (20 meters) below the surface.

(Related: “Plastic Breaks Down in Ocean, After All—And Fast.”)

Still, it’s not as if there’s so much plastic you can walk across the ocean surface, he said. Proskurowski said he has seen the floating Pacific plastic only once, when the sea was glassy calm.

“When I looked off the deck of the ship, I saw hundreds and hundreds of little tiny pieces,” he said. “When the wind picked up, I could no longer see it.”

Trash Escaping to Hawaii

Using floating satellite tags called drifters, Nikolai Maximenko of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu has tracked the currents that carry trash to the Atlantic and Pacific garbage patches.

In the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, drifter studies have indicated that currents occasionally change, allowing floating materials to escape the votex.

When that happens, “they never go to the California beach, but they do go to the Hawaiian Islands,” Maximenko said. Pieces that don’t wind up in Hawaii eventually cycle back into the Pacific garbage patch.

Drifters deployed in the Atlantic show a similar system of currents in the newfound garbage patch, the researchers said, which means pieces could be escaping when those currents shift.

Overall, the Sea Education Association’s Proskurowski said, finding plastic so far out in either ocean is sobering, because “it forces us into physical confrontation with the human impact on the environment.”

Source
natgeo.com

Says the ancient civil code of Israel, “When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable.” (Exodus 21:28)

However, the group is going further and laying the blame for the trainer’s death directly at the feet of Chuck Thompson, the curator in charge of animal behavior, because, according to Scripture,

But, the Scripture soberly warns, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn’t kill it after it claimed its first human victim, this time you die right along with your animal. To use the example from Exodus, if your ox kills a second time, “the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:29)

SeaWorld has no plans to execute Tilly.

Source
huffingtonpost.com

Extra small condoms for boys as young as 12 could soon be on our shelves.

The Hotshot condoms are going on sale in Switzerland after research found that not enough 12 to 14-year-old boys were having protected sex.

The condoms are likely to end up on sale in Britain, said their manufacturer Lamprecht AG.

A spokesman said the UK would be ‘top priority’ if the company expanded abroad, considering it had the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe.

Nysse Norballe said: ‘At the moment we are only producing the Hotshot in Switzerland.

‘But the UK is certainly a very attractive market since there is a very high rate of underage conception.’

A standard condom has a diameter of 52mm in comparison with the Hotshot’s 45mm. Both are the same length – 190mm.

According to a study of 13 to 20-year-olds, a quarter said that a standard condom was too large.

Hilary Pannack, of teenage pregnancy charity Straight Talking Peer Education, said: ‘We know young people are having sex and if this is what it takes to protect them, we need to go along with it.’

Source
dailymail.co.uk

Imagine zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.2 seconds. Laps times at Nurburgring in a faster lap time than a Carrera GT. Top speed of 198 mph. And most amazing, fuel economy of 78 miles per gallon.

It is the first of three Porsche hybrids being introduced at the Geneva Motor Show.

The 918 Spyder is one of three Porsche models with hybrid drive making their world debut at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show. Along with the Cayenne S hybrid SUV with parallel full-hybrid drive and the 911 GT3 R hybrid race car, the 918 shows that Porsche believes that performance and fuel frugality can peacefully coexist.

The 918 combines an electric drive with a high-revving V-8 engine:

It has a seven-speed transmission. The electric power flows from a liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery.

A button on the steering wheel allows the driver to choose among four different modes, Porsche says:

• It can run in E-Drive mode on electric power alone for 16 miles.
• As a hybrid mode, the 918 Spyder uses both the electric motors and the V-8 together.
• The sport hybrid mode uses both as well, only in a more aggressive performance manner.
• The race hybrid is about pure performance.

The body is made of carbon fiber, with liberal use of magnesium and aluminum to reduce weight and increase stiffness.

Inside, the driver monitors the powerplant from three dials: speed, revolutions and “energy management.” Much of the car’s functions are controlled from a touch-screen.

Source
usatoday.com

The two men jumped into the pool to cool down after sweating in a steam room.

A third man tried to save the victims but was unable to pull the men out of the boiling water, Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid reported today.

The two men’s bodies were discovered in the sauna in the city of Kirov in central Russia on February 18 and “their death was caused by overheating”, the Kirov regional investigative committee confirmed in a statement.

The water in the pool was “overheated due to an error by one of the victims,” investigators said.

Saunas usually include a cold plunge pool.

The men were named by investigators as the director of an old people

Source
news.com.au

Good thing those guys have wheels perfectly suited to the snowpocalypse. Our own Joe Brown was trying to convince them the Ford Freestyle is just the thing for hitting the road when the drifts are taller than you are. They didn’t agree, which of course prompted a nasty argument, and before long we had a list of vehicles that are just the thing for slip-sliding away to work or heading for the mountains to do some skiing.

Such cars are, ideally, an equal mix of durability, practicality and cargo capacity with perhaps a bit of disposability thrown in. Why disposability? Well, where there’s snow, there’s probably salt, and few things will destroy a car faster — unless it’s slick roads coupled with a lifelong desire to race in Rally Sweden. Seriously — at what other time of year can you legitimately slide through stop signs and do e-brake power slides without fear of being pulled over for reckless driving?

With such considerations in mind, we have made a list of cars that are perfect for a “snowicane” or heading to the mountains for a weekend on the slopes. It is by no means complete, and you’ll surely want to flame us for leaving something off. Please don’t do that. Tomorrow we’ll run a post with a Reddit widget so you can make your own suggestions and vote for your favorite.

Audi 4000S Quattro

This car started the all-wheel-drive sedan craze and made AWD available to those who couldn’t handle the awesomeness of the Quattro Coupe. Audi’s first-gen quattro system was mechanical, meaning the center and rear differential had to be locked into place with a dashboard switch. This let you do rear-wheel spinouts with reckless abandon while still giving you the option to get out of anything short of quicksand. The cars also were bulletproof, with many doing well over 250,000 miles.

Photo: Audi

Volvo 240 Wagon

Shaped like a brick, yes. Anemic, even with a turbocharged 4-cylinder engine, yes. Practical to the point of being boring, yes. Yet the 240 remains a fantastic car, especially in snow. It’ll carry you, four friends and all your gear up any mountain, or through even the most snowbound city. Plus they’re tougher than a quantum-physics final. Still not convinced? Well, remember Sweden gets a lot of snow.

Photo: Volvo

Toyota Pickup

Pick one. It doesn’t matter what year. They’re all damn near indestructible. Did you see what the guys at Top Gear did to one? If Jeremy Clarkson can’t kill one, neither can you. On top of that, the trucks are known for efficiency, dependability and utter coolness. You could drive one to the North Pole if you had to. Just ask the guys at Top Gear.

Photo: Toyota

Ford Freestyle

It’s comfortable. It’s got loads of room. It’s easy to drive. It’s all-wheel drive. And it’s got a fuel-sippin’ V-6. The Freestyle never got any respect, which is one reason Ford only made it for five years. But it’s perfect for soccer moms and the snowpocalypse, and those who didn’t hoon it in powder lost out.

Photo: Ford

Porsche 911 Carrera 4S

A Porsche? For the snowpocalypse? Yes. Everything looks better from behind the wheel of a Porsche, and the snow is no exception. You can put a rack on it to carry skis and snowboards. It’s got heated seats and a heated steering wheel to keep you toasty. Anti-lock brakes and stability control help keep you out of trouble. And of course it’s got all-wheel drive. Still, the laws of physics will kick in at some point, and that flat-6 mounted waaaay out in back will keep even the most well-poised drivers on their toes at times. It allows for some awesome e-brake slides. No, the car doesn’t rank at all highly on the disposability factor, so make sure your deductible is low.

Photo: Porsche

Subaru Outback

All-wheel drive, cavernous interior and anvil-like reliability. ‘Nuff said.

Photo: Subaru

Jeep Grand Wagoneer

Once upon a time SUVs were trucks with four doors. They didn’t have leather, they didn’t have DVD players, and they sure as hell didn’t cost $74,000. The Grand Wagoneer was the definition of that formula: Four doors, a V-8 and all the capability of the CJ. That was back when Jeep didn’t have to say its trucks were “trail-rated.” You just knew it. Most of them have long since rusted away to nothing, but you can find some nice and even restored Grand Wagoneers if you’re patient. To the originals still out there, we salute you.

Photo: Jeep

Ford Econoline

This perennial hauler has been known to carry anything and everything. One Autopian had a ‘78 Econoline beater that served him well through several midwestern winters. The straight-6 was underpowered. The heater was a joke. And it handled like a toboggan. But it was built like a tank and took huge amounts of abuse. Brute strength makes up for a lack of finesse, if you don’t care about sliding into anything.

Photo: Flickr/Steve G. Bisig

Any $500 Heap

OK, let’s face it. As cool as most of these cars are, a cheap heap really is all you need for winter. If you’ve got a sweet car, why subject it to snow, salt and morons who can’t drive when things get slick? Keep your baby in the garage and hit the roads in a hoopty. Our favorite is the AMC Eagle. Supremely practical, all-wheel-drive and — best of all — available with fake wood grain if you get the wagon.

Photo: AMC

Any Decommissioned World Rally Championship Car

Completely impractical, horribly expensive and probably illegal in most places, but you can’t beat a WRC car as the ultimate snowpocalypsemobile. Insane power, all-wheel drive and a five-point safety harness to keep your limbs in a tidy pile when things go bad. And they will. Putting your skis on the roof of a WRC car and roaring through Park City with an open exhaust is the road-going equivalent of flipping your middle finger at society. That’s a good thing.

Photo: Citroen

Source
wired.com