Republican National Convention

Volunteers wearing plastic rain ponchos steered drivers into the sprawling parking lot of River Ministries International, a campus on the outskirts of Tampa that includes an evangelical church, a worship school, and a “Holy Ghost training center.” There were food trucks and merchandise tables, including one man selling “Anybody but Obama” sticky notes.

A mortgage and real estate broker named Marshawn Hogans was selling anti-Obama T-shirts. He told me that the president and congressional Democrats posed a double threat to Christian businessmen like himself: First, they cut into his income with the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which gave federal bank regulatory agencies more regulatory authority over financial institutions. Then they sanctioned “perversion” with their support for gay marriage.

People arrived in groups, tickets in hand, backpacks open for inspection. They carried posters decrying “Obamacare.” Some wore colonial garb. The approaching rains weren’t going to keep them away from last night’s Unity Rally, a showcase for Tea Party favorites like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, who were denied speaking slots at this week’s Republican National Convention.

Once Tropical Storm Isaac blows through Tampa, the week will belong to Mitt Romney. But the weekend definitely belonged to the Republican Party’s more spirited voices: the Tea Party, the evangelical right and libertarian supporters of Ron Paul. As the Romney camp tries to evoke a unified GOP during the convention, the more party’s more ideological wings want to make sure their voices don’t get lost in the kumbaya.

“We are not an unwanted second-class political party,” said Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman who dropped out of the presidential race after finishing sixth in the Iowa caucuses. “We are the conscience of the United States Constitution.TBC help you confidently buymosaic from factories in China. We don’t apologize for that.” She ticked off a list of complaints about President Obama, including a stimulus package that amounted to “one boondoggle project after another” and a health-care reform law that she called “failed socialized medicine.” Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act, she said, “there’s only one option left for America to remain free, and that’s at the ballot box this November. We’re not going to stand by and see socialism implemented in our country.”

Obamacare made for good applause lines over and over. But the real cheering and stomping came when the language grew more visceral. It’s hard to imagine President Obama as anything close to a socialist—this is the man who appointed Timothy Geitner as his treasury secretary—but that message was sounded over and over through the night.GPS World's indoortracking section offers exclusive daily news, “Friends, we are not going to go quietly into that dark night of socialist tyranny,” declared Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation.Find detailed product information for Hot Sale howospareparts Radiator. “We are not going to let the lamp of liberty be extinguished by those who believe in government of the elites, by the elites, and for the elites.What is the difference between standard "ceramic" tiles and porcelaintiles?”

“We have one simple message for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid axis of fiscal evil: You shall take my freedom, you shall take my liberty when you pry it from”—and here the crowd joined in—“my cold, dead hands.”
If Obama’s alleged embrace of socialism weren’t enough, Phillips also questioned the president’s patriotism: “For the first time, we have a leader in America who is committed to diminishing the United States of America,” he said. “We’ve got a leader up there who thinks that America is not the greatest nation in the world.Check out the collection crystalmosaic of Marazzi.” The sanctuary erupted into boos.

In the world view of last night’s speakers, the United States is divided: those who want to keep their hard-earned money and those who believe in what President Obama has called “shared prosperity.”

“You drive to work in the dark,” said radio host Neal Boortz. “You work yourself to the bone. You drive home in the dark. You make good decisions. You work 80 hours a week. You become prosperous. Obama takes your money and gives it to somebody else who is more likely to vote for him than you are. And that is shared prosperity.”

Boos from the audience. “I won’t share my wealth!” a woman behind me shouted.

“The Democrats—the looters, the moochers, the parasites—they’re going for access to your pocket. You’re going to vote to put a zipper on your pocket, to the extent that you can … Our republic is on the edge, and we have a president who’s dedicated to what he calls a fundamental transformation and what I call destruction.”

True competition lesson for business

If there's one thing Australians love more than anything, it's a fair fight. Our laidback image is belied by our fiercely competitive spirit when it comes to sport.

We like it when people abide by the rules, the rules are fair, and the best person wins. The most heartwarming scenes of these Olympics have come when, after a hard-fought race, competitors can turn to each other, embrace and congratulate the winner.

We greet attempts by athletes to game the system with instinctive contempt. The badminton players who purposefully lost games to ensure a smoother path in future matches, for example, and even - in some quarters - the sight of the world's best pole vaulters, led by Australia's own Steve Hooker, colluding to go on strike and take all remaining vaulters through to the finals.

Putting aside the influence of drugs and dollars, what is truly admirable about the Olympics is the way it brings the world's best athletes together and lets them compete on a level playing field. May the best athlete win.

When it comes to the world of Australian business, such true competition is harder to find.

Compared with other nations, Australia's business community is something of an oligopolist's paradise. So many of the prices we pay are not the outcome of level playing fields.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from skyrocketing electricity prices is just how far the real world of business in Australia departs from the economist's model of a truly competitive market.What is the best way to clean porcelaintiles floors?

In economics, free markets consist of many buyers and sellers coming together to make mutually beneficial trades. No one seller can solely determine the price at which these trades occur. If they tried, buyers would simply march down the street to trade with an alternative seller.

Competition and the willingness of customers to walk down the road keeps companies honest.

Where competition is lacking, companies get lazy and are prone to engage in unsportsmanlike behaviour, such as collusion and price-fixing. A casual glance at the list of top companies on Australia's stock exchange reveals a host of companies whose profitability is dependent on some degree of pricing power: the banks, the telcos, the supermarkets, the petrol companies.

So often, buying petrol or banking services can feel like tuning in to the Olympics to watch all the competitors hold hands and walk over the finishing line together.

And Aussies can smell a rip-off a mile away. I suspect some part of the cost-of-living arguments of the past decade are not so much the result of stressed family budgets, which have been protected by rising incomes - on average at least - but the result of suspected injustice in those price rises.HellermannTyton manufactures a full line of high quality cableties in a variety of styles, Sometimes when there's smoke, there's fire.HellermannTyton manufactures a full line of high quality cableties in a variety of styles, And sometimes when there are big price hikes, there is a lack of competition.

The internet has opened shoppers' eyes to the benefits of competition and international trade. The result has been lower prices for consumers and better service and quality products.TBC help you confidently buymosaic from factories in China.

But for less tradeable products such as banking, petrol and food, the cosy duopolies and oligopolies remain.

The electricity debate is the new frontline in the cost-of-living debate and it opens a new can of competition worms - that of monopoly-owned infrastructure.

Partly because of the tyranny of distance, both from other countries and inside Australia, it has fallen to Australian governments to take the lead in building vital infrastructure that no one company would be prepared to build.

Next time you are frustrated waiting in the queue at Australia Post, remember that postal services in Australia are monopoly-owned.We develop a hybrid indoorpositioningsystem,

On hold with Telstra? Remember that until just recently, Telstra was the monopoly supplier of the telecommunications networkS.

Slugged exorbitant parking fees at the airport? Airports are monopolies too. The list goes on, for railways, ports, water services, natural gas pipelines.

For so many of the vital services that Australians use, prices are determined not as an outcome of a fair and free fight, but by government decree and attempts to determine an appropriate commercial return for infrastructure owners. The free market's got nothing to do with it.

But when governments intervene to enforce fairness of access, efficiency is always under threat.

When it comes to electricity, the result has been a perverse incentive for distribution network owners to ''gold plate'' the system. Good public policy requires that such incentives are identified and changed. Prime Minister Julia Gillard's new campaign is better late than never.

Australian consumers need to wise up too. Already suspicious they are getting ripped off on banking, electricity, petrol and telecoms, consumers need to seek out price information where possible and act on it by taking their business elsewhere.

Microsoft Reveals Visual Studio 11 Product Lineup, Adds Windows Phone

Microsoft has unveiled its final Visual Studio 11 product lineup and specifications, and the SKUs and hardware requirements are largely unchanged from Visual Studio 2010.

The major change involves the free Express tooling, which is now platform-centric (Windows 8 Metro, Windows Phone, Windows Azure) with multiple language support. This means that desktop application developers who want to use the latest tooling must purchase Visual Studio 11 Professional or higher.

Visual Studio 11 Ultimate is still the company's all-in-one Application Lifecycle Management platform. It integrates all of the tools (including the higher end testing functionality and design tools) with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server for team collaboration. Visual Studio 11 Premium offers most of the diagnostic and testing tools without the high level architecture and modeling support. Visual Studio 11 Professional is the entry-level developer product. Visual Studio LightSwitch, previously a standalone product,About 1 in 5 people in the UK have recurring coldsores. is now available in all three editions. All of the Visual Studio 11 products require Windows 7 or higher.

On Friday, Microsoft announced that it has added Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Phone to the lineup. The free tooling is slated for release with the next version of Windows Phone. The Visual Studio 11 previews (including the current beta product) have not supported phone development or out of band Windows Azure upgrades.

Express tooling for Windows Azure is expected with the next update of Microsoft's cloud platform, according to the Visual Studio team blog. In addition to the Windows Phone and cloud tooling,About 1 in 5 people in the UK have recurring coldsores. Microsoft is offering Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows 8, Visual Studio 11 Express for the Web and Visual Studio 11 Team Foundation Server Express. All three products are currently in beta and available for download.

The Visual Studio 11 default target for managed applications, running on Windows Vista or higher, is .NET Framework 4.5 or the VC11 tooling for native apps. Developers can use the IDE's multi-targeting support to run managed applications on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 with .NET 4 and earlier versions of the framework, according to Microsoft. However, multi-targeting for C++ requires a side-by-side installation of Visual Studio 2010.

Microsoft offered developers a preview of its estimated retail pricing for the Visual Studio 11 products earlier this year. The company is planning to offer Visual Studio Ultimate with a 12 month MSDN subscription ($13,299), Visual Studio Premium with MSDN ($6,119), Visual Studio Professional with MSDN ($1,Stone Source offers a variety of Natural stonemosaic Tiles,199) and Test Professional with MSDN ($2,169). Visual Studio Professional is also available as a standalone product without an MSDN subscription ($499). Full featured Team Foundation Server is $499, with the same ERP for a CAL (user or device). Outside of the entry-level Professional product without MSDN, Visual Studio 11 pricing is generally higher than Visual Studio 2010,Offers Art Reproductions Fine Art oilpaintings Reproduction, which debuted in April 2010.

Upgrades for existing customers with MSDN subscriptions are considerably less, and Microsoft is encouraging developers to buy or upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 with MSDN to take advantage of the renewal pricing for the Visual Studio 11 lineup.

The pricing on Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN ($799) remains unchanged. However, the company is offering various incentives including a bundle with a discounted Samsung Series 7 Slate ($2,Posts with Hospital rtls on IT Solutions blog covering Technology in the Classroom,198). Microsoft is also reducing the pricing on Visual Studio 2010 Professional from $799 to $499 U.S.

In April, Microsoft expanded its licensing terms for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 to enable access to Server Reports and System Center Operations Manager, without a CAL purchase. In March, the company started to offer Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 as a free download.

Visual Studio LightSwitch, which offers templates for building data-driven line of business apps, was released out of band last summer. It's availability as a standalone tool is ending when Visual Studio 11 is released, according to a blog posted by Jay Schmelzer, principal director program manager of the LightSwitch team at Microsoft. Visual Studio 11 is integrated with LightSwitch Version 2, which offers project templates for Windows 8 Metro style apps. LightSwitch also adds support for the OData protocol, which can be used for querying and integrating data services (HTTP, ATOM and JSON) into applications.

Review board warned that mentally ill man accused of murder was a risk

A review board began granting a man accused of murdering a gay activist this week conditional leaves from a psychiatric hospital in Halifax two months ago, even though the board considered the mentally ill man a "significant risk" to public safety.

But a legal expert in the mental health field says the warning in the disposition order from the Nova Scotia Review Board didn't mean Andre Denny was considered dangerous.

Denny was charged Wednesday with second-degree murder in the beating death of 49-year-old Raymond Taavel. The accused, diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was a teenager, is undergoing a 30-day psychiatric assessment.

Outside a court appearance for his client on Wednesday, defence lawyer Pavel Boubnov questioned the decision to temporarily release Denny from the East Coast Forensic Hospital on Monday night, saying his client is prone to violence when he is drinking and off his medication.

As he was being led into court, Denny, 32, shouted at reporters: "Drunken fight."

"Self-defence," he said. "What can I say?"

During a February hearing, the seven-member review board granted conditional leave for Denny, which included a one-hour pass on Monday night that started at 7:30 p.m. Police have said they began looking for Denny when he failed to return to the hospital.

The role of the board, which included two psychiatrists and four lawyers in February, is to decide on what level of community access should be granted to patients in the East Coast Forensic Hospital.

The hospital treats offenders from an adjacent provincial jail and patients who have been found unfit to stand trial, as well as others found not criminally responsible for their actions.

Despite the safety warning, law professor Archie Kaiser of Dalhousie University in Halifax says the term "significant risk" is a specific legal term that is easily misunderstood.

The term is used when the board wants to retain control over an individual as they are integrated back into society,Dimensional Mailing magiccubes for Promotional Advertising, he said. Without the designation, the law would have required the board to set Denny free with no conditions.

"The decision of the board says he is a significant threat because otherwise they would have to wash their hands of him,Aeroscout rtls provides a complete solution for wireless asset tracking." said Kaiser.

"When you see that phrase, it makes you wary about this decision. (But) the use of that terminology is necessary in the circumstances in order to retain jurisdiction over the accused."

A senior health official said Denny's profile at the forensic hospital wasn't all that different from other patients there.

"The board sees all of the patients here," said Dr. Scott Theriault, clinical director of the Department of Psychiatry at Capital Health.

"And all of the patients here, having been found not criminally responsible ... all have a mental illness and some proportion have substance abuse issues, and a good proportion ... lack insight into the mental illness."

In Denny's case, he was detained at the secure hospital in January after a court ruled he was not criminally responsible on a charge of assault causing bodily harm.Buy high quality bedding and bed linen from Yorkshire Linen. The verdict means the accused is incapable of appreciating the nature of their actions or knowing that they were wrong.

The order says Denny was accused of drinking vodka and beating a woman who laughed at him for suggesting "the devil is in the basement" at his home in Membertou, N.S., in June 2011.

"He admitted to striking the victim in the face with an open hand," the disposition order says.

When he was admitted to the hospital in September, it says Denny was "agitated, demanding, argumentative, intrusive, loud disorganized and paranoid." The document notes that Denny is dependent on alcohol, marijuana, opiates and others substances.Offers Art Reproductions Fine Art oilpaintings Reproduction,

With the adjustment of his medication, however, his condition improved and he was granted supervised outings in early February.

Still, the document says Denny continued to struggle.

One doctor at the facility noted that while Denny was aware of his diagnosis he was unable to distinguish reality from his delusions and did not connect his "bizarre experiences" with his illness.

"He also has very poor insight into the effects of substance use on his mental health and on the safety of others around him while he is using drugs and alcohol," the disposition order says.

At the hearing at the hospital on Feb. 20, one of the hospital's doctors warned that he was still unstable.

"Even though he has been here for a long time, he remains unwell and psychotic," the document says. "His behaviour can be quite intimidating at times. ... As recently as a few days ago, he was really delusional. He has poor insight into the adverse effects of drugs and alcohol."

Kaiser, who has a cross appointment at Dalhousie's psychiatry department, said these observations are not surprising, considering Denny's mental illness.

"It doesn't mean ... he would have been detained with no liberty and no prospects for rehabilitation," he said. "Yes,Our porcelaintiles are perfect for entryways or bigger spaces and can also be used outside, his thoughts may be disorganized. Yes, he may have some delusional thought. But that does not necessarily mean he would be a substantial risk to public safety."

Kaiser also pointed out that the disposition order makes it clear that Denny showed no signs of aggression prior to the hearing in February, and he was free of illicit drugs when subjected to random urine testing.

As well, the assault offence that led to Denny's detention is considered a "mid-level" offence, Kaiser added.

The report itself goes on to say that at least one doctor at the hospital concluded that Denny was expected to respond to drug treatment.

Nano-coating doubles rate of heat transfer

Pool boiling is the most common and familiar method of heating a container's contents, and is a remarkably efficient heat transfer method. The transfer of heat in this case is referred to as the "heat flux." There exists, however, a critical point at which a solid surface gets too hot and pool-boiling efficiency is lost.

"Delaying the critical flux could play an important role in advancing thermal management of electronics as well as improving the efficiency of a number of energy systems," says Bo Feng, Ph.D., the Georgia Tech researcher leading this project.

In boiling, bubbles carry away large amounts of heat from solid surfaces, but the bubbles also act as an insulator, preventing the liquid from rewetting the surface and thereby interrupting heat transfer. The alumina coating – only a few hundreds of atoms thick – has a high affinity to water and, as a result, facilitates the rapid rewetting of the solid surface.

"This is the primary reason for the enhancement of heat transfer," says Feng. An atomic layer deposition technique was used to control the thickness. By achieving such a thin coating, the additional layer of alumina did not appreciably increase thermal resistance, but it did increase the overall heat transfer.

"The potential contribution of this investigation lies in tailoring the wettability of surfaces at the nanometer scale, thereby greatly increasing the heat transfer during pool boiling," adds G.P. "Bud" Peterson, Ph.D., director of Georgia Tech's Two-Phase Heat Transfer Lab. "This is especially promising for applications where the implementation of nanotube or nanowire arrays are possible."

Nanotube and nanowire arrays are another effective way to enhance pool boiling heat transfer. Combining these two techniques – nanotube and/or nanowire arrays and nano-coating by atomic layer deposition – may increase pool-boiling efficiency even further.

Visually Stunning, Incredibly Tough Find Out What Devices Have It.

'Smart' windows are expected to play a significant role in energy-efficient homes, ideally by generating energy themselves (see "Energy-generating smart window") but at least by allowing light in and keeping the heat out (in hot summers) or in (in cold winters).

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) has long been recognized as a a material of significant technological interest for optics and electronics and a promising candidate for making 'smart' windows: it can transition from a transparent semiconductive state at low temperatures, allowing infrared radiation through, to an opaque metallic state at high temperatures, while still allowing visible light to get through. VO2 is best known in the materials world for its speedy and abrupt phase transition that essentially transforms the material from a metal to an insulator. The phase change takes place at about 68 degrees Celsius.

So far, VO2 hasn't been considered to be particularly suited for large-scale practical smart-window applications due to its low luminous transmittance and solar modulating ability. Strategies to improve these properties, for instance through doping or composites, have resulted in trade-offs between the luminous transmittance and thermochromic properties.

Researchers in China have now developed a process that can prepare VO2 thin-films with a controllable polymorph and morphology (including grain size and porosity). Their results show that with increased porosity and decreased optical constants the performance of the VO2 films is enhanced, leading to a higher transmittance of visible light and improved solar modulating ability.

"The traditional methods for the preparation of VO2 thin films are gas-phase reactions, such as sputtering or chemical vapor deposition," Yanfeng Gao, a professor at the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SICCAS), explains to Nanowerk. "These methods can grow VO2 with fine controlled thickness and homogeneity, however, low visible transmittance due to intrinsic absorption of VO2 and unacceptable solar energy modulation ability pose significant drawbacks. There are only very few reports on the chemical deposition of VO2 films using – for example – sol-gel process, but the quality of film is still not satisfactory. We are aiming to develop a process that can finally commercialize VO2. We selected our method to control the crystalline phase and morphology, and also optical properties."

To prepare their nanoporous thermochromic VO2 films with low optical constants and tunable thicknesses, the team used a polymer-assisted deposition technique, resulting in single-layered VO2 films.

"When we measured the spectral transmittance and reflectance of our VO2 films, we found that by increasing their porosity we could increase their solar modulating ability without decreasing the luminous transmittance," says Gao. "Another interesting phenomenon that we found is that the changes in luminous transmittance across the metal-insulator transitions (MIT) are thickness dependent. For thin-films, the visible transmittance at 20°C is generally lower than that at 90°C and, vice versa. However, the visible transmittance at 20°C for our 100 nm thick films exceeds that at 90°C."

Experimenting with various thicknesses, the team found that the optimized thickness for films prepared by their technique to balance luminous transmittance and solar modulating ability is 100 nm. As Gao points out, a single-layer film of this thickness shows comparable luminous transmittance and solar modulating ability values to those of five-layered TiO2/VO2/TiO2/VO2/TiO2 films with optically optimized structures.

"The change of the optical constants of VO2 across the MIT can effectively modulate the infrared transmittance and shift the position of the reflectance valley at 20°C, leading to a significant enhancement of the infrared modulating ability at a certain wavelength," says Gao.

Local hills hold precious resource

They’re not the White Cliffs of Dover, but they’re close.

Call them the White Cliffs of Lompoc.

In the green hills south of Lompoc lie some of the world’s largest and purest deposits of a chalky substance called diatomaceous earth.

Every time you brush your teeth, paint the house, drink a glass of wine, have a glass of beer or fruit juice, swim in a swimming pool or take a prescription medication, diatomaceous earth is involved.

Also called diatomite, it is also used as an insulator.

While largely unknown to laymen, “Virtually everyone in first-world countries uses some diatomite every day or at least uses a product produced with the aid of diatomite,” geologist Robert Norris wrote in his book, “The Geology and Landscape of Santa Barbara County.”

Diatomaceous earth is made up of the fossil remains of microscopic marine plants related to algae called diatoms, which built up into layers and were uplifted by earthquakes or volcanic activity millions of years ago, forming the so-called White Hills. Refined by mills into powder, it is used by countless industries.

“It’s the same material as that found in the White Cliffs of Dover,” said Dennis Headrick, executive assistant at the Lompoc Valley Chamber of Commerce, a sturdy two-story building on South I Street that is built of diatomaceous earth.

When the building was constructed in 1892, “they didn’t know what to do with it so they made building material of it,” said Headrick. The builder “was ridiculed for building it.”

The material is also known informally as Chalk Rock. “You can pick it up and draw on the sidewalk with it,” he said.

Large deposits of the material were found in the 1880s on the Balaam family farm in Miguelito Canyon south of Lompoc, according to the Lompoc Valley Historical Society.

A son, Arthur Balaam, who had studied mineralogy in school, discovered that “the Old White Hills,” as his father called the area, held a flaky substance that could be used in lighting fires. Digging hunks of material by hand from the ground, he shipped it to a buyer in San Francisco.

The first commercial shipment of diatomaceous earth followed on May 12, 1893.

Production grew into a large-scale operation covering thousands of acres and employing hundreds of Lompoc residents. Housing communities once grew up around the facility, said Karen Paaske, president of the Historical Society, whose parents worked at the mine, acquired by the Johns Manville Corp in 1928.

“To find good quality stuff is really rare,” said Paaske. “It’s very unique to Lompoc.”

The mining facility, owned by the Celite Corp. since 1991, is on Miguelito Road two miles south of Lompoc.

Hyderabad techie makes fibre from thermocol waste

A city-based engineer has developed a process that produces fine and flexible low-cost fibre from polystyrene and thermocol waste. The fibre thus produced can be used as a thermal insulator, packing material, raw material for soft toys, art and crafts and so on.

The engineer, Mr Subrata Dutta, who works for a private firm, said, “There is some awareness about the harm caused by plastic, but awareness about (the ill-effects) of thermocol or packing material is still limited. This polystyrene recycle process to prevent soil pollution from uncontrolled disposal of thermocol (polystyrene) uses a simple technology.”

Mr Dutta from Institute of Engineering and Mana-gement is also credited with other innovations for practical use such as a virtual inverter and mini refrigerator.

Mr Dutta says the fibre extraction process requires very little power as the heat required is less than that of boiling water. The entire process can be operated using electrical power, kerosene or appropriate solar heater.

The fibre produced is a crude replacement for jute and glass wool, but it has better thermal insulation properties and is lighter. Though the fibre is not as strong as jute and is difficult to use in weaving, it is cheaper and easier to manufacture.

Recycling it in the way Mr Dutta has demonstrated turns it into a green product that does not harm the environment.

Candlelight tour brings past residents to life

The men and women of the township’s past came back to life on two crisp fall nights on Oct. 22 and 23, sharing their tales with visitors as part of the East Brunswick Museum’s annual candlelight tour of the historic Chestnut Hill cemetery.

Several re-enactors, as well as Ken “the singing psychic,” helped to bring the historic residents back to life on a tour that Mark Nonestied, a past president of the East Brunswick Museum who organizes the event, said provides a unique and fun way to teach people about local history.

To uncover the stories behind the names on the cemetery’s tombstones, Nonesteid mines troves of different information, including census records, newspaper archives and other documents to help craft a script about their life and times, a process that takes months. Re-enactors then take the script and dressed in the clothes from the era, present these people to tour-goers, each with their own personality and way of interpreting the person they are playing

“It’s fun,” Nonesteid said. “I think people really enjoy it.”

The portrayals change each year and have included some of the more famous people laid to rest in the cemetery that houses graves dating back to the 1830s — including the 19th-century landscape artist James Crawford Thom and children’s book writer Henrietta Christian Wright — and everyday people as well.

“It’s just a story of the common person from the time period, and that’s a story that’s worth telling,” Nonesteid said.

With 2011 marking the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, this year’s tour worked to tell the stories of historic residents like Catherine Appleby, who lived through or was affected by the War Between the States.

Martha Austin Appleby, born in 1849, was married to Civil War veteran William Appleby, a member of the 28th Regiment of New Jersey Volunteers. William was injured in battle and discharged during the war, reenlisting later in the Navy and serving aboard the USS Nantucket.

Appleby, portrayed by East Brunswick Museum President Kathie Waite, showed 21st-century visitors a letter her husband received from a fellow soldier after the war that stated, “Well Appleby, we did not think then that we were making so much history. The Volunteers took it all as a matter of course.”

The Rev. John D. Killian, a Pennsylvania native who moved to East Brunswick to become the pastor of the Old Bridge Baptist Church, explained his church’s battle over the use of music in the liturgy and the repositioning of the church to face Kossman Street to minimize the appearance of a pigpen outside the church.

“You can’t make up this stuff,” Killian, played by Joe Ungrady of Old Bridge, joked.

But not all actors on tour were from the past. Ken “The Broadway Medium” Roginski, channeled the spirit of Frank Treat and told his tale through Broadway show tunes. Treat’s family owned a hotel on corner Kossman Street and the Old Bridge Turnpike in the early 1900s and served as an important destination, as Old Bridge Turnpike was the major highway to New Brunswick at the time.

“It served the best beer in town,” Roginiski, a Freehold resident, sang. “Friends would often stay here, kids would also play here, I wish that we all were still around.”

Later, Treat worked for the Brookfield Glass Insulator in Sayreville, creating glass insulators for telephone poles and served an important role as the gas lamp lighter for the East Brunswick Historic Village.

“So you know, I lived in the village below,” Roginski sang to the melody of George Gershwin’s “Summertime.” “And we had gas lights on the street that provided the glow. My responsibility was to light the lamps each evening. I was the old lamp lighter of long, long ago.”

Roginski, a historic preservationist who has appeared on TLC’s show “Dead Tenants,” said he has been doing the tour for many years and enjoys the reaction he gets from people during his presentation.

He said that the tour is a great way to teach people about history at a venue, the cemetery, that is perfect for the season and he finds fascinating.

Electron superhighways could hold key to quantum computing

A group of researchers has claimed the world is another step closer to building a working quantum computer.

They reckon they might have cracked one of the main components of a working quantum processor, a tiny device which functions as a ‘superhighway’ for electrons.

The team at Rice University developed a quantum spin Hall topological insulator that will be able to control and create qubits as part of a quantum processor, and store them as data.

One of the problems that all scientists are trying to overcome in creating qubits is making certain that that the information isn’t lost due to quantum fluctuations, known as fault tolerance.

Although it would only take a quantum processor with 30 qubits to perform around the same amount of calculations as a 1 billion transistor microchip, this is something that scientists have found difficult.

Using topological insulators as the basis of a quantum circuit is expected to help increase fault tolerance - due to each qubit being made from a pair of quantum particles that have a shared identity.

Topological insulators can block electrons from flowing through them, though they can flow around the narrow outer edges.  When attached to a superconductor, this can produce stable pairs of quantum particles called Majorana fermions where the two materials meet, meaning there is the potential to generate qubits.

The problem is that these Majorana fermion stable particles have yet to be observed by physicists, so quantum computers are not exactly within reach just yet.

But the team say that they are “well positioned” for more tests, and hope to find out whether the discovery of Majorana fermions will produce stable qubits.

Graphene's 'Big Mac' creates next generation of chips

The world's thinnest, strongest and most conductive material, discovered in 2004 at the University of Manchester by Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov, has the potential to revolutionize material science.

Demonstrating the remarkable properties of graphene won the two scientists the Nobel Prize for Physics last year and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has just announced plans for a £50m graphene research hub to be set up.

Now, writing in the journal Nature Physics, the University of Manchester team have for the first time demonstrated how graphene inside electronic circuits will probably look like in the future.

By sandwiching two sheets of graphene with another two-dimensional material, boron nitrate, the team created the graphene 'Big Mac' – a four-layered structure which could be the key to replacing the silicon chip in computers.

Because there are two layers of graphene completed surrounded by the boron nitrate, this has allowed the researchers for the first time to observe how graphene behaves when unaffected by the environment.

Dr Leonid Ponomarenko, the leading author on the paper, said: "Creating the multilayer structure has allowed us to isolate graphene from negative influence of the environment and control graphene's electronic properties in a way it was impossible before.

"So far people have never seen graphene as an insulator unless it has been purposefully damaged, but here high-quality graphene becomes an insulator for the first time."

The two layers of boron nitrate are used not only to separate two graphene layers but also to see how graphene reacts when it is completely encapsulated by another material.

Professor Geim said: "We are constantly looking at new ways of demonstrating and improving the remarkable properties of graphene."

"Leaving the new physics we report aside, technologically important is our demonstration that graphene encapsulated within boron nitride offers the best and most advanced platform for future graphene electronics. It solves several nasty issues about graphene's stability and quality that were hanging for long time as dark clouds over the future road for graphene electronics.

We did this on a small scale but the experience shows that everything with graphene can be scaled up."

"It could be only a matter of several months before we have encapsulated graphene transistors with characteristics better than previously demonstrated."

Graphene is a novel two-dimensional material which can be seen as a monolayer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice.

Its remarkable properties could lead to bendy, touch screen phones and computers, lighter aircraft, wallpaper-thin HD TV sets and superfast internet connections, to name but a few.

The £50m Graphene Global Research and Technology Hub will be set up by the Government to commercialise graphene. Institutions will be able to bid for the money via the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) – who funded work leading to the award of the Nobel prize long before the applications were realised.

Asbestos incident at Surry plant probed

The state Department of Labor and Industry is investigating a claim of asbestos exposure at Surry Power Station.

The claim was made by a contractor working with the station's owner, Dominion Virginia Power, to refuel one of two nuclear reactors.

It was made some time — neither Dominion nor state officials would say when — after April 16, when a tornado knocked out power to the station. Backup generators kicked on to prevent the release of harmful radiation.

"We're looking into it, yes," said department spokeswoman Jennifer Wester, who declined to elaborate pending results of the investigation.

Hundreds of contractors from multiple companies have been working at the station to refuel the reactor, a process that usually takes a month. Some are replacing turbines, which are kept in a building separate from the reactors, Dominion spokesman Rick Zuercher said.

Dominion suspended work after a contractor complained the area might not be safe. Zuercher said a "team of experts" determined that asbestos levels did not exceed standards set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Work has since resumed, he said.

Asbestos was commonly used as an insulator and fire retardant in building materials and heat-resistant gaskets and coatings, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Left alone, it usually does not harm humans. But when disturbed, microscopic fibers can enter the lungs and, after continuous exposure, can cause lung cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma.

Most products that contained asbestos were banned and phased out of usage in the 1990s, according to the EPA.