A Georgia Tech research team has developed a novel technology that could change how industry designs and casts complex, costly metal parts. This new casting method makes possible faster prototype development times, as well as more efficient and cost-effective manufacturing procedures after a part moves to mass production.
Suman Das, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, has developed an all-digital approach that allows a part to be made directly from its computer-aided design (CAD). The project, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has received $4.65 million in funding.
"We have developed a proof-of-concept system which is already turning out complex metal parts, and which fundamentally transforms the way that very high-value castings are made," said Das, who directs the Direct Digital Manufacturing Laboratory in Georgia Tech's Manufacturing Research Center (MaRC). "We're confident that our approach can lower costs by at least 25 percent and reduce the number of unusable waste parts by more than 90 percent, while eliminating 100 percent of the tooling."
The approach being utilized by Das and his team focuses on a technique called investment casting, also known as lost-wax casting. In this process, which dates back thousands of years, molten metal is poured into an expendable ceramic mold to form a part.
The mold is made by creating a wax replica of the part to be cast, surrounding or "investing" the replica with a ceramic slurry, and then drying the slurry and hardening it to form the mold. The wax is then melted out – or lost – to form a mold cavity into which metal can be poured and solidified to produce the casting.
Investment casting is used to create precision parts across diverse industries including aerospace, energy, biomedical and electronics. Das's current efforts are focused on parts used in aircraft engines. He is working with turbine-engine airfoils – complex parts used in jet engines – in collaboration with the University of Michigan and PCC Airfoils.
Today, Das explained, most precision metal castings are designed on computers, using computer-aided design software. But the next step – creating the ceramic mold with which the part is cast – currently involves a sequence of six major operations requiring expensive precision-machined dies and hundreds of tooling pieces.
"The result is a costly process that typically produces many defective molds and waste parts before a useable prototype is achieved," Das said. "This trial-and-error development phase often requires many months to cast a part that is accurate enough to enter the next stage, which involves testing and evaluation."
By contrast, Das's approach involves a device that builds ceramic molds directly from a CAD design, completing the task much faster and producing far fewer unusable parts. Called Large Area Maskless Photopolymerization (LAMP), this high-resolution digital process accretes the mold layer by layer by projecting bitmaps of ultraviolet light onto a mixture of photosensitive resin and ceramic particles, and then selectively curing the mixture to a solid.
The technique places one 100-micron layer on top of another until the structure is complete. After the mold is formed, the cured resin is removed through binder burnout and the remaining ceramic is sintered in a furnace. The result is a fully ceramic structure into which molten metal – such as nickel-based superalloys or titanium-based alloys – are poured, producing a highly accurate casting.
"The LAMP process lowers the time required to turn a CAD design into a test-worthy part from a year to about a week," Das said. "We eliminate the scrap and the tooling, and each digitally manufactured mold is identical to the others."
A prototype LAMP alpha machine is currently building six typical turbine-engine airfoil molds in six hours. Das predicts that a larger beta machine – currently being built at Georgia Tech and scheduled for installation at a PCC Airfoils facility in Ohio in 2012 – will produce 100 molds at a time in about 24 hours.
Although the current work focuses on turbine-engine airfoils, Das believes the LAMP technique will be effective in the production of many types of intricate metal parts. He envisions a scenario in which companies could send out part designs to digital foundries and receive test castings within a short time, much as integrated-circuit designers send CAD plans to chip foundries today.
Moreover, he said, direct digital manufacturing enabled by LAMP should allow designers to create increasingly sophisticated pieces capable of achieving greater efficiency in jet engines and other systems.
"This process can produce parts of a complexity that designers could only dream of before," he said. "The digital technique takes advantage of high-resolution optics and precision motion systems to achieve extremely sharp, small features – on the order of 100 microns."
2012年5月20日星期日
'Age of Miracles' offers an original premise and strong storytelling
Why is it that so many authors and filmmakers love to depict deteriorating futures in which our daily lives become worse and worse? And why are we so entertained by franchises that promote these themes?
Understandably, this is more dramatic than a bright, no-worries future, and such stories teach us moralistic lessons about how we should uphold and never surrender our virtues so, hopefully, we don’t allow such dark futures ruled by greed and hate to come into existence.
In Karen Thompson Walker’s upcoming novel “The Age of Miracles,” she presents a unique scenario for the future in which no one has control over the changes undergoing the world. And she shows us through believable storytelling how people would adapt — or not — to a rapidly, irreversibly decaying planet.
“The Age of Miracles” is told from the viewpoint of 11-year-old Julia, who, along with the rest of the world, discovers the earth’s rotation is slowing down and the days and nights are growing longer and longer.
Gradually, plants die from having too much sunlight or not enough; birds fall dead out of the sky; people contract a “gravity sickness” that ravages their bodies.
There is much dissension between those who wish to remain on the normal 24-hour clock (despite that days and nights no longer correspond to it), and those who wish to live in “real time” with the ever-extending rhythms of the earth.
As if Julia’s coming-of-age dilemmas weren’t complicated enough, she struggles to cope with the rising tensions between her parents, her unstable friendships with her classmates, and the emotional changes occurring within herself while the world seems to be falling apart.
This novel focuses not so much on the “slowing” (a scientific explanation is never given for why the planet’s rotation has slowed), but on the characters’ decisions and reactions to the events taking place.
There is a wide range of personalities all with their own unique viewpoints that Walker molds deftly and lovingly — there are no “bad” characters in this novel — and Julia is an appealing character who displays both the precarious awkwardness and the budding rebelliousness of adolescence.
She isn’t written as a sort of “role model” for young female readers, but she is natural and honest, not always having the answer but doing the best she can to keep going and struggle through complicated situations.
There is also something satirical about this story, regarding the “real-timers” versus the “clock timers.” It is a whole new breed of prejudice, as real-timers are shunned and even threatened by those who stay on the clock.
And it gets intense enough that real-timers begin to move out and build separate communities out in the California deserts. It seems a bit ludicrous for people to get so passionate about time and how we define it. Is it by the man-made devices we use to track it, or by the cycles of nature which can suddenly flux?
But when you think about how much our civilization has been built on the concept of time, the one thing that should be an untouchable constant, maybe it’s not so far-fetched to see how its disruption would bring out the worst in us.
“The Age of Miracles” is a beautiful debut for Walker, with a creative premise that makes it stand out among the array of dystopian-themed novels that have flooded the literary market as of late.
It will be released in bookstores on June 26, and hopefully time won’t slow down before then to make us wait any longer.
Understandably, this is more dramatic than a bright, no-worries future, and such stories teach us moralistic lessons about how we should uphold and never surrender our virtues so, hopefully, we don’t allow such dark futures ruled by greed and hate to come into existence.
In Karen Thompson Walker’s upcoming novel “The Age of Miracles,” she presents a unique scenario for the future in which no one has control over the changes undergoing the world. And she shows us through believable storytelling how people would adapt — or not — to a rapidly, irreversibly decaying planet.
“The Age of Miracles” is told from the viewpoint of 11-year-old Julia, who, along with the rest of the world, discovers the earth’s rotation is slowing down and the days and nights are growing longer and longer.
Gradually, plants die from having too much sunlight or not enough; birds fall dead out of the sky; people contract a “gravity sickness” that ravages their bodies.
There is much dissension between those who wish to remain on the normal 24-hour clock (despite that days and nights no longer correspond to it), and those who wish to live in “real time” with the ever-extending rhythms of the earth.
As if Julia’s coming-of-age dilemmas weren’t complicated enough, she struggles to cope with the rising tensions between her parents, her unstable friendships with her classmates, and the emotional changes occurring within herself while the world seems to be falling apart.
This novel focuses not so much on the “slowing” (a scientific explanation is never given for why the planet’s rotation has slowed), but on the characters’ decisions and reactions to the events taking place.
There is a wide range of personalities all with their own unique viewpoints that Walker molds deftly and lovingly — there are no “bad” characters in this novel — and Julia is an appealing character who displays both the precarious awkwardness and the budding rebelliousness of adolescence.
She isn’t written as a sort of “role model” for young female readers, but she is natural and honest, not always having the answer but doing the best she can to keep going and struggle through complicated situations.
There is also something satirical about this story, regarding the “real-timers” versus the “clock timers.” It is a whole new breed of prejudice, as real-timers are shunned and even threatened by those who stay on the clock.
And it gets intense enough that real-timers begin to move out and build separate communities out in the California deserts. It seems a bit ludicrous for people to get so passionate about time and how we define it. Is it by the man-made devices we use to track it, or by the cycles of nature which can suddenly flux?
But when you think about how much our civilization has been built on the concept of time, the one thing that should be an untouchable constant, maybe it’s not so far-fetched to see how its disruption would bring out the worst in us.
“The Age of Miracles” is a beautiful debut for Walker, with a creative premise that makes it stand out among the array of dystopian-themed novels that have flooded the literary market as of late.
It will be released in bookstores on June 26, and hopefully time won’t slow down before then to make us wait any longer.
2012年5月17日星期四
Para Clocks Are Like Spirographs Made Of Concrete
The year must have been 1990. I was in grade school, and it was one of those Friday afternoons where we got to play board games for one hour before going home. Games had been set up on desks across the room. I must have been distracted, because by the time I looked around the class, all the of good stations had been filled.
The only thing left was the stupid Spirograph station with a stupid boy and a stupid girl I’d never met. I had no idea how the stupid contraption worked or why anyone would want to make stupid spirals with stupid colored pencils. Then I tried it. These strange, stupid tools… they were amazing. My stubby fingers were deftly weaving intricate, nay, downright ornamental patterns of a beauty generally reserved for higher mathematics. It was a great, great day.
This memory had been buried for years before I came across the Para Clocks, a new Kickstarter-based project by the young collective LeeLABS. Based upon simple, radial geometry, these clocks seem born from some sort of concrete Spirograph, one that molds rock rather than shaping the shavings of graphite.
In reality, LeeLABS is building an online and app-backed tool for users to create their own parametric designs, which LeeLABS will carve into a plastic mold before casting the custom shape into a concrete clock. It’s a pretty cool riff on the idea of custom 3-D printing. Rather than producing some sort of cheap plastic product, LeeLABS’ Para Clocks are just starting with the inexpensive plastic prototyping, then using that to create an object that will have about as much physical permanence as physical objects can have.
The result is a bit of a dichotomy in the rapid prototyping space, but it’s just the sort of creative production that can support small scale customized product infrastructures. The consumer can receive a product that’s far more polished than anything they could make in-house (a gorgeous concrete lattice), but the manufacturer isn’t using equipment that’s anywhere near as expensive as a mass manufacture system (it’s appears to be a basic lathe). The deal works out for everyone.
As for me, after that one afternoon in class, I actually never picked up a Spirograph again, and I’ve long forgotten the names of those two new friends. I’m tempted to order a kit off Amazon, but the thought of a grown man playing Spirograph alone on his living room coffee table? I guess there are stupider choices I could make.
The only thing left was the stupid Spirograph station with a stupid boy and a stupid girl I’d never met. I had no idea how the stupid contraption worked or why anyone would want to make stupid spirals with stupid colored pencils. Then I tried it. These strange, stupid tools… they were amazing. My stubby fingers were deftly weaving intricate, nay, downright ornamental patterns of a beauty generally reserved for higher mathematics. It was a great, great day.
This memory had been buried for years before I came across the Para Clocks, a new Kickstarter-based project by the young collective LeeLABS. Based upon simple, radial geometry, these clocks seem born from some sort of concrete Spirograph, one that molds rock rather than shaping the shavings of graphite.
In reality, LeeLABS is building an online and app-backed tool for users to create their own parametric designs, which LeeLABS will carve into a plastic mold before casting the custom shape into a concrete clock. It’s a pretty cool riff on the idea of custom 3-D printing. Rather than producing some sort of cheap plastic product, LeeLABS’ Para Clocks are just starting with the inexpensive plastic prototyping, then using that to create an object that will have about as much physical permanence as physical objects can have.
The result is a bit of a dichotomy in the rapid prototyping space, but it’s just the sort of creative production that can support small scale customized product infrastructures. The consumer can receive a product that’s far more polished than anything they could make in-house (a gorgeous concrete lattice), but the manufacturer isn’t using equipment that’s anywhere near as expensive as a mass manufacture system (it’s appears to be a basic lathe). The deal works out for everyone.
As for me, after that one afternoon in class, I actually never picked up a Spirograph again, and I’ve long forgotten the names of those two new friends. I’m tempted to order a kit off Amazon, but the thought of a grown man playing Spirograph alone on his living room coffee table? I guess there are stupider choices I could make.
2012年5月16日星期三
Strike gold at Museum of the San Ramon Valley
On Jan, 24, 1848 the American River resounded to the cry "Gold! Gold!" and thousands headed to California from across the country, many landing in the San Ramon Valley. Residents can heed the same call at the Museum of the San Ramon Valley's Gold Rush exhibit, on display through July 14.
This exhibit tells that story, from the first electric moment until it played out in Danville and San Ramon as miners arrived searching for attractive home sites. The exhibit features trail diaries, rifles and more artifacts from pioneer San Ramon Valley families who established themselves locally after finding their fortune.
One of those pioneers was Robert O. "R.O." Baldwin, an Ohio farmer who farmed in the valley and whose descendants continued to make their mark on the Bay Area. Baldwin arrived in the valley in 1852, after striking gold in Feather River.
"When he rode through the valley, being a farmer from Ohio, thought this was a garden of Eden in California. He wrote 'I never had a reason to change my mind,'" said Stan Wharton, a museum docent.
Baldwin grew wheat, fruit trees and occasionally beets. He built a large home off what is now El Capitan in Danville, near Osage Station Park. In fact, the park gets its name from the Osage trees (native to Ohio) Baldwin planted.
In addition to photos, the museum will display tools used in placer mining such as gold pans, a sluice box, gold molds, a miner's poke and sizing forks. When the easy placer gold was gone, hard rock mine tunnels were dug and actual hand drills, miner's candles, a can that held black blasting powder, mercury to pull the gold from the ore and many other artifacts will be displayed.
The devastating hydraulic mining practice that radically transformed the Sierra landscape relied on hydraulic hoses and nozzles to blast out the gold. Actual documents and displays will tell many stories in print.
The museum is located at the corner of Railroad and Prospect Avenues in downtown Danville. It is open from 1-4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from 10 a.m.-1 p.m. on Saturdays.
Those interested in learning more about San Ramon Valley Gold Rush history are invited to attend a special event with Sourdough Steve on May 17. A dinner and lecture, titled "Tales from the Gold Diggings," will be held at 7 p.m. at the San Ramon Gold Club. Steve will regale attendees with tall tales and true tales about life in the gold diggings and make 49'er history come alive.
This exhibit tells that story, from the first electric moment until it played out in Danville and San Ramon as miners arrived searching for attractive home sites. The exhibit features trail diaries, rifles and more artifacts from pioneer San Ramon Valley families who established themselves locally after finding their fortune.
One of those pioneers was Robert O. "R.O." Baldwin, an Ohio farmer who farmed in the valley and whose descendants continued to make their mark on the Bay Area. Baldwin arrived in the valley in 1852, after striking gold in Feather River.
"When he rode through the valley, being a farmer from Ohio, thought this was a garden of Eden in California. He wrote 'I never had a reason to change my mind,'" said Stan Wharton, a museum docent.
Baldwin grew wheat, fruit trees and occasionally beets. He built a large home off what is now El Capitan in Danville, near Osage Station Park. In fact, the park gets its name from the Osage trees (native to Ohio) Baldwin planted.
In addition to photos, the museum will display tools used in placer mining such as gold pans, a sluice box, gold molds, a miner's poke and sizing forks. When the easy placer gold was gone, hard rock mine tunnels were dug and actual hand drills, miner's candles, a can that held black blasting powder, mercury to pull the gold from the ore and many other artifacts will be displayed.
The devastating hydraulic mining practice that radically transformed the Sierra landscape relied on hydraulic hoses and nozzles to blast out the gold. Actual documents and displays will tell many stories in print.
The museum is located at the corner of Railroad and Prospect Avenues in downtown Danville. It is open from 1-4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from 10 a.m.-1 p.m. on Saturdays.
Those interested in learning more about San Ramon Valley Gold Rush history are invited to attend a special event with Sourdough Steve on May 17. A dinner and lecture, titled "Tales from the Gold Diggings," will be held at 7 p.m. at the San Ramon Gold Club. Steve will regale attendees with tall tales and true tales about life in the gold diggings and make 49'er history come alive.
2012年5月15日星期二
AFinproject invests in India and Mexico
Italian molder and compounder Finproject SpA is making new investments at facilities in India and Mexico as part of its international expansion strategy.
The company produces more than 30,000 metric tons per year of vinyl and polyolefin compounds for various sectors, but it is most closely associated with footwear, in particular Crocs EVA foam clogs. Finproject’s molding division also makes soles, sandals and boots with polyolefin compounds bearing its own brand name XL Extralight for customers such as Hugo Boss and Samsonite.
Ascoli Piceno, Italy-based Finproject is currently investing a total of 8 million euros ($10.2 million) in India and Mexico, said Maurizio Vecchiola, board member and part of the Vecchiola family that founded Finproject in 1964.
The company expects a new molding and compounds plant in Rajasthan, India, to be completed in September, said Vecchiola, speaking to European Plastics News at the Plast 2012 fair in Milan. The new 86,000 square foot facility will take over production from a site it currently rents in Rajasthan.
The company also is investing in new technology and machinery at a facility in Mexico which belongs to Foam Creations, part of the Finproject group, based in Quebec. The facility started operations in 2010, making soles and polyolefin compounds.
Vecchiola said Finproject is now considering an acquisition in Italy. Although he could not give details for confidentiality reasons, he said that if completed the acquisition would increase Finproject’s annual sales about 49 percent to 110 million euros ($140 million).
He said Finproject invests in various regions to gain advantages in buying materials and in manufacturing products locally.
“Thanks to investments worldwide, we can offer prices in the local currency and deliver our products on time,” he said.
The strategy proved fruitful in its relationship with Niwot, Colo.-based Crocs Inc., which started when Finproject formed Foam Creations in 1996 as a result of a deal with Evasol Plastics. The Crocs lightweight clogs were developed by Foam Creations and launched by Crocs in 2001. Crocs bought Foam Creations in 2004 and then sold it back to Finproject in 2008.
The Finproject group now operates eight facilities around the world: three in Italy and one each in Romania, Canada, Mexico, India and China.
At Plast, Finproject showed its new biodegradable compounds: BioLevirex for use in polyolefins, and BioFinpro for use in PVC.
The company produces more than 30,000 metric tons per year of vinyl and polyolefin compounds for various sectors, but it is most closely associated with footwear, in particular Crocs EVA foam clogs. Finproject’s molding division also makes soles, sandals and boots with polyolefin compounds bearing its own brand name XL Extralight for customers such as Hugo Boss and Samsonite.
Ascoli Piceno, Italy-based Finproject is currently investing a total of 8 million euros ($10.2 million) in India and Mexico, said Maurizio Vecchiola, board member and part of the Vecchiola family that founded Finproject in 1964.
The company expects a new molding and compounds plant in Rajasthan, India, to be completed in September, said Vecchiola, speaking to European Plastics News at the Plast 2012 fair in Milan. The new 86,000 square foot facility will take over production from a site it currently rents in Rajasthan.
The company also is investing in new technology and machinery at a facility in Mexico which belongs to Foam Creations, part of the Finproject group, based in Quebec. The facility started operations in 2010, making soles and polyolefin compounds.
Vecchiola said Finproject is now considering an acquisition in Italy. Although he could not give details for confidentiality reasons, he said that if completed the acquisition would increase Finproject’s annual sales about 49 percent to 110 million euros ($140 million).
He said Finproject invests in various regions to gain advantages in buying materials and in manufacturing products locally.
“Thanks to investments worldwide, we can offer prices in the local currency and deliver our products on time,” he said.
The strategy proved fruitful in its relationship with Niwot, Colo.-based Crocs Inc., which started when Finproject formed Foam Creations in 1996 as a result of a deal with Evasol Plastics. The Crocs lightweight clogs were developed by Foam Creations and launched by Crocs in 2001. Crocs bought Foam Creations in 2004 and then sold it back to Finproject in 2008.
The Finproject group now operates eight facilities around the world: three in Italy and one each in Romania, Canada, Mexico, India and China.
At Plast, Finproject showed its new biodegradable compounds: BioLevirex for use in polyolefins, and BioFinpro for use in PVC.
2012年5月14日星期一
Bad burritos ruin lunch for some at Kingman schools
Several students at Cerbat Elementary and La Senita Elementary turned their noses up Wednesday to an unwelcome lunch visitor - mold.
About 20 students at La Senita and 10 at Cerbat brought their green chili burritos back to the lunch line and said their food "didn't look so good," said Paula Loomis, Kingman Unified School District director of food services.
"There's no way we could have known they were bad," Loomis said.
The burritos were purchased from Las Cabos Mexican Foods, a wholesale frozen food distributor. The burritos come from the company prepackaged in cellophane that contains colorful graphics, making it impossible to tell if something is wrong with the burritos, Loomis said. The burritos are cooked in those packages as well.
The burritos are shipped on a refrigerator truck where they are kept at 10-degrees below zero. They are transferred to the freezers - which are also kept at 10 below - at KUSD's central kitchen. The day before the burritos are to be served, they're taken out of the freezers and put in a thaw box, which sits at about 36-38 degrees. The day they're served they're cooked in the central kitchen to 160 degrees, and then taken to each of the schools where their temperature is taken once when they get there and once before they're served, Loomis said.
Representatives of Las Cabos told Loomis the only way the burritos could've molded is if they were left in the open for five days or in the refrigerator for 10.
"That's impossible," Loomis said. "They go straight from the truck to the freezer until the day before they're served."
KUSD has an extremely large freezer in its central kitchen, Loomis said. There are also plenty of people working in there who wouldn't allow something to sit out, she added.
The district's food services are inspected twice a year by the county health department and receive excellent scores, Loomis said. Also, KUSD food services was inspected by the School Meals Initiative and the Coordinated Review Effort in January, receiving "excellent" ratings both times.
The district has used Las Cabos for years, Loomis said, and nothing like this has happened before. Las Cabos is looking into the incident on its own as well. Loomis said she didn't want to throw the company under the bus, but maintained that KUSD is not a fault for this incident.
When the moldy burritos started being brought back to the lunch line by students, Loomis explained that food service workers stopped serving burritos from the batch. New burritos were cooked, what was thought to be the bad batch was thrown away and students received new burritos.
"These were the last of the burritos," Loomis said. "They're gone for the year."
It was an isolated incident, Loomis said. No one got sick, and the situation has been rectified, she added.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, some molds are dangerous because they cause allergic reactions and respiratory problems. A few molds - in the right conditions - produce "mycotoxins," which are poisonous substances that can make you sick. Mycotoxins are found primarily in grain and nut crops, but are also known to be on other forms of produce.
It's also worth noting that cutting visible mold off of food doesn't necessarily make it safe to eat. What you see on the surface of food is only part of what's going on.
About 20 students at La Senita and 10 at Cerbat brought their green chili burritos back to the lunch line and said their food "didn't look so good," said Paula Loomis, Kingman Unified School District director of food services.
"There's no way we could have known they were bad," Loomis said.
The burritos were purchased from Las Cabos Mexican Foods, a wholesale frozen food distributor. The burritos come from the company prepackaged in cellophane that contains colorful graphics, making it impossible to tell if something is wrong with the burritos, Loomis said. The burritos are cooked in those packages as well.
The burritos are shipped on a refrigerator truck where they are kept at 10-degrees below zero. They are transferred to the freezers - which are also kept at 10 below - at KUSD's central kitchen. The day before the burritos are to be served, they're taken out of the freezers and put in a thaw box, which sits at about 36-38 degrees. The day they're served they're cooked in the central kitchen to 160 degrees, and then taken to each of the schools where their temperature is taken once when they get there and once before they're served, Loomis said.
Representatives of Las Cabos told Loomis the only way the burritos could've molded is if they were left in the open for five days or in the refrigerator for 10.
"That's impossible," Loomis said. "They go straight from the truck to the freezer until the day before they're served."
KUSD has an extremely large freezer in its central kitchen, Loomis said. There are also plenty of people working in there who wouldn't allow something to sit out, she added.
The district's food services are inspected twice a year by the county health department and receive excellent scores, Loomis said. Also, KUSD food services was inspected by the School Meals Initiative and the Coordinated Review Effort in January, receiving "excellent" ratings both times.
The district has used Las Cabos for years, Loomis said, and nothing like this has happened before. Las Cabos is looking into the incident on its own as well. Loomis said she didn't want to throw the company under the bus, but maintained that KUSD is not a fault for this incident.
When the moldy burritos started being brought back to the lunch line by students, Loomis explained that food service workers stopped serving burritos from the batch. New burritos were cooked, what was thought to be the bad batch was thrown away and students received new burritos.
"These were the last of the burritos," Loomis said. "They're gone for the year."
It was an isolated incident, Loomis said. No one got sick, and the situation has been rectified, she added.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, some molds are dangerous because they cause allergic reactions and respiratory problems. A few molds - in the right conditions - produce "mycotoxins," which are poisonous substances that can make you sick. Mycotoxins are found primarily in grain and nut crops, but are also known to be on other forms of produce.
It's also worth noting that cutting visible mold off of food doesn't necessarily make it safe to eat. What you see on the surface of food is only part of what's going on.
2012年5月13日星期日
'The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera'
It’s a truism among scholars that if you don’t like your subject you probably aren’t going to do a very good job. Harvey H. Jackson III, Eminent Scholar in History at Jacksonville State University, has never had that problem, and in his latest book, “The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera: An Insider’s History of the Florida-Alabama Coast” (Georgia, $28.95), he may be said to have been born to it. Reared in Clarke County, Ala., chasing “submarines and alligators” along the Alabama River and whiling summers away on the Florida Panhandle, Jackson is as far from a tweedy academic as it is possible to imagine. He looks good in shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops, glories in offshore fishing, and loves the Flora-Bama with a passion to match that of any bubba. And, man, can he write. If after finishing this beer-soaked and sand-whipped tour de force you don’t find yourself heading to the beach, check your pulse.
Jackson’s purpose in this book, besides just plain celebrating a favorite part of the world, is to understand how it came to be what it is today. His focus is the stretch of coast between Fort Morgan and Panama City, and the cast of characters includes “mice and men, turtles and tourists, rednecks and real estate tycoons.” Many of the highlights will be familiar to longtime residents — hurricanes like Opal and Frederic and Ivan, the Alabama beach mouse, real-estate flipping, Seaside, Joe Francis’ 2003 “Girls Gone Wild” invasion of Panama City and, of course, the BP oil spill. His sources include lots of newspapers like the Destin Log, the Walton Sun, and the Press-Register; books; personal interviews, including a moving one with a paramedic about the unglamorous consequences of binge drinking — “I’ve seen them dead; I’ve seen them maimed for life”; a bikini poster promoting spring break in Panama City; and even a Girls Gone Wild video or three.
To anyone tooling along the coast today, hemmed by multistory condos along the Gulf side and garish strip developments and acres of tacky on the other, it’s difficult to imagine how recent all of this is. Before World War II, the central Gulf Coast was lightly built, and small villages of fishermen, oyster shuckers and small merchants greeted the sun each day. There weren’t a lot of vacationers, and those who did come found shelter in small, family-owned motels or scantling-board shacks perched on pilings. The fishing was fantastic, especially at Destin, “The Luckiest Little Fishing Village in the World,” situated hard by the 100-fathom curve, a deep-water drop-off that is a sportsman’s paradise. Change came, of course, gradually and then ever faster, with broader economic perks, especially during the Reagan years.
Down at Gulf Shores, things remained pretty basic until Hurricane Frederic in 1979, when a new breed of people — “raffish Rotarians, pirates with cash register eyeballs, and hard-handed matrons” — realized there were heady profits to be made. Hard as it is to believe, before Frederic there was only one condo in Gulf Shores. Today, there are over a hundred complexes, some of them with hundreds of units. Gone are the mom-and-pop motels like the old Lighthouse, and the funky beach houses that remain become steadily crowded by bigger developments.
Jackson reserves his lustiest prose for the Flora-Bama, easily the Redneck Riviera’s most distinctive, definitive and beloved landmark. He details the origins of the Mullet Toss and even how much beer is consumed that weekend (let’s just say the figure is prodigious). There are strict rules to the contest — stay in the circle, don’t throw out of bounds, the fish has to be slick, and you can kiss the fish, but you can’t pour beer into it.
Jackson’s purpose in this book, besides just plain celebrating a favorite part of the world, is to understand how it came to be what it is today. His focus is the stretch of coast between Fort Morgan and Panama City, and the cast of characters includes “mice and men, turtles and tourists, rednecks and real estate tycoons.” Many of the highlights will be familiar to longtime residents — hurricanes like Opal and Frederic and Ivan, the Alabama beach mouse, real-estate flipping, Seaside, Joe Francis’ 2003 “Girls Gone Wild” invasion of Panama City and, of course, the BP oil spill. His sources include lots of newspapers like the Destin Log, the Walton Sun, and the Press-Register; books; personal interviews, including a moving one with a paramedic about the unglamorous consequences of binge drinking — “I’ve seen them dead; I’ve seen them maimed for life”; a bikini poster promoting spring break in Panama City; and even a Girls Gone Wild video or three.
To anyone tooling along the coast today, hemmed by multistory condos along the Gulf side and garish strip developments and acres of tacky on the other, it’s difficult to imagine how recent all of this is. Before World War II, the central Gulf Coast was lightly built, and small villages of fishermen, oyster shuckers and small merchants greeted the sun each day. There weren’t a lot of vacationers, and those who did come found shelter in small, family-owned motels or scantling-board shacks perched on pilings. The fishing was fantastic, especially at Destin, “The Luckiest Little Fishing Village in the World,” situated hard by the 100-fathom curve, a deep-water drop-off that is a sportsman’s paradise. Change came, of course, gradually and then ever faster, with broader economic perks, especially during the Reagan years.
Down at Gulf Shores, things remained pretty basic until Hurricane Frederic in 1979, when a new breed of people — “raffish Rotarians, pirates with cash register eyeballs, and hard-handed matrons” — realized there were heady profits to be made. Hard as it is to believe, before Frederic there was only one condo in Gulf Shores. Today, there are over a hundred complexes, some of them with hundreds of units. Gone are the mom-and-pop motels like the old Lighthouse, and the funky beach houses that remain become steadily crowded by bigger developments.
Jackson reserves his lustiest prose for the Flora-Bama, easily the Redneck Riviera’s most distinctive, definitive and beloved landmark. He details the origins of the Mullet Toss and even how much beer is consumed that weekend (let’s just say the figure is prodigious). There are strict rules to the contest — stay in the circle, don’t throw out of bounds, the fish has to be slick, and you can kiss the fish, but you can’t pour beer into it.
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