Invented by a Silicon Valley Storage Technology Expert
Email: info@sunzag.com  

   




Shredders Are Dangerous to Children and Pets
Data Storage Solutions: What is the BEST WAY to store important data?
Going Green
Erase Discs Without Shredding
Wade Sun...Inventor...Ping-Pong Player



Shredders Can Be A Danger To Children And Pets
Inside Edition - Investigative Reports

  

When you meet Hallie Mouritsen, you cant tell that there's anything wrong with this beautiful five year-old girl. But if you look closer at Hallie's left hand, her fingers are cut off at the knuckle. The doctor described them as being "crushed, mutilated and non-viable."

How did it happen? Hallie was feeding paper into a shredder in her home when her fingers got caught in its powerful blades. According to her father, Matt, "it grabbed her fingers and just began pulling."

And Hallie's not the only one. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has issued a safety alert after receiving 50 reports of injuries from paper shredders since 2000, most involving children younger than five.

Mr. Mouritsen is an accounting professor in Salt Lake City, Utah who often works at home. He says he had just opened the shredder for the first time and after using it, left the room briefly. Hallie, who was just two, went into the room with her older sister.

"The next thing I know, while I'm making dinner, my five year-old is yelling, she's stuck, she's stuck!" he told Inside Edition's Investigative Reporter Matt Meagher.

"I just knelt there and held her little face in my hands, and I tried to get her to talk about kitties and puppies and all the things that she loves," said Aimee Mouritsen, Hallie's mother.

According to Hallies parents the opening in this shredder, made by a company called Royal Consumer Information Products, Inc., was so flexible, it can allow a small child's fingers inside. He showed how a pencil could be quickly drawn into the machine.

Hallie's wounds took months to heal. Her dad still chokes up remembering Hallie's reaction the day the bandages came off. "She went like this with her hand (hiding his left hand)she couldn't even look at it." For her mother it was equally upsetting. "That was a sad day."

Hallie's family is one of about a dozen who have sued Royal, the nation's largest paper shredder manufacturer. Most of the lawsuits, including the Mouritsens, have been settled.

Michael P. Atkinson is the Tulsa-based attorney who represented the family. Atkinson urges, "Children should be kept away from paper shredders, particularly those that have problems with the design."

In a statement released to Inside Edition, the company says, "Royal is always concerned and troubled by any injury sustained by one of its consumers. However...We do not believe that there is any defect in its line of shredders."

Royal has changed the design of their shredders. The opening now has a protective bar and they've added new warnings. But the company has not recalled older models.

Royal says parents of small children should not allow them to use any shredder just as they would not allow them to use other household goods such as toasters and blenders.

But it's not just Royal, and it's not just kids. A number of pets have also been injured by shredders.

For one dog owner, it was a horrifying experience. Sandra Clarke of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina told us when she was at home working on March 1st, her curious puppy, Cross, caught his tongue in a shredder made by a different manufacturer. According to Sandra, it was not a pretty sight. "It looked like hamburger meat. It was shredded up about an inch. There was blood everywhere."

As for little Hallie, her parents worry if she even comprehends the challenges yet to come. "She asks us to this day, when are my fingers going to grow back?"

If you've had any bad experiences with a home paper shredder, let us know and be sure to report the problem to the Consumer Products Safety Commission.

TIPS:
Never allow children to operate a shredder, even under adult supervision.
Place shredder where it is not accessible to children or pets.
Unplug the shredder when it is not in use.
Do not place hands or fingers in the shredder opening.
Do not operate shredder when wearing loose-fitting clothes that could get caught in the machine.
Keep hair, ties and necklaces away from the machine's opening.
Do not put food wrappers through the shredder.

BACK TO TOP


Data Storage Solutions: What is the BEST WAY to store important data?
Wade Sun, Storage Technology Expert
Aug 12, 2006

With the internet explosion, and growing IT (information technology) age, there is a great need to be able to store all personal as well as important information. We're in a digital world that is rapidly progressing. We see photography growing into digital pictures. Music is going into mp3s and wavs. Video going into mpegs, avis, and rmvbs. Do you see the digital technology trend? It's exploding, and shows no signs of stopping!

Basically, there are 3 main types of data storage devices that I will comment about:

1)Flash storage

2)Hard Drives (HDDs)

3)Optical Media (CDs, DVDs, BDs)

1)Flash storage-Removable USB memory 'jump drives' and flash cards and drives. Up to 4 Gigabyte flash drives are now available from $100 to $300. Popular flash drives have 256MB, 512MB, and 1 Gig, starting at around $20. Looking at the price per Gigabyte, we see this method is the most expensive, about $10 per Gigabyte for the smaller drives, and up to $75 for the bigger 4 Gigabyte drives. People use them because they have fast transfer rate, and they are small and portable, a great way to transfer small files between computers. However, these are not failsafe...anyone who has used them knows that it's a delicate device, and you must properly 'eject' the device from your computer, or else it could get damaged and your data will be forever gone. I have had a co worker who lost his data because his flash drive got 'zapped'. Be careful! Most people may wear it around their neck with the enclosed neckband, but imagine this: What if you wore a wool sweater, and you walk alot on a carpeted floor? You'd get static electricity shock, which would ruin your flash drive. Because it contains delicate memory chips inside, one would have to exercise caution and not expose it to any electrical or magnetic fields or harsh vibrations or shock. In summary, flash storage is good for transferring small amounts of data between computers and digital cameras and other devices, but not a very secure way to store important data. The 2 Gigabyte capacity is small compared to the other storage devices.

2)Hard Drives-Forever dropping in price, but still expensive. The maximum capacities are around 250 Gigabytes right now, for about $129. This amounts to around $0.52 per Gigabyte cost. There are external USB/firewire drives that you can buy, which are a little more than $1 per Gigabyte. Well, we all know that Hard Drives have the biggest storage capacities. I used to be an engineer at hard drive companies, so I know how delicate the parts are inside a hard drive. You have disks(platters) spinning at thousands of RPMs and magnetic heads reading and recording your data onto the disks. Mechanically, it is a very complicated device and it is not uncommon for your hard drive to "crash" and lose all your information! I did some part time IT support and alot of problems were related to hard drives crashing (especially the higher capacity ones tend to crash more frequently). In summary, while hard drives provide the most capacity, they are actually fragile and not a reliable way to store important information. Their bulky size makes it inconvenient to transfer data between computers, the USB or firewire external drives enable you to swap it between computers without removing the case and fiddling with the IDE cable and power cable. Extra care must be taken with portable hard drives. I would carry them in insulated, static-dissipative bags and make sure it won't be exposed to shocks or vibrations.

3)Optical Media-Since the 1990s, recordable CDs (the CD-R) and DVDs (DVD-R,+R) and RWs have hit the market. CD-Rs store 700MB, and DVDRs can store from 4.7GB to 8.5GB (the new Dual Layer DVD+R). We see when the CD and DVD burners first hit the market, they were like $300 for a drive...but now, the prices have really dropped, and you can buy a 16x DVD dual layer burner for about $40. This makes sense, because the burner can be used over and over to back up important information onto discs, and the cost of the burner itself will be negligible over its repeated usage. So we can look to the price of discs...CD-Rs are pretty much dirt cheap, sometimes you can get free spindles with rebates. I've seen them as low as $0.10 per disc, which is about $0.14 per Gigabyte cost. I just recently bought a 50 pack spindle of 16x DVD-Rs for $15. That amounts to $0.30 per disc, and only $0.06 per Gigabyte! The lowest cost! Optical media is the way of the future. In consumer electronics trends, we see DVD recorders replacing VHS VCRs. Even camcorders have mini-DVD discs to record onto instead of magnetic tapes. Remember when VHS beat out Beta format? Well, optical media will eventually beat out VHS! We're seeing the beginning of the digital revolution.

4.7 Gigabyte DVDs should be enough for most data applications, video files are the biggest, and later this year, the Blu-Ray disc (BD) will be finally released. This will give optical media much more advancement, because for some data storage applications, 4.7 Gigabytes are not enough! BDs will store about 25GB per single layer disc, and 50GB per dual layer disc. The price per disc will most likely be a few times more than the 8.5GB DVD-DL discs that are out there (sale prices of $2 each). The DL disc amounts to around $0.23 per Gigabyte. I predict these prices will drop even more, once the Blu-Ray disc hits the stores. As far as prices, I don't know how much recordable BDs will cost, but if you calculate the price per Gigabyte, I betcha they will still be alot cheaper than flash memory or hard drives. BD burners may be expensive at the beginning, but theoretically they use the same components as a CD or DVD burner, the main difference is that the laser is much narrower to permit a higher trackpitch. The price of these new BD burners will eventually drop, but I say DVD burners will probably be enough for the average consumer.

Another obvious advantage of using optical discs to store information is the versatility: nearly every computer system sold now has a standard CD/DVD burner drive. You can easily transport CDs and DVDs, due to their small and lightweight size, they can go through X-ray machines, dropped, even static shocks won't damage a disc. The durability is outstanding, even NetFlix ships out DVDs in flimsy paper envelopes to their subscribers and uses the same envelope as a prepaid return envelope, because discs are so durable and cheap. Therefore, you will never have a disc getting "Zapped" or "crashing" and lose all your information, as you can with flash memory and hard drives. With unlimited amounts of discs you can burn, basically you can create many backups or archive all your digital pictures, movies, and important information onto the discs, make copies, and share them with friends or clients. Unlike magnetic media, the data encoded onto a CD is permanent, and will never deteriorate as long as you don't expose it to harsh UV rays from the sun for a prolonged period of time. The durability is an advantage, but many consumers still have a subconscious mindset that it is dangerous to burn important information onto a CD or DVD. It's like writing in ink, and can't be erased...they don't want personal data falling into the wrong hands. This is understandable and is a common reaction to new technologies. There are RW type discs that you can re-record (magneto-optical technology), but these are many times more expensive and have slower reading/writing speeds, and don't retain data as well as the regular CD-R and DVDR.

Many CD-R users have a stack of old CD-Rs that they don't use anymore, but still keep them because they contain personal/confidential information. Worldwide, an estimated 500,000 lbs of CDs and DVDs become unused or obsolete EVERY YEAR! This is comparable to about 1 disc per US household! My solution is to simply use the Disc Eraser, then dispose of them into a plastics recycling bin so that the useful polycarbonate and metal alloys can be re-used. The recycling industry has just begun to recycled used discs, but the consumers must do their part. Did you know that recycling companies prefer recycling whole CDs and DVDs, not shredded up, or cut up, fragmented little pieces? Why shred when you should recycle instead? My vision is that the Disc Eraser becomes a common office/computer item. It is the first data destruction device that PROMOTES RECYCLING. Every CD-R and DVDR user should own one for personal data security. Have the best of both worlds! Store your data on CDs and DVDs, and use the Disc Eraser when you no longer need them. And remember to recycle your old discs!

BACK TO TOP


Going Green
By Jerry Adler - Newsweek
July 17, 2006 issue

One morning last week ... 29 years after president Jimmy Carter declared energy conservation "the moral equivalent of war" ... 37 years after the first reference to the "greenhouse effect" in The New York Times ... one day after oil prices hit a record peak of more than $75 per barrel ... Kelley Howell, a 38-year-old architect, got on her bicycle a little after 5 a.m. and rode 7.9 miles past shopping centers, housing developments and a nature preserve to a bus stop to complete her 24-mile commute to work. Compared with driving in her 2004 Mini Cooper, the 15.8-mile round trip by bicycle conserved approximately three fifths of a gallon of gasoline, subtracting 15 pounds of potential carbon dioxide pollution from the atmosphere (minus the small additional amount she exhaled as a result of her exertion). That's 15 pounds out of 1.7 billion tons of carbon produced annually to fuel all the vehicles in the United States. She concedes that when you look at it that way, it doesn't seem like very much. "But if you're not doing something and the next family isn't doing anything, then who will?"

On that very question the course of civilization may rest. In the face of the coming onslaught of pollutants from a rapidly urbanizing China and India, the task of avoiding ecological disaster may seem hopeless, and some environmental scientists have, quietly, concluded that it is. But Americans are notoriously reluctant to surrender their fates to the impersonal outcomes of an equation. One by one—and together, in state and local governments and even giant corporations—they are attempting to wrest the future from the dotted lines on the graphs that point to catastrophe. The richest country in the world is also the one with the most to lose.

Environmentalism waxes and wanes in importance in American politics, but it appears to be on the upswing now. Membership in the Sierra Club is up by about a third, to 800,000, in four years, and Gallup polling data show that the number of Americans who say they worry about the environment "a great deal" or "a fair amount" increased from 62 to 77 percent between 2004 and 2006. (The 2006 poll was done in March, before the attention-getting release of Al Gore's global-warming film, "An Inconvenient Truth.") Americans have come to this view by many routes, sometimes reluctantly; Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, thinks unhappiness with the Bush administration's environmental record plays a part, but many of the people NEWSWEEK spoke to for this story are Republicans. "Al Gore can't convince me, but his data can convince me," venture capitalist Ray Lane remarks ruefully. Lane is a general partner in the prominent Silicon Valley firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has pledged to invest $100 million in green technology. He arrived at his position as a "Republican environmentalist" while pondering three trends: global warming, American dependence on foreign oil and the hypermodernization of Asian societies.

Others got to the same place by way of religion, most prominently Richard Cizik, director of governmental relations for the National Association of Evangelicals—but also people like Sally Bingham, an Episcopal priest in San Francisco and a founder of the religious environmental group Interfaith Power and Light. A moderate Republican, she had to defend herself on a talk-radio show from a listener who accused her of buying into the liberal myth of global warming. "I am," she pronounced frostily, "a religious person called to care for creation from this platform." And many followed their own idiosyncratic paths, like Howell, who started researching the connections between food, health and the environment after her mother died of cancer. Soon she and her husband, JD, found themselves caught up in replacing all their light bulbs and toilets with more-efficient versions and weighing their garbage, which by obsessive recycling they have reduced to less than 10 pounds a week.

But probably the most common formative experience is one that Wendy Abrams of Highland Park, Ill., underwent six years ago, as she was reading an article about global climate change over the next century; she looked up from her magazine and saw her four children, who will be alive for most of it. That was the year the hybrid Prius went on sale in the United States, and she bought one as soon as she could. This reflects what Pope describes as a refocusing of environmental concern from issues like safe drinking water, which were local and concrete, to climate change, which is global and abstract. Or so it was, anyway, until it came crashing into New Orleans last summer with the force of a million tons of reprints from The Journal of Climate. Katrina, says Pope, "changed people's perceptions of what was at stake"—even though no one can prove that the hurricane was directly caused by global warming.

BACK TO TOP



Erase Discs Without Shredding
www.dvd-recordable.org/Article2749.phtml
Jun 19, 2006

PRESS RELEASE: An innovative american company has come up with a simple but effective solution for destroying the confidential data stored on optical discs. The makers also claim their 'Disc Eraser' is the greenest product on the market.

The Disc Eraser is the first and only data security tool that promotes recycling. An intact disc is safer to handle and sort. For example, imagine going through the trouble of shattering all your glass bottles or cutting up your plastics containers before bringing them to the recyclers. Your fragments wouldn't be acceptable.

Likewise, don't cut or break or shred your CDs/DVDs, because this would render them unrecylclable. Use the Disc Eraser instead!

BACK TO TOP


Wade Sun...Inventor...Ping-Pong Player
http://www.sdtta.org/wade_sun-inventor.html
2006 Second Qtr News

Out of many thousands, Wade made it to the top 30 for the new hit Reality TV show, American Inventor, which airs Thursdays at 9pm.

He discovered and developed a new technique that quickly and safely destroys recordable media such as CD-Rs and DVD+Rs. What's more, he designed and prototyped a simple, easy to use device that implements this much needed data-security feature, for which "modern technology" has clumsily produced CD shredders for. Wade named and trademarked his new product as the Compact Disc Eraser, which caught the attention of the producers and the judges on the show. For those that are interested, go to his website at www.DiscEraser.com

Wade believes Table Tennis inspires creative thinking. "Most of the brightest, funniest, and most creative people I know are friends who play Table Tennis!" Wade himself is no exception to this statement, having the meanest penhold backhand loop known to man. An inventor since the age of 4, Wade has never gone this far with any of his past inventions. "My past is full of ideas and self-made prototypes, but for one reason or another, they never made it. But in the process, I learned many things, including how to patent and how to develop marketable products. Now, I'm learning so much about marketing, and it all has become an exciting new career path for me!" A San Diegan, Wade graduated from UCSD in 1997 as an Electrical Engineer, moved to San Jose for work, and then moved back to San Diego in 2005 after getting married. And his "best invention" is yet to be released, sometime in late July of this year. Yes, they are expecting their first baby - it's a boy!

SDTTA would like to say CONGRATULATIONS and GOOD LUCK to Wade!

BACK TO TOP


 
Copyright 2005-2007 SunZag. All Rights Reserved.