$15,000 grant creating device to “modify” guests behavior

BY: Elizabeth Harrington March 17, 2015 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants hotels to monitor how much time its guests spend in the shower.

The agency is spending $15,000 to create a wireless system that will track how much water a hotel guest uses to get them to “modify their behavior.”

“Hotels consume a significant amount of water in the U.S. and around the world,” an EPA grant to the University of Tulsa reads. “Most hotels do not monitor individual guest water usage and as a result, millions of gallons of potable water are wasted every year by hotel guests.”

“The proposed work aims to develop a novel low cost wireless device for monitoring water use from hotel guest room showers,” it said. “This device will be designed to fit most new and existing hotel shower fixtures and will wirelessly transmit hotel guest water usage data to a central hotel accounting system.”

The funding is going toward creating a prototype and market analysis for the device. The goal of the project is to change the behavior of Americans when they stay at hotels.

“This technology will provide hotel guests with the ability to monitor their daily water online or using a smartphone app and will assist hotel guest in modifying their behavior to help conserve water,” the grant said.

The project was filed under “Water conservation,” “Urban water planning,” and “Sustainable water management.”

The EPA also has a WaterSense program that challenges hotels to track their water use and upgrade their restrooms with low-flow toilets and showerheads.

The program also encourages “linen and towel reuse programs” in guest rooms.

The EPA is concerned that the average shower, which lasts just eight minutes, uses 18 gallons of water, and has asked Americans to reduce their shower length by at least one minute.

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The maker of Children’s Tylenol agreed to plead guilty to a federal criminal charge of knowingly selling adulterated bottles of its painkillers for children and infants. The drugs were recalled in 2010 because they contained metal particles.

Johnson & Johnson subsidiary McNeil Consumer Healthcare ‒ which makes Infants’ and Children’s Tylenol and Children’s Motrin ‒ agreed to pay $25 million to resolve the case, the Associated Press reported, citing court documents. The deal came at a plea hearing Tuesday afternoon.

“The proposed criminal resolution is sufficient to punish McNeil for its past failures and to deter McNeil from violating” federal law in the future, prosecutors wrote in a memo to the judge overseeing the case.

Metal particles ‒ including nickel, iron and chromium ‒ were introduced during the manufacturing process at McNeil’s plant in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. The company began a voluntary recall in April 2010. The drugs may also have contained more of the active drug ingredient than specified, the company said in a statement at the time.

McNeil Consumer Healthcare makes over-the-counter drugs for kids (Screenshot from mcneil-consumer.com)

“The particles may be solidified product ingredients or manufacturing residue such as tiny metal specks,”said Marc Boston, a McNeil spokesman, according to the New York Times.

Prosecutors accused the company of continuing to sell the tainted products for nearly a year after discovering the problem, also claiming that McNeil failed to take immediate steps to fix the cause of the adulteration.

The Johnson & Johnson subsidiary first learned of the particle problem in May 2009, when a consumer complained about black specks inside a bottle of Infants’ Tylenol, according to court documents.

McNeil subsequently found metal particles during production but continued making the liquid medicines for several more months. The company and prosecutors said Tuesday that no one was injured due to the tainted drugs.

However, Shawn Arndt, whose 4-year-old son Joshua died after taking one dose of Infant’s Tylenol, sued the company in 2012. The US District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania dismissed his suit in December 2014, in part because Joshua died in November 2009, several months after the recall went into effect.

A Food and Drug Administration investigation traced the problem to machinery at the Fort Washington plant, which included manufacturing violations and airborne contamination from a chemical used for wood pallets, Drugwatch reported. The suburban Philadelphia location was shuttered in April 2010, rebuilt from the ground up, but has yet to re-open. The closing of the factory caused supply disruptions for several of McNeil’s over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, the company said in a March 2013 statement.

Johnson & Johnson has been forced to issue a variety of pharmaceutical recalls since 2009. McNeil was not the only subsidiary that had quality-control failures during that time period.

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L.J. Devon

(NaturalNews) The controlling surveillance state is deepening, prying further into people’s lives like a chisel carving its way through skin and bone. Governments have become opportunistic control freaks, centralizing their micromanagement powers whenever possible. Now the European Union is rolling out plans to monitor travel on all European roads, tracking drivers’ mileages and time traveled per vehicle. This controlling scheme is not for surveillance alone; it’s essentially a plan to tax every driver for the for the distance they travel on European roads.

Could you imagine being taxed for every quarter-mile you drive? 

A senior European politician is doing just that, calling on all European vehicles to be installed with road-pricing systems. This would include mandatory installation of a computer that would track how long one has driven on European roads and how far. This plan would serve as a built-in tax, harmonizing all road toll charges across the EU. The plan would end road-side tollss and replace them with time-tracking and/or distance-tracking toll micromanagement systems.

EU Transport Commissioner says computer system should regulate distance traveled

One of the plan’s advocates, Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc, is also trying to make the computer system as efficient as possible. She said that the EU travel regulations will put “a burden on car drivers” while becoming an “obstacle to their mobility.”

Bulc is advocating for a plan that charges drivers per kilometer and not by time. Her plan also includes a way to limit the speed of cars to minimize fuel loss. Bulc doesn’t want to encourage speeding drivers by pressuring them for every minute they are operating their vehicle. Instead, she thinks it’s safer and more efficient to charge drivers by the mile. It doesn’t matter which way she looks at it, the plan to install computers in all vehicles is a gross violation of property and privacy, and another way centralized government can micromanage the people and their finances.

Bulc said, “It doesn’t matter where you come from — everyone will only pay for the distance they have actually driven and it will be billed on a device throughout Europe. We’re currently investigating just such an idea.”

She continued, “There are many options — a fee could be obligatory but it’s also possible to make it optional i.e. that countries decide themselves whether and on which roads they want to levy a road use charge based on kilometres driven.”

The built in pay-by-the-mile scheme was slammed by UKIP transport spokesman Jill Seymour MEP.

She said, “[L]ook how the EU overrides the democratic decision of the British people: an unelected Slovenian bureaucrat in Brussels announces in a German newspaper interview that she wants to force all British drivers to fit computers in their cars which will count every mile they drive.”

She pointed out, “Britain will be forced into an EU-wide scheme in which Commissioner Bulc will force all drivers to pay for using our own roads, and the money will go straight to Brussels.”

She continued her argument: “This would be outrageous on three counts. First, it would be the imposition of a tax on tens of millions of UK citizens without the consent or control of parliament. Second, the money raised would not go to HM Treasury but to the bureaucrats in Brussels who would then undemocratically decide how the money would be spent on their own EU road schemes. Third, the idea that every British car would be fitted with a high-tech computer tracking every trip a driver makes is an invasion of privacy which we cannot tolerate.”

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