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Wiele osób się teraz zdziwi, jednakże zakup siedziska absolutnie nie kwalifikuje się w danym momencie do najłatwiejszych czynności. Zdecydowanie najistotniejsze jest w gruncie rzeczy to, do jakiego rodzaju czynności potrzebne jest nam wybrane po starannym przemyśleniu akcesorium. Osoby, które realizują pracę w trybie biurowym, powinny zwrócić bardzo wiele zasobów uwagi na parę istotnych parametrów. Kręgosłup powinien być zawsze usztywniony, żeby obciążenie pleców nie było niebezpieczne dla kondycji. Po prostu zbawienną dla zdrowotnej kondycji kwestią będzie także sposobność regulowania aktualnej wysokości siedziska. Wobec tego, będzie można utrzymać odpowiednią postawę, abstrahując całkowicie od swojego wzrostu. Element zagłówka i jego regulacja – tego typu rozwiązanie także będzie przydatna. Dzięki temu elementowi, możemy być pewni, że będziemy mieć optymalną postawę. W kwestii zakupu, świetnie będzie posiłkować się internetową przestrzenią, tam bez najmniejszego kłopotu można zakupić różnego typu fotele obrotowe. Kluczowe będzie zdefiniowanie całokształtu dla swych potrzeb, z których pomocą możliwy będzie bez dwóch zdań najlepszy wybór siedziska.

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Despite the well-publicized dangers and laws against it in many states, texting or emailing while driving remains a huge problem.

Robert F. Bukaty/AP i

Despite the well-publicized dangers and laws against it in many states, texting or emailing while driving remains a huge problem.

Robert F. Bukaty/AP

One of the most dangerous things you can do behind the wheel of your car is text or check your email. Texting and driving is illegal in 39 states, the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands and Guam.

Despite the danger, millions of us continue to do it. I am ashamed to say that I was one of them.

During the recent presidential campaign I was on the road — a lot. I was mainly driving on rural roads in places like Iowa, Indiana and, of course, Ohio. On several occasions I checked my email while driving, and like many people I rationalized my behavior.

“You’re not the only the one,” says Carroll Lachnit of Edmunds.com. “I’m loathe to say it’s an epidemic because that sounds so strong, but when you have a phone in the car, the temptation to use it can be pretty overwhelming.”

The desire to stay connected is so great that many of us can’t resist. You need only stand on any street corner and watch drivers to see just how many people are using their cellphones while behind the wheel.

Lachnit points out that there are efforts to keep the hands of drivers on the wheel with things like voice-activated software to read text messages or emails and apps that automatically respond to text messages saying, “I’m driving.” The technology, however, has a long way to go.

Lachnit says that perhaps people need to start “shaming” each other more when they see people using their phones while driving.

“I give people the stink-eye all the time if I see them holding their cellphone while they’re in the car,” she says. “The problem is, they’re not looking at me. They’re looking at their damn cellphone.”

Daniel McGehee, who studies distracted driving and vehicle safety at the University of Iowa, says that emailing is the “trifecta of distraction,” because it takes your eyes, hands and attention off the road.

McGehee also says many of us delude ourselves by thinking that it’s OK to check our email at a traffic light.

“It’s not,” McGehee says. “Some of the most intense distractions can come when you’re stopped.”

Often at stop signs you may not be aware of pedestrians and other cars around you, and it can take time for your brain to shift from text or email mode to driving mode. One of the most common forms of crash is the rear-end collision.

McGehee says it is best to turn off or put your phone in a bag and leave it put.

“If you take a look at the kinds of things that are going back and forth, they’re really unimportant,” he says. “Is it really so important to send that string of messages back and forth for the last 45 seconds of your life?”

Talking to McGehee, Lachnit and others, I’ve come up with some tips to help avoid texting or mailing while driving.

1. Don’t distract people you know are driving: You know when you’re spouses or loved are commuting. Don’t text or call them when you know they’re on the road. “Are you here yet?” “Where are you?” Those texts and calls can be avoided.
2. Inform your colleagues: Before I go on a trip of any length now, I let my editor know that I’ll be driving for a while. I also set an out-of-office message that says “I’m on the road,” when I leave my desk for a while. What this does is gives you piece of mind that you’re not missing some important email. McGehee says this allows you to be responsive
3. Check in: It’s always thoughtful to check in with your loved ones before you head home. This can avoid the need to text or call or the desire to do so.
4. Turn the sound off on your devices: This will help you eliminate the temptation to check your email or text if you’re constantly hearing the beep of the phone whenever a new message is received.
5. Use hands-free devices: Studies have found that talking on the phone is not as dangerous as other distractions. So if you must call, use a hands-free device.
6. Prepare before you leave: Put your coordinates into the GPS, turn to your local NPR station and set up your playlists or audio books or podcasts before you get on the road.
7. Set reminders: I’ve taken to putting in the tag line of my outgoing messages from my smartphone: “This email is not worth taking your eyes off the road to read or write.” So even if I find myself tempted to read and respond to a text, I remind myself that I shouldn’t.
8. Peer pressure: Everyone can do their part to remind friends and family to not text or email and drive. It seems kind of after-school special, but how many of us would let our friends drink and drive?

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Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney waves to supporters before giving his concession speech in Boston on Tuesday.

Stephan Savoia/AP i

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney waves to supporters before giving his concession speech in Boston on Tuesday.

Stephan Savoia/AP

It was called Project ORCA and the killer app was meant to be the Romney campaign’s “unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election,” as described in a campaign memo.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

A sly jab at the Obama campaign’s Project Narwhal, ORCA was to be a digital voter turnout and monitoring system using volunteers with smartphones to replace the standard phone- and paper-based get-out-the-vote methods.

Romney poll volunteers would enter information they were getting from the field into an “app” about where voters were and were not turning out. That information would then be used by the 800 volunteers at the campaign’s headquarters to allocate resources at precincts in real time.

On Election Day, however, volunteers described issues logging into the site and the inability to properly add voters to the system. The website eventually crashed for about 90 minutes, a problem the campaign attributed to an overload of the data servers at its Election Day headquarters in Boston. Volunteers also described issues with training and support from ORCA days before the election.

In a blog post, Web developer and Romney volunteer John Ekdahl wrote about issues with ORCA he saw early on:

“Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like ‘Has this been stress tested?’, ‘Is there redundancy in place?’ and ‘What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?’, among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.”

Ekdahl describes a combination of both logistical and technology failings of the ORCA effort. One of the problems was that the “app” itself was actually a mobile-optimized website. Confused volunteers searched for the app in the Android and Apple stores, not knowing they had to navigate to the site in a browser. The site also wasn’t turned on until 6 a.m. on Election Day, Ekdahl says, so volunteers had no familiarity with it beforehand.

All of this, Ekdahl writes, resulted in “30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers … wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help.”

In an interview with ABC News on Friday, Zach Moffatt, the Romney campaign’s digital director, responded to the criticism of ORCA saying, “Was it flawless? No. … Without a doubt, ORCA had its challenges.”

Moffatt told ABC, however, that the system did work and recorded data on 14.3 million voters, and that volunteers reported 5,397 incidents of ballot box issues.

“You can’t have a system that’s not working and still get those numbers,” he said.

While few are saying that Romney would have won had ORCA not failed, including Moffatt, it does cast a light on the use of technology in campaigns. More importantly, however, is that the technology works properly when you need it most.

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Men look at mobile phones at the Adjame market in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The market for mobile telephones in developing countries has grown quickly, and now Facebook and Google are trying to get users to use the Internet on their devices.

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Men look at mobile phones at the Adjame market in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The market for mobile telephones in developing countries has grown quickly, and now Facebook and Google are trying to get users to use the Internet on their devices.

Issouf Sanogo /AFP/Getty Images

The chances are slim that a person living in poverty in a developing nation has access to the Internet on a computer. It’s expensive and, in some places, there’s a lack of infrastructure to support it.

The chances are better, though, that that person owns a cellphone. It’s probably not an iPhone or an Android, and he or she probably hasn’t purchased a data plan for it, but it has the ability to access the Internet.

Google believes that this category of cellphone user is the future of its expansion.

On Thursday, Google, alongside the local mobile carrier Globe Telecom, announced a new service in the Philippines called Free Zone, Reuters reports. It allows basic mobile users to access Google products including search, email and Google Plus.

The free service is intended to eventually entice users to shell out for more advanced phones and, presumably, more expensive data plans. If the service is successful, it will expand into other countries.

“It’s aimed at the next billion users of the Internet, many of whom will be in emerging markets and encounter the Internet first on a mobile phone, without ever owning a PC,” AbdelKarim Mardini, product manager for Google, told Reuters.

Google is not the only tech company seeking to tap into emerging markets this way.

As Quartz’s Christopher Mims reports, Facebook has long considered mobile on non-smartphones in the developing world key to the company’s continued expansion.

To that end, Facebook has created two ways for non-smartphone users to experience the social-networking service.

In 2010, Facebook launched Facebook Zero, a text-only version of its service. Users in 45 countries with “mid-range feature phones” can click on links, send messages and update their statuses.

The features of the app are basic, but enough to prompt the kind of wildfire success that fuller versions of Facebook had in the United States. In Africa, the number of people on Facebook jumped 114 percent in 18 months.

And in 2011, Facebook and Snaptu announced a new app called Facebook for Every Phone. It was built for more than 2,500 different types of mobile devices, constituting around 80 percent of the devices sold worldwide. It had 30 million users at acquisition.

Still, there’s room for both Facebook and Google to grow in these markets.

Mashable’s Alex Fitzpatrick reports that approximately three-quarters of the world’s population have access to a mobile phone, and that the majority of those subscriptions are in developing countries.

But owning a mobile device does not yet automatically equate to having Internet access. For example, according to The Economist, only 81 million Indians, or 7 percent of the population, use the Internet, while 507 million own mobile phones.

Narrowing that gap is the task for Internet-based companies in the 21st century.

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Senior Minister of State Lee Yi Shyan transplants some leafy green seedlings at the grand opening of Singapore’s first commercial vertical farm.

Courtesy of MNDSingapore. i

Senior Minister of State Lee Yi Shyan transplants some leafy green seedlings at the grand opening of Singapore’s first commercial vertical farm.

Courtesy of MNDSingapore.

Singapore is taking local farming to the next level, literally, with the opening of its first commercial vertical farm.

Entrepreneur Jack Ng says he can produce five times as many vegetables as regular farming looking up instead of out. Half a ton of his Sky Greens bok choy and Chinese cabbages, grown inside 120 slender 30-foot towers, are already finding their way into Singapore’s grocery stores.

The idea behind vertical farming is simple: Think of skyscrapers with vegetables climbing along the windows. Or a library-sized greenhouse with racks of cascading vegetables instead of books.

Ng’s technology is called “A-Go-Gro,” and it looks a lot like a 30-foot tall Ferris wheel for plants. Trays of Chinese vegetables are stacked inside an aluminum A-frame, and a belt rotates them so that the plants receive equal light, good air flow and irrigation. The whole system has a footprint of only about 60 square feet, or the size of an average bathroom.

Troughs of bok choy stack up vertically at the 30-feet urban farm in Singapore. The veggies rotate along the A-frame to ensure they receive even light.

Courtesy of MNDSingapore. i

Advocates, whose ranks are growing in cities from New York City to Sweden, say vertical farming has a handful of advantages over other forms of urban horticulture. More plants can squeeze into tight city spaces, and fresh produce can grow right next to grocery stores, potentially reducing transportation costs, carbon dioxide emissions and risk of spoilage. Plus, most vertical farms are indoors, so plants are sheltered from shifting weather and damaging pests.

But is vertical farming just a design fad, or could it be the next frontier of urban agriculture? That depends on your angle — and location.

Implementing these “farmscrapers” on a commercial scale has been challenging, and making them economical has been almost impossible.

It’s still up for debate whether vertical farms are more efficient at producing food than traditional greenhouses, says Gene Giacomelli, a plant scientist at the University of Arizona, who directs their the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center.

The limiting factor is light. The total food produced depends on the amount of light reaching plants. Although vertical farms can hold more plants, they still receive just about the same quantity of sunlight as horizontal greenhouses.

“The plants have to share the existing light, and they just grow more slowly.” Giacomelli tells The Salt. “You can’t amplify the sun.”

For American cities, like New York and Chicago, Giacomelli thinks putting plain-old greenhouses on rooftops could be just as efficient as vertical farms – and a lot easier to implement.

In fact, two companies are already working on that approach. Gotham Greens is producing pesticide-free lettuce and basil for restaurants and retailers from rooftop greenhouses in Brooklyn, while Lufa Farms grows 23 veggie varieties in a 31,000 foot greenhouse atop a Montreal office building.

But for the island of Singapore, where real estate is a premium, vertical farming might be the most viable option. “Singapore could be a special case, where land value is so exceptional high, that you have no choice but to go vertically,” Giacomelli says.

An illustration of the 177-feet vertical farm by Plantagon currently in the works for Linkoping, Sweden.

Illustration by Sweco/Plantagon i

An illustration of the 177-feet vertical farm by Plantagon currently in the works for Linkoping, Sweden.

Illustration by Sweco/Plantagon

The Sky Greens vegetables are “flying off the shelves,” reports Channel NewsAsia — perhaps because the vertical veggies are fresher than most available in Singapore, which imports most of its produce from China, Malaysia and the U.S. They do, however, cost about 5 to 10 percent more than regular greens.

“The prices are still reasonable and the vegetables are very fresh and very crispy,” Rolasind Tan, a consumer, told Channel NewsAsia. “Sometimes, with imported food, you don’t know what happens at farms there.”

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A Tesla Motors showroom in San Jose, Calif. Car dealers in New York and Massachusetts have filed a lawsuit that seeks to block Tesla from selling its vehicles in those states.

Paul Sakuma/AP

A Tesla Motors showroom in San Jose, Calif. Car dealers in New York and Massachusetts have filed a lawsuit that seeks to block Tesla from selling its vehicles in those states.

Tesla Motors usually makes headlines for its technology. Its new Model S is the first entirely electric vehicle to be named car of the year by Automobile Magazine.

Friday’s news is less flattering: A judge in New York will take up a lawsuit against the company about how Tesla sells its cars.

When Mark Seeger bought a Tesla in Seattle, he was actually just looking for a pair of shoes.

“I was looking for a Banana Republic 50 percent-off sale,” he says. “I had no intention of going into Tesla or buying a car that day.”

Then he walked past Tesla Motors’ Bellevue, Wash., showroom. It’s one of a handful of Tesla’s company-owned stores. Within five minutes, he’d put down a deposit for an electric car that costs more than $ 50,000.

“This is the most expensive impulse buy I’ve ever done,” he says.

This isn’t a typical sale for Tesla Motors, but according to car dealers in Massachusetts, if it had happened there, it would have been illegal.

The issue is that Tesla sold the car through its own store, instead of through a local dealership.

Robert O’Koniewski, the executive vice president of the Massachusetts State Automobile Dealers Association, is suing Tesla for opening a store in a local mall.

In Massachusetts, franchise law 93B prohibits a manufacturer from owning a dealership, O’Koniewski says. An auto dealer association in New York is also suing Tesla.

Typically, car manufacturers build the cars, then ship them out to local car dealers, which have to meet the various manufacturers’ standards.

Manny Quinones is a sales manager at one of those dealers, Manhattan Motorcars in New York.

“We’re multibrand, so we have brand-specific showrooms,” he says.

Each brand represents another manufacturer that can require expensive equipment and training. Not having to meet those various needs, O’Koniewski says, gives Tesla an unfair advantage.

“Those dealers are investing millions of dollars in their franchises to make sure they comply with their franchise agreements with the manufacturers,” he says. “Tesla is choosing to ignore the law and then is choosing to play outside that system.”

Tesla insists it isn’t breaking the law, in Massachusetts, New York or anywhere else. But it is clearly trying to play outside the franchise system.

Jeremy Anwyl, vice chairman of Edmunds.com, thinks that’s the real issue.

“Let’s say consumers really liked buying from a factory store. That would put dealers in a tough spot because they’ve been saying for years that the franchise system is actually good for customers,” he says.

And if customers like the Tesla model, then the franchise system — and the laws that prop it up — could be in trouble.

“If you step back, why do we have these laws? Well, the dealers would argue, ‘Well, we made a big investment, so we deserve to be protected,’ ” Anwyl says. “But travel agents made a big investment, and they didn’t get any protection.”

Right now, there are only a few thousand Teslas on the road. But if they become more mainstream — as Tesla plans — they could be a model for other manufacturers. Much of that will depend on how Tesla is able to handle the things dealers do now, like service. New Tesla owner Seeger, for one, isn’t worried — because the Tesla is a simpler kind of car.

“An engine is very complex — lots of hoses and belts and pulleys and God knows what, wires,” he says. “The Tesla has a motor and a single-speed transmission and four wheels. That’s kind of it.”

Then again, he’s still waiting in line to receive his first Tesla.

“I’m number 11,100 and I believe 97 for the Model S,” Seeger says.

His second Tesla, the Model X, won’t be out until 2014. Maybe by then the legal battles over Tesla’s showrooms will be resolved.

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