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Before they go to work, dozens of Miami International Airport employees have been put to the sniff test from a pair of specially trained dogs that can detect COVID-19.

So far the pilot project launched last month has detected a pair of cases and will be extended until October and could be expanded to other key facilities.

Cobra, a Belgian Malinois, and One Betta, a Dutch shepherd, inspect staff at a checkpoint where employees are required to remove masks and dangle it in front of either dog. The dogs sit to signal if they detect an odor produced by volatile organic compounds common to those infected with COVID-19. The dogs are 97.5% accurate in detecting the virus, said Dr. Kenneth Furton, provost and executive vice president of Florida International University, at a news conference last week.

Cobra and One Betta work Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. During the eight days that they’ve reported for duty, Miami-Dade Aviation Department Communications Director Greg Chin said the Covid-sniffing canines reviewed 1,093 employees, or about 136 employees per day.

Thus far, the dogs detected two cases. One employee tested positive; the other was recovering from Covid-19.

“After a successful start, the program was extended to the end of October, which gives us more time to collect valuable data on the accuracy and efficiency of the COVID-19 detector dog program,” Furton told the Miami Herald by email. “Because it seems like we’ll be living with this virus for a while, these dogs are an effective way of adding another safeguard against the coronavirus.”

If the dogs signal for COVID-19, the employee would take a rapid COVID test and, if they tested positive, they would be asked to leave and quarantine according to CDC guidelines.

The pilot launched the last week of August through a partnership between the Miami-Dade Aviation Department, Global Forensic and Justice Center, and Florida International University. Miami-Dade County Commissioner for District 9 Kionne McGhee sponsored a 30-day program early this year; Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners approved plans in March 2021. It is the first U.S. airport to use COVID-19 detector dogs, according to Chin.

After October, Furton said, the dogs will be stationed at the PortMiami and Government Center at downtown Miami

Both pure and mixed-breeds are suitable to detect COVID-19, Furton said at a news conference this month. Dogs with zero experience require between two and three months of training. Some come with prior experience, like Cobra, who was trained to detect laurel wilt, a deadly disease common to avocado trees. Those canines only require two to three weeks to learn to detect a new scent.

Miami Heat fans might recognize the dogs. Cobra and One Betta inspected visitors to FTX Arena alongside two other dogs for Heat games from late January through April. The Heat ended the COVID-sniffing program given the wide availability of vaccines and the increase in vaccine rates.

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© 2021 Miami Herald
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo Of The Day: Smoking guns and a lot of action, the way we like our pictures best. Here we have U.S. Naval Special Warfare Task Unit Europe in a bi-lateral training exercise in Limassol (Cyprus), together with the Cypriot Underwater Demolition Team (MYK). You can see a suppressed FN SCAR above. This was one […]

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The post POTD: Cypriot Underwater Demolition Team with U.S. Navy SEALs appeared first on The Firearm Blog.

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2021/09/19/cypriot-underwater-demolition-team/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Photo Of The Day: Finally we have some excellent pictures of the Swiss Special Forces, Kommando Spezialkräfte. The captions say they’re searching a building, in combat gear with their Sturmgewehr 90 rifles. The location is the Swiss Special Forces Training Centre, Demo19. The SIG SG 550 is called Stgw-90 (in German) or Fass-90 (in French) […]

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The post POTD: Swiss Special Forces with Sturmgewehr 90 appeared first on The Firearm Blog.

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2021/09/18/swiss-special-forces-sturmgewehr-90/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Reuben Klamer, the Canton-born inventor of the popular board game The Game of Life, has died. He was 99.

Klamer was commissioned by the Milton Bradley Co. (now Hasbro) to create the game, which made its debut at the International Toy Fair in 1960.

Considered one of the best-selling games of all time and second in popularity only to Monopoly, The Game of Life was inducted in 2010 into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong Museum in Rochester, New York.

While best known for The Game of Life, Klamer created about 200 other toy products, including the Art Linkletter Hoop, Gaylord the Walking Dog, Dolly Darlings, Moon Rocks, Erector-Constructor Sets and Busy Blocks.

“My life has been one rocky road after the other, and every once in a while I get a hit,” Klamer told the Columbus Dispatch in 2012.

He also worked in television helping to design special effects and prop weapons for “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “Star Trek,” and a “Pink Panther” promotional vehicle.

“With a gift for anticipating and capitalizing on trends, developing consumer ‘must-haves’ across categories and working in a variety of media, Klamer’s products have been marketed by industry leaders in more than 60 countries on six continents,” the New York City-based Toy Association said.

Klamer died Tuesday at his home in La Jolla, California.

Klamer was born in Canton, Ohio

Klamer was born June 20, 1922, in Canton to Romanian-Jewish immigrants, Rachel (Levenson) and Joseph Klamer. He studied at George Washington University and graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in business.

At the onset of World War II, Klamer enrolled in the U.S. Navy Midshipman School at Northwestern University and served in combat as an officer in the U.S. Navy amphibious landing forces in the Pacific. He also completed electives in engineering at the University of Michigan after joining the U.S. Navy V-7 Program.

Following the war, Klamer developed his first major invention, a collapsible rack called the “Fashion-aire Rack” which allowed the air-freighting of garments without folding or packing from New York manufacturers to markets.

He later opened his own advertising agency, the Klamer Company in Los Angeles, where he was a trailblazer in the early days of television promotion.

Klamer’s career in the toy industry began when he joined the Ideal Toy Corp. in 1949 to work in sales. He joined Eldon Industries in 1951 as national sales manager and became closely involved in product development.

As the “hula hoop” craze hit the nation in the late 1950s, Klamer became president of Spin-A-Hoop and teamed up with television personality Art Linkletter to promote the toy. He later formed The Toy Development Center and Children Inc., toy design and marketing firms.

Reuben Klamer & Associates was founded in the 1960s, later renamed Reuben Klamer Toylab. During a brief hiatus in the 1970s, Klamer developed and taught a course in creative technology for the University of Hawaii at his Creative Development Center in Kona.

Earlier this year, Klamer completed his memoir, “Blitz, Sizzle, and Serendipity: My Game of Life.”

Honored for his toy contributions

Klamer was inducted into the Hasbro Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2000 and the Toy Industry Hall of Fame in 2005. He received the TAGIE (Toy & Game International Excellence) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.

One of Klamer’s most significant and lasting contributions was pioneering the worldwide use in toys of an unbreakable plastic called polyethylene. He also successfully developed no-glue “snap-together” hobby kits for Eldon Industries, a first in the industry.

Klamer is survived by four of his children: Jeffrey Klamer, Pamela Klamer Singer (Kevin), Andrew Klamer and Jonathan Klamer (Jacqui); three grandchildren; and numerous cousins, nieces and nephews. His eldest son, Joel, died in 2016. He is also mourned by his longtime associate, Beatriz Pardo, as well as longtime staff.

Services will be held on Monday at Hillside Memorial Park in Los Angeles. The family requests that in lieu of flowers donations be made to the Toy Industry Foundation, the Hasbro Children’s Hospital, or a charity of your choice.

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© 2021 www.cantonrep.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

SIG Sauer has just announced the introduction of two new rifle suppressors – the SLX and SLH. Each of the two new suppressors was developed in order to meet the requirements set out by the United States military and will feature SIG Sauer’s new Clutch-LOK QD mounting system. Both suppressors are made of Inconel and […]

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The post SIG Sauer Introduces the New SLX & SLH Rifle Suppressors appeared first on The Firearm Blog.

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2021/09/17/slh-slx-suppressors-sig/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

With tons of U.S. vehicles and aircraft left behind in Afghanistan, America’s near-peer competitors like China and Russia stand to learn a lot, according to Josh Lospinoso, the CEO of cybersecurity company Shift5.

In the final weeks of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan, U.S.-backed Afghan government forces surrendered to the Taliban and U.S. troops became overwhelmed with the task of evacuating tens of thousands of people out of an airport under constant threat of attack. In the chaos, tons of drones, planes, helicopters, armored vehicles and other equipment were left up for grabs.

In an interview with American Military News, Lospinoso said the fact that the Taliban now have their hands on much of that U.S. equipment, and could potentially sell it to countries like Russia or China, creates a “playground” for America’s adversaries to figure out how the equipment works and how it can be hacked and “turned into a paperweight.”

Lospinoso was among the first crop of officers to help stand up the U.S. Army’s Cyber Command. In that role, Lospinoso spent a lot of his time conducting “penetration tests” where he would try to find ways to hack into the digital components of military equipment to interfere with their physical operations.

“A lot of folks are going to be looking at IT and how does IT offensive and defensively kind of play into the military’s strategy,” Lospinoso said. “Why don’t we look at the fleet assets, the things like the Abrams tank or a military vessel like a destroyer.”

Lospinoso said the increasing number of physical components on fleets of military vehicles and aircraft makes them increasingly vulnerable to hackers who could potentially interfere with or even shut off vital components mid-operation.

“With a few thousand dollars worth of equipment, you could cause an Abrams tank to turn into a paperweight, or a fighter jet to be completely mission incapable, in some cases put it into unsafe conditions where it’s going to have a hard time staying in the sky,” he said.

After the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) head Gen. Kenneth McKenzie told AFP the U.S. left behind 73 aircraft, around 70 Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (M-RAP) armored tactical vehicles, 27 more Humvees and multiple counter rocket, artillery and mortar (C-RAM) systems that helped defend the Kabul airport from attacks during the evacuation effort. Video from those final days in Afghanistan even showed U.S. troops smashing up those abandoned vehicles with hammers.

McKenzie said, “We demilitarize those systems so that they’ll never be used again.”

Lospinoso, however, said even demilitarized, that abandoned equipment is useful to America’s enemies.

“What we’ve been hearing is that these things have been demilitarized,” Lospinoso said, “which means that that specific asset can’t be used against us directly like in some sort of combat scenario, which is ‘good,’ but that doesn’t do nearly enough.”

One of the things Lospinoso learned from penetration testing America’s military equipment was that “one of the most important things was getting a physical representation of that asset, even if it was just a part of it.”

Any number of adversaries could now potentially gain access to the equipment abandoned in Afghanistan. Iran borders Afghanistan to the West. Russia has a military presence in Tajikstan, which lies on Afghanistan’s northern border. The Taliban have also described China as its main partner going forward.

“I think it’s really the near-peer adversaries that are benefitting the most from this kind of exposure,” Lospinoso said.

“If you’re able to find cyber vulnerabilities in these really critical weapons systems, whether that’s the backbone of our air transportation infrastructure or its the ground combat vehicle that undergirds our entire mechanized infantry, or God-forbid it’s a fighter aircraft that gives us air superiority, you’re going to win that fight,” he said. “If you can, without firing a single shot, if you can send some message to a system and it turns into a paperweight, you’re going to win that fight.”

Lospinoso said it won’t be easy to simply seal up the vulnerabilities exposed after the U.S. left behind so much equipment in Afghanistan because cybersecurity was not a key factor in how many of those systems were originally designed

“We can’t redesign the system,” he said. “We have to sort of put anti-virus in place to work around what is already there.”

It could also be tricky figuring out to how to protect future U.S. military systems from being captured and then exploited by America’s enemies. Lospinoso said it “makes a ton of sense” to add a form of digital killswitch to wipe the data off of a captured piece of equipment, but there would have to be some safety features in place so that such a killswitch wouldn’t then be used against equipment the U.S. military is actively using.

Lospinoso said the cyber-physical components of military equipment need to be a key focus in the future systems the U.S. designs. His company, Shift5 is one of a few firms focused on cyber-physical security but he said “we need more talent flooding into this problem space.”

“So folks that are maybe working on IT systems and are cybersecurity professionals or critical thinkers that work on those systems, we need some of those folks to jump that lacuna to where we are here and work on fleet assets because the cyber-physical effects are just too great.”

Earlier this year Pulsar sent us a really interesting new toy, and it has now been made official. Pulsar calls it a new generation of multispectral binoculars, named Trionyx T3/T3i. With these magic binoculars, you get a combination of thermal, digital night vision and overlay fusion imaging. The Trionyx T3/T3i models are designed for hunting, search […]

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https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2021/09/16/pulsar-trionyx-t3i-multispectral-binoculars-fusion-night-vision/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss