Branding of Cigarette: Mislead the Human

Subtle branding on cigarette packets is misleading smokers into believing some products are less harmful than others. A survey in UK has released this information.

Products branded "smooth", "silver" or "gold" are generally believed to be healthier and easier to give up. But when shown plain packs the false beliefs disappeared, University of Nottingham researchers discovered this. 

EU rules ban any claims that some cigarettes are safer than others.

Participants in the study were shown pairs of cigarette packs and asked to compare what they were like, or what they assumed they would be like, in terms of taste, tar levels, health risk and attractiveness, how easy they would be to give up and how attractive they would be to someone choosing to smoke for the first time.

           

The results from 800 adult smokers and 500 teenagers from UK also showed that lighter-colored packaging led people to believe the cigarettes had a lower tar content or were generally less harmful.

More than half of adults and teenagers reported that among the eight brands they were shown those labelled "smooth" were less harmful than the regular variety.

Marlboro packs with a gold label were rated as having a lower health risk by 53% of adults and easier to quit by 31%, when compared with the Marlboro packs with a red logo.

When shown packs where the branding had been removed, false beliefs about the risk of harm or addiction dropped significantly. 

But this is not true that cigarette is safer than others. Every  brand is harmful for us, for the environment.

We, all should make a promise that “We will not take any Cigarette from now”

Quantum Computing: A Step to The Future

Researchers have developed a penny-sized silicon chip that uses photons to run Shor's algorithm to solve a mathematical problem.

The algorithm computes the two numbers that multiply together to form a given figure, and has until now required laboratory-sized optical computers.

This kind of factoring is the basis for a wide variety of encryption schemes.

The work reported in Science, is rudimentary but could easily be scaled up to handle more complex computing.

Shor's algorithm and the factoring of large numbers has been a particular case used to illustrate the power of quantum computing.

Quantum computers exploit the counterintuitive fact that photons or trapped atoms can exist in multiple states or "superpositions" at the same time.

For certain types of calculations, that "quantum indeterminacy" gives quantum computers a significant edge.

While traditional or "classical" computers find factoring large numbers impracticably time-consuming, for example, quantum computers can in principle crack the problem with ease.


Important step

Optical computing has been treated as the future information processing by using packets of light instead of electrons as the information carrier.

But these packets, called photons has indeterminate properties that make them quantum objects - so an optical computer can also be a quantum computer.

In fact just this kind of photon-based quantum factoring has been accomplished before, but the ability to put the heart of the machine on a standard chip is promising for future applications of the idea.