November 2012 Meeting

Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh November Meeting

WHEN: Wednesday – November 14, 2012
WHERE: Duquesne University – Bayer Learning Center (Wolfe Lecture Hall)
RSVP BY: November 9, 2012

Download November 2012 Flyer

TECHNOLOGY FORUM – 5:30PM
John Ventre, Expert on Mayan “End of the World” Prediction

“2012 End Time Prophecy”
The Mayan culture lasted from 300 BC to 1500 AD. The period I will review is from 300-900 AD. This Stone Age culture suddenly developed suspension bridges, astronomy, medicine and the most accurate calendar we have ever seen. More accurate than our Gregorian calendar because they started at 12/21/2012 and counted backward. Mayan records say that a dark rift exists in the center of the sky. In 2002 we discovered a black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. In 1993 we discovered that from the earth’s view, the sun will rise in the center plane of the Milky Way Galaxy on the morning of 12/21/2012. This happens every 25,800 years due to the fact that our rotation changes by one degree every 72 years. The Mayans have three calendars which end on 12/21/2012 and one is on a 25,800 year cycle. The last Ice Age started 25,800 years ago and marked the end of Neanderthal and the rise of Cro-Magnon man whose rise and departure was too quick to be explained by evolution. The Myans never said there will be an apocalypse but will there be another change for Homo sapiens? The Jewish 7000 year calendar also ends around 2012 and the Kyoto treaty expires in 2012. The solar cycle of sun spots peaks in 2012 and every summer has been hotter than the previous since 2000 (except 2009).

The most sacred Mayan text is the Popul Vuh which tells of extraterrestrials coming to earth and creating a perfect human species and then destroying it and replacing it with a “dumbed down” version. This is a similar story to older Sumerian tablets found 10,000 miles away.

The Mayan long count is on a 5125 year cycle and also ends on 12/21/2012. Stone Henge and the Great Pyramids of Giza were built 5125 years ago. Some believe that there will be a vibrational shift in our consciousness caused by the thirteen perfectly carved crystal skulls unearthed years ago. The Mayan legend of Kukulcan says that a Caucasian male with blond hair rose from the sea and had an elongated skull. He gave the Mayans their technology and before returning to the sea, he said that he would return. When the Spaniard Cortez arrived in 1519 he was mistaken for the return of Kukulcan. Cortez brought with him diseases that killed 90% of the Aztec population and what remained of the Mayans while he raided their gold and burned their libraries similar to the burning of the Library of Alexandria by the Romans.

Bio
John Ventre is the retired State Security and Public Affairs Director for UPS and was his Companies liaison to his local Congressman. John and other Executives would meet quarterly with 4 Senators and 22 Congress people. John used to also head up his companies crisis management team for 3 states. John is a member of the FBI’s InfraGard group and the DHS Regional Business Coalition. John is the Pa State Director for the Mutual UFO Network. John is the author of the novel’s “12/21/2012 A Prophecy”, and “The Day After 2012”. John

is also a lifetime member of the NRA. John sits on the Board of Directors for JDRF, the Westmoreland Economic Growth Connection, MUFON, and Rotary. John is a United Way Tocqueville Society member for charitable giving. John is the co-inventor of the Thor Wood Splitter and owns the UFO themed Mexican restaurant trademark “Flying Salsa”. John appeared in the Discovery Channels “UFOs over Earth” series in 2008 and the History Channels “UFO Hunters” in 2009, and the Anderson Cooper show and Discovery Canada in 2012. John has appeared on numerous radio shows and is a speaker at various UFO and Paranormal conferences such as the MUFON Symposium, UFO Congress and Fortean Conference. John gives four different presentations: 2012 Prophecy, The Case for UFOs, UFOs in Art and History and the 2008 Pa UFO Wave.

TECHNICAL PROGRAM – 8:15 PM
Dr. Richard Crocombe, ThermoFisher

“Providing Answers in the Field: Advances in Handheld Spectrometers”
“Small” spectrometers fall into three broad classes: small versions of laboratory instruments, providing data; dedicated analyzers, providing actionable information; process analyzers, providing quantitative or semi-quantitative information to a process controller. The emphasis of this talk is on handheld dedicated analyzers.
Increasingly, the lab is moving to the field. If you

take a product that’s historically been large, expensive and complicated to use and you make it small, affordable, rugged and easy-to-use, you can dramatically improve

the efficiency of the testing process. We have found that if you can deliver lab-quality testing directly to the field, giving people reasonably priced, reliable, easy-to-understand, real-time results, then you transform the way they do business. For elemental analyzers (x-ray fluorescence), these applications can be as varied as heavy metals in toys, jewelry assay and field geology. For molecular analyzers (Raman, FT-IR and near-infrared) this can be narcotics identification, counterfeit pharmaceutical detection, hazardous and explosive materials identification and raw material confirmation in chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing.
This talk will describe these applications, the technologies in handheld analyzers and prospects or the future.

Bio
Richard Crocombe studied chemistry at Oxford University in England and then went to the University of Southampton, also in England, for a Ph.D. with Prof. Ian Beattie, working on vibrational spectroscopy of unstable inorganic species. Following that he did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tennessee, with Prof. Gleb Mamantov, working on the development and applications of FT-IR spectroscopy.
He then joined Bio-Rad Digilab Division in Cambridge, MA, and was there for twenty years in a wide variety of roles. Towards the end of that time a major focus was the development of FT-IR spectroscopic imaging. He led a joint development project with Santa Barbara FocalPlane for a series of more reliable, and lower cost, two-dimensional array detectors that could be read out at 5KHz and above, and therefore

be used with conventional rapid-scanning FT-IRs, making FT-IR imaging a routine technique.
Following Bio-Rad’s sale of its spectroscopy business, he left to join Axsun Technologies, who had developed a chip-sized optical module. He took this technology and moved it into analytical spectroscopy, introducing the first spectrometer of this type at FACSS in October 2003: a chip-sized near-infrared spectrometer. Continuing the theme of miniature instrumentation (but working at much shorter wavelengths!), he joined Thermo Fisher Scientific’s handheld x-ray fluorescence (XRF) business in 2007. His initial work there, in a business development role, lead to Thermo Fisher Scientific’s acquisitions of Ahura Scientific and Polychromix in 2010, adding portable molecular analysis (Raman, FT-IR, NIR) to portable elemental analysis (XRF).

He has written a series of review articles on miniature optical spectrometers and their enabling technologies, published in ‘Spectroscopy’ magazine In addition, Richard is

co-chair of the SPIE ‘Next-Generation Spectroscopic Technologies’ conferences, and co-editor of the resulting conference proceedings publications. These conferences bring together a wide variety of technology, instrument and algorithm developers for new spectrometers, covering the whole range of the electromagnetic spectrum.