In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

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John E. Karlin, 1918-2013: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94

Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA

John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use.

A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them?

And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new questions arose: round buttons, or square? How big should they be? Most crucially, how should they be arrayed? In a circle? A rectangle? An arc?

For decades after World War II, these questions were studied by a group of social scientists and engineers in New Jersey led by one man, a Bell Labs industrial psychologist named John E. Karlin.

By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.

But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones. And that keypad, in turn, would inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects.

It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.

“He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,” Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone, the answers to those questions remain palpable at the press of a button. The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.

The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment.

Mr. Karlin, associated from 1945 until his retirement in 1977 with Bell Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., was widely considered the father of human-factors engineering in American industry.

A branch of industrial psychology that combines experimentation, engineering and product design, human-factors engineering is concerned with easing the awkward, often ill-considered marriage between man and machine. In seeking to design and improve technology based on what its users are mentally capable of, the discipline is the cognitive counterpart of ergonomics.

“Human-factors studies are different from market research and other kinds of studies in that we observe people’s behavior and record it, systematically and without bias,” Mr. Israelski said. “The hallmark of human-factors studies is they involve the actual observation of people doing things.”

Among the issues Mr. Karlin examined as the head of Bell Labs’ Human Factors Engineering department — the first department of its kind at an American company — were the optimal length for a phone cord (a study that involved gentle, successful sabotage) and the means by which rotary calls could be made efficiently after the numbers were moved from inside the finger holes, where they had nestled companionably for years, to the rim outside the dial.

John Elias Karlin was born in Johannesburg on Feb. 28, 1918, and reared nearby in Germiston, where his parents owned a grocery store and tearoom.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, psychology and music, and a master’s degree in psychology, both from the University of Cape Town. Throughout his studies he was a violinist in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra and the Cape Town String Quartet.

Moving to the United States, Mr. Karlin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1942. Afterward, he became a research associate at Harvard; he also studied electrical engineering there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At Harvard, Mr. Karlin did research for the United States military on problems in psychoacoustics that were vital to the war effort — studying the ways, for instance, in which a bomber’s engine noise might distract its crew from their duties.

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Horse Meat in Food Stirs Furor in British Isles

LONDON — Few things divide British eating habits from those of continental Europe as much as a distaste for consuming horse meat, so the news that many Britons may have unknowingly done so has prompted alarm among consumers and plunged the country’s food industry into crisis.

A trickle of discoveries of horse meat in burgers, first found in Ireland last month, has turned into a steady stream, culminating in the revelation that lasagna labeled beef from one frozen food big retailer, Findus, was in some cases 100 percent horse meat.

With concern growing, the Food Standards Agency ordered retailers to test all processed food, and large notices have been displayed in British supermarkets seeking to calm worried customers.  The scandal has raised new concerns about the standards applied by the meat processing industry, and fueled worries about what exactly has been going into cheaper burgers consumed in millions in British schools, hospitals and prisons.

Meat from horses is no more harmful than that from cattle, though there were some fears — as yet not substantiated by tests — that phenylbutazone, an equine drug, could find its way into the food chain.

But the labeling of horse meat as beef has breached one of the great culinary taboos of Britain, a country that prides itself on its love of certain animals, particularly horses.

The fact that the source of the meat appears to have been mainland Europe, where the consumption of horse meat is more common, has only increased the continental divide.

“It is completely unacceptable that a product which says it’s beef lasagna turns out to be mainly horse meat,” the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, said in a statement. “Consumers have a right to expect that food is exactly what it says on the label.”

He added, “The presence of unauthorized ingredients cannot be tolerated. This is especially true when those ingredients are likely to be unacceptable to consumers, or where there is any conceivable risk to human health.”

The latest episode came to light when Findus withdrew the beef lasagna products after Comigel, its French supplier, raised concerns about the type of meat used, while maintaining that food safety was not at risk. Some supermarkets have also removed products made by Comigel.

Earlier, Irish food inspectors revealed that some horse meat, which is cheaper than beef, had been found in some burgers stocked by a number of British supermarket chains, including Tesco, Iceland and Lidl. The meat was supplied by two plants in Ireland.

After millions of burgers were removed from supermarket shelves in Ireland and Britain, Poland was identified as the source of that horse meat.

The Irish agriculture minister, Simon Coveney, said he had instructed the police to join an inquiry conducted by his department’s special investigation unit after tests on Monday evening confirmed 75 percent equine DNA in a raw material ingredient at the Rangeland Foods processing plant in County Monaghan.

That was the fifth such instance at processing plants across Ireland over the last month. The latest discovery follows similar incidents last month in the Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland, where samples from other beef processing plants contained up to 80 percent horse DNA.

On Tuesday, the chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, Alan Reilly, said fraud was behind the mislabeling of meat, which had been traced to Poland.

“We are no longer talking about trace amounts,” he told RTE, the national broadcaster. “We are talking about horse meat. Somebody, some place is drip-feeding horse meat into the burger manufacturing industry. We don’t know exactly where this is happening.”

A Grant Thornton report released last week before the announcement on Monday of the latest discovery expressed concern about the fallout from the horse meat fiasco.

“The recent issue with traces of imported horse DNA in beef burgers could translate into millions of euro lost for the industry,” it said. 

Stephen Castle reported from London and Douglas Dalby from Dublin, Ireland.

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q.& A.: Saving Space and Shows on a TiVo

I have a bunch of TV programs recorded on my TiVo that I don’t want to erase, but I’m running tight on drive space. Can I copy these shows elsewhere, like to a DVD?

If you have the TiVo Desktop software for your Windows PC or Mac and have your TiVo recorder connected to your home network, you should be able to transfer the recorded shows to your computer and burn them to DVDs there. Shows that have copy-protection built in will not transfer, however.

TiVo has instructions for transferring the files from a PC or Mac on its site. According to the company’s support documentation, PC owners should use the $70 Roxio Creator program and Mac users should get the $80 Roxio Toast Titanium software to transfer and burn recordings.

Depending on your home’s mix of hardware and software, you may be able to copy the shows to a disc with a connected DVD recorder or burn the shows to a DVD with other recording software. Wondershare’s $40 DVD Creator is one program that has its own online instructions (and a free trial version) for recording shows to disc and there are many others around the Web.

If the file-transfer and disc-burning process sounds too complicated, another way to make room for more shows on your TiVo recorder is to add an external drive that gives you more storage space. This approach only works with certain TiVo models, but you can find out more on TiVo’s approved method here. Companies like Weaknees sell upgrade kits for some TiVo models that can add more recording capacity as well.

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The New Old Age Blog: The Executor's Assistant

I’m serving as executor for my father’s estate, a role few of us are prepared for until we’re playing it, so I was grateful when the mail brought “The American Bar Association Guide to Wills and Estates” — the fourth edition of a handbook the A.B.A. began publishing in 1995.

This is a legal universe, I’m learning, in which every step — even with a small, simple estate that owes no taxes and includes no real estate or trusts — turns out to be at least 30 percent more complicated than expected.

If my dad had been wealthy or owned a business, or if we faced a challenge to his will, I would have turned the whole matter over to an estate lawyer by now. But even then, it would be helpful to know what the lawyer was talking about. The A.B.A. guide would help.

Written with surprising clarity (hey, they’re lawyers), it maps out all kinds of questions and decisions to consider and explains the many ways to leave property to one’s heirs. Updated from the third edition in 2009, the guide not only talks taxes and trusts, but also offers counsel for same-sex couples and unconventional families.

If you want to permit your second husband to live in the family home until he dies, but then guarantee that the house reverts to the children of your first marriage, the guide tells you how a “life estate” works. It explains what is taxable and what isn’t, and discusses how to choose executors and trustees. It lists lots of resources and concludes with an estate-planning checklist.

In general, the A.B.A. intends its guide for the person trying to put his or her affairs in order, more than for family members trying to figure out how to proceed after someone has died. But many of us will play both these parts at some point (and if you are already an executor, or have been, please tell us how that has gone, and mention your state). We’ll need this information.

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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The New Old Age Blog: The Executor's Assistant

I’m serving as executor for my father’s estate, a role few of us are prepared for until we’re playing it, so I was grateful when the mail brought “The American Bar Association Guide to Wills and Estates” — the fourth edition of a handbook the A.B.A. began publishing in 1995.

This is a legal universe, I’m learning, in which every step — even with a small, simple estate that owes no taxes and includes no real estate or trusts — turns out to be at least 30 percent more complicated than expected.

If my dad had been wealthy or owned a business, or if we faced a challenge to his will, I would have turned the whole matter over to an estate lawyer by now. But even then, it would be helpful to know what the lawyer was talking about. The A.B.A. guide would help.

Written with surprising clarity (hey, they’re lawyers), it maps out all kinds of questions and decisions to consider and explains the many ways to leave property to one’s heirs. Updated from the third edition in 2009, the guide not only talks taxes and trusts, but also offers counsel for same-sex couples and unconventional families.

If you want to permit your second husband to live in the family home until he dies, but then guarantee that the house reverts to the children of your first marriage, the guide tells you how a “life estate” works. It explains what is taxable and what isn’t, and discusses how to choose executors and trustees. It lists lots of resources and concludes with an estate-planning checklist.

In general, the A.B.A. intends its guide for the person trying to put his or her affairs in order, more than for family members trying to figure out how to proceed after someone has died. But many of us will play both these parts at some point (and if you are already an executor, or have been, please tell us how that has gone, and mention your state). We’ll need this information.

---

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Chinese Imports and Exports Soar in January

HONG KONG — January trade data from China on Friday showed a surge in exports and imports from the levels of a year earlier — a phenomenon largely due to the timing of the Lunar New Year holiday but also supporting the view that the Chinese economy is firming up.

Economic data from China are often severely distorted by the holiday, when many factories shut down for a week or more.

The holiday this year takes place in February — the first day of the Lunar New Year is Sunday. Last year it fell squarely in January, cutting down on the number of working days during that month.

The trade data released Friday reflected this with a large increase, compared with the year before, as analysts had expected. Exports climbed 25 percent from January 2012, according to the General Administration of Customs, and imports rose 28.8 percent.

The increases were much lower when adjusted for the holiday-induced differences in the number of working days, with exports up 12.4 percent and imports just 3.4 percent higher.

Still, the data beat expectations by a wide margin, supporting the view that healthier domestic and overseas demand also had been significant.

“This strong export number cannot be fully explained by the Chinese New Year effect alone,” Zhiwei Zhang, chief China economist at Nomura in Hong Kong, said in a research note. “These data suggest that external and domestic demand are both strong, which supports our view that the economy is on track for a cyclical recovery” in the first half of this year, he added.

Dariusz Kowalczyk, an economist at Crédit Agricole in Hong Kong, said, “We need to wait for February results to have the full picture of trade at the start of 2013.” However, he added, “one trend is clear: exports have been doing very well recently. This may be a sign of improved external demand but is also a testimony to the resilience of Chinese exporters and to their competitiveness.”

Improved overseas demand and a string of government-mandated stimulus measures have gradually propped up growth and dispelled fears of a hard landing in China. While the Chinese economy expanded just 7.8 percent last year — down from 9.3 percent in 2011 and 10.4 percent in 2010 — many analysts expect growth to top 8 percent again in 2013.

Central bank data Friday that showed ample money had continued to flood into the economy also supported this view. Banks extended 1.07 trillion renminbi, or $172 billion, in new loans during January, more than analysts had expected. Total “social financing aggregate” in the economy, a broad measure of liquidity, or the ease of trading assets, more than doubled from a year earlier, to 2.54 trillion renminbi.

That figure, Mr. Kowalczyk commented, was a “blowout number.”

Like other data released Friday, the financing figure was lifted by the Lunar New Year effects, but even without these, Mr. Kowalczyk said, it was a “huge amount of funding” and would sustain solid economic growth in the near term at least.

Longer term, he cautioned, it would also “stoke inflationary pressures,” and could lead the central bank to tighten monetary policy further down the line as it seeks to stave off inflationary pressures.

For now, inflation remains benign. Consumer prices rose just 2 percent in January from a year earlier, a moderation from the 2.5 percent year-on-year increase in December. The low inflation number, released Friday, was in line with forecasts, but analysts widely expect a rebound in February.

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India Ink: Economic Growth in India to Fall to Five Percent

India’s Gross Domestic Product is expected to drop significantly to 5 percent for the fiscal year ending in March 2013, according to advance estimates released by India’s Central Statistics Office on Thursday, declining from 6.2 percent growth rate seen in 2011-2012.

The estimate by the Central Statistics Office represents a marked drop from earlier growth projections issued by the government for this year. In January, the central bank projected G.D.P. growth of 5.5 percent for the current fiscal year, a decline from an earlier estimate of 5.8 percent.

The provisional estimates are contingent upon the “anticipated level of agricultural and industrial production, analysis of budget estimates of government expenditure and performance of key sectors like, railways, transport other than railways, communication, banking and insurance, available so far,” the report said.

According to the preliminary data released on Thursday, national income registered a growth rate of 4.2 percent in the current fiscal year as compared to 6.1 percent in the previous year, and per capita income grew at a rate of 2.9 percent as compared to 4.7 percent growth last year. Meanwhile, capital investment in the country is expected to drop to 2.48 percent from 4.39 percent in the previous year.

Slow growth may be attributed to the sluggish performance of the manufacturing, agriculture and services sector. The manufacturing sector is expected to grow by 1.9 percent this year, while India’s farm sector is projected to grow at an estimated 1.8 percent.

The services sector saw a decline in its growth rate from previous years, expanding by 6.6 percent, the lowest in over a decade. Other sectors that are expected to have performed relatively poorly include electricity, gas & water supply (4.9 percent growth) and mining and quarrying (0.4 percent growth).

Sectors that have performed relatively well with a growth rate of over 5 percent are construction, the trade, hotels, transport and communication sector, the financing, insurance, real estate and business services sector, and the community, social and personal services sector.

As India prepares to for a national election in 2014, slowing economic growth is putting pressure on the current government to push for reform. The projection of 5 percent GDP growth is the lowest figure since 2002-2003 when the GDP grew at 4 percent, after which the Indian economy has grown at an average of 6 percent each year.

This year, the government has taken measures to rein in the fiscal deficit to 5.3 percent of  GDP, has raised the price of fertilizer and diesel, and has allowed further foreign investment in the retail sector by opening up the insurance, pension and aviation sectors for foreign investment. On Jan. 29, India’s central bank lowered its benchmark interest rate for the first time in nine months to fuel higher growth.

If India continues on the reform path, analysts believe that strong growth will resume in the coming year.

“The government’s advance estimates for real GDP growth at 4.9% is disappointing, especially coming on the back of a downward revision in growth for FY2012 from 6.5 percent to 6.2 percent,” said Ms. Bhupali Gursale, an economist at Angel Broking. “On a positive note though, with the government pushing ahead its reform agenda, the outlook for growth in FY2014 is likely to improve.”

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Gadgetwise Blog: This Robot Does Do Windows

The robots at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show fell largely into two categories: floor cleaners and toys. But there was an exception.

That was a robot taken to new heights – literally. It is the Winbot 7 Series from Ecovacs, and this robot does do windows.

The Winbot works much like any of the floor cleaning robots, only it works on vertical surfaces. Stick it outside on your window glass and it figures out the size of your window, then travels in a zigzag pattern to clean the surface.

The Winbot has to be plugged into an electrical outlet that feeds a powerful vacuum motor that keeps it stuck to the glass as it creeps around. There is a safety tether to keep the Winbot from bombing pedestrians below if it were to lose power. If the Winbot encounters a problem it sounds an alarm.

The Winbot has a damp cleaning pad on its leading edge that is followed by a squeegee and a drying pad in back. The reusable pads could require machine washing after a single large dirty window, but more typically the company said they needed a wash every few months.

The price of replacement parts and cleaning solution have not been yet determined. The Winbot becomes available in April at a list price of $200 for the 710 model that cleans framed windows, and $300 for the 730 model that cleans framed and frameless windows.

They will be available through the Ecovacs Web site.

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