Here are some answers to common questions about this website.
Secondhand tobacco smoke, sometimes referred to by its acronym SHS, is the material that is emitted from a burning cigarette, cigar, or pipe -- and then mixed in the air. Secondhand tobacco smoke consists of both the smoke that comes from the butt end of the cigarette or cigar, or the pipe bowl, and smoke that is inhaled by the smoker and subsequently exhaled. Secondhand tobacco smoke contains many dangerous chemicals and has been associated with a variety of health problems, including lung cancer, asthma, and heart disease mortality. You can find out more about secondhand tobacco smoke in the scientific literature, in general news articles, or on various web pages.
Human exposure to an environmental air pollutant is defined as contact between molecules of the pollutant and a given biological boundary, such as the breathing zone or the human lung. For the purposes of this website, we consider exposure as the concentration of airborne particles from secondhand smoke in the breathing zone of a person. We DO NOT consider any uptake or dose of the chemical components of secondhand smoke. You can learn more about the science of exposure on various websites and in scientific articles.
In a word "yes". The weight of evidence shows that exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke (SHS) can lead to a variety of maladies some very severe, such as lung cancer and heart disease mortality.
See this description of the 2006 US Surgeon General's Report on the health effects of secondhand smoke.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published a seminal report on respiratory illnesses due to SHS exposure in 1993. You may want to read an updated assessment of that report.
In describing and interpreting results from the simulation of exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke (SHS), we make use of common scientific terms. Below is a list of some of these terms and their explanation.
The main purpose of this website is to help visitors learn about the degree of secondhand tobacco smoke exposure that they or their families may receive in their home, their car, or other locations. This knowledge can facilitate constructive discussions about ways to reduce or even eliminate exposure.
In addition, this website can assist students and researchers who are studying exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke, including approaches to reducing exposure or the health risks associated with exposure.
This website was created by Neil Klepeis, a researcher for over 12 years in the field of human exposure to tobacco smoke and other airborne pollutants. Dr. Klepeis has numerous publications on tobacco smoke exposure. His PhD dissertation was devoted to the development of a simulation model for exposure in residences.
You can send a message to Neil using the feedback form. Use this form to offer a comment or suggestion, or to ask a question.
The simulations used on this website are based on years of research into tobacco smoke exposure in homes, cars, and other locations. They have been tested in real locations and are expected to give realistic predictions of actual exposures for real people. However, the simulations should not be viewed as giving exact data on any given situation, but only an approximate characterizaton of likely exposures. They are intended to be useful in providing general knowledge and understanding regarding potential exposures in common locations and for common circumstances. The operators of this website do not guarantee the use of the simulation results for any expressed or implied purpose.
The simulations are based on the PhD work of Neil Klepeis. He developed a software package for human exposure research (heR) in the R language. Various modules of this package are now or will soon be available for download.
On this website we adhere to the common practice of writing units for all scientific quantities using positive or negative superscripts. For example, instead of writing micrograms per cubic meter as μg/m3, we write it as μg m-3. In this case the negative subscript indicates that there are a given number of micrograms of an air pollutant "per" cubic meter of air. Remember from algebra that negative subscripts indicate that one takes the reciprocal of the quantity.
The founders of this website believe in open public access to information that is vital to people's well-being and creativity.
This website will always remain free to the public. It provides a service in the interest of improving the health of persons who may currently be exposed to tobacco smoke, by helping to bring about the understanding, and, eventually, the significant reduction or elimination of their exposure.
In the spirit of open exchange, this website was also constructed using Free Software, including Debian GNU/Linux, Drupal, R,
Apache, PHP, and MYSQL. The recent scientific research on secondhand tobacco smoke exposure, which underlies the simulation used on this website, was supported by the US government, the state of California, and private foundations. Please read about the current research on tobacco smoke exposure.
To contact the operators of this website please use the feedback form. Feel free to ask any question or to give comments and suggestions.
Yes!
Registration is free and easy.
Registered visitors will be able to run premium simulations that are more sophisticated than the basic simulations available to unregistered guest users.
Visitors who register as authenticated users can also post comments on articles, view other user profiles, contact other users, and start forum threads.
If you choose not to register, you can still run some of the basic simulations and read the general information on the website.
Please note that the email addresses of everyone who registers are NOT viewable by guests or other users, and we at SimSmoke.Org will never reveal them to anyone.
The graphics produced as part of simulations are purged from the website every 30 minutes. This means that a graphic you produce will only be available for download for a maximum of 30 minutes, but perhaps only for a few minutes or less. If you can't view or save a full-size graphic (for example, by right clicking and using the "View image" menu item), then rerun the simulation and you should have close to 30 minutes in which to access it.
Note that you must be registered to access all of the simulations. Unregistered users can access the more basic simulations and all of the general website content. Since the simulations can be computationally intensive, it makes sense for us to limit the number of simultaneous users. The number of users currenly online is always shown in the right sidebar. Currently, we have a limit of 200 anonymous users and 75 registered users -- for a total of 275 users at any time. If the website is slow or appears to not be available, then please try again later. The user limits may be reduced in the future, if the load on the system is too high. If the website becomes very popular, we may consider switching to a dedicated server (provided we have the $$$, of course :).
Once you have registered, you can send private email messages to other users by clicking on the "contact" tab in their profile. You may access their profile by clicking on their username link, which is included at the bottom of everything that they have posted to the website. If they are currenlty logged in, then their username link is also included on the right sidebar under "Online users".