tingilinde

prevention

The loss of life in Oklahoma is tragic - perhaps even more so considering how few homes, businesses and schools take steps to protect against strong storms.

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But no local ordinance or building code requires such shelters, either in houses, schools or businesses, and only about 10 percent of homes in Moore have them.

Nor does the rest of Oklahoma, one of the states in the storm belt called Tornado Alley, require them — despite the annual onslaught of deadly and destructive twisters like the one on Monday, which killed at least 24 people, injured hundreds and eliminated entire neighborhoods.

It is a familiar story, as well, in places like Joplin, Mo., and across the Great Plains and in the Deep South, where tornadoes are a seasonal threat but government regulation rankles.

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People don't think until it is too late - and before then we fight regulation as it seems expensive and this isn't going to happen to us.  

It also happens with auto safety.  Cars are remarkable in being able to accommodate a wide variety of driver sizes.  The problem is they only are designed to a very limited number of references dummies - namely a 5'9 170 pound male and a 5'0 100 pound female and only in frontal collisions.  The cars are tested for other collisions, but it isn't clear what happens with larger and smaller people.  It is a particular problem as the population gets heavier.

At the lower end of the range you have to worry about smaller passengers.  Poorly positioned belts can cause serious harm.  It turns out standarized booster seats can help a lot (the paper is not behind a paywall) for kids up to about 4'9.  

 

Booster Seat Laws and Fatalities in Children 4 to 7 Years of Age

Rebekah Mannix, MD, MPH^a,  Eric Fleegler, MD, MPH^a William P. Meehan III, MD^a,^b,^c,  Sara A. Schutzman, MD^a,Kara Hennelly, MD^a, Lise Nigrovic, MD, MPH^a, and  Lois K. Lee, MD, MPH^a

Divisions of ^aEmergency Medicine, and ^cSports Medicine, Children’s Hospital Boston, Boston, Massachusetts; and ^bThe Micheli Center for Sports Injury Prevention, Boston Massachusetts

 

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether state booster seat laws were associated with decreased fatality rates in children 4 to 7 years of age in the United States.

METHODS: Retrospective, longitudinal analysis of all motor vehicle occupant crashes involving children 4 to 7 years of age identified in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System from January 1999 through December 2009. The main outcome measure was fatality rates of motor vehicle occupants aged 4 to 7 years. Because most booster laws exclude children 6 to 7 years of age, we performed separate analyses for children 4 to 5, 6, and 7 years of age.

RESULTS: When controlling for other motor vehicle legislation, temporal and economic factors, states with booster seat laws had a lower risk of fatalities in 4- to 5-year-olds than states without booster seat laws (adjusted incidence rate ratio 0.89; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.81–0.99). States with booster seat laws that included 6-year-olds had an adjusted incidence rate ratio of 0.77 (95% CI 0.65–0.91) for motor vehicle collision fatalities of 6-year-olds and those that included 7-year-olds had an adjusted incidence rate ratio of 0.75 (95% CI, 0.62–0.91) for motor vehicle collision fatalities of 7-year-olds.

CONCLUSIONS: Booster seat laws are associated with decreased fatalities in children 4 to 7 years of age, with the strongest association seen in children 6 to 7 years of age. Future legislative efforts should extend current laws to children aged 6 to 7 years.

 

Perhaps car interiors will become more adaptive to their occupants.  Already some airbag designs note the seat position of the driver and take that into account when deploying and some belts have an airbag incorporated inside.

But knowing of a problem and a solution that isn't terribly expensive - school storm shelters in the tornado belt for example - strikes one as being penny wise and pound foolish.   The same can be said for the current and upcoming cuts in NOAA storm prediction.

 

 

 

 

immigration and politics

How a joke became a plank for the GOP



Decode DC is great stuff.

 

affordable housing in nyc

Some of these don't meet legal requirements, but that doesn't stop landlords from trying and budget minded renters from renting.

One friend paid about $2500 a month for about 300 sq ft in a nice location (West Village).  It did have a bathroom, but was very old and terribly designed.  Heating and cooling were major issues.  Another shared a place with at least a half dozen others and rented rights to a shelf in the 'fridge, a place to store a couple of suitcases and use of a couch for half a day (someone else got to sleep on it during the other half).  

 

 

 

investment advice from susan:-)

The NY TImes has a short piece on Susan Crawford.  

A caveat is I'm a friend.  I'm in 99% agreement with her ..    I'm not keen on her endorsement of Tom Wheeler for FCC chair.  I'm not as optimistic, but perhaps she knows something and there is always political expediency. 

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Ms. Crawford, with a smile on her face, says the outlook is grim.

“We are in this position as a country because we assumed that the magic of the marketplace would provide competition and provide world-class communications,” she said. “But history has demonstrated that left to their own devices, companies will gouge the rich, leave out the poor, cherry-pick markets and focus solely on their profits. It isn’t evil, it’s just the way things work.”

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dealing with peak water

When a stored resource is used at a faster rate than it is replenished over the decades a reality emerges that demands change.  The impact of intense irrigation in parts of the Midwest (via the NY Times)

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The land, known as Section 35, sits atop the High Plains Aquifer, a waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel that begins beneath Wyoming and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas Panhandle. The aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many places to last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by drought.

Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.

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us taxpayer bill for extreme weather was high last year

According to the NRDC it was nearly $100 billion - about $1100 per taxpayer.  While last year may have been a spike it is likely the average will just keep increasing.  Most of the damage was covered by taxpayers rather than insurance.

After Sandy the term resilient seems to be coming into general use  - mostly replacing sustainable.  In this part of the country (NJ) a huge number of small electric generators have been installed.  Being without electricity for a week or two in freezing weather was not particularly fun and many came to see them as extremely desirable necessities.  Permanent natural gas generators are frequently in the $5,000 to $10,000 range and are a very expensive and inefficient power source. Perhaps this should be viewed as an additional cost burden on families who can no longer trust the power infrastructure.

 

 

 

progress

Robert Reich writes an optimistic note to new college gradutes noting American progress in the 45 years since he graduated.

 

the daily show's cronkite moment?

Jon Stewart lashes into the Obama Administration

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

towards better conditions in sweatshops

or not ...  (via The NY Times)

What's a thousand deaths if the jeans are really cute...

 

how a uncommon environmentalist sees the world

Mike notes the two part transcript (part 1,  part 2) of a Jeremy Grantham  interview that appeared in The Guardian a few weeks ago.  I'm not as enthusiastic as he is on China...