Boing Boing » Safety

Zombie work safety PSA made by high school students

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:42:44 +0000

Vincent sez, "Our high school film class from Oak Park High in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada made this zombie-themed PSA to spread the message about a worker's right to refuse unsafe work. It's a big issue. In Canada, in 2010, 1014 workplace deaths were recorded in Canada - that's almost three deaths every day! Between 1993 to 2010, 16,143 people lost their lives due to work-related causes in Canada. A 2003 survey showed that compared with other developed countries of the OECD, Canada isn't doing too well. Of the 29 developed nations 24 had significantly lower workplace death rates than Canada. Using the factor of deaths/100,000 workers, Canada was only safer on average than Korea (29 deaths), Turkey (20.6 deaths), Mexico (12.0 deaths), Portugal (8.7 deaths) and then Canada with 6.1 deaths per 100,000 workers.* Our class used humour because we thought it would be an effective way to create a memorable message. Our PSA won first place in the Manitoba Safe Work video contest, and it is now competing to be the top Canadian video. You may remember our school, which has made other popular videos that you have featured on Boing Boing, including 'Jedi High,' 'Anti-Racism Girl,' and 'The Pink Shirt.'"

Use_Your_Brains

What ouija boards and military contractors have in common

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:30:04 +0000

The power of suggestion, your own expectations, and even your emotions can cause your body to move without you actively telling it to. This weird phenomenon is called the ideomotor effect. It's what makes ouija boards work and it's the mechanism behind $60,000 bomb-detecting devices that an American company was recently caught selling to the Iraqi government. Needless to say, the devices did not actually detect bombs.

HOWTO die at Burning Man

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:55:18 +0000

M Otis Beard sez, "You don't often hear about the deaths that happen at Burning Man. Here is an overview that just might save your life." Be that as it may, Black Rock City has extraordinarily low mortality compared to comparably populated/sized areas in the USA.

Ammonium nitrate fertilizer isn't really a dangerous explosive (most of the time)

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:16:10 +0000

Fertilizer can explode*. We all know that. It was a key ingredient in the bomb that destroyed Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995. Last night, a factory full of the stuff went up with enough force that United States Geological Survey seismographs registered it as a magnitude 2.1 earthquake.

Ammonium nitrate is the chemical that makes these dramatic displays possible. But creating an explosion isn't as simple as just having a pile of ammonium nitrate — let alone a pile of fertilizer — sitting around. We've come to think of this as pretty volatile stuff. But, according to chemist Jimmie Oxley, ammonium nitrate is a lot less dangerous than you might guess. Despite a history of high-profile explosions, like the one that happened last night, ammonium nitrate isn't considered to be that big of a danger. In fact, Oxley called it a "marginal explosive" — a chemical that is mostly safe, but can become dangerous when the conditions are just right.

Oxley studies energetic materials at the University of Rhode Island. You could say that she studies stuff that explodes, but it actually goes a lot further than that. Energetic materials aren't just explosives. The classification includes anything that produces heat as it decomposes. That includes ammonium nitrate, but it also includes your compost pile.

"If you keep a compost heap you might have seen it steaming in the winter sometimes," Oxley said. "And it can even catch on fire. That's because biorganisms break down the compost and release heat. Sometimes, that process releases enough heat that it causes the whole pile to catch."

When it comes to energetic materials, the thing you really want to avoid is a runaway reaction, when a substance starts producing enough heat, on its own, to catch itself on fire and then keep that fire going.

But, amazingly, even that isn't enough to ensure that ammonium nitrate will explode, Oxley said. A couple of years ago, she put together a list of ammonium nitrate accidents that had happened around the world — usually in factories, or during shipping. There are 24 cases on the list that involved fire. Of those, in only 11 cases did the event go from fire to detonation.

In fact, since the 1950s, ammonium nitrate-based explosives have basically supplanted the older dynamite explosives used in mining and other industries, precisely because they are so much safer and harder to detonate. Ammonium nitrate isn't even classed as an explosive, Oxley said.

"It's very difficult to get it to detonate at a reasonable scale," she said. "You can toss 50 pounds of it in the back of your car and it will do nothing. With something like dynamite even a gram or two is highly explosive."

But, obviously, ammonium nitrate does explode sometimes. So what makes those circumstances different?

The most important factor is how much ammonium nitrate you have. Fifty pounds ain't nothing. But a couple hundred tons of the stuff is a different story. If that huge amount of ammonium nitrate also catches on fire ... then you have a problem.

As it burns, ammonium nitrate goes through chemical changes that lead to the production of oxygen. And what does a fire need to keep going and get bigger? Why, oxygen.

The largest industrial accident in the United States happened in 1947, off the coast of Texas City, Texas, when two shipping vessels full of ammonium nitrate exploded. Six hundred people were killed. The explosion might not have happened had the captain of one of the two ships adopted a different tactic for fire-fighting. When he realized his hold was in flames, Oxley said, he had a choice — drown the fire or smother it. The captain opted for smothering it, sealing the hold and trying to starve the fire of oxygen. But the pyre of burning ammonium nitrate was producing its own oxygen. Instead of putting out the flames, the act of sealing the hold allowed the fire to burn bigger and longer without inturruption.

Contrary to some explanations, you don't need a physical jolt to make a great big pile of burning ammonium nitrate explode. The fire alone will do just fine, Oxley said. That's because, depending on how the ammonium nitrate is packed together, the heat can create a sealed plug, trapping hot gases.

Think of a cigarette, she said. When you light it, most of the gas flows away from the cigarette. But some doesn't. That stuff that hangs around helps to pre-warm the parts of the cigarette that haven't already caught fire. That same basic process can happen with a pile of burning ammonium nitrate, only, in that situation, the pre-warmed chemical can end up fusing together. The space behind the plug keeps on being heated and gases form. Hot gas expands, but, behind the plug, it has nowhere to go. Eventually, the gas will break through the seal and the force of that will trigger an explosion.

UPDATE: According to news reports, ammonium nitrate might not have been only chemical culprit at work in West, Texas. The factory had large stores of both ammonium nitrate and anhydrous ammonia — a flammable gas — according to the LA Times. The ammonium nitrate storage building was at the center of the blast, according to local Dallas/Ft. Worth news. It's not clear which of these chemicals was the source of the explosion. But if it had more to do with the anhydrous ammonia then the chemistry explanation for all of this would be different than what I've posted here. Just FYI.
*Fertilizer can also detonate. Although we laypeople use them as synonyms, "explode" and "detonate" actually mean different things. The force of detonations travels faster than the speed of sound. Explosions don't. Both can still kill people, but a detonation is a lot more likely to cause severe damage to large buildings. Experts will probably be debating for a while whether the West, Texas incident was an explosion or a detonation, Oxley said. Meanwhile, she suspects that the Boston Marathon bombings were likely to have been an explosion.

• Image: Ammonium Nitrate, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from philliecasablanca's photostream
• Image: Ammonium Nitrate, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from mgspiller's photostream

Get information on loved ones in Boston with Google's emergency Person Finder

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:56:31 +0000

If you're looking for loved ones in Boston and can't get through to them, try Google's Person Finder, a service designed to help produce good information in the wake of disasters (it's also one of Google's free/open source software projects, with code here for you to examine and/or improve). There's a good Reddit thread on it here.

Person Finder: Boston Marathon Explosions

Major Disneyland attractions shut over OSHA violations

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 04:18:12 +0000

California Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) has served notice on Disneyland over three attractions, which led to their shut-down yesterday. In 2006, Disney agreed to make changes to the staff areas at the park, and the OSHA notice apparently related to lack of progress on these promises.

The citations were related a 2006 agreement to make improvements and to inspections following recent accidents such as the man who was seriously injured while cleaning the outside of Space Mountain. The findings include simple failures like not having a charged fire extinguisher and more serious ones like failure to protect employees from unsafe ladders or lack of railings preventing a fall hazard. Serious fines of up to $70,000 for each infraction could be levied if Disneyland does not comply immediately with the requests (although appeal is also an option). Total penalties for just the Space Mountain citations could reach over $230,000.
These are the same sort of hazards that forced Disneyland to close Alice in Wonderland until temporary scaffolding could be erected with guardrails. The park still hasn’t made permanent fixes there.
There were a lot of violations listed in the citation, here are a few of those listed as Willful Serious:
“Disneyland Resort failed to correct the unsafe work practice of employees of both Disneyland Resort and HSG Inc. accessing upper exterior platform of a building (Space Mountain) to change lights, and perform other maintenance tasks without the protection of guardrails or personal fall protection...”

Disneyland forced to close attractions by OSHA [The Disney Blog/John Frost]

Space shuttle left astronauts vulnerable to Reaver attacks

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 15:23:41 +0000

It's been a good week for pedantry. In a guest blog post at Scientific American, Kyle Hill discusses the durability of spaceship windows — both in the real world, and in Joss Whedon's movie Serenity. Spaceship windows have to be incredibly tough, because even tiny chips of paint become dangerous projectiles in space. But how would they stand up to frontal attack by a spear? Physics has the answers.

Airplane collides with car

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 04:09:26 +0000

2012 was a terrifying year for Russian dashcam videos, but the badness reaches its peak on Dec 29, with this footage of a plane disintegrating crosswise to busy highway traffic.

How safe is safe?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 17:51:36 +0000

The precautionary principle comes up a lot when you're talking about the side effects of technology in the real world. When you don't have evidence that something is dangerous — but you suspect it might be — you could cite the precautionary principle as a reason to ban or limit the use of that thing. It's a messy idea, though, and I'm still not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, technology is often available before data on the wide-ranging effects of that technology are available. Do you use it or not is a legitimate question. On the other hand, following the precautionary principle in a blind sort of way can lead to things like this.

It's time to start asking serious questions about the safety of lube

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 14:17:33 +0000

The stuff you use to make sex a little more smooth might have some serious drawbacks. Nothing has been proven yet — most of the data comes from disembodied cell cultures and animal testing, which doesn't necessarily give you an accurate picture of what's happening in humans — but several studies over the last few years have drawn connections between lubricant use and increased rates of STD transmission. (It also looks like some lubricants might kill off natural vaginal flora — the good bacteria that live "up there" and make the difference between a healthy vagina and, say, a raging yeast infection.)

Some of these studies have provided evidence suggesting that the ingredients in lubricants damage the cells lining the vagina and rectum — which would explain why those lubricants might facilitate STD transmission.

At Chemical and Engineering News, Lauren Wolf has a really well-researched, well-written story that will give you the low-down on this research without hype and without fear-mongering. Her story is easy to understand and explains what we know, what we don't know, and why this matters (besides the obvious, lubricants have been proposed as a possible means of applying topical anti-microbial STD preventatives).

Right now, the Food & Drug Administration doesn’t typically require testing of personal lubricants in humans. The agency classifies them as medical devices, so the sex aids have to be tested on animals such as rabbits and guinea pigs. Rectal use of lubricants is viewed by the agency as an “off-label” application—use at your own risk.

Questions about lubricant safety arose nearly a decade ago when microbicide developers were testing whether the detergent nonoxynol-9 could block HIV transmission. Manufacturers had been incorporating the compound into spermicidal lubricants for years because of its ability to punch holes in the cell membranes of sperm. In 2002, however, a Phase II/III clinical trial of a nonoxynol-9 vaginal gel failed to protect women from HIV infection. Not only that, but the detergent actually increased the risk of HIV infection in the sex workers tested—women living in countries such as South Africa and Thailand who used the product three or four times per day.

Lab work eventually revealed the reason for the paradoxical increase: Nonoxynol-9 is so good at punching holes in cell membranes that it not only bores into sperm but also into the cells lining the vagina and rectum. The mucosal lining of the vagina is a good barrier to infection all by itself, says Richard A. Cone, a biophysicist at Johns Hopkins University. But if that barrier gets compromised, all bets are off, he explains. After nonoxynol-9—still used on some condoms today—went from promising microbicide candidate to malevolent cell killer, scientists like Cone began to question the safety of other supposedly innocuous spermicide and personal lubricant ingredients.

Read the full story

Via David Kroll

Image: Beer Lube?, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 28096801@N05's photostream

What science says about gun control and violent crime

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 21:00:15 +0000

Does gun control mean fewer guns on the street and less violence? Does encouraging gun ownership mean better protected people and less violence?

I don't think it's too early to be asking questions like this. When you're faced with a tragedy like what happened today at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it's reasonable to start asking questions about violence prevention. It's part of the bargaining stage of grief — wondering if there's something we could have done that would have prevented all those needless deaths. And let's get one thing straight: Everybody wants to prevent what happened today.

So what can be done about it? And what does the science say?

I've been trying to get a handle on that for the last hour or so and here are three things it seems we can definitively say:

• It would be completely accurate for someone to tell you that studies in places like Australia and Austria found that implementing more stringent gun control laws reduced deaths from gun-related suicides and violent crime.

• It would also be accurate to say that a study of the effects of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act in the United States showed no big reductions in gun-related deaths, except for suicides among people older than 55.

• And it's also true that a 2003 study of conceal-carry laws in Florida found that they seemed to make no difference one way or the other — neither increasing nor reducing rates of violent crime.

Yes, this looks like it's going to be one of those moments where science cannot provide you a clear-cut, absolute answer.

The issue is that studying the impact of gun laws on violent crime isn't really the single, simple question that it appears to be. Instead, we're talking about many different individual laws, written in different ways and enforced in different manners. One law might fail while another succeeds. How do you compare them?

Where those laws are implemented is also a factor, because a new, stringent gun law in a place surrounded by similar laws is likely to have a different outcome than the same law in a place where you can quickly cross a border and find completely different legislation. It's also not unreasonable to suspect that culture and other local factors play a part. There appear to be big differences in the number of violent gun deaths between geographic regions of the United States.

Some studies are funded by biased institutions. Some studies aren't peer reviewed. Some studies feature poorly thought-out methodology.

All of that leads to a mess of frequently contradictory conclusions that can, frankly, be used to support just about any position you'd like to put forward. So, basically, just because you can support your position, don't think that makes you absolutely correct.

And that leads me to another key theme that kept coming up on Google Scholar — if we really want to prevent deaths from violent crime we need to come to terms with the fact that most people reach their conclusions about the best way to do that with almost no help from science. In fact, I found multiple researchers who argued that solving our national debate about guns and about how to prevent violent crime had very little to do with the science anyway. It would be nice to know what's actually going on. But it really may not matter much in at a practical level.

Regardless of who you are and what you believe, when you start looking at the sociology of this, you'll find that statistics probably don't matter to you. Tribal affiliation does. Here's how Donald Braman — associate professor at George Washington University Law School — and Dan Kahan — professor at Yale Law School — put it in 2006:

For one segment of American society, guns symbolize honor, human mastery over nature, and individual self-sufficiency. By opposing gun control, individuals affirm the value of these meanings and the vision of the good society that they construct. For another segment of American society, however, guns connote something else: the perpetuation of illicit social hierarchies, the elevation of force over reason, and the expression of collective indifference to the well-being of strangers. These individuals instinctively support gun control as a means of repudiating these significations and of promoting an alternative vision of the good society that features equality, social solidarity, and civilized nonagression.

These competing cultural visions, we will argue, are what drive the gun control debate. They are what dispose individuals to accept certain empirically grounded public-safety arguments and to reject others. Indeed, the meanings that guns and gun control express are sufficient to justify most individuals’ positions on gun control independently of their beliefs about guns and safety. It follows that the only meaningful gun control debate is one that explicitly addresses whether and how the underlying cultural visions at stake should be embodied in American law.

Statistics don't convince people. People convince people.

And this fits pretty well with what we know about how people make up their minds on a whole host of divisive issues. We tend to find people we identify with and believe what they believe. When we change our minds, it's usually because our group's values changed. Or because someone (someone we felt we could identify with, even if they weren't a part of our group) convinced us that a new idea fit better into our group's values than we'd previously thought. Or that our values fit better in a different group than the one we currently belonged to.

If all of this sounds familiar, that's because I wrote a piece on this very subject for The New York Times magazine back in August. Same concept. Different application.

But even in Washington, understanding the power of stories could go a long ways toward bridging gaps that only get bigger when we expect those who disagree to rationally accept data and evidence. “We fight it out by throwing arguments at each other and are upset when they have no effect,” Haidt says. “It makes us accuse our opponents of bad faith and ulterior motives. But the truth is that our minds just aren’t set up to be changed by mere evidence and argument presented by a ‘stranger.’”

And now here's the part where I editorialize. Want to prevent gun violence and reduce the number of horrific events like what happened today? Great. Go stop being strangers to each other. Everybody wants the same thing here. Nobody has tapped into any ineffable truths about how to get there. If we want to hash this out in the political and socio/cultural sphere, we're going to have to stop vilifying the people who disagree with us and start trying to talk about how we can all solve the problems we want to solve while remaining true to our own values.

Image: IMG_0362, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from neontommy's photostream

Be careful out there, bedbug warriors

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:47:36 +0000

Yes, bedbugs are gross. But before you go all Conan on any creepy creatures living in your mattress, please be aware that pesticides are both helpful and potentially dangerous. With bedbug infestations on the rise in many American cities, the Centers for Disease Control is trying to make people aware of the dangers of using too much pesticide, using the wrong types of pesticide, or not carefully following directions. Know what you're using on your home and know what any company you hire to spray is using, too. (Via Jen Gunter)

Ono to Cuomo: "Imagine there’s no fracking"

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:44:16 +0000

CBS Outdoor via Rolling Stone

Yoko Ono and Sean Ono Lennon launched "Artists Against Fracking" earlier this year, and have received no response from NY gov. Andrew Cuomo to their request to meet and talk about the idea of a ban of fracking in New York. Now, Ono and Lennon have launched a billboard campaign on a route where the governor often passes. “Governor Cuomo: Imagine there’s no fracking,” the sign reads.

“Our message is simple: We want Governor Cuomo to imagine and guarantee a New York free of the fracking threat to our water, air, beautiful landscapes and climate,” said Ms. Ono recently in Rolling Stone.

The timing of the campaign is pegged with a Nov. 29 deadline for the governor’s health study on the effects of fracking.

“Fracking for gas is inherently dirty and dangerous,” says Sean Lennon. “No amount of regulation can make fracking safe.”

Surviving a plane crash is surprisingly common

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:51:26 +0000

I'm a nervous flyer. But I'm a lot better at it then I used to be. That's because, a few years ago, I learned that it's actually pretty common to survive a plane crash. Like most people, I'd assumed that the safety in flying came from how seldom accidents happened. Once you were in a crash situation, though, I figured you were probably screwed. But that's not the case.

Looking at all the commercial airline accidents between 1983 and 2000, the National Transportation Safety Board found that 95.7% of the people involved survived. Even when they narrowed down to look at only the worst accidents, the overall survival rate was 76.6%. Yes, some plane crashes kill everyone on board. But those aren't the norm. So you're even safer than you think. Not only are crashes incredibly rare, you're more likely to survive a crash than not. In fact, out of 568 accidents during those 17 years, only 71 resulted in any fatalities at all.

I was talking about this fact with a pilot friend over the weekend, and he mentioned one crash in particular that is an excellent example of the statistics in action. On July 19, 1989, United Airlines Flight 232 lost all its hydraulic controls and landed in Sioux City, Iowa, going more than 100 mph faster than it should have been. You can see the plane breaking apart and bursting into flames in the video above. Turns out, that's what a 62% survival rate looks like. (All the pilots you can hear talking in the video survived, too.)

Read the full NTSB report from 2001

In 2007, Popular Mechanics examined 36 years of NTSB reports and found that the majority of surviving passengers were sitting in the back of the plane. But that seems to depend a lot on the specifics of the crash and may not be a reliable predictor of future results.

Thanks, Shav!

Anti-traffic-cam countermeasure

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 23:03:08 +0000

NoPhoto is Jonathan Dandrow's electronic countermeasure for traffic-cameras. It's a license-plate frame that uses sensors to detect traffic-cameras, and floods the plate with bright light that washes out the plate number when the cameras take the picture. It's presently a prototype, but he's seeking $80,000 through Indiegogo to get UL certification and go into production.

Dandrow believes that traffic cameras are unconstitutional, because "if you do commit a traffic violation, you should have your constitutionally guaranteed right to face your accuser – and that your accuser should not win by default just because it happens to be a camera that can’t talk in court."

His device is made in the USA, and (he says) it is legal to use in the US.

Here is how a typical traffic camera encounter would happen with the noPhoto installed on your car:
1 The traffic camera fires its flash to illuminate your car for a picture
2 The noPhoto detects the flash, analyzes it, and sends the proper firing sequence to its own xenon flashes
3 The noPhoto precisely times and fires the flash at the exact moment needed to overexpose the traffic camera
4 Since the traffic camera is not expecting the additional light from the noPhoto, all of its automated settings are incorrect and the image is completely overexposed. Your license plate cannot be seen you and you will not get a ticket in the mail.

Dandrow also says that traffic cams cause more accidents than they prevent, citing studies by the Federal Highway Administration and the Virginia Transportation Research Council, "The increase in rear-end collisions alone from people slamming on their brakes to avoid being ticketed is enough to increase accident rates overall."

(via Rawfile)

A menu for the intrepid space jumper

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:44:52 +0000

Step one: Skip the beans. On Sunday, Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a balloon capsule in the stratosphere, parachuting safely down to Earth. Today, The Guardian answers some interesting questions about the feat, including an inquiry into Baumgartner's pre-jump diet. "For at least a day before the jump, Baumgartner consumed a "low-residue, low-fibre" diet on the orders of his medical team. They wanted his food to pass quickly through his body without any build-up of gas. In a low-pressure environment, the gas might expand and cause him severe internal pain – a condition known as barotrauma." (Via GrrlScientist)

TRAMPOLARCHERY: loosing arrows whilst bouncing on a trampoline

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 01:22:28 +0000

Ryan is a University of Waterloo Engineering grad student who has invited the world to suggest damnfool stunts that he might perform for the youtubes. In this episode, he looses arrows from a powerful bow while bouncing on a trampoline. It's TRAMPOLARCHERY!

CREATIVE DISSONANCE EPISODE 4 – TRAMPOLARCHERY (via Skepchick)

Death on Mount Everest

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 16:32:48 +0000

Back in May, we linked you to the reporting of Outside's Grayson Schaffer, who was stationed in the base camps of Mount Everest, watching as the mountain's third deadliest spring in recorded history unfolded. Ten climbers died during April and May. But the question is, why?

From a technological standpoint, as Schaffer points out in a follow up piece, Everest ought to be safer these days. Since 1996 — the mountain's deadliest year, documented in John Krakauer's Into Thin Air — weather forecasts have improved (allowing climbers to avoid storms like the one responsible for many of the 1996 deaths), and new helicopters can reach stranded climbers at higher altitudes. But those things, Schaffer argues, are about reducing deaths related to disasters. This year, he writes, the deaths that happened on Everest weren't about freak occurrences of bad luck. It wasn't storms or avalanches that took those people down. It wasn't, in other words, about the random risks of nature.

This matters because it points to a new status quo on Everest: the routinization of high-altitude death. By and large, the people running the show these days on the south side of Everest—the professional guides, climbing Sherpas, and Nepali officials who control permits—do an excellent job of getting climbers to the top and down again. Indeed, a week after this year’s blowup, another hundred people summited on a single bluebird day, without a single death or serious injury.

But that doesn’t mean Everest is being run rationally. There are no prerequisites for how much experience would-be climbers must have and no rules to say who can be an outfitter. Many of the best alpinists in the world still show up in Base Camp every spring. But, increasingly, so do untrained, unfit people who’ve decided to try their hand at climbing and believe that Everest is the most exciting place to start. And while some of the more established outfitters might turn them away, novices are actively courted by cut-rate start-up companies that aren’t about to refuse the cash.

It’s a recipe that doesn’t require a storm to kill people. In this regard, things are much different now than in the past: they’re worse.

Read the rest at Outside

Image via Outside and photographer Rob Sobecki

How to build a better speed limit

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:06:14 +0000

Sometime in November, Texas will open a stretch of toll road south of Austin where the speed limit will be 85 miles per hour.It will be the highest speed limit in America. (Montana used to have no speed limit at all during the day, but that changed in 1999.)

Naturally, one of the big arguments against this is that higher speeds lead to more accidents. And there is some data to back this up. For instance, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety makes a pretty good case for lower speed limits in a Q&A posted on their site:

In 2010, a total of 10,395 deaths, or nearly a third of all motor vehicle fatalities, occurred in speed-related crashes. Based on a nationally representative sample of police-reported crashes, speeding – defined as exceeding the speed limit, driving too fast for conditions or racing – was involved in 16 percent of property-damage-only crashes and 20 percent of crashes with injuries or fatalities. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that the economic cost of speed-related crashes is more than $40 billion each year.

...The National Research Council attributed 4,000 fewer fatalities to the decreased speeds in 1974 compared with 1973...

A 2009 study examining the long-term effects of the 1995 repeal of the national speed limit found a 3 percent increase in road fatalities attributable to higher speed limits on all road types, with the highest increase of 9 percent on rural interstates. The authors estimated that 12,545 deaths were attributed to increases in speed limits across the U.S. between 1995 and 2005.

There is definitely a relationship between speed and safety. It's there consistently in individual studies and you see it when you start looking at lots of studies all at once, too. But the meta-analyses—research that compares and analyzes the results of many studies—also show that the speed/safety connection is probably more complicated than it first appears. Speed limits matter. But maybe we need more options to pick from than a simple, static "faster" or "slower".

People and the environment both have a big impact on the relationship between speed and safety. There are a couple of meta-analyses available to read for free online. Check them out, and you'll see how psychology and road conditions play a big role.

For instance, a 1998 publication from the Federal Highway Administration found that the type of road matters. If you raise the speed limit on a road where people are already driving slowly, it won't affect safety at all.

In general, changing speed limits on low and moderate speed roads appears to have little or no effect on speed and thus little or no effect on crashes. This suggests that drivers travel at speeds they feel are reasonable and safe for the road and traffic regardless of the posted limit. However, on freeways and other high–speed roads, speed limit increases generally lead to higher speeds and crashes.

Here's another weird fact that turns up in both the 1998 report and a paper published by the Transportation Research Board in 2001: You're actually safest when you're traveling with the speed of the traffic around you. Speed-related accidents tend to happen when people are traveling faster or slower than the other cars on the road.

In fact, the 1998 report says that most speed-related accidents happen because an individual is driving too fast for the conditions of the road—that's the current weather, the width of the specific road, and how fast other people are driving.

The conclusion that both reports come to: We don't necessarily need lower speed limits. What we need are speed limits that adjust to the current conditions and the specific needs of a specific road. A variable speed limit would reflect the reality that a lot of drivers already see and respond to, and it might be more easily accepted by the drivers who ignore one-size-fits-all speed limits today. Plus, the variable speed limit would allow the law to match up with what's actually safe. If traffic is flowing at an average of 60 mph, it doesn't make sense to have 70 mph posted—somebody is going to try to keep up with the speed limit and create an unsafe condition.

It's an interesting idea. So far, there's not a lot of good data available to show whether or not it actually reduces accidents and fatalities. Variable speed limits have been tested out around the world, but they remain rare and, in North America, are mostly relegated to stretches of rural highway in places with a history of extreme weather—for instance, a road in Tennessee that gets a lot of heavy fog.

But the basic story is that we need more data. To know whether or not variable speed limits actually make sense, we need them to be implemented in more places with more traffic.

READ MORE
• Synthesis of Studies on Speed and Safety - 2001 meta-analysis
• Synthesis of Safety Research Related to Speed and Speed Management - 1998 meta-analysis
• Driving Speed and the Risk of Road Crashes, A Review - 2006 meta-analysis that is behind a paywall
• Wikipedia on variable speed limits
• US Federal Highway Administration research on variable speed limits in construction zones

Image: Driving Cars in a Traffic Jam, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from epsos's photostream
Image: Speed Limit 35, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 71966930@N00's photostream

How to talk about technology in education without losing your mind to fear

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 16:00:32 +0000

Dangerously Irrelevant's "26 Internet safety talking points" is just about the best essay I've read on creating a sane, evidence-led, pro-education, anti-fear Internet safety policy for a school. Given that schools are third in line to receive oppressive technology mandates (behind autocratic nations and prisons, ahead of corporate enterprise users and the general public), this is desperately needed.

B. The technology function of your school organization exists to serve the educational function, not the other way around. Corollary: your technology coordinator works for you, not vice versa.
C. Mobile phones, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, Wikispaces, Google, and whatever other technologies you’re blocking are not inherently evil. Stop demonizing them and focus on people’s behavior, not the tools, particularly when it comes to making policy. You don’t need special policies for specific tools. Just check that the policies you have are inclusive of electronic communication channels and then enforce the policies you already have on bullying, cheating, sexual harassment, inappropriate communication, illicit behavior, etc.
D. Why are you penalizing the 95% for the 5%? You don’t do this in other areas of discipline at school. Even though you know some students will use their voices or bodies inappropriately in school, you don’t ban everyone from speaking or moving. You know some students may show up drunk to the prom, yet you don’t cancel the prom because of a few rule breakers. Instead, you assume that most students will act appropriately most of the time and then you enforce reasonable expectations and policies for the occasional few that don’t. To use a historical analogy, it’s the difference between DUI-style policies and flat-out Prohibition (which, if you recall, failed miserably). Just as you don’t put entire schools on lockdown every time there’s a fight in the cafeteria, you need to stop penalizing entire student bodies because of statistically-infrequent, worst-case scenarios.
E. You never can promise 100% safety. For instance, you never would promise a parent that her child would never, ever be in a fight at school. So quit trying to guarantee 100% safety when it comes to technology. Provide reasonable supervision, implement reasonable procedures and policies, and move on.

It starts at A and goes all the way down to Z. Every one of 'em's a gem.

26 Internet safety talking points

Boots keeps selling quack remedies intended for babies, even after they are banned from US import over fears of broken glass

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 10:22:27 +0000

Boots, which styles itself a "pharmacy-led Health & Beauty retailer" has caught a lot of flack for selling homeopathic "remedies" that contain no active ingredients. One report actually found a Boots pharmacist referring customers who asked a five-year-old child with a three-day bout of diarrhoea to homeopathic sugar pills (advice that could potentially kill the patient by leaving the underlying condition untreated).

Just in case you couldn't imagine Boots being more profit-led (rather than "pharmacy-led") marvel at the fact that the company refuses to withdraw products from Nelsons, a homeopathic manufacturer, even after the US regulator banned Nelsons products over fears that their sugar pills (which include "teething remedies" that are meant for babies) contained fragments of broken glass.

Boots's answer to a concerned customer? "Don't worry, the broken glass isn't in the stuff they sell to us."

How could Boots know that the lax production standards applied only to shipments to the US? The products are made in Wimbledon. Do Nelsons have ‘lax Fridays’ where they all bunk off to the pub while the US export runs are made?
This response lacks any credibility.
I wrote to Boots when I received this to ask how they can be confident that these problems do not affect the UK. I have received no response.
Of course, we know Boots have a rather cynical attitude to the homeopathic products they sell. When giving evidence to parliament, Paul Bennett, professional standards director and superintendent pharmacist at Boots, admitted they have no evidence these products work, but sold them because they could.
One then might understand they were unconcerned about the homeopathic pills not being manufactured correctly – it does not matter one jot if the sugar pill receives a drop of magic ju-ju juice – it’s just water. But why would Boots be unconcerned that their products lack the quality control procedures to prevent glass entering products? To remind you, Boots sell homeopathic babies teething powders – a completely useless product, but may make the baby forget its teething pain if it crunches down on shards of glass.

Boots Unconcerned About Nelsons Production Problems.

What can we learn from the Colorado shooting?

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:12:11 +0000

Bruce Schneier asks what lessons we can learn from the shooting in a Colorado movie theater, and answers the question with admirable good sense:

The rarity of events such as the Aurora massacre doesn't mean we should ignore any lessons it might teach us. Because people overreact to rare events, they're useful catalysts for social introspection and policy change. The key here is to focus not on the details of the particular event but on the broader issues common to all similar events.
Installing metal detectors at movie theaters doesn't make sense -- there's no reason to think the next crazy gunman will choose a movie theater as his venue, and how effectively would a metal detector deter a lone gunman anyway? -- but understanding the reasons why the United States has so many gun deaths compared with other countries does. The particular motivations of alleged killer James Holmes aren't relevant -- the next gunman will have different motivations -- but the general state of mental health care in the United States is.
Even with this, the most important lesson of the Aurora massacre is how rare these events actually are. Our brains are primed to believe that movie theaters are more dangerous than they used to be, but they're not. The riskiest part of the evening is still the car ride to and from the movie theater, and even that's very safe.

Drawing the wrong lessons from horrific events (via Interesting People)

The end of cheap STD control?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:00:55 +0000

More than 700,000 people in the United States probably get gonorrhea each year. I say "probably" because the Centers for Disease Control doesn't know for sure. It's an estimate, because a lot of those cases go untested, unreported, and untreated.

The good news is that, since the 1940s, getting people to get themselves tested has been the hard part. Once you know the gonorrhea is there, antibiotics have made it both easy and cheap to treat. The (more) bad news: That's changing.

At her Superbug blog, Maryn McKenna talks about the threat of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea—it's not just an issue of health, it's also an issue of how much health costs. So far, there's not been gonorrhea reported that's immune to all the drugs we can throw at it. Just the inexpensive drugs. Anticipating big problems when treating gonorrhea becomes a pricy proposition, the World Health Organization has put together a plan for improving treatment today.

The plan specifically calls out an aspect of the growing resistance problem that we highlighted at SciAm: Community control now depends on rapid molecular tests that identify the gonorrhea organism (Neisseria gonorrhaea) but cannot distinguish between drug-susceptible and antibiotic-resistant organisms. Hence, patients who were treated, and then went back to their doctors with the same symptoms, were assumed to have been cured and then reinfected. Physicians have not had the tools to identify ongoing infections that never responded to treatment — and patients who had those resistant, not-responding infections then went on to unknowingly infect others.

In order to address that problem, the plan calls specifically for improvements in lab capacity, diagnosis and surveillance, as well as asking for things that apply to the greater problem of antibiotic resistance: improved awareness, bigger efforts at prescribing antibiotics appropriately and better drugs. One thing that it particularly calls for — as the CDC did in the New England Journal last February — is for physicians to start applying a “test of cure,” actually checking microbiologically to see whether a patient who was prescribed an antibiotic for gonorrhea is clear of infection, or harboring a resistant strain.

Of course, that's expensive, too. The cheapest option is still to not get gonorrhea at all. Get tested. Make sure your partners are tested. And use protection. In the future, we're not going to be able to afford treating some STDs as "no big deal".

Why lavatory ashtrays are mandatory on nonsmoking flights

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:13:04 +0000

Matt Simmons, who writes the Standalone Sysadmin blog, has been wondering why there are ashtrays in airplane toilets, even though you aren't allowed to smoke anywhere on or near an airplane, and you haven't been allowed to do so for quite some time. It turns out that airplane toilet ashtrays are mandatory: "Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served." (Code of Federal Regulations for airworthiness). Simmons explains why:

The plane can not leave the terminal if the bathrooms don’t have ashtrays. They’re non-optional.
That’s an awfully strange stance to take for a vehicle with such a stringent “no smoking” policy, but it really does make a lot of sense. Back in 1973, a flight crashed and killed 123 people, and the reason for the crash was attributed to a cigarette that was improperly disposed of.
The FAA has decided that some people (despite the policies against smoking, the warning placards, the smoke detector, and the flight attendants) will smoke anyway, and when they do, there had better be a good place to put that cigarette butt.

Engineering Infrastructures For Humans (via Digg)

Armenian political rally ends in tragedy when political hydrogen balloons burst into flames

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 05 May 2012 18:56:05 +0000

144 people were burned at a political rally in the Armenian capital of Yerevan last Friday when bunches of hydrogen balloons bearing political slogans burst into flames. An Agence France-Presse story without a byline reports:

“The balloons exploded and caught fire after people holding the bunches released them from their hands into the air,” a witness told AFP.
It was not immediately clear what caused the explosions although police said they were looking into various potential reasons including the “improper storage of flammable substances”.
...The promotional balloons were decorated with the governing party’s election slogan “Let’s believe in change”.

Hydrogen balloons? Really? Is this a thing?

Exploding hydrogen balloons at Armenian political rally injure many (via JWZ)

When human beings are asked to monitor computers, disaster ensues

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 15:36:16 +0000

Ashwin Parameswaran's "People Make Poor Monitors for Computers" is a fascinating look at (and indictment of) the way we design automation systems with human fallbacks. Our highly automated, highly reliable systems -- the avionics in planes, for example -- are designed with to respond well to all the circumstances the designers can imagine, and use human beings as a last line of defense, there to take control when all else fails. But human beings are neurologically wired to stop noticing things that stay the same for a long time. We suck at vigilance. So when complex, stable systems catastrophically fail, so do we. Parameswaran quotes several sources with examples from air-wrecks, the financial meltdown, and other circumstances where human beings and computers accidentally conspired together to do something stupider than either would have done on their own.

Although both Airbus and Boeing have adopted the fly-by-wire technology, there are fundamental differences in their respective approaches. Whereas Boeing’s system enforces soft limits that can be overridden at the discretion of the pilot, Airbus’ fly-by-wire system has built-in hard limits that cannot be overridden completely at the pilot’s discretion.
As Simon Calder notes, pilots have raised concerns in the past about Airbus‘ systems being “overly sophisticated” as opposed to Boeing’s “rudimentary but robust” system. But this does not imply that the Airbus approach is inferior. It is instructive to analyse Airbus’ response to pilot demands for a manual override switch that allows the pilot to take complete control:
"If we have a button, then the pilot has to be trained on how to use the button, and there are no supporting data on which to base procedures or training…..The hard control limits in the Airbus design provide a consistent “feel” for the aircraft, from the 120-passenger A319 to the 350-passenger A340. That consistency itself builds proficiency and confidence……You don’t need engineering test pilot skills to fly this airplane."
David Evans captures the essence of this philosophy as aimed at minimising the “potential for human error, to keep average pilots within the limits of their average training and skills”.
It is easy to criticise Airbus‘ approach but the hard constraints clearly demand less from the pilot. In the hands of an expert pilot, Boeing’s system may outperform. But if the pilot is a novice, Airbus’ system almost certainly delivers superior results. Moreover, as I discussed earlier in the post, the transition to an almost fully automated system by itself reduces the probability that the human operator can achieve intuitive expertise. In other words, the transition to near-autonomous systems creates a pool of human operators that appear to frequently commit “irrational” errors and is therefore almost impossible to reverse.

People Make Poor Monitors for Computers (Thanks, Patrick!)

World's most distracted driver?

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:19:06 +0000

A 29-year-old woman in Torrance, CA, has been arrested for driving on the 405 freeway while texting on her cellphone, with a kid in the back seat without a seatbelt, another kid in the back seat in an unsecured child seat, and an infant on her lap, while her license was under suspension.

At least one other driver on the road spotted the woman chatting and texting on her phone with the baby on her lap and contacted the police. When she was pulled over, she was still holding onto the baby, presumably because it would be cruel to put him in the glove compartment.
"Her excuse was that, while she was driving on the 91 Freeway near Compton, the 1-year-old started crying and in an effort to comfort the 1-year-old, she pulled the 1-year-old to the front seat," a police department rep tells CBS Los Angeles.

Happy distracted driving awareness month!

California Woman Takes Distracted Driving To Entirely New Level

HOWTO make a disco-ball helmet

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:30:42 +0000

On Instructables, Natalina explains how she turned her motorcycle helmet into a disco ball: "This disco ball helmet uses real glass, as it is intended as a costume piece (to be paired with a disco backpack, coming soon!). If you want it to be functional, acrylic mirror would be safer and lighter weight (though not as shiny and reflective)."

Disco Ball Helmet (Thanks, Karen!

FAA to review in-flight gadget policies, maybe, eventually

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 04:06:43 +0000

The US Federal Aviation Administration today announced it is exploring ways to make it easier for airlines to allow travelers to use connected gadgets like phones, iPads, and tablet PCs during plane takeoff and landing.

A statement released today says the FAA is “exploring ways to bring together all of the key stakeholders involved” (airlines, plane manufacturers, consumer electronics producers, and unions representing flight attendants) to discuss the possibility of testing devices to determine if they are safe for passengers to use during the most critical phases of flight.

“No changes will be made until we are certain they will not impact safety and security," read the statement. FAA rules currently require fliers to shut down their electronic devices when the plane's altitude is below 10,000 feet.

Snip from Nick Bilton at the NYT's Bits blog:

Abby Lunardini, vice president of corporate communications at Virgin America, explained that the current guidelines require that an airline must test each version of a single device before it can be approved by the F.A.A. For example, if the airline wanted to get approval for the iPad, it would have to test the first iPad, iPad 2 and the new iPad, each on a separate flight, with no passengers on the plane.
It would have to do the same for every version of the Kindle. It would have to do it for every different model of plane in its fleet. And American, JetBlue, United, Air Wisconsin, etc., would have to do the same thing. (No wonder the F.A.A. is keeping smartphones off the table since there are easily several hundred different models on the market.) Ms. Lunardini added that Virgin America would like to perform these tests, but the current guidelines make it “prohibitively expensive, especially for an airline with a relatively small fleet that is always in the air on commercial flights like ours.”

More at the New York Times, Associated Press, and Wall Street Journal.

Photo: "Person Holding a Business Phone While on a Plane," Jim Lopes, Shutterstock.

The Apocalypse will be a lot like flying coach

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:53:16 +0000

What could possibly make a 1960s-era nuclear war worse than you'd already assumed it would be? How about being packed like sardines into a fallout shelter with 13 of your soon-to-be-closest friends?

Frank Munger is a senior reporter with the Knoxville News Sentinel, where he covers Oak Ridge National Laboratory—a nearby energy research facility that previously did a lot of civil defense research. Munger turned up this, and several other photos, of mockup nuclear shelter arrangements tested out in the basement at ORNL when the facility was trying to establish best practice scenarios for surviving the Apocalypse.

They look ... less than pleasant.

That said, though, they may not have been meant as long-term arrangements. Munger linked to an Atlantic article that makes an interesting case related to these photos: If what you're talking about is one relatively small nuclear bomb (as opposed to massive, hydrogen bomb, mutually assured destruction scenarios), the idea of "Duck and Cover" isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. If you could get these 14 people out of the way of the fallout for a couple weeks, their chances of survival would rise exponentially. Fallout shelters were not meant to be "the place you and your people live for the next 50 years."

The radiation from fallout can be severe -- the bigger the bomb, and the closer it is the the ground, the worse the fallout, generally -- but it decays according to a straightforward rule, called the 7/10 rule: Seven hours after the explosion, the radiation is 1/10 the original level; seven times that interval (49 hours, or two days) it is 1/10 of that, or 1/100 the original, and seven times that interval (roughly two weeks) it is 1/1000 the original intensity.

See the rest of Frank Munger's photos of ORNL fallout shelter mockups.Read the rest of The Atlantic article on "duck and cover".