Category: Technology
Highway crash survival – ctd.
Contrarian reader JS writes:
Most if not all news accounts of such accidents provide no information about the factors involved. From your account it is clear that a) slowing down during bad conditions; b) having proper approved child safety restraints; and c) operating a vehicle with a good safety rating are the right ingredients for safe driving with a family. This account is far more valuable to the world in general than a news report that simply says a head-on collision sent five to hospital with non life-threatening injuries and the driver of a second vehicle was killed.
I am a motorcyclist, and I read with great attention every account of accidents involving bikes. Rarely if at all are details given as to circumstances. There may be a statement which says the accident is being investigated but the results are never made public. Such dry reportage has no value if circumstances are left to pure speculation. How can I or anyone else learn anything from that?
As an example, the inordinate number of fatal accidents along the Trans Canada near Antigonish in the last few weeks has left a general impression that all have been caused by impatient drivers trying to pass where they shouldn’t. There have been no facts whatsoever presented to support that assumption, yet it persists. Elected officials are now demanding massive public expenditures to twin the highway. On what facts is that assumption based?
I am sure your deeply personal account will be read by many and give cause for serious thought about our own respective situations and hopefully remind us all that there is a story behind the story.
Thank you to the many readers who wrote messages of concern about Silas, Jenn, Maggie, Josh, and Jacob. We are all grateful. They are all on the mend.
How my family survived a highway crash
The five occupants of this 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan — my son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren — survived a head-on collision on the TransCanada Highway Thursday evening. I offer the following details in hopes that other families will find it helpful to understand the factors that decisively improved their chances of survival.
Shortly before 5 p.m, August 26, my family was westbound on Route 105 in Lexington, Nova Scotia, just north of the Canso Causeway, when a severe rain squall hit the area. Daughter-in-law Jenn had just slowed down when an eastbound car apparently hydroplaned and spun across the centerline into their path.
Grandson Jacob, age 6, suffered a broken femur. The others — Jenn, my son Silas, Jacob’s twin brother Josh and sister Maggie, 8 — were badly bruised and badly shaken. Surgeons at the IWK-Grace Hospital in Halifax repaired Jacob’s leg Saturday. Doctors expect all to recover fully. We are grateful to them, and to the EMTs and volunteers who responded to the crash.
The driver and lone occupant of the other car, Marlene MacDonald of Port Hawkesbury and Washabuckt, died at the scene.
I offer my sincere sympathy to Ms. MacDonald’s daughters, grandchildren, and siblings. Events like this cause those affected to reflect on counterfactual alternatives; since Thursday, our family and friends have thought constantly of the MacDonald family’s suffering, and how easily it could have been ours. I am sorry for their loss.
Death and injuries in car crashes result not from a vehicle’s collision with another object but from what’s sometimes called the second collision — that of the occupants with the inside surfaces of the car. The second collision occurs a fraction of a second after the first.
Here are some of the factors that made the second collision survivable in my family’s case:
- Jenn reduced speed to reflect driving conditions, lessening the force of the subsequent impact.
- In response to legislation, insurance company pressures, and consumer demand, automobile manufacturers have made tremendous improvements in the crashworthiness of their cars over the last decade. Modern vehicles are better engineered to absorb and dissipate the force of sudden impacts while maintaining the integrity of the passenger compartment.
- Jenn and Silas drove a 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan equipped with front and side airbags. The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety gives this model a “good” rating (its highest) for “frontal offset” and “side impact” test results. You can check the crashworthiness of your car here.
- All the occupants were secured with optimal, industry-recommended safety equipment: the adults with standard lap-and-shoulder belts; the eight-year-old with a child’s safety booster seat held in place by a lap-and-shoulder belt; the six-year-olds by properly secured child safety seats appropriate to their size and weight.
The last point merits emphasis. For many families, child safety seats are expensive to purchase and tedious to install and use. After Thursday, the expense and inconvenience look pretty small to us, the benefits enormous.
Finally, a word of thanks to the numberless, nameless engineers, auto executives, safety advocates, insurance industry risk analysts, and legislators who helped my dear family survive.
Their survival is not a miracle. It is the result of considered steps by real people to improve highway safety.
Oracle vs. Microsoft
Oh the drama of it all!
(Click here if the video doesn’t appear.) Hat tip: Doug MacKay
Administrivia: missing videos in Contrarian emails
Where possible, I like to embed videos in Contrarian, to save readers the trouble of clicking through to them, while including the links for those who prefer to view them at source.
Lately, however, most of the embedded videos are disappearing from the emails a few hundred of you use to read Contrarian [see link (1) at right.] At first I assumed this was an artifact of Steve Jobs’s hatred of Adobe Flash, causing the embedded videos to disappear chiefly on iPads and iPhones. But, no, of late they have failed to show up in my regular email program.
Is this true for all readers? Is it caused by some new upgrade to WordPress? To Thunderbird? To Google’s email posting system? To some change in the way websites compose their embed codes? I don’t know, and honestly, there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to track down the answer. If some knowledgeable person out there knows the answer, and a fix, please let me know.
In the meantime, at some sacrifice of graphical purity for those reading posts on the website, I will try to flag the existence of embedded videos, and alternative links if they don’t display in email.
Before Google went evil
Google wasn’t always a carrier-humping, net-neutrality, surrender money, and TechCrunch has video to prove it:
For those who don’t follow tech news, Google pulled a stunning about-face on net-neutrality this week, teaming up with Verizon, the very company it pilloried on the issue, in an agreement to abandon the concept of neutrality for fast-growing wireless portions of the Internet, and for whatever new transmission technologies happen along in future.
The do-no-evil company’s reversal stunned the tech world. Unabashed Google admirer Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, called it a Munich Agreement, a description Josh Marshall of TPM Media said was “a bit inflammatory, but pretty much captures it.” Added Jarvis: “Pass the sauerkraut, Herr Chamberlain.”
Wired’s Ryan Singel, too, offered trenchant analysis, and dug out this ringing declaration from a 2007 Google blogpost:
The nation’s spectrum airwaves are not the birthright of any one company. They are a unique and valuable public resource that belong to all Americans. The FCC’s auction rules are designed to allow U.S. consumers — for the first time — to use their handsets with any network they desire, and and use the lawful software applications of their choice.
Google defended itself, weakly, in a blog post by Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel.
To underscore the totality of Google’s reversal, TechCrunch produced this letter to Google users by none other than CEO Eric Schmidt.
A Note to Google Users on Net Neutrality:
The Internet as we know it is facing a serious threat. There’s a debate heating up in Washington, DC on something called “net neutrality” – and it’s a debate that’s so important Google is asking you to get involved. We’re asking you to take action to protect Internet freedom.
In the next few days, the House of Representatives is going to vote on a bill that would fundamentally alter the Internet. That bill, and one that may come up for a key vote in the Senate in the next few weeks, would give the big phone and cable companies the power to pick and choose what you will be able to see and do on the Internet.
Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can’t pay.
Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight. Please call your representative (202-224-3121) and let your voice be heard.
Thanks for your time, your concern and your support.
Eric Schmidt
Google has been a huge force for consumer rights in this incredibly important field. Its defection is a blow that will force defenders of an open Internet to organize.
Exaschmidt – feedback
I described a 250-gigabyte laptop hard drive as “impossibly huge.” Ivan Smith found one twice as big at Tiger Direct: a 500 gigabyte Hitachi Travelstar laptop drive for just $99. That’s 1¢ for every 50 megabytes. Ivan has more on the incredible shrinking price of data storage here.
Exaschmidt
Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaking at the Techonomy conference Wednesday:
There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing… People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them.
FYI: An exabyte (EB) is a unit of computer data storage equal to two to the sixtieth power, or 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes in decimal. A modern laptop hard drive might hold 250 gigabytes, which is impossibly huge. An EB equals four thousand million of those hard drives.
Viral solitude – updated
How a video goes viral:
Sometime on Wednesday, Halifax filmmaker Andrea Dorfman uploaded her lovely video, featuring Tanya Davis’s poem about solitude, to YouTube.
At 6:38 a.m., Friday, when Halifax artist Shelagh Duffett reposted the video to her website, it had been viewed 40 times. Kimberley Mosher, an account manager for a Halifax Advertising agency, saw it on Shelagh’s site and put it on her Facebook page, where, in turn, fashion blogger Allison Garber saw it and reposted the link to her FB page. All this happened in less than three hours.
Allison’s and my mutual friend (and brilliant, Baddeck-based communications strategist) Stacey Pineau sent me the link at 9 a.m. Acting the slowpoke, I didn’t get the video onto Contrarian until just before noon. By then, it had been viewed more than 600 times. But I also sent it to Andrew Sullivan, whose Daily Dish blog at The Atlantic magazine’s website is phenomenally popular. Sullivan published it the following day, Saturday, at 2 p.m.
About eight p.m. Saturday night, celebrity film critic Roger Ebert tweeted the link with a melancholy note hinting at its appropriateness for a Saturday night.
Now I am only speculating, but I suspect Ebert saw the video on Sullivan’s blog. By Sunday morning, three days after Dorfman uploaded it, more than 100,000 people had seen How To Be Alone. As of this posting (5:49 p.m., Tuesday), the tally stands just shy of 190,000. As of Wednesday noon, it has 273,899 views.
In case you are wondering, Dorfman and Ebert have a Bacon number of three.
WaPo unmasks a hidden, top-secret America
The blogosphere is agog at a Washington Post series that uncovers the astonishing, bloated, secret, and likely ineffective national security apparatus that has grown up in the United States following 9/11. Two crack WaPo reporters, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, spent two years tracking down the story, an increasingly rare example of what the dead-tree media can do when it taps its traditional strengths. Here’s the opening sentence:
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
Some highlights:
– Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on Top Secret programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security, and intelligence at over 10,000 locations across the country. Over 850,000 Americans have Top Secret clearances.
– Redundancy and overlap are major problems and a symptom of the ongoing lack of coordination between agencies.
– In the Washington area alone, 33 building complexes for Top Secret work are under construction or have been built since September 2001.
Andrew Sullivan rounds up blogger reaction. Money quote to Glenn Greenwald:
We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.
Flowingdata highlights the infographic:
Click the image (or here) to activate the graphic and explore that the Post calls, “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” [Note: the graphic was sluggish this morning, presumably owing to heavy traffic.]
After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine…
Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications….
The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.
9/11 happened not because intelligence agencies hadn’t detected elements the plot, but because inter-agency secrecy meant no one could put the pieces together. A core finding of the WaPo investigation is that this inability to connect the dots is worse than ever. They detail how various agencies collected ample evidence about alleged Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hassan and attempted Christmas Day bomber Umar Abdulmutallab, but didn’t recognize its significance.
PBS even has a “making of” video:
One for my master, one for my dame
Soldiers herd sheep off the apron of the air force base at El Alto, Bolivia, so the BAe 146 military transport jet in the background can take off.
