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The internet is a giant playground full of potholes you can fall in without realizing it. Lifehacker has advice that you’ve probably heard, but can never be reinforced enough. Read these tips on protecting your privacy, your money, your data, your reputation, and your blood pressure. My favorite: Do not feed the trolls.
First, it’s important to remember that trolls are not attacking you—they’re attacking boredom. They have nothing better to do than say something mean so that’s how they’ve unfortunately chosen to spend their time. If what they’re saying isn’t going to have much of an impact on anyone, just remember that they’re bored, loathsome people and let it go. On the other hand, if they’re promoting hate speech and potentially causing harm to others, it’s best to avoid engaging them and instead report them to the site’s administrator. Many sites offer a means of flagging harmful posts, and commenting systems offer ways for an administrator to ban problematic users. A simple email is often sufficient to take care of a bad person. Engaging with a troll-ish thread is just going to make you angry and potentially get you in trouble, too. If you do fall into the trap of feeding a troll, however, using the principles of cognitive therapy can be a worthy solution. This means responding positively and calmly, while accepting their different opinion. The trolls will likely find it frustrating and even condescending, but it’s hard to argue with someone who is accepting your point of view (or even agreeing with you).
Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
There are so many things wrong with this scene. People who live in climates where they might encounter ice occasionally should learn a few commonsense skills.
1. Don’t use ice-covered steps if there is any alternative route.
2. If they are your steps, use salt or other chemicals to melt the ice. If it’s too cold, you can use sand or ashes or maybe even block access.
3. Use the handrail. That’s what it is for.
4. Watch where you are going.
5. Take your hands out of your pockets. You may need them to regain balance or break a fall.
-via Arbroath
A year ago, we told you about artist John Morse and his Roadside Haiku project in Atlanta. Now his talents have been commissioned for traffic signs in New York City! The New York City Department of Transportation has installed a collection of curbside signs written in haiku along with graphics designed by John Morse. The seventeen-syllable poetry warns drivers, pedestrians, and bikers to watch for safety hazards. Some also have QR codes. See more of them at core77. Link -via Metafilter
Mysterious beings that disable computers are called bugs. Before computers, mysterious beings that sabotaged vehicles and other machines were called gremlins. This use of the term originated in the 1920s to describe unexplained problems with military aircraft, according to Wikipedia. Gremlins were blamed for factory mishaps during World War II, as this safety poster reminds us. See more wartime industrial safety posters at vintage ads. Link -via Boing Boing
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In 1983, more than 10,000 transfusion recipients were infected with HIV from tainted blood. In response, the FDA instituted a lifelong ban on blood donations from any man who’d had sexual contact with another man (“MSM” for short). There are no exceptions, even for celibate men who have tested negative for HIV.
Last month, U.K. Department of Health, acting on recommendation in a report from the the U.K. Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs (SaBTO), lifted their similar law banning MSM blood donations — provided the men haven’t had sex in at least one year. Restrictions have been relaxed in Australia, Japan, Sweden, South Africa and New Zealand. Some think the US should follow suit, but others believe the ban should remain to protect transfusion recipients.
Why a one-year deferral?
The SaBTO report looked at data regarding HIV and related diseases and “additional infectious agents” in the donor population as well as the UK overall population. What SaBTO found is that these diseases can be reliably screened for at the time of donation – if the donor is not in an “early window infection” stage. This window is between nine days and 12 months, depending on the disease. During the window, test results could be unreliable -a false negative might appear in donors who’d recently engaged in high-risk behavior, who could then transmit the disease to a recipient.
The SaBTO recommended deferring gay males for either one or five years from their last sexual encounter to ensure the window had been exceeded. The UK chose the one-year deferral.
Should the US follow suit and institute a deferral system rather than an outright ban on donations from gay men?
In favor of maintaining the lifetime ban
In 2009, the Center for Disease Control “estimate[d] MSM represent approximately 2% of the US population, but accounted for more than 50% of all new HIV infections annually from 2006 to 2009.” This data is the most heavily cited in ban-lifting opponents, who say this creates an increased risk to recipients.
Dr. Jay P. Brooks, a professor of pathology and the director of blood banking and transfusion medicine at University Hospital in San Antonio, says the risk is too great to lift the ban:
“If the current policy is changed or eliminated, we just don’t know what the increased risk to the blood supply will be. We could have one additional HIV-positive unit released every 10 years, every 20 years — or one per year. . . But if the policy is changed to relieve the stigma, you have a risk that has been transferred to a completely different group — the recipients — and I think that is an unfair situation.”
The FDA agrees: a petition put forth from the American Red Cross in 2006 called the ban “medically and scientifically unwarranted,” but the FDA maintained that the increased risk of HIV infection in the general population was too great to assume.
In favor of lifting the lifetime ban
The American Red Cross continues to advocate a repeal of the MSM donor ban in favor of a deferral system, as does Dr. James P. AuBuchon, president of the American Association of Blood Banks. “Given the sensitivity of the tests we now have available, there is no detectable increased risk of HIV entering the blood supply by allowing gay and bisexual men to donate. . . [U]nits of blood are typically destroyed quickly if they’re identified as unsuitable, and blood collectors have a robust protocols — including computer systems approved by the FDA — to prevent erroneous releases.”
What the FDA should focus on, says Joel Ginsberg, head of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, are “behavioral risks rather than belonging to a particular group” by reworking the donor questionnaire about sexual activity and lifestyle behaviors, regardless of demographic.
There are opponents to this tactic, though–primarily, SaBTO. They felt that “the introduction of extensive donor health check questionnaires regarding sexual history will lead to a loss of existing donors,” when presenting their data to the UK Dept. of Health. So there’s the dilemma: do you lose part of your current donor base to admit the (very few) celibate homosexual men who could then donate under the new, fairer screening process? That gamble is not likely to be accepted in the U.S. The most viable option for lifting the ban appears to be the one-year deferral adopted in 12 other industrialized nations.
OK, Neatoramanauts: If it were on a ballot, would you vote to keep the blood donation ban for gay men intact, or vote to implement a deferral system?
Sources:
Pro/Con: Two views of U.S. prohibiting gay men’s blood donation
American Red Cross Fights Ban On Gays’ Blood
Bloody Personal
Britain Lifts Ban on Gay Men Donating Blood. Could the U.S. Be Far Behind?
SaBTO Donor Criteria Selection Review (April 2011) [PDF]
HIV Incidence Report, CDC 2009
Helmets, anti-lock brakes, sunscreen -they all seem like they should make us so much safer and healthier, but as it turns out, they can actually put us in more danger, largely because we take our safety for granted once we have these protection measures in place. Read about these and other safety precautions that actually make you less safe in this great Cracked article.
If you read There, I Fixed It, then you already know there are a lot of people with stupid solutions to serious safety concerns, but just in case you can’t get enough, there’s always this BuzzFeed collection of terrible OSHA violations.
When I was a kiddo, my favorite playground activities were climbing to the top of the monkey bars and spinning way too fast on the merry-go-round. Since then, playgrounds have become increasingly more safe, and according to the New York Times, less mentally stimulating. The article argues that these changes have resulted in kids being less willing to take risks and more of them developing life-long fears -things that are a lot worse than an occasional broken bone.
Link Image via cryptic_star [Flickr]
Kids these days don’t know what hazardous fireworks are… why, back in my day, when we walked six miles to school uphill both ways, fireworks were dangerous. I mean real dangerous, like the M80s we used to by all the time. How dangerous were they?
Federal law now caps the flash powder content of firecrackers at 50mg per firework. Typical M-80s contained somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000mg of powder apiece, or roughly 60 times as much explosive. (This power makes sense given the M-80’s original purpose: simulating the sound of gunfire and artillery during military training missions.)
Read about how these changes came about at mental_floss. Link
Are buses less safe today? Yes, according to the Federal Transit Authority, because of … fat people. So it’s rewriting the rules to ensure bus safety:
The Federal Transit Authority (FTA) proposes raising the assumed average weight per bus passenger from 150 pounds to 175 pounds, which could mean that across the country, fewer people will be allowed on a city transit bus.
The transit authority, which regulates how much weight a bus can carry, also proposes adding an additional quarter of a square foot of floor space per passenger. The changes are being sought "to acknowledge the expanding girth of the average passenger," the agency says.
"This change is really just a bow to reality," says Joseph Schwieterman, who studies bus ridership as director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University in Chicago. "With no small number of bus passengers tipping the scale at 200 pounds or more, this is much more realistic."
Larry Copeland of USA Today has the full story on this weighty matter: Link
English Russia, a blog that presents readers with the oddities and wonders of Russia, has a collection of graphic work safety posters from the Soviet Union. They get rather blunt, but it would be hard to top the German masterpiece Forklift Driver Klaus.
Link via The Agitator
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These scans of an old safety booklet for children called It’s Great to be Alive! are full of gruesome injuries that befall careless bicycle riders, pedestrians, and kids at play.
In fairness, adults didn’t have a lot of options in those days, so using abject fear was a common parenting tool. There were no reflective bicycle helmets or knee-pads for skateboarders, no designated bicycle lanes, many fewer supervised activities, and we didn’t even have seat belts in cars until the mid-1960s. When accidents happened, they were usually pretty grim.
See more mayhem in this article from Gene Gable. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
Would you recognize that someone is drowning if you saw them? Real-life drowning looks nothing like the way Hollywood depicts drowning: the yelling, the arm-waving, the violent panic.
The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC).
gCaptain has a list of signs that indicate the instinctive drowning response. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
When Ralph Nader wrote the book Unsafe at Any Speed, the US Government sat up and took notice. Highway deaths were unacceptably high, and someone had to do something about it. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, a government program actually developed the RSV, a car that had many new safety features. The government tinkered with the design, the features, and tried to sell the idea of a safer car to the automobile industry and the public. What happened to this program? It’s a long story, but in the end, the RSVs were destroyed.
Then-NHTSA chief Jerry Curry contended the vehicles were obsolete, and that anyone who could have learned something from them had done so by then. Claybrook, the NHTSA chief who’d overseen the RSV cars through 1980, told Congress the destruction compared to the Nazis burning books.
“Junking those cars was a terrible idea,” said Kelley, who now teaches at Tufts medical school. “What is the benefit of keeping anything that’s historically important? The future wants to know more about the past, and when you destroy the past, you destroy the future’s access to knowing about it.”
“I thought they were intentionally destroying the evidence that you could do much better,” said Friedman.
Read the complete story at Jalopnik. Link -via Metafilter
The government of the Swiss canton of Fribourg has hired an actor to dress as an angel, stand in the middle of roads around the canton, and urge people to drive slowly:
The ‘road angel’, who forms part of a safe-driving campaign, will wave and flap his wings at motorists travelling too fast. [...]
‘The idea is to provide a sort of concrete protection, to have a real angel telling drivers to be responsible,’ Benoît Dumas, a Fribourg police spokesman, said.
‘To have a physical presence like that makes the message more visible, and it’s out of the ordinary.’
The actor, whose identity has not been released for privacy reasons, works 20 hours per week and will ‘appear’ in different parts of the 670-square-mile region of western Switzerland.
Link via Fast Company | Photo: Daily Mail
Should the US ditch the classic red “exit” sign and replace it with a green man? There are arguments both for and against. For the red:
The contrast between the letters and the background renders it highly legible, the illumination stresses the importance of the message, and the color is evocative of both fire and fire-safety devices (fire extinguishers, fire engines, fire alarms, and the like).
But in other parts of the world, pictograms rule. The “running man” sign was designed by Yukio Ota and adopted internationally for exits a quarter century ago!
The sign’s wordlessness means it can be understood even by people who don’t speak the local language. And the green color, they argue, just makes sense. Green is the color of safety, a color that means go the world over. Red, on the other hand, most often means danger, alert, halt, please don’t touch. Why confuse panicked evacuees with a sign that means right this way in a color that means stop?
Slate lays out the arguments for both and a history of exit signs in one chapter of a six-part series on signs. Links to all the chapters are found at the top of each. Link -via Simply Left Behind
In this instructional video, a safety expert at a drainage site stresses the importance of having a sturdy harness, properly attached. He demonstrates how a rope line connecting him to the guardrail will prevent an accident. You can guess what happened next.
via reddit
Mike Rowe, the host of the TV show "Dirty Jobs" is a surprisingly eloquent guy. In this TED talk in December 2008, he talked about people with dirty jobs, questioning one’s assumptions, the nature of hard work, and the "war on work."
I learned a lot of new things by watching this video clip, including how to properly castrate lambs (hint: yanking ‘em out with one’s teeth is one of the steps)
Hit play or go to Link [TED video clip]
If you’re the dainty type of cyclist who just can’t go anywhere without a touch of lace, you may consider this awesome reflective lace by Elena Corchero.
Link Via Craftzine Image Via Elena Corchero
While sightseeing at the coast, 3-year-old Alaina Pitton and her family came whitin inches of tragedy in a matter of seconds, and it was caught on tape! While posing for a photo, the little girl fell between two fencerails, and had she not grabbed tightly to some weeds, would have toppled over a 150 ft. cliff.
Oregon Parks service is now working on making the area safer for small children. KATU News has the story and video.
Dr. Carl Winter takes popular songs and changes the lyrics to incorporate food safety instructions. The results are funny! I Want to Hold Your Hand by the Beatles becomes You Better Wash Your Hands, Heartache Tonight is turned into Stomachache Tonight, and We Are The Champions becomes We Are the Microbes. Many songs have accompanying videos. Link -via Eat Me Daily
A few things came to my mind when I saw this clip.
1) Why have a loaded gun in plain site at the office?
2) Who woud be stupid enough to go straight to the trigger and pull it?
3) Whas there anyone in front of the desk?
Link: YouTube
