After misinterpreting the data on the side-impact crash tests it ran on child car seats, Consumer Reports is changing its methodology on such tests, enlisting the help of experts in the field instead of acting with total independence. (Here is our earlier take on child car seats.)
I’ve blogged before about my suspicions that the ban on electronic devices on airplanes is the product of a regulator with an overactive imagination, which is an opinion that upsets a lot of blog readers, so let’s take it another direction. Everyone knows you shouldn’t use cell phones in hospitals for fear of disrupting life-save hospital equipment. Right? According to . . .
There is a very disturbing report in the new Consumer Reports about child car seats. Here’s an excerpt: You’d think that in a car crash, infants in their cozy car seats would be the most protected passengers of all. But you’d be wrong, our tests reveal. Cars and car seats can’t be sold unless they can withstand a 30-mph frontal . . .
Read the Column » The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever By Ignaz Semmelweis Hand Hygiene Among Physicians: Performance, Beliefs, and Perceptions By Didier Pittet, MD et al Novel Antimicrobial Surface Coatings and the Potential For Reduced Fomite Transmission Of SARS And Other Pathogens By Craig Feied The September 25, 2006, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine . . .
As many readers of this blog may recall, we have written about child car seats and how they seemingly provide no safety advantage over seat belts for children 2 and older. This aroused the ire of many safety officials and researchers, who felt we were giving car seats an unduly bad name. Well, it seems like Britney Spears has just . . .
The February 19, 2006, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine concerns NASCAR, or the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, which in a previous incarnation was known, quite fittingly, as the Stock-Car Auto Racing Society, or SCARS. This post contains bonus material.
I’ve just returned from a quick trip to British Columbia (specifically to the ski town of Whistler, to which one can only properly say “wow”), and a couple of things from western Canada caught my eye. The first is this blog post about the use of urinalysis for construction job applicants in Alberta, where the long-standing oil rush is headier . . .
In the “Letters” section of today’s New York Times Sunday magazine, a letter by two doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia criticizes our piece on car seats vs seat belts: As pediatricians, scientists and leaders of the world’s largest study on children in crashes, we think that overinterpretation of findings from a single source of data led Stephen J. . . .
Dubner went solo on the Today Show this morning. Levitt, who still can’t quite get his head around flying halfway across the country to do a four minute interview, was off at a water park in Wisconsin with his wife and kids, which luckily was a good enough excuse to miss the interview. If you weren’t on the East Coast, . . .
A number of readers, in light of our recent column on car seats vs. seat belts for kids, have asked my views on seat belts and air bags for adults. So let me ask you a question: if you could only have one or the other, would you go for the seat belt or the air bag. It turns out . . .
The July 10, 2005, Freakonomics column, “The Seat-Belt Solution: How Much Good Do Car Seats Do?” is about the efficacy of child car seats versus plain old seat belts. This blog post supplies additional research material.
Things move quickly in the modern world. Within two hours of posting my academic paper on car seats vs. seat belts on the Freakonomics web page (the first time this paper had seen light of day), another economist found the paper and tested its hypotheses on a very different data set and reported back the results. The economist is Paul . . .