Get out of a speeding ticket with GPS!

This article in CNN.com this morning caught my eye because I, like this teenager in the article was caught for speeding a lot!
Did you know that out of 20 tickets issued, 19 go unopposed because motorist do not want to get in a one on one argument with a Police officer. That is your word against the officers word and the majority of the time motorist lose because an officer of the law could never be wrong?!
Well guess what? GPS (ground positioning system) is a trend that is challenging the old radar gun.
The argument by defenders of radar (police) and the defenders of the GPS (motorist) have one main theme, accuracy!
The article does not operationalize accuracy, it really operationalizes in-accuracy. Radar needs to be properly calibrated daily and can have outside factors that can throw off radar by another speeding car or in some cases by the sheer design of the car that effect the receiver of the radar. GPS is separated by all these factors because it has no human interference, but can have some lag time due to satellite reception and speed of intervals of data collected. It can't prove if you were speeding or not between intervals of data collection, therefore, not a full proof system.
The interesting thing about the article is that it is giving motorist a voice to challenge the radar argument. It also shows an amazing tracking system, if your teenager is out at a "friends house" and your GPS tracker catches them on Church St. in Burlington VT, then you can make 2 assumptions, either the car was stolen or Jr. is going to get in a heap of trouble when he gets home! So for my kids when they become of age, the independent variable will be "good driver" and the dependent variable will be "installed GPS". Sounds like something written by Orwell?

Get Married, Have a Heart Attack!

This article in CNN news health section caught my eye. The title of it is "bad marriage could damage your heart". And the first line reads "a lousy marriage might literally make you sick".
Marital strife and other bad personal relationships can raise your risk for heart disease, what it likely boils down to is stress! Stress is a well-known contributor to health problems, as well as a potential byproduct of troubled relationships. What I found interesting in this article is that they have several research questions that then focus down to one. First, it covers two questions on being single. Single male is more likely to develop health risks (such as heart disease, obesity and high blood pressure) and a single woman is less likely to develop them. The research question here would be "Does being single effect your health?" and the variables associated would be single male/female and the increased or decreased health risks.
Now being married is the follow-up to the two prior research questions . And to be very specific, a bad marriage. The article does not operationalize "bad marriage", it just states that study participants with bad relationships have biological evidence of stress that could contribute to heart disease. That includes inflammation and elevated levels of stress hormones.
What is interesting is there was no association between marital woes in general and risks for heart disease or early death. But it did find, over a 10-year follow-up, that women who keep silent during marital arguments had an increased risk of dying compared with wives who expressed their feelings during fights. What appeared to matter more for men was just being married; married men were less likely to die during the follow-up than single men. So what is the real answer here? Independent variable is bad marriage and the dependent is bad health. Bad marriage, bad for both woman and men, more so for woman. Being single, better for woman. The article ends with that there is a weak association that doesn't prove bad relationships can cause heart disease, but they can't rule it out. I had to get a chuckle out of this entire article because in big bold letters it tells you that you are basically going to die if you are in a bad marriage then literally the last two sentences states that there is not enough evidence to prove the link. Then why write it?

Bright Ideas

I don't know if anyone has noticed or heard, but the month of October is National Energy Awareness month. In this months issue of "Waste News" they write about dozens of ways you can save on energy. In one article, "Bright Ideas" it talks about one of the easiest ways to save energy, as easy as changing your light bulb! Compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL's) are one of the easiest things you can do. For a long time, these weird looking bulbs were ignored because of the cost associated with them, now, companies have coupons and incentives to switch over. It was apparent to me that the writer of the article spent some time researching various energy and utility companies, but what was interesting was (I can't believe I am going to say it) Wal-Marts participation. Wal-Mart must have spent some time crunching numbers, all this in an effort for good publicity. Here are some interesting numbers Wal-Mart gives in this article. Wal-Mart has surpassed its goal to sell 100 million CFL's by the end of 2007 (thats great, so how many more?) "Over the life time of the bulb, Wal-Mart customers will save some $30 per bulb and could save some $3 billion on electricity and conserve the energy to power 450, 000 homes and reduce emissions as much as taking 700,000 cars off the road". Huh? What in the heck does that mean? What is Wal-marts operationalization of "save". I can understand the 3 billion, simple math, but the homes and the cars, is that savings for a day, week, month, year, forever? I believe that the content of this article was written under good intentions. It just makes sense that a simple thing as changing you light in your home can save, but to have figures like that with no real knowledge of what is actually saved, it just draws some skepticism by this reader.

$4.6 Billion reasons to Stop air Pollution

Last week the Federal Government reached a settlement deal in the realm of $4.6 billion dollars to several groups of electricity producing coal fired power plants. Part of the deal was to also "roughly" lower emissions by 70% in the next 12 years?
The article in the Boston Globe reports that 8 east coast states are part of the settlement. Senator John Kerry was quoted in saying that " I hope that this settlement will begin to repair the damage to our communities, our health, and our natural resources, which have been seriously impacted over many years."
Now that I have been taking this class, I can recognize how things that are written are taken literally by the general public. The article writes about the impact that companies from the Midwest accounts for "as much as 25% of the sulfur and nitrogen emissions in certain locations in New England". Can a statement be any more vague? It talks about certain areas of Maine and Vermont and the wide range of percentages that each have, and they like to use the term roughly? "Roughly 10% of sulphate we observe in the region is coming from states like PA or OH". "In Acadia National park, roughly 15% of sulphur particles came from the south and Midwest and that % jumps to over 25% in the Lye Brook Wilderness in Southern VT". Where is the validity to these numbers? What type of air monitoring program was in place to justify these numbers? I am sure that if I tried to make an argument in Prof. Chavda's class by backing my argument with "roughly", I am sure that the argument would be disregarded before I could even finish my statement! So why is the globe writing an article like this? The article was written based on generalities with no hard numbers to support the statements made. It is almost like a water cooler type conversation article (if that makes sense?), something that you can tell your co-worker as part of your "hows the weather" morning conversation. Before I finish, there was one last statement made about adult asthma rates. "In a 2003 report by the New England Asthma Regional Council found that Massachusetts' adult asthma rate was more than 2% points higher than the national average". My question was how did they get to those results, was there any other organization outside of NE that confirmed these results? What was there operationalization of "adult asthma"? This class is making realize that the perception of the world is done with generalizations with no real validity to things being said or written. It makes me want more from what is being said out there and get to the real nooks and crannies of the issues, not arbitrary statements that we are all supposed to digest.

Geothermal Energy

The last couple of weeks, I have been reading and hearing about geothermal energy and how it could be the energy solution that we have been looking for. My interest peaked this weekend when I drove by a development in the lakes region advertising there new homes "Ask us about our geothermal package". I later went on the web to get some validity to this
concept. Geothermal energy is the energy right below our feet. Deep below us, the earth's core is constantly generating heat. This heat melts rock, steams water, builds up pressure, I think you get the picture. This practice of tapping into this energy has been used for years. Iceland's main power supply is from geothermal energy. Research has shown that drilling deep enough into these sources, harnessing the hot water (700 degrees in some cases) is the safest and cleanest form of energy production and use.
On the web site geothermal.marin.org, it covers the benefits of this reliable and what seems to be an endless supply of energy. It is a clean source of energy, there are no fossil fuels involved in the production of electricity from geothermal techniques. It is usually a closed water system, steam comes up from the ground, runs turbines and generates electricity. There a no by-products, no emissions, just clean energy. Environmentally, it is easy on the land. Geothermal installations don't require damming of rivers or harvesting of forests and there are no mine shafts, tunnels, open pits, waste heaps or oil spills. The energy is reliable, the system runs on its own, it fuels power for itself, it is not interrupted by power failures, weather patterns or any outside forces that could disrupt its operation. The system is extremely flexible, when demand grows production can increase without impacting its size, unlike wind and solar farms, these systems need to get larger to keep up with demand. It can also help in areas where energy production does not exist. It can create jobs, create energy and help countries that are burdened with poor energy programs.
Why isn't everyone doing this then? Is it political? Are oil lobbyist hindering its production? I explored this as well. Geothermal energy is used all over the world. This country has hundreds of plants set up all over from California to Idaho. Communities are probably getting this form of energy and don't even know it. I would hate to make conclusions, but the one theme that I was getting from the articles on geothermal is that we consume to much power. In 1999, North America’s (Mexico, USA, Canada) per capita energy consumption was about 4 ½ times greater than the world average. North America’s per capita energy consumption is forecast to increase nearly 10 percent by 2010. To me, as a environmentalist, these are reliable facts that should concern all of us, for us to change and have a causal relationship in this energy topic, changing our consumption habits will in turn change our need for power.

Population Boom

I was looking through CNN's website and I came across an article based on the overpopulation of the planet and that we are path to reach 9 billion by the year 2050!! This article interested me because back in my Biology days I did a small project on China's population issue and the measures that the government put in place to try and curve their boom. The article even mentions the "one child policy" and fines, sterilization and forced abortions, that China has in place. It is crazy to even think of a government that would have these policies in place. The article is actually very good but lacks depth. It goes into India taking the title of largest population and that 1/3 the worlds population will be between India and China. The worlds resources will be challenged, and there will be a relentless pursuit of clean water. The article then goes into that there is only 3% of clean drinkable water in the world, the rest is saltwater. Water is the basis of life, without it we are a baron rock. Scientists in this article are concerned with the future water supply and if it will sustain 9 billion people, not only as drinking water but for sustaining our food supplies. How they got these figures is very suspect and why they did not get into other methods of obtaining clean water. The article to me was borderline fear tactics, nothing real concrete, just estimates. I am sure the J curve of the human population explosion is sky rocketing, first billion in 1830, took almost 2 million years to get there, and 170 years to get to the next 5 billion. I am sure this data is somewhat accurate. But it does not get into the resource issues as in depth as they should, it made arbitrary mentions of the challenges the world will encounter with water and food and wildlife. Water is the biggest issue, desalinization is a reality, it is clean, effective and is a modestly cheap process to get clean drinking water from our enormous oceans. This was never mentioned as a solution for our supposed water crisis. It was an interesting article, I just wished it had more information to support it.

Union Strike

I would like to talk a little bit about the GM UAW strike that went on today. At 11:00 a.m. this morning, 73,000 UAW workers went on strike because both parties (Management and the Union) could not come to terms on several key issues. Their contract had originally ended on the 14th but after 9 days of not seeing eye to eye, the Union decided to pull out the big guns and coordinate a strike. CNN has an article discussing the most current events.
This particular issue really chaps my you know what!! The main reason both parties cannot come to terms is the incurred health care costs. GM wants to shift 51 Billion in future health care costs for retirees and current work force. Between the two, there is a little over 340,000. Now I work for a municipality, the City has several Unions, and believe me, the weekly cost for a worker on the average family plan pays about $15.00 a week. I am willing to bet that the GM workers are paying very similar cost if not less! The thing that gets my goat is that these workers have no idea what millions of other working americans are paying for their health care.
I went on to the National Coalition of Health Care to get some figures on what people are paying for Health care.
"Premiums for employer-based health insurance rose by 7.7 percent in 2006. Small employers saw their premiums, on average, increase 8.8 percent. Firms with less than 24 workers, experienced an increase of 10.5 percent (3)
The annual premium that a health insurer charges an employer for a health plan covering a family of four averaged $11,500 in 2006. Workers contributed nearly $3,000, or 10 percent more than they did in 2005 (3).The annual premiums for family coverage significantly eclipsed the gross earnings for a full-time, minimum-wage worker ($10,712)".
If that employer covers 80% of what the insurance company charges (My brother is in a similar situation) then the cost for the coverage is for the employee to pay. 80% of $11,500 is $9,200, leaving $2,300 for the employee which comes out to be a little over $44.00 a week! That is 3 times what the Union worker pays. Does the UAW Union think that increased health care costs are a myth? Do they honestly think that there workers are exempt from these cost that the rest of the country is dealing with? It is just frustrating to read stuff like this because unfortunatley it comes down to money, and in the long run, the consumer of a GM product will pay for it anyway!
This concludes my rant of the week!