AI

A review of bicycle helmet laws shows that more laws reduce cycling-related head injuries. They also reduce non-head injuries and increased head injuries in other sports. Put simply, campaigns to promote helmet-wearing appear to be most effective in making people too afraid to ride their bikes.
Dave Horton, a sociologist at Lancaster University, amplifies these findings in a series of essays that show how the media and civic leaders of present cycling as a strange, reckless, and dangerous practice.
I routinely see similar effects with regard to online safety. We’ve made sensible people of all ages afraid because somewhere, someone has done something bad. The Internet is a dangerous place where bad people are armed with malware that will steal your money, identity and/or children.
Mississippi TV station WLOX reports on an FBI program that educates kids on online safety. “We need to be able to educate these children to the dangers and the issues that they’re going to face online,” said FBI Special Agent Scott Wells.
Safe Online Surfing is an educational game that teaches young people about cyber words, cyberstalking, and how sketchy websites are trying to steal your identity. (It’s also a game done in Flash, meaning that people who iPads or other mobile devices can’t play it.)

FBI Safe Online Surfing

Guess the wrong answer and you deprive an underwater princess of air. Predators, we learn, will try to lure you in with inappropriate topics, not try to win your trust by playing a game.

Indeed, the web is a troublesome place, as demonstrated by the WLOX viewers whose fifth most popular news story is, well, this. With video.

 (h/t to MeFi)

Thank you, AARP. I’m certainly thinking about an Alaskan cruise this night.

The web story on Sunday evening reported that Sonoma’s chef had won the competition for Worcester’s best chef.

Sonoma chef sizzles in restaurant competition PRINCETON HAS ‘WORCESTER’S BEST’

By Monday morning, however, the headline and page title matched the picture caption and story.

EVO chef Albert Maykel III wins Worcester’s Best Chef competition

You got your Internet in my cheese.
Thank you, I think.

The Internet of Things, Soon Accessible by Smartphone – Technology Review

A forthcoming packaging chip could let your phone talk to the plastic wrap on your cheese.

These are the famous Flaming Tar Barrels of Otterly St. Mary. 

In brief, the townsfolk put tar in barrels, set the tar on fire, and carry the barrels around the town. Only local are permitted to carry the barrels, but the competition is open to men, women, and children.

They are worried that they’re not able to raise enough money to keep the festival going.
Mark Steele describes the town and its carnival of flaming tar barrels in this BBC Radio 4 Extra show.

A lot will be said about the recent tragedy in Connecticut. Most of it will be an expression of grief and bewilderment. Much of the commentary will be thoughtful and heartfelt. Some of it will be positioned, consciously or not, to advance an agenda. Intertwined with all of it will be observations from people whom we respect, but who are making statements that are passionate, stupid, and wrong. That’s who we are, and that’s how we have to live together.
Let me add just a couple of quick thoughts based on early and likely to be inaccurate information.

• It appears that the guns used in this shooting were purchased and owned legally by the assailant’s mother (now dead by those same guns). Gun control legislation of a type that would pass muster under the recent Supreme Court rulings on the Second Amendment probably wouldn’t have prevented these guns from being used in these crimes.
  There may be reasons for considering stronger gun control laws, but this case doesn’t appear to be one of them.
• Much will be said about identifying people with mental illness in an effort to prevent future shootings. Our predictive powers regarding the behavior of anyone, mentally ill or otherwise, are nil. We have statistics that will show that a certain percentage of people who exhibit certain behaviors or who have been treated for certain conditions are likely to cause problems. There is, however, zero chance that we can then say with certainty that any specific individual matching that profile will offend.
  Two members of my extended family have done time in jail as the result of their mental illnesses, one for what he did and the other for what he said and that others feared he might do.
  • The one who did the crime did so as a complete surprise to all of us.
  • The one who said the wrong thing to the wrong person as the wrong time only learned how not to say those things to anyone, including a therapist, again.  Anyone who has been committed to a hospital under a Massachusetts Section 12 knows the magic words not to say. As a result, the person’s illness goes underground even further.

  Even as we discuss identification of people likely to offend, we make it more difficult to get the kinds of sustained mental health and family services that might give us a chance to heal what is badly broken.  A person who kills his mother and her kindergarten class isn’t going to be made whole by a Prozac presecription.