Isegoria

Hybrid vehicles make a lot of sense for taxi cabs, since they log a lot of miles in stop-and-go traffic. According to Hybrid Cabs Take A Licking…But Their Meters Keep On Ticking, “30 San Francisco Escape Hybrid taxis are beginning to hit the 100,000-mile milestone,” and “owners and drivers report” a number of benefits:

Fuel savings between $20 and $31 over the traditional, full-size sedan cabs per 150- to 300-mile shifts. Air conditioning cost on hot days: $5 a shift, about half the sedan-version cost. Brakes are lasting twice as long. The reason: The electric engine acts as a second braking system, taking much of the load off the conventional friction brakes, says Tom Watson, Ford Hybrid Electric Vehicle Propulsion System engineering manager, Sustainable Mobility Technologies and Hybrid Programs. Several water pumps blew at the 50,000-mile mark, a situation that’s been rectified, say Watson and San Francisco cab company owners. No legroom complaints from customers, who seem delighted by the novelty of the hybrid and by doing the right thing for the planet.

Women in Italy Like To Clean but Shun The Quick and Easy:

Italian women keep some of the cleanest homes around.

They spend, on average, 21 hours a week on household chores other than cooking — compared with just four hours for Americans, according to Procter & Gamble Co. research. Italians wash kitchen and bathroom floors at least four times a week, Americans just once. Italians typically iron nearly all their wash, even socks and sheets. And they buy more cleaning supplies than women elsewhere do.

All that should make them the perfect customers for the manufacturers of cleaning products.

But when Unilever launched an all-purpose spray cleaner about six years ago, the product flopped. And when Procter & Gamble tested its top-selling Swiffer Wet mop, which eliminates the need for a clunky bucket of water, the product bombed so badly in Italy that P&G took it off the market.

What the world’s biggest consumer-products companies failed to realize is that what sells products elsewhere — labor-saving convenience — is a big turnoff here. Italian women want products that are tough cleaners, not timesavers.

American housewives presented cake-mix marketers with a similar dilemma a half-century ago, when the first mixes failed to catch on. Once the powdered eggs were removed, and the cook had to add fresh eggs, the mixes caught on — because the housewife wasn’t “cheating” anymore.

Engineering a Soft Landing describes an airbag for motorcyclists:

Takeuchi’s company built its first prototype jacket in 1996. Like eventual production versions, it had an airbag inside that inflated automatically when a pin connecting the jacket to the bike was forcefully pulled from its socket. (A one-touch release button allows riders to get off their bikes without inflating the bags.)

But when Takeuchi took his invention to motorcycle shows in Tokyo and Osaka, bike manufacturers shunned him. ‘They thought the jacket would remind people that riding a motorcycle was dangerous,’ he says.

The Payoff: Undeterred, Takeuchi began selling the jackets in Japan in 1999 under the name Eggparka; in 2001 he relaunched the brand as Hit-Air. Today, Mugen Denko sells 16 styles of airbag-equipped motorcycle jackets and vests for about $270 apiece in Asia, Australia, Europe, and South America. (Product liability laws have been an obstacle in the United States.)

Warriors of the future will ‘taste’ battlefield:

The device, known as “Brain Port,” was pioneered more than 30 years ago by Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, a University of Wisconsin neuroscientist. Bach-y-Rita began routing images from a camera through electrodes taped to people’s backs and later discovered the tongue was a superior transmitter.

A narrow strip of red plastic connects the Brain Port to the tongue where 144 microelectrodes transmit information through nerve fibers to the brain.

Instead of holding and looking at compasses and bluky-hand-held sonar devices, the divers can processes the information through their tongues, said Dr. Anil Raj, the project’s lead scientist.

In testing, blind people found doorways, noticed people walking in front of them and caught balls. A version of the device, expected to be commercially marketed soon, has restored balance to those whose vestibular systems in the inner ear were destroyed by antibiotics.

Michael Zinszer, a veteran Navy diver and director of Florida State University’s Underwater Crime Scene Investigation School, took part in testing using the tongue to transmit an electronic compass and an electronic depth sensor while in a swimming pool.

He likened the feeling on his tongue to Pop Rocks candies.

“You are feeling the outline of this image,” he said. “I was in the pool, they were directing me to a very small object and I was able to locate everything very easily.”

From Britain, The Times says, At $3 a gallon, the Americans are squealing:

This is, of course, still far less than the equivalent of about $8 being paid by British motorists, but such comparisons hold little sway in the US where, for many, the unfettered freedom of the individual to drive across wide-open spaces is almost part of the Constitution. By contrast, public transport has, historically at least, been regarded as un-American.

Police search for killer chimps in Sierra Leone:

Police hunted Monday for chimpanzees that escaped from a Sierra Leone preserve and mauled a group of local and American sightseers — a rare attack that left one local man dead and at least four other people hospitalized.

The U.S. Embassy warned Americans against traveling to the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, from where the chimps escaped before the Sunday attack on a taxicab filled with Americans and others.

The Sierra Leonean driver died as the chimps ripped his body apart and the three Americans were treated at a local hospital for minor injuries, a top police official, Oliver Somasa, said.

Another Sierra Leonean man in the group had his hand amputated after the primate mauling, Somasa said.

Michael Brandon McClellan fears we may be facing Our Rhineland Moment:

There are indeed many similarities between the sad plight of France during the Rhineland crisis and the ominous situation facing the United States in regard to preventing a nuclear Iran today. Similar to the Germans occupying the German Rhineland, the Iranians are violating international mandates, but they are doing so within their own territory. While in 1936 many did not consider the German actions to be aggression, asking “how can a nation illegally occupy its own territory”, so too do many today question the right of the US to militarily invade to prevent a nuclear Iran.

Also like the Rhineland occupation, a nuclear-armed Iran would substantially alter an already precarious strategic paradigm. Nukes in the hands of Ahmadinejad and the mullahs would run the risk of undermining nearly every major American foreign policy goal in the Middle East — be it stabilizing and democratizing Iraq, rolling back the tide of Jihadist terrorism, or securing global energy resources. Just as the mandated demilitarization of the Rhineland was strategically well founded, so too are there sound reasons why the international community has forbidden the development of Iranian nuclear weapons.

Ilya Shapiro, a Canadian with a law degree, finds himself to be an Overqualified Immigrant:

If the federal government ever gets its act together and passes a much-needed immigration reform, I’m giving up my legal career and taking up a profession that will actually allow me to become a U.S. citizen. Like gardening. Or construction. Or anything else that counts as “unskilled.”

And maybe I’ll also fly to Cancun for some sun-and-fun. And come back illegally. (I’m tan and speak fluent Spanish; think I could pass?) Or I’ll have a Miami friend take me out on a boat — so I can come back on a raft.

Because I sure ain’t gonna get a green card the way I’m going: English-speaking, highly educated, law-abiding, and patriotic. I’m precisely the type of person Uncle Sam would never dream of inviting to be a permanent resident. Unless I got married — which’ll happen sooner or later, right?

The Balance of Risk describes risk compensation, or how we naturally return to risk homeostasis:

For instance, a study of Munich taxicab drivers conducted while the taxicab fleet was being changed over to ABS braking systems. The drivers were tracked by observers unaware of which kind of brakes each cab had. Against the expectations of safety experts who recommend ABS brakes as a safety advance, the drivers with ABS brakes actually had more accidents per vehicle mile than those without. The drivers braked more sharply, made tighter turns, drove at higher speeds, and made a number of other adjustments to their driving, all of which more than compensated for their supposedly safer cabs.

Fortunately for us, risk homeostasis does not seem to apply in all cases. Safety innovations that are invisible tend not to provoke changes in behavior — for example changing windshields to safety glass does not alter most peoples’ driving behavior. The difference in the windshield is effectively invisible to the driver, and so doesn’t affect the driving. The taxicab drivers, by contrast, were intimately familiar with their cabs, and the difference in braking was apparent to them.

The island nation of Naura is Paradise well and truly lost:

It sits, a tiny eight-square-mile speck, way out in the vast and lonely reaches of the Pacific, halfway between Hawaii and Australia. In 1798 a passing British captain, the first westerner to see it, dubbed it Pleasant Island. That old name sounds cruelly ironic now. Seen from the air, Nauru resembles an enormous moth-eaten fedora: a ghastly grey mound of rock surrounded by a narrow green brim of vegetation. On the ground, this unlovely impression is confirmed. Strip-mining has turned Nauru into a barren, jagged wasteland. The once-dense tropical vegetation has been cleared. The exposed rock reflects the heat of the equatorial sun and drives away rain.

Unlike many small, remote Pacific islands, Nauru possesses a valuable commodity, phosphate, a sought-after fertiliser ingredient. A high-grade supply was discovered in 1900. For a brief, heady moment in the 1970s, Nauruans were, astonishingly, among the richest people on earth. Now they are poverty-stricken, unhealthy and look set to be clobbered by international trade sanctions. The story of Nauru’s descent from prosperity to penury is one of the most cautionary tales of modern development.

A taste of how the resource curse has hit the phosphorous-rich island:

Today, out of a total population of 12,000, some 4,000 are foreigners. Australians serve as managers, doctors and engineers, Chinese run the restaurants and shops, while other Pacific islanders do the dirty work in the mines. That was all very well for much of the 20th century, when the money was flowing in and Nauruans saw no need to work for a living. But nowadays few Nauruans are capable of doing these jobs. Only a third of children go to secondary school.
[...]
There are no taxes of any kind in Nauru. The government employs 95% of those Nauruans who work. Schooling and medical care are free. If Nauruans need treatment that neither of the two hospitals on the island can provide, the government pays to fly them to Australia instead—though Ausaid, an Australian aid agency, recently warned that Melbourne hospitals would turn away Nauruan patients unless the country’s medical bills are settled. Students who want to go to university are also sent to Australia on the government’s tab. Electricity, telephones and housing are all subsidised.

With their government salaries and low living costs, Nauruans have enjoyed a way of life that, to other Pacific islanders, might seem enviable. Office hours are flexible. A much-used golf course fills some of the last green spaces on the island. A government station broadcasts three television channels for the islanders’ enjoyment, though technicians often seem to lose interest in the programmes halfway through.

Yet the most popular pastime seems to be idly driving the 20-minute circuit around the island, drinking imported Victoria Bitter beer and tossing the empty cans out of the window.

Mere excerpts cannot do the article justice. Read the whole thing.

Joseph White’s latest Eyes on the Road column looks at the VTTI‘s new crash research, where they “rigged up 100 cars with video cameras and other data recording devices to chronicle 42,300 hours of data and images of people driving in the general vicinity of Washington, D.C., and the Virginia suburbs”:

The study captured video of a total of 241 drivers ranging in age from 18 to over 55. Over the course of a year, the test cars got into a total of 82 accidents (69 of which were fully recorded), 761 near crashes and 8,295 “incidents,” defined as events requiring an evasive maneuver.
[...]
Based on data gathered from police reports, researchers had thought that 25% to 30% of accidents involved some kind of driver distraction. But the Virginia Tech study suggests that 80% of crashes involve some kind of driver distraction or drowsiness within the three seconds prior to the crash, the NHTSA said in a statement.

Further, many, many accidents are caused by a very, very small proportion of drivers:

One 18-year-old woman was involved in three crashes, 53 near-crashes and 401 “incidents.” A 41-year-old woman was involved in four crashes, 56 near-crashes and 449 incidents. Pause and take that in. In the space of a year or so, two people were involved a total of 116 crashes or near-crashes, and a combined 850 incidents that involved some sort of swerving or emergency avoidance maneuver. Consider that this track record of bad driving was compiled even though the motorists knew that they were being watched by a camera. This makes you wonder what the world would be like if really bad drivers could somehow be taken off the road.