Forget the middle. Think about your forehead meeting the driver's skull if you're sitting behind him and suddenly the car isn't moving anymore because the front of it is wrapped around a concrete barrier.
Why? Because your car is 40 times less safe than school bus?
In fact, those in the back without seat belts are not only risking their own lives, but are also a deadly threat for the driver and a passenger in front.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TwkGMeQjTQ#t=4m (in Russian. The first test is with front with seatbelts, in the back only child is using it. The next test is front without seat belts, in the back both adults are using them, a child is not).
BTW, in my country seat belts are mandatory in both front and back of the vehicle.
Actually, the big reason to put on your belt in the rear of the car is that the mortality rate of the front seat passengers goes through the roof when the rear passenger does not have a belt on. The front seat passenger is held in place by a seatbelt and then pummeled from behind by the person in the rear seat slamming into the back of the front seat.
> "Even the smallest reduction in the number of bus riders could result in more children being killed or injured when using alternative forms of transportation," it said.
Fascinating, someone actually thinking rationally about safety.
Until a problem is fixed, it is acceptable to communicate with solutions. (And if a problem remains unfixed after suitable solutions are offered, it is further acceptable to complain about it.)
I think my comment was misinterpreted by some. I don't disagree with his statement or with him saying it on Hacker News. I find it interesting that memes appear everywhere, even on sites that think they are "above them." Another example of a Hacker News meme is the phrase "Cargo Cult X." I've noticed others, but I can't recall them right now.
TSA isn't just protecting the passengers on one flight from dying, they're protecting the entire airline industry and a large part of the US economy.
If a plane goes down due to a terrorist attack those unfortunate people end up dying. If you just calculate the cost of saving those people by implementing tough security measures you can argue that it's not cost effective.
BUT you can't just figure the lives of the people on the plane into your calculations. You have to figure the impact to the airline industry if people become afraid of flying and what will happen to the US economy when another successful attack comes.
All three (lives on plane, airline industry and economy) are worth having tough security measures in place.
I do not blame the airlines for the previous terrorist attacks. Actions were taken to resolve the issue after the event so it is not like nothing has been done. Strengthening the cockpit doors and locking them is acceptable.
The TSA's security measures are a farce according to any competent security researcher, so their net value is negative not only in preventing attacks, but in making flight for current passengers less safe as well as for those who will choose alternatives because of these policies.
I remember feeling jealous when my teammates on the ski-team took their parent's cars up the mountain. But now I feel really safe for being in a school bus on those wet, snowy roads.
"The child will go against the seat, and that will absorb most of the impact,"
It's remarkable how scientists, engineers and tech folk are able to abstract the description of a high-trauma event, especially for a young child's body and describe it in such matter-of-fact terms.
I note this here not only because it is striking to read but to also consider that we do this in our own work in the startup world. Often we will think of an act such as 'unfriending' someone as simply a manipulation and purge of row(s) in a database when, from the user's perspective, it may be a significant and deeply nuanced real-world event.
I think in both cases we could make better products if we articulated better and humanized events such as "going against the seat" or "unfriending".
(nb: I'm not comparing the impact of a mass body trauma to that of unfriending someone, fortunately for us there is very little if anything in startup world that has such real-world significant consequences)
I don't disagree that "we could make better products" when analyzing things from a human point of view — that's practically day 0 in any industrial design class — but I dispute the implicit comparison here. It's extremely important that the person who saves your life doesn't think of it human terms. They need to be thinking in absolute terms because those terms will give them the power to save your life.
It again brings to mind the (Canadian version of the) Iron Ring. Building things that abuse the forces of nature and exert power over the shape of our work, building these things and having them work, is distinctly beyond human terms. It's why you pair architects with structural engineers: a friend of mine always complains that his job is to remind architects about gravity. I wonder just how many lives have been secretly saved like that.
Of course, the best solution is to somehow hold on to both sides, but I think too much sentiment these days is reactionary against the dehumanized computer technology we're working our way past. I really liked the last slide of one of Job's recent keynotes where they put a signpost labeling the intersection of "technology" and "liberal arts". Always keep that intersection in mind even when you make a decision to walk in one of those directions looking for it.
> It's extremely important that the person who saves your life doesn't think of it human terms. They need to be thinking in absolute terms because those terms will give them the power to save your life.
I think you're right, because that reminds me of when I had to save Grandma. One day, I woke up to hear her screaming. She's very old and has weak bones. One day, her leg just snapped in half under her.
Maybe it is dehumanizing or something not to lose your mind just because your own Grandmother is on the floor screaming, lying in a huge pool of her own blood. But I had to do first aid. I had to get the paramedics.
I was the only person there and if I had gone to pieces, she would have died. She's fine now, though. We got her good care. She can even walk again.
>>It's extremely important that the person who saves your life doesn't think of it human terms. They need to be thinking in absolute terms because those terms will give them the power to save your life.
>I think you're right, because that reminds me of when I had to save Grandma. [...]
You didn't fail to think of your grandma in human terms. If you had assessed things logically you'd have realised that the world is overpopulated and that your grandma is going to take resources that could be used "better" elsewhere and simply allowed her to die screaming. Even if you don't buy the overpopulation argument you can ask if grandma is decreasing infant or juvenile mortality; if not then she's not aiding proliferation of the species but hindering it.
Acting calmly and collectedly in a first-aid situation doesn't mean your not acting as a human being first.
I've done life-saving first aid in 2 situations (in as much as if someone had failed to act both people would have died; I think someone would have acted eventually in both situations) in both cases I've helped to save those who's genes should logically be removed from the gene pool through them having "defects".
Don't get me wrong I'm not at all saying that you acted wrongly, you acted as a human.
When you say "absolute terms" from what axioms are you starting?
The grandparent post spoke of "absolute terms", not me. You'll have to ask them about that part.
If I think about things logically to that degree, entropy will screw us no matter what we do, so we might as well live as well as we can under whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. Everything we know about universe formation (which isn't much) indicates that we start from zero. After all, if a civilization before us started out with the tech to make new universes, you'd think we'd have seen evidence of them by now.
And now that we're done with that tangent, I do think that people who make life-or-death decisions need to do it based on facts, not anecdotes. And that's hard, because the tendency is to hear this story about how someone's kid fell out of a bus and want to fix it.
Because, hey, anybody can make up statistics and studies to say whatever they want and most people don't know if they're lying, so even the legitimate studies are given a credibility rating of zero and they listen to whoever they trust the most. Who might well be some idiot on TV that they happen to agree with on other issues, even if they don't know anything about anything. But that goes down another long tangent, if you get into it, because there are so many strategies for evaluating the information you get from other people and they all have some flaw or another in that you can get bad information if you're not careful. But nobody really has the time to get all the information they need and that leads to problems.
Most statements are contextual and taken out of that context they become nonsense. Any statement that isn't must be a full description of the world.
The dichotomy I spoke of is more plain in the architect v. structural engineer example. The human terms the architect considers are building usage, energy distribution, flows of traffic, aesthetics, color, material, use of glass. By given each one and many others due consideration the architect attempts to build a useful, beautiful structure for humans.
The structural engineer attempts to decide if it's going to implode after its first earthquake (or even before). He doesn't care whether humans enjoy it. He cares whether the architects' dream has a right to exist in reality.
In the bus example, this is meant to suggest that just because we can humanly fear for the safety of our children it is wise to design with precision and care for reality otherwise we might make something comforting but ineffectual.
To do this pretty near requires switching your mind into a mode that abstractly considers the forces of impact a child's body might undergo during a bus crash. I simply want to reiterate that the voice of reason may be cold, but you should be unafraid to keep it in your toolbox, so to speak.
The hole argument is stupid - there are plenty of money in Washington tied up to things that doesn't matter (bridge to nowhere comes to mind) which could be used to buy these damn safety belts. They don't hinder anything really, the price is trivial and 6 kids would not die.
But no, we got to be all "rational" about it (which is code for not do a damn thing).
I challenge you to come up with a punishment that would work not just to keep kids in their seats, but also to get them to buckle their belts. At six kids per year I'm against punishing kids for being kids. I imagine there is some other program imaginable that will save more children's lives per dollar than seatbelts in school busses. It isn't like the government has the money to spare.
When your injury rate is 6 out of 37.9 million [1], there's not much of a policy change you can enact to make something safer. You're thinking "seat belts are more safe, therefore they are better." The rational argument is more along the lines of "Adding a drop of water to the ocean makes it more wet, but not in any way that matters."
I agree. This would be more of a burden than is necessary. Helmets and seat belts are some of the very few laws that exist to protect an adult from themselves. The social aspect of this being that we decrease the cost of healthcare from people flying through the windshield of a car. Nonetheless, all children in America should not be punished by forcing them to wear seat belts for negligible benefit. By doing this, other safety factors would probably be removed, and it would cause distractions for the driver to check if all kids are buckled at all times. "Suzy, put your seatbelt on! Suzy? Suzy, put it on now!" I can see this scenario, and it would likely cause more accidents than it would prevent.
Well there's also the fact that kids bodies are much more malleable than the average adult body, and given that as crashes aren't expected, the kids won't be tensing up when they hit the seat and will kind of flop around a bit. Same reason drunk drivers almost never die in the accidents they cause. In most cases I would bet that the bus crash wasn't traumatic for the kids but something exciting they'll talk about for a while.
"Same reason drunk drivers almost never die in the accidents they cause."
Unless you have some statistics to back that up, I'm going to go ahead and doubt that. Drunk driving incidences where neither party dies rarely make the news so we don't think of them often, and incidences where the victim dies but the drunk driver doesn't make better news than incidences where everyone dies. They stand out in our minds more as a particular case of some sort of injustice.
Furthermore, drunk driving incidences with fatalities where the driver survives generate newsworthy trials and sentencing which drives further awareness of this case.
I've heard that too: in the event of an accident, it's better to relax all muscles than to tense them up (particularly, I've heard this about whiplash). Why is that?
When taking a big fall rock climbing the advice is to relax, enjoy the fall and shout something. Animal noises are the most fun, expletives the most common. The shouting is to make sure you're breathing out as you fall onto your harness rather than breathing in, and to give you something to concentrate on so you don't tense up in fear.
I'm not really sure why it helps, but I can certainly say it does. I know that when I panic and go stiff it hurts more as my tense body hits the rock. Even when in a similar mental state, hitting the rock with a relaxed body is less painful.
Anecdotal evidence: My dad (around 50 years old) still has periodic pains in his hip from an accident 20-25 years ago because he tensed his legs, making them rigid and sending the force of the collision through his bones, shattering fragments inside his hip. To this day he still has minor bone fragments in his hip which presumably cause the pain.
My understanding is that when tense, you're more likely to resist the way your body is going to move, causing more injury. The forces involve are such that you can't actually make a significant change in where you're going to go, but if you tense up you may end up putting a lot of force in a little area. Like, say, you tense up your leg, which puts all of the force into your knee or ankle.
I'd also add that since the bus is so heavy and carries so much momentum, it's far less likely to stop as quickly and forcefully as a car, so the actual force transmitted to the passengers is remarkably low.
I've been in an accident between a car and a bus - it wasn't very serious, but it was a good insight into the weight of the bus. The biggest clue was the noise in that case - the bus shook a bit, but nobody came out of their seats.
> I think in both cases we could make better products if we articulated better and humanized events such as "going against the seat" or "unfriending".
Some supporting evidence, or even argument, would be nice. What's the relevant mechanism? (Possibilities include "injuries are not analyzeable in terms of physical properties" and "if they don't think of victims as humans, they won't take accidents seriously".)
BTW - Are you suggesting that the folks who analyze accidents are not sufficiently aware that humans are involved? Based on what?
Those seem to be ridiculously good numbers and back up everything stated in this article. I would worry that making ANY changes could actually increase that number.
This seems to be the cue for those annoying people to start reciting "if it saves even one life...".
In reality, these numbers are incredibly good, so much that chasing after any improvement is bound to be extremely expensive. The money that would be spent on seatbelts or whatever could obviously be invested to greater effect in some other effort.
If you wanted to be even more heartless (rational) you could approximate a statistical value of life for those casualties. It wouldn't compare favorably to even the costs of installing seat-belts in one urban school district.
Sometimes those people are wrong, but it seems that in this case the cost is purely monetary and the budget has plenty of bloat in it where we could move money from which could make the final 6 lives be saved (it is what, the cost of two helicopters and 7 hellfire missiles? Half a bridge to nowhere?).
Given these things, I would have to disagree with you, in this case it would be worth saving the final 6 lives.
Would installing seat belts actually save those lives? An accident that would be fatal without a seatbelt may well be fatal with one, involving perhaps a fire or train or semi truck.
Improving general road, pedestrian, and bicycle safety would be a far better preventative measure (or even offering more/more convenient school bus service) using any money that would fund seat belts, as car accidents are the number one killer of children.
Of course there's a ton of bloat in the budget. But once we've pared down that money (if we could pare it down -- bureaucrats have been promising to do so forever, but it just gets worse), there are other ways to spend the money that would be more effective. It's a question of the opportunity cost: spending the money here means that it's not available to spend elsewhere. We must choose the most effective way to spend it.
We could install those seat belts on every bus in the nation, but that would cost hundreds of millions (and the article quotes information indicating that it might actually be counterproductive anyway, but set that aside for this argument). But that money could instead be invested in finding a cure for some childhood disease, or building a poison treatment center, or better law enforcement to keep some drunks off the road, and on and on. It seems to me that any of my suggestions are likely to save more than six lives a year, so why would you want to invest that money on something that is going to do less good?
In fact those larger vehicles may increase the risk of hazard to smaller vehicles. It sounds almost like a zero sum game, but I'm sure many more factors come into play.
That word has been driving me crazy recently. Every time I write it I stare at it trying to decide if I got it right. Most of the time I do, but this is twice in a row I got it backward.
I think I worked at it so much I got it reversed in my head.
Choose and Chose also always give me pause when I write them.
We need more people like you in this world. I had a (foreign) prof that used loose constantly in the handouts. I think no one ever mentioned that to him..
I had an English instructor that would give handouts in which the word "Internet" was not capitalized. (There is only one Internet so it should always be capitalized.) I decided that I would wait until I was finished with school before sending her a correction. (I never actually got around to it, though.)
I think that a huge factor is also that people will treat a bus full of small children with a lot of respect simply because they might have / know children themselves.
You really don't want to live in a small community and the 'jerk that rear-ended the school bus in their F150.'.
In cities with good public transport, many otherwise-would-be-cars are buses. Here in Helsinki many school children use public transportation, and none of the buses, trams, trains or subway cars have seatbelts, and as far as I know, nobody has ever suggested them to be installed.
I'd be far worried about a seatbelt malfunction locking a child inside an overturned bus or with a vehicular collision where the car is leaking gasoline and has the very real potential to catch on fire, which given sufficient heat means there's a very real risk of a diesel fire from the school bus.
I'd agree, six deaths a year out of 24 million is acceptable losses by any measure. I'd consider 1 in a million deaths in school busses to be fucking amazing, but 0.25 in a million is absurdly good.
"And, maybe more importantly, banning kids who won't stay buckled up would be very unpopular."
More importantly, that would likely result in more kids being killed by taking less safe modes of transportation to school (EDIT: if the article is true anyway).
>I don't understand how anyone can believe it's safer to be unrestrained and free to bounce around the cabin in a crash.
Did you read the article? That is the point; most people share your view.
Buses are safer because the tightly packet seats act like little pods of foam, like little safety bubbles. If the bus hits something, it's 4 inches of foam that the kid is going to hit...basic physics, f=ma, a=v/t...the foam increases the time it takes the moving body to slow to a stop, and spreads the force over a longer period of time. Since it would be instantaneous, not aggregate (I'm making both of those terms up, no idea what you would actually call this) force that you care about, a longer time at a lower force == a safer collision.
Think about it like this: you have two buckets, one of them is called "child" and the other called "seat". These two buckets contain a liquid called "momentum". If the bus hits a brick wall, all of the momentum from the child is going to get transferred into the "seat" bucket. The interstitial bucket you use to transfer this liquid is called "force".
The foam seat means that you're using a little tiny thimble to transfer the momentum from the child to the seat...it takes a long time, and it isn't very big...it's "gradual".
It's counter-intuitive, but that is one of the reasons that buses are safe.
While we're here talking about physics: another big reason why buses are safe are because of their high mass. I was in one accident while on a school bus - another car hit the bus head-on while the bus was stopped. The kinetic energy of the 1 ton car travelling at say 30 mph - 1/2 * m * v^2 - was absorbed by the bus. I won't step through the math, but because of the high mass of the bus, the resulting velocity of the bus+car was quite low (it also helped that the change in velocity was mitigated by brakes/tires/friction, as the driver was ready for the impact).
In any case, as a passenger on the bus, the result of the impact was quite minimal - there were no injuries on the bus, and the bus actually drove off afterwards (with no passengers and a bit of sheet metal scraping the pavement).
Granted, it's a different story if the bus hits a tree or is hit by a tractor trailer doing 70 mph.
Another reason why buses are safe? The bus is operated by a trained professional, most of which have years of experience driving the bus for hours every day.
I have often wondered about the difference in accident rates between professional and other drivers, anyone know if there are any studies done on this?
Newton's law: F = m* a = m* dv/dt. If we assume the child and bus seat's masses are constant (no exploding kids, please!), this leads to F = d(m* v)/dt = dp/dt where p is momentum. When the child hits the foam seat, the force will not remain constant, that is it varies with time, leading from the above to dp = F* dt. We can find the change in momentum by integrating Force with respect to Time, leading to (in LaTeX notation) p_f - p_i = \int_{t_i}^{t_f}(F* dt) = I where I stands for Impulse.
The time-averaged force F' = 1/delta(t) * I = 1/delta(t) * delta(p), and this is where I think it becomes very clear that we like to have longer collision times for less damage. If we're interested in having a smaller average force for when the child hits the seat, then either delta(t) needs to be longer (the collision takes a longer time, due to e.g. the foam seat, the bumpers on cars, collapsible sections of the vehicle, etc.), or the change in momentum of the child needs to be smaller (e.g. if the collision is inelastic and the seat brings the child's velocity to 0, that is better than the seat bouncing the child back). It's easy to add another layer of foam.
Possibly the funnest lab in my high school physics class: shooting an egg at a brick wall and having it survive unharmed by encasing it in some design. (Mine was the Hindenburg of Bubblewrap.)
In this crash, "compartmentalization" seems to work. In other words, if you drive a tank and hit things head on, maybe you don't need to wear a seat belt.
It's not a matter of absolute level of safety (is it more or less sage), it's a matter of cost/benefit. And a matter of diminishing returns.
Yes, it sucks that 6 kids per year still die in a tragic manner. Horrific for the family. But the article is pointing out that busses are already much safer than more common forms of transporting.
So the issue isn't one of more safety, less safety. If we could afford every convenience, then more safety would be better. But you cannot take safety in isolation without consider other factors, such as cost, rate of accidents, etc.
This article makes me feel like I'm talking to someone who would say: "I don't wear seatbelts because I want to be thrown from the car in an accident".
It all comes down to money. If we put in seatbelts things will cost more and I'm not taking a pay cut.
...Except that the article's point is backed up by actual safety analyses, while the guys refusing to wear seatbelts are making an after-the-fact rationalization that contradicts safety statistics. There's a difference.
Did you actually read the article? Six kids die in a school bus every year. Awful, yes, but it's nothing compared to how many die in cars. Want to save more kids? Get more school buses with the money, not more seat belts.
In a crash, "The child will go against the seat, and that will absorb most of the impact," said John Hamilton, transportation director for the Jackson County, Fla., school board.
How do you go against the seat when the bus flips over?
Instead of the seat absorbing the impact, the soft, metal roof does the job.
And more seriously, do buses have crumple zones like cars do? If a bus were to roll over, is the passenger compartment designed to work like a roll cage? Or does it just collapse?
Too bad the article didn't comment on the frequency of bus rollovers. One is left to conclude, though, that they must be extremely rare, if the average annual fatality rate is 6.
Six deaths a year? Add seatbelts and you'd have more deaths than that from communicable disease. Lets have all these kids put their hands on exactly the same surface.
I went looking to verify that statistic thinking it can't be right, but I didn't find what I expected. According to the source below:
"Approximately 27 school aged children die in school bus accidents every year. Seven of these are passengers in a school bus and twenty are pedestrians. Of these twenty pedestrians, fourteen are killed by school buses"
In other words it seems your child is twice as likely to be run over by its own schoolbus rather than to die inside it in a collision!
About 440,000 public school buses carry 24 million children more than 4.3 billion miles a year, but only about six children die each year in bus accidents, according to annual statistics compiled the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
So yes, those six or seven only cover the students inside the actual bus.
Brain dead or maimed completely doesn't count as dead. So the number should be higher. A lot of school buses have short low seats with metal frames, those seats should be replaced with the high back 4 inch foam seats.
Seriously, a big issue that the article missed is the obvious safety issue associated with having a bunch of kids on a bus with metal latches attached to 3 ft long strips of canvas: kids beating the crap out of each other.
I grew up in the country town with a 1 hour bus ride to school, with kids ranging from K-12. The superintendant personally cut the belts out of our bus after a fight resulted in a broken hand inflicted by a swinging belt and a broken window.
On a side note, Anyone else surprised that installing seat belts would cost an additional 8000 - 12000 _per_ bus. That just sounds a lot of BS. $170 million per state. LOL.
Yes. It is expensive even for a single installation.. Now, if the cost were $50 to install a seatbelt, then the magnitude of the issue of "costs of installing seat belts" wouldnt be so big and instead people would be judging the "need for seat belts" based on merits. Does it really improve the net safety for children.
No, I dont think each seat belt would need to cost 150-250 bucks especially when these are installed in bulk contracts.
Keep in mind that these seat belts would be retrofitted to existing models, models which may not be designed to hold seat belts since, as discussed in the article, almost no states require seat belts on school buses over a certain weight. Whatever the case, it wouldn't be surprising if installing a seat belt were 150-250 bucks as there are probably a metric fuckton of regulations on what such a seat belt needs to be.
This is pure speculation of course and, as you've said, only distracts from the real point. Whatever the cost, adding seat belts would probably only make things worse.
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Wow, thats an actually enlightening article from msn.com! I've been thinking in recent years about school bus seat belts and until now I hadn't understood why the state didn't require them. Now I feel a little better informed about the trade-offs.
I have a feeling that my thinking on the topic is tainted by the ever-present "Click it or ticket" billboards. This is something I feel despite having lived through the dawn of airbags, which were instituted in such a way to hype passive restraints. An example of that hype was that cars without airbags had to have automatic seat belts. Wouldn't that be just the ticket for those pesky non-seatbelt-wearing kids!
I wonder if in the future:
* adding seat belts will cause manufacturers/school districts to skimp on passive restraints
* the push to fuel efficiency will lead to lighter buses in the school district fleets, necessitating a move to seat belts anyway
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadI imagine it'd be very easy to get ejected from the back seat of a car in a rollover/accident.
Do you ever sit in the middle back seat?
BTW, in my country seat belts are mandatory in both front and back of the vehicle.
Fascinating, someone actually thinking rationally about safety.
Edit: I found a paper from 2007 that claims there were 129 extra driving fatalities in the last quarter of 2002 due to harsher airport security. http://aem.cornell.edu/faculty_sites/gb78/wp/JLE_6301.pdf (page 27)
Or that backscatter X-ray machines odds of giving you cancer are roughly equal to those of dying in a terrorist attack: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-...
If a plane goes down due to a terrorist attack those unfortunate people end up dying. If you just calculate the cost of saving those people by implementing tough security measures you can argue that it's not cost effective.
BUT you can't just figure the lives of the people on the plane into your calculations. You have to figure the impact to the airline industry if people become afraid of flying and what will happen to the US economy when another successful attack comes.
All three (lives on plane, airline industry and economy) are worth having tough security measures in place.
So if they stop all of these security measures and people die as a result, you aren't going to blame the TSA or the airlines..right?
…evidence is incomplete and uunconvincing, and they unconvincing, arguing that…
It's remarkable how scientists, engineers and tech folk are able to abstract the description of a high-trauma event, especially for a young child's body and describe it in such matter-of-fact terms.
I note this here not only because it is striking to read but to also consider that we do this in our own work in the startup world. Often we will think of an act such as 'unfriending' someone as simply a manipulation and purge of row(s) in a database when, from the user's perspective, it may be a significant and deeply nuanced real-world event.
I think in both cases we could make better products if we articulated better and humanized events such as "going against the seat" or "unfriending".
(nb: I'm not comparing the impact of a mass body trauma to that of unfriending someone, fortunately for us there is very little if anything in startup world that has such real-world significant consequences)
It again brings to mind the (Canadian version of the) Iron Ring. Building things that abuse the forces of nature and exert power over the shape of our work, building these things and having them work, is distinctly beyond human terms. It's why you pair architects with structural engineers: a friend of mine always complains that his job is to remind architects about gravity. I wonder just how many lives have been secretly saved like that.
Of course, the best solution is to somehow hold on to both sides, but I think too much sentiment these days is reactionary against the dehumanized computer technology we're working our way past. I really liked the last slide of one of Job's recent keynotes where they put a signpost labeling the intersection of "technology" and "liberal arts". Always keep that intersection in mind even when you make a decision to walk in one of those directions looking for it.
I think you're right, because that reminds me of when I had to save Grandma. One day, I woke up to hear her screaming. She's very old and has weak bones. One day, her leg just snapped in half under her.
Maybe it is dehumanizing or something not to lose your mind just because your own Grandmother is on the floor screaming, lying in a huge pool of her own blood. But I had to do first aid. I had to get the paramedics.
I was the only person there and if I had gone to pieces, she would have died. She's fine now, though. We got her good care. She can even walk again.
>I think you're right, because that reminds me of when I had to save Grandma. [...]
You didn't fail to think of your grandma in human terms. If you had assessed things logically you'd have realised that the world is overpopulated and that your grandma is going to take resources that could be used "better" elsewhere and simply allowed her to die screaming. Even if you don't buy the overpopulation argument you can ask if grandma is decreasing infant or juvenile mortality; if not then she's not aiding proliferation of the species but hindering it.
Acting calmly and collectedly in a first-aid situation doesn't mean your not acting as a human being first.
I've done life-saving first aid in 2 situations (in as much as if someone had failed to act both people would have died; I think someone would have acted eventually in both situations) in both cases I've helped to save those who's genes should logically be removed from the gene pool through them having "defects".
Don't get me wrong I'm not at all saying that you acted wrongly, you acted as a human.
When you say "absolute terms" from what axioms are you starting?
If I think about things logically to that degree, entropy will screw us no matter what we do, so we might as well live as well as we can under whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. Everything we know about universe formation (which isn't much) indicates that we start from zero. After all, if a civilization before us started out with the tech to make new universes, you'd think we'd have seen evidence of them by now.
And now that we're done with that tangent, I do think that people who make life-or-death decisions need to do it based on facts, not anecdotes. And that's hard, because the tendency is to hear this story about how someone's kid fell out of a bus and want to fix it.
Because, hey, anybody can make up statistics and studies to say whatever they want and most people don't know if they're lying, so even the legitimate studies are given a credibility rating of zero and they listen to whoever they trust the most. Who might well be some idiot on TV that they happen to agree with on other issues, even if they don't know anything about anything. But that goes down another long tangent, if you get into it, because there are so many strategies for evaluating the information you get from other people and they all have some flaw or another in that you can get bad information if you're not careful. But nobody really has the time to get all the information they need and that leads to problems.
The dichotomy I spoke of is more plain in the architect v. structural engineer example. The human terms the architect considers are building usage, energy distribution, flows of traffic, aesthetics, color, material, use of glass. By given each one and many others due consideration the architect attempts to build a useful, beautiful structure for humans.
The structural engineer attempts to decide if it's going to implode after its first earthquake (or even before). He doesn't care whether humans enjoy it. He cares whether the architects' dream has a right to exist in reality.
In the bus example, this is meant to suggest that just because we can humanly fear for the safety of our children it is wise to design with precision and care for reality otherwise we might make something comforting but ineffectual.
To do this pretty near requires switching your mind into a mode that abstractly considers the forces of impact a child's body might undergo during a bus crash. I simply want to reiterate that the voice of reason may be cold, but you should be unafraid to keep it in your toolbox, so to speak.
But no, we got to be all "rational" about it (which is code for not do a damn thing).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States
Unless you have some statistics to back that up, I'm going to go ahead and doubt that. Drunk driving incidences where neither party dies rarely make the news so we don't think of them often, and incidences where the victim dies but the drunk driver doesn't make better news than incidences where everyone dies. They stand out in our minds more as a particular case of some sort of injustice.
Furthermore, drunk driving incidences with fatalities where the driver survives generate newsworthy trials and sentencing which drives further awareness of this case.
I'm not really sure why it helps, but I can certainly say it does. I know that when I panic and go stiff it hurts more as my tense body hits the rock. Even when in a similar mental state, hitting the rock with a relaxed body is less painful.
I've been in an accident between a car and a bus - it wasn't very serious, but it was a good insight into the weight of the bus. The biggest clue was the noise in that case - the bus shook a bit, but nobody came out of their seats.
Some supporting evidence, or even argument, would be nice. What's the relevant mechanism? (Possibilities include "injuries are not analyzeable in terms of physical properties" and "if they don't think of victims as humans, they won't take accidents seriously".)
BTW - Are you suggesting that the folks who analyze accidents are not sufficiently aware that humans are involved? Based on what?
Here is John Hamilton who made that remark:
http://web.jcsb.org/Trans/index.htm
What evidence do you have that he is a scientist, an engineer or a tech folk?
Those seem to be ridiculously good numbers and back up everything stated in this article. I would worry that making ANY changes could actually increase that number.
In reality, these numbers are incredibly good, so much that chasing after any improvement is bound to be extremely expensive. The money that would be spent on seatbelts or whatever could obviously be invested to greater effect in some other effort.
Given these things, I would have to disagree with you, in this case it would be worth saving the final 6 lives.
Improving general road, pedestrian, and bicycle safety would be a far better preventative measure (or even offering more/more convenient school bus service) using any money that would fund seat belts, as car accidents are the number one killer of children.
We could install those seat belts on every bus in the nation, but that would cost hundreds of millions (and the article quotes information indicating that it might actually be counterproductive anyway, but set that aside for this argument). But that money could instead be invested in finding a cure for some childhood disease, or building a poison treatment center, or better law enforcement to keep some drunks off the road, and on and on. It seems to me that any of my suggestions are likely to save more than six lives a year, so why would you want to invest that money on something that is going to do less good?
If everyone drove such heavy vehicles they would lose almost all of their safety advantages.
I think I worked at it so much I got it reversed in my head.
Choose and Chose also always give me pause when I write them.
I edited my post and fixed it.
You really don't want to live in a small community and the 'jerk that rear-ended the school bus in their F150.'.
I'd agree, six deaths a year out of 24 million is acceptable losses by any measure. I'd consider 1 in a million deaths in school busses to be fucking amazing, but 0.25 in a million is absurdly good.
It's definitely cheaper, though. And, maybe more importantly, banning kids who won't stay buckled up would be very unpopular.
More importantly, that would likely result in more kids being killed by taking less safe modes of transportation to school (EDIT: if the article is true anyway).
Did you read the article? That is the point; most people share your view.
Buses are safer because the tightly packet seats act like little pods of foam, like little safety bubbles. If the bus hits something, it's 4 inches of foam that the kid is going to hit...basic physics, f=ma, a=v/t...the foam increases the time it takes the moving body to slow to a stop, and spreads the force over a longer period of time. Since it would be instantaneous, not aggregate (I'm making both of those terms up, no idea what you would actually call this) force that you care about, a longer time at a lower force == a safer collision.
Think about it like this: you have two buckets, one of them is called "child" and the other called "seat". These two buckets contain a liquid called "momentum". If the bus hits a brick wall, all of the momentum from the child is going to get transferred into the "seat" bucket. The interstitial bucket you use to transfer this liquid is called "force".
The foam seat means that you're using a little tiny thimble to transfer the momentum from the child to the seat...it takes a long time, and it isn't very big...it's "gradual".
It's counter-intuitive, but that is one of the reasons that buses are safe.
In any case, as a passenger on the bus, the result of the impact was quite minimal - there were no injuries on the bus, and the bus actually drove off afterwards (with no passengers and a bit of sheet metal scraping the pavement).
Granted, it's a different story if the bus hits a tree or is hit by a tractor trailer doing 70 mph.
Another reason why buses are safe? The bus is operated by a trained professional, most of which have years of experience driving the bus for hours every day.
Newton's law: F = m* a = m* dv/dt. If we assume the child and bus seat's masses are constant (no exploding kids, please!), this leads to F = d(m* v)/dt = dp/dt where p is momentum. When the child hits the foam seat, the force will not remain constant, that is it varies with time, leading from the above to dp = F* dt. We can find the change in momentum by integrating Force with respect to Time, leading to (in LaTeX notation) p_f - p_i = \int_{t_i}^{t_f}(F* dt) = I where I stands for Impulse.
The time-averaged force F' = 1/delta(t) * I = 1/delta(t) * delta(p), and this is where I think it becomes very clear that we like to have longer collision times for less damage. If we're interested in having a smaller average force for when the child hits the seat, then either delta(t) needs to be longer (the collision takes a longer time, due to e.g. the foam seat, the bumpers on cars, collapsible sections of the vehicle, etc.), or the change in momentum of the child needs to be smaller (e.g. if the collision is inelastic and the seat brings the child's velocity to 0, that is better than the seat bouncing the child back). It's easy to add another layer of foam.
Possibly the funnest lab in my high school physics class: shooting an egg at a brick wall and having it survive unharmed by encasing it in some design. (Mine was the Hindenburg of Bubblewrap.)
In this crash, "compartmentalization" seems to work. In other words, if you drive a tank and hit things head on, maybe you don't need to wear a seat belt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTGMEgibFHU
Now here are some videos where, for some reason, harmful objects didn't line up exactly in front of the bus:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aenzUIixM8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0-vi5nOK08
Yes, it sucks that 6 kids per year still die in a tragic manner. Horrific for the family. But the article is pointing out that busses are already much safer than more common forms of transporting.
So the issue isn't one of more safety, less safety. If we could afford every convenience, then more safety would be better. But you cannot take safety in isolation without consider other factors, such as cost, rate of accidents, etc.
It all comes down to money. If we put in seatbelts things will cost more and I'm not taking a pay cut.
How do you go against the seat when the bus flips over?
And more seriously, do buses have crumple zones like cars do? If a bus were to roll over, is the passenger compartment designed to work like a roll cage? Or does it just collapse?
I went looking to verify that statistic thinking it can't be right, but I didn't find what I expected. According to the source below:
"Approximately 27 school aged children die in school bus accidents every year. Seven of these are passengers in a school bus and twenty are pedestrians. Of these twenty pedestrians, fourteen are killed by school buses"
In other words it seems your child is twice as likely to be run over by its own schoolbus rather than to die inside it in a collision!
http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/personal_injury/bus/statis...
About 440,000 public school buses carry 24 million children more than 4.3 billion miles a year, but only about six children die each year in bus accidents, according to annual statistics compiled the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
So yes, those six or seven only cover the students inside the actual bus.
I grew up in the country town with a 1 hour bus ride to school, with kids ranging from K-12. The superintendant personally cut the belts out of our bus after a fight resulted in a broken hand inflicted by a swinging belt and a broken window.
No, I dont think each seat belt would need to cost 150-250 bucks especially when these are installed in bulk contracts.
This is pure speculation of course and, as you've said, only distracts from the real point. Whatever the cost, adding seat belts would probably only make things worse.
Keep those little frackers in their seats.
If everyone isn't buckled in, driver should stop the bus.
$15k to install seatbelts? What if they weren't made from gold (or the gold lining the pockets of the vendor).
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I have a feeling that my thinking on the topic is tainted by the ever-present "Click it or ticket" billboards. This is something I feel despite having lived through the dawn of airbags, which were instituted in such a way to hype passive restraints. An example of that hype was that cars without airbags had to have automatic seat belts. Wouldn't that be just the ticket for those pesky non-seatbelt-wearing kids!
I wonder if in the future:
* adding seat belts will cause manufacturers/school districts to skimp on passive restraints
* the push to fuel efficiency will lead to lighter buses in the school district fleets, necessitating a move to seat belts anyway
Next up: why don't city buses have seat belts?