Thursday, December 16, 2010
Ben Folds, Nick Hornby, & Pomplamoose VideoSong!!!!
How Cool Is This!? Three of my favorite artisits together! So fun!
We're #1 - On another usless ranking of cities
So I read to day in the paper that the Madison metropolitan area was ranked #1 for the "most secure places to live" in the country in the ranking of metro areas over 500,000. Yeah! Madison is the best! Yippie! wait.....what does that mean...most secure? Why it so secure. So the ranking done by Farmers Insurance looked at the following apples and oranges...
"Factors used to determine how secure a metro area is included crime, extreme weather, risk of natural disaster, housing depreciation, foreclosures, terrorist threats, environmental hazards, air quality, life expectancy and job losses."
One of these things is not like the other. I don't really see what one has to do with another. What is the point of such a list?
The other problem with this and many similar lists is the city/ suburb/ metro area differences. It says they ranked metropolitan areas so I assume they looked at these factors for the whole Madison metroplitan area, city and suburbs. The problem is that no one lives in a Metropolitan area, we live in homes or apartments in a town or city on a street. Some of the factors such as natural disasters, crime, environmental hazadars can vary greatly across a large metropolitian area. Folks along the river in St. Louis or in Malabu on the ocean cliffs may have greater risks of flooding or mudslides than people in other parts of the area. Just because there is high crime in Detroit, does not mean I don't want to open a business in Grosse Pointe.
Another tough one is job losses, for an individual this may or may not matter. If you have a stable job you would care less than someone looking for work.
I know these things are not about only an individual's choice where to move to but for busiensses, developers, city leaders, etc. but this one seems a bit off. Go Madison!
"Factors used to determine how secure a metro area is included crime, extreme weather, risk of natural disaster, housing depreciation, foreclosures, terrorist threats, environmental hazards, air quality, life expectancy and job losses."
One of these things is not like the other. I don't really see what one has to do with another. What is the point of such a list?
The other problem with this and many similar lists is the city/ suburb/ metro area differences. It says they ranked metropolitan areas so I assume they looked at these factors for the whole Madison metroplitan area, city and suburbs. The problem is that no one lives in a Metropolitan area, we live in homes or apartments in a town or city on a street. Some of the factors such as natural disasters, crime, environmental hazadars can vary greatly across a large metropolitian area. Folks along the river in St. Louis or in Malabu on the ocean cliffs may have greater risks of flooding or mudslides than people in other parts of the area. Just because there is high crime in Detroit, does not mean I don't want to open a business in Grosse Pointe.
Another tough one is job losses, for an individual this may or may not matter. If you have a stable job you would care less than someone looking for work.
I know these things are not about only an individual's choice where to move to but for busiensses, developers, city leaders, etc. but this one seems a bit off. Go Madison!
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Missing the Point
Being a traffic safety nerd and parent, I listened with interest to this NPR story about how long you should keep kids facing backwards in their car seat. The story was good in that it pointed out the larger point that way too many of us are killed in car accidents that there should be but it focused on the issue of car seats as the key to fixing this problem. The story points out that the leading cause of death in toddlers is car accidents. Five kids a day are killed in car accidents!
The article includes a great quote from a pediatrician who sums up my feelings well:
"I think we've become immune to this," says Ben Hoffman, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. "I think it happens so frequently and with such regularity that we've lost focus on how important it is. And I think that we're so reliant on cars to get us from Point A to Point B that we've sort of accepted it as the price of doing business. "
But my conclusion which I have written about before here and here is not, we need to keep kids rear facing longer, but that maybe we need to re think the way we live, where we live, work and play and how we get from Point A to Point B. If there is strong evidence to suggest changes in the way we use car seats, of course we should consider changes, but the larger point is not about car seats. The point of trying to keep kids rear facing longer I would think would need different types of car seats because my 1.5 yr old baby can't fit anymore in his rear one, his feet were too bent to fit comfortably. We should focus our energy on where we can get the most bang for our buck. I hate to say this but think about it, even in a few cases where there is a bad accident and the rear facing kid survives without a problem and he would have been injured with a front facing seat, what about mom the driver who was just killed. Shouldn't we try to prevent the accident in the first place!
Back to Dr. Hoffman, why do we accept this as a part of life in this country and why don't we devote a quarter of the energy we spent on fighting terrorism to trying to cut the amount of serious car accidents.
The article includes a great quote from a pediatrician who sums up my feelings well:
"I think we've become immune to this," says Ben Hoffman, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. "I think it happens so frequently and with such regularity that we've lost focus on how important it is. And I think that we're so reliant on cars to get us from Point A to Point B that we've sort of accepted it as the price of doing business. "
But my conclusion which I have written about before here and here is not, we need to keep kids rear facing longer, but that maybe we need to re think the way we live, where we live, work and play and how we get from Point A to Point B. If there is strong evidence to suggest changes in the way we use car seats, of course we should consider changes, but the larger point is not about car seats. The point of trying to keep kids rear facing longer I would think would need different types of car seats because my 1.5 yr old baby can't fit anymore in his rear one, his feet were too bent to fit comfortably. We should focus our energy on where we can get the most bang for our buck. I hate to say this but think about it, even in a few cases where there is a bad accident and the rear facing kid survives without a problem and he would have been injured with a front facing seat, what about mom the driver who was just killed. Shouldn't we try to prevent the accident in the first place!
Back to Dr. Hoffman, why do we accept this as a part of life in this country and why don't we devote a quarter of the energy we spent on fighting terrorism to trying to cut the amount of serious car accidents.
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