Third World Hospitals May Get Greener Before Ours Do
By Erica Westly | January 29, 2010
Credit: Golden Section Graphics
An article I co-authored on green hospitals for Fast Company is online now (it was for the Feb. issue, and looks way better in print than web, but so it goes). In the course of reporting the article, I got to speak to Perkins+Will architect Jean Mah, and one of the things I thought was really cool but didn’t make it into this particular piece was the fact that implementing sustainable architecture practices may actually be easier in developing nations than here in the US. Take, for example, the hospital Perkins+Will is helping design in Sri Lanka: There was no pre-existing energy infrastructure in place at the location, so Mah and her colleagues were forced (or maybe the right word is able) to start from scratch. They used biodigestors to create a sustainable energy source for the hospital, and there wound up being enough energy left over to power the community as well. This is not to say that the US would be better off without its energy infrastructure, but it’s easy to see how those layers of development can hinder new sustainable design practices, especially when the projects in question involve hospitals, one of the largest and most complex building-types.
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Why Aren’t Braces Better?
By Erica Westly | December 8, 2009
It’s the holidays, which means lots of family photos. And there’s nothing like posing for picture after picture to make you aware of the flaws in your smile. I had a perfect smile once–about twenty years ago when I first got my braces off. But to look at me now, you would never be able to tell I had braces. In order to get straight teeth once more, I’d have to get braces again, as an adult–not exactly something I’ve been looking forward to, having already suffered through three years of braces (complete with rubber bands and a few painful overnight head gear sessions).
I don’t recall anyone telling me that the effects of braces would eventually wear off when I was an adolescent. My impression from the orthodontist my mom took me to was that, providing I wore my retainer for a year after the braces came off, my teeth would stay straight forever. But, like so many of my friends the same age, once I hit my twenties I realized this was not the case: My bite reverted to its old crooked ways, and my teeth once again began to look crowded. Our parents tried to spare us the humiliation of wearing braces in high school or college, but did their good intentions have the perverse effect of making us have to get braces twice?
I’ve been trying to learn more about orthodontic technology online, but haven’t come up with much so far. What is it that makes permanent teeth-straightening so difficult? Apparently the history of metal braces dates back to Ancient Rome, with more orthodontics techniques developing in the 19th century. Still, most orthodontics sites acknowledge that teeth straightening is not an exact science, and more than a few scholarly papers have called for more evidence-based research in the field. Considering how much money braces can cost–between $4,400 and $4,800, according to a recent report in Smart Money–I would have thought the need for evidence-based methods would be a given.
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Swine Flu Vaccine Delays
By Erica Westly | October 26, 2009
As many news outlets have noted, vaccine manufacturers have been having trouble meeting the U.S. demand for H1N1 vaccines. The delays are largely due to the fact that most drug companies have been relying on traditional egg-based techniques for producing vaccines. There are new, faster production techniques available, but the FDA has yet to approve them for use in the U.S. I’ve written a few blog posts about this issue for Fast Company. Unfortunately, these delays might hinder the already difficult task of persuading Americans to get vaccinated (51 percent of respondents to a recent poll said they didn’t plan to get vaccinated; 40 percent they didn’t plan to vaccinate their children either).
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In Defense of Swine Flu Vaccines
By Erica Westly | October 6, 2009
I wish I had time to write a full post on why getting vaccinated for the new H1N1 virus is a good idea, but I figure the least I can do is highlight the great articles that have been written on the subject. First is David Dobbs’ piece for Slate a few weeks ago. Next is Michael Specter’s commentary in the New Yorker this week. Happy flu season, everyone.
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Another Nobel Snub
By Erica Westly | September 21, 2009
Credit: American Institute of Physics
A few weeks ago, the Museum of the City of New York released a list of 400 influential New Yorkers to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival to the island. I was looking at the scientists included on the list (there were about six or seven, as I recall) when I came across Chien-Shiung Wu, a physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project and later became a professor at Columbia. She did what was arguably her most important work in the 1950s, when she overthrew a physics principle called the conservation of parity. Two male colleagues bolstered the work with a separate experiment, and it was they, not Wu, who received the Nobel prize in 1957. It’s a scenario that became all too familiar to me when I compiled my list of Nobel snubs for Scientific American last year. Wu should have been on that list, and I regret that I didn’t know about her until now.
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Alternative Swine Flu Vaccines
By Erica Westly | August 28, 2009
I’m working at Fast Company Magazine for the next few months. Here’s a link to my first blog post for them. It’s about a company called Protein Sciences that’s getting ready to take their insect cell-based swine flu vaccine to clinical trials. Most vaccines are still produced in chicken eggs, but several companies have been exploring cell-based methods, which are faster and produce higher vaccine yields. It’s a topic I’ve become quite interested in, so hopefully I’ll be writing about it again soon.
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World Mosquito Day and Other Pest “Holidays”
By Erica Westly | August 13, 2009
Credit: quapan via Flickr Creative Commons
Apparently August 20 is World Mosquito Day. These types of events are usually started to pay tribute to something or someone, but it seems World Mosquito Day was set up to remind people that mosquitoes are bad news. I wondered if there were any other pest-themed holidays–a National Termite Day, perhaps?–so, I did some digging. Here’s what I found:
1.) The London Zoo hosts an annual Pestival, a celebration of “insects in art, and the art of being an insect.” This year’s list of activities include a Termite Pavilion and a symposium entitled “How Insect Are We?”
2.) World Rat Day, started in 2002 as a holiday to “honor and promote pet rats as the wonderful companion animals they are.”
3.) And let’s not forget the annual Roadkill Cook-Off held in West Virginia each September.
No termite holidays that I could see, but let me know if you can think of other weird pest-related holidays.
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Animal Abuse in the News
By Erica Westly | July 30, 2009
Our relationship with animals? As Facebook would say, "it's complicated."
Several national news stories about animal abuse have caught my attention this summer. A few days ago, Connecticut police broke up a bird fighting ring. Strangely enough, the birds being used in the fights were finches and canaries–not species one typically thinks of as aggressive. 19 men were arrested and over $8,000 in gambling money was confiscated.
Then, of course, Michael Vick, having served a 18-month sentence for dog fighting, was reinstated by the NFL this week. Last week, PETA posted an undercover video of circus elephant abuse. And a little over a month ago, a Florida teenager was arrested for mutilating and killing 19 neighborhood cats.
These may all seem like clear cases of animal cruelty, but it’s also important to remember that our relationship with animals is constantly evolving. What we consider acceptable behavior today could be considered abusive twenty years from now. Killing animals, even dogs and cats, is condoned by our culture in certain circumstances, such as medical research and overpopulation. In those cases where we’ve actively decided to kill an animal, the line between humane behavior and cruelty is much harder to define.
I don’t really support the idea of hunting for sport, but I came across David Petzal’s guidelines for teaching your child to hunt on Field & Stream’s website the other day, and I think a lot of his points make sense. Maybe if more kids were taught how to have respectful relationships with animals early on, the average adult would be more informed about what constitutes cruelty. At the least, such training might help prevent future animal cruelty cases by helping identify which children seem to have problems with animals and, therefore, shouldn’t be encouraged to work with them, own them, etc.
Topics: Culture, Miscellaneous, Psychology | No Comments »
The Future of Distracted Driving
By Erica Westly | July 24, 2009
Credit: Colin Purrington, via Flickr Creative Commons
Thanks to the New York Times, the dangers of driving while talking on a cell phone are once again in the news. As the report featured in the NYT article shows, it’s not just holding a phone in your hand that causes bad driving–talking to someone over a headset causes distracted driving, too.
Slate’s William Saletan says now that the evidence against using cell phones while driving is abundantly clear, we should be asking ourselves what we can do to stop it. Saletan proposes four possible solutions to the cell phone problem, but none of the ideas, which include carpooling, the old stand-by, “pulling to the side of the road,” and mass transit, seem like viable long-term options.
Here’s my take on it: Americans are tired of driving. With traffic getting more congested and daily commutes becoming longer–American drivers collectively spend over 3.7 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, according to a 2007 article in USA Today–driving in the U.S. has become a considerable hassle. It’s no wonder that people look to fill the time by texting and talking on the phone.
Revamping the country’s bus and train systems would be great, but that’s unlikely to happen any time soon. Plus, many Americans are reluctant to give up the privacy having their own cars provides. Instead, I think the future of transportation lies in creating (and marketing) cars that are smart enough to do most of the driving for us.
No, I’m not the first person to imagine self-driving cars, but the industry finally seems to be at a point where the idea of autonomous cars on the highway can be discussed in realistic terms. Take, for example, the ads for the 2010 Mercedes E-Class, which highlight sensors that prevent the driver from merging into other cars and brakes that activate automatically when the car is too close to another vehicle (or pedestrian, or tree–anything the driver could potentially crash into).
Yes, there are still plenty of Americans who claim to like driving–almost 70 percent, according to a recent Pew survey, although it’s worth noting that this was a significant decline from 1991, when the figure was closer to 80 percent. And yet in the same survey, 58 percent of drivers admitted to using a handheld phone while driving, and over 40 percent said they ate while driving.
Whether drivers engage in these distracting behaviors because they’re bored or because they’re so used to multitasking they can’t help themselves is unclear. What is clear, though, is that distracted driving is becoming a major problem that warrants practical, well thought out solutions.
Can everyone afford to buy a Mercedes E-Class? Certainly not, but I suspect the technology behind the E-Class’s automated safety features will become affordable enough to use in more moderately priced cars soon. Hopefully I don’t sound as ignorant and naive as Homer Simpson in that “Skinner’s Sense of Snow” episode where, upon finding out that Flanders’ car has cruise control, tells the car, “School, please,” and then promptly runs over a fire hydrant. If I do, don’t hesitate to let me know via comment.
Topics: Culture, Technology | 2 Comments »
On Incidental By-catch and Whale Wars
By Erica Westly | July 1, 2009
A minke whale off the Canadian coast
Credit: Rene Ehrhardt via Flickr Creative Commons
I’ve seen several reports about data presented at last week’s International Whaling Commission meeting, but the most compelling study I’ve read about involves “incidental by-catch.” Japan and Korea are the only countries that allow the sale of whale meat derived from whales and dolphins accidentally caught by fisherman.
At the meeting, two researchers presented genetic data showing nearly 50 percent of the whale meat found in Japanese markets last year came from minke whales from Japanese and Korean coasts. In the past, Japan has claimed the by-catch figure is closer to 20 percent. Needless to say, some researchers have speculated that some of this “incidental by-catch” may actually be intentional.
Japan has been bound by the International Whaling Commission’s ban on commercial whaling for over 20 years. And yet, whaling for “scientific purposes” is still allowed. Japan is permitted to catch up to 150 minke whales a year, and, much to environmentalists’ chagrin, much of the whale meat sold at Japanese and Korean markets comes from these “scientific” catches.
Obviously, whaling remains a hot political issue. Some Japanese politicians claim whale meat is an essential part of their cultural heritage while many researchers and environmental groups want to outlaw the practice completely. The two sides have been struggling to come to an agreement since the 1980s, but as this most recent IWC meeting indicated, the arguing isn’t likely to end any time soon.
And so, while researchers try to quantify threats like the incidental by-catch issue, fringe environmental groups like the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, started by Greenpeace co-founder Paul Watson, take a more head on approach. The group’s attempts to confront Japanese whalers in the Antarctic are documented in the Animal Planet series “Whale Wars” (the second season just started last month).
I would personally prefer to watch a series featuring trained scientists instead of this rag-tag team of activists. On the other hand, sometimes it takes an activist to expose horrible truths. Take, for example, last year’s video of the Hallmark Meat Packing Co. shot by an undercover Humane Society activist. The Sea Shepherd’s footage of a minke whale getting harpooned and shot at with a machine gun has a similar turn-your-stomach feel.
If this were a show about marine biologists, I don’t know that this kind of footage would be included, although it all depends. Look at climate researcher James Hansen’s recent foray into activism.
Topics: Biology, Culture, Environment | No Comments »