An American Lion: January 2011

Someone Needs a Technical Writer and an Editor With Geography Skills

I am not humble about my own geography skills. In elementary school, I complained about a map of Europe that did not have Luxembourg on it. Of course, I got in trouble. Being smart doesn't always pay off, but I wasn't smart. I wasn't exceptional. I was pretty ordinary.

Anyone can catch a mistake. That's why two sets of eyes are always preferable to one set of eyes.

What?

You haven't caught it yet?

hint: Egypt is identified on the map as being where Iraq should be.

The Tea Party Plan to Abandon Our Veterans

How is it that the Tea Party can get away with abandoning America's veterans?

If you look at these proposals, you will see a number of things that I agree with. Spending must be cut. But spending on Veterans needs to be increased, not capped or decreased:

[Representative Michele] Bachmann's budget proposal, released on Tuesday, lists more than $400 billion in potential cuts.

Bachmann would replace farm subsidies with farmer savings accounts, eliminate or dramatically scale back the Department of Education (save $29 billion or $31 billion) and slash programs at the Department of Justice ($7.8 billion).

She would also cap Veterans Affairs health care spending, privatize the Transportation Safety Administration, Federal Aviation Administration and Amtrak, repeal the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, and open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to leasing.

Who is going to sign on for those cuts? Who is going to say, "yes, let's cap Veterans Affairs health care spending" and escape derision for that terrible proposal?

The last time I checked, we were still creating more Veterans, not fewer. We have thousands and thousands of Veterans being discharged from the military every month and they have specific needs that, more often than not, center around health care and rehabilitation as well as counseling and other forms of medical assistance. I would think that cutting the fluff to pay for MORE Veterans spending would be the way to entice support.

In my not too humble opinion, these Tea Party activists are anything but Republicans. I know who and what a Republican is. I've been one all of my life. Nothing makes me angrier than to see the name of Ronald Reagan taken in vain by someone who has no idea what the man was about. Right now in America, we are NOT taking care of hundreds of thousands of men and women who DID NOT go to war against some other nation in the 1980s; that's because Ronald Reagan kept us out of as many shooting wars as possible, thus, he did NOT create a massive population of Veterans that would still be consuming vast amounts of our nation's resources.

Think about that--we are benefiting from a kind of peace dividend because Ronald Reagan kept us out of a major shooting war. That's what we need to pursue, and we need to pursue it right now. Every single day, we are creating Veterans that will require care ten, twenty, thirty, and forty or more years from now. If we cap spending on today's Veterans, their health needs will worsen and we'll need to spend MORE on their needs years from now.

Republicans take care of Veterans. I think these Tea Party people are just troublemakers who are out to make themselves a buck. It's one thing to disagree with your opponents in the political arena; it's entirely another to do so without any conviction whatsoever in order to raise money. The Tea Party is about raising money for personal capital and personal wealth. There is no "party" there, in terms of a shared, common goal of advancing a political agenda. There is, however, a fantastic means of raising money.

And therein lies my problem. This woman, Bachmann, has no compunction about capping what we spend to take care of Veterans as she raises money to run for the Presidency. More power to her. Unfortunately, she is too easy to see through.

Perry the Platypus Cubee

I don't know what a Cubee is, but this is wonderful.

Double-click on the image, print it out, and create your own Cubee. Or don't.

Staatsgalerie Anfahrt (State Gallery Directions)

This brochure, from an art gallery in Stuttgart, Germany, has a number of wonderful design features.

The map is very effective, and I prefer maps like this. The simplicity is very attractive. It quickly orients the person looking at this brochure. It gives the map, the transportation options, and it only provides what is absolutely necessary. There is no marketing hype because this is for an art gallery. If you want to use this brochure to get around Stuttgart, then welcome to the world of dual use and utility. Germany is very conscious about recycling; a handy brochure like this would serve someone who just needed to know how to get to downtown Stuttgart very well.

What I like about this is the off-center divide of the brochure. The map takes up about two thirds of the page, and then the image sits immediately to the right of the map; this is a kind of demarcation line for the page. The eye is treated to organization and space.

The text below the map is very simple and understated. It's minimalistic. There is a buffer between the two columns, and the text is aligned right and left. This is very well done. Germany has a lot of this minimalistic design, and it's not uncommon for something as simple and well done as this to be overlooked.

The Schlieffen Plan

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B77qap1WZAq0TGlrR21vUEliR1k/edit?usp=sharing

My research paper on the Schlieffen Plan. The technical writing is very bland, but I think the paper works. I actually got a pretty good grade on it, so I must have done something right.

If it feels too brief and choppy, then that's more of a reflection on the assignment that I was given. I would have been happy to do a ten or twelve page paper and use more sources. Some tables and figures would have helped enormously, along with the proper maps.

Here are some of the images I would have inserted into the paper if it wasn't for the length requirement that I operated within.

American Insurgents, American Patriots Review

I was impressed by what I learned from this book. I would certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn a little more about how the American Revolution actually happened.

Mr. T. H. Breen gives us a well-researched book about the "nuts and bolts" of the American Revolution. He picks up the thread in the years before 1775 and demonstrates pretty clearly that this was not something that was created by the lofty speeches and writings of our Founders. It was certainly informed by pamphlets and by a popular reaction to what was being said in newspapers (early Americans didn't care for their popular media any more than we do today). But it was birthed in small towns wherever there were enough men willing to pick up whatever weapon they owned and come together to thwart the colonial governors and their emissaries.

Revolutions have several components. There are the over-arching ideas of a revolution, which can be expressed by high-minded, lofty rhetoric and then there are the angry, frothing masses who are willing to die to get their point across.

Mr. Breen demonstrates time and again that the vehemence of rural colonists was responsible for pushing the Founding Fathers towards more radical positions. Were it not for the ability of the locals to run off a tax collector or intimidate loyalists into silence, the muscle of the American Revolution would not have revealed itself to the men who came to lead it. As early as 1774, extralegal committees were taking control of local governments in small towns throughout the Northeast. The people were in revolution before it became fact.

The people drove the events with which we are familiar. The terrible defeat and retreat of British regulars from Lexington and Concord was carried out by whoever happened to appear along the route of march and take aim. That outpouring of support informed just how radical men like John Adams could afford to be. Benjamin Franklin's talk of moderation and negotiation ended abruptly when he saw just how much the people were willing to sacrifice.

Please pay close attention to Chapter Six in the book, because that is where Mr. Breen really establishes his thesis, which is to elevate the importance of the American Revolution as a people-driven event that captured the energies of a significant number of Americans and was not wholly concocted by a handful of wealthy merchants and lawyers. It was carried out by the people who convinced men like Ebenezer Punderson, hardly a well-known figure in American history, to get in a boat and row out to an anchored British warship where he requested a kind of asylum and protection from his own neighbors. And while they never actually harmed him, they hated him for saying that they had no right to resist the authority of the British Crown.

I thought the presentation of the book was good. I didn't notice anything about how it was structured; some of the reviewers on Amazon.com thought it was repetitive. I didn't think it was repetitive; what Mr. Breen knew that he had to do with his work was support his argument with details and facts, and he was able to do that. I did not track down every one of his notes or citations; I think his arguments were validated by the material he presented to back them up. It's not an easy read, like a David McCullough book; it's a little more difficult than that because Mr. Breen wrote it with criticism and challenges in mind, I suspect.

Missing from many books about the American Revolution are details about associations, committees, and other dreary details that don't quite reach the poetic status of General Washington arriving to take command of the rabble. In point of fact, Washington commanded with the consent of the rabble, and it was never the other way around. The men who took up arms and wandered in and out of the colonial army were incapable of being fooled by great speeches. They were too busy worrying about shoes, sickness, their families and their future.

The cover was a near miss with me. Without the comma after "American Insurgents," I was put off. That's my problem. I understand why the comma was not necessary and was supported by the alteration in size of the print. White words? That was probably what was decided would work best against the rather well-chosen painting on the front. The painting, itself, is a wonderfully primitive kind of folk art, and I don't think a better one could have been chosen.

Frances Perkins Would Know How Frances Fox Piven Feels

Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins

There's an interesting collision of history going on right now, linked by the wonderful name Frances.

Frances Fox Piven has been relentlessly attacked for months over her work as an academic researcher:

The racket Frances Fox Piven heard in the middle of the night last weekend sounded like someone pounding on the front door of the small, isolated house she calls home in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. Startled and awaken from her sleep, Piven, who had plenty of reason to feel on edge, pondered her next move.

A City University of New York professor and scholar of grassroots activism, the 78-year-old Piven has been the target of relentless Glenn Beck attacks. For an entire year now the Fox News talker has been pushing a tangled conspiracy theory that puts Piven, and her late husband, fellow academic Richard Cloward, at the center of an all-powerful left-wing movement to “collapse” the United States economy and government -- a devious collapse designed to allow President Obama to radically transform the country, according to Beck.

The talker’s basis for the dark attacks date back to a Nation essay Piven and Cloward wrote 45 years ago. And as part of his misinformation campaign, Beck has repeatedly demonized Piven, denouncing her as an “enemy of the Constitution” and someone who wants to “destroy America.” Piven has become a star player in Beck’s rogue gallery of treacherous, all-powerful (often Jewish) liberals, seeking to eliminate the American way of life.

That racket? It was an icicle. I know, I don't enjoy having that "false suspense" embedded in an article, either.

Reading about these attacks on Piven, I was reminded of a book I read last year about the inner circle of President Franklin Roosevelt and his first hundred days in office, titled, "Nothing to Fear," by Adam Cohen.

Cohen's book deals with FDR's cabinet secretaries, and Frances Perkins was completely unknown to me before I read the book. It was quite a radical choice to make her the Secretary of Labor, and she fought, endlessly, it seems, for acceptance and for her agenda. Without her efforts, the adoption of things that we take for granted, like Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and ending abusive child labor practices wouldn't have happened until much later (if at all).

Much of what Perkins accomplished in FDR's cabinet likely informed and influenced what Piven wrote. How radical could Piven be if people knew of the efforts of Perkins to use the power of the Federal government to help the unemployed? It would seem that Piven was taking up a gauntlet that people now take for granted, and one that is not nearly as radical as some would have us believe.

Perkins had to sit across from business leaders and union bosses and faced a great deal of intimidation. Cohen notes that if she had failed, she would have set the cause of women back decades, if not more. She had to be tough and turn a blind eye to a lot of the nasty things being said about her.

How is it that we're still debating child labor laws? I don't understand that at all.

Thomas Lowry and the Ethics of Historical Preservation

Union Regimental Drum Corps from the American ...

Image via WikipediaWe should begin by putting this into perspective. Thomas P. Lowry is a historian who was recently caught by the National Archives doing something that he shouldn't have done. It's a little more than a piece of technical writing gone awry. It's a clumsy forgery, albeit, one that took a little too long to uncover.

In 1998, Mr. Lowry took an ink pen and changed the date on a document that pardoned a Union Army soldier for the crime of desertion. Well, he did a little more than that. In order to come up with a hook for a Civil War book that he now realized he could write, he changed the document to make it look like it was signed on the day of Lincoln's assassination, fundamentally altering the context of that day in American history.

Not only that, but Mr. Lowry went to the media with his discovery. My question is, how did this glaringly obvious forgery slip past the archivists?

As an example of forgery, it's clumsy. Holding up the document reveals that.

There are also heat-imaging techniques that can spot forgeries. I don't even know if you'd have to do that with this document, although the National Archives probably did so in order to ensure that it wasn't going after Mr. Lowry for no good reason. Again, what took them so long? Why didn't anyone bother to investigate further when Mr. Lowry's book came out? Lincoln's last day on Earth has probably been investigated and documented as much as any other significant day in American history. Why didn't someone cast a bit of doubt on this from the beginning? If there was some skeptical reaction, I cannot located an example of it.

In fact, there was this glowing (and rather less-than-skeptical) review from the Smithsonian Associates:

I have captured the review as a full screen shot. These things tend to disappear.

Look at how the review elevates Lowry and his wife (gee, was it her idea? Will he be a cad and roll over on his wife and blame her? I hope not) to the status of "professional" historians. The review implies that these amateurs went out and found something wonderful. Well, so much for that. No amateur historian will be able to escape some measure of skepticism now. They "found" 543 original Lincoln notations or they "created" them? How would you like to be the archivist who now has to look at everything they did and scan for alterations?

If you want to play devil's advocate, what's the harm? Was this, in fact, a correction? Could someone plausibly say that this document did, indeed, come out in 1865? No, of course not. The National Archives was smart enough to track down Mr. Lowry and he, to his credit, confessed his crime. Was it ethical? It crossed over several ethical boundaries and has landed Mr. Lowry in a heap of trouble. It wasn't even a "harmless white lie" or "gentle fib" because Mr. Lowry profited from altering a historical document. You can follow this link to C-SPAN's video archives and (unless they take the video down) watch him talk about the book after the book has been touted for sale.

How many scholarly articles, research papers, and books feature this error? They will now have to be corrected, where possible. How many citations of his work are in circulation? They are not citing a disreputable source.

If you follow the link to the Amazon.com page for Thomas P. Lowry, you begin to see another, perhaps even larger, problem. His obsession with detailing the sexual mores of the Civil War era becomes evident. Which is fine, except that virtually everything else the man has ever done is now academically suspect. Did he lie when he researched his books about other subjects as well? Mr. Lowry appears to have never really had a problem getting published or finding other writers to work with. He has written numerous books and collaborated with others. Their work has been compromised now as well. How can their books be trusted?

The work that featured the tell-tale alteration wasn't even the only book he ever wrote about the subject of court-martials and pardons. How much of those works are based on documents altered by Mr. Lowry? And, for that matter, what did he do to top himself when he realized how profitable it could be to walk into the National Archives and start slinging ink around?

Mr. Lowry has now earned the enmity of virtually every Civil War historian in the world (yes, they do have American Civil War historians all over the world). He has betrayed colleagues and he has committed historical fraud. He has profited from altering a historical document, one of the worst ethical breaches a serious historian and researcher can commit.

It goes beyond what he did; it even goes beyond why he did it (the likeliest reasons are greed and the desire for power and authority in the community of Civil War historians). It now becomes the responsibility of the people who published and sold his books to own up to the deception.

I would expect to see much of his work disappear. It isn't worth the paper it is printed on.

How sad (an Update). The Mr. Lowry wants to hold on to his few accomplishments:

The Archives on Monday accused Lowry of altering the pardon in plain view in the agency's main research room to amplify its historical significance. Lincoln had indeed issued a pardon to Pvt. Patrick Murphy, but the 16th president did it exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Archives officials, after a year-long investigation, say Lowry signed a written confession Jan. 12 that he brought a fountain pen into the research room sometime in 1998 and wrote a 5 over the 4 in 1864, using a fade-proof ink.

Lowry, a retired psychiatrist who discovered the pardon in an unsorted file box, has denied any wrongdoing. He said he was pressured by federal agents to confess.

"I consider these records sacred," he said in an interview Monday at his Woodbridge home. "It is entirely out of character for me. I'm a man of honor."

His wife, Beverly, said the change was made by a former Archives staffer, a charge the agency denies.

There were no security cameras at the time to record what happened in the room. Lowry cannot be charged with a crime because the statute of limitations on tampering with government property is five years.

Fonts Do Not Matter

Or do they?

They certainly matter in the world of typography and design. They certainly matter when the font being used is part of a marketing campaign.

For technical writing? Well, that depends on the document. I have done extensive work on documents that used 12 point Times New Roman. Lots of text, lots of tables, lots of paragraphs with endnote notation. Not great to read, but it was exactly what the client wanted. I have done broader technical writing with blue headings (that's pretty much a standard when you're in Word these days on the Mac) and I've done some projects that didn't hinge upon the font that I selected.

Fonts are wonderful. I refuse to bash them. The more the merrier. The people who design successful fonts are really good at what they do.

Fonts are problematic in that you can really screw things up with the wrong font. And I'm not talking about the humorous (or deadly) backlash against Comic Sans. I'm talking about using an arcane, inflexible, difficult-to-read font on a dark background when people are trying to get at your website or at your document.

This is not the final say on the subject, but it does have that academic feel to it:

Print fonts and web fonts are distinguished by why they were created. While print fonts are designed for easy reading on paper, web fonts are designed to be easily read via a computer screen. Considering this, it would make sense that web fonts should be easier to read online than print fonts. However, the research suggests that this is not entirely true. While people might prefer the aesthetic value of web fonts, there does not appear to be a major difference in readability between the two types of fonts.

Boyarski, Neuwirth, Forlizzi, and Regli found that there was no perceptible difference in their study of the difference in readability of two fonts, Georgia and Times New Roman. While both are serif fonts, Georgia was designed for the web and Times New Roman is a print font. Both Georgia and Times New Roman have large x-heights. The x-height is the height of a lowercase x in a line of text. In a study of 48 participants, the researches measured the reading comprehension and speed using a reading task and the Nelson-Denny Test. The mean score out of 12 points for Georgia was 9.6 and 10.2 for Times New Roman. Although participants scored slightly higher for Times New Roman, they noted a preference for Georgia over Times New Roman. This suggests that serif web fonts like Georgia may be preferable over serif print fonts.

Although there might be a slight preferences for serif web fonts over serif print fonts, the bulk of research where both sans-serif and serif web and print fonts were compared has shown little difference in the readability of web and print fonts. Bernard, Liao, and Mills concluded that there was no perceptible difference in the readability of computer and print fonts. Bernard, Liao, and Mills used two print fonts (Times New Roman and Arial) and two web fonts (Georgia and Verdana) in their study. Below are examples of the fonts used in the study.

Print Web

Serif Times New Roman Georgia

Sans Serif Arial Verdana

To test readability, the researchers had participants read eight different passages from a fixed distance as quickly and accurately as possible. They concluded that there was no difference between print and web fonts in terms of legibility and reading speed.

I'm sure there are font purists who would shudder at the idea that fonts don't matter. And I would tend to agree with them. Fonts matter, insofar as picking the wrong font, and the wrong colors, can kill your readership.

Think of this mishmash:

This is a testing of fonts and all that on this page for example purposes only.

And you'll see what I'm getting at. Grey on white, or colors on white, don't work as well as black lettering on a white background. The above example is too extreme, of course, but I wanted to show how a line can disappear and how selectively changing a font or a color can lead to an unintended move by a reader.

If you look at the reddish "fo" in fonts, your eye is almost trained to tell you that that could be--could be--a hyperlink. Did you hover over it? Anything reddish tells me that there might be an embedded hyperlink there.

For the web, I use Georgia. For print, I use Arial. This article, except where noted, is pretty much done in Georgia.

I almost never deviate from that formula. I know there are plenty of reasons to move to Times New Roman or to Verdana, but I keep things simple. I use Georgia and Arial, and I might--might--be persuaded to use something else for a title or something that is meant to look older or specifically designed.

The Costs of Doing Without Proper Documentation and Technical Writers

I haven't given it as much thought as I need to, but I really need to go through my experiences with my last employer and try to find ways to learn from what happened there.

There are so many "liability" reasons not to write about a previous employer. I don't wish to trip any ethical wires, I don't want to hurt my former employer in any way, and I certainly don't want to be sued. I will change the names of the guilty and the innocent, several times, if necessary. I will do my utmost to make this instructive.

Some background. The company I was with, previously, was in the midst of a transformation from older systems to newer systems. The way that it did business was, increasingly, through the web and through sharing files with clients. This is nothing new, or exclusive, but the company had a hard time walking away from those legacy systems. The older employees weren't a problem; they were simply trying to get through each week and keep the information flowing. The need to get information to the customer was paramount with this company. It was sacrosanct.

As the newer system, which was Oracle-based, and I probably don't have to say PeopleSoft, but I will, came online, there were issues. It wasn't flexible enough. It didn't do what the clients wanted. And it was heavily customized.

The end result of the heavy customization? It didn't work and no one knew what had been done.

Now, let's be fair to the company--it was focused on delivering products to customers. It was focused on the here and now. It was delivering information to clients as per the contracts it had signed and it was giving them great service and a great product. The drag on all of this was the inability of the people trying to transform the business to get past the defects in the software package it was trying to roll out and to stand up these new systems.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist. You have a legacy system. It has to go. You replace it, then you test and re-test the replacement, and then you give that replacement a real-world, small-sample test with the clients. Then you preview it for all. Once you have everyone on board, THEN and only then do you retire your legacy system.

What held up this process at my old company was not the people--the people were great. The software wasn't the problem because the software was fine. It could, when set up, deliver what it promised.

No, the problem was centered around documentation. Not enough people knew what had been done previously by contractors and temps that had been brought in to fix key issues. Without a single document that brought together all of the components under one cover, no one knew what the entirety of the system was. No one knew, for example, what was in a certain kind of table in the PeopleSoft configuration. And, in layman's terms, when you don't know what's in a table, you don't know how it modifies or affects other tables when key processes are run.

Technical Writing, in other words, was there, but not at the holistic, comprehensive, or top level of the project. There was documentation, yes. But it wasn't comprehensive. There were plenty of orphaned Word files floating around on shared drives, but no one really owned them. And, there were directories of documents in Microsoft Project, but spread across different releases, different pages, and different project pages.

I believe that every project needs a technical writer who owns the documentation, updates it, and works closely with the developers, managers, planners, coders, and users. Without that, you have a mess.

A Grammy Is Worth Nothing

This is ridiculous:

He’s leader of the pack in terms of BRIT nominations tonight, but can London rapper Tinie Tempah convert them into prizes when the awards ceremony is held on Feb. 15? Bookmakers would have us believe that British pop’s biggest night could be one of disappointment, not delirium, with Ladbrokes backing the 22-year-old to scoop just one of his four nods, and arguably the least prestigious of them all — Best Breakthrough Act.

Not that the category is unimportant — a BRIT is a BRIT after all, and, after a Grammy, perhaps music’s most coveted statuette. But when you think that Tempah is in the running for best male solo, best British single and, most important of all, best British album, a Breakthrough prize alone may not be enough to keep him happy.

A Grammy Award is worth exactly nothing. It confers no artistic achievement; it confers nothing in terms of respectability. It is simply an award for being acceptable to a quickly-evaporating music industry.

The Grammy is an award for selling a lot of "records." Well, look at the thing, itself. Aside from those of us who are audiophiles, no one really owns "records" anymore (I believe I own somewhere in the neighborhood of 35,000 LP records and at least that many "singles," which is another baffling exercise in confusion altogether). People aren't buying music anymore; the culture does not experience a seismic shift when an artist puts out their latest platter anymore. Videogames are far more important than music these days.

Say you just won a Grammy. Good for you. Rarely does someone who matters in the history of music have a Grammy, unless it was awarded posthumously or for something that no one listens to anymore. Relax, Home Slice. Hootie and the Blowfish have a Grammy. I know that some people think Hootie and the Blowfish were just a really, really bad joke. But, in point of fact, the year 1996 still stands as the absolute worst year in the history of recorded music. Everything everyone did that year blew massive, massive chunks.

Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Led Zeppelin, Buddy Holly, and The Who have something in common--they have never won a Grammy.

Imagine music without them. Then, tell me a Grammy means anything.

Monument to the Peasants

A monument to the peasants, Boblingen, Germany. Image from Google Maps.

As of today, however, this monument no longer exists.

What remains are three circular stumps, and very little else. It would appear that the monument was removed to make the sight area of a German speed camera clearer. I don't know the particulars, but oh well.

This monument paid tribute to The Peasants Rebellion:

The Peasants' War (Deutscher Bauernkrieg in German, literally the German Peasants' War) was a popular revolt that took place in Europe during 1524–1525. It consisted, like the preceding Bundschuh movement and the Hussite Wars, of a series of both economic and religious revolts in which peasants, townsfolk and nobles all participated.

At its height in the spring and summer of 1525, the conflict, which occurred mostly in the southern, western and central areas of what is now modern Germany plus areas in neighbouring Alsace and modern Switzerland and Austria, involved an estimated 300,000 peasant rebels: contemporary estimates put the dead at 100,000. It was Europe's largest and most widespread popular uprising prior to the French Revolution of 1789.

AND:

Germany's peasants and plebeians compiled lists of articles outlining their complaints. The famous 12 Articles of the Black Forest were ultimately adopted as the definitive set of grievances. The articles' statement of social, political and economic grievances in the increasingly popular Protestant movement unified the population in the massive uprising that broke out first in Lower Swabia in 1524, then quickly spread to other parts of Germany.

Now That's Reasonable

Who said polite discourse is dead?

Super Dickmann's

Avoid at all cost. These things are pretty bad. It's a marshmallow dipped in thin chocolate, served on a wafer, and it has an "unfortunate" phallic appearance.

Studded Tires Are Bad For Your Health?

What?

Drivers who hit the road in winter with studded tires may be ruining more than just the pavement beneath their cars. They also could be harming their hearts and lungs.

Microscopic road debris kicked up as the tires' spiky metal posts meet the asphalt could pose risks to health, not only for drivers, but also for the people living near highways, Swedish scientists suggest.

Researchers collected airborne particles generated as studded tires rolled over a road simulator at about 40 miles an hour, according to a study published in the latest issue of the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology. They then added this dust to a dish containing human white blood cells, similar to the ones that line the lungs.

By extension, isn't everything thus harmful?

Anything that creates road debris could pose a threat to human respiratory systems. That would mean that regular tires are also harmful, just not to the same degree as the spiked tires. Anything that comes into any sort of contact with a road surface could kick up road debris. What are the comparisons between studded tires and no studded tires? Or is this just an effort to ban the tires?

Never used them. Never had to.

	Print	Web
Serif	Times New Roman	Georgia
Sans Serif	Arial	Verdana

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Claiming someone else did it is tantamount to using the "dog ate my homework" excuse. Whoever that "someone else" is probably didn't get to write books and go on C-SPAN.

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