Research dollars at work
Posted by Dalton48 on 28 Mar 2007 at 02:45 pm | Tagged as: Small people, Stuff
Toppling televisions are a hazard for tots: Halifax researchers
March 28, 2007 – 14:12
Call me Milton, but does public money really need to be spent to figure this one out?
Though to be honest, I’m not sure it would have occurred to me. You’d think the manufacturers would have designed them not to injure people (other than by what broadcasters show on them, of course…).
You’d be surprised how many small kids get squashed by televisions. They’re heavy, usually up on a table of some sort, and not that hard t pull over on yourself if you’re small and lacking a good sense of consequence.
We have those stats already from other sources, though (mostly hospital records), so I wonder why that was funded.
No, no, I wouldn’t be surprised. What I am surprised at is that the fairly straightforward combination of large, heavy object, gravity, and small people doesn’t add up to some people. And while it’s fascinating to keep track of statistics on every possible household accident, how is it useful?
Well, journalists seem to find it useful…
Does seem like unnecessary research, especially as flat screen TVs are presumably mostly making this particular hazard relatively obsolete. TV-squashed kids do show up in the papers occasionally, though, and always seem to involve (maybe this is just journalists selecting good stories) a much broader sadder story of kids left alone basically unsupervised.
But then again it’s just one of the many, many things to give you nightmares with small kids around. Not long ago I found my kids practicing their rock climbing moves on the bookshelves in the play room and did a panicked mental inventory of the number of brackets I’d screwed into the shelves and walls. Most of my actual (literal) nightmares featuring squashed kids, though, involve traffic. Which probably just means my imagination is more attuned to actual statistical risk profiles than most.
This reminds me a little of a series of ads run in the subways here recently, full of robust public spiritedness from one perspective and utterly depressing from another, with taglines, in English and Spanish, like the following:
- Never shake your infant
- Talk to your child
- Never leave your baby alone in the bath
- Don’t sleep with your baby in the same bed if you’re drunk or on drugs
Ouch.
Which probably just means my imagination is more attuned to actual statistical risk profiles than most.
And Paul is right. I thought the bookcase thing was a higher statistical risk than it was.