Good popcorn - you need to know this

From "Investigation of the properties influencing popcorn popping quality," Maga J.; Blach, B.; Developments in Food Science (1992), 29, 543-50:

The roles of popcorn moisture content and storage temperature prior to popping as well as popping temperature and the amount of added oil and salt on resulting popped volume and number of unpopped kernels were evaluated. Max. popped volume was in the 12.5-13.5% moisture range while the proportion of unpopped kernels increased with increasing moisture. Popped volume decreased while unpopped kernels increased with an increase in storage temperature. The addition of 2-4% oil maximized popped volume and minimized unpopped kernels. The addition of 2% salt gave the highest popped volume and the lowest amount of unpopped kernels. Optimum popping temperature was 180°.

Safety first

While setting up my little netbook this morning, I carefully arranged the power cord to avoid tipping over a nearby coffee cup, whereupon my coworker assured me that the cup was empty. My observation is that the rule regarding coffee cups should be the same as for guns: always assume they are loaded.

How to handle vice

Heidi sent me this story:

Swiss prostitutes trained to use defibrillators

My first thought is, that doesn't sound like any of the Swiss in my family. My second thought is, you can save lives by regulating vice rather than trying to stamp it out, which is not a brand-new thought, admittedly, but well worth hearing over and over again until it someday sinks in.

The costs of single-payer health insurance

Here is today's required reading. In 1995, Taiwan began providing government-run health insurance for everyone; by the end of the year, almost everyone in the country had enrolled and abandoned their US-style system of mixed private and public hospitals and free market insurance. What happened to health care costs? In the first seven years they ... stayed about the same.

That's right. They went from 57% insured to 97% insured without increasing overall spending on health care. People liked it, used it, remained healthy, and it was just as affordable as the private system that had insured not much more than half the population. And that's in a country that had a GDP of $13,000/person in 1995.

Is this why we buy health insurance?

Medical bills underlie 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies

Harvard researchers surveyed some 2000 people who filed for bankruptcy in 2007. Their findings:

While only 29 percent directly blamed medical bills for their bankruptcy, 62 percent had medical bills that totaled more than 10 percent of family income, said an illness was responsible, had lost income due to illness or some other medical factor.

Even more shocking is the fact that 78% of these - or almost half of all bankruptcy filings - involved people who had health insurance. These were, in the main, middle class Americans with decent jobs and health insurance, yet a severe illness still throws them into economic distress. Part of the problem, as the report notes, is that too often you're only allowed to buy health insurance if you don't ask for health care:

"Nationally, a quarter of firms cancel coverage immediately when an employee suffers a disabling illness; another quarter do so within a year," the report reads.

And once you've lost it, good luck trying to ever get insurance again with a preexisting condition. So what good is health insurance? Hard to tell from the newspaper accounts of this study and, from the description of the method, I'm not sure this study adequately addresses the question. The key stat would be the proportion of insured families declaring bankruptcy v. the uninsured and I don't think the statistics are here to determine that. I don't find the study available yet at the American Journal of Medicine, but it will be worth taking a closer look at.


Edit: I neglected to point out that this data is from 2007, before the current economic troubles. This situation must be far worse right now.

Flu prevention, Razorback style

Meanwhile, at the University of Arkansas:

Archaeo-epidemiology

From CNN.com: Scientists dig for lessons from past pandemics

Markel and colleagues examined 43 cities and found that so-called nonpharmaceutical interventions -- steps such as quarantines and school closings -- were remarkably successful in tamping down the outbreak. "They don't make the population immune, but they buy you time, either by preventing influenza from getting into the community or slowing down the spread," Markel told CNN

*snip*

If it seems odd to base medical strategy on 90-year-old newspapers, the approach is increasingly popular. "There's a big case for looking at history," says Simonson. "We call it archaeo-epidemiology. You go to libraries and places like that, dig around, collaborate with people like John Barry and try to quantify what really worked."

Barry is the author of "The Great Influenza," perhaps the signature history of the devastating 1918 pandemic. He says the historical record shows that isolating patients worked to slow the spread of flu in 1918, but that attempted quarantines -- preventing movement in and out of cities -- was "worthless."

Fashion accessories for pandemics

One of my colleagues has sent me this link:

GET WELL SOON MASKS

Sharkey leaves the Shire, continued

EPA, with White House nudge, eases rule on lead emissions

Looking to bolster the fight against childhood lead poisoning, the Environmental Protection Agency last month approved a tough new rule aimed at clearing the nation's air of the toxic metal.

But at the last minute, federal documents show, the Bush administration quietly weakened a key provision, exempting dozens of polluters from scrutiny.

*snip*

To help meet the new limit, the EPA had planned to require lead monitors next to any factory emitting at least half a ton of lead a year. But after the White House intervened, the agency raised the threshold to a ton of lead or more....
As a result, dozens of factories won't be checked regularly.