Thursday, March 23, 2006

Survey Says!

As you've no doubt noticed, I have recently been embedding video links in this here weblog. You click on the picture and you see a little video clip which is actually situated over on Google Video or YouTube or ifilm. I have mixed feelings on how this is working.

The good thing about them is that you just click and you get to see the clip and it will usually not be preceded by an ad. The bad thing is that the embedded links sometimes cause this page to load slower. The little window I embed calls up a still picture from the other site and if that site's busy, it may not appear on this page immediately.

I don't know which is preferable so I've decided to conduct a survey. The cut-off time will be Noon (my time) on Sunday. At that point, I will tally all the votes and that will be the policy for this site. I will keep linking to video clips of interest no matter how the vote comes down but this will determine whether I embed the video links (as I've been doing lately) or if I just put up a link like this one or this one or even this one. So write and give me one of these two answers...

• EMBEDDED VIDEO CLIPS, YES! - Yes, I like the little windows that I can just click on and watch a video clip on your site, Mark! It does not interfere with my browsing at all.
• EMBEDDED VIDEO CLIPS, NO! - No, I would prefer to just have a normal link that I can click on and go see the clip on another site if I want, Mark! And yes, I know this may mean several more clicks or sometimes sitting through a brief ad.

Send your votes to this special address: survey@newsfromme.com. You can tell me why you feel the way you do but I'll be satisified if you just send me a YES or a NO. Thank you...and please note that this may be the fairest election you've voted in for years.

• Posted at 11:41 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Hey, wanna see a great job of baseball fielding? It's September 28, 2005, Tampa Bay Devil Rays versus Cleveland Indians. The ball is hit for what should be an easy single and Eduardo Perez is the baserunner heading from first to second. And he would have made it too, but the ball went near infielder Ronnie Belliard and...well, just watch what happened. (Perez was so impressed, he switched teams and joined the Indians.)

• Posted at 12:57 AM · LINK

Where to Have Your Heart Attack

In a Las Vegas casino, that's where. According to a recent (unlinkable) article in The Wall Street Journal, around 1,800 people, including gamblers and hotel employees, have had their heartbeats restarted in Vegas casinos over the last nine years. It all began when a Vegas-based paramedic named Richard Hardman had the idea for a life-saving program. He noticed how often he and other rescuers were called in to treat heart attack victims and how there was always a security guard standing there, looking helpless and with no idea what to do.

Hardman went to executives of the Boyd Group, a company that owns many Vegas hotels, and proposed that they not only have defibrillators handy but that security guards and other staffers be trained how to use them. This was a much more involved process than it sounds because it involved studying the problem and compiling data on it and then the concerns of attorneys had to be addressed and local "good samaritan" laws had to be changed. Eventually, a pilot program was started and the first time it saved someone's life, other casinos saw the publicity and wanted in.

Across the country, among people who suffer cardiac arrest in public places, the survival rate is under 10%. In Vegas hotels, it's 53% and if the defibrillators are applied within three minutes of the collapse, that number goes up to 74%. Today in most casinos, there are enough defibrillators strategically dispersed — and enough people qualified to use them — that three minutes is quite possible.

So that's the answer to the question I asked earlier. Unfortunately, we do not have stats on how many people had heart attacks just because they were in Vegas casinos. But between the smoke and the buffets and the Blackjack dealers who can draw five cards to a 21 and beat your twenty, I'm guessing the number is high.

• Posted at 12:40 AM · LINK

The Pursuits of Freedom

You may have noticed that every so often, I write here about TV coverage of high-speed car chases. I'm not sure why I find them interesting. It might be the odd mental state being displayed by someone who flees from police despite the fact that there always seems to be about a 98% chance of being caught and/or involved in a car crash. (And — oh, yeah — they sometimes wind up getting shot, too. Like there weren't enough other good reasons to not try it.) I may also be fascinated by the general cluelessness of local news anchors who have to ad-lib, sometimes for an hour or so at a time, without benefit of very many facts to impart.

It's also kind of fun to see something on your TV and you have no idea just how and when it's going to end. I mean, you can pretty much bet it's going to end badly for the guy being chased...but how bad? And how and where will it happen? And will any innocent people be hurt in the process? I love moments when what's on my television is completely out of human control.

Oddly enough, I don't like those World's Wildest Police Videos shows that make up about half the schedule of Spike TV. They're phony with their precision editing and phony soundtracks. Do people even notice that it doesn't matter which state or even country the pursuit is in, it's still the same helicopter reporter covering it? And that there's the same annoying sound effects track of police sirens and tire squeals and crash sounds even though there was no microphone at the actual chase that could have recorded the noises?

But I sometimes get hooked watching the real things, especially when they occur on streets I know. If you're so inclined, I'll tell you about a huge online library of video from Southern California police pursuits. It starts on this page of the website of KCBS and KCAL, which are channels 2 and 9, and which share a common news crew. Most of what they have there are edited reports from the local news but they also have "web extras," which are usually long and untrimmed. Some of them are the raw footage that the copter fed back to the newsroom even when the anchors weren't chiming in with their comments.

This may not interest you in the slightest. But if it does, you'll waste quite a lot of time over on that site watching crazed drivers and hearing about P.I.T. maneuvers and spike strips.

• Posted at 12:15 AM · LINK