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A set of television messages based on the findings of a preliminary study of factors associated with actually observed use of safety belts was produced and shown on one cable of a dual cable television system for nine months. Observations of actual use of safety belts were obtained before and throughout the study period. The automobiles in which safety belt use was observed were matched to the households of experimental and control cables through license numbers, motor vehicle registry files and the cable company files. The television messages had no effect whatsoever on safety belt use. This study adds to the growing body of evidence that a behavior modification approach is an inefficient and often ineffective means of reducing highway losses. Passive approaches, i.e., those which reduce the frequency and severity of damage to people and property irrespective of voluntary action show greater promise of reducing highway losses. (A)

A description of the construction and operation of a replica of a coil, such as Nikola Tesla first described in 1891, is presented.

Summary Eleven cultural recoveries of Histoplasma capsulatum were obtained from 455 isolation attempts, utilizing individual or pooled liver and spleen emulsions prepared from 935 specimens of bats collected in the Canal Zone and Panama from 1961 to 1963. At least five species of bats have been shown to be capable of experiencing naturally acquired histoplasmosis by these surveillance studies. Attempts to demonstrate pathognomonic lesions in four of the five species of positive bats and comparative pathologic study of the tissues of bats which failed to yield cultural evidence of disease were uniformly uninformative.

In recent years the great interest in supersonic aerodynamics has overshadowed the other fields of fluid mechanics to a very large extent. The glamor and romance of high speed have caught the fancy of almost everyone so that one might suspect that little or no fluid mechanics exists outside the area of supersonics. Yet there is scarcely any field of physics which reaches further into antiquity for its origins and is at the same time more modern than fluid mechanics. Its history is studied with great names in science from Archimedes through the Bernoullis down to Jukowski, Prandtl, and von Karman in the present era.

Registration with a social agency, required attendance of prenatal care, a school lunch, supplemental milk, counseling, nutritional education, health education, group discussion, and selfgovernment are elements of a public school program for teen-age mothers. To study the health impact of this program, we located the birth certificates of children born to mothers who were 16 years of age and under and who attended the program. We matched these certificates with certificates of children of the same race and sex born to mothers of the same age living in similar socioeconomic census tracts who did not attend the school but who gave birth during the same period of time. This gave us a study and control group totaling 448 births to mothers 14, 15, and 16 years old. We defined low birth weight as under 2,501 gm and found 23.7% of the control group and 11.6% of the study group to be low birth weight infants. We defined gestation periods less than 37 weeks as premature and found 34.4% of the control group and 21.4% of the study group to be born prematurely. Both of these differences were statistically significant at the level of p smaller than .01. The slightly diminished frequency of prenatal care in the control group was not significantly associated with the differences in birth weight or gestational age. One infant died in the study group and eight infants died in the control group. The differences between the study group and the control group were most pronounced among the 14-year-old mothers.

Published four times a year (October, December, February, and April) by Boston University School of Education, 332 Bay State Road, Boston 15, Massachusetts. Subscription price $3.00 a year; 2 years, $5.50. (In Canada, $3.50 a year; foreign, $4.00 a year.) Single copies $1.00. Entered as second-class matter, Boston, Massachusetts, October 30, 1953. Change of address should be sent promptly, giving both the old and the new address. Copyright, 1962, Trustees of Boston University. All rights reserved.

A common requirement in commercial data processing is that the sum of a set of numbers, rounded in a generally understood manner, be equal to the sum of the numbers rounded individually. Four rounding procedures are described to accomplish this. The particular procedure that is appropriate depends upon whether the numbers being accumulated can vary in sign, whether their sum can vary in sign, and whether the last number being summed can be recognized as such prior to its rounding.

The concepts of "cost-benefit" and "cost-effectiveness" are increasingly cropping up in debate over present and future motor vehicle standards. Often they are introduced to attack, or justify, a particular standard. Just as often, they are misunderstood and misused. Since a motor vehicle safety performance standard has no costs per se, it cannot be evaluated either in cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness terms. It is the particular design alternatives available to manufacturers to achieve the objectives of a standard that have societal costs. The various design alternatives can be evaluated. Cost-effective designs should be chosen to minimize societal costs, and until there is evidence that cost-effective designs have been chosen, cost-benefit studies are premature. Even then, because of the major conceptual and methodological difficulties in the valuation of life and limb, cost-benefit studies will be appropriate only in the evaluation of designs not primarily intended to save lives and reduce injuries -- that is, vehicle designs to reduce property damage. Until manufacturers are forthcoming with accurate cost data, neither cost-effectivenss nor cost-benefit studies in this field can be relied upon. Pending legislation may resolve this.