Keeping a good eye on the elderly people of Ireland this winter
Good advice from the AA Ireland
One trend we in the AA have noticed over recent weeks in particular is quite a few adult children looking into gifting our Home rescue to cover their ageing parents or relatives now that we’re coming into winter. This got us thinking about the things we can all do to help out elderly relatives and neighbours during the colder months that lie ahead to make sure they’re warm and comfortable in their own homes.
While many senior citizens are well organized and perfectly independent, others may struggle a little more during winter depending on their age and overall health. Below we outline some practical ways you can lend a helping hand:
THEIR HEATING: The cost of heat and light is a big concern this winter and we’ve been hearing from lots of people who are worried about how their elderly relatives and neighbours will cope with the extra expense. There are however small things we can all do to help out if it’s needed.
- Bleed their radiators: You can make sure that all their radiators have been bled so that they are getting the maximum efficiency for their money.
- Have their boiler serviced: If you can afford it, another good way of helping out could be to organize their annual boiler service for them so that it’s in good working order and won’t let them down on a cold day. This is something which is provided to AA Home Rescue customers who opt for the boiler service and repair add on. It’s also a good idea to have a basic carbon monoxide alarm installed in their home just in case.
- Check for drafts: You can also check their home for drafts and caulk up an unnecessary gaps or cracks. Another relatively simple and inexpensive thing you can do is have door jams installed if there’s a bit of a gap underneath the door. This will also help to keep mice and rats out.
- Have their chimney swept: If they use their fire place it’s also no harm to make sure their chimney has been swept. Creosote tends to build inside the flue especially during cold weather and its highly combustible stuff and can even lead to a chimney fire.
- Check their smoke alarms: Make sure they have enough smoke alarms in their home and replace the batteries with a reliable brand throughout so that you know they’ll be powered up for a good few months to come.
THEIR PIPES: In recent years a lot of businesses and homes learnt the hard way the importance of making sure that pipes are properly insulated to prevent them from cracking during very cold snaps.
- Check the insulation: Check their pipes are thoroughly insulated remembering to check right up into the attic, an area of the house they may find difficult to access themselves.
- Turn off the mains: If they’re coming to stay with you over Christmas or they will be away from home at any other time over winter it’s also a good idea to switch their water off at the mains and drain their pipes by letting the taps run and flushing their toilets.
Burst pipes can be a very costly affair particularly if they don’t have building and contents insurance in place.
THEIR ROOF AND GUTTERS: It’s also worth giving a bit of thought to other areas that can be difficult for them to access.
- Clear their gutters: Wet leaves and other autumn debris can be a scourge at this time of year and a trip up a ladder can be a very daunting task for an older person who isn’t as steady on their feet as they once were. Choose a dry day to tackle the job, arming yourself with work gloves, a trowel and a bucket.
- Check their roof: While you’re up there it’s also a good opportunity to inspect their roof for any broken or missing tiles that could lead to water damage to the interior of the house.
- Who would you call if?
- It was 11pm on a Sunday evening in the depths of Winter and you discovered a burst pipe upstairs leaking into your living room?
- Or if you found your front door had been tampered with, it wouldn’t close, and you were in the house alone?
Our AA customers have found themselves in these situations.
New York Marathon called off after days of pressure from the general public
After days of intensifying pressure from runners, politicians and the general public it was decided to call off the New York city marathon in the wake of Hurricane Sandy city officials and the event’s organizers decided Friday afternoon to cancel the race for this year.
The move was historic — the marathon has taken place every year since 1970, including the race in 2001 held two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — but seemed inevitable as opposition to the marathon swelled. Critics said that it would be in poor taste to hold a foot race through the five boroughs while so many people in the area were still suffering from the storm’s damage, and that city services should focus on storm relief, not the marathon.
Proponents of the race — notably Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mary Wittenberg, director of the marathon — said the event would provide a needed morale boost, as well as an economic one.
“It’s clear that the best thing for New York and the best thing for the marathon and the future is, unfortunately, to move on,” said Ms. Wittenberg, the chief executive of New York Road Runners, the organization that operates the marathon. “This isn’t the year or the time to run it. It’s crushing and really difficult. One of the toughest decisions we ever made.”
“We still want to do something, and we’re going to do something,” he said, referring to a replacement event for the marathon. “But it won’t require generators or water.”
Among the many details that remained unclear was how the field of nearly 50,000 runners who were expected to compete in Sunday’s marathon, thousands of whom traveled to New York from other countries, might be compensated. Runners who were registered for Sunday’s race are guaranteed entry into next year’s race.
“We have a lot to work through,” Ms. Wittenberg said when asked if elite runners would still receive their appearance fees. “We appreciate the investment athletes have put into training for New York. As always we’ll be sure to be fair. I think everyone knows and will expect that of us.”
Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Wittenberg had repeatedly stood behind the plan, insisting it was best for the city. But many runners joined a chorus of politicians and area residents this week in speaking out against the plan to stage the marathon despite the widespread damage wrought by the storm Monday night.
For days, online forums sparked with outrage against politicians and race organizers, a tone that turned to vitriol against runners, even from some other runners who accused them of being selfish.
The city was divided so bitterly that it became clear to marathon organizers that to hold the race would defeat the very purpose of it.
“The marathon is about uniting the city,” Mr. Hirsch said. “But all it was doing was dividing it. Is that what the New York City Marathon is all about? No, not at all.”
But as the criticism of the decision to hold the race escalated on Friday, Road Runners continued with its plans. Runners arrived to pick up their bibs at the Jacob K. Javits Center, elite runners spoke to reporters at the marathon’s media center in Central Park and preparations for the course were made. After lunch, board members were sent an update with little hint of what was to follow.
Christine Quinn, the speaker of the City Council and an ally of the mayor’s, came out against the race, saying it was not something she would have chosen to do.
Ms. Wittenberg had said several times this week that the decision to hold the race was ultimately Mr. Bloomberg’s. But she had been working around the clock to turn the event into a platform to help the city heal, both psychologically and financially.
“People are running as an example, they have children, raised money to come here, and they see this as a good, healthy thing,” said Norbert Sander, who won the 1974 marathon and now runs the Armory, an indoor track in Upper Manhattan. “People came from around the world. I think they caved to the worst elements.”
Deborah Rose, a City Council member whose district is in Staten Island, said she fully supported the decision to cancel the race, adding that she and her colleagues were imploring the mayor to change his mind about the event.
“I thought it was a gross misplacement of priorities on the mayor’s part to even consider having the marathon when there are people in Staten Island facing life-and-death situations,” she said. “I’m glad to see that the mayor had an epiphany and be sensitive to those communities that have been so impacted by the hurricane.”
She called on all the marathoners to go to Staten Island to help with the cleanup effort and to bring the clothes they would have shed at the start to shelters or other places where displaced people were in need.
“This is always a race that unites the entire city,” said Howard Wolfson, the deputy mayor. “It’s something that 100 percent of the people who live here can agree on every year. When you have a significant number of people voicing real pain and unhappiness over its running, you have to hear that and take that into consideration. Something that is a celebration of the best of New York can’t become divisive.”
Ever Wonder What Elephants Would Have to Say?
At the Everland Zoo in South Korea, there is a young male elephant that can speak Korean.
His vocabulary includes “annyong” (hello), “anja” (sit down), “aniya” (no), “nuo” (lie down) and “choah” (good). Researchers say the elephant, whose name is Koshik, vocalizes in a novel way: He puts his trunk in his mouth.
The findings appear in the journal Current Biology.
“We asked native Korean speakers to write down what they heard, and they understood him,” said Angela S. Stoeger, a biologist at the University of Vienna and one of the study’s authors. “We also compared his imitative vocalizations with that of other elephants, and it was very different.”
In fact, Koshik seems to imitate the pitch and timbre of human speech, and of his trainers in particular.
The researchers think that Koshik started imitating human speech out of a need to socialize. For seven years when he was a juvenile and at a critical stage in his development, he was the only elephant at Everland Zoo.
“He adapted vocalizations to his human companions, the only social contact he had,” Dr. Stoeger said.
It is not clear, however, how much Koshik understands, or whether he is capable of learning more. While he seems to know the meaning of “sit,” for instance, he does not expect his trainers to sit when he says the word himself.
“He’s basically using this as a social function, but not really to communicate with the keepers,” Dr. Stoeger said.
Since 2002, Koshik has had a female Asian elephant as a companion. Although he interacts and socializes with her using typical calls, he also continues to produce his Korean utterances with the people around him.
Previously, Dr. Stoeger and her colleagues discovered an African elephant that imitates the sound of truck engines and another African elephant that imitates the sounds of the Asian elephants that it grew up near.
Curiosity rover gulps in the Martian air, & finds hints of a vanished atmosphere
Picture right has what looks like a female but is in fact a rock?
Nasa’s Curiosity rover has gulped in Martian air but failed to find methane gas which is linked to living things. But it has turned up signs that Mars may have lost much of its original atmosphere.
Since landing on the Red Planet’s surface Aug. 5, the Mars Science Laboratory rover has zapped rocks with its laser, dug its toes into sand dunes at its current location, Rocknest, and even scooped up Martian soil for a little taste in its laboratory belly. Now it has breathed in the Martian atmosphere, looking for clues as to the composition of Mars’ atmosphere.
Mars’ atmosphere is very thin – a mere 100th the density of the Earth’s – and too thin to easily support life. But planetary scientists think the atmosphere was once much thicker – and they want to find out why so much of it disappeared.
For this exercise, the rover used the Sample Analysis at Mars suite. Though it’s one of the two instruments in the payload that is famous for being able to ingest dirt, it can also analyze gasses.
“SAM can take many different types of measurements,” said Laurie Leshin of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a SAM co-investigator. “I think of it like a Swiss Army knife: It’s a beautifully integrated set of tools that can do many jobs … and of course it’s right there in Curiosity’s pocket.”
SAM contains three instruments. One of them, a Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer, found that the carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere had a 5% increase in the share of heavier carbon isotopes than when the planet first formed. The scientists took this as a sign that upper atmospheric layers, carrying carbon dioxide with the lighter carbon isotopes, were blown off, while the lower layers containing more gas with heavier carbon isotopes stayed behind.
Though they’re not sure how much of the atmosphere was lost, said Leshin, it could possibly be more than half the carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere and near-surface reservoirs.
That could be a pretty significant share of air, given that – as measured by SAM – the Martian atmosphere is 95.9% carbon dioxide.
Scientists had also been itching to use SAM’s Tunable Laser Spectrometer to get a whiff of methane, which would indicate that living things were at some point hard at work.
“Everybody is excited about the possibility of methane on Mars because life as we know it produces methane — and indeed 90% to 95% of all methane in the Earth’s atmosphere is biologically derived,” said SAM co-investigator Sushil Atreya, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
For the moment, however, the methane measurements were a bust.
“At this time we don’t have a positive detection of methane on Mars … but that could change over time,” Atreya said.
Curiosity will continue to take lungfuls of air as it makes its way on its two-year mission toward Mt. Sharp, a 3-mile-high mound in the middle of Gale Crater whose layers may hold clues revealing whether Mars was ever hospitable to life. In the meantime, scientists are looking forward to SAM taking in its first mouthful of dirt in the coming weeks.
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