Al's Morning Meeting

At least 1,200 times in the past nine years, U.S. hospital workers have inadvertently given patients solutions meant to flow through one tube -- an IV, an epidural, a feeding tube, a bladder catheter, a blood line -- into another tube, frequently causing harm and sometimes death. The true tally is much greater.

Most health care is delivered safely, experts say, but medical errors are more common than many people realize. That is because most error reporting is voluntary and anonymous, so only a fraction of incidents is known, the Wisconsin State Journal found in an examination of tubing misconnections and other patient-safety problems.

• How many errors occur?

• How do tubes get mixed up?

• What would make the care safer?

• Are tired nurses a factor?

This project also includes an interactive "nurse scheduler" game that allows you to try to manage nurses' shifts in an imaginary ICU. You must manage three shifts a day on the schedule. Keep clicking the little arrows to go to the next step in the game.

I want to say a special thanks to the Association of Health Care Journalists which is allowing free access to Al's Morning Meeting to a section of the association website that is usually for members. The group published a useful interview with reporter David Wahlberg about how he did the Missed Connections investigation and how other journalists can get started.  The  free access will be good for a week.

The latest fad in school security is to require students to only use clear or mesh backpacks. Cloth backpacks have to be stored in lockers once the students arrive at school.

Students are not pleased. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

Through an online group called "Hell No I'm Not Wearing a See-Through Backpack," many are organizing a resistance campaign, with proposals including petitions, protest T-shirts, a "day of silence" when school opens, and mass refusals to wear the new gear.

"We see it as an invasion of our personal space and privacy," said Joe Salvo, the organizer of the online group and a Wissahickon High sophomore. "It's the idea that our rights are going to be slowly taken away in the name of safety that bothers me. ... How far are they willing to take this?"

Suburban school officials are equally adamant that they must adopt more stringent measures to ensure safety.

Urban districts such as Philadelphia, Chester and Camden say they already use X-ray machines and metal detectors to scan all students and belongings for weapons.

After the Springfield shooting, a safety task force was convened in Montgomery County by District Attorney Bruce Castor; this month, it came out with 13 pages of recommendations for schools, including using clear or mesh backpacks.

 Shortage of Tower Climbers

We have plenty of towers in the United States, but we don't have many skilled tower climbers. The Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World writes:

The rapid growth of communications technology has put pressure on tower climbers to do more with less training.

"The rate of development of skilled labor to do the task is way behind the growth of demand," said Winton Wilcox, president of ComTrain LLC, a Wisconsin-based company that monitors tower safety and trains climbers. "There isn't 10 to 12 years to learn the business anymore. You're lucky to find two men on a crew that have more than five years experience."

Corey Schirmer, of Topeka, was hired to climb towers nine years ago. He didn't need a license or experience. He recently quit because of the job's demands.

"I felt overworked sometimes," he said. "Where you didn't feel it was safe to work, but you've got to get the job done, so you get up there and you do it."

Working with the National Association of Tower Erectors, OSHA has compiled an inspection checklist for the approximately 9,000 U.S. tower climbers.

"A lot of the reasons people die is they weren't tied off," said Craig Lekutis, president of WirelessEstimator.com, which provides news and safety information to tower climbers. "If you’re not properly tied off and you don't have the correct personal protection equipment, you're going to slip at some point. Gravity can be unforgiving."

As an adoptive father three times over, I was immediately drawn to this series. In it, NPR highlights the many different kinds of adoption in America -- transracial, international and a secretive hidden kind of adoption. It also looks at the complexities that create an adoption.

It is worth a listen.

Second Life is a virtual world online. Some journalism grad students at the University of California, Berkley, have launched a Second Life project in which they reported, wrote and videotaped segments about faith, sexuality and family.

The Smoking Gun has had two fun collections this month. This one is a collection of jailhouse mugshots of people who wore athletic team clothing when they were collared.

Last week, The Smoking Gun included a collection of people who each had some sort of bandaging on them when they said “cheese.” Clever.

Let's say you were lucky enough to catch Barry Bond's record-setting baseball. The Wall Street Journal's Tom Herman poses a question about whether the lucky fan would owe taxes on the ball, which would easily be worth half a million, experts say. There are two main schools of thought on this question:

1.) The fan who catches the ball shouldn't owe tax until she or he sells it. This is the commonsense view, though as Herman points out, common sense doesn't always comport with the tax code.

2.) It's automatically taxable income to the fan when that person catches the ball because it's "accession to wealth." This view stems from cases saying that anyone who stumbles across a "treasure trove" instantly owes tax on it.

Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.