Last year, we put out a podcast called "Death By Fire? Probably Not." It was about the remarkable decline in fatal fires in the U.S. over the past century, and explored some of the contributing factors.

Joseph M. Fleming, a deputy fire chief with the Boston Fire Department, has now written in with a guest post that challenges what we think we know about smoke alarms. Fleming has more than 30 years of experience in the fire industry (in both firefighting and management), and suggests that people think a little harder about smoke alarms.

According to the Sports Business Journal, the NBA is going to fully phase in a revenue-sharing plan in 2013-14 which:

All of this will -- according to Jeanie Buss (Executive VP of business operations for the Los Angeles Lakers) -- allow teams to become “economically viable so that every team has the opportunity to compete.”  And according to Buss, this will “make for a healthier league.” 

As the article notes, Buss served on the committee that created this plan.  And as the article also notes, Buss and the Lakers will contribute the most revenue.  Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that this plan will dramatically change the level of balance in the league.

TV is bad for children.  Wait, no it's not.  Yes, it is!   And it's really bad for their hearts!

Here's the latest paper on the topic, from Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson, and Nodir Adilov.  Using a natural experiment to rule out the possibility of reverse causation, the authors find "a strong negative correlation between average county-level cable subscription rates when a birth cohort is below three and subsequent mental retardation diagnosis rates, but a strong positive correlation between the same cable subscription rates and subsequent autism diagnosis rates."