FYI, there is a product designed for colling a car heating in the sun.
Solar powered fan set in cracked open car window.
It get really bad reviews.
Wow, this thread became a lot more informative than I had anticipated. OK, so maybe all those people who crack their windows are really on to something.
Getting a paper published with your name on it is sufficient purpose for some.
Very true, but what makes you think that one result is more publishable than the other?
To be fair, the overall conclusion for both papers is still pretty sound: don’t leave babies in cars on sunny day, even if it’s not that hot out. The authors (both sets) look like they just wanted a quick bit of evidence, though they seemed to get sloppy in the details, they always saw dangerous increases in temperatures.
As to how this got published? Both were “letter” sized publications – typically short papers sharing a single experiment. These are published to get a piece of data out fast, or to put out something that you’re not interested in following up with a longer paper. The peer review process is usually faster and not quite as rigorous for this. Adding to that, both papers were published in Pediatrics, where the reviewers will be other pediatricians who will be focused on the medical accuracy and validity of the papers, rather than the details of physics underlying each experiment.
And if you must leave them in the car, pack them in ice so they don’t spoil.
What?
Never attribute to malice, etc. etc.
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The main thrust of the McLaren paper is to determine whether the interiors of closed vehicle reached temperatures that would be dangerous to children, even on days with relatively mild ambient temperatures. The characterization of the diffrences between open and closed windows was (I suspect) just a side project.
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The authors have a background in medicine, not heat transfer. Although they *should *certainly have known enough to run randomized trials, they probably didn’t know enough to question their results.
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As far as I can tell, the results from the McLaren paper for closed vehicles fall in line with the results from earlier papers. Temperatures in vehicles with cracked windows, although lower than the temperatures in vehicles with closed windows, were still dangerous–and so the results were “consistent” among the papers in that respect.
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Finally, the fact is that this: “Opening the windows 20 cm (8 inches) had minimal effect on the temperature rise and maximum temperature attained.” is a complete mischaracterization. It seems unbelievable that that would be done *intentionally *on something that’s so easy to check.
zut, I love you. If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the parking lot with a meat thermometer.
ETA: I have an AutoCool somewhere which I bought solely for the purpose of testing it- I was pretty sure it would be useless- and it was. It does, however, make a minimal but significant difference to the smell of an older car (subjectively, of course).
A “hot” Baltimore (technically, Owings Mills, MD) day, which is going to be in the 80 to 90 deg range. I don’t bother cracking the windows on cooler days. The car sits for about 9 hours in the parking lot, with no shade.
For reference, I believe temperatures obtained rectally are more reliable than those obtained orally. Please make sure you have a comfortably shaped experimental device.
“Sarah? How comfortable is the shape of your rectum?”
But air has less mass than rectums. Especially if someone has a massive rectum. So temperature change would be difficult to measure.
Yeah but it says “as seen on TV”, that’s got to count for something.
Rectum? Damn near killed 'im.
Yeah, it counts for TV cars. If you use it, no cars on TV will get hot.
Unfortunately, at least some of the people who are leaving their windows cracked open do it so the windows don’t explode from the pressure of the expanding hot air inside :rolleyes:.
Well, that’s just silly. I, of course, do it because hot air rises, and I don’t want my car floating off while I’m doing my shopping.
One of the most-quoted papers in Protein Chemistry is misquoted (people quote a paper from the right author but which talks about sugars and doesn’t even mention proteins; what should be quoted is a presentation, which is less prestigious). I got a lowered grade on a presentation I did on the subject for NOT quoting the wrong paper… even after I explained the misquotation. People are very, very bad at verifying quotes and for some Tradition beats Accuracy every time.
I don’t know what’s required of MDs in the US, but most people I know who studied Statistics in college (in several countries including the US) never saw anything about Design of Experiments, or saw everything in a completely theoretical fashion, or never learned any continuous probability distribution other than Gauss’ “Normal” Distribution (which they then proceed to apply to any data distribution, statistical or not, because, you see, it’s “normal”) - that’s when they went beyond combinations. It’s pretty scary given how many of them work in research.