Light Monitoring System Keeps Glendale, Ariz., Out of the Dark

Not so long ago, work crews that replaced burned out streetlights relied upon citizens to call in and report them. The process took time.

Now, more and more public works departments are using remote technology to find darkened streetlights in near real time. One of them is Glendale, Ariz., located 10 miles northwest of Phoenix. Glendale has installed a wireless outdoor street light monitoring and control system aimed at keeping the city well lit.

The system, called “Remote Operations Asset Management” was installed by Glendale in 2008 to monitor the daily performance of each street Diving lamp within the city’s 55 square miles. The technology allows the city to take immediate action and repair a light that’s malfunctioning burned out.

The system connects to state-of the-art photo cells that were installed in each of the city’s nearly 20,000 street lights. The cell controls each light’s timing and also records its performance at 30-minute intervals.

“I describe it as a photo cell on steroids,” said Mike Sills-Trausch, Glendale’s city’s street lighting program manager. “Every street light across the United States is operated by a photo cell that tells the light when to turn off and when to turn on, but the ROAM photo cells have a computer circuitry in it and that allows each node to communicate its operating condition to a gateway approximately every 30 minutes.”

In Glendale, about 50 gateways have been installed around the city so that the information about the streetlights is transmitted via the Internet to the ROAM vendor’s office in Atlanta. Once the vendor, Acuity Brands, receives the information, Glendale city staff can access the data online to see the city’s light performances from the previous day.

Glendale takes 10 to12 work orders each day regarding light repair. The work orders can be completed through a module within the ROAM system, which can also be tracked until the repair is completed. With the use of ROAM’s integrated mapping software and GPS technology, service technicians are able to more accurately identify the location of the street light that needs repair, according to Sills-Trausch.

Prior to the system installation, the city would do night-time sweeps once every three to six months in which volunteer group members would drive around the city, recording and reporting the locations of burned out street lights.

With this method, several hundred work orders for maintenance would be made at once, an amount that couldn’t be processed all at once. By immediately receiving information about needed repairs, the city no longer has to respond to street light work orders in large waves.

Once the system was implemented, it reported that more than 10 percent of Glendale’s street lights either weren’t working properly or weren’t operating to industry standards, according to Acuity Brands.

These large databases are very hard to pull out reliable data from

"There is a very important story to be told about unnecessary carotid surgery and stenting in the U.S.," Dr. David Spence, a stroke prevention researcher at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, told Reuters Health last week.

According to his research, 90 percent of symptom-free patients who get surgery would be better off without it, he said in an email.

Dr. Stanley L. Barnwell, the medical director of intervention neuroradiology at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, said he's less convinced by the results of the new study than by earlier research showing stenting is just as safe as surgery.

In an earlier experiment called the CREST trial, patients were randomly assigned to receive either of the procedures to clear up the plaque in their arteries.

This type of project set out in advance to control for differences between the patients and to carefully monitor their outcomes, whereas the current study is a look back on medical records from patients who were not necessarily part of a study.

"These large databases are very hard to pull out reliable data from," Barnwell, who was not involved in either study, told Reuters Health.

Kallmes said the studies complement each other -- his study had more numbers and reflected real world practice, while the earlier trial was carefully controlled but limited in the number of patients involved.

"Maybe they give us bookends of the real rate of hemorrhage [after these procedures], and the truth lies somewhere in between," Kallmes said.

In his study, published in the journal Stroke, Kallmes and his colleagues call for more research to explain why they saw such a big difference between the two procedures.

Forced to strip at OR Tambo

A South African woman was left traumatised and humiliated when she was forced to strip down to her jeans after airline staff incorrectly accused her of carrying a bomb.

Alta Klein is still reeling from the incident, which she said occurred for "no proper reason" and without explanation. The girlfriend of a prominent South African soccer player, Klein was shocked by the strip search and is considering legal action against El Al Israel Airlines, who hired the security staff who allegedly degraded her.

Klein was checking into her El Al flight to Tel Aviv, departing from OR Tambo International Airport last Thursday when her handbag set off the scanners alarm.

El Al Airlines general manager Roz Bukris said the airline would not give a statement on its security, but would be conducting an investigation into the incident. "We have yet to receive an official complaint," she added.

Klein claims she was kept waiting for an hour while airline staff searched and scanned her handbag, camera and cellphone thoroughly before she was led into an office with a small dressing room.

She said she noticed her handbag in an X-ray machine and was told to take a seat. Two women, who emerged from a back room, told her to take her shoes and jacket off, which she did.

"Straight after that they came back out and told me that they needed to do a strip search to check my clothes and body. I asked what it was for. I had asked the same question throughout my waiting and they always had the same answer: 'We have detected a bomb'," she recalled.