In This Episode: Previous episodes have pointed out that children can indeed have Uncommon Sense. So much so, they can truly contribute to society. So this week, I’ll tell you about Nora Keegan. She’s 14, and has been doing something extraordinary for five years now.
074: “I’ve Learned to Never Give Up”
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Show Notes
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* If you want to understand better how sound pressures double, see Understanding the 3dB rule by “Noise Measurement Experts” who have been in the biz for a long time.
* Nora’s paper was published in the June 2020 issue of Paediatrics & Child Health.
* There are a few photos in the transcript below.
Transcript
Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham.
At 8 years old, Nora Keegan of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, noticed something that a lot of kids notice: hand dryers — the ones that blow air really hard over your hands — are really, really loud. So much so that she noticed her ears hurt when she was done with them. “I thought maybe the kids aren’t just being oversensitive,” she said later, “the hand dryers are being really loud.”
As she got to the ripe old age of 9, Nora’s young mind was putting some pieces together. Is something that loud harmful, especially for children? It’s not just because children’s hearing is more sensitive than adults’ hearing. Their arms are a lot shorter than adults’, so they have to stand closer to the machines. Plus, they’re mounted on the wall about four feet up, to make them convenient for adults, but still useable by children. That means kids old enough to wash by themselves, who are very commonly in the range of four feet tall, end up with the machine right in front of their heads.
You might recall that your ears are attached to your head. Same with kids!
So the machines are vertically right by their ears, and horizontally? Well, with their short arms, they’re close horizontally, too. And then there’s their sensitive hearing.
Enter Nora Keegan’s curious mind, driven by Uncommon Sense. “I decided to do a study,” she said, and “test it to see if they were dangerous to hearing.”
Well, how do you do that?
Sound pressure is typically measured in decibels, dB for short, which isn’t actually a loudness measure per se — the range doesn’t go from zero to 10, for instance (or even to 11 for you Spinal Tap fans). To confuse lay people even more, a sound pressure level of 20 dB isn’t double 10 dB.
Decibels are a measure of relative intensity starting at a baseline, and for sound pressure, that baseline is considered to be the lower threshold of human hearing — what a good young ear can barely discern.
