Put on those Safety Glasses!

Edgar Lara-Curzio justifiably dinged us for running a photo showing a University of Lowell (Mass.) student working with a testing machine without wearing safety glasses. It appeared in our March 17 issue on page 53. The photo on page 54, however, has three people wearing their safety glassses.

Edgar is from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) where he says safety is "ingrained" in the culture.Visitors and employees must follow strict rules at ORNL and are required to wear under clearly-defined circumstances.  Plastics engineering professor Robert Malloy at U. Lowell says the school has strict rules about safety glasses and that the gaff was perpetuated by university pr people. And we should have recognized it when we ran the shot.

I searched "safety glasses" at U. Lowell’s site’s, but its Google search engine viewed my request as a virus or spyware and would not fulfill it. Since when does safety glasses sound like a virus or spyware (I’ve longed since to Yahoo! as my search engine because Google’s spyware and virus filters are so poor!)?

But I agree with Prof. Mallory’s initial response to Edgar’s e-mail. "Point well taken."