New online calculators with SAES relevance

• The Discovery Channel’s health and fitness website now has an Activity Calorie Burn Rate calculator that has an extremely extensive list of physical activities in the database. Among the physical activities for which there are burn rate coefficients are 23 child care activities (i.e. carrying infants, bathing children and pushing strollers); every farm and gardening activity from chasing livestock to shoveling grain; and even such scholarly activities as teaching classes, filing and attending meetings.

• Several organizations working to heighten environmental impact awareness (including the Nature Conservancy) have installed calculators on their websites that allow visitors to calculate the carbon footprint (greenhouse gas produced by transportation, electric energy use and diet, etc.) that their lifestyle decisions are leaving.

• Researchers with the World Health Organization have developed some important new algorithms for predicting an individual’s likelihood of hip fractures and major osteoporotic fractures that have been the subject of considerable interest in view of the breakthroughs’ potential to assist physicians in preventive care for one of the primary perils of aging. A taste of the variables that are involved is available at a calculator, the One-Minute Osteoporosis Risk Test, now up and running on the International Osteoporosis Foundations website.

• Many members of the SAES faculty and staff will be among the 130 million Americans receiving tax rebates of $300 to $1,200 from the IRS by mid-July. Anticipating the understandable curiosity of those yet to receive their rebate checks who are nonetheless curious as to exactly how much they will be getting, the IRS now has an “Economic Stimulus Payment Calculator” on its website. You’ll need to have a copy of your 2007 Form 1040, Form 1040EZ, or Form 1040A to refer to for the needed information for the calculator to produce an estimate.

• With fears of inflation pushing up mortgage interest rates at the same time that a sharp drop in real estate prices is tempting prospective home buyers, MLCalc.com has launched a website with mortgage and loan calculators that also comes equipped with straightforward instructions and easy-to-comprehend, color-coded outputs.

• Don’t forget that google.com is itself a calculator, and you can use that same field where you insert key words to ask google.com to do some quick calculations. For example, query “convert 5 U.S. dollars to Canadian money” and your first hit will be “5 U.S. dollars = 5.06150231 Canadian dollars.”  Ask google to convert the driving distance from Greensboro to Memphis from miles to kilometers by querying “675.62 miles in kilometers,” and the yield is “ 6675.62 miles = 1,087.30499 kilometers.”

Posted April 30, 2008 04:33 PM

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