I receive a hard copy version of Inc. magazine each month, delivered to by my friendly mailman. He’s been delivering our mail to us for years. The magazine is arriving for free, though I cannot recall how or why this arrangement occurred, perhaps it was from remnant sky miles on airline programs which remained unused, or for which I’ll never accrue sufficient miles for anything. I like Inc. magazine and think many of the articles are interesting and thought provoking, once you can find them. In the March 2010 issue, for example, the reader first finds content on page six with a short profile accompanied by a large photograph, on page 14 there is a letter from the editor and on page 17 there is reader mail (hopefully email).

If we want to be generous and don’t refer to the inside cover as an actual page, the reader is provided with three pages of content in the first 17 pages of the magazine, or a ratio of 82% advertisements to 18% content. Continuing on to page 41, there is approximately 14 pages of content out of 24 pages, which is a happier ratio of 42% advertisements to 52% content. Overall, in the first 41 pages I found 17 pages of content which translates to roughly 40% reader content and 60% advertisement. Of course, if I had the patience, I would have analyzed all of the pages of the magazine. But a quick Google search led me to a web site called Magazine.org, which states that the average (traditional) magazine is about a 50/50 ratio between ads and content. Overall, I guarantee my down and dirty research to be somewhere between relatively accurate to completely anecdotal and spurious. Feel free to contact me as you browse your own magazine pages counting ads versus content should your due diligence and subsequent findings prove otherwise!

Let’s compare my Inc. Magazine findings with an online magazine. I would estimate that the online magazine I review daily has a ratio of 60% content to 40% advertisements, which is much better than the paper based version of Inc., or the Magazine.org estimate. However, and this is an important caveat, whenever the reader selects an online article to read, content always appears. In a traditional magazine, it’s somewhat more challenging, and certainly more time consuming to find the table of contents and then leaf through the publication to arrive at page 41 to read your article. We all have a propensity to browse paper based magazines page by page until an article catches our eye.

It’s rare that a paper based magazine shows up at our house. From time to time we might receive a promotional copy, but our online propensity continues to grow. We receive the New York Times on Sundays though we have questioned how long we will continue to subscribe to the paper based version. Our Boston Globe and Boston magazine delivery days have long since passed. We continue to embrace a virtual and online centric manner of content consumption, which is easier, faster and more environmentally friendly. We seem to quote Yahoo, blogs, and online resources far more than we now say, “I read an interesting article in the paper.”

Consequently, I think there is no doubt that online magazines are on the right track from a content and delivery standpoint. That said, there are several things they could do to enhance the reader experience. For example they could place all ads to the right of the content instead of the top and right. They could make the font bolder and more readily viewable for the average reader. They could add a more graphical reader interface, and perhaps even offer writers the ability to post photos. Nonetheless, they provide an invaluable service to writer and reader alike, offering searchable and extensive content, without charge, an opportunity for new writers to publish and an eco-friendly, non paper based delivery system that is sure to render traditional paper based magazines obsolete in the coming decade. In my opinion, though it is early in the game, the score looks like online magazines 1, paper based magazines 0, in what is almost certain to be a long term rout.

Police and other emergency services and their personnel are in the business of helping others. Police lights are put in place to ensure the safety of emergency personnel and the public at large. Police sometimes need to drive really fast, so it is important to have a signal in place that lets other drivers know that a police car will be coming through, so they can get out of the way in time. Otherwise, a potentially fatal crash may occur, which could result in the injury or even death of the emergency vehicle driver, the driver who was unable to get out of the way in time, and/or others around them.

Police often have to stop by the side of the road, which in many cases are really dangerous places to stop like the highway or when it is really dark. In either case, police lights are necessary to alert other drivers to the presence of the stopped vehicle. This way, they can slow down or move into the other lane when they are approaching a stopped police car, so that they do not accidentally clip the car or the police if she or he has stepped out of their car. Police also need a way to let the person they may be trying to catch to know that they need to pull over and stop so that the police driver can interact with them. The best way to do this is through emergency warning lights accompanied by a siren.

There are different placements of police lights on the police car. The warning lights could be mounted on top of the vehicle, they could be mounted in the interior of the car, such as the dashboard, and they could be integrated into the vehicle. Some emergency vehicles may have a combination of these placements of lights. There are also different types of light sources that these warning lights may come from, including steady burning lights, rotating lights, LED-based light bars, and strobe lights, among others.

Whatever types of lights may be used or where they may be placed, these hazard lights should be utilized in a way that maximizes the help it can provide to others. There should no shortage of police lights that are highly effective and not too expensive.