Some news stories make you laugh and some make you cringe. If you live in an apartment you may have done both while reading the July 13 story in this newspaper about an employee of Schindler Elevator K.K. getting trapped in a Schindler lift in the same Tokyo residential building where a teenager was killed by a different malfunctioning Schindler lift in June. The irony is definitely rich, but we cringe because we use elevators all the time. Many of us, in fact, literally can't live without them. However, as illustrated by another tragic news story, the hazards of high-rise living are not always technological in nature.

On May 23, a 9-year-old girl in Miyagi Prefecture fell to her death from an upper floor of her apartment building. Because the accident occurred two months after another well-publicized incident involving a man who allegedly threw a 9-year-old boy from the 15th floor of an apartment building in Kawasaki, the police approached the girl's death as the possible result of foul play, perhaps a copycat crime. But according to the Mainichi Shimbun the police seem to believe it is an accident. Residents of the building said that in the past they had scolded the girl for playing on the railings of the upper floors.

Kids can be expected to do reckless things, but you would think they'd be too afraid of heights to climb over balcony railings. According to physician Masaaki Oda in his book "The Danger of Raising Children in High-Rise Condominiums," kids who grow up in tall buildings fail to acquire a normal fear of heights. Toddlers develop depth perception based on their own physical circumstances, and living high above the ground can distort that perception.