I submit that on or about Thu, 22 Sep 2005 07:04:08 GMT, the person
known to the court as SMS <[email hidden]> made a statement
(<[email hidden]> in Your Honour's bundle) to the
following effect:
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:I have found the Exeter study to be easy for people to understand and
persuasive. "Twice as many girls as boys wear cycle helmets but they
have exactly the same head injury rate."
Quoted message said:Does this study include the distance and time that each gender rode
their bikes, and adjust for skill levels, which vary by gender and age?
What were the ages that were studied? Are they referring to an absolute
rate of head injuries, or head injuries as percentage of total injuries?
LOL! I love the way that sceptical papers have to meet standards of
rigour which pro-helmet papers have never achieved!
What the Exeter study shows IMO is what every other small-scale study
shows, if you probe the data: the difference in %HI between different
cyclist populations is pretty much independent of helmet use, and very
dependent on riding style.
Look at the data from the most widely-cited study, the 1989 Seattle
study. The "reduction" in head injuries in the helmeted population
was the same, to within a few percent, as the reduction in lower limb
injuries.
Quoted message said:In one UK study I read, the number of head injuries as a percentage of
total injuries decreased by about half as helmet use tripled, but they
didn't state what happened in terms of total injuries. Maybe total
injuries quadrupled as helmet use went up, so in absolute terms the
number of head injuries stayed the same, they didn't say.
Cite. I know a number of UK studies, this sounds a bit like Crook &
Feikh, who made an elementary statistical error in their
interpretation (their data shows that helmets are 186% effective,
protecting people who aren't even wearing them). They made other
errors, too, for example inverting the sign of the helmet use curve
for children.
Quoted message said:Soundbites like "Twice as many girls as boys wear cycle helmets but they
have exactly the same head injury rate" are cute, but they are usually
intended to mislead naive people into making incorrect conclusions, from
incomplete data.
LOL! Soundbytes like "helmets prevent 85% of head injuries" are cute,
but they are usually intended to mislead naive people into making
incorrect conclusions, from incomplete data.
Angie's entire programme is in fact founded on misleading soundbytes!
One of the problems with the sceptical case is it does not easily
render into "BIKE DANGER!" and "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" type
soundbytes, which is the stock-in-trade of obsessive-compulsives like
Angie.
Here's a list of some false claims made by Angie and BeHIT:
http://www.cyclehelmets.org/mf.html?1058 - most of these have been
repeated even after they have been told they are wrong, and in one
case they agreed with the Advertising Standards Authority not to
repeat a claim, which they promptly repeated in their next press
release.
Quoted message said:I wouldn't worry about Angie Lee getting such an obscure award. It is
true that she appears to be way too single-minded in terms of
concentrating on helmets as a way to reduce head injuries, and her
efforts at compulsion are extremely misguided. OTOH her efforts to
encourage voluntary helmet use have been very effective.
For some values of effective. According to her own studies (the data,
not the conclusions, obviously!) her efforts actually increased head
injury rates in Reading.
But her major achievement lies in distracting attention away from the
real cause of serious child head injury, which is motor traffic (only
a minority of these victims are cyclists). The helmet promotion lobby
have built the perception that cycling, not driving, is dangerous, and
that plastic hats are an effective remedy. Both these are false. Many
people now believe that wearing a helmet is the first, best thing a
cyclist can do for their safety, which is an absurd and dangerous
fantasy. Angie herself describes helmet promotion as "helping
children to cycle safely" - but there is no known correlation between
helmet use and cyclist safety, anywhere in the world, according to our
former (pro-helmet) road safety minister. Angie wants a helmet law,
not cyclist safety. If she cared about cyclist safety she'd be
campaigning against dangerous driving and poor road design, both of
which have far more effect.
Quoted message said:If someone else
can take up the cause of better rider education and training then
that'll be great, but don't begrudge her the success she's had. Every
study on the subject has reached the same conclusion, helmets reduce the
number of head injuries when crashes occur.
False. The largest study ever conducted (Rodgers) reached the
opposite conclusions, as you have been told numerous times, and every
population-levels study has reached either a null result or shown an
increase in head injury rates with increasing helmet use. The fact
that you refuse to accept these studies does not make them go away.
For any urcers who do not know, Scharf styles himself as "one of
Earth's leading experts on cycle helmets". According to him the
tactics used by CTC and others in opposing the Martlew bill cannot
work because helmets are, in fact, massively protective, and everybody
knows this. He also styles himself as "one of Earth's leading
experts on bicycle lighting" and assures all his readers that dynamo
lights are woefully inadequate and cannot be trusted.
Under a different email address he killfiled Frank Krygowski and me
for daring to challenge him (repeatedly) to cite evidence for some of
his claims. I look forward to seeing how he gets on with Dr Raven :-)
Guy
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
"To every complex problem there is a solution which is
simple, neat and wrong" - HL Mencken
