Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

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Mike Sales
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by Mike Sales »

pwa wrote:The only point i was making was that, if my own youth was anything to go by, not wearing a helmet did not make me careful. I could hardly have been more reckless on a bike if I had tried. I survived two head injuries, one resulting in a cut scalp and the other saw me waking up in the ambulance. My wife disputes my assertion that it did me no harm.


Who knows? Maybe you would have pushed your safety margin a little further in a lid, survived because of it and credited the helmet?
I have read that a study observed just this phenomenon in helmeted children.

Risk taking is a constant human pursuit, and is not an exact science, but nevertheless the risk taker does not ignore the odds and the penalty.
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pjclinch
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by pjclinch »

The utility cyclist wrote:
pjclinch wrote:
The utility cyclist wrote:and same in Australia :roll:
“School based Bicycle Safety Education and Bicycle Injuries in Children: A Case-Control Study”, John Carlin, Injury Prevention, 1998"


If you're going to quote "case-control" studies that are using methodologies that don't really fit with case-control best practice (e.g., not randomised and blind) but that happen to fit your favoured results then you're going to have to take those that don't come up with stuff you like (i.e., most of the stuff that says bike helmets are Wondrous) at face value too.

The utility cyclist wrote:The report concludes that there is no evidence that the Bike Ed course results in a lower accident risk, and some evidence that children who have taken a course face a higher risk[/b], possibly because some parents believed the “Bike Ed” course “immunised” their children against road safety risks


Or quite possibly they faced higher exposure because they rode their bikes more often? A pretty sure way of cutting your absolute risk of a bike accident is to cycle much less (ideally, stop altogether).

The literature is full of howlers. Unless you're reading the whole paper, with the analytical skills to do that and probably following up a lot of the references, it's skating on very, very thin ice just taking the conclusions and abstracts at face value. After all, that's what has led to so many people thinking helmets are 85% effective at reducing serious head injury.


So you ignored the whole of GB study by Hertfordshire CC that said 61% of cycle trained kids had no difference to casualties? This was actually a few years after the report that said cycle trained kids had three times less the risk of untrained kids, a study fom THIRTY years ago.


I have not made much in the way of comment on that report.
What I was doing was suggesting you're on rather shifting sands if you choose to ignore a whole category of papers on the (entirely reasonable) grounds that their methodologies aren't really fit for purpose, but then shout out about the supposed truthiness of reports that make similarly poor use of methodology.

You can either have your cake or eat it. You can't have both.

The utility cyclist wrote:Believe what you want but teaching kids to wear hi-vis and helmets, normalising it, teaching them to take all the responsibility to be safe or supposedly die as opposed to more stringent rules for the adults/those in killing machines is simply not working, never has worked and will continue not to work except to continue to blame kids for their injuries or even death and will continue to deflect away from the real issues.


I believe there's good cause to think that's broadly true, but I don't think that's a particularly safe conclusion from one report with what is probably a misconstrued attempt to use case-control for something it doesn't really work for.

The utility cyclist wrote:If kids without training are not having as many injuries or same level in some areas then this is very telling indeed and not entirely unsurprising.


It may be telling but without looking at it in rather more detail to isolate confounders it would be jumping rather to speedily to conclusions, mainly on the basis that it tells you what you want to hear. Cognitive bias at work. Again, I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, I'm saying your degree of certainty and the methodology that underpins it doesn't really stand up to scrutiny.

The utility cyclist wrote:I wonder what the hat wearing % is of cycle trained kids (outside of the cycle training programme) and how much more risk they will take compared to those without training who are less likely to wear a plastic hat?


So what are you doing to find out, and how do you know it will be accurate?

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pjclinch
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by pjclinch »

pwa wrote:The only point i was making was that, if my own youth was anything to go by, not wearing a helmet did not make me careful. I could hardly have been more reckless on a bike if I had tried. I survived two head injuries, one resulting in a cut scalp and the other saw me waking up in the ambulance. My wife disputes my assertion that it did me no harm.


And yet there are published studies with not obviously poor methodologies that show children take more risks when they have PPE.

You might have been pretty wild, but it's not too much of a stretch to see you could have been far more reckless on a bike, because you never tried anything that, in hindsight, would be almost certain death (let's say riding the wrong way up a busy motorway "proving it's easy" to dodge between the traffic in all 3 lanes). Kids generally have far lower fear thresholds than adults, typically overestimating their own abilities or underestimating possible consequences, but they're still finite.

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The utility cyclist
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by The utility cyclist »

Is this deliberately taking the micturate! :twisted:
On the front page of BBR fgs CUK sort your shizzle out, there's not even any remote sense of balance :twisted:
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gaz
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by gaz »

That one's the BBR events page.

This is the BBR front page.

I'm aware that doesn't improve the choice.
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RickH
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by RickH »

The utility cyclist wrote:Is this deliberately taking the micturate! :twisted:
On the front page of BBR fgs CUK sort your shizzle out, there's not even any remote sense of balance :twisted:

And how many good quality photos of people on bikes without helmets (& the necessary permission of the subject) have you offered to Cycling UK to use in their publicity?

I know several people who take lots of photos on rides & other event. A number of them get used by Cycling UK but most, if not all, of the people out on a group ride will be wearing a helmet when riding.

I'm very much on your side - I believe helmets are very much NOT a good thing - but I'm not sure quite how we can get from where we are now to a lidless paradise.

On a less serious note: she seems to be balancing perfectly OK (unless there's someone out of frame holding her up)! :lol:
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The utility cyclist
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by The utility cyclist »

RickH wrote:
The utility cyclist wrote:Is this deliberately taking the micturate! :twisted:
On the front page of BBR fgs CUK sort your shizzle out, there's not even any remote sense of balance :twisted:

And how many good quality photos of people on bikes without helmets (& the necessary permission of the subject) have you offered to Cycling UK to use in their publicity?

I know several people who take lots of photos on rides & other event. A number of them get used by Cycling UK but most, if not all, of the people out on a group ride will be wearing a helmet when riding.

I'm very much on your side - I believe helmets are very much NOT a good thing - but I'm not sure quite how we can get from where we are now to a lidless paradise.

On a less serious note: she seems to be balancing perfectly OK (unless there's someone out of frame holding her up)! :lol:

CUK don't ask as far as I'm aware, I've only been a member for 10 years and never once seen any info re submitting photos, I have seen that they often use stock images that they pay for or get permission to use.
I certainly could provide photos of myself, my friends, my mum )who is 68) and my grand-kids all cycling 'normally' in lots of different ways/styles, I wonder if they would use one of me coming down my local short slope at 35mph on my way to the supermarket or chipping along the bypass road on my carbon bike on my way to visit my friend or my grandson cycling in the 'middle of the road' on a casual cycle ride sans helmet. Course they wouldn't, they are too afraid of actually representing what people on bikes that see cycling as a normal activity without needing special falsely represented garments. They will only show people riding bikes sans helmets in nice safe, non threatening (in their opinion) environments :roll:

They don't want to show any cyclists sans plastic hat and/or hi-vis doing anything they would consider to be 'risky' or outside their little cocoon of normality.
However I shall bombard CUK with photos forthwith, I'll let you know how many make it on any of the platforms they use.
Oh, where do I send the photos?
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RickH
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by RickH »

There's guidance on photography, aimed at submissions to Cycle on this page. I'll ask my friend, who's photos I've spotted on the website several times recently, how she got them to Cycling UK.

I would suggest not bombarding them, I think that is likely to be counterproductive. Sending a few example & entering into a dialogue would probably be better otherwise there's a risk of anything you send being consigned to spam.

I also came across this page about volunteer photographers while seeing if I could find anything specific.

Cycling UK wrote:Cycling UK is looking for volunteers to join our pool of event photographers. The volunteers will photograph cycle events, rides and activities organised by our cycling clubs and groups. The photos will be used on our website and in marketing materials used to showcase the groups' and volunteers' amazing work, and therefore support Cycling UK in inspiring more people to go cycling.(link)

There's also this from Feb about Peter Cornish, one of the volunteer photographers.
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mjr
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by mjr »

So is the choice work for free or they'll keep buying photos of helmet users?
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RickH
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by RickH »

mjr wrote:So is the choice work for free or they'll keep buying photos of helmet users?

I suspect they buy relatively little stock or commissioned photography. I suspect most of the "helmet users" images are donated (probably mainly by people helping at/organising Cycling UK/member group events) rather than bought.

How many extra thousands of pounds do you think Cycling UK should be budgeting for photography? Professional photoshoots don't generally come cheap. I had a quick look at one stock photo site for cycling photos & most of them show cyclists with helmets. A lot of the ones that didn't have helmets on weren't actually riding (most standing holding a bike).
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by PaulaT »

RickH wrote:There's guidance on photography, aimed at submissions to Cycle on this page. I'll ask my friend, who's photos I've spotted on the website several times recently, how she got them to Cycling UK.


The requirements https://www.cyclinguk.org/sites/default/files/document/2018/08/photographer_role_description.pdf seem a bit odious to me. A signed consent form for everyone who appears in the photo? Why? UK law doesn't require that and I can see that it would be a right PITA checking that you've got signed consent from everyone on the hundreds of images you took in the day. Much as I love cycling I think I'll stick to photographing Badgers :mrgreen:
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by Cyril Haearn »

Please to post some badger photos
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RickH
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by RickH »

PaulaT wrote:
RickH wrote:There's guidance on photography, aimed at submissions to Cycle on this page. I'll ask my friend, who's photos I've spotted on the website several times recently, how she got them to Cycling UK.


The requirements https://www.cyclinguk.org/sites/default/files/document/2018/08/photographer_role_description.pdf seem a bit odious to me. A signed consent form for everyone who appears in the photo? Why? UK law doesn't require that and I can see that it would be a right PITA checking that you've got signed consent from everyone on the hundreds of images you took in the day. Much as I love cycling I think I'll stick to photographing Badgers :mrgreen:


The simplest way for an event people sign up to is to have it included it in the sign up process (& preferably have a means for people to obtain copies of pictures of themselves at reasonable, or no, cost).
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The utility cyclist
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by The utility cyclist »

RickH wrote:There's guidance on photography, aimed at submissions to Cycle on this page. I'll ask my friend, who's photos I've spotted on the website several times recently, how she got them to Cycling UK.

I would suggest not bombarding them, I think that is likely to be counterproductive. Sending a few example & entering into a dialogue would probably be better otherwise there's a risk of anything you send being consigned to spam.

I also came across this page about volunteer photographers while seeing if I could find anything specific.

Cycling UK wrote:Cycling UK is looking for volunteers to join our pool of event photographers. The volunteers will photograph cycle events, rides and activities organised by our cycling clubs and groups. The photos will be used on our website and in marketing materials used to showcase the groups' and volunteers' amazing work, and therefore support Cycling UK in inspiring more people to go cycling.(link)

There's also this from Feb about Peter Cornish, one of the volunteer photographers.


I meant sending them a lot in one go or a few every couple of weeks or so, so they have plenty for the website/magazine/social media to choose from. Surely more free photos for them saves them money right and no excuses not to show abnormal cycling that presents cycling as dangerous/requiring special clothing.
thanks for the info though.
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Re: Big Bike revival ... yet more helmet normalising!

Post by Psamathe »

RickH wrote:
PaulaT wrote:
RickH wrote:There's guidance on photography, aimed at submissions to Cycle on this page. I'll ask my friend, who's photos I've spotted on the website several times recently, how she got them to Cycling UK.


The requirements https://www.cyclinguk.org/sites/default/files/document/2018/08/photographer_role_description.pdf seem a bit odious to me. A signed consent form for everyone who appears in the photo? Why? UK law doesn't require that and I can see that it would be a right PITA checking that you've got signed consent from everyone on the hundreds of images you took in the day. Much as I love cycling I think I'll stick to photographing Badgers :mrgreen:


The simplest way for an event people sign up to is to have it included it in the sign up process (& preferably have a means for people to obtain copies of pictures of themselves at reasonable, or no, cost).

A bit off-topic but having others take pictures of me and post them on an internet site does worry me a bit (but I appreciate they might not be breaking any laws). If it were just a picture then not such an issue but with face recognition software running on Social Media sites it becomes a bit more of an invasion of privacy (i.e. it can be that they are not only posting a picture but indirectly your name, location, etc.). In theory Social Media sites should not have any reference images of me but who knows and were one to somehow creep into their systems I might retrospectively have loads of information about me published without my ever having given my permission.

So I think that CTC/CUK's requirement is erring to cautions and is something I'd support.

I wonder if the law is lagging behind things like Social Media face recognition. My concerns relate to my understanding of functionality in these sites as I don't actually use them and have no particular interest in the but don't want them posting info about me via 3rd parties.

Ian
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