Nuxx:A682ca5b-72e6-41e1-8004-cd81dbac24d4@m19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com

Path: num2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!num1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!number.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!postnews.google.com!m19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Message-ID:  From: Nuxx Bar  Newsgroups: uk.rec.cycling Subject: Re: Cambridge spelling gaffe. Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:17:27 -0700 (PDT) References: <4ICdnTGlMdbNBK7XnZ2dnUVZ8rqdnZ2d@eclipse.net.uk>  <05355819-8cc6-475e-adeb-2966f47fcab5@k19g2000prh.googlegroups.com>    <2b3a35hp1h1rovkgg9q8k1vqgtm7vjgv17@4ax.com> <66WdnT7osc3gvqjXnZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d@eclipse.net.uk>   Lines: 82 Organization: http://groups.google.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 81.156.150.242 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1245021447 8662 127.0.0.1 (14 Jun 2009 23:17:27 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:17:27 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: m19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com; posting-host=81.156.150.242; posting-account=7_6kYAkAAABD6HrjM0VxehwvZOKMxm4g User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Bytes: 5867 Xref: perfectly-safe.chapmancentral.co.uk uk.rec.cycling:830203

On Jun 14, 7:16=A0pm, "Simon Mason"  wrote: > "Just zis Guy, you know?"  wrote in messagenews:= ekca359nsukbfr8tqbkddrqct4tu1qkfmc@4ax.com... > > > > > On Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:21:15 +0100, "Simon Mason" > >  wrote: > > > [ob. Smith] > > >>I used to listen to him on the radio quite a lot and to give him his du= e, > >>he > >>was a convincing snake oil salesman who had the gift of getting the rad= io > >>presenter on his side. It was somewhat spoiled by his website which was > >>full > >>of barking mad people talking claptrap, much like the ABD lot are now. > > > Don't underestimate the attractiveness of people who publicly say what > > you desperately wish was true, even though you know it's not. =A0That > > was his main constituency, I think: people who desperately want to > > believe that speed enforcement is a problem and speeding is not. > > Once he got a radio presenter to state how misleading it was for the > government to include serious injury figures along with road deaths, as > though being seriously injured was completely a different matter to being > dead and only dead people should count in road casualty figures.

I don't doubt that you are someone who's been taken in by the pro- camera ruse, rather than someone who pretends to think that cameras work when they know they don't due to a hatred of motorists (as with the person you replied to). The above is just one way in which you've had the wool pulled over your eyes, for the following reasons:

- The criteria for what is recorded as a serious injury changes from time to time, and the government has used this many times to claim that serious injuries have been reduced by cameras when they haven't (hospital admissions show this).

- Including serious injuries with deaths is usually used as a way of masking the fact that deaths haven't fallen as predicted. This is magnified by the above deception. Why else would you add together two different sets of figures? Why not measure death and serious injury figures separately? No-one's saying that serious injuries "shouldn't cound in road casualty figures", but they *are* different to deaths, and they *are* less serious.

In a way, it's rather touching that someone of your age can be so unquestioningly trusting of the government, but I'm afraid that when it comes to the authorities defending cameras with statistics, that trust is utterly misplaced. Almost every time the authorities use statistics to claim that cameras have saved lives, there is an easily identified, basic deception being employed.

(This has to be the case, since cameras don't actually save lives, so the only way to make it look like they do save lives is to be dishonest. Why are the authorities being dishonest, rather than admitting that cameras have been a failure?  Because they would rather save face than save lives.  Unbelievably callous, but true I'm afraid.  Chapman is not the only one who supports cameras in the full knowledge that they're killing people.)

The most common fraud is regression to the mean (RTTM), which even Chapman admits exists. So how come he seems quite happy when SCPs etc deliberately neglect the RTTM bias to make it look as though camera benefits exist when they don't? Surely if he really believed that cameras saved lives, he wouldn't believe that such lies were necessary? Surely if he really cared about road safety, he wouldn't want the figures to be distorted in such a way: he'd want to be certain that cameras really were saving lives, which he couldn't be without undistorted data?

It's that kind of thing which convinces me that he knows cameras are killing people, but he's quite happy to pretend that they're actually saving lives, just because they're doing such a good job at making motorists suffer that he wants to keep them despite the deaths that result. There is no other explanation for his attitude towards things such as RTTM fraud (not to mention his hate campaigns against anyone who dares to criticise cameras, whether or not they are right).