Re: Cambridge spelling gaffe.

On Jun 14, 7:16 pm, "Simon Mason" <si...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"Just zis Guy, you know?" <guy.chap...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in messagenews:ekca359nsukbfr8tqbkddrqct4tu1qkfmc@xxxxxxxxxx



On Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:21:15 +0100, "Simon Mason"
<si...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[ob. Smith]

I used to listen to him on the radio quite a lot and to give him his due,
he
was a convincing snake oil salesman who had the gift of getting the radio
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.  That
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).
.

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