Matt O'Toole wrote:

Frank Krygowski wrote:


Be aware that there is _very_ serious discussion taking place in many
scholarly publications regarding the effectiveness of helmets.


What makes it so serious, compared to other discussions? Letters after people's
names? Big egos? Feeding frenzy at the hog trough of research dollars?
Self-importance typically associated with these things? Or is it earnest
effort, for once!

Maybe "serious" doesn't describe it well enough.

When you log onto the web sites for some of these journals, you can find
discussions between the original authors and other knowledgeable
scientists who discuss their work.

A recent paper out of Scotland reached some very pro-helmet conclusions,
for example; but correspondents were able to point out errors in
computation that invalidated its results. That was interesting, because
it pitted two (or more) statistics experts against each other, with one
emerging a clear loser.

The discussions take place at a much higher level than the typical
wreck.bike discussions (if you can believe such a thing!) For example,
no time is wasted on tales like "My buddy ran into a swarm of
butterflies, and I _know_ his helmet saved his life!!!!" ;-)
It all tends to be very scientific, very mathematical.

--
Frank Krygowski [To reply, remove rodent and vegetable dot com.
Substitute cc dot ysu dot
edu]