People who know things?

[liv]

So, practical advice sought:

A] Does anyone have any experience of making voice recordings? Podfics or reading poetry aloud to share digitally, that kind of thing? It doesn't need to be professional level or even close, but it needs to be good enough quality that the words can be heard relatively clearly. Ideally I don't want to buy a lot of equipment or spend hours doing audio processing, but I'm not sure what the minimum set-up is to achieve this. I mean, my computer has a reasonable basic mic which is good enough for things like voice calls. And I know a lot of my students use their smartphones to record tutorials and so on, and apparently that's good enough to be a revision aid. So I imagine this should be possible without major investment, but I don't know where to start.

Software recommendations especially appreciated! My desktop is Windows and my phone is Android, and my netbook is going to be Linux eventually but that's a topic for another day.

B] I'm in the process of buying a bike. I've talked to Colin at University Cycles, and he's super helpful and has offered to lend us a couple of bikes at the weekend so I can try them out. What should I be looking out for when I try the bikes? What questions should I be asking? Also, what equipment do I need? I'm thinking lights obviously, panniers, and a lock, presumably a D-lock. Anything else?

I don't expect to become a serious cyclist any time soon. I'm intending to use the bike just to potter about Cambridge, so if I can go slightly faster and with slightly less effort than walking, that's about all I'm after. One of the suggestions Colin made was a Dutch bike, which he said was solidly built and easy to maintain; definitely those features are more important to me than speed or being fantastically light or suitability for difficult off-road trails. I'm approximately convinced by the argument that cycle helmets aren't a good trade-off.

I'm not quite sure how best to judge the price point for a new bike. I would rather buy a second-hand, good quality bike than a cheap rubbish new one, but I'm not sure how much of a premium there actually is on new bikes; I suspect most people feel like me. And I'm certainly willing to pay a bit more upfront for a bike that is easy and pleasant for me to use. But equally, if it does happen that the bike becomes my major means of transport or I get excited about long distance rides, I can always sell my starter bike and buy something more specialist; I don't want to buy a very fancy vehicle off the bat though.

I'm probably not going to be a very self-sufficient sort of bike owner; I'll most likely take the bike to the shop for anything more complicated than a puncture. I do appreciate that there's no such thing as a magic, entropy-violating machine that keeps going forever with no effort, I just don't want to make bike maintenance my major hobby.

I know there was something else too, but it's gone out of my mind. Anyway, please express opinions!

Comments

[starlady]

I would second the recommendation for Audacity as the editing program--it's full featured, fairly intuitive, and has a decent online help platform. Also, second the recommendation to use some kind of external mike; the one rec'd above sounds fine, and if you're not going to be using it heavily, you certainly don't want to go much above that price point. Equally to the point, the quality jump from in-device microphone (shudder) to cheap external headset/microphone is huge and well worth spending a small amount of money.

I use my bike for shopping and commuting and I would recommend what's called a hybrid, i.e. in between a road bike (thin tires) and a mountain bike (thick tires). You may also want to get a step-through frame, which makes it easier to wear things like skirts while biking as you don't have to swing your legs all the way up and over the seat. It's what I have. Lights, panniers (I actually only have one, but also technically this means getting a rack put on the bike to attach the pannier to), and locks--bike theft is terrible in the Bay Area, I use both a loop lock and a D-lock, ask the shop people to show you how--are essential, as is a helmet. I can't say this enough; I was doored by a car (in a bike lane, on a designated bike road) and was knocked unconscious, had to get 13 stitches, but I was basically fine--no concussion, even--because I was wearing a helmet. It was broken, of course, by the impact with the road and if I hadn't been wearing it I'd be brain damaged or dead.

[liv]

Many thanks for this! I think it's pretty unanimous that I need Audacity; I feel like a bit of a dinosaur that I've never recorded my voice, so it's really helpful to get suggestions. And ok, I'll see if I can dig out my old USB mic, and if not I'll buy a new one, I don't want to make this recording into a huge enterprise but I don't want to come out with something completely rubbish in quality.

Thank you for good suggestions about bikes. I do wear skirts most of the time so I think step-through is the way forward. And yes, I need a rack to attach panniers, that's a really good point. I hadn't thought of getting a loop as well as a D-lock, so that's really good advice. People steal bikes all the time in the English Cambridge too, and part of me thinks that I just have to accept my bike will have a lifetime. But also some of my friends have said that they've gone years without a bike getting stolen if they use a D-lock, so that seems a good investment.

I'm sorry you had such a horrible accident, and glad that you were protected by your helmet. The evidence is really clear that in accidents where riders hit their heads, helmets have an important protective effect. However given that riders without helmets have fewer accidents, it's not a straightforward calculation, and I'm reasonably convinced that without helmet is better. I'm also not cycling in US cities which have considerably worse car-centric infrastructure than British ones, and that changes the balance of risk too.

[starlady]

*nods* On the subject of locks, I use the loop lock on my front tire (which is on a quick release) and loop it into the D-lock, which goes around the frame and the rear tire. Someone once stole my front tire by cutting the loop lock (with wirecutters, they were prepared), but they didn't get the frame and the rear tire, so I was pretty happy.

I do take your point about the cycling infrastructure differential. Everyone in Japan bikes and almost no one wears helmets, but that's because bikes and pedestrians are unquestionably the priority traffic, not cars. (Though weirdly, penalties for drivers of cars hitting cyclists are often quite weak.) I actually learned to bike in Japan and I think nothing of not wearing a helmet here, but I would be really afraid to do the same in the Bay Area.

[liv]

Thank you, that's really good advice about how to use the locks. The other advantage of a loop is that you can attach the bike to things like lamp posts which are too big for a D-lock, so that works. I do agree the safety calculus really does vary a lot with where you are; I'm in Cambridge, which is a very bicycle-centric city, though I don't think it's anything like as good as it could be. In San Francisco I'd be scared to bike at all, and if I did I'd probably wear a helmet in spite of all the statistics!

I like your very apt default icon, too, I forgot to say!

Frame lock

[ofunaq]

Two locks is essential: I have a frame lock for the back wheel (e.g. http://www.abus.com/uk/Mobile-Security/Bike-Safety-and-Security/Locks/Frame-Locks), and also a D-lock. I find the frame lock amazingly handy -- it carries my keys while I cycle, it makes sure I don't leave my bike and house keys behind when I get on my bike, and it makes me lock my bike and take my key out, even if I park for a few seconds to pop into a shop.

When parking at Cambridge station, I lock up extra carefully. The ideal is to lock both wheels and the frame to the bike stand. With luck, I can do this on a Sheffield stand, by locking the back wheel to the frame, and looping the D-lock through the front wheel, frame and stand. Some sort of loopy lock would make this easier, but it would be harder to carry: my D-lock just clips onto the frame when I cycle.

I was very lucky to get a Belgian second hand bike from the old Station Cycles at Cambridge station. It's pretty much my ideal turn-up-and-go low maintenance bike: solid but not crazy-heavy, upright position, dynamo lights, hub gears (7 speeds, but 3 would have been enough), hub brakes, marathon tyres, mudguards, pannier racks, frame lock, D lock. For a longer ride, I try to carry a pump, as most leaks are slow enough that it's faster to pump up a flat tyre, ride 500m, lather, rinse repeat, especially if you're far from help, or commuting with time pressure.

For a cycling jacket, I like the blue Altura ones: very reflective, but not eye-wateringly high-viz.

[lethargic_man]

Many thanks for this! I think it's pretty unanimous that I need Audacity; I feel like a bit of a dinosaur that I've never recorded my voice, so it's really helpful to get suggestions. And ok, I'll see if I can dig out my old USB mic, and if not I'll buy a new one, I don't want to make this recording into a huge enterprise but I don't want to come out with something completely rubbish in quality.

Your Skype headset ought to be sufficient.

Thank you for good suggestions about bikes. I do wear skirts most of the time so I think step-through is the way forward. And yes, I need a rack to attach panniers, that's a really good point. I hadn't thought of getting a loop as well as a D-lock, so that's really good advice. People steal bikes all the time in the English Cambridge too, and part of me thinks that I just have to accept my bike will have a lifetime. But also some of my friends have said that they've gone years without a bike getting stolen if they use a D-lock, so that seems a good investment.

You need to secure the frame, front wheel and rear wheel all to an immobile object if possible. This is the ideal solution; but it's indispensable (which means a chain (and ideally a D-lock, but I don't take one if I'm not leaving the bike long in public areas), or two D-locks) if your bike has quick-release wheels, because quick-release is quick-nick.

FWIW, I've been cycling to work for eighteen years now, and I've never had a bike nicked, though I've had two attempts to nick my bike, both foiled by my chain, and a horn nicked from my €25 bike in Berlin (it was almost worth more than the bike).

I'm sorry you had such a horrible accident, and glad that you were protected by your helmet. The evidence is really clear that in accidents where riders hit their heads, helmets have an important protective effect. However given that riders without helmets have fewer accidents, it's not a straightforward calculation, and I'm reasonably convinced that without helmet is better. I'm also not cycling in US cities which have considerably worse car-centric infrastructure than British ones, and that changes the balance of risk too.

My experience cycling in London (though not, curiously, cycling in Edinburgh) is that drivers aren't the problem; the problem is pedestrians taking one step out onto the road before looking to see if there's any traffic, which destroys your argument.

And if, by cycling without a helmet, you think you're creating a world in which the risk of head injury is lessened for all cyclists, maybe that's so but I still think it would be increased for you.

If you insist on doing that, at least get yourself an invisible cycle helmet. It'll be cool; you'll be living the Snow Crash world.

Speaking of invisible cycle accessories, check out this.

[naath]

The evidence is that the risk of head injury is increased by helmet-wearing because the risk of *collision* is increased by helmet-wearing, and even if the helmet does protect your head (not actually proven in all circumstances, cycle helmets are surprisingly fragile) it does nothing at all to protect the rest of you.

The causation here is that both the cyclist and the drivers around the cyclist are likely to take more care to avoid risky behaviours (like cycling in the dooring zone, or tailgating) if the cyclist appears/feels more vulnerable.

[liv]

Thanks for a nice succinct summary here. I believe in risk compensation, sure, but I suspect that the magnitude of the effects can get a bit exaggerated. Even so, that's in addition to slightly more complex indirect reasons why more cycle helmet coverage leads to more accidents, so that's a lot of reasoning pointing in the same direction, namely that I don't really need to wear a cycle helmet and in fact probably shouldn't.

[liv]

I know I used to use a headset when we did Skype calls, but that was on a much older computer and I think I might have thrown it out when I moved to a tiny flat and was trying to be minimalist about possessions, as I didn't directly need it for VoIP on my newer computer. But it might be in a box of misc somewhere.

Thank you for the detailed description of how to lock up the bike. I was dimly aware that you have to lock up the wheels as well as the frame, but this is really clear on why. And yeah, I think it's worth spending money and effort on a decent lock if it means I can keep the bike for years rather than months.

Regarding helmets, if I were doing regular serious commuting in London, I'd wear one, so I'm not surprised that you make that choice. But I'm planning on occasional pottering about in Cambridge, mostly sticking to bike paths as much as I can, so I can do the civic thing of making cycling overall safer by eschewing unnecessary safety precautions.

I do love the cool futuristic tech! I think I don't need an invisible helmet, my problem with bike helmets is not that they're ugly and bulky, but that the expectation and practice of helmet use paradoxically reduces cycling safety. And I think I'd rather just wear plain reflective clothes than invisible reflective paint, but that is still some very impressive chemistry!

[damerell]

I'm not sure the evidence is even really clear for that - certainly not if we discount the notorious TRT '89 study.

The things are engineered down to the standards to make them light and breathable, and the standards specify something about 1/8 as robust as the average skull. It might _feel_ akin to wearing a bulletproof vest, but it's more like putting a cigar case in your top pocket and hoping.

[liv]

You may be right, I don't have all the key studies at my fingertips. What convinced me not to bother with helmets was Goldacre & Spiegelhalter's summary. They say case-control studies [...] have shown that people wearing helmets are less likely to have a head injury and cite a Cochrane review which sounded credible to me. That may well be the notorious TRT '89 study you refer to here, assuming 89 is a typo for 99, but that's not a single study, it's a meta-analysis. I was convinced by Goldacre's argument that even if it's true that helmets relatively protect people who have similar head-injuring accidents, if they also lead to helmet wearers having more accidents, their effect may be overall increasing rather than decreasing risk. That seemed to me adequate reason to eschew wearing a helmet, without having to give up the intuitively appealing idea that helmets are somewhat protective.

[damerell]

I do mean '89 - Thompson RS, Rivara FP, Thompson DC. New England Journal of Medicine, 1989 v320 n21 p1361-7. 1989.

This started the whole thing off, and is where the 85% and 89% figures for effectiveness come from. http://cyclehelmets.org/1068.html (and the entire site is useful) discusses it in more detail, but the potted summary is that it's pretty dubious.

There is then an enormous collection of papers (often with some non-empty subset of TRT involved) which assume TRT '89 got it right and proceed on that basis.

You've found the Cochrane review from 1999 which is discussed at http://cyclehelmets.org/1069.html ... guess which three people did that review, assuming blithely that they got it right in 1989?

(Also, while this does not prove any misconduct, guess who funded TRT's research? The manufacturers of foam hats...)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1410838/ is a paper by Dorothy Robinson documenting some of the compelling evidence that no jurisdiction that has introduced and enforced helmet compulsion has produced thereby a significant drop in head injury rates. The only conclusion I can draw from that is that they _don't_ work; speculation as to why is interesting (especially when presented with the intuitively appealing idea that they must) but is ultimately not pertinent.

[liv]

Wow, that's really egregious! A meta-analysis based heavily on studies by the review authors is one thing, but one based heavily on studies on the same data set, that's shocking. And if I had known that they were claiming helmets are over 80% effective I would have been way more skeptical, based on the Goldacre review I inferred just that helmets have some protective effect, which seemed uncontroversial.

I think there's a bit of problem with arguing from compulsion doesn't work to helmets don't work; an obvious explanation would be that the legislation is not effective at changing behaviour and not properly enforced. It's like comparing countries with different abortion laws; where abortion is in fact illegal the rate of abortion isn't substantially lower than in countries where the procedure is legal and available, but I don't think anyone would argue that abortion doesn't successfully terminate pregnancies.

But ok, it seems like the evidence in favour of helmets protecting cyclists is worse than I thought it was, easy enough to accept that conclusion given that it leads to the same decision I was planning to make anyway :-)

[damerell]

Robinson and others do support that last step, which I agree is not trivial; it is known that in some of the places that have legislated there have been significant behavioural changes, more generally that legislation of various flavours has produced a wide range of behavioural outcomes... but it never seems to work, for all that.

So I'd say it's more as if governments keep legislating homeopathy. After a while one has to conclude it's not because people don't take their sugar pills, especially if we know full well in some places they do, but because they just don't do anything.

[damerell]

You don't know that, of course. People have survived doorings (and much worse) without permanent consequences, helmets or no. Indeed, the sheer number of "saved my life" stories demonstrates that most of them must be false.

[liv]

That's a really interesting point! I hadn't thought of the connection between everybody having a saved life story, and the likelihood that most of those people would have survived without a helmet.

[damerell]

Well, quite. Something like one in three thousand UK cyclists can expect to die in the saddle - and of course not all of those will be of head injuries, of head injuries that even the most optimistic helmet proponents think are preventable, and of such head injuries not accompanied by other mortal injuries.

Given that, at a conservative estimate, one in ten helmet wearers will tell you a "saved my life" anecdote, we conclude:

1) helmets make you grossly accident-prone (in which case, don't wear one, and why don't helmet wearers keep breaking bones etc).
2) only the grossly accident-prone wear helmets (but clearly usage rates too high for that to be true).
or 3) nearly all these anecdotes are wrong.