CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
THis
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27067615
"Lead changes who we are," she says. "If you wanted to say, Jessica, I don't believe that story, then my answer is that you need to come up with another story that would explain why we have found this particular pattern to lead in the 1970s and 80s and then crime in the 1990s and 2000s.
Jessica, I want to say it is poverty. Those sucking up lead in petrol were the american underclasses living out by the freeway.
What about the amount of lead coming from the water supply piping?
@neddie-h, yes this is why you can get grant to strip out lead pipes.
It is povert, gorgeous George Monbiot buries that conclusion in the article IWRATS links to but he makes it - African Americans live under the free way in lead paint houses.
"this is why you can get grant to strip out lead pipes"
Think grants have ended.
SW will replace any of their lead from main to house/property boundary.
Plumber, name of Fast but really should be BAd, stripped some lead from my house, hopefully all the drinking water - will ask if we received grant, think so as we had a nice plumber who was not VAT registered who could not take the work as would not get grant.
Fast and Scottish water then had argument about who should remove what.
Fast then left loads of earth that would not fit back in the hiole (too Fast and no tamping down) in my front yard. Balerno in Bloom (or someone else?)_ then took it (by mistake, I guess they thought I left it for them)
This was 2001
I used to know someone who worked for SEPA and she told me that the pink stuff* in the water is an additive that binds lead so you should be okay.
*You know the stuff you get if you don't clean your sink for a few days.
gembo, the correlation between poverty and freeway proximity may be true but it doesn't explain why more freeways but less lead has lead to reduced crime.
I'm sure I read somewhere that when lead was introduced to make petrol engines run more smoothly the company responsible knew it was a dangerous poison and that there was a perfectly viable less risky alternative. However as the alternative couldn't be patented they wouldn't make money off it so they opted for the poison. I don't remember the source though so it may have been unreliable.
@acsimpson, I think the lad crime correlation is at best just that, a correlation but no causal connection and at worst bogus.
Lead poisoning should confine you to bed quite ill, unlikely to commit crime or create children who will be criminals twenty years later.
@acsimpson:
I first read about that here. Thomas Midgely was the guy:
Thomas Midgely
I always remember that he developed both leaded petrol and CFCs. This is already quite the body of regrettable work.
I always forget that he died when he was strangled by the ropes of the device he designed to help people lift him out of bed after he contracted polio. This makes him, I think, the strongest piece of evidence that God exists and is just taking the mick.
I heard Midgely described as being responsible for more damage to the world's environment than anyone else in history.
Lead poisoning should confine you to bed quite ill,
Acute yes, chronic no. Needleman father of chronic lead studies;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Needleman#Lead_poisoning_research
[Also - causation is not detectable by scientific means.]
Thanks Stickman, that's the one.
While his profit driven push for lead seems fairly clear cut his introduction of CFCs is less so. He had no way of knowing the damage they were doing and meanwhile their introduction to refrigeration possibly saved countless lives.
@acsipmson
Refrigerators prior to CFCs used ammonia and sometimes sulphur dioxide. They did sometimes leak and poison people, but not often. Neither is wildly toxic and both smell strongly so they're not all that dangerous. Quite possible that CFC use was driven by manufacturing convenience, but I don't know.
CFC propellants were never necessary.
@iwrats, wallpaper used to kill you. True. I have a book with samples of the wallpapers. Modern printing techniques render them harmless. Them William Morrises were deadly.
Thanks for clearing that up IWRATS.
gembo, I'm sure you know that such wallpaper can be seen in Mary Kings Close.
MKC also has that spooky cold spot. Boo. Did I scare you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect
It may be the Shamen type dance music that is the true causation of the correlation in the drop in crime.
@ed1, had transcendental meditation dude explain to me once that the 10000 people who were doing the old yogic flying in Liverpool had created so much karma that the crime rate fell.
Definite correlation there.
@Gembo - had heard the same about a Washington study of the same ilk.
http://www.worldpeacegroup.org/washington_crime_study.html
I am yet to be convinced - but would love to be.
@iain McR
There is no way yogic flying is anything to do with reduced crime. There is a correlation but as with the lead it is spurious.
Meditation is a great thing for us all but further claims are bogus
On a more serious note, with lead, there is at least a believable (but as yet unproven?) causation mechanism.
@neddie-h lead in petrol bad. Reducing it good. Coincides with reduction in reported offending but not causal. Hence my less serious but equally correlated yogic flying. Still urge anyone to meditate if it suits
@gembo Not causal in the scientific sense, no, because you can never get direct proof of a causal relationship without a dedicated and properly designed scientific experiment, and we are dealing with people's lives here so that might be deemed slightly unethical :-)
However in the real world when a large number of studies and meta-studies repeatedly and independently identify a statistically significant correlation between measured levels of lead, proven consequent developmental retardation of impulse control, and recorded crime levels, then scientifically speaking it moves into the 'accepted theory until proven otherwise' bucket.
Meditation still cool though. Wish I still had the time. :-)
you can never get direct proof of a causal relationship without a dedicated and properly designed scientific experiment
Fraid not. Causation, like faith, is not susceptible to science.
It may be splitting probabilistic hairs but causation is statistically determinable through experimental method, though only if you can completely rule out the presence of any third factor which could influence the result, which is very hard to do, often not possible, and certainly not through after-the-event observation.
The uk did not ban the sale of leaded petrol until the year 2000. The uk was later than united states with availability of unleaded petrol not become widely available until the late 1980s. Many popular cars built in the late 80s could not take unleaded petrol. The fleet of uk vehicles only became typically unleaded in the 1990s. I cant but wonder where was the 2009, 22 year post peak lead fuel, crime fall, in the uk if leaded fuel was the cause. Why was there not a crime fall in UK 17 odd years behind the states.
"leaded gasoline was phased out in the USA beginning in 1973" Wiki
In the uk in 1988 only 1 percent of petrol sold was unleaded.
American cars also had catalytic converts in the 1970s, few uk cars had these until the very late 80s.
Thanks Ed1, I don't think we are at the stage where the lead in petrol is shown to be the cause of increased crime and the reduction in the lead the reason for the reduction in recorded crime. Elegant though the graphs may be.
@Snowy
I think it's a fundamental tenet of the scientific method that you can't demonstrate causation. You can demonstrate constant correlation and defy others not to see causation. I love the inherent spookiness of spontaneous radioactive decay which appears to have no cause.
Similarly I don't think you can demonstrate either the truth or falseness of a single proposition through the method but you can defy people to deny the truth of useful propositions.
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