don’t wear your helmet, you could have a bike accident!

As once in a while reappears the argument that wearing a bike helmet increases one’s chances of a bike accident. In the current case, it is to argue against a French regulation proposal that helmets should be compulsory for all cyclists. Without getting now into the pros and cons of compulsory helmet laws (enforced in Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as some provinces of Canada), I see little worth in the study cited by Le Monde towards this argument. As the data is poor and poorly analysed. First, there is a significant fraction of cycling accidents when the presence of an helmet is unknown. Second, the fraction of cyclists wearing helmets is based on a yearly survey involving 500 persons in a few major French cities. The conclusion that there are three times more accidents among cyclists wearing helmets than among cyclists not wearing helmets is thus not particularly reliable. Rather than the highly debatable arguments that (a) seeing a cyclist with an helmet would reduce the caution of car or bus drivers, (b) wearing an helmet would reduce the risk aversion of a cyclist, (c) sport-cyclists are mostly wearing helmets but their bikes are not appropriate for cities (!), I would not eliminate [as the authors do] the basic argument that helmeted cyclists are on average traveling longer distances. With a probability of an accident that necessarily  increases with the distance traveled. While people renting on-the-go bikes are usually biking short distances and almost never wear helmets. (For the record, I mostly wear a [bright orange] helmet but sometimes do not when going to the nearby bakery or swimming pool… Each time I had a fall, crash or accident with a car, I was wearing an helmet and I once hit my head or rather the helmet on the ground, with no consequence I am aware of!)

it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair

shortened iterations [code golf]

A codegolf lazy morning exercise towards finding the sequence of integers that starts with an arbitrary value n and gets updated by blocks of four as

until the last term is not an integer. While the update can be easily implemented with the appropriate stopping rule, a simple congruence analysis shows that, depending on n, the sequence is 4, 8 or 12 values long when

respectively. But sadly the more interesting fixed length solution

`~`=rep #redefine function
b=(scan()-1)*c(32~4,8,40~4,1,9~3)/32+c(1,1,3,0~3,6,-c(8,1,9,-71,17)/8)
b[!b%%1] #keep integers only

ends up being longer than the more basic one:

a=scan()
while(!a[T]%%1)a=c(a,d<-a[T]*T,d+T+1,e<-d-1,e/((T<-T+4)-1))
a[-T]

where Robin’s suggestion of using T rather than length is very cool as T has double meaning, first TRUE (and 1) then the length of a…

Nature tidbits

In the Nature issue of July 19 that I read in the plane to Singapore, there was a whole lot of interesting entries, from various calls expressing deep concern about the anti-scientific stance of the Trump administration, like cutting funds for environmental regulation and restricting freedom of communication (ETA) or naming a non-scientist at the head of NASA and other agencies, or again restricting the protection of species, to a testimony of an Argentinian biologist in front of a congressional committee about the legalisation of abortion (which failed at the level of the Agentinian senate later this month), to a DNA-like version of neural network, to Louis Chen from NUS being mentioned in a career article about the importance of planning well in advance one’s retirement to preserve academia links and manage a new position or even career. Which is what happened to Louis as he stayed head of NUS after the mandatory retirement age and is now emeritus and still engaged into research. (The article made me wonder however how the cases therein had be selected.) It is actually most revealing to see how different countries approach the question of retirements of academics: in France, for instance, one is essentially forced to retire and, while there exist emeritus positions, it is extremely difficult to find funding.

“Louis Chen was technically meant to retire in 2005. The mathematician at the National University of Singapore was turning 65, the university’s official retirement age. But he was only five years into his tenure as director of the university’s new Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and the university wanted him to stay on. So he remained for seven more years, stepping down in 2012. Over the next 18 months, he travelled and had knee surgery, before returning in summer 2014 to teach graduate courses for a year.”

And [yet] another piece on the biases of AIs. Reproducing earlier papers discussed here, with one obvious reason being that the learning corpus is not representative of the whole population, maybe survey sampling should become compulsory in machine learning training degrees. And yet another piece on why protectionism is (also) bad for the environment.

un lagarto en las Cataratas del Iguazú [guest jatp]