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I hope the actual research paper is better, but this piece makes a couple of irrational comparisons.
First off, all sailing events per total sailing population is contrasted against all ski/snowboard events per skier/snowboarder person-days. Total population (sail) is different than total skier person-days. These are two different denominators. It's not clear how they relate.
They should have compared all sailing morbidity against total sailing person-days, just like they did with the skier/snowboarders. OR they should have used the total skier/snowboarder population as they did with sailing. Either of those might have yielded comparable statistics. As it is they are purposely comparing apples to cumquats.
As for the football comparison, they only cite deaths on the one hand (football) vs death and injury on the other (sail). And again, there is no denominator mentioned. Since every football game likely produces multiple injuries, I'm willing to bet if they compared the same stat (death AND injury) that football would come out far worse than sail.
Bacon is fine for you now. This is a lecture a week ago by the President of the World Heart Foundation to a conference of Cardiologists.
It make is a very, very interesting 20 minutes.
The proper measure would probably be deaths/person/hr of activity. While it's common to make an all day, or even three day passage, the average NFL player is on the field for roughly 8 hours a year (very rough guess, 16, 1 hour games, of which you play at most 30 minutes on average).
The average skier makes maybe 3 runs a day (?) of 30 minutes (?) each, and goes skiing 10 days a year. So that works out to be about 15 participation hours a year.
At least around here we have Wednesday night sailing for 30 nights a year, and the average time is probably 4 hours, so our average sailor is out for 120 hours a year, and that's just from the goof around races.
A single overnight trip is more exposure time than most athletes will get in a year.
Yes, all water related activities are extremely dangerous so PLEASE! keep out of water at all times, especially when you desire to ride jet skis or motor boats.
Reality check here, we had a death 20 years ago after our Thursday night Regatta. Sad day indeed but it really wasn't a Sailing related incident just a heart attack. Fake news, I think our President would call this.
In another thread about 'learning sailing', Sal Paradise made a post intentionally exaggerating the differences of how people of different generations can look at things.
I thought it was funny as Hell, but also held real truths.
Now a days things like this are analyzed and questioned by people (and kids) who've never participated in the reported activity/subject.
It's faux, it's BS.....but it is published...and it is read.
Then is considered by some as learned fact/absolute.
Yes, it was published, but not in a REAL publication. There are individuals that produce fake news and articles, they get published on the Internet, but no REAL publication would put anything like this out without a by-line, photos, references and quotes. I was a writer for many years and EVERY article by me had a by-line, photos, interviews, quotes and references. If I didn't have those things the article would have never made it beyond the copy editor, which is the lowest guy on the editorial totem pole.
The piece we are discussing is in a consumer mag that is referencing a research study done by an apparently credible source. As is so often the case, writers/reporters with little scientific expertise interpret research (or more likely have it interpreted for them by someone with an agenda). This is why I said I hoped the actual research document is of higher quality than this pop piece.
It’s always important to examining the source of research. Peer reviewed scientific journals with established histories of being critical and credible are the first basic benchmark when looking at research. This piece doesn’t come close to passing this first test.
Mike is right. They're out to sell their magazine (and ad copy). They do this by providing information that may sound correct, then juxtaposing it with other information that may also sound correct, but which may or may not have any actual relationship to the first information. For example: 'There were twenty car accidents last Thursday. It was a full moon.' makes it sound like the rocky satellite is impacting the driving habits of otherwise normal citizens. Omitting the fact that freezing rain fell, coating the roads in a half inch of ice makes a big difference.
In the article, skiers and snowboarders got counted in "person-days", so the same person going skiing over two days gets counted as two person-days. We don't know how many different skiers and snowboarders there are. We only know the total number of "person days". The article says that there are 8 million sailors, but doesn't say how many "sailor-days" there are. One sailor going on a week-long trip only counts as one, not seven. But if we want to compare the skiing danger to the sailing danger we need to know the number of "sailor days" to have a valid comparison. So the article is comparing apples and kumquats here. For "football", they say 197 players died over the same 11 year period "during play or practice"- but they fail to provide the number of players overall (to be able to compare the number to sailing) or to provide the number of "player-days", to be able to legitimately compare the number to skiing/snowboarding. Maybe there were 400 total football players - meaning almost half of them died. Maybe there were 80,000,000? We don't know. Two other questions come to mind as well. Were football players who died after they left the field counted, or not? And since this is a European website posting this story, do they actually mean soccer, not American Football?
The article goes on to talk about alcohol as a factor in sailing deaths. Then it suddenly mentions motor boats mingled in with some unclear sailing information , which brings up the question as to whether the original data lumps sailboats and powerboats together too. Again, we don't know. The more cogent story would perhaps have been to compare alcohol-related accidents sailing and driving, but it probably wouldn't sell many ads.
I also cannot determine how they got the fatality rate numbers they got. If you agree to accept their eight million sailors per year for 11 years it comes to 88 million sailors in total. If there were 271 deaths over the eleven years and divide it out, I seem to get a rate of 3.07 deaths per million, not 1.19 . If you take the 271 deaths over an eleven year span, it averages out to 26 deaths per year with eight million sailors. On my calculator that comes out to 3.25 deaths per million. Both these numbers are more than double the 1.19 rate called for in the article. If you multiply the 1.19 rate per million by 8 (there are 8 million sailors per year) it comes to 9.52 deaths per year. Then if you multiply by 11 (for the 11 years) it comes to 104.7 . That is a far cry from the 271 deaths reported. Nothing in this article seems to add up.
I wonder what the stat would be if you included walking across the street - if drunk it can be very dangerous - if not looking both ways can be very dangerous - if talking on phone and not paying attention can be very dangerous
sailing - if drinking can lead to problems, if not watching the weather or test your skills vs the weather can be dangerous, if not paying attention can be dangerous - gosh I did not see that rock on the chart,
anything can be dangerous - I use rock climb, do high angle rock rescue, mountain climb, ski and now sail - and all are dangerous but given proper training and common good sense all can be safe just like sailing
It's funny, the need to attach a numerical figure to how dangerous sailing is.
Any person with reasonable self preservation instincts, can stand alone on the deck of a 35' boat on a moonless night, broad reaching at 8 knots in 2 meter seas, and very quickly identify that what they are doing is dangerous, without attaching a numerical value to it.
5 miles offshore with a turtled beach cat, nobody around, boat won't right- danger identified, I don't need C-3PO pointing out the statistical details for me.
Generic danger is of no value when trying to keep yourself safe, you need to identify specific risks and establish controls to mitigate those specific risks.
I've done both, sailing and skiing (took up snowboarding in my 50's), pretty much my entire life. Both have there dangers. Running into a tree or chair lift tower are probably the biggest danger to your life, on the slopes.
Falling overboard - we know, is the biggest danger on a sailboat.
Both of those dangers are easily avoidable but they claim a few victims. I still think driving between these two recreations poses the biggest life threatening danger.
I’m not one to dismiss statistical conclusions out of hand, but the way the data is reported here is seriously flawed. Drives me nuts when articles like this don’t reference and link to the original source research paper.
By any statistical measure I’ve seen, boating in general is pretty darn safe compared to many risks most urbanites take for granted: driving, walking down a busy street, eating bacon! (OK, that last one is now considered safe again). When you consider only cruising-sized sailboats, the accident rates (including morbidity/mortality) steeply trend to inconsequential. This is why I’m always fascinated by discussions around insurance.
As long as God's laws are in effect humanity will be subject to what is considered Darwin's Laws of Natural selection. Stupid people do stupid things which leads to their demise. I have eaten most things that "medical science" has determined to be unhealthy for me all my 62 years, I own and operate pistols and rifles, a touring motorcycle, I have raced "kids bikes" until I was in my late forties, and my occupation is one which exposes me to most things that are "known to the State of California to cause cancer". Many folks who sit behind a desk and pee their pants over anything that society tells them to do not understand that the lonely fear of dying should not override the fear of living.
Just read Rocky's post and have to disagree on one point. Doing stupid things (as evidenced by his behavior) does not necessarily lead to one's demise. It occurred to me however, that ever since the first man, up to, say, 1870 or 1890, everyone who was born HAS died. The death rate, except for the people who are currently alive, is 100%. This makes living the most dangerous activity that anyone could possibly contemplate. I will therefore agree with Rocky and suggest that people get out from behind their desks and at least visit the head before they die anyway.
God(s) is irrelevant to the process of natural selection. And sadly, stupidity is not the only factor that leads to some genes being culled from the herd. If this were the case we would have bred ‘stupid' out of humanity a long time ago.
I do think we are seeing a general decrease in the ability of most people to do rational risk assessment when it comes to our choices. We scare ourselves silly over the minutest parts-per-billion of some toxic chemicals in pollution, while we ignore the slaughter wrought by unsafe use of cars. We get bent out of shape over the smallest deviation from some public health standard in restaurants, while we launch crusades against illicit drugs which end up causing far more harm to society. We allow ourselves to be scared into believing violent crime high, terrorism is a huge and growing problem, and foreigners are stealing our jobs. None of this is true, but when people "sit behind a desk” all day, or worse, get their experience of the world through the TV or computer screen, all they see is the unusual and the ugly.
So damn right. Get out and live. None of us is getting out this life alive.
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