UAE Claims Blackberry Outage Resulted In Fewer Car Accidents
from the correlation-vs.-causation dept
As a bunch of folks have submitted in one form or another, police in the United Arab Emirates are claiming that a significant dropoff in traffic accidents in the past week or so is due to the giant Blackberry outage that made many of the devices useless for quite some time. Of course, as the report notes, there's nothing beyond correlation to back this up, and there may be an alternative explanation as well:At the end of last month, popular UAE footballer Theyab Awana was killed in a high speed crash near Abu Dhabi, and it was claimed that he was sending a message on his BlackBerry when he hit a lorry.That would suggest a pretty major third variable which likely distorts the impact of the Blackberry outage.
The football star's father, Awana Ahmad Al Mosabi, made an emotional plea to people not to use smartphones while driving, and a Facebook campaign against the use of BlackBerry Messenger while driving has grown in popularity.
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Filed Under: blackberry, car crashes, united arab emirates
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Variable 2) The Blackberry outage
Variable 3) The death of the football player and the massive campaign to stop people from texting while driving (Technically two variables, but one was caused by the other).
That third variable has the bonus of being vary public and possibly caused people to drive safer, texting or not.
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Come on. This is silly. Most people believe they are immortal, or at least don't care enough about their mortality to believe that THEY will be the one who gets in the accident just because they were "sending a quick text." I guarantee that the outage is the variable that reduced accidents. Because of the 80% who use their equipment responsibly? No, because of the 15% who don't. (5% just should never be behind the wheel to begin with.)
Really, admit that SOME people are going to use their equipment irresposibly, and they are generally the ones to cause accidents. I've seen people drive up on medians, turn the wrong way on a one-way street, and just generally drive like idiots, and 9 times out of 10 they have a cell phone in their hand. This is not a referendum to ban cell phones while driving, or anything as stupid and counter-productive as that. It IS stating that it only takes ONE person to cause MULTIPLE accidents, and that pretending that an emotional appeal for people to "drive better" is the actual cause of fewer accidents is insulting my intelligence.
Leopards don't change their spots. Texters gonna text.
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No. Everyone will drive responsibly because I said so.
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I am saying that it's more likely that a celebrity dying due to texting while driving might be a bigger variable then one phone provider going down. Remember, the iPhones didn't go out, the Android phones didn't go out, the flip phones didn't go out, just Blackberry. How big does Blackberry have to be to cause a noticeable drop in accidents?
It's possible that the Blackberry outage caused the problem, but if it did, they must drive worse then an Ohio driver in Pittsburgh.
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Seroiusly?
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Re: Seroiusly?
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We know the reason freetards read this article
You freetards must secretly be against automobile accidents.
It doesn't matter. Most rational people support the profit and benefit to the economy caused by automobile accidents. Soon we'll get our new PROTECT-AUTO-ACCIDENTS bill signed into law. So there.
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Re: We know the reason freetards read this article
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What
Casey Mahoney Brad P
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There have been numerous studies across the globe that demonstrate that texting while driving is as bad as or more dangerous than drunk driving.
This is a serious and global problem, several teens have died in my town this year from texting while driving. These people are turning their vehicles into ramming machines simply because they aren't paying attention to the road. We need a national campaign with a catchy slogan akin to "Click it or Ticket". Maybe "Text and Drive, Wrecks and Die" or "Don't text me bro", I don't know maybe someone else can do better.
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Assholes
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Correlation and causation.
In reality if x is correlated with y then there are four possibilities
1. x causes y.
2. y causes x.
3. both x and y are caused by something else (z).
4. The correlation happened by chance.
Now it is possible to eliminate 4 by examining the data statistically (or at least to put a bound on the chance of it happening that way).
Assuming that that has been done and produces an adequately low chance of a random occurrence we are left with 1-3.
In the present case we know that the Blackberry outage was not caused by the fall in road accidents in UAE (eliminating 2). It is also pretty much incredible that a third factor caused both of these ( the death of the sports star didn't cause the Blackberry outage!)
Therefore in this case (assuming the details of the statistics eliminating 4 are sound) we can be pretty confident that correlation DOES imply causation.
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Re: Correlation and causation.
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