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.
Filed Under: blackberry, car crashes, united arab emirates
