London incidents

Tue Jul 12 23:09:24 UTC 2005

Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Jul 2005 09:26:33 +1200, Mark Foster said:
> 
> 
>>"Using phone company records, researchers assessed phone use immediately
>>before the crash.
>>They found a third of calls in the 10 minutes before the crash were made on
>>cellphones.
> 
> 
> And the *other* 2/3rd of the calls were made on what, exactly?
> 
> A land line just before departure, followed by a crash less than 10 minutes into
> the drive? (This would tie in well with the "agitated by the phone call" theory
> advanced by JC Dill...)

Oh, gawd. Now I have to go read it myself. You can track this down
pretty easily at the BMJ site, bmj.com, and download a PDF version.
It's only 5 pages long.

I don't see where they got that "one third of the calls" number above.
As far as I can tell, the study only looks at mobile phone calls.

As for the "inattentive-risky driver" and "agitated driver" theories, the
researchers took (tried to take) this into acount by using a case-crossover
design whereby individual drivers are their own control.

Feel free to argue the results of the study, but read the study, not
some confused newspaper summary, and please don't do it on NANOG.
-- 
Crist J. Clark                               crist.clark at globalstar.com
Globalstar Communications                                (408) 933-4387