There is curretly a law pending in Nevada, where I live, that would make it illegal to both text and talk on a cell phone while driving. It is expected to pass, I hope it does.
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Indeed. Texting during driving should be made illegal. It diverts your attention while driving. I've seen a lot of comments that make claims like,
"well, here's this other activity that is just as detracting that's legal."
But that doesn't mean texting should be legal just because another activity is also dangerous. At best it means those other activities might need to be made illegal.
I quite clearly indicated what the difference was, already.
We are literally talking about 8 times more likely to get into a wreck versus 4 times more likely. Dropping it back to the "distracted by talking" rather than taking your eyes of the road. We could bring it back to something more safe. That was my point.
If you want to talk about attention, I could make a really good case for bad behaving children being far worse than texting or talking.
Wah? No.
Go back and read the OP.
The SD would be the SD for the number of wrecks, period. In order to blame 28% of accidents on texting, we would have to see a rise in wrecks that mirrors the amount of texting while driving. In order for 28% to actually be "real", we'd have to see that in the total number of wrecks. 28%, alone, is such a giant increase over the year to year fluctations that it would be easily seen. It's just not in the numbers. Something is "missing" in order for the 28% number to actually work.
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Last edited by dadudemon on Apr 24th, 2011 at 04:05 AM
Mode would also work quite nicely if you segmented the speeds into tiers. The mode of the top 25%, mode of the two middles, mode of the lowest. Median would also work, fine, for those groups, too.
I like "average" because it balances out the outliers.
An even better number would be the amount of people that speed 5 mph over or more. That number would approach 100%, I think.
Despite what I've said in this thread, I think a law like that would be just fine. I want to see more laws passed to prevent people from harming others. That includes alcohol and drug use. Texting while at home or walking? Mostly okay. Texting while driving? Not okay.
I am dead serious when I say that molesting your companion while driving is much more dangerous than anything I've covered. Even I am not an expert at doing that without swerving, yet.
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Last edited by dadudemon on Apr 24th, 2011 at 04:13 AM
No, but really, here in California there is a law prohibitting talking on the cellphone while driving, except when using a hands free system. So I don't see many people texting while driving. I see plenty eating/putting on makeup/shaving/cutting their hair/putting on their clothes/taking a shower while driving, though.
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Last edited by BackFire on Apr 24th, 2011 at 10:59 AM
so ya, I'm not surprised that the voice activated one is less dangerous, and in fact, because there is no person on the other end demanding attention, is probably safer than cell phones.
The point that it is attention, rather than the voice activated stuff or hands free, that is responsible for the crashes is not refuted by this. In fact, we see, as the technology allows for a more fluid distribution of top down attention over the environment, the risk of a crash reduces, whereas in the case of cell phones, moving from a normal model to hands free does nothing.
But yes, it could be safer. I don't think "communicating while operating a multi ton vehicle at speeds the human brain is barely able to percieve properly" is a right in the first place, so I have no objection to people being asked to not do it while they drive, even if it only saved one person, or even simply offered the opportunity for a person not to be killed.
this is a non-sequitor unless you are proposing that children or any form of distraction be banned from the car. Telling people to pull over when they text is hardly as much a violation of personal freedom as telling them they can't travel with their children would be.
also a strawman because I don't think anyone has said texting is the most distracting thing for a driver. The reason you can't get rid of other things, like for instance, the sun shining directly in your eyes, is the pragmatics or, as mentioned above, ethics of it, not that obnoxious children are exempt from any principle here.
further, yes, and that would support the "attentional" versus "voice" theory here, because you are attending to something else. However, studies tend to find that passangers in the car are aware enough of what is going on to at least not be tarribly botherson when the driver needs to be attentive. Obviously, children much less so, but kids aren't all stupid.
which two means are you contrasting? or is it ANOVA?
I can't imagine there is any disparity at all...
there are a host of reasons we can get into, but the central premise, that gross total crashes must go up for any cause for those crashes to account for a larger proportion of crashes, is false. If texting caused the same amount of deaths each year, and the total number of crashes went down, by definition, texting would account for a greater proportion of the crashes...
I read over what you said a couple of times, so I appologize if I got that wrong...
though, just to throw it out there, a much easier explanation is that any time a cell phone is involved in a crash, it is now ruled a "texting" crash, the same way anyone who smokes that gets cancer is ruled to have died because of smoking (ie, greater correlation than actual causation), mixed with the increase in a generation of tech savy drivers, and the simple fact that the cops probably pay more attention to the issue than they did 3-4 years ago, to me, seems to explain the problem nicely...
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Apr 23rd, 2011 07:31 PM
which two means are you contrasting? or is it ANOVA?
