I thought I’d follow up an email sent to this site’s esteemed blogger, Michael, about an article I read.  Here’s the subject of the email: 
“The folllowing is a link to a story I read from a UK cycling site:  http://road.cc/content/news/47314-how-make-roads-safer-turn-those-mobiles .   In the story, UAE police linked (word used by author) the 3 day Blackberry outage with a significant decrease in car accidents over that time.  While the study wasn’t necessarily done scientifically, it would be interesting to see what change was observed in US accident rates over that same time.  There should be some non-zero change seen, at least that’s my hypothesis.  Do you know anyone that works with such data?  It is also possible that the variance in the accident data is large enough per day that any difference caused by the Blackberry outage here would be lost inside the noise (i.e., uncertainty in the data, ± the square root of the variance in this case). I hope that someone working with accident data in the US follows up on this.  A decrease in accident rate that correlates with the Blackberry outage could help efforts to pass more and stricter laws regarding cell phone use and texting while driving.”