{"id":13566,"date":"2013-08-13T12:49:52","date_gmt":"2013-08-13T11:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=13566"},"modified":"2013-08-13T12:49:52","modified_gmt":"2013-08-13T11:49:52","slug":"playing-with-a-loaded-gun-isnt-dangerous-no-really","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=13566","title":{"rendered":"Playing With A Loaded Gun Not Dangerous. No, Really."},"content":{"rendered":"

This story has cropped up on a few feeds<\/a>, and it is highly misleading (that\u2019s even before the Daily Mail has offered its own interpretation).<\/p>\n

\"BabyIt would appear that \u201cdumbing down\u201d is reaching even places like the London School Of Economics (LSE) and Carnegie Mellon University, the inmates of which establishments now appear incapable of identifying suitably robust data as the source of alleged scientific studies. They can\u2019t even refrain from trying to give witty titles to their papers.<\/p>\n

Basically, they have concluded that using a mobile phone while driving doesn\u2019t increase your chances of crashing.<\/p>\n

The \u201cstudy\u201d is flawed beyond belief. To begin with, it harvested data from phone masts for conversations which jumped between cells (i.e. were assumed to be made by people on the move in cars). The calls monitored were made only after 9pm, and so were skewed towards those users using special free tariffs (yes, it is American data only) offered by many carriers. The calls only involved voice \u2013 no internet traffic was monitored. And there was no way of knowing how many of the calls were made using hands free devices.<\/p>\n

\"AThis has all the hallmarks of first year students cutting their teeth in learning how to publicise their \u201cresearch\u201d, no matter how amateurish the actual data. It\u2019s just like when kids paint a picture with daubs of of colour and people pretend it is good \u2013 sometimes straying beyond normal parental encouragement and foisting the artwork on the wider public.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of studies \u2013 proper ones, and anecdotal \u201csurvey\u201d types \u2013 which say exactly the opposite, and a proper scientist would be very cautious in drawing extreme conclusions from results like those generated in the current story. This is especially true where the results fly in the face of everything that is obvious.<\/p>\n

Driving and farting about at the same time with things in the car (such as phones, satnavs, and babies) is absolutely guaranteed to increase the risk of something going wrong. After all, you can drive around for years in a car with defective brakes or tyres and not have an accident \u2013 but that doesn\u2019t mean defective brakes and tyres don\u2019t increase the risk<\/strong> of an accident.<\/p>\n

The report \u2013 both the original \u201cresearch\u201d and the press interpretation \u2013 is highly irresponsible. It shows what happens when you dumb down education and allow people to think they\u2019re something they\u2019re not. In this case, people like Saurabh Bhargava (Carnegie) and Vikram Pathania (LSE), who apparently consider themselves to be scientific researchers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story has cropped up on a few feeds, and it is highly misleading (that\u2019s even before the Daily Mail has offered its own interpretation). It would appear that \u201cdumbing down\u201d is reaching even places like the London School Of Economics (LSE) and Carnegie Mellon University, the inmates of which establishments now appear incapable of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80,86,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adi-related","category-bad-drivers","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}