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When Massholes go batty
By adamg on Mon, 06/09/2008 - 5:15pm
Cambridge Police report that when a man felt he'd been cut off on Cambridge Street last night, he caught up to the other motorist and beat him with a baseball bat he happened to have handy. No word on the condition of the other motorist.
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Murderous Heat
Read the entire article here.
Counfounding variables
By no means am I pouring cold water on that theory, I'm sure there is both correlation and causation between heat and road rage. That said, I would have expected confounding variables to wipe out that effect, down into the noise. Consider the example of feedback. At some point the majority of car drivers are going to opt for air conditioning?
Did you say confounding variables?
Oh, I'm sure there are some in there that sociologists would never think of. They did think of quite a few that are linked to calendar year and crime - such as age distributions. The long term nature of one of the studies would tend to render some confounders irrelevant (chronic cohort studies versus time series studies) - although I'm not much of a fan of generic trend line fitting, no matter how many df or how much data you have. Kind of a kludgy approximation of "bunch of stuff we don't know".
In any case, I popped it up to point out that there are some pretty good studies showing associations ... what is unclear is whether it is the heat itself, or the heat driving people out into the streets (although SES was controlled for)
I Don't Doubt That
I don't doubt there's some correlation there. It's the main reason I don't like to compare the violent crime rates of Boston to that of New Orleans, Miami, Phoenix, etc. There's no winter down there. Ask any cop in Boston what months see the lowest crime rates. It ain't July and August.