Febuntoo News Generator

...it would be that we would stop propagating the lie that DRM is for your benefit. I just saw this on Lulu's ebook page.

If I had a second wish, I might wish for world peace or something. Eliminating DRM comes first (it might even be a pre-requisite).

As usual, when I get back from a big conference and trip, my mind is full processing everything that happened, and my life is full recovering from the effects of the travel.  Instead of a full report right here and now, I’m going to give a quick highlight of the latter part of July 2010.

• 16 July our team loads up a mini-van and starts the 12+ hour drive to Portland, Oregon.  On the way we stop in Berkeley, CA to visit the wonderful folks at ZaReason.  Cathy and Earl, our proprieters, are loaning me one of their snappy new (and shiny red!) Terra HD almost-mini-notebook.  I’m giving it a full test run under Fedora for a number of reasons.  Personally, I want to see what life is like on a modern, small notebook; I’ve always been a “bigger is better” laptop selector (for myself.)  I also want to see how this system, loaded with stock Intel components, handles Fedora 13 and maybe rawhide (Fedora 14 to be.)  This also gives me a chance to help iron out any kinks in delivering Fedora on these systems, if any arise.  I’ve long been a fan of ZaReason’s approach to supplying systems to Linux users, they’ve clearly developed a following, and it’s great to see them reaching out to Fedora users with pre-installation and so forth.
  • The trip north is simply epic, with the Bay Area, Central Valley of California, Mt. Shasta, the Siskyous, and the Willamette Valley of Oregon.  Beautiful country, awe inspiring.  It is great to show it to some folks for their first time.
  • We arrive pretty late to Portland where we hook up with Robyn Bergeron, who I get to meet in person for the first time; she’s very cool.  The hotel is very nice right in the middle of downtown, and we settle in to be as fresh-as-possible for CLS the next day.
• 17 July we spend at CLS, participating to various degrees.  My take of the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) community is that there are a number of large groupings you can lump attendees in to.  Some are very experienced online community membesr and leaders.  Some have taken that community leadership to add a production of some sort to the necessary, core social need of being involved.  Common products are free and open  source software projects, but those aren’t the only ones in evidence.   Some are a subtle mix of social and something tangible that still can’t be held in your hand.  Within those groupings are people who are new, experienced, and everywhere in between.  I don’t think these differences are clear to everyone attending, and I think they create some potential disconnect in terms of how the people coming to CLS interact.  Just something to expect in a rather new community, and dinner conversation spurs Max to write a blog post at my prodding.   I attend a few sessions:  “Moving beyond the mailing list“; “You suck or conflict resolution in your communities” (where we hear the advice to, “Just remove them from your mailing list,” when a poisonous person problem in e.g. the Fedora Project is much more complex).  I meet up with lots of old and new friends, make new friends and contacts, have a great lunch downtown at the food carts, and do my best to do my best.  We end the day with sushi served by model railroad, which finally makes me happy.
  • There are two incidents that happen that day, one I observe that makes me feel very uncomfortable while it is happening, and the other I hear about a few days later.  Both happen in the morning plenary session, and both are disturbing instances of sexist behavior.  I think my blocking on writing about those has contributed to my not writing about the event overall.  I feel that my first real writing about this has to be to the CLS discussion list, because this is the community where the behavior happens and needs to be corrected.  At the moment, that is all that I’ve decided.  I’m still feeling that stunning and chilling effect that makes me want to go silent and pretend nothing is happening, all will be forgotten. Ick.
• Sunday 18 July starts out OK, although we are all a bit over-sleep-ish.  This morning I pitch a session to share about the community leadership handbook, The Open Source Way.  I give a good, thorough introduction, and try to illicit some feedback on what people need from such a book, as well as prodding them to use it as a canonical resource for the principles we are espousing all the time.  I also attend a few sessions, including  “You’re killing your community“, a wry look at why too much help can be harmful.  We end up having dinner at the top of Portland, at Portland City Grill overlooking everything, where happy hour yields us some nice food at a tasty price.  Late night Saturday and Sunday we pony up for some points-only poker, and I learn finally how Texas hold ‘em is really played.
• On Monday 19 July we head down to Oregon State University campus to meet with Drs. Tim Budd and Carlos Jensen.  The real and potential fall out from this trip are worthy of a separate blog post, and I think I’m going to write an article on it for opensource.com.  The summary is, I’m seeing an inverse mirroring relationship between the goals and methods of FOSS and academia.  It opens some really cool possibilities.
  • Also cool, for the rest of the week I get to meet multiple graduate students from OSU working on research that is useful and can make a difference: gender equality; enormous lack of joining and engagement; and so forth.
• Monday night is the Teaching Open Source education bird’s of a feather mini-session, and I get to meet even more interesting people.  Then I head back to Corvallis to …
• … spend Tuesday with a friend and his family.  I head back to Portland in time to help with booth setup, then back to the hotel where I’m surprised by the kids and Larry showing up earlier than I expected. Yay!  Food is sought, then bed.
• Early Wednesday I’m up to finish my part on the final slides Mel and I are using this morning at 10:40, “5 FOSS in Edu Projects That Changed the World“  All goes fine in our talk, it is actually pretty good, and the day is a bit more relaxing after that.  We work the booth and hang out in the expo hall, make trouble, and talk lots of stuff to lots of people, especially teaching open source (TOS) stuff and the open source way stuff.
  • Wednesday night I dip to an Android hands on, which includes my own Nexus One handset to start developing on and such.  Thanks Google, and thanks Tim Bray for organizing the session along with the awesome crew from Google.  My girls are going to be very jealous when I get back to the hotel room.
• Thursday we try to just improve on Wednesday, including getting one or two mini-talks going at the Fedora booth.  Lots more TOS talk, I have lunch with an old friend and colleague (downtown food carts for the win again.)  Now that I’m with the kids, I take it pretty easy at night, heading back in to the hotel early and getting wicked tasty pizza delivered by bicycle for dinner from Old Town Pizza.
• Friday I’m up early again, having a morning adventure walk and finishing updating my slides (source and all OSCON materials) for my talk today, “Being a Catalyst in Communities: The Science Behind the Open Source Way“.  Very smooth talk, I’m happy with the updated slides and after giving the talk a few times this year, I’ve got a good stride with it; also, I don’t go over time.  Then we pack everyone up, load the kids and Larry in the minivan, and head back south to Santa Cruz.  We arrive home about 3:30 Saturday morning, and here I am still.

I will be at the KVM Forum and LinuxCon from 9th August in Boston, USA.

Greets $world. I recently decided to keep this blog for technical/development posts only, as it's syndicated on Planet Ubuntu{,-uk} and I would feel somewhat self-conscious posting my usual drivel to such an esteemed planet. Perhaps that's why I rarely post here (not that I really worry about my post frequency any more).

More fun/trivial/banal stuff will be posted over at my Tumblr blog. I'd very much welcome your follows/subscriptions, as it feels a bit lonely over there right now.

The "Roadshow" column in yesterday's Merc had some pretty ... odd ... statistics involving marijuana and driving.

It quotes "an NHTSA report" as saying:

contrary to popular belief, marijuana has been found to play a significant role in car accidents across the United States, with as much as 33 percent of drivers arrested at the scene of the accident being positive for marijuana and another 12 percent testing positive for marijuana and cocaine. Every year, 28 percent of drivers in the U.S. will attempt to drive within two hours after ingesting alcohol or illicit drugs. Marijuana is the drug used most often — 70 percent — by drivers who drove after drug use and is a major factor why crashes are the leading cause of death for American young people.

Whoa. Let's play that back again: 45 percent of all drivers arrested at accident scenes (33 plus another 12) test positive for marijuana? Nearly half?

Mr. Roadshow, you don't really believe that number, do you?

I didn't. So I did some searching, looking for the NTHSA source.

When I searched for large portions of the quoted phrase, I didn't find anything from the NHTSA. The Roadshow quote appears to come from an article on friendsdrivesober.org (I'm sure that's an unbiased source). Here's their MS Word file or Google's cached HTML version). The same article is also available as a PDF at prevnet.org and there are lots of other pages making reference to it.

The friendsdrivesober.org article cites "Brookoff, Cook & Mann, 1994; Sonderstrom, Dischinger, Kerns & Trillis, 1995." for the 33% number. There's no citation offered for the "28% will attempt to drive...". They credit "NHTSA, 2000" for "Marijuana is the drug used most often ... by drivers who drove after drug use", but that one's not important because it says nothing about prevalence in accidents, merely that it's used more often than other drugs (no surprise there).

The NHTSA weighs in

Googling on a more general set of terms, I found my way to a October 2000 NHTSA report, Field Test of On-Site Drug Detection Devices. It's a roundup of many different studies, with drug use numbers all over the map, though none larger than the 33% figure and certainly nothing near 45%. That 33% figure is near the bottom:

Brookoff et al. (1994) used on-site testing devices in a study that found a 58% prevalence rate for drugs in subjects arrested for reckless driving (who were not found to be impaired by alcohol). The Brookoff team found that 33% of their sample tested positive for marijuana, 13% for cocaine, or 12% for both. (Because of sampling flaws in the study, these drug test rates should not be interpreted as drug prevalence rates for reckless drivers.) Interestingly, the on-site device (Microline) used by Brookoff and his colleagues generated a significant false positive rate for marijuana when compared to GC/MS results.

The horse's mouth

So what about the original study? I wasn't able to find Dischinger, Kerns & Trillis, but here's Brookoff et al. at the New England Journal of Medicine: Testing Reckless Drivers for Cocaine and Marijuana (cookies required).

A couple of important notes on the study: the figures represent percentage of drivers arrested for "reckless driving that would constitute probable cause to suspect intoxication by drugs", who were not considered to be under the influence of alcohol, and who were suspected of being under the influence of marijuana or cocaine ("all patrol officers were told that they could summon [the testing van] if they stopped a person suspected of driving recklessly under the influence of cocaine or marijuana"). Morover, not all drivers consented to be tested, and the percentages are only for those who were tested.

Seems like a perfectly valid study, as far as it goes (though there's been some mild criticism of the test they used). It's mostly interesting as a study of how marijuana and cocaine use correlate with visible intoxication and sobriety test results. It's not a study of the prevalence of drugs on the road: the NHTSA report is right about that. The numbers it reports are useless in that context.

So the jump from that study to what friendsdrivesober.org and Roadshow implied -- that 45% of people involved in car accidents test positive for marijuana -- is quite a leap, and attributing that leap to the NHTSA seems especially odd since they explicitly say the study shouldn't be used for those purposes.

What really happened here?

So what happened here? Brookoff, Cook, Williams and Mann publish a study on behavior of reckless drivers under the influence of drugs.

NHTSA makes a brief and dismissive reference to it in a long survey paper.

Then friendsdrivesober.org writes an article that references the study but entirely misinterprets the numbers. This study gets picked up and referenced by other sites, out of context.

Then somehow the paragraph from friendsdrivesober.org shows up in Roadshow, attributed to the NHTSA. How did that happen?

If you look at the friendsdrivesober.org article, the paragraph cites Brookoff in its first sentence, then goes on to other unrelated claims, citing an NHTSA study at the end of the paragraph. I suppose it's possible (though hard to understand) that one could miss the first reference, and take the NHTSA reference at the end of the paragraph as the reference for the whole paragraph. That's the best guess I can come up with. Just another example of the game of telephone.

Nobody with any sense thinks it's a good idea to drive under the influence of marijuana or other intoxicants. But bogus statistics don't help make your point. They just cast doubt on everything else you say.