What the phone didn't do

It seems the Blackberry outage is held to be responsible for a recent 40% drop in traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi, which would suggest four out of ten accidents there are being caused by people reading email at the wheel!

While a nice piece of trivia, it's also an interesting example of how events in one area (email outage) can result in significant changes in crowd behaviour in another, and, assuming some of these accidents might have been fatal, quite literally how these influences can be a matter of life and death.
What comes to my mind is the potential this shows for manipulating individual behaviour, for large scale effects, and the ethical questions that then arise. [more on this here]