Thanks all for the congratulations. Robert Nott contacted us a week or two before the presentation, and then gathered our responses and names/ages/grades/etc. on the day of, so it was kind of a pleasant surprise.
To respond to the communication issue and the 'how should we perceive interlocks' issue (not actually sure that is what it is, but I think I get the gist of your intent introducing the issue?): We spent several meetings leading up to the presentation deciding how technical we wanted it to be - on one hand, it needed to be entertaining and fit into a short presentation (we did not know we would get 30 minutes, although we knew we would get more than most mentorship groups' 10 minutes because we had more people) and one angled towards high-schoolers, but we also did not want to underestimate the audience's ability to understand and enjoy the details of the study. Another factor was that it was not just a presentation of our findings, as it would be (say) in a recommendation to a committee, but a summary of our mentorship experience - so we wanted to go into what it was actually like, what we actually did at SFI. Our plan was to put the details on the slides and soften them in our patter, by leading up to and explaining them; in retrospect we did not do that very well and probably should have practiced more beforehand. I felt that otherwise the presentation went well. As to the elitism you brought up, and I know you were speaking generally: I acknowledge that it could be a possible outcome, but was not our experience at all. It felt instead very disappointing when we realised as we were talking that the audience was not understanding something or couldn't relate. As we explained to Robert Nott afterwards, when you are doing a study that takes in our case months and in many studies years, you tend to get wrapped up in the data and it's meaning, which can represent reality sometimes very well and sometimes not; either way, it is important to recognize that most people have a different interaction with the issue (whatever you are studying, there are probably people affected by it). In our case, it was a particularly personal issue* for many New Mexicans. Not mentioned in the article was the long question we got at the end from a woman whose relative was killed, not in a vehicle but outside her house (as I remember) from a drunk driver. Her question was about the effectiveness of interlocks, and although we found that they do have some significant effectiveness, we agreed that multiple solutions had to be brought to bear on the issue. I was less cynical about how easily interlocks could be bypassed after this study than I was before. For example, having a sober friend breathe into the interlock before driving makes less sense when you think about it: why would the sober friend endanger hir friend's life? And apparently the interlocks periodically signal you to pull over and breathe into it again, and also have tampering alarms. As to whether they remove personal responsibility or rights from the driver, one has to consider how much damage a car can do. Around 500 kilograms at 27 meters per second is 13,500 Newton-seconds, enough momentum to impart a velocity of 193 m/s [431 mph] to a 70-kg mass (which is what I am) [please, somebody tell me if my math or physics understanding is wrong here]. So I consider a car a powerful weapon. This is important because if a person behaves recklessly enough with a weapon we take that weapon away and often fine / jail the person. There are differences, such as fine points of intent (and also that cars take a lot of concentration and some skill to use at all, whereas guns also do but less so), but the fact that by buying a car and registering for a drivers licence one makes a social if not a legal contract to behave in certain ways (following the rules of the road) and not in others (vehicular homicide). If it was just a danger to the driver you could make a case for letting personal decisions have their personal consequences, although the loss of life would still be tragic; but that is not the case, anyone on the road or simply near it is at increased and considerable risk when some percentage of drivers are impaired. I don't believe jail is a good solution for most things, but particularly not for DWI, because it just disrupts people's lives which leads them to depend on the comforting effects of drinking after they get out. Indeed, data compiled by Dr. Roth (we did not verify it) shows that a higher percentage of first-time offenders than second-time offenders (and so on down the line) never have an additional infraction, and that interlocked offenders show this trend more clearly than jailed offenders. In the end, most of the DWI crashes in any given year are from first-time offenders, so no reactionary measures will help those - and that is why Dr. Roth thinks public education, such as the attention brought to a public case like Scott Owens, or simply the observed inconvenience of having an interlock, or a victim impact panel. has the greatest effects. We were going to include this in our study by using incidence of terms like 'DWI' and 'drunk driving' in Google NGram and Google Trends, but the data was looking a little too hard to extract. *My family had an interlock in our truck for a while (I believe it was the shortest duration mandated for interlocks, six months, since the time is dependent on how over the legal limit you are) when I was very young. I don't remember much beyond that it was inconvenient but you got used to it, and that my mother said my father always made sure he was sober before he drove thereafter. Well, that response was a lot longer than I meant for it to be, but I am interested to see what people have to say. -Arlo James Barnes
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