Risk Compensation or Risk Reduction? Seatbelts,State Laws,and Traffic Fatalities*

Objective. The risk compensation hypothesis suggests that drivers enjoying greater safety will drive more recklessly and thereby impose greater risks on nonoccupants. We provide a test of the risk compensation hypothesis in the context of state seatbelt laws and belt use rates. Methods. Fixed‐effects models with policy and demographic variables are estimated using annual state data from 1985 to 2002 to test the effect of seatbelt laws and seatbelt use rates on logged fatality rates for occupants, pedestrians, motorcyclists, and all nonoccupants in separate models. Results. Contrary to the risk compensation hypothesis, the results indicate that both occupants and nonoccupants enjoy greater safety due to state mandatory use laws and increased safety belt use rates. Conclusion. Overall, seatbelt laws and the higher belt use these laws induce do not increase nonoccupant risk exposure. If anything, these laws and the accompanying increase in belt use result in safer driving behavior.     

Adaptive tests of regression functions via multiscale generalized likelihood ratios

Many applications of nonparametric tests based on curve estimation involve selecting a smoothing parameter. The author proposes an adaptive test that combines several generalized likelihood ratio tests in order to get power performance nearly equal to whichever of the component tests is best. She derives the asymptotic joint distribution of the component tests and that of the proposed test under the null hypothesis. She also develops a simple method of selecting the smoothing parameters for the proposed test and presents two approximate methods for obtaining its P‐value. Finally, she evaluates the proposed test through simulations and illustrates its application to a set of real data.     

Intersensory Redundancy Enhances Memory in Bobwhite Quail Embryos

Information presented concurrently and redundantly to 2 or more senses (intersensory redundancy) has been shown to recruit attention and promote perceptual learning of amodal stimulus properties in animal embryos and human infants. This study examined whether the facilitative effect of intersensory redundancy also extends to the domain of memory. We assessed bobwhite quail chicks' ability to remember and prefer an individual maternal call presented either unimodally or redundantly and synchronously with patterned light during the period prior to hatching. Embryos provided with unimodal auditory exposure failed to prefer the familiar call over a novel maternal call postnatally at 48 hr and 72 hr following exposure. In contrast, embryos provided with redundant, synchronous audiovisual stimulation significantly preferred the familiar call at 48 hr following exposure, but not at 72 hr. A second experiment provided chicks with a single 10‐min refamiliarization with the familiar call at either 48 hr or 72 hr following hatching. Chicks given only unimodal auditory exposure prior to hatching did not appear to benefit from this brief postnatal refamiliarization, showing no preference for the familiar call at either 72 or 96 hr. Chicks that received redundant audiovisual stimulation prenatally showed a significant preference for the familiar call (following the brief reexpo sure 24 hr earlier) at both 72 and 96 hr of age. These results are the first to demonstrate that redundantly specified information is remembered longer and reactivated more easily than the same information presented unimodally. These findings provide further evidence of the salience of intersensory redundancy in guiding selective attention and perceptual learning during early development.     

WOMEN'S WORK:

We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. We find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support. The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to provide medical information and emotional support to geographically dispersed veterans. Activism transformed women activists by endowing them with a sense of empowerment and a somewhat broadened concern for social justice. Although their transformations disposed the women to become active on related issues, it did not extend to concerns about gender discrimination. We suggest that the next research step is to investigate gender differences in movement processes by surveying activists across a variety of movements to test propositions and to identify the characteristics of other social contexts that structurally instigate a departure from traditional gender roles.     

Empirical Non-Parametric Control Charts: Estimation Effects and Corrections

Owing to the extreme quantiles involved, standard control charts are very sensitive to the effects of parameter estimation and non-normality. More general parametric charts have been devised to deal with the latter complication and corrections have been derived to compensate for the estimation step, both under normal and parametric models. The resulting procedures offer a satisfactory solution over a broad range of underlying distributions. However, situations do occur where even such a large model is inadequate and nothing remains but to consider non- parametric charts. In principle, these form ideal solutions, but the problem is that huge sample sizes are required for the estimation step. Otherwise the resulting stochastic error is so large that the chart is very unstable, a disadvantage that seems to outweigh the advantage of avoiding the model error from the parametric case. Here we analyse under what conditions non-parametric charts actually become feasible alternatives for their parametric counterparts. In particular, corrected versions are suggested for which a possible change point is reached at sample sizes that are markedly less huge (but still larger than the customary range). These corrections serve to control the behaviour during in-control (markedly wrong outcomes of the estimates only occur sufficiently rarely). The price for this protection will clearly be some loss of detection power during out-of-control. A change point comes in view as soon as this loss can be made sufficiently small.     

Telecommuting: The future of work, corporate culture, and American society

Conclusion Throughout American history, first on the family farm and now in modern day business institutions, the workplace has been a stabilizing institution in American society that has anchored the ongoing, informal interactions occurring outside the workplace. In 1900, few Americans had a private mode of transportation. Barely 4,000 passenger automobiles were sold in 1900, and while horses were common, they were used primarily for farming, public transportation, and commercial activity in cities. By 1930, nearly 40 million cars had been added to America’s streets. The automobile recast life and work in central cities and eventually the suburbs.     

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for high dimensional inversion in remote sensing

Summary.  We discuss the inversion of the gas profiles (ozone, NO₃, NO₂, aerosols and neutral density) in the upper atmosphere from the spectral occultation measurements. The data are produced by the 'Global ozone monitoring of occultation of stars' instrument on board the Envisat satellite that was launched in March 2002. The instrument measures the attenuation of light spectra at various horizontal paths from about 100 km down to 10–20 km. The new feature is that these data allow the inversion of the gas concentration height profiles. A short introduction is given to the present operational data management procedure with examples of the first real data inversion. Several solution options for a more comprehensive statistical inversion are presented. A direct inversion leads to a non-linear model with hundreds of parameters to be estimated. The problem is solved with an adaptive single-step Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. Another approach is to divide the problem into several non-linear smaller dimensional problems, to run parallel adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo chains for them and to solve the gas profiles in repetitive linear steps. The effect of grid size is discussed, and we present how the prior regularization takes the grid size into account in a way that effectively leads to a grid-independent inversion.     

Interactionism,Social Organization,and Social Processes: Looking Back and Moving Ahead

With its roots in American pragmatism, symbolic interactionism has created a distinctive perspective and produced numerous important contributions and now offers significant prospects for the future. In this article, I review my intellectual journey with this perspective over forty years. This journey was initiated within the American society, sociology, and symbolic interaction of circa 1960. I note many of the contributions made by interactionists since that time, with particular focus on those who have contributed to the study of social organization and social process. I offer an agenda for the future based on currently underdeveloped areas that have potential. These are inequality orders, institutional analysis, collective action across space and time, and the integration of temporal and spatial orders. The article concludes with calls for further efforts at cross‐perspective dialogues, more attention to feminist scholars, and an elaborated critical pragmatism.     

领导权理论与后现代思潮

英国著名教授E·拉克劳以其拓展马克思主义的革命理论而闻名,并成为西方“后马克思主义”的著名代表人物之一。在其代表作《领导权与社会主义策略》(“Hegemony”一词,曾有“文化霸权”等译法;但本文译者认为,在拉克劳的著作中,他主要是在“国家、革命、阶级和革命的领导者”等意义上来谈论这一范畴的,所以在这里把“hegemony”译为“领导权”)一书中,拉克劳把马克思主义的领导权理论与后结构主义等当代“时髦”理论相结合的尝试引人注目,但也备受争议。为此,他在另一本著作《我们时代革命的新反思》一书中,系统地回答了《领导权与社会主义策略》一书中的有关问题。这些问题涉及其领导权理论与社会主义革命在当今社会现实中所面临的理论困境,包括革命的主体、阶级的构成、阶级斗争、对立和认同等等。此外,领导权理论还涉及其与现代西方哲学思潮的内在逻辑联系,如胡塞尔的现象学、维特根斯坦的后分析哲学、德里达的解构主义以及其他的后现代主义理论等。针对这些理论和现实问题,拉克劳一一进行了认真的回答和阐述。英国《新左派评论》编委会的部分成员罗宾(Robin Blackburn)、彼德(Peter Dews)和安娜(Anna-Marie Smith)于1988年5月策划专访拉克劳。以下访谈是从拉克劳《我们时代革命的新反思》一书中选译