Fatal and serious road crashes involving young New Zealand drivers: a latent class clustering approach

The over-representation of young drivers in road crashes remains an important concern worldwide. Cluster analysis has been applied to young driver sub-groups, but its application by analysing crash occurrence is just emerging. We present a classification analysis that advances the field through a holistic overview of crash patterns useful for designing youth-targeted road safety programmes. We compiled a database of 8644 New Zealand crashes from 2002 to 2011 involving at least one 15–24-year-old driver and a fatal or serious injury for at least one road user. We considered crash location, infrastructure characteristics, environmental conditions, demographic characteristics, driving behaviour, and pre-crash manoeuvres. The analysis yielded 15 and 8 latent classes of, respectively, single-vehicle and multi-vehicle crashes, and average posterior probabilities measured the odds of correct classification that revealed how the identified clusters contain mostly crashes of a particular class and all the crashes of that class. The results raised three major safety concerns for young drivers that should be addressed: (1) reckless driving and traffic law violations; (2) inattention, error, and hazard perception problems; and (3) interaction with road geometry and lighting conditions, especially on high-speed open roads and state highways.     

Main Currents of Marxism

We present a three-fold test for sustainability on policies addressing environmental and natural resource management. The first — ecological holism — requires that management of natural systems not only ensure the long term viability of ecosystem functions and enhanced diversity of wildlife within that ecosystem, but also facilitate the provision of renewable energy and material resources. The second — community centeredness — is an assessment of the improvement (or reduction) in economic wellbeing of local populations measured by employment and income and in quality of life for the larger community resulting from that policy. The third — institutional legitimacy — evaluates the level of justice that a policy and its outcome(s) bring to the entire community (here, just policies will satisfy Rawls's "veil of ignorance" test). Three policies for National Forest management on Washington's Olympic Peninsula are examined and results are compared: the Northwest Forest Plan, the Wild Olympics Wilderness and Scenic Rivers Act of 2012 (Wild Olympics), and The Third Way (an alternative forest management option). Each policy satisfies the first test of ecological holism, but not in equal measures. Success in this regard can be differentially ranked because the relative impacts are not neutral. Both the Northwest Forest Plan and Wild Olympics fail the test of community centeredness. In contrast, The Third Way promotes community centeredness and ecological holism. We assert that, as a result, it would satisfy John Rawls's test for justice, and it is institutionally legitimate.     

Modeling Technological and Institutional Change in Karl Marx’s Theory of Capitalism

Health policy in the United States struggles with apparently conflicting purposes: (1) access to health care and (2) cost-containment. The failures of policy to resolve this apparent conflict have produced inequities in the health system and the perverse outcomes of high costs and poor access. The failures of policy are associated with the third-party payment system that has become a "rationing transaction" in John R. Commons' hierarchy of transactions. The dominion of private interests over the payment system elevates the financial interests of insurers over the interests of patients. Commons' approach to "reasonable value" as a means of resolving conflicts of interest through a process that engages all participants in the going concern suggests a strengthened role for the public sector in the payment system to achieve the public purposes of the health system.     

John Stuart Mill's Theory Of Justice

John Stuart Mill has traditionally been portrayed as self-contradictory and failing to construct a unified social theory. Recent scholarship, however, has challenged this view, finding Mill's work to be creatively synthetic in bridging the antinomies inherent in liberal democratic thought. This revisionist interpretation of Mill is advanced by an understanding of his theory of justice and its role in shaping his policy positions on issues such as welfare, education, voting rights, property rights, taxation, government intervention, and the future of capitalism.     

Alfred Marshall on Socialism

William Godwin had a dual influence on Thomas Robert Malthus. First, Malthus wrote the premier (1798) edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population to refute Godwin's thesis that institutional reforms could halt the growth of population and thereby pave the way toward universal affluence. There were only two checks on population, said Malthus in 1798: vice and misery. Second, pursuant to his discovery of virtuous checks on population in Scandinavia, Malthus reread Godwin's principal works. He now accepted Godwin's dual proposition that population growth could be stopped, even reversed, by the virtuous check of moral restraint and that this check could be made operational through institutional realignment. In the second (1803) edition of his Essay, Malthus argued, therefore, that poverty could be replaced by prosperity through institutional changes in the form of the introduction of universal education and gradual abolition of the poor law.     

Industrialization in an age of globalization: some comparisons between East and South East Asia and Latin America

The contrast between industrial experience in East and South East Asia and Latin America is dramatic. Whilst a first generation of newly industrialized economies in East Asia grew rapidly on the basis of manufacturing expansion, the longer‐established industries of Latin America have performed relatively poorly by most indicators. This paper utilizes data from UN and World Bank databases to assess relative performance since the early 1980s. It shows that whilst there is some evidence of modest catch‐up in efficiency terms for Latin America in the 1990s, this is not enough to make serious inroads into the loss of international competitiveness experienced by the region in earlier decades.     

What is the Comparative Advantage of the Service Learning Pedagogy? Insights from Development Economics

We rely on the Kolb learning cycle and the experiences from two development economics class to analyze the comparative advantage of service learning pedagogy. We hypothesize that service learning is uniquely positioned to improve learning outcomes in applied/policy-oriented specializations. We conceptualize learning outcomes from a discipline-specific perspective where service hours are directly linked to the course content. We argue that the sustainability of service learning in applied/policy-oriented disciplines is limited by journal-entry orthodoxy and short-term costs. Emotive journal entries often encourage an “everything goes” response which threatens the credibility of service learning and limits its use in specializations that value objectivity. Service hours imply costs to faculty and students that exceed those of traditional approaches. This can serve as a disincentive for course adaptation, despite the decline in these costs over time, and enrollment. Our analysis encourages instructors to explore alternatives to the widely used journal-entry and to seek opportunities to inform students of the expected long-run benefit/cost tradeoffs. We encourage administrators to support faculty who teach classes that are predisposed to service learning in ways that can reduce short-run costs. With its comparative advantage and the united efforts across the academy, we expect that in the long-run service experiences will routinely be used to complement traditional lectures in applied/policy-oriented classrooms across the academy.     

From Experience: Applying Performance Support Technology in the Fuzzy Front End

A new product originates from an idea, or in many cases, integration of multiple ideas. The process of transforming an idea into a robust concept requires definition of the underlying technologies, identification of expected customer benefits, and assessment of the market opportunity. The idea-development and subsequent idea-selection stages of new product development are often referred to as the "fuzzy front end" because they typically involve ad hoc decisions and ill-defined processes. To address this shortcoming, Nortel developed an idea-to-opportunity front-end process that provides a consistent and structured approach for idea development and evaluation. This article describes the process and how it was implemented using electronic performance support technology.     

Freedom and the market

Those who believe that the free market is positively related to both economic efficiency and individual freedom are prone to regard resistance to the establishment of the global market essentially free from any serious sociopolitical constraint as a politically insignificant expression of impatience, ignorance, and hypocrisy. This article attempts to endow the manifestation of discontent with the status quo evident in public protests in Seattle and Washington DC with political significance through explicating it as an expression of a fundamental conflict between economic efficiency and individual freedom inherent in the global implementation of the principle of self-regulating markets. This analysis of the antiglobalization movement is conducted from the perspective of the theoretical foundation of the evaluation of the dynamics of capitalism by Polanyi, Hayek, and Keynes, and its conclusions are brought to bear upon the validity of their contesting views of the relationship between economic efficiency and individual freedom.