A feed on US road accidents summer vs winter etc. A feed from Organizations and Markets.
Does the inclement weather have you worried about sliding off the road to an icy death? If so, Ive got some good news for you. On a per-mile driven basis (or per-trip or per-minute traveled), winter is actually the least likely time to get killed behind the wheel. Summer drivers have a risk of 1.24 fatalities per 100 million miles driven compared with 1.01 during the winter. For males behind the wheel of an SUV, those summer and winter numbers are 1.39 and 0.87, respectively.Thats what we discovered when we teamed with the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety to develop TrafficSTATS an interactive website that merges traffic fatality and personal travel information to generate risk estimates. The site generates risk estimates for combinations of age, day of week, month of the year, gender, hour of the day, drivers, passengers, and vehicle types. Did you know that a man behind the wheel is 80% more likely to get killed than a woman? Or that 16-20 year-old drivers have about the same fatality risk as 75-84 year-olds?
Not being from the US, I don't have a strong intuition about winter vs summer - are a lot of winter miles driven under snow and ice conditions?
The findings on men and women and on very young and very old drivers (both higher risk than experienced, non-elderly) are very well known; perhaps counterintuitive to elderly male drivers who haven't updated their priors in 50 years or so.
John, you don't need to go to the US to encounter driving conditions made dangerous by winter conditions. Tasmania will do.
It was the winter vs summer comparison that I regard as counterintuitive. I have long regarded elderly drivers as a hazard though without the benefit of statistics. The sight of the 75 yo lady across the road setting off, barely visible in the drivers seat, and seldom bothering to indicate, was highly suggestive.
On the topic of updating, have you revised your philosophy of economics reading list to replace the works of Lakatos?
Do you have a suggested replacement? The Wikipedia article suggests Paul Feyerabend and George Soros as being influenced by Popper: would they be more to your taste? Or are there other post-Popperians I should know about?
Yes, George Soros took on board the idea of the open society and he spent a lot of money promoting the institutions of democracy in Eastern Europe.
Feyerabend did the German translation of "The Open Society and its Enemies".
For economists the most useful post-Popperian is probably Larry Boland, a properly trained economist with a prolific record of publication on the philosophy and methods of economics after Joe Agassi introduced him to the critical Popperian method. He has a website and this is a summary of one of his books on the foundations of economic methods.
Boland in turn introduced his student Stanley Wong to the Popperian approach, including the idea of metaphysical research programs (the source of the Lakatosian idea of research programs). Wong did rather better than Lakatos and his followers when he made a contribution to economics by shredding the work that made part of the reputation of Paul Samuelson.
Jack Birner is good value as well.
I regret to say I found Boland incomprehensible, and your review suggests the I'm not alone, for example
I'm perfectly happy to believe the suggestion (if I read you right) that Lakatos stole the SRP idea from Wong - it's a good idea whoever came up with it.
Lakatos stole the idea of programs from Popper who developed the theory of metaphysical research programs in the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. This was written in the 1950s but remained in ms and galleys until it was finally published in three volumes in the 1980s. The ms circulated freely among staff and research students at the LSE and Lakatos had a complete photocopy of it.
Boland writes clearly enough and most of his stuff, including some of his books, can be found on line at his website.
The problem with the philosophy of science in the US is the dominance of the logical empiricists from the 1940s to recent time, led by the European diaspora, the logical positivists who were driven overseas by Hitler. This locked up a great deal of talent, grappling with ideas that never really went anywhwere, and when this became too boring it precipitated a flight of students in search of more exciting ideas which they found with Kuhn, POMO etc.
Popper's ideas were misrepresented by the positivist/empiricists and ignored or dismissed as an eccentric variation of positivism by the likes of Rorty. So Boland has suffered from the general indifference and incomprehesion of Popper's ideas among the philosophers.