OBJECTIVE Sobriety checkpoints are an effective deterrent to alcohol-impaired driving although a substantial proportion of drinking drivers who pass through checkpoints are missed. The present study was designed to determine the extent to which police officers correctly identify individuals with blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) at or above 0.05% at checkpoints, and if there are characteristi...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of exposure to others' drink driving during adolescence on self-reported driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol in young adulthood. Data were drawn from 1956 participants with a driving license enrolled in the International Youth Development Study from Victoria, Australia. During 2003 and 2004, adolescents in Grades 7, 9 and 10 (a...

The most fundamental law of economics links the price of a product to the demand for that product. Accordingly, increases in the monetary price of alcohol (i.e., through tax increases) would be expected to lower alcohol consumption and its adverse consequences. Studies investigating such a relationship found that alcohol prices were one factor influencing alcohol consumption among youth and you...

AIMS To measure the effectiveness of a high-visibility enforcement campaign to reduce rates of underage drinking and driving. DESIGN Mixed-model analysis compares rates of drinking and driving (1) between the baseline and intervention period and (2) between the baseline and follow-up period. The impact of the intervention was evaluated using roadside surveys and web surveys. SETTING Two col...

Let K denote a field, and let V denote a vector space over K with finite positive dimension. We consider a pair of linear transformations A : V → V and A∗ : V → V that satisfy (i), (ii) below: (i) There exists a basis for V with respect to which the matrix representing A is irreducible tridiagonal and the matrix representing A∗ is diagonal. (ii) There exists a basis for V with respect to which ...

Phylogenetic comparative methods are increasingly used to give new insights into the dynamics of trait evolution in deep time. For continuous traits the core of these methods is a suite of models that attempt to capture evolutionary patterns by extending the Brownian constant variance model. However, the properties of these models are often poorly understood, which can lead to the misinterpreta...

375 Alcohol-impaired driving is a major public health problem in the United States. Traffic crashes involving alcohol killed more than 16,000 people in 1997 alone (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [NHTSA] 1998b) and injure a million more each year (Blincoe 1996). Fatal traffic crashes, the leading cause of death for those aged 1 through 24, involve alcohol 4 times out of 10 (NHTSA...

Although public health efforts have made some progress in reducing risk of adolescent motor vehicle crashes over the last three decades, new technologies and evolving behavior patterns have focused attention on the risk of distracted driving. For many of the same reasons that alcohol-impaired driving represents a distinct risk for adolescents, distracted driving has an elevated impact on this a...

One approach for reducing alcohol and other drug problems is community-based prevention programs. These programs focus on changing the environment in which a person consumes alcohol rather than the behavior of the individual drinker. Several international and U.S. programs have assessed the effectiveness of such approaches in reducing alcohol-related problems. Some of those analyses have had in...

One of the most striking characteristics of human beings is their ability to function successfully in complex environments about which they know very little. Reflect on how little you really know about all the individual matters of fact that characterize the world. What, other than vague generalizations, do you know about the apples on the trees of China, individual grains of sand, or even the ...