same as it ever was

surprising things learned from the car culture by j.j. flink (1975):

1. the gas tax was initially very popular (p. 150).
2. congestion and parking were major problems beginning in the early 1910s (pp. 162-3).
3. induced demand! "every attempt to make roads adequate for existing motor vehicle performance and current volume of traffic has inevitably encouraged the automobile industry to build still larger and faster cars and the public to drive more of them farther on more occasions" (p. 175).
4. criticism of detroit's cars began in earnest in the early 1950s (p. 191).
5. alternatives to the ICE are not new (p. 225).
6. oil companies are always up to the same old tricks (p. 229).

in sum, very little has changed, except for the public's acceptance of the gas tax.

moving cooler

haven't looked at the report yet, but as usual todd litman's anlysis and response to criticism is spot on.

"A new transportation paradigm assumes that mobility is just one factor in achieving accessibility, that too much mobility can be as harmful as too little, and that demographic and economic trends are increasing the value of alternative modes and multi-modal communities."

switching from scientific studies to the study of texts. what to learn from science studies, that reads science as a text?

they're one in the same.

SCOT

a fun exchange in technology and culture between historian nick clayton and social construction of technologists wiebe bijker and trevor pinch.

clayton tries to sink the scot ship by pointing to flaws in b&p's historical accuracy. i don't fully agree with b&p's assertion that since they were not trying to contribute to the history of the bicycle that clayton's entire argument is misdirected (it seems like you should try to get your historical house in order before embarking on theoretical expeditions), but their endorsement of the privilege of the analyst in staking out relevant boundaries is well-taken. however, i felt like they didn't really go far enough with this idea. to my mind, the reason that we privilige the analyst is to make studies more objective by explicitly introducing the perspective of the analyst as an object of critique. b&p do mention this, but it should really form the cornerstone of their arguemnt. otherwise they could be misconstrued as advocating relativsm, which is sort of how the whole thing comes off.

in any case, the scot idea of a "relevant social group" seems way too easy. as latour teaches us, "there is no relevant group that can be said to make up social aggregates, no established component that can be used as an incontrovertible starting point" (Reassembling the Social, p. 29). it's so tempting to close off an entire class of individuals made the same by one or more characteristics. if we can't do this, then what's the alternative? (this is one of the things i'm struggling with, going through latour's texts, trying to connect his methods to useful insights i can glean for my own work.)

i do like some of the notions of scot though, that different people embody different hopes and ideas onto the same piece of technology. it'll surely be interesting to dig into some of this work.

kuhn was a physicist

right. so, it seems like there are a number of examples of scientists making important contributions to fields in the humanities and social sciences.

but: is the converse true?

fundamental

"The probability that decision maker n chooses alternative i from choice set Jn (labeled Pin) depends on the observed characteristics of alternative i compared with all other alternatives (i.e., on zin relative to all zjn for j in Jn, j != i) and on the observed characteristics of the decisionmaker (sn)."

great text by dreyfus and law...

"...to solve a problem by means of dynamic programming we choose the arguments of the optimal value function and define that function in such a way as to allow the use of the principle of optimality to write a recurrence relation. Starting with the boundary conditions, we then use the recurrent relation to determine concurrently the optimal value and policy functions. When the optimal value and decision are known for the value of the argument that represents the original whole problem, the solution is completed and the best path can be traced out using the optimal policy function alone."

they definitely don't make them like this anymore.