The Driver-Car.

The car has become ubiquitous in late modern society and has become the leading object in the ordinary social relations of mobility. Despite its centrality to the culture and material form of modern societies, the relationship between the car and human beings has remained largely unexplored by sociology. This article argues that cars are combined with their drivers into an assemblage, the ‘driver-car’, which has become a form of social being that brings about distinctive social actions in modern society – driving, transporting, parking, consuming, polluting, killing, communicating and so on. To understand the nature of this assemblage a number of theoretical perspectives that describe the interaction and collaboration between human beings and complex objects are explored; the process of driving, ‘affordance’, actor-network theory, and the embodied relationship between driver and car. This theoretical account of the driver-car is intended as a preliminary to the empirical investigation of the place of the driver-car in modern societies

Prospective study of rabbit antithymocyte globulin and cyclosporine for aplastic anemia from the EBMT Severe Aplastic Anaemia Working Party

Development and application of statistical models for medical scientific researc

Predictors of reproductive cost in female Soay sheep

1. We investigate factors influencing the trade-off between survival and reproduction in female Soay sheep (Ovis aries). Multistate capture-recapture models are used to incorporate the state-specific recapture probability and to investigate the influence of age and ecological conditions on the cost of reproduction, defined as the difference between survival of breeder and non-breeder ewes on a logistic scale. 2. The cost is identified as a quadratic function of age, being greatest for females breeding at 1 year of age and when more than 7 years old. Costs, however, were only present during severe environmental conditions (wet and stormy winters occurring when population density was high). 3. Winter severity and population size explain most of the variation in the probability of breeding for the first time at 1 year of life, but did not affect the subsequent breeding probability. 4. The presence of a cost of reproduction was confirmed by an experiment where a subset of females was prevented from breeding in their first year of life. 5. Our results suggest that breeding decisions are quality or condition dependent. We show that the interaction between age and time has a significant effect on variation around the phenotypic trade-off function: selection against weaker individuals born into cohorts that experience severe environmental conditions early in life can progressively eliminate low-quality phenotypes from these cohorts, generating population-level effects