Man vs. Machine: An Investigation of Speeding Ticket Disparities Based on Gender and Race

This paper analyzes the extent to which police behavior in giving speeding tickets differs from the ticketing pattern of automated cameras. The automated tickets provide an estimate of the population of speeders at a given location, time, and even severity of the violation. The data, obtained from Lafayette, Louisiana, provides a wide range of details concerning characteristics of the violation such as location, date, time of day, legal speed, speed over the limit, day of the week, and also specific details about the ticketed driver. The probability of a ticketed driver being African-American or female is significantly higher when the ticket was given by a police officer in contrast to an automated source, implying that police use gender and race as a determining factor in issuing a speeding ticket. Potential behavioral reasons of this outcome have been discussed.

Gilles Deleuze y la teoría de los signos. De la estética de las intensidades a los regímenes de signos

[Abstract] Style is one of the few terms of cultural analysis which can be fruitfully used in completely different cultural areas: Style theories have been developed for texts (most often literary texts), for art, architecture, music, conversation, thinking, and problem-solving. Less attention was rewarded on styles of athletes, of artisans, of playing a game, and of unremarkable daily activities such as walking or driving. With the help of semiotics, it is possible to look at styles in a different way: namely, to describe them as a type of sign process with certain properties. In his doctoral thesis, the author proposes a model which describes the stylistic sign process in a general way, delimitating stylistic signs from other signs. The model consists of two main parts, corresponding to two sign processes that interact when a style is produced or when it is received: (1) Style is created when choice on the basis of a schema takes place and when regularities in this choice appear. These regularities can be formulated as feature rules. The first sign process describes the inscription of these rules (by a style producer ) and the readout (by a style receiver) out of a realisation. (2) On the basis of the stylistic features used in the first sign process, a stylistic interpretation can be produced (by the style receiver) and also envisaged and taken into account in the style production process (by the style sender)