An Analysis of Teen-Age Driver Crashes 2005-2008 (pdf)
January 10, 2010 Analytics, Motor Vehicles, Traffic SafetyBrown, D., A. Watkins, CAPS Research Report, Jan. 10, 2010.
This study was conducted at the request of an advocate group that wanted information to assist them in developing public information and education countermeasuers for teen-age drivers. While most past CAPS studies of youth-involved drivers were limited to 16-20 year olds, the advocate group was also interested in 15 year olds, and they were not interested in 20 year olds since their projects were oriented around teen drivers. Several studies were conducted, including CARE IMPACT studies that compared 15, 16-19 and 15-19 year old causal drivers with causal drivers in the older age group.
A Relation Context Oriented Approach to Identify Strong Ties in Social Networks
October 1, 2009 Analytics, Law EnforcementLi Ding, Dana Steil, Brandon Dixon, Allen Parrish, David Brown; Annals of Information Systems, Oct. 2009
Social network graphs have been found to be an extremely effective tool in the identification of potential perpetrators of criminal activity. These graphs can grow extremely large, as illustrated by an example within this paper that contained over 4.9 million nodes and over 211 million edges. Obviously some reduction of these graphs is essential to their being useful. Further, considerable "noise" (false positive relationships) are generated when the graphs are totally comprehensive. This research transformed the original social network into a relational context-oriented edge-dual graph. This was done by evaluating the quality of the connectivity for each edge to obtain a metric to this effect for each edge. By retaining only the strongest edges the overall graph becomes more reliable and more useful in practice.
HIT: A GIS-Based Hotspot Identification Taxonomy
June 1, 2009 Analytics, Motor Vehicles, Traffic SafetySteil, D. and A. Parrish; International Journal of Computers and Their Applications, to appear, 2009.
The authors have developed a Hotspot Identification Taxonomy (HIT) that organizes the various methods for viewing hotspots. Basically they are defined as follow:
- First order - high crash frequency road segments possibly filtered for specific event(s);
- Second order - road segments defined as those that have high event counts specifically related to a countermeasure under consideration (e.g., selective enforcement for the speed event);
- Third order - segments having a high frequency of countermeasure-related events and for which the countermeasure was historically effective.
Analysis of the Wet vs. Dry Counties within Alabama (pdf)
January 31, 2009 Analytics, Health and Human Services, Law EnforcementBrown, D., CAPS Research Report, Jan. 31, 2009.
CARE IMPACT analyses were performed to compare 13 dry counties with 13 wet counties over their various crash characteristics for a recent five-year (2003-2007) time period. The results fall into two logical categories: those that compare the demographics of the counties and those that compare the crash characteristics with regard to alcohol. A few of the nearly 200 attribute comparisons are presented in this report in order to guide the future direction of the research project.
Alcohol Age Crash Analysis – Projections of the Effect of Lowering the Legal Drinking Age in Alabama (pdf)
August 16, 2008 Analytics, Health and Human Services, Law EnforcementBrown, D., CAPS Research Report, Aug. 16, 2008.
This report, and the Op Ed that follows it, is in response to a number of prominent college presidents who have recently come out in favor of lowering the drinking age to 18 years. The goal of the report is to project how many additional fatalities will be caused in Alabama should the law be change in Alabama.