In his 1903 monograph Principles of Mathematics Bertrand Russell formulated a theory which interpreted a proposition expressed by a sentence as a unitary bond of referents (meanings) of its parts. In the paper I argue that the problem he faced in his attempt to define the unity of proposition is a special case of a wider philosophical problem of the relation between language and the world. Mentioned for the first time by Plato in Parmenides and then repeated by Aristotle in Metaphysics, infinite regress formulated as ʻthe third man argument’ presented a problem for Francis Bradley, Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. It was reformulated in syntactic terms by Hans Reichenbach and used by Donald Davidson as an argument against referential semantics. The conclusion of the paper is as follows: ʻthe third man argument’ is a result of projecting syntactic structures of language on metaphysically conceived referential semantics. It does not undermine ontology conceived as an investigation of possible beings.

The problem of poor quality of traffic accident data assembled in national databases has been addressed in European project InDeV. Vulnerable road users (pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and moped riders) are especially affected by underreporting of accidents and misreporting of injury severity. Analyses of data from the European CARE database shows differences between countries in accident number trends as well as in fatality and injury rates which are difficult to explain. A survey of InDeV project partners from 7 EU countries helped to identify differences in their countries in accident and injury definitions as well as in reporting and data checking procedures. Measures to improve the quality of accident data are proposed such as including pedestrian falls in accident statistics, precisely defining minimum injury and combining police accident records with hospital data.

Buckling of the stiffened flange of a thin-walled member is reduced to the buckling analysis of the cantilever plate, elastically restrained against rotation, with the free edge stiffener, which is susceptible to deflection.Longitudinal stress variation is taken into account using a linear function and a 2nd degree parabola. Deflection functions for the plate and the stiffener, adopted in the study, made it possible to model boundary conditions and different buckling modes at the occurrence of longitudinal stress variation. Graphs of buckling coefficients are determined for different load distributions as a function of the elastic restraint coefficient and geometric details of the stiffener. Exemplary buckling modes are presented.