GM Foods and the Misperception of Risk Perception

Public opposition to genetically modified (GM) food and crops is widely interpreted as the result of the public's misperception of the risks. With scientific assessment pointing to no unique risks from GM crops and foods, a strategy of accurate risk communication from trusted sources has been advocated. This is based on the assumption that the benefits of GM crops and foods are self-evident. Informed by the interpretation of some qualitative interviews with lay people, we use data from the Eurobarometer survey on biotechnology to explore the hypothesis that it is not so much the perception of risks as the absence of benefits that is the basis of the widespread rejection of GM foods and crops by the European public. Some respondents perceive both risks and benefits, and may be trading off these attributes along the lines of a rational choice model. However, for others, one attribute-benefit-appears to dominate their judgments: the lexicographic heuristic. For these respondents, their perception of risk is of limited importance in the formation of attitudes toward GM food and crops. The implication is that the absence of perceived benefits from GM foods and crops calls into question the relevance of risk communication strategies for bringing about change in public opinion.     

Missing item imputation for quality-of-life instruments with application to asthma quality-of-life questionnaires

There has been increasing use of quality-of-life (QoL) instruments in drug development. Missing item values often occur in QoL data. A common approach to solve this problem is to impute the missing values before scoring. Several imputation procedures, such as imputing with the most correlated item and imputing with a row/column model or an item response model, have been proposed. We examine these procedures using data from two clinical trials, in which the original asthma quality-of-life questionnaire (AQLQ) and the miniAQLQ were used. We propose two modifications to existing procedures: truncating the imputed values to eliminate outliers and using the proportional odds model as the item response model for imputation. We also propose a novel imputation method based on a semi-parametric beta regression so that the imputed value is always in the correct range and illustrate how this approach can easily be implemented in commonly used statistical software. To compare these approaches, we deleted 5% of item values in the data according to three different missingness mechanisms, imputed them using these approaches and compared the imputed values with the true values. Our comparison showed that the row/column-model-based imputation with truncation generally performed better, whereas our new approach had better performance under a number scenarios.     

Emotional Climate in a European Problem Area: East Berlin and West Berlin Three Years After Reunification

In autumn of 1992, three years after the unification of Germany, during a period of violent attacks against foreigners, 120 students from East Berlin and West Berlin and 20 foreign students living in West Berlin answered the Emotional Climate Questionnaire developed by de Rivera and Fernandez-Dols. Foreign respondents expressed a positive attitude toward their government/state and believed in prosocial behavior to a greater extent than respondents from East Berlin and West Berlin. Whereas East Berlin students disagreed only somewhat with statements in favor of selfishness and egoism, West Berlin students strongly disagreed with them. We attribute the differences that were found in the answers of the foreign students to their national values. In addition, we regard the differences between the emotional climates of East Berlin and West Berlin as reflecting a climate of instability among East Berliners. We interpreted selfishness as a kind of polarized behavior indicating a climate of instability. A factor analysis revealed 5 factors of an emotional climate: Nation's Future, Just World, Reactive Egoism, Scepticism, and Basic Egoism. The concept of emotional climate is discussed on the basis of the current data.     

Is statistics too difficult?

By means of several historical examples, it is shown that it does not appear to be easy to build bridges between rigorous mathematics and reasonable data-analytic procedures for scientific measurements. After mentioning both some positive and some negative aspects of statistics, a formal framework for statistics is presented which contains the concept formation, derivation of results and interpretation of mathematical statistics as three essential steps. The difficulties especially of interpretation are shown for examples in several areas of statistics, such as asymptotics and robustness. Some problems of statistics in two subject-matter sciences are discussed, and a summary and outlook are given.     

T-CIA: investigating T cells in aging

Over the past few decades it has become clear that the immune system and especially T cells are instrumental in achieving a long and healthy life. The European Union (EU) previously supported several pan-European research projects coordinated from Tuebingen, Germany, aimed at providing a better understanding of immunosenescence. For 3 years, until the end of 2005, the EU is supporting a project called T cells in aging (T-CIA). The aim of T-CIA is to spy out and combine current efforts in immunology, molecular biology, and gerontology for a better understanding of why the elderly often have dysregulated immune responses and are more susceptible to infections and cancer.     

SOCIAL JUSTICE IMPLICATIONS OF FUNDING THE PROVISION OF ADULT ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

National economic salvation through improved productivity and quality is surely more likely when English language skills of Non-English Speaking Background settlers are maximised. This article argues however, that the recent federal user-pays scheme for funding adult ESL will impose considerable hardship on many prospective and newly-arrived settlers. The paper briefly surveys the directions and scope of existing and proposed funding schemes; identifies some of the sociological objections to the user-pays scheme; and then advances an alternative approach that more strictly upholds principles of social justice.     

A MACROECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF ENERGY SUBSIDIES IN A SMALL OPEN ECONOMY

We construct a dynamic model of a small open economy to analyze the effects of large energy subsidies. The model includes domestic energy production and consumption, trade in energy at world market prices, as well as private and public sector production. The model is calibrated to Egypt and used to study reforms such as reductions in energy subsidies with corresponding reductions in various tax instruments or increases in infrastructure investment. We calculate the new steady states, transition paths to the new steady state, and the size of the associated welfare losses or gains. Our main results for a 15% cut in energy subsidies are: (1) Steady state gross domestic product drops in most of our experiments as less energy is used in production. (2) Steady state consumption rises in most of our experiments. (3) Welfare can rise by as much as 0.6% in consumption equivalent terms. (4) The largest gains in terms of output and of welfare can be obtained when savings from energy subsidy cuts are used to fund additional infrastructure investment. (JEL E21, E63, H55, J26, J45)     

Use of visitors’ perception in urban reserves in the Buenos Aires metropolis

Urban nature reserves (UR’s) fulfill unique functions for society and are irreplaceable, satisfying human needs particularly in urban and periurban areas. The aim of this paper was to use a perception based approach to analyze whether the urban nature reserves in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, Argentina were principally used by visitors according to their main conservation mission. Five hundred written surveys designed to evaluate users’ profile and their perceptions of the selected reserves were conducted during the summer of 2009 to visitors selected at random. Collected data was analyzed by multivariate analyses. The results discriminated two groups (1 and 2) of reserves showing that people chose to visit a nature reserve for two contrasting motivations: the contemplation of nature (group 1) or active recreation (group 2). Both groups of reserves, the respondents participated in environmental programs. All respondents knew about plants whereas knowledge of the fauna was related to the visitors’ level of education. In all reserves respondents considered that nature enhance the quality of human life in the first place, and valued biodiversity en second place. Visitors in group 1 considered nature as very important, while respondents in group 2 thought that is important as a place for having fun. Our findings can potentially assist administrators to understand better how visitors perceive the reserves.     

The problem of being a paradigm: the emergence of neural stem cells as example for “Kuhnian” revolution in biology or misconception of the scientific community?

In a thought experiment we want to test how the emergence of adult neural stem cells could constitute an example for a scientific revolution in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. In his major work, “The structure of scientific revolutions, 3rd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago” (Kuhn 1996), the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, states that scientific progress is not a cumulative process, but new theories appear by a rather revolutionary sequence of events. Kuhn built his theory on landmark events taken from chemistry and physics, lacking examples from biology. Beginning with Ramon y Cajal’s famous quote, “no new neurons after birth”, from the early years of the twentieth century, and Reynolds and Weiss’s conflicting finding in 1992 of adult neural stem cells giving rise to new neurons, we will test how the finding of neural stem cells in the adult brain matches with Kuhn’s theory. The pivotal problem of defining a paradigm will be our main focus, since the emergence of adult neural stem cells has been acclaimed by the scientific community as the rebuttal of Ramon y Cajal’s paradigm.     

Relative Commodity Prices and Cointegration

The Prebisch–Singer hypothesis of a secular decline in the relative price of primary commodities is reassessed, on the basis of recently available time series data, for 1900–1986. Special attention is given to adequate dynamic modeling of price fluctuations. Primary and manufactured-goods prices are found to be cointegrated. The hypothesis of stationarity for the long-run relative-price movements cannot be rejected. The empirical evidence does not support the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis.