The Risk Perception Paradox—Implications for Governance and Communication of Natural Hazards

This article reviews the main insights from selected literature on risk perception, particularly in connection with natural hazards. It includes numerous case studies on perception and social behavior dealing with floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, wild fires, and landslides. The review reveals that personal experience of a natural hazard and trust—or lack of trust—in authorities and experts have the most substantial impact on risk perception. Cultural and individual factors such as media coverage, age, gender, education, income, social status, and others do not play such an important role but act as mediators or amplifiers of the main causal connections between experience, trust, perception, and preparedness to take protective actions. When analyzing the factors of experience and trust on risk perception and on the likeliness of individuals to take preparedness action, the review found that a risk perception paradox exists in that it is assumed that high risk perception will lead to personal preparedness and, in the next step, to risk mitigation behavior. However, this is not necessarily true. In fact, the opposite can occur if individuals with high risk perception still choose not to personally prepare themselves in the face of a natural hazard. Therefore, based on the results of the review, this article offers three explanations suggesting why this paradox might occur. These findings have implications for future risk governance and communication as well as for the willingness of individuals to invest in risk preparedness or risk mitigation actions.     

我国东北工业发展60年:回顾与展望

东北地区工业经历了60年大规模的建设、改造和振兴,积累了许多可资借鉴的经验.从一定意义上说,没有东北老工业基地的贡献,就不会有共和国的快速发展和改革开放的成就.目前东北工业发展仍然面临着诸多的问题和困难,但总体上看,有利条件多于不利因素,特别是国家实施老工业基地振兴战略以来,东北地区经济实力和综合能力增强;国家扩大内需的政策和十大产业振兴规划,与东北工业结构吻合度高,从而必将给东北地区带来新的发展机会,并产生强劲的推动力.     

Evaluating Item Discrimination Power of WHOQOL-BREF from an Item Response Model Perspectives

Quality of life (QOL) has become an important component of health. By using the methodology of psychometric theory, we examine the item properties of the WHOQOL-BRIEF. Samejima’s graded response model with natural metrics of the logistic response function was fitted. The results showed items with negative natures were less discriminating. Items written in a specific way were more suitable to assess certain subgroups. The national items showed variation in discriminatory power. Questions measuring objective and specific issues performed worse than items assessing general aspects of the QOL.     

Model based labeling for mixture models

Label switching is one of the fundamental problems for Bayesian mixture model analysis. Due to the permutation invariance of the mixture posterior, we can consider that the posterior of a m-component mixture model is a mixture distribution with m! symmetric components and therefore the object of labeling is to recover one of the components. In order to do labeling, we propose to first fit a symmetric m!-component mixture model to the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samples and then choose the label for each sample by maximizing the corresponding classification probabilities, which are the probabilities of all possible labels for each sample. Both parametric and semi-parametric ways are proposed to fit the symmetric mixture model for the posterior. Compared to the existing labeling methods, our proposed method aims to approximate the posterior directly and provides the labeling probabilities for all possible labels and thus has a model explanation and theoretical support. In addition, we introduce a situation in which the “ideally” labeled samples are available and thus can be used to compare different labeling methods. We demonstrate the success of our new method in dealing with the label switching problem using two examples.     

建构主义对国际关系理论发展的影响

建构主义作为一种后现代理论,研究主体与客体的关系,其思想渊源可追溯到古希腊.建构主义的基本观点是:物质客观存在,但物质的意义是观念赋予的.建构主义理论的嵌入动摇了国际关系理论的逻辑起点,引发人们对国际关系理论的哲学思考.观念至上与物质至上两种主义之争有助于国际关系理论的全面发展.     

近年来中国近代社会演迁研究的学术反思

近30年来,关于中国近代社会演迁问题的学术研究经历了从西方中心论到中国中心的转变,随之而来的争论是中国近代社会演迁的动力与机制是否来源于传统时代向近代的转移?在社会演迁过程中官方与民间各自发挥了怎样的作用?是官方主导还是民间主导?传统社会形成的地域性在近代社会演迁中是否仍起作用?对近年来关于上述问题研究的简述与反思必将有助于研究的深化。     

基层司法的路径探索——论"陈燕萍工作法"中的"法官能动"

由于我国基层社会本身具有的强烈的"乡土性"与"本土性"特征,现代法律制度下的基层司法必须以更加灵活的方式将现代法律理念适用于乡土社会的法律纠纷,基层司法也因此具有了与规范式司法相差甚远的"乡土特征"."陈燕萍工作法"根据基层司法的实践情况,总结出个案实体优先、法官主动调查等经验,其核心在于基层法官在司法过程中的"适度能动",对我国当前基层司法具有重要的现实指导意义.