A method for considering the acceptability of novel biotechnologies for the control of brushtail possums

Abstract

Public acceptance and regulatory approval of biotechnologies is increasingly dependent on consideration of cultural, ethical and spiritual effects, and the opportunity for community involvement. The objective of this study was to articulate a means for researchers to identify relevant issues during the development of the technologies. It encompassed the substantive issues, such as safety, the provision of credible and adequate public information, and the opportunity for citizens, as well as stakeholders, to give society's informed consent. In this initial analysis of novel toxins and infertility or sterility-inducing agents being developed to manage pest populations of brushtail possums, several issues were identified. They included the risk associated with fertility controls entering the food chain, the severity of animal welfare compromise with toxins, and the adequacy of terminology used to describe pest control agents. This approach provides a means for researchers to acknowledge the issues contributing to public acceptance of biotechnologies during their development and with the involvement of those with interests in biotechnology.     

Foreign aid,public investment,and the informal economy

This paper examines the absorption of foreign aid in the presence of formal and informal production. Calibrating a two-sector open economy model to 67 aid-recipient countries for 1990–2019, we show that an increase in foreign aid drives resources into the informal sector, and away from the formal sector. With untied aid, the expansion of the informal sector can lead to an economic contraction through the Dutch Disease effect. An economic expansion with an increase in the share of formal production can be attained by re-allocating existing aid to public investment rather than an increase in the aggregate level of aid.     

Still connecting the dots: An investigation into infants' attentional bias to threat using an eye-tracking task

An attentional bias toward threat has been theorized to be a normative aspect of infants' threat and safety learning, and an indicator of risk for internalizing psychopathology in older populations. To date, only four studies have examined this bias using the dot-probe task in infancy and the findings are mixed. We extended the literature by examining patterns of attention to threat in a culturally and linguistically diverse sample of infants aged 5–11 months old (N = 151) using all measures previously employed in the infant dot-probe literature. Given that an attentional bias toward threat is associated with higher risk of developing anxiety disorders later in life, we also examined how negative affect—an early correlate of later anxiety disorders—is related to attentional bias toward threat in infancy. This study was the first to use a consistent measure of negative affect across the whole sample. An eye-tracking dot-probe task was used to examine attentional bias toward threat (i.e., angry faces) relative to positive (i.e., happy faces) stimuli. Results showed that an attention bias to threat was not characteristic of infants at this age, and negative affect did not moderate the putative relationship between attention and emotional faces (angry, happy). These findings therefore suggest that attention biases to socio-emotional threat may not have emerged by 11 months old.     

Standards Update: Some Interesting XML Standards

Abstract

This article will briefly examine a few XML-based standards that have been developed by the Library of Congress (with input and help from various interested partners). These standards attempt to take traditional library concepts and frameworks and give them expression using modern technology. The standards that will be examined are MODS, METS, MADS, and MIX. Some of the text has been taken from the various Library of Congress Web pages for the standards being described. The Web page URLs are noted at the end of each section.     

The effects of managerial decision making behaviour and order book size on workload control system implementation in Make-To-Order companies

Insufficient attention has been paid to behavioural influences on the implementation of the ‘Workload Control’ (WLC) concept – a Production Planning and Control (PPC) approach for small and medium sized Make-To-Order companies – and there is an implicit assumption that managers are rationalistic in their decision-making. This paper analyses the effects of both managerial decision-making behaviour and the size of a company’s order book, affecting the number of decisions that have to be made, on two case study implementations of a WLC system. The Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model from the Naturalistic Decision-Making literature is used to unpack the first case where implementation failed. This highlighted a misalignment between how the company’s owner-manager initially made operational decisions and how a rationalistic WLC system functions. But the company is studied over six years, allowing us to show how the owner-manager was forced to transition from the RPD model to a more rationalistic approach to PPC as the size of the order book increased. A second case study is then briefly presented in which WLC system implementation was successful; the RPD model was not strongly evident and the size of the order book was greater to begin with. The paper helps to understand the decision-making behaviour of managers in small companies and how it may conflict or be misaligned with the rationalistic assumptions underpinning the WLC concept. This provides a possible explanation for why few successful implementations of the concept have been presented in literature.     

The Impact of a Task Clarification and Feedback Intervention on Restaurant Service Quality

Customer service is a key aspect of restaurant success, as performance has shown a reliable positive relationship with customer retention. However, waitstaff performance may deteriorate, as income from gratuities is often unrelated to service quality. The present study investigated the effectiveness of an intervention consisting of task clarification and task-specific feedback on restaurant service tasks and observed the relationship between task completion and gratuities. Three adult women servers participated during their regular working shifts at a local dine-in restaurant. Initially customer service task completion was low (36% on average across participants). Performance increased immediately following the introduction of the intervention, and all participants maintained 87.5%–100% task completion. Correlational analyses found that gratuities were unrelated to performance and may thus pose a problem for performance maintenance. Implications relating to feedback and payment schedules are discussed.     

Contract Pricing in Consumer Credit Markets

We analyze subprime consumer lending and the role played by down payment requirements in screening high‐risk borrowers and limiting defaults. To do this, we develop an empirical model of the demand for financed purchases that incorporates both adverse selection and repayment incentives. We estimate the model using detailed transaction‐level data on subprime auto loans. We show how different elements of loan contracts affect the quality of the borrower pool and subsequent loan performance. We also evaluate the returns to credit scoring that allows sellers to customize financing terms to individual applicants. Our approach shows how standard econometric tools for analyzing demand and supply under imperfect competition extend to settings in which firms care about the identity of their customers and their postpurchase behavior.     

On the functional form of temporal discounting: An optimized adaptive test

The tendency to discount the value of future rewards has become one of the best-studied constructs in the behavioral sciences. Although hyperbolic discounting remains the dominant quantitative characterization of this phenomenon, a variety of models have been proposed and consensus around the one that most accurately describes behavior has been elusive. To help bring some clarity to this issue, we propose an Adaptive Design Optimization (ADO) method for fitting and comparing models of temporal discounting. We then conduct an ADO experiment aimed at discriminating among six popular models of temporal discounting. Rather than supporting a single underlying model, our results show that each model is inadequate in some way to describe the full range of behavior exhibited across subjects. The precision of results provided by ADO further identify specific properties of models, such as accommodating both increasing and decreasing impatience, that are mandatory to describe temporal discounting broadly.