Adaptive Management: A Paradigm for Remediation of Public Facilities Following a Terrorist Attack

Terrorist actions are aimed at maximizing harm (health, psychological, economical, and political) through the combined physical impacts of the act and fear. Immediate and effective response to a terrorist act is critical to limit human and environmental harm, effectively restore facility function, and maintain public confidence. Though there have been terrorist attacks in public facilities that we have learned from, overall our experiences in restoration of public facilities following a terrorist attack are limited. Restoration of public facilities following a release of a hazardous material is inherently far more complex than in industrial settings and has many unique technical, economic, social, and political challenges. For example, there may be a great need to quickly restore the facility to full operation and allow public access even though it was not designed for easy or rapid restoration, and critical information is needed for quantitative risk assessment and effective restoration must be anticipated to be incomplete and uncertain. Whereas present planning documents have substantial linearity in their organization, the “adaptive management” paradigm provides a constructive parallel paradigm for restoration of public facilities that anticipates and plans for uncertainty, inefficiencies, and stakeholder participation. Adaptive management grew out of the need to manage and restore natural resources in highly complex and changing environments with limited knowledge about causal relationships and responses to restoration actions. Similarities between natural resource management and restoration of a public facility after a terrorist attack suggest that integration of adaptive management principles explicitly into restoration processes will result in substantially enhanced and flexible responses necessary to meet the uncertainties of potential terrorist attacks.     

Individualism vs Collectivism in Different Cultures: A cross-cultural study

In this study, individualism vs collectivism, in line with the work of Triandis in 1985, was assessed in two groups of male and female students, in Egypt and Germany. The results confirm the effect that cultural background has on individualist vs collectivist orientations in both of these cultures for male and female students. Men and women scored higher on individualism in Germany than in Egypt, whereas collectivism scores were higher in Egypt than in Germany. These findings are discussed in terms of general recommendations for intercultural interventions that discourage viewing people solely in terms of group membership, and instead as distinct individuals.     

Constrained allocation problems with single-peaked preferences: An axiomatic analysis

We introduce a new class of problems that contains two existing classes: allocation problems with single-peaked preferences and bankruptcy problems. On this class, we analyze the implications of well-known properties such as Pareto optimality, strategy-proofness, resource-monotonicity, no-envy, equal treatment of equals, and two new properties we introduce, hierarchical no-envy and independence of nonbinding constraints. Unlike earlier literature, we consider rules that allow free-disposability. We present characterizations of a rule we introduce on this domain. We relate this rule to well-known rules on the aforementioned subdomains. Based on this relation, we present a characterization of a well-known bankruptcy rule called the constrained equal awards rule. Received: 22 June 2000/Accepted: 21 March 2002 This paper is based on the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Rochester. I wish to thank my advisor, William Thomson, for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Communication of risk: health hazards from mobile phones

Summary. Possible health hazards from mobile phones arise from the use of the phones themselves and via the base stations that relay signals. Except for an increase in traffic accidents induced by the use of mobile phones in cars the evidence for a health hazard is at most indirect, but it cannot be entirely dismissed; the phones have not been widely used for sufficiently long for direct epidemiological studies to have high sensitivity for detecting any induced incidence of cancer, for example. The background and evidence are briefly reviewed and the steps taken in the UK to make information widely available described.     

Parent and Nonparent Perception of the Multimodal Infant Cry

This study examined whether perceivers can detect infant distress in the visual and acoustic signals within the cry. Parent and nonparent perceivers rated distress in 3‐, 6‐, 8‐, and 12‐month‐old infants' cries that were manipulated to separate facial, vocal, and bodily action. Mean perceiver ratings differed for high‐ and low‐distress cries at each infant age on the basis of facial and vocal action, but not bodily movement. Perceivers rated the cry sound as more distressed and the cry face as less distressed with increasing infant age. Parents rated the cries as less distressed overall than did nonparents. The results suggest that information about distress is available for perceivers in the crying infant's face and voice.     

A “brer rabbit” case for reverse mandated benefits

Reverse mandated benefits is a government-mandated policy that requires employees to provide their employers with benefits that workers would not provide otherwise. Of course, only those benefits would be mandated that are worth more to employers than they cost, as determined by political authorities. My case for such a policy argues that it is at least as sensible as policies mandating that employers provide benefits to their employees that would not be provided otherwise.     

Forced to work and liberated from work

The work-welfare nexus is essential in all social policy regimes. The question is in what situations individuals should be entitled to social welfare benefits and in which situations they should be obliged to work. Social welfare law and administrative practices define mechanisms that separate the deserving poor from people able to work. This article analyses the functions and character of these "separation mechanisms" in Sweden during three periods in history: a) in rural society in the late 19th century; b) in industrial society during the successful years of the Swedish model from World War II until the late 1970s; and c) the present, including the period of welfare retrenchment and reconsideration since the early 1980s. The conclusion is that Swedish social policy has always been strongly work-oriented, but the specific form and content of the work ethic has varied under the influence of different ideologies and handled in different social policy institutions. Under specific conditions the work line has been either generous or restrictive and it has been based on structural attempts to improve the opportunities to work as well as on attempts to strongly pressure the individual to work. The work line of today is seen as an interesting attempt to combine an effort to create good work through improved work conditions and an effort to reinforce elements of work enforcement in the social insurance system.     

Liquid nitrogen treatment of hand and plantar warts.

The author reports on a study of the liquid nitrogen treatment of warts at the Rutgers University Student Health Center. He demonstrates that liquid nitrogen therapy is a safe, effective treatment method, appropriate for use by nurses and other primary providers in a college health setting.