A Process for Incorporating Comparative Risk into Environmental Policymaking in Louisiana

The goal of Louisiana's 1990–1991 comparative risk project, also called the Louisiana Environmental Action Plan (LEAP), was to incorporate risk assessment into state environmental planning and policymaking. Scientists, government officials, and citizens were brought together to estimate the relative risk to human health, natural resources, and quality of life posed by 33 selected environmental issues. The issues were then ranked according to their relative estimated risks. It was hoped that this ranking of "comparative risks" would enable state policymakers to target the most important environmental problems and allocate scarce public resources more rationally and efficiently. As a result of the project, the governor issued an Executive Order forming a permanent Public Advisory Committee to continue this type of comparative risk assessment in Louisiana.     

Teaching Teachers to Teach Corporate Governance Differently

Journal of Management and Governance -     

A comparative approach to assessing the quality of life of intercollegiate athletes

Although concerns have frequently been raised recently regarding the quality of life of intercollegiate athletes, information is seldom available on which college and university administrators can base policy decisions. Particularly lacking are studies that provide administrators with assessments of their own athletics programs relative to athletics programs at other institutions. We describe here a method we used in conducting a comparative evaluation of the status of student-athletes at a large public university, involving comparisons of student-athletes at this university to student-athletes at a subset of the institutions that participated in the 1987–88 National Study of Intercollegiate Athletes. By utilizing existing data sets to construct comparison samples, relative assessments of the status of student-athletes at a given institution can be performed without the excessive costs of gathering data on student-athletes at comparison institutions. Techniques employed in data collection and analysis are discussed as well as the format of the report in which the findings of the study were presented.     

The psychodynamically oriented clinical social worker as sports consultant: A preliminary report

This paper explores an unusual and innovative application of psychodynamically oriented clinical social work method to the sports area. The coach of a national Olympics team requested a clinical consultation because he suspected that there might be psychosocial reasons why a certain number of world class atheletes he was coaching were not performing up to their full potential.     

EVALUATING CHANGES IN THE DISTRIBUTION OF CAPITAL WEALTH

A small-scale general equilibrium model in which the distribution of capital wealth is a key parameter is employed to examine the potential economic consequences of greater capital wealth equality. Every performance indicator examined – aggregate income, consumption equality, social welfare in the sum-of-utilities sense, and aggregate saving –is improved by greater capital wealth equality. However, the bottom-line social welfare gain, relative to the present high-inequality situation – even from the maximum achievable level of complete equality in capital wealth distribution – would be numerically rather modest.     

Modelling map positional error to infer true feature location

The authors consider the issue of map positional error, or the difference between location as represented in a spatial database (i.e., a map) and the corresponding unobservable true location. They propose a fully model‐based approach that incorporates aspects of the map registration process commonly performed by users of geographic informations systems, including rubber‐sheeting. They explain how estimates of positional error can be obtained, hence estimates of true location. They show that with multiple maps of varying accuracy along with ground truthing data, suitable model averaging offers a strategy for using all of the maps to learn about true location.     

EVALUATION OF AN ACADEMIC FAMILY THERAPY TRAINING PROGRAM: CHANGES IN TRAINEES' RELATIONSHIP AND INTERVENTION SKILLS

Students in an academic training program were assessed for changes in their relationship and intervention skills following completion of the program. Positive improvements were found on some measures but not all. Additionally, trainee variables such as previous clinical experience. gender, age, marital stauts and scores on standardized admission tests were examined in relation to trainees' skills changes. Trainee characteristics were unrelated to changes in intervention skills. However, a number of relationships were found between trainee characteristics and changes in relationship skills.     

Analytical approximations for iterated bootstrap confidence intervals

Standard algorithms for the construction of iterated bootstrap confidence intervals are computationally very demanding, requiring nested levels of bootstrap resampling. We propose an alternative approach to constructing double bootstrap confidence intervals that involves replacing the inner level of resampling by an analytical approximation. This approximation is based on saddlepoint methods and a tail probability approximation of DiCiccio and Martin (1991). Our technique significantly reduces the computational expense of iterated bootstrap calculations. A formal algorithm for the construction of our approximate iterated bootstrap confidence intervals is presented, and some crucial practical issues arising in its implementation are discussed. Our procedure is illustrated in the case of constructing confidence intervals for ratios of means using both real and simulated data. We repeat an experiment of Schenker (1985) involving the construction of bootstrap confidence intervals for a variance and demonstrate that our technique makes feasible the construction of accurate bootstrap confidence intervals in that context. Finally, we investigate the use of our technique in a more complex setting, that of constructing confidence intervals for a correlation coefficient.