Reversals of preference between compound and simple risks: The role of editing heuristics

A reversal of preference between compound and simple risks was demonstrated in the context of compound gambles with loss elements transparently in common. The role of predecision editing heuristics in this violation of the Invariance Principle was explored in a process-tracing study. Verbal reports showed thatcancellation-by-similarity andamalgamation heuristics were differentially applied to simple and compound risks depending on their similarity structure. It was argued that such heuristics are often useful in simplifying complex choice problems without loss of important information. However, the inappropriate cancellation of elements of compound risks can be maladaptive, and can contribute to a lack of insight into the true nature of these risks.     

Local Voices in an Internal Market: The Case of Community Health Services*

This paper presents findings from a study of contract specification and implementation in community health services (CHS). In this paper, we focus on one aspect of that study: the role of local people in informing the assessment of health needs and in determining the provision of community health services in the context of the NHS “internal market”. The paper is based on fieldwork undertaken in three districts within one region. Analysis of data obtained from these localities suggests that while there appears to be a genuine commitment to the principle of local involvement, ideas about how that involvement can be built into the activities of either purchasers or providers are less transparent.     

Youth voices thrive in Facilitating Leadership in Youth

In inner-city Washington, D.C., lives a generation of young people for whom violence, discrimination, and poverty are a daily reality. Out-of-school-time programming by Facilitating Leadership in Youth provides youth with comprehensive support and services, trusting relationships, and gradually increasing leadership opportunities to elicit positive community change.     

Predicting falls in older women

Falls among older people are common and their occurrence is associated with detrimental effects on physical and psychosocial functioning. However, falls are not an inevitable consequence of ageing and there is growing evidence of effective interventions to prevent them. Accurate screening methods to identify high-risk populations are important if such strategies are to be cost-efficient. Epidemiological studies have identified a diverse group of risk factors for falls of different types in a variety of settings and patient groups. These have proved useful in delineating high-risk groups and have propagated a range of risk assessment tools for falls. Without an accepted taxonomy for the reporting of trials testing these instruments, direct comparison of results has been difficult. In frail older people, 'multi factorial assessment tools' have achieved some utility in the discrimination of fallers from non-fallers, whereas performance-based 'functional mobility assessments' appear to be more suited to predicting falls in groups of more active elders. The predictive value of these measures has been hampered by the complex and dynamic interaction between attendant risk factors and their variable influence in populations of different frailty profiles. Furthermore, current indices used in the prediction of falls are built upon statistical methodologies employing logistic regression, which fail to account for the breadth and depth of these associations in populations at risk of falling. Statistical representations more consistent with the complex modelling required in the design of falls risk assessment trials, such as tree classification techniques, may provide better results in future studies that aim to generate accurate predictors of falls.     

The Effect of Environmental Disclosure Requirements on Willingness to Pay for Residential Properties in Borderlands Community*

Objective. This study examines the effect of environmental information disclosure requirements on future real estate transactions. The setting involves pollution from a concrete products and quarrying site near a largely Hispanic, residential community. Methods. The survey‐based contingent valuation (CV) method is used to test the hypothesis that a split‐sample treatment for an information disclosure requirement with a potentially negative affective quality will reduce the willingness to pay (WTP) of potential buyers for a typical property. Results. Results indicate that the information disclosure treatment reduces WTP, and that this effect is significantly exacerbated when the surveys are conducted in Spanish. Conclusions. In addition to identifying significant reductions in the WTP of potential home buyers, our findings demonstrate the importance of cultural and regional considerations for how information disclosure requirements are conducted in real estate transactions. Future CV studies should also consider Spanish‐language options in applications involving significant Hispanic populations.     

Extending social security protection to the entire population: Problems and issues

Rural, agricultural and informal-sector workers have often beendenied the social security protection to which other economic sectors of populations have had access, and this is particularly true in the case of developing countries. There are also other important groups which have few or no rights to social security protection, such as family, domestic and casual workers. The lack of coverage is disturbing, as witnessed by the frequency with which this topic appears on social security meeting agendas worldwide, and particularly so since these sectors, as a whole form a very large proportion of the populations of many countries. Certainly there are difficulties of a practical nature which inhibit extension of coverage to these groups. So what can social security systems do? What kind of coverage is best suited to the needs of these groups? This article, based on papers presented at an ISSA Regional Meeting for Asia and the Pacific held in Manila in 1992, analyses the issues and makes some suggestions for a strategy relating to extension of coverage.     

Shot at Dawn: Late photography and the anti-war memorial

The military executions of World War One are the subject of Chloe Dewe Mathews’s 2014 photographic series Shot at Dawn. These events—in which hundreds of soldiers were court-martialled and executed for cowardice and desertion—remain controversial, without consensus or established collective narrative. This article charts historic negotiations with the subject but also considers more recent efforts to integrate these proceedings within memorial practice. World War One remembrance activities, whilst diverse, have often emphasised sacrifice, heroism and community. Correspondingly, participation and engagement were core values in the major British World War One centenary arts project, titled 14-18 NOW, from which Shot at Dawn was commissioned. Chloe Dewe Mathews’s contribution to the programme, however, presents a photographic aesthetic of resistance to the principles of inclusivity and remembrance elsewhere embraced by the project. As such, the work challenges the consensual politics of commemoration and—through the practices of late photography, land art and performance pilgrimage—substitutes trauma and forgetfulness for reconciliation and memory.     

Performing the limits of finance

Recent financial turmoil has put emphasis once again on the very meaning and reach of ‘finance’. In doing so, recent financial crises have also provoked questions about the very ‘ends’ of finance: Where are the borders of finance? Given the expansive reach of financial innovation over the past two decades, are there any serious limits to the kinds of practices that can be converted into financial objects? Does the culture of finance (expansive and all encompassing) encounter meaningful interruptions? This paper explores these questions by reviewing a cluster of public-art responses to the 2008 financial crisis mounted by artists critical of the expansive logic of financial abstraction. This paper pays particular attention to the work of Fergal McCarthy and Fred Forest, two public artists who have confronted finance and its rational culture with practices of gameplay, whimsy, and carnival. In doing so, these artists invoke a strategy designed to lay the all-encompassing claims of financial abstraction alongside its own impossibility; alongside performances which undermine the expansive claims of financial abstraction. These are strategies, I conclude, which can interrupt the technocratic discourses which dominate the contemporary cultures of finance; strategies which, in the words of one artist, evoke ‘plausible states of uncertainty’ about our faith in financial abstraction.