Sector Approaches,Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Poverty Reduction

This article examines the relationship between sector‐wide approaches (SWAps), sustainable livelihoods approaches (SLAs) and rural poverty reduction. The authors suggest that SLAs provide one means by which SWAps can focus more effectively on poverty reduction, whilst SWAps provide an entry point via which government and donor initiatives can be made supportive of the livelihoods of the poor. The article puts forward guidelines indicating the core issues upon which donors should focus to enhance the poverty impact of sector‐wide approaches.     

Processing Culture: Cognition,Ontology, and the News Media1

This article discusses how people cognitively engage with the contemporary, mainstream, U.S. news in ways that yield ontological services. It treats the news as both a system of signs and a cultural object, and assesses how people mentally intercept, negotiate, and use the news in ways that foster a sense of control and order over an unstable and unpredictable social world (i.e., “ontological security”) ( Giddens, 1991 ). Based on interview data, it argues that through criticisms, consumption orientations, lay theorizing, and “ignorant othering,” all orbiting and drawing from the contemporary, mainstream, U.S. news, people cognitively sift through and simplify a broader frenzied social environment. In so doing, they are able to mentally establish at minimum a sense of rudimentary understanding and at most a sense of trusted certainty of what is real and true of the world outside their immediate social circles.     

A short-term, quasi-experimental evaluation of D.A.R.E.'s revised elementary school curriculum

We present the short-term results of a quasi-experimental evaluation of the revised D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) curriculum. Study outcomes examined were D.A.R.E.'s effects on three substances, namely students' lifetime and 30-day use of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana, as well as their school attendance and academic performance. The study comprised students in 17 urban schools, each of which served as its own control; 5th graders in the 2006-2007 school year constituted the comparison group (n = 1490), and those enrolled as 5th graders in the 2007-2008 school year constituted the intervention group (n= 1450). We found no intervention effect on students' substance use for any of the substance use outcomes assessed. We did find that students were more likely to attend school on days they received D.A.R.E. lessons and that students in the intervention group were more likely to have been suspended. Study findings provide little support for the implementation and dissemination of the revised D.A.R.E. curriculum.     

The Value of Environmental Information without Control of Subsequent Decisions

The standard value of information approach of decision analysis assumes that the individual or agency that collects the information is also in control of the subsequent decisions based on the information. We refer to this situation as the “value of information with control (VOI‐C).” This paradigm leads to powerful results, for example, that the value of information cannot be negative and that it is zero, when the information cannot change subsequent decisions. In many real world situations, however, the agency collecting the information is different from the one that makes the decision on the basis of that information. For example, an environmental research group may contemplate to fund a study that can affect an environmental policy decision that is made by a regulatory organization. In this two‐agency formulation, the information‐acquiring agency has to decide, whether an investment in research is worthwhile, while not being in control of the subsequent decision. We refer to this situation as “value of information without control (VOI‐NC).” In this article, we present a framework for the VOI‐NC and illustrate it with an example of a specific problem of determining the value of a research program on the health effects of power‐frequency electromagnetic fields. We first compare the VOI‐C approach with the VOI‐NC approach. We show that the VOI‐NC can be negative, but that with high‐quality research (low probabilities of errors of type I and II) it is positive. We also demonstrate, both in the example and in more general mathematical terms, that the VOI‐NC for environmental studies breaks down into a sum of the VOI‐NC due to the possible reduction of environmental impacts and the VOI‐NC due to the reduction of policy costs, with each component being positive for low environmental impacts and high‐quality research. Interesting results include that the environmental and cost components of the VOI‐NC move in opposite directions as a function of the probability of environmental impacts and that VOI‐NC can be positive, even though the probability of environmental impacts is zero or one.     

A Note on the Aggregation of Event Probabilities

In this article, multiple forecasts given as probabilities of events are aggregated using two assumptions: calibration and conditional independence. The forecasts are treated as data and the aggregation is based on Bayes's theorem. A measure of discrimination is given and the behavior of the aggregated posterior probability is examined as the number of forecasters grows without bound. The work is motivated by recent research efforts employing large numbers of individual forecasts.