Will‐making prevalence and patterns in Australia: keeping it in the family

This article provides evidence of the prevalence of wills and the principles underpinning the intended distribution of estates in Australia. Intentions around wealth transfers and the social norms that underpin them occur in the context of predicted extensive intergenerational transfers from the ageing baby boomer generation, policies of self provision and user pays for care in old age, broader views on what constitutes ‘family’, the increased importance of the not‐for‐profit sector in the delivery of services, and the related need for philanthropy. A national telephone survey conducted in 2012 with 2,405 respondents aged 18 and over shows that wills are predominantly used to distribute assets to partners and/or equally to immediate descendants. There is little evidence that will makers are recognising a wider group of relationships, obligations and entitlements outside the traditional nuclear family, or that wills are being replaced by other mechanisms of wealth transfer. Only a minority consider bequests to charities as important. These findings reflect current social norms about entitlements to ‘family’ money, a narrow view of what and who constitutes ‘family‘, limited obligation for testators to recompense individuals or organisations for care and support provided, and limited commitment to charitable organisations and civil society.     

Relations Between Alphabetized Name Order and Nomination Counts in Peer Nomination Measures

Peer nominations, a central method for measuring peer relationships in developmental research, typically involve asking children or adolescents to choose peers who fit various criteria from an alphabetized roster of classmates or grade‐mates. Although such measures have been used for decades, very little research has investigated the effects of alphabetical name order on the number of nominations received by peers. This study collected peer nominations for 20 items among 607 eighth grade participants in two schools. Regression analyses showed that earlier name order significantly predicted higher nomination counts for eight of the items, and explained over 5 percent of the variance in four affective variables (friendship, acceptance, acquaintanceship, and received liking). Across variables, name order effects were negatively correlated with internal reliability of nominations, implying that order effects may be related to the consensus of the peer group. Name order also had a minimal effect on inter‐correlations among a subset of variables. Implications and concrete recommendations for controlling and reducing name order effects in future research are discussed.     

Indiana bat roosting behavior differs between urban and rural landscapes

Urban Ecosystems - Urbanization may negatively affect forest obligate bat species. We compared the roosting behavior of federally endangered Indiana bats (Myotis sodalis) in a fragmented site,...     

On the total outer-connected domination in graphs

A set S of vertices of a graph G is a total outer-connected dominating set if every vertex in V(G) is adjacent to some vertex in S and the subgraph induced by V?S is connected. The total outer-connected domination number γ _toc (G) is the minimum size of such a set. We give some properties and bounds for γ _toc in general graphs and in trees. For graphs of order n, diameter 2 and minimum degree at least 3, we show that $\gamma_{toc}(G)\le \frac{2n-2}{3}$ and we determine the extremal graphs.     

Incentives in a Stage‐Gate Process

Many large organizations use a stage‐gate process to manage new product development projects. In a typical stage‐gate process project managers learn about potential ideas from research and exert effort in development while senior executives make intervening go/no‐go decisions. This decentralized decision making results in an agency problem because the idea quality in early stages is unknown to the executive and the project manager must exert unobservable development effort in later stages. In light of these challenges, how should the firm structure incentives to ensure that project managers reveal relevant information and invest the appropriate effort to create value? In this study, we develop a model of adverse selection in research and moral hazard in development with a go/no‐go decision at the intervening gate. Our results show that the principal's uncertainty regarding early‐stage idea quality—a term we refer to as idea risk—alters the effect of late‐stage development risk. The presence of idea risk can alter the incentives offered to the agent and may lead the principal to reject projects that otherwise seem favorable in terms of positive net present value. A simulation of early‐stage ideas, found through search on a complex landscape, shows that the firm can mitigate the negative effects of idea risk by encouraging breadth of search and high tolerance for failure.     

A New Era in Governmental Reform: Realizing Community

The good government models of the 1990s realized a focus that included reinventing, reengineer-ing, rethinking, quality, empowerment, and devolution of the organization. These organizational reform ideologies sought to increase involvement, improve productivity, manage performance, and drive results. One essential key that has been disregarded in these government models is the involvement of community in the decision-making process. This paper points to the importance of involving and empowering citizens in the decision-making process, particularly in regard to community justice based on the notion of restorative justice system. Community justice, a modern day reform movement with international proportions, is based on the principles of empowering community, repairing harm caused by a crime or disturbance, and reducing risk to the community.     

Robustness of Risk Maps and Survey Networks to Knowledge Gaps About a New Invasive Pest

In pest risk assessment it is frequently necessary to make management decisions regarding emerging threats under severe uncertainty. Although risk maps provide useful decision support for invasive alien species, they rarely address knowledge gaps associated with the underlying risk model or how they may change the risk estimates. Failure to recognize uncertainty leads to risk‐ignorant decisions and miscalculation of expected impacts as well as the costs required to minimize these impacts. Here we use the information gap concept to evaluate the robustness of risk maps to uncertainties in key assumptions about an invading organism. We generate risk maps with a spatial model of invasion that simulates potential entries of an invasive pest via international marine shipments, their spread through a landscape, and establishment on a susceptible host. In particular, we focus on the question of how much uncertainty in risk model assumptions can be tolerated before the risk map loses its value. We outline this approach with an example of a forest pest recently detected in North America, Sirex noctilio Fabricius. The results provide a spatial representation of the robustness of predictions of S. noctilio invasion risk to uncertainty and show major geographic hotspots where the consideration of uncertainty in model parameters may change management decisions about a new invasive pest. We then illustrate how the dependency between the extent of uncertainties and the degree of robustness of a risk map can be used to select a surveillance network design that is most robust to knowledge gaps about the pest.     

Risk Estimation and Value-of-Information Analysis for Three Proposed Genetic Screening Programs for Chronic Beryllium Disease Prevention

Genetic differences (polymorphisms) among members of a population are thought to influence susceptibility to various environmental exposures. In practice, however, this information is rarely incorporated into quantitative risk assessment and risk management. We describe an analytic framework for predicting the risk reduction and value-of-information (VOI) resulting from specific risk management applications of genetic biomarkers, and we apply the framework to the example of occupational chronic beryllium disease (CBD), an immune-mediated pulmonary granulomatous disease. One described Human Leukocyte Antigen gene variant, HLA-DP beta 1*0201, contains a substitution of glutamate for lysine at position 69 that appears to have high sensitivity (approximately 94%) but low specificity (approximately 70%) with respect to CBD among individuals occupationally exposed to respirable beryllium. The expected postintervention CBD prevalence rates for using the genetic variant (1) as a required job placement screen, (2) as a medical screen for semiannual in place of annual lymphocyte proliferation testing, or (3) as a voluntary job placement screen are 0.08%, 0.8%, and 0.6%, respectively, in a hypothetical cohort with 1% baseline CBD prevalence. VOI analysis is used to examine the reduction in total social cost, calculated as the net value of disease reduction and financial expenditures, expected for proposed CBD intervention programs based on the genetic susceptibility test. For the example cohort, the expected net VOI per beryllium worker for genetically based testing and intervention is $13,000, $1,800, and $5,100, respectively, based on a health valuation of $1.45 million per CBD case avoided. VOI results for alternative CBD evaluations are also presented. Despite large parameter uncertainty, probabilistic analysis predicts generally positive utility for each of the three evaluated programs when avoidance of a CBD case is valued at $1 million or higher. Although the utility of a proposed risk management program may be evaluated solely in terms of risk reduction and financial costs, decisions about genetic testing and program implementation must also consider serious social, legal, and ethical factors.