Development and Consideration of Global Policies for Managing the Future Risks of Poliovirus Outbreaks: Insights and Lessons Learned Through Modeling

The success of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative promises to bring large benefits, including sustained improvements in quality of life (i.e., cases of paralytic disease and deaths avoided) and costs saved from cessation of vaccination. Obtaining and maintaining these benefits requires that policymakers manage the transition from the current massive use of oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) to a world without OPV and free of the risks of potential future reintroductions of live polioviruses. This article describes the analytical journey that began in 2001 with a retrospective case study on polio risk management and led to development of dynamic integrated risk, economic, and decision analysis tools to inform global policies for managing the risks of polio. This analytical journey has provided several key insights and lessons learned that will be useful to future analysts involved in similar complex decision-making processes.     

Maximizing a Family of Optimal Statistics over a Nuisance Parameter with Applications to Genetic Data Analysis

In this article, a simple algorithm is used to maximize a family of optimal statistics for hypothesis testing with a nuisance parameter not defined under the null hypothesis. This arises from genetic linkage and association studies and other hypothesis testing problems. The maximum of optimal statistics over the nuisance parameter space can be used as a robust test in this situation. Here, we use the maximum and minimum statistics to examine the sensitivity of testing results with respect to the unknown nuisance parameter. Examples from genetic linkage analysis using affected sub pairs and a candidate-gene association study in case-parents trio design are studied.     

偏心摄影验光法测量屈光度的不确定度分析

对偏心摄影验光法测量屈光度进行了不确定度分析，指出过渡区的存在，眼瞳边缘的模糊，以及虹膜与暗区难以辊不确定度偏大的主要原因。推出了不确定度计算公式，并计算了不同近视模型眼屈光度的合成标准不确定度，提出了解决本法不确定度偏大的根本手段，即寻找新的直接测量量来代替暗区上下端纵坐标。     

Polarization in the Reaction to Health‐Risk Information: A Question of Social Position?

Dissemination of risk information is ubiquitous in contemporary society. We explore how individuals react in everyday life to health-risk information, based on what they report in personal interviews. Health-risk information was without exception recognized as unstable and inconsistent. This conformity, however, did not extend to the narratives regarding how health-risk information should be handled. Two opposite positions (ideal-typical strategies) are presented. Either you tend to process and evaluate new information or you tend to ignore it as a whole. Our attempt to reveal the underlying rationality in these two very different approaches involved the exploration of three different avenues of interpretation and brings together two scientific paradigms--economics and sociology--that provide the framework for our analysis. First, we suggest that a greater long-term experience of explicit choice implies that this kind of action becomes more natural and less resource consuming, whereas a reliance on habits in daily life--a natural adjustment to a lack of resources--makes it is more costly to bother about new information. Second, with fewer resources in the short run, fewer opportunities to mitigate bad outcomes, and greater exposure to social and material risks, one is less likely to devote resources to deal with health-risk information. Third, there are several possible links between a low propensity to take account of risk information and a high relative importance of genuine uncertainty in one's life. These theoretical perspectives provide a viable set of hypotheses regarding mechanisms that may contribute to social differences in the response to health-risk information.     

战略柔性的增强途径

战略柔性是企业以内部结构的可调整性和变革性应对环境变化的能力。企业要根据外部环境以及内部结构特征,确定适合本企业的战略柔性增强途径:以外部环境的不确定性为导向,以影响柔性因素的内部结构体系为基础,以结构调整的变革成本为依据,从降低变革成本的因素中归纳出有效的增强途径。     

论霍姆斯的现实主义法学思想——从“法律的生命不是逻辑，而是经验”谈起

小奥利弗·温德尔·霍姆斯是一个颇具争议和戏剧色彩的人物,他提出了许多闪光的观点,同时他的思想中也有保守和过激的一面。但霍姆斯作为美国现实主义法学的奠基人是无可置疑的。本文通过分析霍姆斯的一个著名的命题,探讨了霍姆斯的现实主义法律思想的相关特点。     

Ethics and Choosing Appropriate Means to an End: Problems with Coal Mine and Nuclear Workplace Safety

A common problem in ethics is that people often desire an end but fail to take the means necessary to achieve it. Employers and employees may desire the safety end mandated by performance standards for pollution control, but they may fail to employ the means, specification standards, necessary to achieve this end. This article argues that current (de jure) performance standards, for lowering employee exposures to ionizing radiation, fail to promote de facto worker welfare, in part because employers and employees do not follow the necessary means (practices known as specification standards) to achieve the end (performance standards) of workplace safety. To support this conclusion, the article argues that (1) safety requires attention to specification, as well as performance, standards; (2) coal-mine specification standards may fail to promote performance standards; (3) nuclear workplace standards may do the same; (4) choosing appropriate means to the end of safety requires attention to the ways uncertainties and variations in exposure may mask violations of standards; and (5) correcting regulatory inattention to differences between de jure and de facto is necessary for achievement of ethical goals for safety.     

论法律运行中的不确定性及其约束

传统观念认为,法律运行过程是确定的,每一个案件都存在着“唯一正确的答案”。事实上,在判决的形成过程中,作为前提的法律规则与案件事实均具有不确定性,而法官在判决过程中的理性是有限的,因此判决结果存在一定的不确定性,每个案件事先并不存在一个所谓的“唯一正确的答案”。当然,法律的确定性仍然是其生命所在,不确定性是相对的,是受到严格控制的。     

Antecendents and effects of decision comprehensiveness: The role of decision quality and perceived uncertainty

On the basis of a sample of 184 top executives, we investigated the roles of decision quality and perceived uncertainty in the relationship between decision comprehensiveness and performance. Our results show that decision quality mediates a large proportion of the comprehensiveness–performance relationship and may thus provide a more proximate outcome measure of the effect of comprehensiveness. In addition, we found that perceived uncertainty directly affects the level of comprehensiveness in organizations rather than moderating its effect on performance as conceptualized by previous research. Based on the integration of behavioral and information processing theories we suggest that more process-oriented measures such as decision quality and perceived uncertainty may overcome conflicting empirical results in the field.     

Establishing dominance between strategies with interval judgments of state probabilities

In decision-making under uncertainty, a decision-maker is required to specify, possibly with the help of decision analysts, point estimates of the probabilities of uncertain events. In this setting, it is often difficult to obtain very precise measurements of the decision-maker׳s probabilities on the states of nature particularly when little information is available to evaluate probabilities, available information is not specific enough, or we have to model the conflict case where several information sources are available.In this paper, imprecise probabilities are considered for representing the decision-maker׳s perception or past experience about the states of nature, to be specific, interval probabilities, which can be further categorized as (a) intervals of individual probabilities, (b) intervals of probability differences, and (c) intervals of ratio probabilities. We present a heuristic approach to modeling a wider range of types of probabilities as well as three types of interval probabilities. In particular, the intervals of ratio probabilities, which are widely used in the uncertain AHP context, are analyzed to find extreme points by the use of change of variables, not to mention the first two types of interval probabilities. Finally, we examine how these extreme points can be used to determine an ordering or partial ordering of the expected values of strategies.