Risk Communication in The Netherlands: The Monitored Introduction of the EC "Post-Seveso" Directive

Implementation of article 8.1 of the EC-"Seveso" Directive (82/501/EC) is now under way in many countries in Europe. In The Netherlands, the implementation of the Directive started with a carefully monitored introduction of active information provision at two sites (Dordrecht and Elst). This introduction was supported by a multidisciplinary research group. This group helped to develop the risk communication program and also played a role in the evaluation of the program. This paper describes these processes and their evaluation. We will focus on the design of the risk communication programs and the effects of the programs on knowledge and attitudes of the local target groups. This effort and its results clearly started an institutional learning process involving governmental bodies at several organizational levels (local, regional, and national), and industrial organizations (individual firms and organizations of industries). Monitoring the design, the implementation, and the effects of active information provision proves an effective means to gain experience with the implementation of the Seveso Directive and could help to facilitate further implementation.     

Innovation in education: Technological economics

Technological change and innovation are vital parts of the economy. This paper concerns one particular attempt to study both the process of innovation itself and possible means of increasing its effectiveness: Technological Economics. Barriers to innovation, intellectual and organizational, are described from the experience at the University of Stirling.     

Inference with Bivariate Truncated Data

Inthis paper we build on previous work for estimation of the bivariatedistribution of the time variables T ₁ and T ₂when they are observable only on the condition that one of thetime variables, say T ₁, is greater than (left-truncation)or less than (right truncation) some observed time variable C ₁.In this paper, we introduce several results based on the InfluenceCurve (which we derive in this paper) of the NPMLE of the distributionF of (T ₁,T ₂) developed by van derLaan (van der Laan, 1996). Specifically we will: prove that theNPMLE is asymptotically equivalent to an estimator developedby Gürler (Gürler, 1997), derive the asymptotic distributionof the NPMLE based on its Influence Curve, present tests to determinethe amount of dependence between T ₁ and T ₂,present the results of simulation studies that compare the NPMLEand Gürler's estimator and evaluate the performance of boththe above mentioned tests and confidence intervals of Fbased on the asymptotic distribution of the NPMLE, and finallywe will apply the methods in a data analysis in which we alsopoint out practical issues that arise in the implementation ofthe estimator.