Risk Analysis: Celebrating the Accomplishments and Embracing Ongoing Challenges

As part of the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Society for Risk Analysis and Risk Analysis: An International Journal, this essay reviews the 10 most important accomplishments of risk analysis from 1980 to 2010, outlines major accomplishments in three major categories from 2011 to 2019, discusses how editors circulate authors’ accomplishments, and proposes 10 major risk-related challenges for 2020–2030. Authors conclude that the next decade will severely test the field of risk analysis.     

Toward a sociology of global comparative placemaking

I call for a globally informed sociology of comparative placemaking that integrates historical and contemporary processes and includes the ephemeral, institutional, and personal. By placemaking, I am referring to the explicit or tacit cooperation among people to create, maintain, and give meaning to places in space through bodily occupation given differential resources and constraints. I review select place, space, and community-based literature about urban, Black, migrant, LGBTQ, and international populations to think about how we can build upon and integrate multiple theoretical, methodological, and epistemological insights to form an explicit placemaking research agenda. A US focus on neighborhoods contrasts with a comparative examination of global urban networks, social polarization, and transformation of the built environment in the interdisciplinary field of global urban studies (Ren, 2018). I argue for a placemaking research agenda that bridges insight from US Urban Sociology with Global Urban Studies to consider how various structures and actors constrain and facilitate place projects. With a globally reaching and comparatively informed sociology of placemaking, we can illuminate our multi-structured story of place and agency in context. We can answer questions about how and why we co-create and are simultaneously disciplined by the process of creation.     

Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling of Post-Earthquake Ignition Probabilities Considering Inter-Earthquake Heterogeneity

Post-earthquake fires are high-consequence events with extensive damage potential. They are also low-frequency events, so their nature remains underinvestigated. One difficulty in modeling post-earthquake ignition probabilities is reducing the model uncertainty attributed to the scarce source data. The data scarcity problem has been resolved by pooling the data indiscriminately collected from multiple earthquakes. However, this approach neglects the inter-earthquake heterogeneity in the regional and seasonal characteristics, which is indispensable for risk assessment of future post-earthquake fires. Thus, the present study analyzes the post-earthquake ignition probabilities of five major earthquakes in Japan from 1995 to 2016 (1995 Kobe, 2003 Tokachi-oki, 2004 Niigata–Chuetsu, 2011 Tohoku, and 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes) by a hierarchical Bayesian approach. As the ignition causes of earthquakes share a certain commonality, common prior distributions were assigned to the parameters, and samples were drawn from the target posterior distribution of the parameters by a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation. The results of the hierarchical model were comparatively analyzed with those of pooled and independent models. Although the pooled and hierarchical models were both robust in comparison with the independent model, the pooled model underestimated the ignition probabilities of earthquakes with few data samples. Among the tested models, the hierarchical model was least affected by the source-to-source variability in the data. The heterogeneity of post-earthquake ignitions with different regional and seasonal characteristics has long been desired in the modeling of post-earthquake ignition probabilities but has not been properly considered in the existing approaches. The presented hierarchical Bayesian approach provides a systematic and rational framework to effectively cope with this problem, which consequently enhances the statistical reliability and stability of estimating post-earthquake ignition probabilities.     

Linguists and other animals

Book reviewed in this article:
Joan Dunayer, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation     

高校青年学生网络思想与法制教育的几点思考

随着因特网的发展 ,网络上信息的内容日益呈现出其复杂性 ,世界观并没有完全形成的青年学生 ,很容易受到网上信息内容所隐含的意识形态的影响。正确辨别网络信息 ,正确对待网上游戏 ,抵制恶意信息流传 ,增强青年学生的自我控制能力 ,加强对他们的思想与法制教育 ,是高校实现人才培养目标的重要保证。     

我国民事审级制度的改革与完善——比较法学视角下的分析

比较分析中国、日本、德国、美国、法国及我国台湾地区的民事审级制度可以看出我国审级制度中存在的弊端。实际上 ,实行有条件的三审终审制更具合理性。为此 ,我国原有的两审终审制必须加以改革 ,那就是实行以两审终审为原则、以三审终审为例外的民事审级制度。     

黑龙江（汉族）民歌衍变过程探析——对黑龙江、河北（汉族）民歌的比较

黑龙江汉族民歌的衍变历经了数百年的岁月沧桑，它与民族迁徙、人口变迁以及文化传统等存在着极为密切的联系。通过对黑龙江民歌与河北、山东、河南、山西民歌进行比较，表明黑龙江民歌与河北民歌之间存在着较近的亲缘关系。因此，文章试图在对较有代表性的几首黑龙江与河北民歌比较研究的基础上进一步探究黑龙江民歌衍变的影响因素。     

Implied Preference for Seismic Design Level and Earthquake Insurance

Seismic risk can be reduced by implementing newly developed seismic provisions in design codes. Furthermore, financial protection or enhanced utility and happiness for stakeholders could be gained through the purchase of earthquake insurance. If this is not so, there would be no market for such insurance. However, perceived benefit associated with insurance is not universally shared by stakeholders partly due to their diverse risk attitudes. This study investigates the implied seismic design preference with insurance options for decisionmakers of bounded rationality whose preferences could be adequately represented by the cumulative prospect theory (CPT). The investigation is focused on assessing the sensitivity of the implied seismic design preference with insurance options to model parameters of the CPT and to fair and unfair insurance arrangements. Numerical results suggest that human cognitive limitation and risk perception can affect the implied seismic design preference by the CPT significantly. The mandatory purchase of fair insurance will lead the implied seismic design preference to the optimum design level that is dictated by the minimum expected lifecycle cost rule. Unfair insurance decreases the expected gain as well as its associated variability, which is preferred by risk-averse decisionmakers. The obtained results of the implied preference for the combination of the seismic design level and insurance option suggest that property owners, financial institutions, and municipalities can take advantage of affordable insurance to establish successful seismic risk management strategies.     

论英语语言课程设计中的需求分析

界定需求要从目标和目的两个方面进行,这两个方面是我们发展测试、材料、教学活动、评价策略的基础。因此需求分析是语言课程建设不可分割的一部分。本文重点介绍了英语语言课程设计中需求分析的方法及步骤。目的在于强调需求分析的重要性,以及需求分析对于教师改进教学方法、提高教学效果、提高学生学习的主动性和积极性的重要意义。     

Statistical and Combinatorial Aspects of Comparative Genomics*

Abstract. This document presents a survey of the statistical and combinatorial aspects of four areas of comparative genomics: gene order based measures of evolutionary distances between species, construction of phylogenetic trees, detection of horizontal transfer of genes, and detection of ancient whole genome duplications.