A Random Utility Analysis of Southern Alberta Sportfishing

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Iqbal and Empathy

This Essay argues that empathy does and should play an important, albeit limited role, in a judge’s decision making process. Specifically, empathy is essential for making correct, principled, and unbiased judgments, because empathy is one of the few means we have to understand human motivation. Empathy is a crucial cognitive mechanism that can help compensate for common cognitive bias. As such, empathy, appropriately restricted, should be an accepted and meaningful tool for judges to use in evaluating the sufficiency of complaints, especially as they relate to Iqbal’s plausibility pleading standard

Public Response to a Catastrophic Southern California Earthquake: A Sociological Perspective

This paper describes a hypothetical scenario of public response to a large regional earthquake on the southern section of the San Andreas Fault. Conclusive social and behavioral science research over decades has established that the behavior of individuals in disaster is, on the whole, controlled, rational, and adaptive, despite popular misperceptions that people who experience a disaster are dependent upon and problematic for organized response agencies. We applied this knowledge to portray the response of people impacted by the earthquake focusing on actions they will take during and immediately following the cessation of the shaking including: immediate response, search and rescue, gaining situational awareness through information seeking, making decisions about evacuation and interacting with organized responders. Our most general conclusion is that the actions of ordinary people in this earthquake scenario comprised the bulk of the initial response effort, particularly in those areas isolated for lengthy periods of time following the earthquake

Climate change: Time to Do Something Different

Copyright: © 2014 Page and Page. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these termsThere is now very little, if any, doubt that the global climate is changing and that this is in some way related to human behaviour through unsustainable preferences in lifestyle and organisational practices. Despite the near conclusive evidence of the positive relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, a small proportion of people remain unconvinced. More importantly, even among the much larger number of people who accept a link between human behaviour and climate change, many are inactive, or insufficiently active, in attempting to remedy the situation. We suggest this is partly because people are unaware both of how their day-to-day behaviours connect with energy consumption and carbon emissions, and of the behavioural alternatives that are available to them. This, we believe, is a key reason why individual lifestyles and organisational practices continue in an unsustainable way. We also suggest that the psychologists and behavioural researchers who seek to develop a better understanding of people’s relationship with, and reaction to, environmental issues, might also be on track to suffer a similar blindness. They risk becoming fixed on investigating a limited range of established variables, perhaps to the detriment of alternative approaches that are more practically oriented though, so far, less well explored empirically. In this article, we present the FIT framework as an alternative perspective on the variables that might underpin pro-environmental activity and behaviour change. After briefly reviewing the related literature, we outline that framework. Then we present some early empirical data to show its relationship to a range of pro-environmental indices. We follow with a discussion of the framework’s relevance in relation to pro-environmental behaviour change and make proposals for future research.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

NeuroEconomics

Over the last two years a research field has developed under the banner of 'neuroeconomics' in which recent neuroscientific methods are deploid to analyze economically relevant processes. This paper aims to provide an overview of the methodology and current state of neuroeconomic research by giving a brief definition of the concept of neuroeconomics, outlining relevant methodologies, and describing studies undertaken in the current research areas to date. Finally, some future prospects are considered.

Positive youth development in swimming: clarification and consensus of key psychosocial assets

The purpose of this study was to gain a more cohesive understanding of the assets considered necessary to develop in young swimmers to ensure both individual and sport specific development. This two stage study involved (a) a content analysis of key papers to develop a list of both psychosocial skills for performance enhancement and assets associated with positive youth development, and (b) in-depth interviews involving ten expert swim coaches, practitioners and youth sport scholars. Five higher order categories containing seventeen individual assets emerged. These results are discussed in relation to both existing models of positive youth development and implications for coaches, practitioners and parents when considering the psychosocial development of young British swimmers

Disaster Mythology and Availability Cascades

Sociological research conducted in the aftermath of natural disasters has uncovered a number of “disaster myths” – widely shared misconceptions about typical post-disaster human behavior. This paper discusses the possibility that perpetuation of disaster mythology reflects an “availability cascade,” defined in prior scholarship as a “self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse.” (Kuran and Sunstein 1999). Framing the spread of disaster mythology as an availability cascade suggests that certain tools may be useful in halting the myths’ continued perpetuation. These tools include changing the legal and social incentives of so-called “availability entrepreneurs” – those principally responsible for beginning and perpetuating the cascade, as well as insulating decision-makers from political pressures generated by the availability cascade. This paper evaluates the potential effectiveness of these and other solutions for countering disaster mythology. Las investigaciones sociológicas realizadas tras los desastres naturales han hecho evidentes una serie de “mitos del desastre”, conceptos erróneos ampliamente compartidos sobre el comportamiento humano típico tras un desastre. Este artículo analiza la posibilidad de que la perpetuación de los mitos del desastre refleje una “cascada de disponibilidad”, definida en estudios anteriores como un “proceso de auto-refuerzo de la formación de una creencia colectiva, a través del que una percepción expresada produce una reacción en cadena que hace que la percepción sea cada vez más verosímil, a través de una mayor presencia en el discurso público” (Kuran y Sunstein 1999). Enmarcar la propagación de los mitos del desastre como una cascada de disponibilidad sugiere que ciertas herramientas pueden ser útiles para parar la continua perpetuación de los mitos. Estas herramientas incluyen el cambio de los incentivos legales y sociales de los llamados “emprendedores de la disponibilidad”, los principales responsables del inicio y la perpetuación de la cascada, además del aislamiento de quienes toman las decisiones de las presiones políticas generadas por la cascada de disponibilidad. Este artículo evalúa la efectividad potencial de estas y otras soluciones para contrarrestar los mitos del desastre

Fall Prediction and Prevention Systems: Recent Trends, Challenges, and Future Research Directions.

Fall prediction is a multifaceted problem that involves complex interactions between physiological, behavioral, and environmental factors. Existing fall detection and prediction systems mainly focus on physiological factors such as gait, vision, and cognition, and do not address the multifactorial nature of falls. In addition, these systems lack efficient user interfaces and feedback for preventing future falls. Recent advances in internet of things (IoT) and mobile technologies offer ample opportunities for integrating contextual information about patient behavior and environment along with physiological health data for predicting falls. This article reviews the state-of-the-art in fall detection and prediction systems. It also describes the challenges, limitations, and future directions in the design and implementation of effective fall prediction and prevention systems