A Contingent Valuation Study of Lost Passive Use Values Resulting From the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

We report on the results of a large-scale contingent valuation (CV) study conducted after the Exxon Valdez oil spill to assess the harm caused by it. Among the issues considered are the design features of the CV survey, its administration to a national sample of U.S. households, estimation of household willingness to pay to prevent another Exxon Valdez type oil spill, and issues related to reliability and validity of the estimates obtained. Events influenced by the study’s release are also briefly discussed.contingent valuation, natural resource damage assessment

Support for regulation versus compliance: Face masks during COVID-19

Objectives: Wearing masks could still be one of the few non-pharmaceutical interventions for controlling the pandemic. There are people who wear them and people who don't, but this framing is overly simplistic. We aim to chart the contradictions in attitudes and behavior regarding mask wearing and describe the messaging challenge that these generate. Study design: Our data come from a survey administered to a nationally representative sample of 2000 respondents from the YouGov panel of US households in August–September 2020. Methods: Respondents were asked whether they wear a facemask when they go outside their home since the COVID-19 epidemic began and whether they support or oppose your municipal government passing mask wearing regulation. We also collected respondents’ demographic and economic characteristics, knowledge regarding the facts of COVID-19 and political ideology. Results: A substantial majority of Americans (60%) both favor a masking requirement and are themselves wearing masks, while 13% oppose a mask mandate and do not wear masks. In contrast, 17% of Americans oppose a mask mandate but are currently wearing one, while 10% do not wear a mask but favor a mask mandate. These two groups are distinctively different from one another and the other groups in their socioeconomic characteristics, risk perception and political beliefs. Conclusions: Our study offers a better understanding of the mismatch between mask wearing behavior and attitude toward the mask mandate, which will help the public health authorities to devise policies regarding mask wearing as an effective intervention to manage the pandemic

Who should get the scarce ICU bed? The US public's view on triage in the time of COVID-19

Objective: To determine the relative importance members of the US public place on different patient attributes in triage decisions about who should receive the last available intensive care unit (ICU) bed. Methods: A discrete choice experiment was conducted with a nationally representative sample of 2000 respondents from the YouGov internet panel of US households. Respondents chose which of three hypothetical patients with COVID-19 should receive an ICU bed if only one were available. The three patients differed in age, gender, Alzheimer's-like disability and probability of survival if the patient received the ICU bed. An experimental design varied the values of the four attributes of the three hypothetical patients with COVID-19 that a respondent saw in four choice tasks. Results: The most important patient attribute to respondents was the probability the patient survives COVID-19 if they get the ICU bed (OR CI: 4.41 to 6.91). There was heterogeneity among different age groups of respondents about how much age of the patient mattered. Respondents under 30 years of age were more likely to choose young patients and old patients, and less likely to select patients aged 40-60 years old. For respondents in the age group 30-49 years old, as the age of the patient declined, their preference for saving the patient declined modestly in a linear fashion. Conclusions: Respondents favoured giving the last ICU bed available to the patient with the highest probability of surviving COVID-19. Public opinion suggests a simple guideline for physician choices based on likelihood of survival as opposed to the number of life-years saved. There was heterogeneity among respondents of different age groups for allocating the last ICU bed, as well as to the importance of the patient having an Alzheimer's-like disability (where religion of the respondent is important) and the gender of the patient (where the gender and racial identity are important)

A Contingent Valuation Study of Lost Passive Use Values Resulting From the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

We report on the results of a large-scale contingent valuation (CV) study conducted after the Exxon Valdez oil spill to assess the harm caused by it. Among the issues considered are the design features of the CV survey, its administration to a national sample of U.S. households, estimation of household willingness to pay to prevent another Exxon Valdez type oil spill, and issues related to reliability and validity of the estimates obtained. Events influenced by the study’s release are also briefly discussed

Observations sur la langue dans les lettres adressées a Š. Ljubić

Dans le présent article sont examinées certaines questions portant sur la langue et l\u27orthographe telles qu\u27on peut les constater dans les lettres faisant partie du legs de Š. Ljubić conservé dans les Archives historiques de Zadar. Leur date se situe autour de la moitié du 19e siècle. Les auteurs de ces lettres sont I. Kukuljević Sakcinski, A. Torkvato Brlić, B. Petranović et Š. Starčević. Donc, un Zagrébien, un autre provenant de Slavonie et deux Dalmates, dont l\u27un était Serbe et l\u27autre Croate. De cette manière dans ces lettres sont représentées toutes les couches et structures et les principaux courants de la Croatie avec leurs vues sur la langue littéraire

Assessing the activity of faults in continental interiors: Palaeoseismic insights from SE Kazakhstan

The presence of fault scarps is a first-order criterion for identifying active faults. Yet the preservation of these features depends on the recurrence interval between surface rupturing events, combined with the rates of erosional and depositional processes that act on the landscape. Within arid continental interiors single earthquake scarps can be preserved for thousands of years, and yet the interval between surface ruptures on faults in these regions may be much longer, such that the lack of evidence for surface faulting in the morphology may not preclude activity on those faults. In this study we investigate the 50 km-long ‘Toraigyr’ thrust fault in the northern Tien Shan. From palaeoseismological trenching we show that two surface rupturing earthquakes occurred in the last $\textbf{39.9±2.7 ka}$ BP, but only the most recent event (3.15–3.6 ka BP) has a clear morphological expression. We conclude that a landscape reset took place in between the two events, likely as a consequence of the climatic change at the end of the last glacial maximum. These findings illustrate that in the Tien Shan evidence for the most recent active faulting can be easily obliterated by climatic processes due to the long earthquake recurrence intervals. Our results illustrate the problems related to the assessment of active tectonic deformation and seismic hazard assessments in continental interior settings.This study was financed by NERC and ESRC (Earthquakes without Frontiers project, Grant code: EwF_NE/J02001X/1_1), and the Centre for Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes and Tectonics (COMET). KOMPSAT-2 imagery was obtained through a category-1 award to RTW. EJC thanks St. Edmund Hall for travel support. RTW was supported during this research by a University Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of London