Witches, Floods, and Wonder Drugs: Historical Perspectives on Risk Management

This paper reports an investigation that was undertaken to give a philosophical and historical perspective to IIASA's work on decision making in the face of uncertainty in such areas as energy, agriculture, health care, and water resources, and in particular, problems of risk management. While current risk-management methods usually apply advanced concepts of system modeling and statistical inference to societal decision making under uncertainty, it has generally been the case, as this paper points out, that risk-management problems have not revolved around obtaining the correct probabilities. Rather, the problems have important political and procedural elements, and involve how a society collects and employs imperfect and incomplete information. Clark's central point is that the answers to today's societal risk-management problems do not depend solely on the usual techniques of risk assessment; rather, they lie in developing imaginative approaches to risk management that incorporate the social decision processes that must be involved. IIASA's research amply corroborates this point

Conceptual modelling for simulation Part II: a framework for conceptual modelling

Following on from the definition of a conceptual model and its requirements laid out in a previous paper, a framework for conceptual modelling is described. The framework consists of five iterative activities: understanding the problem situation, determining the modelling and general project objectives, identifying the model outputs, identify the model inputs, and determining the model content. The framework is demonstrated with a modelling application at a Ford Motor Company engine assembly plant. The paper concludes with a discussion on identifying data requirements from the conceptual model and the assessment of the conceptual model

Institutional Redesign Proposals for the Preparation of Criminal Policy by the Government. The Focus on Ex Ante Evaluations

As many other countries, Spain is also experiencing a punitive turn in Criminal Justice Policy in the last 15 years, which is taking social narratives about crime and disorder as well as actual punishment to a parallel dimension that is quite often away from reality. While some strategies try to fight back from values and ideology or empirical studies to prove what works as well as the real effects of certain policies, my approach uses very different tools to tackle the issue: First, I´ll defend the suitability of Evaluation knowledge, from a Public Policy Analysis perspective, for the improvement of Criminal Justice Policy. Such perspective conceives Evaluation as much more than just a research tool and provides, in my opinion, a holistic approach that needs to be better connected with Spanish Criminal Justice Policy making in order to have a greater impact on it. Second, to ease such connection, I´ll propose a set of adjustments in the structure and tasks of institutions involved in Criminal Justice Policy creation. It is my view that for Evaluation to be considered a relevant tool in Spanish Criminal Justice Policy there should be some institutional changes I will try to explain in detail.Financiado por el proyecto: "La medición de la exclusión social generada por la política criminal de los países occidentales desarrollados, DER2015-64846-P. Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Geological and Palaeontological Context of a Pliocene Juvenile Hominin at Dikika, Ethiopia

Since 1999, the Dikika Research Project (DRP; initiated by Z.A.) has conducted surveys and excavations in badlands that expose Pliocene and Pleistocene sediments south of the Awash River in Ethiopia, between surrounding hominin localities at Hadar, Gona and the Middle Awash region. Here we report our geological mapping and stratigraphic measurement of the DRP area, and the context of a remarkably well-preserved skeleton of the earliest known juvenile hominin at the Dikika DIK-1 locality. Our mapping of the DRP area permits a complete definition of the hominin-bearing Hadar Formation and provides a cohesive structural and tectonic framework defining its relationships to adjacent strata. Our findings reveal the basin-scale tectonic, depositional and palaeoenvironmental history of the area, as well as a clear taphonomic and palaeontological context for the juvenile hominin. Such data are crucial for understanding the environmental context of human evolution, and can be integrated into larger-scale tectonic and palaeoenvironmental studies. Our basin-scale approach to palaeoenvironments provides a means to elucidate the complex geological history occurring at the scale of temporally and geographically controlled fossil point localities, which occur within the rich tectonic and depositional history of the Awash Valley