No exit: next steps to help promote South Pacific peace and prosperity

This paper explores contemporary official and scholarly thinking on aid, development, conflict prevention and strategic shaping to try to identify promising avenues to promote regional growth and stability in a tight budget environment. Overview As Australia focuses on its global interests in a changing and challenging international environment, there’s a danger that we’ll lose sight of important constants of history and geography. We don’t have an either/or choice to focus on near or distant security imperatives. While the Australian Government’s decision to lift defence funding will help with this, cutting aid to help offset that boost may prove counterproductive. We also need to further improve the quality of our aid and regional diplomacy, as well as the hard and soft aspects of our security engagement. This paper suggests some useful first steps for doing so

Young tableaux, multi-segments, and PBW bases

The crystals for finite dimensional representations of sl(n+1) can be realized using Young tableaux. The infinity crystal on the other hand is naturally realized using multisegments, and there is a simple description of the embedding of each finite crystal into the infinity crystal in terms of these realizations. The infinity crystal is also parameterized by Lusztig's PBW basis with respect to any reduced expression for the longest word in the Weyl group. We give an explicit description of the unique crystal isomorphism from PBW bases to multisegments for one standard choice of reduced expression, thus obtaining simple formulas for the actions of all crystal operators on this PBW basis. Our proofs use the fact that the twists of the crystal operators by Kashiwara's involution also have simple descriptions in terms of multisegments, and a characterization of the infinity crystal due to Kashiwara and Saito. These results are to varying extents known to experts, but we do not think there is a self-contained exposition of this material in the literature, and our proof of the relationship between multi-segments and PBW bases seems to be new.Comment: 21 pages. v2: Published version. Minor stylistic and formatting changes. Seminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire 73 (2015), Article B73

How Non-Group Health Coverage Varies with Income

Looks at what percentage of people with neither employer-sponsored nor public coverage purchase private non-group health insurance, by income level and family type. Points to the need to make non-group coverage more affordable and more attractive

Rights, responsibilities and NICE: a rejoinder to Harris

Harris' reply to our defence of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence's (NICE) current cost-effectiveness procedures contains two further errors. First, he wrongly draws a conclusion from the fact that NICE does not and cannot evaluate all possible uses of healthcare resources at any one time and generally cannot know which National Health Service (NHS) activities would be displaced or which groups of patients would have to forgo health benefits: the inference is that no estimate is or can be made by NICE of the benefits to be forgone. This is a non-sequitur. Second, he asserts that it is a flaw at the heart of the use of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) as an outcome measure that comparisons between people need to be made. Such comparisons do indeed have to be made, but this is not a consequence of the choice of any particular outcome measure, be it the QALY or anything else

Simulation sample sizes for Monte Carlo partial EVPI calculations

Partial expected value of perfect information (EVPI) quantifies the value of removing uncertainty about unknown parameters in a decision model. EVPIs can be computed via Monte Carlo methods. An outer loop samples values of the parameters of interest, and an inner loop samples the remaining parameters from their conditional distribution. This nested Monte Carlo approach can result in biased estimates if small numbers of inner samples are used and can require a large number of model runs for accurate partial EVPI estimates. We present a simple algorithm to estimate the EVPI bias and confidence interval width for a specified number of inner and outer samples. The algorithm uses a relatively small number of model runs (we suggest approximately 600), is quick to compute, and can help determine how many outer and inner iterations are needed for a desired level of accuracy. We test our algorithm using three case studies. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Budget allocation and the revealed social rate of time preference for health

Appropriate decisions based on cost-effectiveness evaluations of health care technologies depend upon the cost-effectiveness threshold and its rate of growth as well as some social rate of time preference for health. The concept of the cost-effectiveness threshold, social rate of time preference for consumption and social opportunity cost of capital are briefly explored before the question of how a social rate of time preference for health might be established is addressed. A more traditional approach to this problem is outlined before a social decision making approach is developed which demonstrates that social time preference for health is revealed through the budget allocations made by a socially legitimate higher authority. The relationship between the social time preference rate for health, the growth rate of the cost-effectiveness threshold and the rate at which the higher authority can borrow or invest is then examined. We establish that the social time preference rate for health is implied by the budget allocation and the health production functions in each period. As such, the social time preference rate for health depends not on the social time preference rate for consumption or growth in the consumption value of health but on growth in the cost-effectiveness threshold and the rate at which the higher authority can save or borrow between periods. The implications for discounting and the policies of bodies such as NICE are then discussed.Economic evaluation. Discounting. Cost-effectiveness analysis

A stitch in time: preserving peace on Bougainville

A decade after the successful peacekeeping mission, and a year and a half before the window opens for a referendum on Bougainville’s political status, the peace process is dangerously adrift.In this paper, Peter Jennings and Karl Claxton set out a plan to help deliver a sustainable solution for next steps in the peace process. An Australian-led preventive development effort, conducted in close cooperation with our regional partners, is needed to avoid the future requirement for a larger, costlier, riskier, and more intrusive peacekeeping mission than the limited intervention appropriate in 1997-2003.The new Government’s decision to link aid more directly to our strategic interests could assist. While the initiative would require a significant initial investment, it could create a substantial longer-term cost saving and avoid serious military, diplomatic and reputational risks

Bayesian approaches to technology assessment and decision making

Until the mid-1980s, most economic analyses of healthcare technologies were based on decision theory and used decision-analytic models. The goal was to synthesize all relevant clinical and economic evidence for the purpose of assisting decision makers to efficiently allocate society's scarce resources. This was true of virtually all the early cost-effectiveness evaluations sponsored and/or published by the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) (15), Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Cancer Institute, other elements of the U.S. Public Health Service, and of healthcare technology assessors in Europe and elsewhere around the world. Methodologists routinely espoused, or at minimum assumed, that these economic analyses were based on decision theory (8;24;25). Since decision theory is rooted in—in fact, an informal application of—Bayesian statistical theory, these analysts were conducting studies to assist healthcare decision making by appealing to a Bayesian rather than a classical, or frequentist, inference approach. But their efforts were not so labeled. Oddly, the statistical training of these decision analysts was invariably classical, not Bayesian. Many were not—and still are not—conversant with Bayesian statistical approaches

Dimensions of design space: a decision-theoretic approach to optimal research design

Bayesian decision theory can be used not only to establish the optimal sample size and its allocation in a single clinical study, but also to identify an optimal portfolio of research combining different types of study design. Within a single study, the highest societal pay-off to proposed research is achieved when its sample sizes, and allocation between available treatment options, are chosen to maximise the Expected Net Benefit of Sampling (ENBS). Where a number of different types of study informing different parameters in the decision problem could be conducted, the simultaneous estimation of ENBS across all dimensions of the design space is required to identify the optimal sample sizes and allocations within such a research portfolio. This is illustrated through a simple example of a decision model of zanamivir for the treatment of influenza. The possible study designs include: i) a single trial of all the parameters; ii) a clinical trial providing evidence only on clinical endpoints; iii) an epidemiological study of natural history of disease and iv) a survey of quality of life. The possible combinations, samples sizes and allocation between trial arms are evaluated over a range of costeffectiveness thresholds. The computational challenges are addressed by implementing optimisation algorithms to search the ENBS surface more efficiently over such large dimensions.Bayesian decision theory; expected value of information; research design; costeffectiveness analysis

Making real the learning to learn (L2L) rhetoric embedded in an ITE learning and teaching strategy

Building on current research at Chester into the promotion of reflection as a tool for helping students to become more strategically aware of their learning, the project explores the value of introducing college tutors to ideas about learning to learn in its broader sense. Emphasis will be placed upon Claxton's 4Rs: resilience; resourcefulness; reflectiveness and reciprocity as a model of what good learning does look like (Smith, 2004