1,721,075 research outputs found
Public choices between lifesaving programs : how important are lives saved?
Full text linkIn developing and industrial countries alike, there is concern that health and safety policy may respond to irrational fears - to the"disaster of the month"- rather than address more fundamental problems. In the United States, for example, some policymakers say the public worries about trivial risks while ignoring larger ones and that funding priorities reflect this view. Many public health programs with a low cost per life saved are underfunded, for example, while many environmental regulations with a high cost per life saved are issued each year. Does the existing allocation of resources reflect people's preoccupation with the qualitative aspects of risks, to the exclusion of quantitative factors (lives saved)? Or can observed differences in the cost per life saved of environmental and public health programs be explained by the way the two sets of programs are funded? The authors examine the preferences of U.S. citizens for health and safety programs. They confronted a random sample of 1,000 U.S. adults with choices between environmental health and public health programs, to see which they would choose. The authors then examined what factors (qualitative and quantitative) seem to influence these choices. Respondents were asked about pairs of programs, among them: smoking education or industrial pollution control programs, industrial pollution control or pneumonia vaccine programs, radon eradication or a program to ban smoking in the workplace, and radon eradication or programs to ban pesticides. The survey results, they feel, have implications beyond the United States. They find that, while qualitative aspects of the life-saving programs are statistically significant in explaining people's choices among them, lives saved matter, too. Indeed, for the median respondent in the survey, the rate of substitution between most qualitative risk characteristics and lives saved is inelastic. But for a sizable minority of respondents, choice among programs appears to be insensitive to lives saved. The interesting question for public policy is what role the latter group plays in the regulatory process.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Public Health Promotion,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Insurance Law,Water Conservation,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Insurance Law,Water Conservation,Environmental Economics&Policies
When is a life too costly to save? : evidence from U.S. environmental regulations
Full text linkExcept for two relatively minor statutes, U.S. environmental laws do not permit the balancing of costs and benefits in setting environmental standards. The Clean Air Act, for example, prohibits the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from considering costs in setting ambient air quality standards. Similarly, the Clean Water Act does not allow consideration of benefits in setting effluent standards. When the EPA is allowed to balance benefits against costs, it has considerable discretion in defining"balancing."The authors ask two questions: Whether allowed to or not, has the EPA balanced costs and benefits in setting environmental standards? Where has the EPA drawn the line in deciding how much to spend to save a statistical life? Their answers are based on data about the costs and benefits of regulations involving three classes of pollutants: cancer-causing pesticides usedon food crops (1975-89); carcinogenic air pollutants (1975-90); and all uses of asbestos regulated under the Toxic Substances Control Act. The following are their findings. The EPA behaved as though it were balancing costs and benefits in its regulation of pesticides under Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and of asbestos under Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA), the two so-called balancing statutes. The higher the cost of the ban, the less likely the EPA was to ban the use of these products. The greater the number of lives saved, the more likely the EPA was to ban their use. But the amount the EPA was (implicitly) willing to spend to save a life was high: 49 million to avoid cancer through exposure to asbestos. The value the EPA attached to saving a life was higher for workers than for consumers. The value attached to avoiding a case of cancer through exposure to pesticide resides on food was less than 52 million value of preventing cancer among pesticide applicators - perhaps because workers are exposed to higher levels of pollution than consumers. After 1987, when the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the EPA for considering costs in setting emissions standards for vinyl chloride, the EPA considered costs in setting emissions standards only after an acceptable level of risk was achieved. Ironically, before the vinyl chloride decision, the value per cancer case avoided was only $15 million. The amount the EPA was willing to spend to save a life was thus less under the Clean Air Act than under the balancing statutes. But after this decision, the EPA did not consider costs at all if the risk of cancer to the maximally exposed individual was above one in 10,000.Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research,Health Economics&Finance,Montreal Protocol
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Chapter 10: VALUING FOOD SAFETY: WHICH APPROACHES TO USE?
No full textThis book was originally published by Westview Press, Boulder CO, 1995.valuation methodologies, averting behavior, foodborne risks, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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