Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease associated with a history o... more Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease associated with a history of repetitive head impacts (RHI). CTE was described in boxers as early as the 1920s and by the 1950s it was widely accepted that hits to the head caused some boxers to become “punch drunk.” However, the recent discovery of CTE in American and Australian-rules football, soccer, rugby, ice hockey, and other sports has resulted in renewed debate on whether the relationship between RHI and CTE is causal. Identifying the strength of the evidential relationship between CTE and RHI has implications for public health and medico-legal issues. From a public health perspective, environmentally caused diseases can be mitigated or prevented. Medico-legally, millions of children are exposed to RHI through sports participation; this demographic is too young to legally consent to any potential long-term risks associated with this exposure. To better understand the strength of evidence underlying the poss...
Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law, 2014
The entire U.S. federal regulatory apparatus, especially that part devoted to reducing (or decidi... more The entire U.S. federal regulatory apparatus, especially that part devoted to reducing (or deciding not to reduce) risks to the environment, health, and safety (EHS), relies increasingly on judgments of whether each regulation would yield benefits in excess of its costs. These judgments depend in turn upon empirical analysis of the potential increases in longevity, quality of life, and environmental quality that the regulation can confer, and also of the economic resources needed to “purchase” those benefits—analyses whose quality can range from extremely fine to disappointingly poor. The quality of a risk analysis (from which the benefits of control are derived) or of an economic analysis depends on attributes they share in common, such as the complexity and rigor of the data collection and mathematical modeling, the transparency by which the assumptions used are disclosed, and the humility of the conclusions drawn (particularly the care taken to acknowledge uncertainty in the esti...
Five international consensus statements on concussion in sports have been published. This comment... more Five international consensus statements on concussion in sports have been published. This commentary argues that there is a strong need for a new approach to them that foregrounds public health expertise and patient-centered guidance. Doing so will help players, parents and practitioners keep perspective about these potentially life-altering injuries especially when they recur.
In this article, we discuss four vexing problems in risk‐based decision making that John Evans ha... more In this article, we discuss four vexing problems in risk‐based decision making that John Evans has addressed over the last nearly 40 years and has perennially challenged the two of us and others to think about. We tackle the role in decision making of potential thresholds in dose–response functions, how the lack of health reference values for many chemicals may distort risk management, the challenge of model uncertainty for risk characterization, and the yet‐untapped potential for value‐of‐information analysis to enhance public health decision making. Our theme is that work remains to be done on each of these, but that some of that work would merely involve listening to ideas that John has already offered.
Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis, Jan 6, 2016
Public perceptions of both risks and regulatory costs shape rational regulatory choices. Despite ... more Public perceptions of both risks and regulatory costs shape rational regulatory choices. Despite decades of risk perception studies, this article is the first on regulatory cost perceptions. A survey of 744 U.S. residents probed: (1) How knowledgeable are laypeople about regulatory costs incurred to reduce risks? (2) Do laypeople see official estimates of cost and benefit (lives saved) as accurate? (3) (How) do preferences for hypothetical regulations change when mean-preserving spreads of uncertainty replace certain cost or benefit? and (4) (How) do preferences change when unequal interindividual distributions of hypothetical regulatory costs replace equal distributions? Respondents overestimated costs of regulatory compliance, while assuming agencies underestimate costs. Most assumed agency estimates of benefits are accurate; a third believed both cost and benefit estimates are accurate. Cost and benefit estimates presented without uncertainty were slightly preferred to those surr...
Regulatory agencies established to protect the public all face a fundamental challenge: there are... more Regulatory agencies established to protect the public all face a fundamental challenge: there are many more firms to inspect than there are government personnel to inspect them. For example, more than 50,000 Americans die each year from health and safety hazards at work, but the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) can only visit about 1 percent of the nation's potentially dangerous workplaces each year. Improving OSHA's and other agencies' techniques for selecting targets for inspection could help prevent numerous unnecessary injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. A multidisciplinary team of experts in science, law, and statistics from the University of Pennsylvania will use cutting edge analytical techniques to develop and test alternative strategies for deploying regulatory inspection resources based on profiling firms and identifying those most likely to be exposing workers to unsafe and unhealthy conditions. The firm profiles will be based on fina...
Preface Chapter 1. The Jobs and Regulation Debate -Cary Coglianese and Christopher Carrigan EVIDE... more Preface Chapter 1. The Jobs and Regulation Debate -Cary Coglianese and Christopher Carrigan EVIDENCE Chapter 2. Analyzing the Employment Impacts of Regulation -Richard D. Morgenstern Chapter 3. Do the Job Effects of Regulation Differ with the Competitive Environment? -Wayne B. Gray and Ronald J. Shadbegian Chapter 4. The Employment and Competitiveness Impacts of Power-Sector Regulations -Joseph E. Aldy and William A. Pizer Chapter 5. Environmental Regulatory Rigidity and Employment in the Electric Power Sector -Rolf Fare, Shawna Grosskopf, Carl A. Pasurka, Jr., and Ronald J. Shadbegian ANALYTICS Chapter 6. Toward Best Practices: Assessing the Effects of Regulation on Employment -Lisa A. Robinson Chapter 7. Emitting More Light than Heat: Lessons from Risk Assessment Controversies for the "Job-Killing Regulations" Debate -Adam M. Finkel Chapter 8. Happiness, Health, and Leisure: Valuing the Nonconsumption Impacts of Unemployment -Matthew D. Adler Chapter 9. A Research Agenda for Improving the Treatment of Employment Impacts in Regulatory Impact Analysis -Ann Ferris and Al McGartland Chapter 10. Employment and Human Welfare: Why Does Benefit-Cost Analysis Seem Blind to Job Impacts? -Brian F. Mannix REFORM Chapter 11. Unemployment and Regulatory Policy -Jonathan S. Masur and Eric A. Posner Chapter 12. Reforming the Regulatory Process to Consider Employment and Other Macroeconomic Factors -Stuart Shapiro Chapter 13. Analysis to Inform Public Discourse on Jobs and Regulation Michael A. Livermore and Jason A. Schwartz Chapter 14. Rationing Analysis of Job Losses and Gains: An Exercise in Domestic Comparative Law -E. Donald Elliott Contributors Index Acknowledgments
The recent literature providing insights from neuroscience and evolutionary biology into how indi... more The recent literature providing insights from neuroscience and evolutionary biology into how individuals perceive risky choice situations represents a “second wave” of findings that recapitulates as well as challenges the risk perception research begun in the 1980s, which relied on psychometric survey research. Gleaning insights from the first wave of research that could improve the communication and control of environmental risks has yielded disappointing results. This is a result, in part, of the eagerness of scholars and pundits to posit a chasm between the “rational” and “objective” perceptions of experts, on the one hand, and a lay public that is seen as lurching between “paranoia and neglect” and as insensitive to the magnitude of risks. Interpretations of the psychometric research have suffered from inattention to uncertainty and interindividual variability in risk, to expert biases, and to important aspects of risky choice that were not explored in the first wave of research...
In his article" Cancer-Causing Substances in Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics"(Nov. 10 issue)... more In his article" Cancer-Causing Substances in Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics"(Nov. 10 issue),* Curran argues that the Federal Court of Appeals should have upheld the Food and Drug Administration's de minimis interpretation of the Delaney clause—the provision in the ...
An important part of processing elicited numerical inputs is an ability to quantitatively decode ... more An important part of processing elicited numerical inputs is an ability to quantitatively decode natural-language words that are commonly used to express or modify numerical values. These include 'about', 'around', 'almost', 'exactly', 'nearly', 'below', 'at least', 'order of', etc., which are collectively known as approximators or numerical hedges. Figuring out the quantitative implications of these expressions for the uncertainty of numerical quantities is important for being able to understand, for example, what is actually being reported by a patient who says a headache has lasted for " about 7 days " , and how we should translate the patient's report into uncertainty about the duration. We used Amazon Mechanical Turk to empirically identify the implications of various approximators common in English. To evaluate the numerical range implied by each approximator, we analyzed paired statements differing only in the approximator used in numerical expressions. Despite often considerable diversity, there were several statistically significant findings, but far less quantitative variation implied by the approximators than might have been expected. The numerical implication of different approximators interacts with the magnitude and roundness of the nominal quantity. This investigation strategy generalizes easily to languages other than English.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease associated with a history o... more Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease associated with a history of repetitive head impacts (RHI). CTE was described in boxers as early as the 1920s and by the 1950s it was widely accepted that hits to the head caused some boxers to become “punch drunk.” However, the recent discovery of CTE in American and Australian-rules football, soccer, rugby, ice hockey, and other sports has resulted in renewed debate on whether the relationship between RHI and CTE is causal. Identifying the strength of the evidential relationship between CTE and RHI has implications for public health and medico-legal issues. From a public health perspective, environmentally caused diseases can be mitigated or prevented. Medico-legally, millions of children are exposed to RHI through sports participation; this demographic is too young to legally consent to any potential long-term risks associated with this exposure. To better understand the strength of evidence underlying the poss...
Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law, 2014
The entire U.S. federal regulatory apparatus, especially that part devoted to reducing (or decidi... more The entire U.S. federal regulatory apparatus, especially that part devoted to reducing (or deciding not to reduce) risks to the environment, health, and safety (EHS), relies increasingly on judgments of whether each regulation would yield benefits in excess of its costs. These judgments depend in turn upon empirical analysis of the potential increases in longevity, quality of life, and environmental quality that the regulation can confer, and also of the economic resources needed to “purchase” those benefits—analyses whose quality can range from extremely fine to disappointingly poor. The quality of a risk analysis (from which the benefits of control are derived) or of an economic analysis depends on attributes they share in common, such as the complexity and rigor of the data collection and mathematical modeling, the transparency by which the assumptions used are disclosed, and the humility of the conclusions drawn (particularly the care taken to acknowledge uncertainty in the esti...
Five international consensus statements on concussion in sports have been published. This comment... more Five international consensus statements on concussion in sports have been published. This commentary argues that there is a strong need for a new approach to them that foregrounds public health expertise and patient-centered guidance. Doing so will help players, parents and practitioners keep perspective about these potentially life-altering injuries especially when they recur.
In this article, we discuss four vexing problems in risk‐based decision making that John Evans ha... more In this article, we discuss four vexing problems in risk‐based decision making that John Evans has addressed over the last nearly 40 years and has perennially challenged the two of us and others to think about. We tackle the role in decision making of potential thresholds in dose–response functions, how the lack of health reference values for many chemicals may distort risk management, the challenge of model uncertainty for risk characterization, and the yet‐untapped potential for value‐of‐information analysis to enhance public health decision making. Our theme is that work remains to be done on each of these, but that some of that work would merely involve listening to ideas that John has already offered.
Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis, Jan 6, 2016
Public perceptions of both risks and regulatory costs shape rational regulatory choices. Despite ... more Public perceptions of both risks and regulatory costs shape rational regulatory choices. Despite decades of risk perception studies, this article is the first on regulatory cost perceptions. A survey of 744 U.S. residents probed: (1) How knowledgeable are laypeople about regulatory costs incurred to reduce risks? (2) Do laypeople see official estimates of cost and benefit (lives saved) as accurate? (3) (How) do preferences for hypothetical regulations change when mean-preserving spreads of uncertainty replace certain cost or benefit? and (4) (How) do preferences change when unequal interindividual distributions of hypothetical regulatory costs replace equal distributions? Respondents overestimated costs of regulatory compliance, while assuming agencies underestimate costs. Most assumed agency estimates of benefits are accurate; a third believed both cost and benefit estimates are accurate. Cost and benefit estimates presented without uncertainty were slightly preferred to those surr...
Regulatory agencies established to protect the public all face a fundamental challenge: there are... more Regulatory agencies established to protect the public all face a fundamental challenge: there are many more firms to inspect than there are government personnel to inspect them. For example, more than 50,000 Americans die each year from health and safety hazards at work, but the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) can only visit about 1 percent of the nation's potentially dangerous workplaces each year. Improving OSHA's and other agencies' techniques for selecting targets for inspection could help prevent numerous unnecessary injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. A multidisciplinary team of experts in science, law, and statistics from the University of Pennsylvania will use cutting edge analytical techniques to develop and test alternative strategies for deploying regulatory inspection resources based on profiling firms and identifying those most likely to be exposing workers to unsafe and unhealthy conditions. The firm profiles will be based on fina...
Preface Chapter 1. The Jobs and Regulation Debate -Cary Coglianese and Christopher Carrigan EVIDE... more Preface Chapter 1. The Jobs and Regulation Debate -Cary Coglianese and Christopher Carrigan EVIDENCE Chapter 2. Analyzing the Employment Impacts of Regulation -Richard D. Morgenstern Chapter 3. Do the Job Effects of Regulation Differ with the Competitive Environment? -Wayne B. Gray and Ronald J. Shadbegian Chapter 4. The Employment and Competitiveness Impacts of Power-Sector Regulations -Joseph E. Aldy and William A. Pizer Chapter 5. Environmental Regulatory Rigidity and Employment in the Electric Power Sector -Rolf Fare, Shawna Grosskopf, Carl A. Pasurka, Jr., and Ronald J. Shadbegian ANALYTICS Chapter 6. Toward Best Practices: Assessing the Effects of Regulation on Employment -Lisa A. Robinson Chapter 7. Emitting More Light than Heat: Lessons from Risk Assessment Controversies for the "Job-Killing Regulations" Debate -Adam M. Finkel Chapter 8. Happiness, Health, and Leisure: Valuing the Nonconsumption Impacts of Unemployment -Matthew D. Adler Chapter 9. A Research Agenda for Improving the Treatment of Employment Impacts in Regulatory Impact Analysis -Ann Ferris and Al McGartland Chapter 10. Employment and Human Welfare: Why Does Benefit-Cost Analysis Seem Blind to Job Impacts? -Brian F. Mannix REFORM Chapter 11. Unemployment and Regulatory Policy -Jonathan S. Masur and Eric A. Posner Chapter 12. Reforming the Regulatory Process to Consider Employment and Other Macroeconomic Factors -Stuart Shapiro Chapter 13. Analysis to Inform Public Discourse on Jobs and Regulation Michael A. Livermore and Jason A. Schwartz Chapter 14. Rationing Analysis of Job Losses and Gains: An Exercise in Domestic Comparative Law -E. Donald Elliott Contributors Index Acknowledgments
The recent literature providing insights from neuroscience and evolutionary biology into how indi... more The recent literature providing insights from neuroscience and evolutionary biology into how individuals perceive risky choice situations represents a “second wave” of findings that recapitulates as well as challenges the risk perception research begun in the 1980s, which relied on psychometric survey research. Gleaning insights from the first wave of research that could improve the communication and control of environmental risks has yielded disappointing results. This is a result, in part, of the eagerness of scholars and pundits to posit a chasm between the “rational” and “objective” perceptions of experts, on the one hand, and a lay public that is seen as lurching between “paranoia and neglect” and as insensitive to the magnitude of risks. Interpretations of the psychometric research have suffered from inattention to uncertainty and interindividual variability in risk, to expert biases, and to important aspects of risky choice that were not explored in the first wave of research...
In his article" Cancer-Causing Substances in Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics"(Nov. 10 issue)... more In his article" Cancer-Causing Substances in Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics"(Nov. 10 issue),* Curran argues that the Federal Court of Appeals should have upheld the Food and Drug Administration's de minimis interpretation of the Delaney clause—the provision in the ...
An important part of processing elicited numerical inputs is an ability to quantitatively decode ... more An important part of processing elicited numerical inputs is an ability to quantitatively decode natural-language words that are commonly used to express or modify numerical values. These include 'about', 'around', 'almost', 'exactly', 'nearly', 'below', 'at least', 'order of', etc., which are collectively known as approximators or numerical hedges. Figuring out the quantitative implications of these expressions for the uncertainty of numerical quantities is important for being able to understand, for example, what is actually being reported by a patient who says a headache has lasted for " about 7 days " , and how we should translate the patient's report into uncertainty about the duration. We used Amazon Mechanical Turk to empirically identify the implications of various approximators common in English. To evaluate the numerical range implied by each approximator, we analyzed paired statements differing only in the approximator used in numerical expressions. Despite often considerable diversity, there were several statistically significant findings, but far less quantitative variation implied by the approximators than might have been expected. The numerical implication of different approximators interacts with the magnitude and roundness of the nominal quantity. This investigation strategy generalizes easily to languages other than English.
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