Suchergebnisse

Ecological risk assessment embodied in an adaptive management framework is becoming the global standard approach for formally assessing and managing the ecological risks of technology and development. Ensuring the continual improvement of ecological risk assessment approaches is partly achieved through the dissemination of not only the types of risk assessment approaches used, but also their efficacy. While there is an increasing body of literature describing the results of general comparisons between alternate risk assessment methods and models, there is a paucity of literature that post hoc assesses the performance of specific predictions based on an assessment of risk and the effectiveness of the particular model used to predict the risk. This is especially the case where risk assessments have been used to grant consent or approval for the construction of major infrastructure projects. While postconstruction environmental monitoring is increasingly commonplace, it is not common for a postconstruction assessment of the accuracy and performance of the ecological risk assessment and underpinning model to be undertaken. Without this "assessment of the assessment," it is difficult for other practitioners to gain insight into the performance of the approach and models used and therefore, as argued here, this limits the rate of improvement of risk assessment approaches.

The predictive power of experts, operations analysis, and the value of information are interwoven subjects that are hard to winnow down to an essence. Prediction is a big subject, so I have limited this article to what I know best: the operational and tactical domains of conventional warfare.

A symposium contribution on, "The Supreme Court Forecasting Project," highlights the statistical model's erroneous prediction that the Court would affirm the Texas Court of Appeals' judgment that Texas law criminalizing gay sex is constitutional in the gay rights case Lawrence v. Texas. Although the prediction resulted from a programming error that was later fixed to produce a revised prediction of a 5-4 reversal, the corrected model still missed Justice Kennedy's vote to reverse the lower court even though Kennedy's empathy for gay rights was evidenced in earlier cases. A look at why Lawrence v. Texas was the most predictable of all major cases of the 2002 term is followed by an account of personal predictions for 27 cases covered during the same term as a member of the Supreme Court press corps. Specific cases are detailed & the personal predictions are compared with those of the statistical & expert models. J. Lindroth

On June 23, 2010, the American Antitrust Institute sponsored a symposium on prediction and antitrust. Its purpose was to examine the role of prediction in the antitrust world and to explore the applicability of current and increasingly well-established prediction and forecasting strategies to the antitrust enterprise. This article both summarizes the various presentations and conveys the conference organizer's personal observations about the topic. After introductory observations that establish the centrality of prediction to antitrust analysis in the phases of planning, investigation, litigation, and remedies, it describes various tools used to make predictions. Special attention is given to mergers and cartels. The article concludes with a discussion of ways in which the antitrust community might be enriched by exploring multidisciplinary sources of experience that have the potential of improving our sophistication with regard to prediction and forecasting.