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When the current phase of our conflict with Iraq began in March 2003, much was unknown. Our political leaders based the case for war on the conviction that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that had not been eliminated despite twelve years of grinding sanctions. Congress voted in October 2002 to authorize renewed use of military force against Iraq, acting on the basis of representations by the Bush Administration that Iraq had been actively concealing WMD stockpiles and programs from the United Nations inspectors who had a mandate to verify the complete destruction of Iraq's WMD capability. Facts were alleged; evidence was proffered; inferences were drawn from the record, or from Iraq's failure to rebut what the record seemed to show. The factual premises for this war turned out to be, in a word, mistaken. Whether the case was overstated, misstated, knowingly misrepresented, or deliberately falsified was a point of debate in the campaign season of 2004. The tale is dismaying but all too familiar. We can recognize a pattern established by the Mexican-American, Spanish-American, and Indochina Wars: The President of the United States goes to Congress with an assertion of an outrage that cannot be ignored and that requires a prompt and decisive forcible response. Congress accepts the Executive's claim without much inquiry into whether the factual premises are well founded and approves the initiation of combat. War ensues; the world is transformed; the facts, however, turn out to be different from how they were portrayed when Congress acted.

This article discusses the methodological challenges posed for psychological research on whiteness at the intersection between race and gender in Germany. Much of the current research in the social science field in Germany focuses on violent expressions of racism or Fremdenfeindlichkeit (hostility towards strangers) and represents a collective immunization against the knowledge about the history and the historicity of whiteness as a history of seizure. Such approaches are motivated by fear and uncertainty. The author takes this uncertainty not only as a starting point for an investigation into the heavily veiled history of whiteness, but also as a method in itself.

A review essay on books by (1) Mari Caputi, A Kinder, Gentler America: Meloncholia and the Mythical 1950s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); (2) Marcie Frank, How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); (3) Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Lanham. MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006) & (4) Helen Liggett, Urban Encounters Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

The National Institute has been producing forecasts since 1958, and they are an essential part of our contribution to the policy debate in the UK and elsewhere. Model-based forecasts for the UK have been published every quarter1 since the 1970s, whilst model-based forecasts for the US and the major Europeans started only in the late 1980s. The country coverage of the European forecasts has increased over the years, and Euro Area forecasts began as soon as membership was clear. There is a long enough history of forecasting to be able to evaluate our performance, and this note extends the work reported in Pain, Riley and Weale (2001), Barrell, Kirby and Metz (2005) and Barrell and Metz (2006). The Institute forecasts for the UK are the main focus of the analysis in this note, but evaluations of the US and Euro Area forecasts produced by the Institute are also undertaken. We focus on evaluating the last forecast undertaken (at T–1) before the start of the year being forecast (at T), as they contain as much information as was possible without using any from the year being forecast. We also look at the evolution of forecasts over the two years preceding the publication of the first outturn for the year being forecast in order to gauge at which point those forecasts become efficient in that the root mean squared deviation (RMSD) of the errors is smaller than standard deviation of the series.

ABSTRACTDeveloping a better understanding of the impact of uncertainty on process performance has been recognized as an important research opportunity in service design (Hill, et al., 2002). Within this general research stream, our study focuses on the question of what managers can do to most effectively address operational uncertainty and mitigate its negative effects. To begin to address this question, we report on an exploratory study using a sample of professionals in the financial‐services industry who acted as informants on 108 financial‐services processes. These professionals were sampled from a population of graduates of a university in the northeastern region of the United States who were employed in the financial‐services industry. Based on these processes, we empirically examine the relationship between responses to operational uncertainty and process performance after controlling for customer mix, other uncertainty sources, and process type characteristics. Our findings suggest that process improvement—an uncertainty reduction approach related to the internal functioning of the process—as well as several uncertainty coping approaches are associated with better performing processes. However, uncertainty reduction approaches related to customer involvement with, and demands on, the process are not associated with better performing processes. We discuss the implications of our findings for determining what actions managers can take to reduce the negative performance effects of operational uncertainty and how managers can decide which of these actions to take. We conclude with a discussion of the limitations of our study.

This volume concerns Rational Agents - humans, players in a game, software or institutions - which must decide the proper next action in an atmosphere of partial information and uncertainty. The book collects formal accounts of Uncertainty, Rationality and Agency, and also of their interaction. It will benefit researchers in artificial systems which must gather information, reason about it and then make a rational decision on which action to take.

International cooperation is plagued by uncertainty. Although states negotiate the best agreements possible using available information, unpredictable things happen after agreements are signed that are beyond states' control. States may not even commit themselves to an agreement if they anticipate that circumstances will alter their expected benefits. Duration provisions can insure states in this context. Specifically, the use of finite duration depends positively on the degree of uncertainty and states' relative risk aversion and negatively on the cost. These formally derived hypotheses strongly survive a test with data on a random sample of agreements across all four of the major issue areas in international relations. Not only do the results, highlighting evidence on multiple kinds of flexibility provisions, strongly suggest that the design of international agreements is systematic and sophisticated; but also they call attention to common ground among various subfields of political science and law.

In this article I clarify the often muddled distinctions between uncertainty, difficulty, and complexity and show that all three can enhance our understanding of institutional performance and design. To cope with uncertainty, institutions align incentives for information revelation; to handle difficult problems, institutions create incentives for diverse problem-solving approaches; and to harness complexity, institutions adjust selection criteria, rates of variation, and the level of connectedness. The distinction between complex systems and equilibrium systems also necessitates a discussion of the differences between the existence, stability, and attainment of equilibria and why, despite often being neglected, the latter two concepts are important to our understanding of institutions.