Intended and Unintended Consequences of Security Assistance in Post-2011 Tunisia

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106
Author(s):  
Ruth Hanau Santini ◽  
Giulia Cimini
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
State Security ◽  
Security Assistance ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Democratic Constitution

In Tunisia, the notion and understanding of security, while no longer focused on regime security, remains a top-down, state-security understanding, rather than a societal one. Further, while the 2014 democratic Constitution devised significant checks and balances between the branches of government, even in the security field, external security assistance facilitated the centralization of security decision-making in the hands of the President of the Republic.

Enhancing Regulatory Decision Making for Postmarket Drug Safety

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vishal Ahuja ◽  
Carlos A. Alvarez ◽  
John R. Birge ◽  
Chad Syverson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Operations Management ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pharmaceutical Products ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Surveillance Systems ◽  
Veterans Health ◽  
Health Administration ◽  
Regulatory Decision ◽  
Increased Risk

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates the approval and safe public use of pharmaceutical products in the United States. The FDA uses postmarket surveillance systems to monitor drugs already on the market; a drug found to be associated with an increased risk of adverse events (ADEs) is subject to a recall or a warning. A flawed postmarket decision-making process can have unintended consequences for patients, create uncertainty among providers and affect their prescribing practices, and subject the FDA to unfavorable public scrutiny. The FDA’s current pharmacovigilance process suffers from several shortcomings (e.g., a high underreporting rate), often resulting in incorrect or untimely decisions. Thus, there is a need for robust, data-driven approaches to support and enhance regulatory decision making in the context of postmarket pharmacovigilance. We propose such an approach that has several appealing features—it employs large, reliable, and relevant longitudinal databases; it uses methods firmly established in literature; and it addresses selection bias and endogeneity concerns. Our approach can be used to both (i) independently validate existing safety concerns relating to a drug, such as those emanating from existing surveillance systems, and (ii) perform a holistic safety assessment by evaluating a drug’s association with other ADEs to which the users may be susceptible. We illustrate the utility of our approach by applying it retrospectively to a highly publicized FDA black box warning (BBW) for rosiglitazone, a diabetes drug. Using comprehensive data from the Veterans Health Administration on more than 320,000 diabetes patients over an eight-year period, we find that the drug was not associated with the two ADEs that led to the BBW, a conclusion that the FDA evidently reached, as it retracted the warning six years after issuing it. We demonstrate the generalizability of our approach by retroactively evaluating two additional warnings, those related to statins and atenolol, which we found to be valid. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

scholarly journals The Psychological Puzzle: Contributing Factors to the Top-Down Politicization of Intelligence

Elements ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Moretti
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Rational Decision ◽  
Contributing Factors ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Rational Decision Making

Policy and intelligence are intimately intertwined. Policymakers need intelligence to make decisions, while the intelligence community derives significance from its ability to provide policy makers with reliable information. In this symbiotic relationship, it is healthy for intelligence consumers to at times check and direct the work of intelligence producers. However, if undertaken maliciously, this checking mechanism manifests as top-down politicization. Here, leaders use intelligence post facto to legitimize their policies instead of using it to guide them, reversing the rational decision-making process. Certain factors may compel leaders to manipulate intelligence to reflect their policy preferences. This essay demonstrates how three distinct processes of top-down politicization can arise from ambiguous evidence, the psychology of intelligence consumers, and the nature of the leaders’ political positions and responsibilities. It then proceeds to argue that political leaders’ psychology is the most potent source of top-down politicization.

Responding to the Racialisation of Irishness: Disavowed Multiculturalism and its Discontents

2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 68-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronit Lentin
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Politics Of Recognition ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Republic Of Ireland ◽  
Irish People ◽  
The Republic

This article begins by discussing the specificities of racism in the Republic of Ireland. Critiquing multiculturalist and top-down antiracism policies, it argues that Irish multiculturalist initiatives are anchored in a liberal politics of recognition of difference, which do not depart from western cultural imperialism and are therefore inadequate for deconstructing inter-ethnic power relations. Multiculturalist approaches to antiracism result in the top-down ethnicisation of Irish society, and are failing to intervene in the uneasy interface of minority and majority relations in Ireland. Instead of a ‘politics of recognition’ guiding multiculturalist initiatives, I conclude the article by developing Hesse's (1999) idea of a ‘politics of interrogation’ of the Irish ‘we’ and propose disavowed multiculturalism as a way of theorising Irish responses to ethnic diversity. Interrogating the Irish ‘we’ cannot evade interrogating the painful past of emigration, a wound still festering because it was never tended, and which, I would suggest, is returning to haunt Irish people through the presence of the immigrant ‘other’.

scholarly journals Farmers’ Satisfaction of Rural Facilities and Its Influencing Indicators: A Case Study of Sichuan, China

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Yibin Ao ◽  
Jiayue Li ◽  
Yan Wang ◽  
Changjiang Liu ◽  
Shuhong Xu
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Recreational Facilities ◽  
Logit Regression ◽  
Life Type ◽  
Logit Regression Model ◽  
Public Toilets ◽  
Significant Factors

The disparity between construction targets and the real needs of farmers in the construction of rural facilities is a problem that has led to a failure in meeting farmers’ demands. This paper investigates farmers’ satisfaction and the influencing factors of rural facilities through factor analysis and logit regression model. This research led to three key findings: (1) overall satisfaction of farmers of rural facilities is below average level; (2) farmers’ satisfaction is affected mainly by the horizontal comparison, road facilities, electricity and signal facilities, reconstruction of public toilets, irrigation facilities, cultural and recreational facilities, renovation of fuel and kitchen, healthy facilities, village planning and renovation, and income factor; (3) farmers’ needs are shifting from production to life type. This paper is the foundation of further analysis of the effects of significant factors on farmers’ satisfaction, providing a theoretical basis for the construction of “bottom-up” and “top-down” decision-making mechanism.

scholarly journals Strategic Planning to Advance Equity on Campus: A Case Study at Portland State University

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marisa Zapata ◽  
Stephen Percy ◽  
Sona Karentz Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Strategic Planning ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Board Of Trustees ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
State University ◽  
Diversity And Inclusion ◽  
Portland State University

Propelled by many factors, including a newly appointed Board of Trustees responsible for governance of our university, resource shortages, and enrollment swings, Portland State University embarked on a strategic planning effort in 2014 with the intent of reunifying a divided campus and creating a bold vision for moving forward in the next five years. While committed from the start to goals of diversity and inclusion, the planning process itself generated greater awareness of and commitment to equity—a bolder vision of empowerment that creates a responsibility to understand and mitigate negative, but often unintended consequences of, campus decisions and action—particularly as they impact groups that have experienced institutional racism and injustice. Equity emerged not only as a goal, with intendant initiatives for action, but also as a commitment to conscientious ongoing attention to decision-making that embraces utilization of an equity lens.

scholarly journals Systematic Exploration and Uncertainty Dominate Young Children’s Choices

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel J. Blanco ◽  
Vladimir Sloutsky
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Cognitive Control ◽  
Exploration And Exploitation ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Reward Seeking ◽  
Systematic Fashion ◽  
Systematic Exploration ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
Exploration Exploitation

Organisms need to constantly balance the competing demands of gathering information and using previously acquired information to obtain rewarding outcomes (i.e., the “exploration- exploitation” dilemma). Exploration is critical to obtain information to discover how the world works, which should be particularly important for young children. While studies have shown that young children explore in response to surprising events, little is known about how they balance exploration and exploitation across multiple decisions or about how this process changes with development. In this study we compare decision-making patterns of children and adults and evaluate the relative influences of reward-seeking, random exploration, and systematic switching (which approximates uncertainty-directed exploration). In a second experiment we directly test the effect of uncertainty on children’s choices. Influential models of decision-making generally describe systematic exploration as a computationally refined capacity that relies on top-down cognitive control. We demonstrate that (1) systematic patterns dominate young children’s behavior (facilitating exploration), despite protracted development of cognitive control, and (2) that uncertainty plays a major, but complicated, role in determining children’s choices. We conclude that while young children’s immature top-down control should hinder adult-like systematic exploration, other mechanisms may pick up the slack, facilitating broad information gathering in a systematic fashion to build a foundation of knowledge for use later in life.

scholarly journals Attentional mechanisms drive systematic exploration in young children

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel J. Blanco ◽  
Vladimir Sloutsky
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Attention Allocation ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Distributed Attention ◽  
Systematic Exploration ◽  
The World ◽  
Attentional Mechanisms

Exploration is critical for discovering how the world works. Exploration should be particularlyvaluable for young children, who have little knowledge about the world. Theories of decision- making describe systematic exploration as being primarily driven by top-down cognitive control, which is immature in young children. Recent research suggests that a type of systematic exploration predominates in young children’s choices, despite immature control, suggesting that it may be driven by different mechanisms. We hypothesize that young children’s tendency to distribute attention widely promotes elevated exploration, and that interrupting distributed attention allocation through bottom-up attentional capture would also disrupt systematic exploration. We test this hypothesis by manipulating saliency of the options in a simple choice task. Saliency disrupted systematic exploration, thus indicating that attentional mechanisms may drive children’s systematic exploratory behavior. We suggest that both may be part of a larger tendency toward broad information gathering in young children.

Managing records and archives in a Hong Kong school: a case study

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric C.K. Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Management Approach ◽  
Record Management ◽  
Records Management ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Content Type

Purpose This study aims to explore the principles and practices for managing records with the lens of functional analysis and knowledge management by using a case study that focuses on the experience of implementing records management at a public high school in Hong Kong. Design/methodology/approach A single case study is chosen as the research method for this paper. A series of qualitative interviews and documentary analysis were used to collect and triangulate the qualitative data. Findings The results show that the case school adopted a hybrid top-down and bottom-up approach to record management, facilitate decision-making and manage knowledge. The school adopted the taxonomy provided by the quality assurance framework as the functional classification in a digital archive in the records management system. Practical implications This study provides a set of taxonomy and a hybrid top-down and bottom-up approach to schools for ensuring that accurate information of all school activities is kept and can facilitate an effective and evidence-based, decision-making process. Social implications Identifying taxonomy and management practices for effective documentation in public schools can support planning, assist with organising the continuity of improvement plans and increase reporting and accountability to society. Originality/value This study offers a taxonomy and management approach to the literature of records management and the practices for promoting and improving records management in school.

Augustus’ “New” Festival: The Centrality of Married Women’s Rituals at the Ludi Saeculares of 17 BCE

Numen ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 377-404
Author(s):  
Šterbenc Erker Darja
Keyword(s):  
Married Women ◽  
Top Down ◽  
New Era ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Personal Decision

AbstractThe article explores how Augustus and the priesthood of theXVviri sacris faciundisorganized and performed the rituals for celebrating a new era (ludi saeculares) under the rule of the gods Apollo and Diana. In the Republic, it had been a woman’s personal decision whether or not to take part in women’s festivals. However, theXVviricommanded that 110 married women (matronae) perform rituals (supplications and sacrifices) on the Capitoline. This article argues for the novelty of such a custom, in that it was a new form of top-down appeal tomatronaeto honor the gods in public festivals. The article also argues for the centrality of rituals of thematronaein the festival. At theludi saeculares, the cooperation between men (theXVviri) andmatronaewas ritually staged and seen as indispensable for ensuring the continuity of Rome.

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