Ambiguity: What's Your Tolerance?

Developing Tolerance for Ambiguity

FROM THE INCEPTION OF MEDICAL EDUCATION, STUDENTS ARE TRAINED to recognize and categorize disease. Through the formulation of differential diagnosis we learn which constellations of symptoms are characteristic of certain pathologies, and we structure our investigations, treatment plans, and prognostic predictions accordingly. These activities ground and direct the clinical encounter. Yet, as th...

Typical Ambiguity: Trying to Have Your Cake

Ambiguity is a property of syntactic expressions which is ubiquitous in all informal languages–natural, scientific and mathematical; the efficient use of language depends to an exceptional extent on this feature. Disambiguation is the process of separating out the possible meanings of ambiguous expressions. Ambiguity is typical if the process of disambiguation can be carried out in some systema...

Rapid Survey of Wasting and Stunting in Children: Whats New, Whats Old and Whats the Buzz?

Nationwide Rapid Survey on Children (RSoC), conducted by the Ministry of Women and Child Development and UNICEF in 2013-14 showed a marked improvement in the status of the child malnutrition over the third National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) that was conducted in 2005-06. Despite some impressive gains in the anthropometric indicators of malnutrition, the absolute levels remain high, and of c...

Assessing your board's risk tolerance.

Tolerance of Ambiguity and Entrepreneurial Innovation

We build a general equilibrium model of occupation choice, where the risks inherent in a technology embodying a new innovation are only vaguely known (ambiguous), whereas the old technology has known risks. Using the Arrow-Hurwicz criterion to characterise decisionmaking in the face of ambiguity, we distinguish agents according to their degree of ambiguity aversion. Equilibrium requires that al...