Reconceptualizing ‘effectiveness’ in environmental projects: Can we measure values-related achievements?

Reconceptualizing 'effectiveness' in environmental projects: can we measure values-related achievements?

There have been recent calls for a shift to an evidence-based paradigm in environmental management, grounded in systematic monitoring and evaluation, but achieving this will be complex and difficult. Evaluating the educational components of environmental initiatives presents particular challenges, because these programs often have multiple concurrent goals and may value 'human outcomes', such a...

Can We Measure Memes?

Memes are the fundamental unit of cultural evolution and have been left upon the periphery of cognitive neuroscience due to their inexact definition and the consequent presumption that they are impossible to measure. Here it is argued that although a precise definition of memes is rather difficult it does not preclude highly controlled experiments studying the neural substrates of their initiat...

Can we appropriately measure appropriateness?

A few years ago, at a national interventional cardiology meeting, the speaker regaled the audience with an anecdote that may have been apocryphal but was entirely believable. At some earlier meeting, this speaker had challenged his audience with 3 sequential questions to which he invited a show of hands. The first was, “Have any of you witnessed an inappropriate coronary intervention?” in respo...

What can we learn from Plausible Values?

In this paper, we show that the marginal distribution of plausible values is a consistent estimator of the true latent variable distribution, and, furthermore, that convergence is monotone in an embedding in which the number of items tends to infinity. We use this result to clarify some of the misconceptions that exist about plausible values, and also show how they can be used in the analyses o...

Can We Measure Parton - Parton Cross Sections ?