I welcome the opportunity to comment on Consent in Escrow by Van der Loos and her colleagues.1 The authors are correct in their premise that the conduct of human subject research after a natural ormanmade disaster is ‘rife with. . . ethical, legal and policy challenges’.2 But I disagree with their conclusion that a revision to the process of informed consent used in the conduct of such research...

Solving non-routine problems is one of the most important skills for the 21st century. Traditional paper– pencil tests cannot assess this type of skill well because of their lack of interactivity and inability to capture procedural data. Tools such as MicroDYN and MicroFIN have proved to be trustworthy in assessing complex problem-solving performances in the dynamic environments representing li...

Laurence BonJour (1998) has recently proposed an a priori solution to the problem of induction. According to BonJour, it is necessarily true that explanations involving ordinary inductive conclusions are the best explanations of inductive premises, and we can be justified in believing this fact a priori. He contends that no empiricist account of justification that rejects or denigrates the a pr...

The quantum measurement problem is formulated in the form of an insolubility theorem that states the impossibility of obtaining, for all available object preparations, a mixture of states of the compound object and apparatus system that would represent definite pointer positions. A proof is given that comprises arbitrary object observables, whether sharp or unsharp, and besides sharp pointer ob...

In this paper test equating is considered as a missing data problem. The unobserved responses of the reference population to the new test must be imputed to specify a new cutscore. The proportion of students from the reference population that would have failed the new exam and those having failed the reference exam are made approximately the same. We investigate whether item response theory (IR...

Woodward’s interventionist theory of causation is beset by a problem of circularity: the analysis of causes is in terms of interventions, and the analysis of interventions is in terms of causes. This is not in itself an argument against the correctness of the analysis. But by requiring us to have causal knowledge prior to making any judgements about causation, Woodward’s theory does make it mys...

Establishing the existence of equilibrium in insurance markets has always been a challenging task for economists due to imperfect information. As illustrated by Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976), imperfect information may lead to complete market failure. This paper extends the standard model of adverse selection by introducing employers that choose the set of policies that are offered to consumers...

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the classic NP hard optimization problems. The Dynamic TSP (DTSP) is arguably even more difficult than general static TSP. Moreover the DTSP is widely applicable to real-world applications, arguably even more than its static equivalent. However its investigation is only in the preliminary stages. There are many open questions to be investigated. Th...

Assessment and selection of suppliers are two most important tasks in the purchasing part in supply chain management. Supplier selection can be considered to be a single or multi-objective problem. From another point of view, it can be a single or multi-sourcing problem. In this paper, an integrated AHP and Fuzzy TOPSIS model is proposed to solve the supplier selection problem. This model makes...