the us foreign policy processes in the middle east, in the post world war ii period, have always brought about security challenge, danger and crisis, in the region. all us presidents have experienced grave security crisis in this geopolitical area. there also exists many indications of distrust of the current foreign us policy exercised in the middle east on the part of middle eastern citizens....

E conomics and environmentalism are belief systems that shape their adherents’ way of thinking about the world. We might just as accurately characterize them as secular religions, which most theologians count as real religions (see, for example, Tillich 1963), but many people prefer to regard them as competing belief systems. Many (not all) economists and environmentalists thus function in the ...

among the many reasons that may limit the adoption of promising reform ideas, policy capacity is the least recognized. the concept itself is not widely understood. although policy capacity is concerned with the gathering of information and the formulation of options for public action in the initial phases of policy consultation and development, it also touches on all stages of the policy proces...

The credibility of politicians is crucial to their persuasiveness as election candidates. The paper applies a parameter-free Baysian source credibility model (integrating trustworthiness and epistemic authority) in a real-life test predicting participants’ posterior belief in the goodness of an unnamed policy after a named candidate has publically supported or attacked it. Two studies test mode...

We present decentralized rollout sampling policy iteration (DecRSPI)–a new algorithm for multiagent decision problems formalized as DECPOMDPs. DecRSPI is designed to improve scalability and tackle problems that lack an explicit model. The algorithm uses Monte-Carlo methods to generate a sample of reachable belief states. Then it computes a joint policy for each belief state based on the rollout...

We present Κ-abstraction as a method for automatically generating small discrete belief spaces for partially observable Markov decision problems (POMDPs). This permits direct application of existing reinforcement learning methods to POMDPs. We show results from applying these methods to a 256 state POMDP, and discuss the types of problems for which the method is suitable. Topic: Algorithms and ...

OBJECTIVE To determine if the belief that thirdhand smoke is harmful to children is associated with smoking parents' attitudes, home or car smoking policies, and quitting behaviors. METHODS Data from a national randomized controlled trial, Clinical Effort Against Secondhand Smoke Exposure, assessed thirdhand smoke beliefs of 1947 smoking parents in an exit survey after a pediatric office visi...

Being able to correctly aggregate the beliefs of many people into a single belief is a problem fundamental to many important social, economic and political processes such as policy making, market pricing and voting. Although there exist many models and mechanisms for aggregation, there is a lack of methods and literature regarding the aggregation of opinions when in uence and learning between i...