In this study I examine the critical factors and themes that are identified as salient influencers of overt and relational aggression among youth. Sex differences and similarities associated with such adolescent perceptions are assessed. Forty-eight ethnically diverse youth between the ages of 14 and 16 years participated in sex-specific focus groups and individual interviews. Sex-Specific Syst...

Mild variations of these statistics were observed before the 90s with an insignifcant tendency to grow from the second half of the 70s to the first half of the 80s. The Chernobyl accident in 1986 was not followed by any response. The incidence of perforated peptic ulcers almost doubled in the first half of the 90s, regional differences in the statistics appeared. These changes coincided with th...

In this paper, we are interested in the decision analysis focusing on the Benefit-Cost-Deficit (BCD) model. The BCD model is proposed recently in order to analyse the intentional deviated users behaviour (prescribed behaviour crossing). This later is considered as a decision problem under risk where the consequences of users’ decisions can be evaluated following three attributes: the Benefit, t...

In this paper, we develop a qualitative theory of influence diagrams that can be used to model and solve sequential decision making tasks when only qualitative (or imprecise) information is available. Our approach is based on an orderof-magnitude approximation of both probabilities and utilities and allows for specifying partially ordered preferences via sets of utility values. We also propose ...

Finding an optimal elimination ordering is a NP-hard problem of crucial importance for the efficiency of the Influence Diagrams evaluation. Some of the traditional methods for determining the elimination ordering use heuristics that consider that potentials are represented as tables. However, if potentials are represented using binary trees traditional methods may not offer the best results. In...

The potential influence diagram is a generalization of the standard "conditional" influence diagram, a directed network representation for probabilistic inference and decision analysis [Ndilikilikesha, 1991). It allows efficient inference calculations corresponding exactly to those on undirected graphs. In this paper, we explore the relationship between potential and conditional influence diagr...

Despite the salience of information technology investments in many firms, industry and firm-specific variations exist in the efficient use of information technology. Recent evidence suggests that industries vary in terms of how they use information technology (IT) and that the business benefits that firms receive from IT are strongly influenced by industry factors. This research examines some o...