The Precautionary Principle is in sharp political focus today because: 1) the nature of scientific uncertainty is changing, and 2) there is increasing pressure to base governmental action on more "rational" schemes, such as cost-benefit analysis and quantitative risk assessment, the former being an embodiment of "rational choice theory" promoted by the Chicago School of Law and Economics. The P...

the current research aims to consider the importance of decision maker level of analysis in the study of foreign policy. this capability is created in regard to the role of man in foreign policy and international relations theories. however, the main research question is whether the decision maker level of analysis will be the theoretical support for the analysis of foreign policy and what the ...

Markov decision processes (MDP) with finite state and action space have often been used to model sequential decision making over time in dairy herds. However, the length of each stage has been at least 1 mo, resulting in models that do not support decisions on a daily basis. The present paper describes the first step of developing an MDP model that can be integrated into a modern herd managemen...

Libraries have been written about the theory and practice of public policy making. Yet, this enormous scholarship has proved insufficient to lift the veil of mystery and idiosyncrasy that shrouds the art of decision making. The heady ambition to turn both clinical practice and health policy into evidence-based bastions of rationalist decision making has been downgraded; the vocabulary is now “e...

This article argues that in public health research, standard approaches to knowledge translation are based on (1) an invalid model of the relationship between research knowledge and policy and (2) an oversimplified concept of ‘knowledge’. Standard approaches tend to focus primarily on communicating research knowledge to policy makers in order to increase the impact of research on policy making....

During the past six decades, data analysis and research studies have been instrumental in shaping public and private health care policy. Policymakers obtain the knowledge they need for making policy decisions through exposure to and examination of data generated through research studies, experimentation, demonstrations, and analyses. In this article, U.S. hospital care policy has been divided i...