Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Improving the design and implementation of evidence-based practice depends on successful behaviour change interventions. This requires an appropriate method for characterising interventions and linking them to an analysis of the targeted behaviour. There exists a plethora of frameworks of behaviour change interventions, but it is not clear how well they serve this purpose. This paper evaluates these frameworks, and develops and evaluates a new framework aimed at overcoming their limitations. A systematic search of electronic databases and consultation with behaviour change experts were used to identify frameworks of behaviour change interventions. These were evaluated according to three criteria: comprehensiveness, coherence, and a clear link to an overarching model of behaviour. A new framework was developed to meet these criteria. The reliability with which it could be applied was examined in two domains of behaviour change: tobacco control and obesity. Nineteen frameworks were identified covering nine intervention functions and seven policy categories that could enable those interventions. None of the frameworks reviewed covered the full range of intervention functions or policies, and only a minority met the criteria of coherence or linkage to a model of behaviour. At the centre of a proposed new framework is a 'behaviour system' involving three essential conditions: capability, opportunity, and motivation (what we term the 'COM-B system'). This forms the hub of a 'behaviour change wheel' (BCW) around which are positioned the nine intervention functions aimed at addressing deficits in one or more of these conditions; around this are placed seven categories of policy that could enable those interventions to occur. The BCW was used reliably to characterise interventions within the English Department of Health's 2010 tobacco control strategy and the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence's guidance on reducing obesity. Interventions and policies to change behaviour can be usefully characterised by means of a BCW comprising: a 'behaviour system' at the hub, encircled by intervention functions and then by policy categories. Research is needed to establish how far the BCW can lead to more efficient design of effective interventions.

/pdf/the-behaviour-change-wheel-a-new-method-for-characterising-4vp816z23u.pdf

The behaviour change wheel: a new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions.

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

/pdf/international-norm-dynamics-and-political-change-37ig9r9dlq.pdf

International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at decision. The authors propose an alternative theoretical perspective, the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, that highlights the role of affect experienced at the moment of decision making. Drawing on research from clinical, physiological, and other subfield of psychology, they show that emotional reactions to risky situations often drive behavior. The risk-as-feelings hypothesis is shown to explain a wide range of phenomena that have resisted interpretation in cognitive-consequentialist terms.

Risk as Feelings

Early studies of intuitive judgment and decision making conducted with the late Amos Tversky are reviewed in the context of two related concepts: an analysis of accessibility, the ease with which thoughts come to mind; a distinction between effortless intuition and deliberate reasoning. Intuitive thoughts, like percepts, are highly accessible. Determinants and consequences of accessibility help explain the central results of prospect theory, framing effects, the heuristic process of attribute substitution, and the characteristic biases that result from the substitution of nonextensional for extensional attributes. Variations in the accessibility of rules explain the occasional corrections of intuitive judgments. The study of biases is compatible with a view of intuitive thinking and decision making as generally skilled and successful.

https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/JudgementAndChoice.MappingBoundedRationality.DKahneman2003.pdf

A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality.

/pdf/changing-conceptions-of-administration-29gsn9dz19.pdf

Changing Conceptions of Administration

Some information is beneficial; it makes people’s lives go better. Some information is harmful; it makes people’s lives go worse. Some information has no welfare effects at all; people neither gain nor lose from it. Under prevailing executive orders, agencies must investigate the welfare effects of information by reference to cost-benefit analysis. Federal agencies have (1) claimed that quantification of benefits is essentially impossible; (2) engaged in “breakeven analysis”; (3) projected various endpoints, such as health benefits or purely economic savings; and (4) relied on private willingness-to-pay for the relevant information. All of these approach0es run into serious objections. With respect to (4), people may lack the information that would permit them to say how much they would pay for (more) information; they may not know the welfare effects of information; and their tastes and values may shift over time, in part as a result of information. These points suggest the need to take the willingness-to-pay criterion with many grains of salt, and to learn more about the actual effects of information, and of the behavioral changes produced by information, on people’s experienced well-being.

The Welfare Effects of Information

Decisions of individuals relating to homosexual conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western Civilization. Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards˜. Blackstone described ‘the infamous crime against nature’ as an offense of ‘deeper malignity than rape’…

Same‐sex relations and the law

An American nondelegation doctrine is flourishing. Contrary to the standard account, it does not forbid Congress from granting broad discretion to executive agencies. Instead it is far narrower and more targeted. It says, very simply, that executive agencies cannot make certain kinds of decisions unless Congress has explicitly authorized them to do so. In so saying, the American nondelegation doctrine promotes the central goals of the standard doctrine, by preventing Congress from shirking and by requiring it to focus its attention on central questions, and also by protecting liberty. The abstract idea of “certain kinds of decisions” is currently filled in by, among other things, the canon of constitutional avoidance; the rule of lenity; and the presumptions against retroactivity and extraterritoriality. More recent nondelegation canons, not yet firmly entrenched, require agencies to consider costs and forbid them from interpreting statutes in a way that produces a large-scale increase in their regulatory authority. The cost-consideration canon makes a great deal of sense, especially as a way of disciplining the modern regulatory state; the “major questions doctrine,” as it is sometimes called, is less obviously correct. and its proper provenance depends on the nature of the relevant statute.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2972935_code647786.pdf?abstractid=2972935&mirid=1

The American Nondelegation Doctrine

Administrative agencies frequently say “not now.” They defer decisions about rulemaking or adjudication, or decide not to decide. When is it lawful for them to do so? A substantial degree of agency autonomy is guaranteed by a recognition of resource constraints, which require agencies to set priorities, often with reference to their independent assessments of the relative importance of legislative policies. Unless a fair reading of congressional instructions suggests otherwise, agencies may also defer decisions because of their own policy judgments about appropriate timing. At the same time, agencies may not defer decisions, or decide not to decide, if Congress has imposed a statutory deadline, or if their failure to act amounts to a circumvention of express or implied statutory requirements, or amounts to an abdication of the agency’s basic responsibility to promote and enforce policies established by Congress.

Cass R. Sunstein

Papers

Changing Conceptions of Administration

The Welfare Effects of Information

Same‐sex relations and the law

The American Nondelegation Doctrine

The Law of 'Not Now'