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.

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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.

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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.

Introduction: What Are Animal Rights? PART I: CURRENT DEBATES 1. Animal Rights, One Step At A Time 2. Animal Rights: Legal, Philosophical, and Pragmatic Perspectives 3. Ethics Beyond Species and Beyond Instincts: A Reply to Richard Posner 4. Eating Meat and Eating People 5. Taking Animal Interests Seriously 6. Animals As Objects, or Subjects, of Rights 7. Drawing Lines 8. All Animals Are Not Equal: The Interface Between Scientific Knowledge and Legislation for Animal Rights PART II: NEW DIRECTIONS 9. Foxes in the Hen House: Animals, Agribusiness, and the Law 10. A New Property Status for Animals: Equitable Self-Ownership 11. Can Animals Sue? 12. Of Mice and Men: A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights 13. Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life 14. "Beyond Compassion and Humanity": Justice for Non-Human Animals

Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions

/pdf/rules-and-rulelessness-3w2jk9356o.pdf

Rules and Rulelessness

When strong emotions are triggered by a risk, people show a remarkable tendency to neglect a small probability that the risk will actually come to fruition. Experimental evidence, involving electric shocks and arsenic, supports this claim, as does real-world evidence, involving responses to abandoned hazardous waste dumps, the pesticide Alar, and anthrax. The resulting “probability neglect” has many implications for law and policy. It suggests the need for institutional constraints on policies based on ungrounded fears; it also shows how government might effectively draw attention to risks that warrant special concern. Probability neglect helps to explain the enactment of certain legislation, in which government, no less than ordinary people, suffers from that form of neglect. When people are neglecting the fact that the probability of harm is small, government should generally attempt to inform people, rather than cater to their excessive fear. But when information will not help, government should respond, at least if analysis suggest that the benefits outweigh the costs. The reason is that fear, even if it is excessive, is itself a significant problem, and can create additional significant problems. “If someone is predisposed to be worried, degrees of unlikeliness seem to provide no comfort, unless one can prove that harm is absolutely impossible, which itself is not possible.”1 “[A]ffect-rich outcomes yield pronounced overweighting of small probabilities . . . .”2 “On Sept. 11, Americans entered a new and frightening geography, where the continents of safety and danger seemed forever shifted. Is it safe to fly? Will terrorists wage germ warfare? Where is the line between reasonable precaution and panic? Jittery, uncertain and assuming the worst, many people have answered these questions by forswearing air travel, purchasing gas masks and radiation detectors, placing frantic calls to pediatricians demanding vaccinations against exotic diseases or rushing out to fill prescriptions for Cipro, an antibiotic most experts consider an unnecessary defense against anthrax.”3 *Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, Law School and Department of Political Science. I am grateful to Christine Jolls, Eric Posner, Richard Posner, and Adrian Vermeule for helpful comments on a previous draft, and to Martha Nussbaum for valuable discussion. 1See John Weingart, Waste Is A Terrible Thing To Mind 362 (2001). 2Yuval Rottenstreich and Christopher Hsee, Money, Kisses, and Electric Shocks: On the Affective Psychology of Risk, 12 Psych Rev. 185, 188 (2001). 3Erica Goode, Rational and Irrational Fears Combine in Terrorism's Wake, The New York Times, Oct. 2, 2001.

/pdf/probability-neglect-emotions-worst-cases-and-law-4b05na9ev5.pdf

Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law

Constitutional limits on government's power to regulate the culture and the arts, newly salient in light of the controversy involving the Brooklyn Museum, are best understood by distinguishing among (a) content-neutral, (b) content-based, and (c) viewpoint-based restrictions, and also among (a) criminal and civil sanctions, (b) "penalties," and (c) mere failure to fund The resulting three-by-three matrix provides an understanding of the vast bulk of current constitutional law At the same time, several serious puzzles are created by current law: the distinction between viewpoint discrimination and content discrimination can be thin in the context of art; it is hard to know what counts as a "mere" failure to fund; and the law contains important uncertainties about selective funding There is discussion as well of government subsidies of the market for culture and art

/pdf/culture-and-government-money-a-guide-for-the-perplexed-2hd4zl07pp.pdf

Culture and Government Money: A Guide for the Perplexed

Careful attention to choice architecture promises to open up new possibilities for environmental protection – possibilities that go well beyond, and that may be more effective than, the standard tools of economic incentives, mandates, and bans. How, for example, do consumers choose between environmentally-friendly products or services and alternatives that are potentially damaging to the environment but less expensive? The answer may well depend on the default rule. Indeed, green default rules may well be a more effective tool for altering outcomes than large economic incentives. The underlying reasons include the power of suggestion; inertia and procrastination; and loss aversion. If well-chosen, green defaults are likely to have large effects in reducing the economic and environmental harms associated with various products and activities. Such defaults may or may not be more expensive to consumers. In deciding whether to establish green defaults, choice architects should consider both consumer welfare and a wide range of other costs and benefits. Sometimes that assessment will argue strongly in favor of green defaults, particularly when both economic and environmental considerations point in their direction. But when choice architects lack relevant information, when interest-group maneuvering is a potential problem, and when externalities are not likely to be significant, active choosing, perhaps accompanied by various influences (including provision of relevant information), will usually be preferable to a green default.

/pdf/automatically-green-behavioral-economics-and-environmental-35wac2pbvx.pdf

Cass R. Sunstein

Papers

Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions

Rules and Rulelessness

Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law

Culture and Government Money: A Guide for the Perplexed

Automatically Green: Behavioral Economics and Environmental Protection