Ag Decision Maker, September 2015, Vol. 19, no. 11

A Business Newsletter for Agriculture

Liberties and constraints of the normative approach to evaluation and decision in forensic science: a discussion towards overcoming some common misconceptions

At a time when disciplined inference and decision making under uncertainty represent common aims to participants in legal proceedings, the scientific community is remarkably heterogenous in its attitudes as to how these goals ought to be achieved. Probability and decision theory exert a considerable influence, and we think by all reason rightly do so, but they go against a mainstream of thinking that does not embrace-or is not aware of-the 'normative' character of this body of theory. It is normative, in the sense understood in this article, in that it prescribes particular properties, typically (logical) coherence, to which reasoning and decision making ought to conform. Disregarding these properties can result in diverging views which are occasionally used as an argument against the theory, or as a pretext for not following it. Typical examples are objections according to which people, both in everyday life but also individuals involved at various levels in the judicial process, find the theory difficult to understand and to apply. A further objection is that the theory does not reflect how people actually behave. This article aims to point out in what sense these examples misinterpret the analytical framework in its normative perspective. Through examples borrowed mostly from forensic science contexts, it is argued that so-called intuitive scientific attitudes are particularly liable to such misconceptions. These attitudes are contrasted with a statement of the actual liberties and constraints of probability and decision theory and the view according to which this theory is normative.

Ag Decision Maker, October 2015, Vol. 19, no. 12

A Business Newsletter for Agriculture

Iowa College Student Aid Commission Annual Report FY 2013-2014

Iowa College Student Aid Commission Annual Report

Ag Decision Maker, November 2015, Vol. 20, no. 1

A Business Newsletter for Agriculture

Just the Facts for 2012

There are 20,552 full-time employees who work for the State of Iowa Executive Branch(excluding Fair Authority, Community-Based Corrections, and the Regents employees). These employees are undoubtedly the most valuable resource for providing timely and quality services to Iowans. To strategically manage this resource, state departments and policymakers must have thorough and accurate information. The information in “Just the Facts for 2008” is a snapshot of the workforce, collected,compiled, and presented in a format that will aid agencies and decision makers in strategic planning. In many cases, data cover a number of years and are presented to give the reader a sense of trends. While the Department of Administrative Services, Human Resource Enterprise (DAS/HRE)wants to present data in its purest form so readers can draw their own conclusions, we also have a responsibility to clarify anything that may be confusing or misleading. It is important to highlight workforce trends and explain their significance to the work of Iowa state government. The following chapter summaries are intended to do that.

Ag Decision Maker, December 2015, Vol. 20, no. 2

A Business Newsletter for Agriculture

Deploying the Maintenance Decision Support System (MDSS) in Iowa, 2003

Adverse weather conditions dramatically affect the nation’s surface transportation system. The development of a prototype winter Maintenance Decision Support System (MDSS) is part of the Federal Highway Administration’s effort to produce a prototype tool for decision support to winter road maintenance managers to help make the highways safer for the traveling public. The MDSS is based on leading diagnostic and prognostic weather research capabilities and road condition algorithms, which are being developed at national research centers. In 2003, the Iowa Department of Transportation was chosen as a field test bed for the continuing development of this important research program. The Center for Transportation Research and Education assisted the Iowa Department of Transportation by collecting and analyzing surface condition data. The Federal Highway Administration also selected five national research centers to participate in the development of the prototype MDSS. It is anticipated that components of the prototype MDSS system developed by this project will ultimately be deployed by road operating agencies, including state departments of transportation, and generally supplied by private vendors.

Iowa College Student Aid Commission Performance Report, FY 2015

Agency Performance Report

Decision making techniques with similarity measures and OWA operators

We analyse the use of the ordered weighted average (OWA) in decision-making giving special attention to business and economic decision-making problems. We present several aggregation techniques that are very useful for decision-making such as the Hamming distance, the adequacy coefficient and the index of maximum and minimum level. We suggest a new approach by using immediate weights, that is, by using the weighted average and the OWA operator in the same formulation. We further generalize them by using generalized and quasi-arithmetic means. We also analyse the applicability of the OWA operator in business and economics and we see that we can use it instead of the weighted average. We end the paper with an application in a business multi-person decision-making problem regarding production management

FY15 Enrich Iowa Report Direct State Aid Funding Use & Impacts from Iowa Public Libraries, January 12, 2016

This report details the amount and use of Enrich Iowa funding Iowa libraries received for the Direct State Aid program. Annually, Iowa libraries are required to report on the use of this funding in set categories, but libraries are also given the opportunity to provide comments or stories on the impacts of these funds. The right column includes the comments submitted by Iowa libraries.

Decision making: singin' in the brain.

Which neurons in the brain "decide" to initiate particular behaviors in response to sensory information? In this issue of Neuron, two papers (Kohatsu et al. and von Philipsborn et al.) identify candidates in the courtship circuitry of Drosophila. The activity of these neurons is both regulated by sex pheromones and necessary and sufficient to trigger male love song.

Speed-cohesion trade-offs in collective decision making in ants and the concept of precision in animal behaviour

In decision making, speed-accuracy trade-offs are well known and often inevitable because accuracy depends on being well informed and gathering information takes time. However, trade-offs between speed and cohesion, that is the degree to which a group remains together as a single entity, as a result of their decision making, have been comparatively neglected. We combine theory and experimentation to show that in decision-making systems, speed-cohesion trade-offs are a natural complement to speed-accuracy trade-offs and are therefore of general importance. We then analyse the decision performance of 32 rock ant, Temnothorax albipennis, colonies in experiments in which accuracy of collective decision making was held constant, but time urgency varied. These experiments reveal for the first time an adaptive speed-cohesion trade-off in collective decision making and how this is achieved. In accord with different time constraints, colonies can decide quickly, at the cost of social unity, or they can decide slowly with much greater cohesion. We discuss the similarity between cohesion and the term precision as used in statistics and engineering. This emphasizes the generality of speed versus cohesion/precision trade-offs in decision making and decision implementation in other fields within animal behaviour such as sexually selected motor displays and even certain aspects of birdsong. We also suggest that speed versus precision trade-offs may occur when individuals within a group need to synchronize their activity, and in collective navigation, cooperative hunting and in certain escape behaviours.