Towards statistical multicriteria decision modelling: a first approach

Many real life situations result from decisions taken by a very large number of decision makers. Among them, we may cite road traffic congestion, crowding during shopping, equity market behaviour, distribution of holiday destinations, etc. Furthermore, these decisions often depend on the optimisation of several conflicting criteria. In this paper, we introduce a new multicriteria tool based on Markov chains to model and manage these macroscopic phenomena. Finally, the road traffic congestion problem will be considered to illustrate the applicability of our approach. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Remuneration differences in the emerging economies of China and India

Emerging economies by definition tend to be less dependent on expatriate skills and labour than lower-income countries, yet remuneration (pay plus benefits) differences between expatriate and local workers persist in them to some degree. According to relative deprivation theory, economic development paradoxically elevates the salience of relatively small gaps in remuneration. We therefore expected workers to report injustice and demotivation regarding relative remuneration, despite the closing of remuneration gaps between expatriate and local workers due to the economic development of recent years. To explore that possibility, 482 skilled professionals from a variety of sectors and organizations in two emerging economies, India (n = 233, response rate = 54%) and China (n = 249, response rate = 58%), participated in the research. International salaries were greater than local salaries by a factor of 2.73:1 in India and 1.90:1 in China; these mean ratios bordered on intolerable in the India sample and were largely tolerable among the sample from China. In both countries, differently remunerated workers differed in their justice cognitions and their demotivation, with lowered motivation and fewer justice cognitions in the locally salaried, local workers. These differences were however more statistically significant between people working in India than in China. Insofar as the motivational and justice gaps persisted, the findings support relative deprivation theory. Insofar as the same gaps appear to be sharper in the country with the higher-not lower-mean remuneration differential, they do not. An in-country workshop with local experts who interpreted the findings (in India), and content analysis of the participants' recommendations (in China) jointly recommended linking remuneration to (i) workplace performance instead of (ii) economy-of-origin, to help promote (iii) fairness.     

助听器对听障学生唇读汉字语音识别的作用

本研究探讨了听觉障碍学生唇读语音识别中助听器和音素可见性的影响。结果表明,助听器与音素可见性之交互作用在正确率上表现显著,在反应时上不显著,音素可见性在唇读语音识别过程中作用明显,助听器明显作用于单韵母、复韵母的语音识别过程。     

新生儿疾病的共同决策框架和工具应用进展

以新生儿疾病为重点,介绍了医患共同决策的定义和发展历史,以及在新生儿疾病治疗中实现共同决策的一些工具,其中包括共同决策框架与模型以及决策辅助工具,共同决策框架以临床咨询、决策辅助和指导等形式为新生儿家属提供决策支持,决策辅助工具则借助宣传册、视频和交互式网站等形式,帮助医患共同决策,减少其决策冲突,提高决策质量和满意度。最后探讨了新生儿疾病治疗中实施共同决策的挑战,以及未来研究将要前进的方向,为促进医患共同决策在新生儿学科的发展提供新的思路。

     

Ethical Guidelines for Counselors When Working With Clients With Terminal Illness Requesting Physician Aid in Dying

In 2005, the American Counseling Association (ACA) introduced a new ethical standard for counselors working with clients with terminal illness who are considering hastened death options. The authors’ purpose is to inform counselors of the Death With Dignity Act and explore relevant ethical guidelines in the ACA Code of Ethics ( ACA, 2005 ).     

On the role of lyrics in the music–exercise performance relationship

ObjectivesTo examine the role of lyrics on a range of psychological, psychophysical, and physiological variables during submaximal cycling ergometry.DesignWithin-subject counterbalanced design.MethodTwenty-five participants performed three 6-min cycling trials at a power output corresponding to 75% of their maximum heart rate under conditions of music with lyrics, same music without lyrics, and a no-music control. Cycling cadence, heart rate, and perceived exertion were recorded at 2-min intervals during each trial. Positive and negative affect was assessed before and after each trial.ResultsParticipants cycled at a higher cadence towards the end of the cycling trials under music with lyrics. Main effects were found for perceived exertion and heart rate, both of which increased from min 2 through to min 6, and for affect: positive affect increased and negative affect decreased from pre- to post-trials.ConclusionsParticipants pedalled faster in both music conditions (with and without lyrics) while perceived exertion and heart rate did not differ. The inclusion of lyrics influenced cycling cadence only at min 6 and had no effect on the remaining dependent variables throughout the duration of the cycling trials. The impact of lyrical content in the music–exercise performance relationship warrants further attention in order for us to better understand its role.     

Maturity is explicit: Self-importance of traits in humanitarian moral identity

Development of humanitarian moral identity may correspond with the growing self-importance of moral traits. This study considered the extent to which moral traits become explicit in novice and expert humanitarian moral identity narratives. Eighty humanitarian caregivers from L’Arche communities were given self-understanding interview prompts to assess temporal (i.e., past, present, and future) and relational expectations. Humanitarian responses were compared to four paragraphs comprised of moral traits (i.e., just, brave, caring, and religious) using a computational knowledge representation model known as latent semantic analysis (Landauer, T., McNamara, D., Dennis, S., & Kintsch, W. (Eds.). (2007). Handbook of latent semantic analysis (University of Colorado Institute of Cognitive Science). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum). Consistent with predictions, humanitarian experts displayed more explicitly self-important moral traits than novices on future and romantic partner expectations. Findings suggest that humanitarian development is associated with simulation related to future goal achievement and moral action modeled by close intimates.     

Self-determination Versus the Determination of Self: A Critical Reading of the Colonial Ethics Inherent to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

The United Nations' (UN) adoption of a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is intended to mark a fundamental ethical turn in the relationships between indigenous peoples and the community of sovereign states. This moment is the result of decades of discussion and negotiation, largely revolving around states' discomfort with notion of indigenous self-determination. Member states of the UN have feared that an ethic of indigenous self-determination would undermine the principles of state sovereignty on which the UN is itself grounded. However, such fears are the result of very poor understandings of the ethical principles under which the relations between indigenous peoples and nation-states already have been formed under centuries of European colonialism. The principle of self-determination embraced in this Declaration does not diverge from colonial norms; it entrenches these norms as international policy. Without doubt, indigenous peoples are more likely to benefit than suffer from states' observance of the Articles within this Declaration. Reducing the challenge of indigenous peoples' rights to the notion of self-determination set out in this document, though, misses an extraordinarily important opportunity to critically investigate the ethic of rights that has produced an opposition between nation-states and indigenous peoples to begin with. A true turn in the ethics of this relationship would see not simply the institution of a right to self-determination but, rather, indigenous peoples' right to first determine the nature of self for themselves.     

The politics of humanitarian intervention: a critical analogy of the British response to end the slave trade and the civil war in Sierra Leone

A leading scholar of humanitarian intervention, Brown (2002) Brown, C. 2002. “Humanitarian intervention and international political theory”. In Human rights and military intervention, Edited by: Mosley, A. and Norman, R. 153–69. Aldershot: Ashgale Publishing.  [Google Scholar] refers to British internal politics to satisfy the influential church and other non-conformist libertarian community leaders, and above all ‘undermining Britain's competitors, such as Spain and Portugal, who were still reliant on slave labour to power their economies, as the principal motivation for calls to end the slave trade than any genuine humanitarian concerns of racial equality or global justice’. Drawing on an empirical exploration, this article seeks to draw a parallel between this politics of humanitarian intervention which characterised the abolition movement, albeit rarely recognised in the academic literature, and the British intervention to end the almost 11 year civil war in Sierra Leone. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of this politics of humanitarian intervention in the reconstruction of post-conflict Sierra Leone.     

Selective humanitarian intervention: moral reason and collective agents

This paper examines four interpretations of the observation that humanitarian intervention might be used ‘selectively’ or ‘inconsistently’ in order to elucidate the normative commitments of the deliberative process in international relations. The paper argues that there are several types of concerns that are implicit in the accusation of inconsistency, and only some of them amount to objections to humanitarian intervention as a whole. The paradox of humanitarian intervention is that intervention is prohibited except where the intervention is humanitarian, yet humanitarian reasons never exist in isolation, and it is nearly impossible to determine the real reason for intervention (or any other collective action) in the international arena. The problems revealed by an examination of inconsistency in the example of humanitarian intervention turn out to be general problems with applying the norms of practical reasoning to moral questions dealing with collective agents.