When making decisions, people naturally face uncertainty about the potential consequences of their actions due in part to limits in their capacity to represent, evaluate or deliberate. Nonetheless, they aim to make the best decisions possible. In Decision Theory with a Human Face, Richard Bradley develops new theories of agency and rational decision-making, offering guidance on how 'real' agents who are aware of their bounds should represent the uncertainty they face, how they should revise their opinions as a result of experience and how they should make decisions when lacking full awareness of, or precise opinions on relevant contingencies. He engages with the strengths and flaws of Bayesian reasoning, and presents clear and comprehensive explorations of key issues in decision theory, from belief and desire to semantics and learning. His book draws on philosophy, economics, decision science and psychology, and will appeal to readers in all of these disciplines.

* How is science represented by the media?
* Who defines what counts as a risk, threat or hazard, and why?
* In what ways do media images of science shape public perceptions?
* What can cultural and media studies tell us about current scientific controversies?
Media, Risk and Science is an exciting exploration into an array of important issues, providing a much needed framework for understanding key debates on how the media represent science and risk. In a highly effective way, Stuart Allan weaves together insights from multiple strands of research across diverse disciplines. Among the themes he examines are: the role of science in science fiction, such as Star Trek; the problem of 'pseudo-science' in The X-Files; and how science is displayed in science museums. Science journalism receives particular attention, with the processes by which science is made 'newsworthy' unravelled for careful scrutiny. The book also includes individual chapters devoted to how the media portray environmental risks, HIV-AIDS, food scares (such as BSE or 'mad cow disease' and GM foods) and human cloning. The result is a highly topical text that will be invaluable for students and scholars in cultural and media studies, science studies, journalism, sociology and politics.

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This book is for a broad audience of practitioners, policymakers, scholars, and anyone interested in scenarios, simulations, and disaster planning. Readers are led through several different planning scenarios that have been developed over several years under the auspices of the US Department of Energy, the US Air Force, and continued work at GlobalInt LLC. These scenarios present different security challenges and their potential cascading impacts on global systems - from the melting of glaciers in the Andes, to hurricanes in New York and Hawaii, and on to hybrid disasters, cyberoperations and geoengineering. The book provides a concise and up-to-date overview of the 'lessons learned', with a focus on innovative solutions to the world's pressing energy and environmental security challenges.

Studieren, Lehren und Forschen basieren heute weitgehend auf dem Einsatz neuer Medien. Dabei werden das Sehen und das Klicken mit der Maus als Selbstverstandlichkeit vorausgesetzt. Man nimmt an, dass alle in normaler Schrift Dokumente lesen koennen. Wie koennen aber Menschen mit visueller Beeintrachtigung bei den stark auf Visualisierung ausgerichteten Lernprozessen wirklich partizipieren? Das Ziel der Arbeit ist es, Einblicke in komplexe Barrieren in der visuellen Bildungslandschaft zu geben. Der Fokus liegt auf Interaktionsprozessen zwischen sehenden und nicht (gut) sehenden Lernenden. Wichtige Sachaspekte werden vermittelt und didaktische Elemente reflektiert. Im Rahmen einer Aktionsforschung werden am Beispiel der Universitat Zurich moegliche Loesungswege aufgezeigt.

In einem perspektivverschrankenden Ansatz untersuchen die Autorinnen und der Autor die polyvalenten Wirkungen von Bildungsurlaub. Ausserdem befassen sie sich mit den durch die Gesetzesanderung evozierten Steuerungseffekten auf der Ebene der Anbieter und Angebote. Es werden daruber hinaus die professionellen Handlungsmodi der Programmplanung untersucht und die Interessens- und Verwertungszusammenhange der Teilnehmenden. Hintergrund ist die Tatsache, dass es in Deutschland nur wenige gesetzliche Regelungen gibt, die ein Recht des Einzelnen auf Weiterbildung sichern. Ein besonderes Beispiel sind die Landesgesetze zum Bildungsurlaub (auch Bildungsfreistellungsgesetze). Das Bundesland Bremen hat sein Bildungsurlaubsgesetz im Jahre 2010 novelliert und versucht die Teilnahmequote zu erhoehen, indem es das Spektrum an Bildungsurlaubsanbietern und Veranstaltungsformaten ausdifferenziert und erweitert.

This book, based on the author's Clarendon Lectures in Finance, examines the empirical behavior of corporate default risk. A new and unified statistical methodology for default prediction, based on stochastic intensity modeling, is explained and implemented with data on U.S. public corporations since 1980. Special attention is given to the measurement of correlation of default risk across firms. The underlying work was developed in a series of collaborations over roughly the past decade with Sanjiv Das, Andreas Eckner, Guillaume Horel, Nikunj Kapadia, Leandro Saita, and Ke Wang. Where possible, the content based on methodology has been separated from the substantive empirical findings, in order to provide access to the latter for those less focused on the mathematical foundations.
A key finding is that corporate defaults are more clustered in time than would be suggested by their exposure to observable common or correlated risk factors. The methodology allows for hidden sources of default correlation, which are particularly important to include when estimating the likelihood that a portfolio of corporate loans will suffer large default losses. The data also reveal that a substantial amount of power for predicting the default of a corporation can be obtained from the firm's "distance to default," a volatility-adjusted measure of leverage that is the basis of the theoretical models of corporate debt pricing of Black, Scholes, and Merton. The findings are particularly relevant in the aftermath of the financial crisis, which revealed a lack of attention to the proper modelling of correlation of default risk across firms.

The concept of rationality is a common thread through the human and social sciences -- from political science to philosophy, from economics to sociology, and from management science to decision analysis. But what counts as rational action and rational behavior?
Jose Luis Bermudez explores decision theory as a theory of rationality. Decision theory is the mathematical theory of choice and for many social scientists it makes the concept of rationality mathematically tractable and scientifically legitimate.
Yet rationality is a concept with several dimensions and the theory of rationality has different roles to play. It plays an action-guiding role (prescribing what counts as a rational solution of a given decision problem). It plays a normative role (giving us the tools to pass judgment not just on how a decision problem was solved, but also on how it was set up in the first place). And it plays a predictive/explanatory role (telling us how rational agents will behave, or why they did what they did).
This controversial but accessible book shows that decision theory cannot play all of these roles simultaneously. And yet, it argues, no theory of rationality can play one role without playing the other two. The conclusion is that there is no hope of taking decision theory as a theory of rationality.

The Handbook of Rational and Social Choice provides an overview of issues arising in work on the foundations of decision theory and social choice over the past three decades. Drawing on work by economic theorists mainly, but also with contributions from political science, philosophy and psychology, the collection shows how the related areas of decision theory and social choice have developed in their applications and moved well beyond the basic models of expected utility and utilitarian approaches to welfare economics.
Containing twenty-three contributions, in many cases by leading figures in their fields, the handbook shows how the normative foundations of economics have changed dramatically as more general and explicit models of utility and group choice have been developed. This is perhaps the first time these developments have been brought together in a manner that seeks to identify and make accessible the recent themes and developments that have been of particular interest to researchers in recent years. The collection will be of particular value to researchers in economics with interests in utility or welfare but it will also be of interest to any social scientist or philosopher interested in theories of rationality or group decision-making.

Building on his highly original and always insightful earlier works on collective activity, in Origins of Collective Decision Making Andy Blunden turns his attention to the question of how groups make decisions. Examining three paradigms - Counsel, Majority, and Consensus based methods - Blunden discovers that each has unique ethical foundations, deeply rooted in the historical experiences of specific struggles.

Gibt es ein padagogisches Konzept, das in einer globalisierenden Gesellschaft eine erfolgreiche Schuledukation gewahrleisten kann? Dieser Frage nachzugehen, scheint nicht nur vor dem Hintergrund von Pisastudien und ihren Ergebnissen aktuell und lohnenswert. Ausgehend von globalen Interdependenzen kommt der Begriff Burgergesellschaft mit seinen Moeglichkeiten zu aktivem, handlungsorientiertem Lehren und Lernen ins Blickfeld. Es werden Denkmuster und Ansatze der vormodernen, modernen und postmodernen Padagogik befragt, die zur Loesung der Frage nach einem padagogischen Konzept beitragen koennten. Ob die hier gefundenen Ansatze sich auch fur eine Padagogik der Globalgesellschaft eignen, soll am Beispiel Indien eine Untersuchung von Dokumenten indischer Primarerziehung, national bedeutsamen reformpadagogischen Modellen und aktuellen Projekten erbringen.