Digital Commons Network^™

Making Sense Of Ethnocentrism: Intelligence Analysis & National Cultural Dimensions, Travis J. Benson

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Varying internal and external stimulants naturally oscillate the creation of objective intelligence analysis; however, the most egregious offender to accuracy and completeness is the natural human mental process. No element of intelligence analysis is more formidable than the cognitive process that houses specific deviations, known as biases, as it yields inaccuracies and alters what is believed to be a rational response to a complex analytical problem. The phenomenon of ethnocentrism is consistently identified as an analytical limitation of intelligence professionals, derived from cognitive bias. Ultimately, ethnocentrism manifests an analyst’s perception of information directly through the lens of culturally dependent heuristics …

Using The R = Mc2 Heuristic To Understand Barriers To And Facilitators Of Implementing School-Based Physical Activity Opportunities: A Qualitative Study, Derek W Craig, Timothy J Walker, Paula Cuccaro, Shreela V Sharma, Natalia I Heredia, Michael C Robertson, Maria E Fernandez

Journal Articles

BACKGROUND: Schools are a key setting for supporting youth physical activity, given their broad reach and diverse student populations. Organizational readiness is a precursor to the successful implementation of school-based physical activity opportunities. The R = MC

METHODS: We analyzed interview data from 15 elementary school staff (principals, assistant principals, physical education teachers, and classroom teachers) from a school district in Texas. We focused on factors related to adopting, implementing, and sustaining a variety of school-based physical activity opportunities. We used the Framework Method to guide the analysis and coded data using deductive (informed by the R = MC

RESULTS: …

Expecting Specific Performance, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, David Hoffman, Emily Campbell

Articles

Using a series of surveys and experiments, we find that ordinary people think that courts will give them exactly what they bargained for after breach of contract; in other words, specific performance is the expected contractual remedy. This expectation is widespread even for the diverse array of deals where the legal remedy is traditionally limited to money damages. But for a significant fraction of people, the focus on equity seems to be a naïve belief that is open to updating. In the studies reported here, individuals were less likely to anticipate specific performance when they were briefly introduced to the …

Optimal Inverter-Based Resource Installation To Minimize Technical Energy Losses In Distribution Systems, Felipe B. Dantas, Damasio Fernandes, Washington L.A. Neves, Alana K.X.B. Branco, Flavio Costa

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 2

This paper proposes an algorithm for the optimal installation of inverter-based resources (IBR) composed of wind energy conversion systems, photovoltaic systems, and battery energy storage systems in distribution systems using genetic algorithm (GA) and the cuckoo search (CS) as optimization techniques. The OpenDSS software is used to calculate the power flow in the distribution system with different penetration levels of IBRs. It is used a standard load shape of the IEEE 123 bus system programmed in OpenDSS and irradiance, temperature, and wind speed curves from Brazil. The proposed algorithm, using a genetic algorithm and cuckoo search, was able to define …

Bibliotherapy In The Helping Professions: A Heuristic Model For Intervention Design, Natalie Marie Haney

Masters Theses

I propose a new approach to examining bibliotherapy’s usefulness in the community-based care of individuals with serious mental illness (SMI), focused on producing a heuristic that benefits helping professionals who offer non-clinical and non-psychiatric services. Meant for writers designing bibliotherapy interventions in the helping professions, I conceptualize bibliotherapy in a model against the backdrop of community-based care’s history. A model has the potential to allow each writer to conduct situation-specific inquiry, invent bibliotherapy intervention designs suited to the unique needs of the profession’s help-seekers, and reflect on knowledge generated for intervention reiteration. Referring to Dewey, Rosenblatt and Barnlund to create …

Kernel Matrix-Based Heuristic Multiple Kernel Learning, Stanton R. Price, Derek T. Anderson, Timothy C. Havens, Steven R. Price

Michigan Tech Publications

Kernel theory is a demonstrated tool that has made its way into nearly all areas of machine learning. However, a serious limitation of kernel methods is knowing which kernel is needed in practice. Multiple kernel learning (MKL) is an attempt to learn a new tailored kernel through the aggregation of a set of valid known kernels. There are generally three approaches to MKL: fixed rules, heuristics, and optimization. Optimization is the most popular; however, a shortcoming of most optimization approaches is that they are tightly coupled with the underlying objective function and overfitting occurs. Herein, we take a different approach …

Fourteen Propositions For Resilience, Fourteen Years Later, Morgan Mathisonslee, Steven J. Lade, Conor Barnes, Karina Benessaiah, Erin T.H. Crockett, Andrea S. Downing, Julie A. Fowler, Rachel Belisle-Toler, Shubhechchha Sharma, Klara J. Winkler

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

In 2006, Walker et al. published an article titled, “A Handful of Heuristics and Some Propositions for Understanding Resilience in Social-ecological Systems.” The article was incorporated into the Ecology and Society special feature, Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems. Walker et al. identified five heuristics and posed 14 propositions for understanding resilience in social-ecological systems. At the time, the authors hoped the paper would promote experimentation, critique, and application of these ideas in resilience and social-ecological systems research. To determine the extent to which these propositions have achieved the authors’ hopes, we reviewed the scientific literature on socialecological systems since the …

Simulation-Based Optimization: Implications Of Complex Adaptive Systems And Deep Uncertainty, Andreas Tolk

VMASC Publications

Within the modeling and simulation community, simulation-based optimization has often been successfully used to improve productivity and business processes. However, the increased importance of using simulation to better understand complex adaptive systems and address operations research questions characterized by deep uncertainty, such as the need for policy support within socio-technical systems, leads to the necessity to revisit the way simulation can be applied in this new area. Similar observations can be made for complex adaptive systems that constantly change their behavior, which is reflected in a continually changing solution space. Deep uncertainty describes problems with inadequate or incomplete information about …

Threat Assessment, Sense Making, And Critical Decision-Making In Police, Military, Ambulance, And Fire Services, Greg Penney, David Launder, Joe Cuthbertson, Matthew B. Thompson

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Military and emergency response remain inherently dangerous occupations that require the ability to accurately assess threats and make critical decisions under significant time pressures. The cognitive processes associated with these abilities are complex and have been the subject of several significant, albeit service specific studies. Here, we present an attempt at finding the commonalities in threat assessment, sense making, and critical decision-making for emergency response across police, military, ambulance, and fire services. Relevant research is identified and critically appraised through a systematic literature review of English-language studies published from January 2000 through July 2020 on threat assessment and critical decision-making …

Smart Heuristics For Individuals, Teams, And Organizations, Gerd Gigerenzer, Jochen Reb, Shenghua Luan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Heuristics are fast, frugal, and accurate strategies that enable rather than limit decision making under uncertainty. Uncertainty, as opposed to calculable risk, is characteristic of most organizational contexts. We review existing research and offer a descriptive and prescriptive theoretical framework to integrate the current patchwork of heuristics scattered across various areas of organizational studies. Research on the adaptive toolbox is descriptive, identifying the repertoire of heuristics on which individuals, teams, and organizations rely. Research on ecological rationality is prescriptive, specifying the conditions under which a given heuristic performs well, that is, when it is smart. Our review finds a relatively …

Usability Of Electronic Health Record-Generated Discharge Summaries: Heuristic Evaluation., Patrice Dolhonde Tremoulet, Priyanka D Shah, Alisha A Acosta, Christian W Grant, Jon T Kurtz, Peter Mounas, Michael Kirchhoff, Elizabeth Wade

Faculty Scholarship for the College of Science & Mathematics

BACKGROUND: Obtaining accurate clinical information about recent acute care visits is extremely important for outpatient providers. However, documents used to communicate this information are often difficult to use. This puts patients at risk of adverse events. Elderly patients who are seen by more providers and have more care transitions are especially vulnerable.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to (1) identify the information about elderly patients' recent acute care visits needed to coordinate their care, (2) use this information to assess discharge summaries, and (3) provide recommendations to help improve the quality of electronic health record (EHR)-generated discharge summaries, thereby increasing patient …

Upshot Of Heterogeneous Catalysis In A Nanofluid Flow Over A Rotating Disk With Slip Effects And Entropy Optimization Analysis, Muhammad Ramzan, Saima Riasat, Jae Dong Chung, Yu-Ming Chu, M. Sheikholeslami, Seifedine Kadry, Fares Howari

All Works

The present study examines homogeneous (HOM)–heterogeneous (HET) reaction in magnetohydrodynamic flow through a porous media on the surface of a rotating disk. Preceding investigations mainly concentrated on the catalysis for the rotating disk; we modeled the impact of HET catalysis in a permeable media over a rotating disk with slip condition at the boundary. The HOM reaction is followed by isothermal cubic autocatalysis, however, the HET reactions occur on the surface governed by first-order kinetics. Additionally, entropy minimization analysis is also conducted for the envisioned mathematical model. The similarity transformations are employed to convert the envisaged model into a non-dimensional …

Internet Memes: Leaflet Propaganda Of The Digital Age, Joshua Troy Nieubuurt

English Faculty Publications

Internet memes are one of the latest evolutions of “leaflet” propaganda and an effective tool in the arsenal of digital persuasion. In the past such items were dropped from planes, now they find their way into social media across multiple platforms and their territory is global. Internet memes can be used to target specific groups to help build and solidify tribal bonds. Due to the ease of creation, and their ability to constantly reaffirm axiomatic tribal ideas, they have become an adroit tool allowing for mass influence across international borders. This text explores the link between internet memes and their …

Fair Questions: A Call And Proposal For Using General Verdicts With Special Interrogatories To Prevent Biased And Unjust Convictions, Charles Eric Hintz

All Faculty Scholarship

Bias and other forms of logical corner-cutting are an unfortunate aspect of criminal jury deliberations. However, the preferred verdict system in the federal courts, the general verdict, does nothing to counter that. Rather, by forcing jurors into a simple binary choice — guilty or not guilty — the general verdict facilitates and encourages such flawed reasoning. Yet the federal courts continue to stick to the general verdict, ironically out of a concern that deviating from it will harm defendants by leading juries to convict.

This Essay calls for a change: expand the use of a special findings verdict, the general …

Escalation Of Commitment And Heuristics In Outdoor Leadership: How Poor Education Can Impact Outdoor Leaders’ Decisions, Perry A. Darby

Student Publications

This study combines established escalation of commitment theory with research specifically aimed at understanding the role of heuristics in the field of outdoor leadership in order to create an understanding of decision-making processes in this context. Current decision-making frameworks taught to outdoor leaders rely on these theories but has yet to undergo rigorous testing as to its effectiveness. This study gave current decision-making education to one group and a control education to another group and found no significant differences between the two when asked to respond to the same situation. This finding suggests that further research into decision-making frameworks in …

Seeking Reward Or Avoiding Risk From Restaurant Reviews: Does Distance Matter?, Esther Kim, Sarah Tanford

Department of Hospitality and Tourism Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which consumers will exert more effort to avoid risk (negative reviews) versus seek reward (positive reviews) when making a restaurant decision.

Design/methodology/approach

This study investigates the influence of distance and review valence on restaurant decisions. A 2 (base restaurant review valence: negative, neutral) × 2 (target restaurant review valence: neutral, positive) × 2 (distance: 30 min, 60 min) between-subjects factorial design was used.

Findings

People exert more effort to seek a reward versus avoid a risk. People will drive any distance to dine at a restaurant with positive …

Betting On Climate Policy: Using Prediction Markets To Address Global Warming, Gary M. Lucas Jr, Felix Mormann

Faculty Scholarship

Global warming, sea level rise, and extreme weather events have made climate change a top priority for policymakers across the globe. But which policies are best suited to tackle the enormous challenges presented by our changing climate? This Article proposes that policymakers turn to prediction markets to answer that crucial question. Prediction markets have a strong track record of outperforming other forecasting mechanisms across a wide range of contexts — from predicting election outcomes and economic trends to guessing Oscar winners. In the context of climate change, market participants could, for example, bet on important climate outcomes conditioned on the …

Can Standardized Heuristics Reduce Bias And Preserve Clinical Creativity?, Daniela Fishbein, Ryan Long, Phd

Phase 1

Background: Heuristics, commonly known for introducing bias, are now being standardized to reduce biases in clinical decision-making (CDM). In a healthcare environment that recognizes the importance of clinical creativity, it remains unclear how standardized heuristics such as the fast-and-frugal model impact creative features of CDM. One framework of CDM, proposed by Engebresten et al., emphasizes the importance of uncertainty and creativity through four aspects: imagination, reflective questioning, understanding and critical judgment.

Objectives: Using the fast-and-frugal model as an example, we investigate the role that standardized heuristics play in a CDM framework that emphasizes uncertainty and creativity over the standardization of …

Bounded Rationality, Paternalism, And Trademark Law, Stacey Dogan

Faculty Scholarship

We don’t need behavioral economics to understand that trade marks can shape consumer preferences in ways that have little to do with objectively measurable differences in product quality. Scholars, judges, economists, and policymakers have long recognized the tendency of strong marks to skew consumer decisions. The concern lies not only in price effects but with the allocative effects of encouraging investment in persuasive advertising, rather than product innovation or similar “productive” pursuits. While informative advertising can benefit consumers, advertising that creates artificial brand-based differences between otherwise identical products appears not only costly to consumers but also socially wasteful.

This Essay …

The (Mis)Application Of Rule 404(B) Heuristics, Dora W. Klein

Faculty Articles

In all of the federal circuit courts of appeals, application of Rule 404(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence has been distorted by judicially-created "tests" that, while intended to assist trial courts in properly admitting or excluding evidence, do not actually test for the kind of evidence prohibited by this rule. Rule 404(b) prohibits evidence of "crimes, wrongs, or other acts" if the purpose for admitting the evidence is to prove action in accordance with a character trait. This evidence is commonly referred to as "propensity" evidence, or "once a drug dealer, always a drug dealer" evidence.

This Article examines …

Experimental Evidence On The Cyclicality Of Investment, Cortney S. Rodet, Andrew Smyth

ESI Working Papers

We report laboratory experiments investigating the cyclicality of investment. In our setting, optimal investment is counter-cyclical because investment costs fall following market downturns. However, we do not observe counter-cyclical investment. Instead, heuristic investment models where firms invest a fixed percentage of their liquidity, or a fixed percentage of anticipated market demand, better fit our data on average than does optimal investment. We also report a control treatment without cost changes and a treatment with asymmetric investment liquidity. Both of these extensions support our main result.

Dispatch Guided Allocation Optimization For Effective Emergency Response, Supriyo Ghosh, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Effective emergency (medical, fire or criminal) response iscrucial for improving safety and security in urban environments. Recent research in improving effectiveness of emergency management systems (EMSs) has utilized data-drivenoptimization models for efficient allocation of emergency response vehicles (ERVs) to base locations. However, thesedata-driven optimization models either ignore the dispatchstrategy of ERVs (typically the nearest available ERV is dispatched to serve an incident) or employ myopic approaches(e.g., greedy approach based on marginal gain). This resultsin allocations that are not synchronised with the real evolution dynamics on the ground or can be improved significantly.To bridge this gap, we make the following contributions: …

The Role Of Sleep Deprivation And Fatigue In The Perception Of Task Difficulty And Use Of Heuristics, Mindy Engle-Friedman, Gina Marie Mathew, Anastasia Martinova, Forrest Armstrong, Viktoriya Konstantinov

Publications and Research

Objectives: This study investigated the effects of sleep deprivation on perception of task difficulty and use of heuristics (mental shortcuts) compared to naturally-experienced sleep at home. Methods: Undergraduate students were screened and assigned through block-random assignment to Naturally-Experienced Sleep (NES; n=19) or Total Sleep Deprivation (TSD; n=20). The next morning, reported fatigue, perception of task difficulty, and use of “what-is-beautiful-is-good,” “greedy algorithm,” and “speed-accuracy trade-off ” heuristics were assessed. Results: NES slept for an average of 354.74 minutes (SD=72.84), or 5.91 hours. TSD rated a reading task as significantly more difficult and requiring more time than NES. TSD was …

A Frame-Based Nlp System For Cancer-Related Information Extraction., Yuqi Si, Kirk Roberts

Journal Articles

We propose a frame-based natural language processing (NLP) method that extracts cancer-related information from clinical narratives. We focus on three frames: cancer diagnosis, cancer therapeutic procedure, and tumor description. We utilize a deep learning-based approach, bidirectional Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) Conditional Random Field (CRF), which uses both character and word embeddings. The system consists of two constituent sequence classifiers: a frame identification (lexical unit) classifier and a frame element classifier. The classifier achieves an F

Thinking Fast And Slow About The Concept Of Materiality, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

Determining whether, for securities law purposes, a misrepresentation or omission is material raises interesting questions. The Court of Appeals in SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co. provided some guidance on materiality, and the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in several times in the past 50 years. This article first discusses what Texas Gulf Sulphur contributed to the doctrine of materiality, then briefly considers other dimensions of the doctrine, and finally moves to its thesis: The doctrine of materiality should take into account important psychological insights and heuristics that may affect the way that a fact finder decides whether a misrepresentation …

Loading Time Flexibility In Cross-Docking Systems, Dincer Konur, Mihalis M. Golias

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this study, we investigate truck-to-door assignment problem for loading outgoing trucks in a cross-docking system with flexible handling times. Specifically, a truck's loading time depends on the number of workers assigned to the outbound door, where the truck is being loaded. An optimization problem is formulated to jointly determine the number of workers and the trucks to be loaded at each door. The resulting problem is a nonlinear integer programming model. Due to the complexity of this model, two evolutionary heuristic methods are proposed for solution. First heuristic method is based on truck assignments while the second heuristic is …

Improved Forward Buying Of Commodity Materials, Andrew Manikas, James Kroes

IT and Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

This research presents the Enhanced Commodity Forward Buy (ECFB) heuristic, a new method for commodity purchasing, which allows strategic forward buying of commodities for products that include commodity components or materials. The ECFB addresses limitations of existing methods by considering stochastic demand and stochastic commodity prices for products that contain both commodity and non-commodity materials. We conduct a simulation test of the new heuristic on 10 commodity indices using actual historical market prices, over a range of holding costs, markup margins, commodity percentages of the product’s cost of goods sold and demand distributions. The results of the simulation show that …

Anchoring In Financial Decision-Making: Evidence From The Field, Michael Jetter, Jay K. Walker

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper analyzes 12,596 wagering decisions of 6,064 contestants in the US game show Jeopardy!, focusing on the anchoring phenomenon in financial decision-making. We find that contestants anchor heavily on the initial dollar value of a clue in their wagering decision, even though there exists no rational reason to do so. More than half of all wagers occur within $500 of the initial dollar value, although the maximum possible wagering value averages $5,914. This anchoring phenomenon remains statistically significant on the one percent level, even after controlling for scores, clue category, time trends, and player-fixed effects.When exploiting within-player variation …

Decision Making And The Law: Truth Barriers, Jonathan J. Koehler, John B. Meixner Jr.

Scholarly Works

Reaching an accurate outcome is a central goal of the American trial. But structural features of the legal system, in combination with the cognitive shortcomings of legal actors, hinder the search for truth. Regarding the legal system, various rules and policies restrict decision makers’ access to evidence, violate the laws of probability, and limit the evidentiary concerns that may be considered on appeal. Regarding legal actors, informational deficits (particularly regarding scientific and statistical evidence) and cognitive biases of police investigators, witnesses (lay and expert), attorneys, judges, and jurors pose serious obstacles. We conclude by suggesting that research in judgment and …

Modeling Mental Workload Via Rule-Based Expert System: A Comparison With Nasa-Tlx & Workload Profile, Lucas Rizzo, Sarah Jane Delany, Pierpaolo Dondio, Luca Longo

Conference papers

In the last few decades several fields have made use of the construct of human mental workload (MWL) for system and task design as well as for assessing human performance. Despite this interest, MWL remains a nebulous concept with multiple definitions and measurement techniques. State-of-the-art models of MWL are usually ad-hoc, considering different pools of pieces of evidence aggregated with different inference strategies. In this paper the aim is to deploy a rule-based expert system as a more structured approach to model and infer MWL. This expert system is built upon a knowledge-base of an expert and transates into computable …