scholarly journals Harnessing the Wisdom of the Crowd to Forecast Incident and Cumulative COVID-19 Mortality in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn S Taylor ◽  
James W Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Accurate Method ◽  
The United States ◽  
Probabilistic Forecasting ◽  
Probabilistic Forecasts ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Combining Methods

Background Forecasting models have played a pivotal role in decision making during the COVID-19 pandemic, predicting the numbers of cases, hospitalisations and deaths. However, questions have been raised about the role and reliability of models. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential benefits of combining probabilistic forecasts from multiple models for forecasts of incident and cumulative COVID mortalities. Methods We considered 95% interval and point forecasts of weekly incident and cumulative COVID-19 mortalities between 16 May 2020 and 8 May 2021 in multiple locations in the United States. We compared the accuracy of simple and more complex combining methods, as well as individual models. Results The average of the forecasts from the individual models was consistently more accurate than the average performance of these models, which provides a fundamental motivation for combining. Weighted combining performed well for both incident and cumulative mortalities, and for both interval and point forecasting. Inverse score with tuning was the most accurate method overall. The median combination was a leading method in the last quarter for both mortalities, and it was consistently more accurate than the mean combination for point forecasting of both mortalities. For interval forecasts of cumulative mortality, the mean performed better than the median. The leading individual models were most competitive for point forecasts of incident mortality. Conclusions We recommend that harnessing the wisdom of the crowd can improve the contribution of probabilistic forecasting of epidemics to health policy decision making, and report that the relative performance of the different combining methods depends on several factors including the type of data, type of forecast and timing.

A Paradigm of ‘Crisis’ Decision Making: The Case of Synfuels Policy

1987 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed E. Ahrari
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Crisis Response ◽  
Policy Option ◽  
The Self ◽  
Policy Response ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Crisis Conditions

In explaining the making and unravelling of the synfuels policy in the United States, a new approach—the ambivalent-majoritarian paradigm—is presented in this article. This paradigm fills a significant conceptual gap for the study of domestic policy formulated under crisis conditions.It is argued that the self-imposed necessity to respond to a crisis condition involving a policy decision is likely to force legislators to adopt a policy option that they would not adopt under normal conditions. The crisis response is likely to be passed by a ‘majoritarian’ crisis coalition which would also include a significant number of ‘ambivalents’, i.e., those legislators who have serious misgivings about the correctness or feasibility of the policy. In order for such a policy response to survive, it must withstand the scrutiny of ‘normal’ conditions involving that policy.

scholarly journals Resistensi Hubungan Luar Negeri Amerika Serikat dan Iran: Studi Kasus Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-175
Author(s):  
Wildan Ilmanuarif Shafar ◽  
Dian Mutmainah
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Comprehensive Plan ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

Since 2015 the United States has been a signatory of the historic nuclear agreement with Iran known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was also agreed by other P5+1 countries. JCPOA is the achievement of the U.S. and other P5+1 countries' negotiations with Iran regarding the limitation of Iran's nuclear program. JCPOA is also known to be the vital instrument to reduce Iran's capabilities regarding its aggressive behavior and malign activities, creating destabilization in the Middle East. However, in 2018 the United States government decided to withdraw its participation from the JCPOA. As we know, this decision had an impact on Iran's behavior, which several times violated the contents of the JCPOA agreement even though they did not leave the agreement. We are also witnessing the impact of this decision increase the conflict between the US and Iran in recent years. This research aims to explain the rationale of the U.S. decision to withdraw from the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018. This research using the foreign policy decision-making framework model by Charles W. Kegley and Gregory A. Raymond. This concept focuses on explaining factors of foreign policy decision-making in three sources of analysis and the process of foreign policy-making based on rational choice.

scholarly journals The Dragon and the Captain: China in the perspective of Brazil´s nationalist rightThe Dragon and the Captain: China in the perspective of Brazil´s nationalist right

Geosul ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (77) ◽  
pp. 258-269
Author(s):  
Maurício Santoro
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Brazilian Government ◽  
Trade Partner ◽  
Policy Decision Making

Since 2009 China has been Brazil´s biggest trade partner, and its important ally. However, the nationalist right that won the 2018 elections has a critical perspective of the country. This paper maps the views on China held by the new Brazilian government, both in terms of the economic arguments (protectionism of industry, fear of Chinese control of infrastructure and natural resources) and political concerns (the desire for a diplomatic rapprochement with the United States and anti-communism hostility towards Beijing). The paper claims that these positions are important for foreign policy decision-making and that they complicate relations with China, but that is also necessary to take into account more moderate views from other groups in the administration.

Industrial risks

1981 ◽  
Vol 376 (1764) ◽  
pp. 133-149 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Cost Effectiveness ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Small Element ◽  
Light Water ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Industrial Risks

A brief look is taken at the status of progress, or the lack of it, towards a quantitative approach to the estimation and assessment of risk for several technologies in the United States. The increase of interest in the consideration of comparative risks in decision-making is also discussed. Finally, a recently proposed trial approach to quantitative safety goals for light-water nuclear power reactors is summarized. The approach is divided into two major tasks: the predominantly social and political task of setting safety criteria, and the technical task of estimating the risks and deciding whether the safety criteria have been met. The safety criteria include the following: limits on hazard states within the reactor; limits on risk to the individual; limits on societal risk; a cost-effectiveness criterion as low as reasonably achievable; a small element of risk aversion.

Groupthink and the Hostage Rescue Mission

1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rescue Mission ◽  
British Policy ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
Basic Argument

Irving Janis's work on groupthink has attracted considerable attention from those who seek to explain foreign-policy decision making. The basic argument – that excessiveesprit de corpsand amiability restrict the critical faculties of small decision-making groups, thereby leading to foreign-policy fiascos – is both an appealing and a stimulating one. In addition, it is also an argument that is capable of being tested against empirical evidence. Thus, Frank Heller has suggested that groupthink may be very useful in explaining British policy during the Falklands Crisis. The purpose of this note is to indicate the utility of the notion of groupthink in explaining one recent foreign-policy fiasco, the attempt by the United States to rescue its hostages in Tehran.

Foreign Policy Mistakes

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akan Malici
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chemical Weapons ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Military Engagement ◽  
Disjointed Incrementalism

Syria is in tatters. A brutal dictator, vicious terrorist groups, and a raging civil war have led to the death of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of millions. Given the ongoing Syrian conflict, President Barack Obama’s rather restrained foreign policy toward the Bashar al-Assad regime has been described as “feckless,” “flawed,” and “clueless.” In August 2012, however, President Obama issued a strong warning when he famously said the “red line” for the United States in terms of stepping up a military offensive would be if “we started seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” Beginning in 2013, the Damascus regime did utilize chemical weapons against the Syrian people, perhaps most shockingly in August in the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus. Yet President Obama ultimately held back from intervening militarily, and his decision has since received strong and persistent criticism. After retiring from his post as secretary of defense, Robert Gates judged the president’s decision a “serious mistake.” It allowed the tragedy to continue and American credibility to be hurt. The president himself, however, disagreed. About the decision not to act militarily he said later: “I’m very proud of this moment.” He was convinced that the United States could not successfully affect the situation and that he had kept the country out of another quagmire. It is indeed the case that good decisions can avoid wars or win them while bad decisions can start wars or lose them, and these consequences are just one reason why the study of foreign policy mistakes is so important. Yet it can, of course, not be the case that an evaluation of foreign policy decisions is rendered to the subjective eyes of the beholder. Instead, what is needed is an objective framework by which to identify and analyze foreign policy mistakes. Foreign policy mistakes are procedural errors concerning the diagnostic or the prescriptive level of the foreign policy decision-making task. They can be mistakes of omission or commission and can occur in regard to a threat or to an opportunity. Of special importance is the question how foreign policy mistakes can be avoided. This question can be answered through a decision-making framework defined by (a) the level of information a leader can have about a foreign policy challenge and (b) the potential consequences of a decision. Because many, if not most, challenges with respect to questions of international security are “ill-defined,” the myopic strategy of disjointed incrementalism is ideal. It avoids mistakes by making reversible (disjointed) and relatively small (incremental) moves away from the status quo. In the case of Syria, President Obama followed a strategy of disjointed incrementalism. He could not rely on much certain or reliable information regarding the situation and correctly understood that a military engagement could have potentially very adverse consequences in terms of casualties and a general escalation of the situation. Contrary to often repeated judgments that his decision not to engage militarily was a mistake, it is the case that he indeed avoided a mistake.

scholarly journals All Models Are Useful: Bayesian Ensembling for Robust High Resolution COVID-19 Forecasting

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniruddha Adiga ◽  
Lijing Wang ◽  
Benjamin Hurt ◽  
Akhil Peddireddy ◽  
Przemyslaw Porebski ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Disease Incidence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Statistical Machine Learning ◽  
Multiple Methods ◽  
Intervention Measures ◽  
Probabilistic Forecasts ◽  
The Individual

ABSTRACTTimely, high-resolution forecasts of infectious disease incidence are useful for policy makers in deciding intervention measures and estimating healthcare resource burden. In this paper, we consider the task of forecasting COVID-19 confirmed cases at the county level for the United States. Although multiple methods have been explored for this task, their performance has varied across space and time due to noisy data and the inherent dynamic nature of the pandemic. We present a forecasting pipeline which incorporates probabilistic forecasts from multiple statistical, machine learning and mechanistic methods through a Bayesian ensembling scheme, and has been operational for nearly 6 months serving local, state and federal policymakers in the United States. While showing that the Bayesian ensemble is at least as good as the individual methods, we also show that each individual method contributes significantly for different spatial regions and time points. We compare our model’s performance with other similar models being integrated into CDC-initiated COVID-19 Forecast Hub, and show better performance at longer forecast horizons. Finally, we also describe how such forecasts are used to increase lead time for training mechanistic scenario projections. Our work demonstrates that such a real-time high resolution forecasting pipeline can be developed by integrating multiple methods within a performance-based ensemble to support pandemic response.ACM Reference FormatAniruddha Adiga, Lijing Wang, Benjamin Hurt, Akhil Peddireddy, Przemys-law Porebski,, Srinivasan Venkatramanan, Bryan Lewis, Madhav Marathe. 2021. All Models Are Useful: Bayesian Ensembling for Robust High Resolution COVID-19 Forecasting. InProceedings of ACM Conference (Conference’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages.https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn

scholarly journals Constitution and Family in the United States

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 651-668
Author(s):  
Carl A. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Community Involvement ◽  
Living Arrangements ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Family ◽  
Family Based ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

Decisions of the United States Supreme Court beginning with Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) have transformed family law in the United States. By characterizing the right to marry as a fundamental constitutional right and procreative decision-making as both a fundamental liberty interest and privacy right, the Court has “deregulated” the institutions of marriage and family. During this same period the Court’s approach to legal questions involving the rights of non-marital cohabitating couples as well as individual procreative decision-making has tended to blur legal distinctions between the family based upon marriage and other living arrangements. The widespread adoption of mutual consent and/or marital breakdown as grounds for the dissolution of marriage in the United States has significantly altered the social dynamics of marriage and further reduces distinctions between marriage and other living arrangements. However, recent decisions by the Court in Hardwick, Michael H., and Webster point to a change of direction in the Court’s view of privacy which may signal a willingness to tolerate greater community involvement in establishing protective regulation of the institutions of marriage and the family based upon it. The Court also appears to be in the process of significantly narrowing the constitutionally recognized right of privacy when viewed as a zone of autonomous decision-making for the individual or non-marital couple.

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