Fog Of Uncertainty Research Articles

Peering Through the Fog of Uncertainty: Out-of-Sample Forecasts of Post-Pandemic Tourism

Abstract This paper uses an augmented gravity model framework to investigate the historical impact of infectious diseases on international tourism and develops an out-of-sample prediction model. Using bilateral tourism flows among 38,184 pairs of countries during the period 1995–2017, I compare the forecasting performance of alternative specifications and estimation methods. These computations confirm the statistical and economic significance of infectious-disease episodes in forecasting international tourism flows. Including infectious diseases in the model brings a significant improvement in forecast accuracy relative to the standard gravity model. The magnitude of these effects, however, is likely to be much greater in the case of COVID-19, which is a highly contagious virus that has spread fast throughout populations across the world.

BHC brilliance in the fog of uncertainty: Illuminating trends in bank performance

BHC brilliance in the fog of uncertainty: Illuminating trends in bank performance

Perspectives of Patients With Relapsed and Refractory Acute Myeloid Leukemia and High-Risk Myelodysplastic Syndrome on Patient-Clinician Communication About Prognosis and the Future.

Patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and high-risk myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) experience unpredictable disease trajectories and high prognostic uncertainty, which serve as barriers to patient-clinician communication about prognosis and their values and preferences for the future in the event of worsening health. Little is known about patients' day-to-day lived experiences and how this shapes their willingness to engage in such conversations. To explore participant perspectives on living with their illness and patient-clinician communication about prognosis and the future. This is a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews. Patients with relapsed and refractory (R/R) AML and high-risk MDS from a northeastern U.S. cancer center. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and thematic analysis was used to generate findings. Of the 14 participants, the mean age was 66 years, 79% were men, 93% were White, married, and had AML. The overarching theme that describes the experience was "Taking One Day at a Time" in a Fog of Uncertainty. Uncertainty was a universal perception related to the challenges for clinicians to predict prognosis. To cope with uncertainty, most participants tried to focus on the present and maintain normality in everyday life. Participants valued encouragement and positivity in patient-clinician communication, however, the majority were not ready to discuss prognosis and the future in the event of worsening health. Of note, 7 of 14 participants died within three months after the interview. These data describe a unique perspective of patients with R/R AML and high-risk MDS that clinicians could use to enhance communication strategies.

Peering Through the Fog of Uncertainty: Out-of-Sample Forecasts of Post-Pandemic Tourism

Peering Through the Fog of Uncertainty: Out-of-Sample Forecasts of Post-Pandemic Tourism

Sailing through the storm: Improvising paradox navigation during a pandemic.

Despite rich depictions of paradox navigation strategies, and the recognition that they are fraught with uncertainty, research reveals relatively little about how leaders navigate paradoxical tensions when improvising in the face of highly unpredictable and quickly evolving events. We conducted a narrative study of how French President Macron navigated the tension between the paradoxical poles of "saving lives" and "preserving life as usual" during the pandemic. Our article surfaces three central elements that form a model of improvised paradox navigation in stormy conditions: turning points, fog of uncertainty, and chaotic learning. Our model contributes to paradox theorizing by shedding light on paradox navigation in highly turbulent environments and has implications for management learning and improvisation.

The Corona Truth Wars

The current corona pandemic disrupts the entire world like and threatens not only public health, but our economies, social relations, democracies, rule of law, mental well-being and more. While we may have more understanding of the Sars-Cov-2 virus than half a year ago, much of what it does and how to combat it is still uncertain, despite a dazzling amount of research on it. That may be logical when new issues arise, but the situation is complicated by the fact that this quest for truthful knowledge about the virus is entangled with various (geo)political dynamics, government policy pressures, media reporting, platform moderation and public understandings of it all. It is therefore quite unclear what information is reliable, which experts to follow and what (epistemic) authorities to trust. Science and Technology Scholars are perfectly equipped with concepts, theories and methods to help us understand these complex dynamics, and guide us through the fog of uncertainty and manipulation. Yet they seem remarkably absent in public and scientific debates. What is going on?

A Modern, Behavior-Aware Approach to Asset Allocation and Portfolio Construction

Diversification has been the cornerstone of investing for thousands of years as evidenced by timeless proverbs like “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” The magic behind diversification – and one of the reasons it is considered the only “free lunch” available in investing – is that a portfolio of assets will always have a risk level less-than-or-equal-to the riskiest asset within the portfolio. Yet it was not until Dr. Harry Markowitz published his seminal article “Portfolio Selection” in 1952 that investors had a mathematical formulation for the concept. His work, which ultimately coalesced into Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), not only provided practitioners a means to measure risk and diversification, but it also allowed them to quantify the marginal benefit of adding new exposures to a portfolio and to derive optimal investment portfolios. For his work, Dr. Markowitz was awarded a Nobel prize in 1990. The theory, however, has its shortcomings. The assumptions that asset class returns are normally distributed and that expected returns, volatilities, and correlations are both known to investors and are static over time fail to hold up to empirical evidence. Unfortunately, these assumptions appear to fail spectacularly during market crises: the very times that investors rely on diversification the most. In light of these shortcomings, some have begun to question the merits of asset class diversification and MPT. With the benefit of perfect hindsight, the diversified portfolio will never be return optimal. It will always contain asset classes that disappoint. To judge the outcome of diversification after the fog of uncertainty has lifted, however, misses the point. Diversification is valuable precisely because investors don’t know what the future holds. We can be vaguely right instead of precisely wrong. Nevertheless, we believe there are pragmatic improvements that can be made to address some of the MPT’s flaws. In our opinion, the most glaring of these flaws is the failure to acknowledge the role of investor behavior in long-term investment results. Despite his foundational research in MPT, even Dr. Markowitz has admitted to forgoing its application within his own personal investments for behavioral reasons. “Instead, I visualized my grief if the stock market went up and I wasn’t in it – or if it went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret. So I split my contributions 50/50 between bonds and equities.” Today, investors are presented with a larger palette of asset classes than ever before. The rise of nontraditional asset classes, the expansion of sub-asset classes, and the proliferation of mutual funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs) provide investors with new diversification opportunities wrapped in low-cost, liquid packages. This paper outlines our views about the appropriate asset mix for different types of investors and explains our process for constructing a diversified portfolio that includes many of these new diversification opportunities. Most importantly, it highlights the steps that can be taken within asset allocation to address the behavioral shortcomings of investors. Our ultimate goal is to acknowledge that the optimal investment plan is, first and foremost, the one the investor can stick with.

Inactivated poliovirus vaccine: The fog of uncertainty is lifting!

India achieved zero transmission of wild polioviruses (WPVs) in 2011. On 25 February, 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) removed India from the list of WPV-endemic countries. Formal certification of eradication requires three years without WPVs, expected in the first quarter of 2014. Then we have to advance to the second phase of polio eradication, for eliminating vaccine polioviruses (VPVs) [1]. Albert Sabin derived VPVs by attenuating WPVs. Two major phenotypic changes were brought about by genetic variations: loss of neurovirulence and reduction in ‘force of infection’. Force of infection determines the efficiency of transmission between hosts: VPVs are less efficient in transmission than WPVs. Polioviruses, with single stranded positive sense RNA genome, acquire point mutations during replication. As a result, VPVs tend to revert genetically during cycles of virus replication. In serial replication in humans, VPVs de-attenuate and become ‘vaccine-derived polioviruses’ (VDPVs) [2]. If all children are fully vaccinated with OPV, VDPVs will not emerge but the price to pay will be the occasional vaccineassociated paralytic polio (VAPP). So, OPV has to be withdrawn, when the stray VDPVs will circulate unchecked among children, become ‘circulating VDPVs’ (cVDPVs) and replace the eradicated WPVs. The emergence of cVDPVs should therefore be preempted at all costs [1]. We already have the necessary tool of intervention, the inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) developed by Jonas Salk. Now the contours of eradication phase 2 are clear: introduce IPV, achieve high coverage, discontinue OPV and maintain clinical and virological surveillance [1]. These steps will have to be orchestrated globally in order to conclude polio eradication. WHO is planning to discontinue VPVs in stages, starting with withdrawal type 2 by switching from trivalent to bivalent OPV (bOPV, containing types 1 and 3), since WPV type 2 was eradicated in 1999. In preparation for this shift, IPV needs to be introduced universally. Where schedule-based vaccination will not achieve high coverage, to begin with IPV may have to be given in campaigns. After WPV 1 and 3 are eradicated, bOPV will also be withdrawn. Many countries currently use IPV-containing pentavalent vaccine with DPT with acellular pertussis (aP) component and Haemophilus influenza b (Hib) conjugate vaccine or hexavalent vaccine containing hepatitis B vaccine (HB) also. Hexavalent is ideal for India since we have HB and Hib in our Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP). If hexavalent with wP can be made, that will be even better.

Emergency Lawmaking After 9/11 and 7/7

This essay offers case studies of three emergency statutes, all dealing with terrorism and all enacted within less than a year after a major terrorist attack: the September 14, 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force; the USA PATRIOT Act; and the U.K. Terrorism Act 2006. A standard worry about such cases is that the circumstances of emergency lawmaking produce blank-check delegations to the executive. The fog of uncertainty, emotions such as urgency and visceral fear, and the tendency of legislators and the public to rally 'round the flag, all cause legislators to vote the executive massive new powers, regardless of whether those powers are rationally justifiable. This view is descriptively and theoretically flawed. Descriptively, executives in all three episodes lost control of the political dynamics, faced bipartisan resistance or rebellion in the legislature, and ended up obtaining far less than they asked for or desired. Theoretically, emergency conditions have cross-cutting political effects on legislators. The mechanisms and forces operative during emergency lawmaking cut both ways, constraining as well as empowering the executive, with unpredictable net results in particular cases. Although executives usually receive new powers in emergencies, there is no reason to think that they systematically tend to receive more new authority than a rational legislature would provide.

Immunotherapy III: Combinatorial molecular immunotherapy--a synthesis and suggestions.

Animal models have clearly shown that tumor cells may be amenable to molecular manipulation which can result in immune activation and rejection of unmodified cells (Chapters 4 and 5). The challenge now is to design clinical trials which have a realistic chance of success, (although the definition of 'success' is itself an important issue [see Chapter 9]. How should such a strategy be formulated? A review of the previous fifteen years since the first (immune) gene transfer studies were reported, encompasses a great wealth of data. Unfortunately, far from crystallising a set of unifying principles, these diverse reports shroud us in a fog of uncertainty as to how best to proceed. However, if this technology is to have practical, widespread application in the treatment of cancer patients, it is necessary to identify certain critical immunological goals which any protocols should achieve. Clear elucidation of these goals, by unifying the huge amount of disparate experimental data, must eventually be accomplished. In this chapter, we have reviewed the literature covering the era of molecular immunotherapy. We propose four general goals around which widely applicable clinical protocols, not necessarily dependent upon tumour type or experimental bias, might be based and suggest how they may be achieved in the context of gene transfer.

The Issue Should Be Decided Now

assured. The prophetic visibility is admittedly low; few of us would pretend we can see very far into the fog of uncertainty that is even the immediate future. We badly need some intellectual counterpart of radar. Even so, certain concrete facts can be made out, not all of them pleasant. One is that our old security, the security that came in part from our two broad oceans, has been repealed by science. Whereas we have been used to thinking of ourselves as out of range and almost impossible to reach, we now realize that our old ally, geography, has taken some bad blows. We accept the sobering truth that this country can be the target of a surprise attack, and is not impossible of invasion. Whatever else may be true of the postwar world, we know that much is so.

Principles and Procedures for Putting across Business Statistics Reports to Executives

IN ITS BROADEST interpretation our present problem is how to present the results of research effort to the executive. Let us first narrow the statement of the problem. 1. This paper is not concerned with ways and means of putting across commercially published statistical reports. 2. No consideration is given to problems incident to presenting weekly, monthly, quarterly, or on any other time basis an intricate system of chart control for the chief executives of a corporation to follow and by which to direct the activities of their organization. 3. No consideration will be given to the problems incident to presenting all manner of business statistics to all manner of business executives. There may be other sub-classifications of this broad topic which should be eliminated, as this discussion is limited to the principles and practices of presenting specific problem analyses to the executives of a particular corporation, no matter what its corporate title may be. Statistics and statistical methodology are limited to data available and to various manipulations that the trained research man will adopt in attempting to reach sound generalizations based upon a multiple number of observations so that a solution of some definite confusion or uncertainty may be presented to management. Statistical analyses are not ends in themselves but are a means whereby the trained analyst seeks to find a clear-cut path through the fog of uncertainty. The Receivers. Business executives make decisions about the best course of action at particular times when confronted with particular problems. They are eager for help in finding the solution of many of the problems which must be encountered daily. Their objective is to eliminate the pure chance element and reduce uncertainty to a minimum. The very existence of a commercial research department on a corporation payroll is vivid testimony that the executives of that corporation desire whatever assistance research men may be able to give to management in selecting proper courses of action at the right time. There is an obvious desire for the results of statistical and economic analysis. The audience, therefore, is receptive regarding the results of analyses of problems.