Difficult editorial decisions

Editorial: Decisions! Decisions!

complexities, is still poorly understood in many circles. We tell students that there is no free lunch, that if you want to use a screen to identify everyone, or almost everyone, who might have a given abnormality, then you will have to accept that you will falsely identify many individuals who later turn out to be normal. In the jargon of decision analysis theory, high hit rate means high fals...

Evaluating Evidence When Making Difficult Decisions

This paper presents the case for using the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence and a derivative of it, to model the reasoning process in debates on difficult philosophical, theological and scientific questions. This gives a useful formal framework within which to enhance the debating process. A well-known theological debate and two scientific exemplars are given for illustration of the working a...

Difficult Intraoperative Decisions during Colic Surgery

One of the first major surgeries many equine surgical residents will log as a primary surgeon will be an emergency colic surgery. Being adequately prepared for this challenge and able to make correct intraoperative decisions is imperative for successful case outcome. Arguably the two greatest challenges faced during colic surgery are assessing bowel viability, and overall patient survivability ...

Choice processing in emotionally difficult decisions.

Choice conflicts between one's important values may cause negative emotion. This article extends the standard effort-accuracy approach to explaining task influences on decision processing by arguing that coping goals will interact with effort minimization and accuracy maximization goals for negatively emotion-laden decision tasks. These coping goals may involve both a desire to process in a tho...

Difficult decisions for long-term tube-feeding.