The petroleum activities on the Norwegian Continental Shelf are subject to regulations issued by the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate. One important issue in these regulations is the use of acceptance criteria, and this paper discusses some philosophical aspects of acceptance criteria for risk, and the role of statistical decision theory within safety management. Statistical decision theory has ...

Critical to the discovery, development and rational use of drugs and vaccines are the foundational principles and proper application of statistics. However, in too many cases, there has been misuse of statistics and/or overemphasis on statistical significance (p < 0.05), as though this criterion possessed truth-guaranteeing properties. To clarify confusion about the proper use of statistics in ...

In the process of decision-making, sometimes analysts are given a sub-set of criteria for which statistical data are available from experiments, whereas for some other criteria, only qualitative judgments can be made. In such situations, it is important to consider the weights of experimental criteria along with the decision maker’s qualitative weights. Furthermore, in complex decision scenario...

BACKGROUND We aimed to determine whether there was a decrease in the number of children diagnosed on the autism spectrum after the implementation of the new diagnostic criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders Fifth Edition published in May 2013. METHOD We reviewed 1552 charts of children evaluated at the Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo,...

Species sensitivity distributions (SSDs) are increasingly used in both ecological risk assessment and derivation of water quality criteria. However, there has been debate about the choice of an appropriate approach for derivation of water quality criteria based on SSDs because the various methods can generate different values. The objective of this study was to compare the differences among var...