VOLUME 74, NO. 5, MAY 2012 Consider the recent controversy over prostate cancer screening. A Presidential Task Force scaled back recommended testing. But many doctors, citing important cases of detecting cancer, disagreed (Harris, 2011; Brownlee & Lenzer, 2011). Whose judgment should we trust? New England fish populations are threatened, according to experts. They suggest discontinuing cod fish...

Although scholars of international security share a skepticism for the extent to which agreements can be externally inforced, much of the extant game-theoretic work involves strong forms of commitment. We beuild on the cannonical model of crisis bargaining to gain insights about the role of two forms of commitment in bargainingthe ability to commit to a settlement and the ability to commit to e...

Introduction This chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the concept of credibility and its areas of application relevant to information science and technology, encompassing several disciplinary approaches. An information seeker's environment—the Internet, television, newspapers, schools, libraries, bookstores, and social networks—abounds with information resources that nee...

T hose of us who have monitored,and participated in, the rapid advances in nanoscale materials in recent years are well aware of the exciting science and technological promise they hold. In the past three years, the extraordinary results from the Bell Labs research facility in Murray Hill,New Jersey,on field-effectinduced phenomena at the molecular scale seemed to epitomize the vision proclaime...

A new health technology assessment section is to start in Critical Care. The use of new technology is germane to critical care medicine [1]. Consequently, intensivists are obliged to critically appraise the technology in use. There are already publicly funded bodies performing the task of sifting through development data on these innovations, so what could be new about technology assessment? Ou...

Five types of constructions are introduced for non-prioritized belief revision, i.e., belief revision in which the input sentence is not always accepted. These constructions include generalizations of entrenchment-based and sphere-based revision. Axiomatic characterizations are provided, and close interconnections are shown to hold between the di®erent constructions. x

Carbon policy faces an intractable trade-off: while credible commitment to future policy improves the dynamic efficiency of incentives it imposes costs in form of reduced flexibility to respond to changing circumstances. Investors favor long-term stability of the regulatory regime. But considerable uncertainty prevails, resulting in increased market risks and investment hold-up. Uncertainty ste...

The ability to self-correct is considered a hallmark of science. However, self-correction does not always happen to scientific evidence by default. The trajectory of scientific credibility can fluctuate over time, both for defined scientific fields and for science at-large. History suggests that major catastrophes in scientific credibility are unfortunately possible and the argument that "it is...

Today, social media provide the means by which billions of people experience news and events happening around the world. However, the absence of traditional journalistic gatekeeping allows information to flow unencumbered through these platforms, often raising questions of veracity and credibility of the reported information. Here we ask: How do the dynamics of collective attention directed tow...

Credibility of a web-based document is an important concern, when a large number of documents is available on internet for a given subject. In this paper, various criteria that affect the credibility of a document are explored. An attempt is made to automate the process of assigning a credibility score to a web-based document. Presently the prototype of the tool developed is restricted to only ...