Difference between revisions of "Decision analysis and risk management"

• Objectives, expectations.
• Content and methods.
• Introduction to the group work and individual work.

• Look from decision-maker's point of view: needs, communication, and assessment all included.
• Openness: RA, RM, RC are not totally separate.
• Performance: Context about what we actually aim to achieve. Ho do we know if we succeeded?
• Developing risk management options.
• Development of risk assessment questions.
• Science-policy interface. Why it does not exist.

Swine flu material collection and synthesis: How the swine flu problem emerged (spring 2009) and spread in the world. Groups present summaries.

Swine flu story (summer 2009): Preparedness in Finland and internationally. Vaccination campaigns, counter-campaigns.

• Should we launch vaccination campaign?
• Should I take vaccination? Should I not take vaccination?

Group work: make a research plan to find out good policies in this case. Which models to use, what to assess?

• Purpose of assessment: Why it is done
• Concepts: decisions, objectives, optimisation, uncertainty, decision trees

Subjective probabilities

• Practical exercise
• Bayesian rule and Bayesian networks.
• Denis Lindley: Philosophy of probabilities

Swine flu story (autumn - winter 2009): First deaths of swine flu (threat was real). Problems with implementation: long queues in health centers. Clear-cut case falls apart. False alarm? Disease was milder than thought.

Decision-making under uncertainty

• Assessment performance? Quality of evidence? Impacts of uncertainty in decision-making. Hindsight.
• Use of adjuvants. How similar is the same? Can/Should be aim at zero risk? Benefit-risk comparisons.
• Acceptability
• Value of information

Swine flu story: Secret connections to drug industry? Narcolepsy.

• Justified true belief and its problems
• Inference rules: how do we know what we know?
• Shared information vs. private information
• Actions by a group based on shared information
• Shared belief systems
• Risk assessment as a collaborative project of information production.

Practical work

• Do we need pre-peer-review?

Opasnet and other web tools for risk assessment.

• Practical and technical things to get started.
• Aim: to learn skills that are needed to perform and participate in practical training.

How methods learned should be applied now? Why openness is needed?

Return second draft of research plan. Impacts of openness on topics discussed.

Discussion: Lectures of concepts

• Pragma-dialectics, argumentation theory.
• Parts of argumentation.

Structuring of discussions in practice and theory

• Ready-made texts: discussions and organisation
• Homework: evaluate relevance - validity of arguments. Discuss in groups the next day.
• Build a structured discussion out of this in groups.
• Possibly utilise group writing tools?

Statistics

• list of links to some methods of descriptive statistics
• list of links to many methods inferential statistics
• fairly thorough description of sensitivity analysis
• thorough mathematical description of uncertainty propagation and covariance matrices; nothing about Monte Carlo
• how to integrate with Monte Carlo; not necessary in risk assessment
• a short description of training in subjective probabilities
• Frequency probability
• Bayesian probability
• Principle of maximum entropy

Exposure

• only a stub
• EPA Exposure factors program interesting for both teaching and opasnet Base
• some basic concepts of exposure assessment
• short description of basic concepts and examples of biomarkers in exposure assessment
• a short description of exposure modelling with indoor and outdoor air as examples
• official ISEA/IPCS exposure glossary -> put to opasnet glossary
• total exposure assessment by Paul Lioy (1990)
• EPA exposure factors handbook: chapter on uncertainty and variability

Toxicology

• general terms and concepts of toxicology
• a stub with useful links about toxicology
• measures of toxic pollutant concentrations: short description about NOEC and ECx
• mathematics of probit model; advanced material
• the carcinogenic potency database: learn more about this!

Epidemiology and public health

• good description of basic concepts of epidemiology
• a description but mostly about history and other trivia (trivia from RA point of view)

Risk characterisation

• a good description of risk aversion with math required

Risk management

• something about security risk management; not useful

Risk and impact assessment

• overview of RA in different fields
• a long description of relevant concepts of risk management
• ISO/IEC guide 73:2009 about risk assessment vocabulary
• a good description of basic concepts of risk
• only a list of software; the software themselves may be interesting but haven't checked
• only a placeholder of hazard identification
• a brief description of HIA but lots of links
• a short description of a new standard ISO 31000
• short description of PRA with software links
• EPA risk assessment website: learn more about it!
• Object oriented quality management: interesting idea of Statistics Netherlands; implementation unclear

Decision analysis and economy

• description of concept of cost overrun (economy)
• strategic misinterpretation (underestimation) of budget; an interesting detail related to economy
• Strategic misrepresentation in budgeting
• Decision theory in Wikipedia
• Decision theory in Opasnet
• Prospect theory in Wikipedia

Open assessment

• a general lecture about the utility of open assessment
  • presentation file related to the lecture
• background information about open assessments
• background about variables
• background about mass collaboration
• evaluating assessment performance

Miscellaneous

• very brief description of EU-OSHA
• Institute of Risk Management - gives RA education?
• this is about education assessment and learning philosophy. not very relevant
• MIT Open CourseWare