<p>There is a shortage of organs available for donation worldwide. There have been several campaigns to try to increase the numbers of registrered donors. The topic has been brought to the forefront but more work is still needed to distribute information to the public.</p><p>The aim of this literature review was to examine what influences people in their decision to donate their organs or not, and what role nurses play in providing the most current information available. The study found that there was several different reasons given for not donating their organs. A great number of people were convinced that their religion was against organ donation. The level of knowledge about organ donation and ethnoculural background were major factors when making the decision to register as an organ donar. Only through making more information available in different languages, educating healthcare workers about culural and religions differences can the numbers of registrated donors increase.</p>

<p>Planning is what sustains an energy system. It is a process of analysis and ongoing decision making about what resources and energy technologies to use when supplying energy to society. This research focuses on integrated energy systems, i.e. systems that are comprised of several energy carriers – electricity, gas, hot water - and energy distribution networks. The planning of these kinds of systems is a complex process, influenced by many factors, among which the most important are the availability of energy resources and the competition between different energy carriers in satisfying energy demand. During the last 10-20 years significant changes have taken place on the world energy scene, which have important implications for energy planning. Two main factors have triggered these changes. The first factor is the immediate need to address environmental changes or more generally, to take measures that are sustainable in the long run. Sustainability can be defined in many ways and in relation to different issues such as economic and ecologic development, reduction of greenhouse gases, responsible use of natural resources, social equity, etc. In recent years, an increased awareness of these issues has been observed at all levels of the society. The second factor is the deregulation of national energy sectors in more than 50 countries. This process brought changes in the ownership of different parts of the formerly integrated energy systems. New business opportunities were created in power generation, wholesale power/gas trading and energy retailing, while the energy infrastructures remained state owned or/and under regulatory control. The newly created energy markets (many of them international) have attracted both new players (power, oil and gas companies and financial institutions) together with the old ones (integrated utilities). In parallel with this vertical separation of national energy sectors, recent studies have shown a tendency for horizontal integration at the regional/company level. For instance, in order to reduce their overall business risk, companies prefer to participate in several segments of the energy value chain (in both regulated and non-regulated activities), and often across more than one fuel commodity, such as gas and electricity or district heating. In this context, the competition between different energy carriers in satisfying the end-use energy demand became obvious in economic as well as in technological and environmental terms. Traditionally, in integrated planning, this competition did not play a big role, since the same state entity made decisions at both national and regional levels. However, in the post-deregulation era it is no longer obvious who the planner is. In many cases, planning decision at local levels involve at least three main interest groups: energy companies (and/or other investors), the state and the local community. This thesis is motivated by the need to help planners to cope with the changes in concepts and values concerning the planning of local energy supply systems. This thesis has two aims. The first aim is to improve the understanding of what planning of local systems implies and how such a process can be structured. The second aim is to contribute to the development of decision support methodologies and tools that can cope with the needs in planning. For this purpose, the use of energy modelling and Multi- Criteria Decision Analysis has been studied.</p>

<p>It has become increasingly common for a city or region to use sporting and media events to promote themselves. But what is behind these events? What kind of organisation is necessary to plan and run them? In the summer of 2009 the internationally known Volvo Ocean Race will arrive in Stockholm. The race is eight months long and will be hosted in Stockholm for almost the whole of June. The City of Stockholm is behind the event and Stockholm’s marinas will be responsible for making sure that everything runs smoothly and on schedule. Hosting this big event will have an impact on the citizens of Stockholm in many ways. The purpose of this study is to examine the political decision-making behind the event and the first part of the year of planning and preparations that have lead up to it.</p><p>The study is based on interviews with the people responsible for the planning of the event and one politician that were involved in the decision-making. The method that is used in the study is Grounded Theory, which the authors believe has been valuable in this case. The implication of using this method is that the authors have been able to look more closely into the planning of the event without being too influenced by earlier learned theories. The method also can help us to see patterns in the study that otherwise could be missed. In the end of this study we look at previous research and give suggestions for future studies. The authors hope that this study can give inspiration to other researchers in this growing and interesting field.</p>

There are different opinions on who the appropriate decision makers are for extremely premature infants. Some argue the responsibility should fall to the parents, and others argue the neonatal experts should be responsible for decision making. This study explored parental perceptions of their involvement in decision making in the neonatal intensive care (NICU). The NICU operated from the philosophy of Family Centered Care (FCC). FCC situates the parents as central to all aspects of their child’s care and as such, the parents should be well informed and actively involved in decision making. An interpretative descriptive approach was used to examine the experiences of seven parents who had infants born at 24-26 weeks gestation who were admitted to the NICU. Thematic analysis revealed that the culture of the NICU along with the relationships developed in the NICU had an impact on the parents’ perceptions of decision making.

Co-management is considered an alternative approach to fisheries management, however, not all co-managed fisheries have been successful. Most studies discussing the success and failure of co-management have emphasized economic and social attributes of success and failure, such as fishery rights and institutional arrangements. The effect on co-management of biological characteristics, such as the growth rate of the fish stock and the stock size, has gained little attention. This study investigates the influence of intrinsic growth rate (r) and relative stock size (B') on fishers' decision to cooperate with catch quotas. The concept of mixed strategies from game theory is incorporated with basic economic concepts and a biomass dynamics model to capture important aspects in a fishery cooperative. The discounting concept is applied to capture the fishers' tendency to cooperate (��[subscript i]). Profits from fishing are specified for each fisher within a 2 by 2 matrix with two players and two strategies (cooperative and non-cooperative). When both players have dominant strategies, where one player's best strategy coincides with the other player's best strategy, the game has a pure strategy equilibrium. Alternatively, the equilibrium outcome of the game is determined using mixed strategies. The results indicate that the biological parameters, r and B', influence fishers' cooperation. However, social parameters (��[subscript i]) and economic parameters (profit/cost ratio when the stock is at the carrying capacity) must also be considered. Furthermore, this study finds that the fishers are more likely to play the cooperative strategy over very wide ranges of r and B' when their tendencies to cooperate are high. In contrast, the fishers are more likely to play mixed strategy when their tendencies to cooperate are low. Having a large discrepancy between the fishers' tendencies to cooperate has less influence on the outcomes of the game than having high values for the fishers' tendencies to cooperate. The profit/cost ratio generally accentuates the most frequent outcomes of the game. For instance, if the outcomes are mostly mixed strategies, a higher ratio expands the mixed strategy outcomes over wider ranges of r and B'. / Graduation date: 2001

Knowledge-Based Model Construction (KBMC) has generated a lot of attention due to its importance as a technique for generating probabilistic or decision-theoretic models whose range of applicability in AI has been vastly increased. However, no one has tried to analyze the essential issues in KBMC, to determine if there exists a general efficient KBMC method for any problem domain, or to y identify the fruitful future research on KBMC. This research presents a unified framework for comparative analysis of KBMC systems identifying the essential issues in KBMC, showing that there is no such general efficient KBMC method, and listing the fruitful future research on KBMC. This thesis then presents a new KBMC mechanism for hierarchical diagnosis and repair. Diagnosis is formulated as a stochastic process and modeled using influence diagrams. In the best case using an abstraction hierarchy in problem-solving can yield an exponential speedup in search efficiency. However, this speedup assumes backtracking never occurs across abstraction levels. When this assumption fails, search may have to consider different abstract solutions before finding one that can be refined to a base solution, and, therefore, search efficiency is not necessarily improved. In this thesis, we present a decision model construction method for hierarchical diagnosis and repair. We show analytically and experimentally that our method always yields a significant speedup in search efficiency, and that hierarchies with smaller branching factors yield more significant efficiency gains. This thesis employs two causal pathways (functional and bridge fault) of domain knowledge in device trouble shooting, preventing either whole class of faults we will never be able to diagnose. Each causal pathway models the knowledge of adjacency and behavior within the corresponding interaction layer. Careful search of causal pathways allows us to restrict the search space of fault hypotheses at each time. We model this search among causal pathways decision-theoretically. Decision-theoretic control usually results in significant improvements over unaided human expert judgments. Furthermore, these improvements in performance are robust to substantial errors in the assessed costs and probabilities. / Graduation date: 1995

The purpose of this thesis is to integrate behavioral finance with market microstructure and financial decision-making. Specifically, I focus on two issues concerning the integration of psycho-physiological mechanisms and the informational content of prices in financial markets: firstly, the role of emotions in financial decision making and how as an adaptive mechanism, they show to be more suitable for survival than pure rationality (in an economic sense); and secondly, the empirical and theoretical testing of how cognitive illusions and polysemy affect the informational content of prices.

How do we make the best decisions in face of voluminous, complex, changing, and uncertain information? We describe a multi-disciplinary effort in developing the next generation decision analytic and engineering technologies. We explain the goals, the approaches, the achievements, and the evolving plans of the project. We illustrate the ideas and issues explored in various biomedical domains, with related information ranging from genes to humans. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

We propose an information extraction framework to support automated construction of decision models in biomedicine. Our proposed technique classifies text-based documents from a large biomedical literature repository, e.g., MEDLINE, into predefined categories, and identifies important keywords for each category based on their discriminative power. Relevant documents for each category are retrieved based on the keywords, and a classification algorithm is developed based on machine learning techniques to build the final classifier. We apply the HITS algorithm to select the authoritative and typical documents within a category, and construct templates in the form of Bayesian networks. Data mining and information extraction techniques are then applied to extract the necessary semantic knowledge to fill in the templates to construct the final decision models. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

This paper presents an optimal method and a heuristic approach which aims at maximizing the profit when responding to a set of customer enquiries under limited capacity. The model takes into consideration the quantity of available-to-promise (ATP) which measures the capability to fill customer orders, along with enquiry quantity and product price. The optimal method and the heuristic approach are tested using ATP, product price and enquiry quantity each at their different levels. From the example conducted, it is found that (1) the optimal model can help to make appropriate decision for selecting a subset of enquiries, and (2) the heuristic approach can produce a result within 5% from the optimum achieved by optimal method for most parameter settings. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)