Medical privacy and research.

Medical records are increasingly kept in electronic form. The existence of large medical databases raises new questions about privacy and control over that information. When records exist in a form that can easily be shared with others, there are legitimate privacy concerns. This paper argues that this fear is not properly a privacy issue, but rather concerns the viability of social norms that govern the doctor-patient relationship and the use of medical information that is obtained within that relationship. When medical information is used for research purposes, the information is transformed into data elements and is no longer about the individuals. Information obtained either in the ordinary course of providing medical care or in the course of conducting research studies for which individuals have given their informed consent does not require further consent to be used as data in research files as long as it is not individually identifiable.

Reports of elapsed time: bounding and rounding processes in estimation.

The present article concerns the way temporal information is represented in memory and the processes used in estimating when events occurred. In particular, we examine the sources of bias in reports of the time that has elapsed since a target event occurred. We find that reported times are less than actual times. Evidence is presented that this forward bias is not a result of misrepresentation of elapsed time in memory, but rather reflects two factors that arise in constructing reports from inexact information in memory. One factor is subjects' imposition of an upper boundary on reports, reflecting their notion of what would constitute reasonable answers to the question asked. This boundary truncates the distribution of reports, producing forward bias. The other factor is subjects' use of rounded (prototypic) values; these values, although stated in days, actually represent larger temporal categories (e.g., 14, 21, 30, 60 days ago). The distance between rounded values increases as the temporal categories become larger. Because of decreasing precision in memory and this increase in the distance between rounded values, a broader range of values is rounded down than up, thus producing forward bias.

Answering autobiographical questions: the impact of memory and inference on surveys.

Survey questions often probe respondents for quantitative facts about events in their past: "During the last 2 weeks, on days when you drank liquor, about how many drinks did you have?" "During the past 12 months, how many visits did you make to a dentist?" "When did you last work at a full-time job?" are all examples from national surveys. Although questions like these make an implicit demand to remember and enumerate specific autobiographical episodes, respondents frequently have trouble complying because of limits on their ability to recall. In these situations, respondents resort to inferences that use partial information from memory to construct a numeric answer. Results from cognitive psychology can be useful in understanding and investigating these phenomena. In particular, cognitive research can help in identifying situations that inhibit or facilitate recall and can reveal inferences that affect the accuracy of respondents' answers.

Evolution of public response to the energy crisis.

There is a wide range of technical measures to improve the efficiency of fuel use in industry. The economic justification for adopting these measures can, as a rule, be readily established. If one can resolve the nontechnoeconomic constraints which affect the adoption of these measures, one can look forward to substantial reductions in the fuel required to operate many important industrial processes.