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This article discusses anecdotes functions’ to express philosophical anxieties and skepticism towards philosophical generalizations. By taking up Hans Blumenberg’s work on the rhetoric of philosophical discourse, this article examines an unpublished one-page story written by Blumenberg about his advisor, phenomenologist Ludwig Landgrebe. The story becomes absurd when Landgrebe (identified as “L.”) uses his pocket-watch to time a ferry trip, which he is only taking in order to go home and search his house for the selfsame pocket-watch. The article interprets the story as an illustration both of Heideggerian Being-in-the-World and of Landgrebe’s little-known variation on Heidegger’s model. Blumenberg’s anecdote conveys a reductio ad absurdum of the notion that we only notice objects when they are not handy ( zuhanden ). Besides critiquing Heidegger and Landgrebe, the anecdote exposes problems of phenomenology that an argument would express less satisfactorily.

In (S.B. Ekhad and D. Zeilberger, 2020) an exciting case study has been initiated in which experimental mathematics and symbolic computation are utilized to discover new properties concerning the so-called Absent-Minded Passengers Problem. Based on these results, Doron Zeilberger raised some challenging tasks to gain further probabilistic insight. In this note we report on this enterprise. In particular, we demonstrate how the computer algebra packages of RISC can be used to carry out the underlying heavy calculations., Comment: Removed various typos and inserted an extra link for a Mathematica notebook to repeat the (not-so-costly) calculations

Passengers board a fully booked airplane in order. The first passenger picks one of the seats at random. Each subsequent passenger takes his or her assigned seat if available, otherwise takes one of the remaining seats at random. It is well known that the last passenger obtains her own seat with probability $1/2$. We study the distribution of the number of incorrectly seated passengers, and we also discuss the case of several absent-minded passengers.

The relationship between the British empire and the metropolitan populace remains a recurring point of debate for historians. Autobiographies, such as that of the nineteenth-century tailor James Carter (1792–1853), offer a means of moving beyond the question of working-class knowledge of the empire, to understand the ways in which workers perceived the role and significance of the empire within the context of their own lives. Analysis of Carter's autobiography yields a vision of a worker who, while far from ignorant of the empire's existence, perceived it as a largely distant entity, except in those moments when its influence manifested directly in his own personal and economic affairs.

Before choosing among two actions with state-dependent payoffs, a Bayesian decision-maker with a finite memory sees a sequence of informative signals, ending each period with fixed chance. He summarizes information observed with a finite-state automaton. I characterize the optimal protocol as an equilibrium of a dynamic game of imperfect recall; a new player runs each memory state each period. Players act as if maximizing expected payoffs in a common finite action decision problem. I characterize equilibrium play with many multinomial signals. The optimal protocol rationalizes many behavioral phenomena, like �stickiness,� salience, confirmation bias, and belief polarization.

Though moving across borders is a common phenomenon in the contemporary globalised world, travel writing as a genre has still retained its significance as well as some of its traits from its colonial predecessors. Thus, while many “Western” travelogues in non-Western destinations still narrate the non-west as exotic, dangerous and often ludicrous, the non-Western traveller's visit to a Western land is often accompanied by a sense of pride, privilege and even bitter experiences of discrimination. This essay discusses how the Bengali writer Nabanita Dev Sen's travelogue “Dr. Dev Sen's Bidesh Yatra” projects the post-colonial voice that subverts the paradigmatic tension between the power and lure of the Western land, and the apparent powerlessness of the non-Western traveller. Using the humorous technique of self-caricature, Dev Sen narrates the vagaries of an absent minded, messy, Indian woman travelling alone to Europe and the USA, and creating havoc with the Western immigration laws. In doing so, Dev Sen ...

Public spaces constitute a relevant part of the landscape of the ordinary city. According to the European Landscape Convention, studies and designs of public spaces, in particular of open spaces, should appropriately focus on the different users who inhabit it and recognise themselves in these spaces. In this sense, close to the traditional studies on morphological characteristics, urban materials and equipment, it is useful to explore the performances of public spaces in innovative ways. This article proposes to come back to emphasise and highlight daily life, still today forgotten as a relevant component of a good design and planning of public spaces. It underlines the importance of the gaze on the everyday and ordinary for urbanism, through some introductory experiences of designed urban spaces and some concepts, such as ‘practices’ and ‘way of uses’. Moreover, it offers a review of different lines of studies on public life and other research interested in daily urban practices. Among these, the article focuses on rhythm and chronographic analysis, which describe practices of use, urban populations and their rhythms of presence within places. In conclusion are presented some opportunities that an adoption of the proposed approaches to everyday could bring to a better management, maintenance and planning of public spaces.

This study investigates whether cognitive failures mediate the potential influence of work demands and conscientiousness on body balance problems and domestic near-falls at home after work. The participants were 109 employees (55% female). We used the Workplace Cognitive Failure Scale (WCFS) to measure the frequency of failure in memory function, failure in attention regulation, and failure in action execution. Performance constraints, time pressure, and concentration demands were assessed by the Instrument for Stress-Oriented Task Analysis (ISTA). In a structural equation model, work-related cognitive failure significantly mediated the influence of work demands on after-work domestic body balance problems encountered in the previous 4 weeks. Work-related cognitive failure did not mediate the directional link between conscientiousness and body balance problems. Mental work demands have aftereffects after work is finished. The risk of domestic fall is due in part to cognitive failure that reflects cognitive strain from mental workload. Work redesign is likely to reduce the risk of falling not only at work, but also after work at home. Stumbling, slipping, and near-falls are the most frequent safety-threatening incidents at work and home (SUVA, 2010). In this context, near-falls occur 20 times more fre- quently than actual falls. Major efforts have been made to find reliable antecedents to occupational slip, trip, and fall (STF) accidents and these have found that greater age is most closely related to risk. In addition, after work, cogni- tive resources are often depleted and this may increase the risk of falls at home. This study investigates whether men- tal work stressors, cognitive failure, and stumbling, slip- ping, and near-falls at home are interrelated. More specif- ically, we tested the hypothesis that cognitive failure at work is a mediator of the link between mental work stress- ors and STF near-accidents at home, after work is finished.

We resist new forms of meaning. We're even resistant to the idea of them. It simply is difficult to conceptualise ways of understanding that we haven't thought through before, or that differ from our usual ways of thinking. This is something we have to work at: as all school pupils can attest. To ‘get your head round’ something: even the cliche conveys a sense of effortful rearrangement. From such practical difficulty flow the many religious, philosophical or ‘commonsensical’ beliefs – some of them notorious – which in turn reinforce these resistances. Our own resistances are hardest of all to spot. So what about ‘us’, the ‘you’ and ‘I’ this text posits – and posits as cultural and conceptually located in ways roughly similar to each other? Our thinking seems to start with language; and language seems irrevocably embroiled in denotation. We even have terms of pure denotation, like the English ‘thingummy’, ‘whodyamaflick’ and ‘doovalacky’, that are entirely about the gesture of indicating an object, and not at all concerned with the qualities of the object in itself. But language also has a semiotic element: a ‘musical’, rhythmic ebb and flow, as independent of logic as a ‘hum’ by A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, and related to a stream of consciousness like the one that James Joyce gives Molly Bloom in Ulysses . ‘Stream of consciousness’ is a literary trope, of course; and semiotic ways of going on do receive special attention in literary contexts – not least poetry. At first glance they seem to be of less use when something needs to be imparted: although recent educational research shows the semiotic supporting the semantic, for example when music helps children learn to read. Still, in the main, when we catch ourselves thinking like Molly Bloom we say we're being ‘absent minded’. Even in fiction, the semiotic is frequently used to represent a character daydreaming or ruminating. Novelist Niall Griffiths often uses first-person stream of consciousness narration. In Stump (2004), he disrupts grammar, and omits both conjunctions and the rhythmic order imposed by conventional sentence structures, to orchestrate a semiotic blur.

In workplaces where activity continues around the clock, human error has been observed to exhibit a circadian rhythm, with a characteristic peak in the early hours of the morning. Errors are commonly distinguished by the nature of the underlying cognitive failure, particularly the level of intentionality involved in the erroneous action. The Skill-Rule-Knowledge (SRK) framework of Rasmussen is used widely in the study of industrial errors and accidents. The SRK framework describes three fundamental types of error, according to whether behavior is under the control of practiced sensori-motor skill routines with minimal conscious awareness; is guided by implicit or explicit rules or expertise; or where the planning of actions requires the conscious application of domain knowledge. Up to now, examinations of circadian patterns of industrial errors have not distinguished between different types of error. Consequently, it is not clear whether all types of error exhibit the same circadian rhythm. A survey was distributed to aircraft maintenance personnel in Australia. Personnel were invited to anonymously report a safety incident and were prompted to describe, in detail, the human involvement (if any) that contributed to it. A total of 402 airline maintenance personnel reported an incident, providing 369 descriptions of human error in which the time of the incident was reported and sufficient detail was available to analyze the error. Errors were categorized using a modified version of the SRK framework, in which errors are categorized as skill-based, rule-based, or knowledge-based, or as procedure violations. An independent check confirmed that the SRK framework had been applied with sufficient consistency and reliability. Skill-based errors were the most common form of error, followed by procedure violations, rule-based errors, and knowledge-based errors. The frequency of errors was adjusted for the estimated proportion of workers present at work/each hour of the day, and the 24 h pattern of each error type was examined. Skill-based errors exhibited a significant circadian rhythm, being most prevalent in the early hours of the morning. Variation in the frequency of rule-based errors, knowledge-based errors, and procedure violations over the 24 h did not reach statistical significance. The results suggest that during the early hours of the morning, maintenance technicians are at heightened risk of "absent minded" errors involving failures to execute action plans as intended.

This article examines Norwegian policy vis-a-vis the United Nations (UN) through the end of 1945. From here it will become clear that framing foreign policy orientations of the 1940s along conventional lines exaggerates the commitment of Norwegian politicians to two grand ideas. The novel idea of Atlantic alignment, developed by Norwegian circles in London exile, was more ambiguous than generally acknowledged and left room for universal extension. By contrast, the alleged turn in the mid-1940s toward support of the UN was in the form of lip-service as opposed to action that would have engaged actors from Norway. The government outsourced policy-making on the issue to a small circle of experts and made no attempt to exert leadership in regard to UN matters. Norway's indifference toward the UN in the 1940s stands in marked contrast to the country's later reputation as a faithful supporter of the world organization.

The screw mechanism for wine and oil presses was widely applied in the eastern Mediterranean only in Late Antiquity, about half a millennium after its invention. This occurred in relation to a great intensification of commercial production in this region, including the bringing into cultivation of marginal land and the occupation of new areas. However, why was a screw mechanism not used in other important export regions, such as North Africa? Case studies of settlement patterns in a number of regions suggest that the absentee landlords of large estates seem to have been less inclined to adopt changed technology, whereas resident owners—whether of large or small estates—living close to their land, and directly involved in the processes of production, may have been more likely to do so. Among the many factors at play—technical, geographic, cultural, chronological, environmental, and commercial—the relationship of the landowner to his land may have played an important role in the diffusion of technology.

Conflicting prognoses for European identity are addressed using data from residents of Edinburgh, Scotland, on the everyday significance of being European; a theoretically informed focus on people in one city. A representative sample of established residents aged 18—24 years are compared with a sample of resident peers engaged in Europe-oriented work or study. Survey data provide an overview of their different understandings of Europe and patterns of identification with Europe, Britain, Scotland and Edinburgh. Using qualitative interviews, rationales for self-engagement with or disengagement from Europe are further interrogated and located in orientations to place of residence, nationality and citizenship.These data provide some further insight into the process by which some come to present themselves as passionate utopian Europeans, while for many being European remains emotionally insignificant and devoid of imagined community or steps towards global citizenship.

If one of two rational players is absent-minded for at least three rounds, cooperation in a prisoners' dilemma with a finite number of repetitions is possible. If both players are absent-minded, even two rounds of absent-mindedness can be enough for cooperation in these rounds and all rounds before. Sufficient conditions for the existence of a cooperative equilibrium are derived, a plausible interpretation of absent-mindedness in the case of many repetitions is given.

In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet is confused in Darcy's presence and thoughtful about him (and much else) in his absence. This article argues that the contrast reflects both a general—and a particularly gendered—implication of early modern epistemology. Elizabeth's confusion in Darcy's presence suggests the general uncertainty accompanying any perception of a material object. But women's lack of basic property rights also renders the object world particularly absent and uncertain for them. For Austen, the narrative advantage of this uncertainty is that it creates the need for thought. Perhaps one reason the dispossessed heroine is such a fixture of the early modern novel is that she epitomizes the doubt that renders a character's mind complex.

This paper starts with a re-examination of Piccione and Rubinstein's [Games Econ. Behav. 20 (1997) 3] Absent-Minded Driver problem, and suggests a novel interpretation of Aumann, Hart and Perry's [Games Econ. Behav. 20 (1997) 102] notion of action-optimality. We then consider several variants of the original problem in which the assumption that the player's information sets partition the set of his decision nodes is relaxed. This relaxation enables us to construct a counter-example to Piccione and Rubinstein's result that planning-optimal strategies are always action-optimal. We also show that an agent with more information may do worse than an agent with less.

Piccione and Rubinstein (1997) present and analyse the sequential decision problem of an “absentminded driver”. The driver's absentmindedness (imperfect recall) leads him to time-inconsistent strategy evaluations. His original evaluation gets replaced by a new one under impact of the information that the circumstances have changed, notwithstanding the fact that this change in circumstances has been expected by him all along. The time inconsistency in strategy evaluation suggests that such an agent might have reason to renege on his adopted strategy. As we shall see, however, this danger is only apparent. There is no serious problem of dynamic inconsistency in this case. My diagnosis of the case under consideration is in many respects similar to the one provided by Aumann, Hart and Perry (1997), but the analysis leading to this diagnosis is not quite the same.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)William Porcher DuBose is a perhaps the "greatest theologian that the Episcopal Church in the United States of America has produced." One of Dubose's contemporaries, W. H. Moberly, identified him as "the wisest Anglican writer . . . on both sides of the Atlantic" and as "one of the foremost philosophical theologians of our time." A modern biographer, Robert Boak Slocum, has called him "the most original and creative theologian to appear in the more than 200-year history of the Episcopal Church" and, in fact, "the only important creative theologian that the Episcopal Church in the United States has produced." Among his numerous books, the best known are The Soteriology of the New Testament , (1892)/(1906) The Gospel in the Gospels , and The Reason of Life (1911).In 1861, however, "Willie" Dubose was an ardently pious young student at the South Carolina Diocesan Seminary in Camden, about to be pulled from the contemplative life of the seminary into the world of suffering and death. When his native state seceded from the Union in April 1861, DuBose initially took little interest in the conflict. "I surprise myself by my coolness on the subject" of the war, he wrote to his fiancee. So slight was his regard for the world outside of the seminar that "I sometimes reproach myself for feeling too little interest and excitement." Indeed, he felt that no service to his state or country could be more vital than the work of the ministry. "One who has devoted his life to God," he wrote, "can no longer call it his own" (17). Moreover, the bookish DuBose did not believe himself to be cut out for command. "The disposition, occupation and habits of a student are not the best preparation for such a position," he believed. "I am too contemplative, too absent minded, and can never remember the points of the compass." And perhaps most important, "having so long trained myself to regard myself as the 'servant of men,'" he found it "hard to become their master" (61).He soon realized, however, that officers would be required to organize and train the new companies being mustered into Confederate service, and by the end of the year DuBose was drilling recruits in Charleston. When he found the camp less godly than the seminary, his fiancee consoled him with the thought that "I do not think you will regret this unexpected lesson in the study of human nature. I feel that God is perhaps preparing you for great usefulness in the ministry." On the other hand, she regretted that he had "hardly time or opportunity for influencing your men in religious things, except by example" (24).Transferred to Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, DuBose received his first wound at the Second Battle of Manassas. As the only officer of his regiment who was not killed or seriously wounded that day, he reorganized the shattered unit and commanded it during Lee's Maryland campaign where, at the battle of Turner's Gap, he was again wounded and was taken prisoner. Within a month he was exchanged, but no sooner had he rejoined his command than he received his third wound of the year in a skirmish at Kenston, North Carolina.While recovering, DuBose was, in May 1864, promoted to captain and reassigned as chaplain in Joseph B. Kershaw's brigade. Despite what might have been a rear echelon posting, DuBose was often at the front in the 1864 battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor and in the deadly siege of Petersburg where, he observed, "there continues to be a good deal of religious interest manifested in the brigade. …

This note contributes to the discussion of decision problems with imperfect recall from an empirical point of view. We argue that, using standard methods of experimental economics, it is impossible to induce (or control for) absent–mindedness of subjects. Nevertheless, it is possible to test Gilboa's (1997) agent–based approach to games with imperfect recall. We implement his model of the absent–minded driver problem in an experiment and find, if subjects are repeatedly randomly rematched, strong support for the equilibrium prediction which coincides with Piccione and Rubinstein's (1997) ex ante solution of the driver's problem.

In this note we apply the notion of absent-mindedness (see Piccione and Rubinstein, 1994), which is a form of imperfect recall, to the Rosenthal (1981) centipede game. We show that for standard versions of the centipede game a subgame perfect equilibrium exists in which play is continued almost to the end if one player is known to be absent-minded. In fact, it is sufficient that one player is known to be absent-minded with sufficiently high probability.

The example of the “absent-minded driver” was introduced by Piccione and Rubinstein in the context of games and decision problems with imperfect recall. They claim that a “paradox” or “inconsistency” arises when the decision reached at the “planning stage” is compared with that at the “action stage.” Though the example is provocative and worth having, their analysis is questionable. A careful analysis reveals that while the considerations at the planning and action stages do differ, there is no paradox or inconsistency.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D81, C72.

We classify the responses to our paper “On the Interpretation of Decision Problems with Imperfect Recall” and address some of the points raised.

Absent minded people are not under the control of task-relevant stimuli. According to the Neuroenergetics Theory of attention (NeT), this lack of control is often due to fatigue of the relevant processing units in the brain caused by insufficient resupply of the neuron’s preferred fuel, lactate, from nearby astrocytes. A simple drift model of information processing accounts for response-time statistics in a paradigm often used to study inattention, the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART). It is suggested that errors and slowing in this fast-paced, response-engaging task may have little to due with inattention. Slower-paced and less response-demanding tasks give greater license for inattention—aka absent-mindedness, mind-wandering. The basic NeT is therefore extended with an ancillary model of attentional drift and recapture. This Markov model, called NEMA, assumes probability λ of lapses of attention from one second to the next, and probability α of drifting back to the attentional state. These parameters measure the strength of attraction back to the task (α), or away to competing mental states or action patterns (λ); their proportion determines the probability of the individual being inattentive at any point in time over the long run. Their values are affected by the fatigue of the brain units they traffic between. The deployment of the model is demonstrated with a data set involving paced responding.

The Sleeping Beauty problem is presented in a formalized framework which summarizes the underlying probability structure. The two rival solutions proposed by Elga (Analysis 60:143-147, 2000) and Lewis (Analysis 61:171-176, 2001) differ by a single parameter concerning her prior probability. They can be supported by considering, respectively, that Sleeping Beauty is "fuzzy-minded" and "blank-minded", the first interpretation being more natural than the second. The traditional absent-minded driver problem is reinterpreted in this framework and sustains Elga's solution.

A possible solution to the absent minded driver problem is that the decision maker optimizes taking into account the utility he will actually have in the future, and not the utility level he should have.

Previous work has suggested that conscious error awareness may fluctuate with levels of attention. Here, we explore this relationship by showing that error awareness can be impaired when exogenous support to attentional systems is reduced by decreasing task demands. Twenty participants performed a manual Go/No-Go response-inhibition task optimized to examine error awareness. In one condition (Immediate), participants were asked to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible to each Go stimulus, and in the other condition (Delayed) they were asked to time their responses to the offset of the stimulus, thereby decreasing task difficulty and imposing a more automated response set. As expected, speeding increased the error rate. However, contrary to the expectation (and to participants’ subjective reports) that speeding would impair awareness of performance, we found the opposite to be true: errors were more likely to be unnoticed when the task was easier. We suggest that this tradeoff reflects two qualitatively different types of errors arising from the different cognitive demands of the Immediate and Delayed conditions. We propose that unaware errors reflect pure lapses of sustained attention and are therefore more susceptible to changes in task demands, while aware errors mostly reflect failures to inhibit responses, and are therefore most susceptible to increased response speed.

Researchers find homologs of genes associated with disorders of the human nervous system in a new database of Aplysia gene expression.

Adam Smith led a quiet, uneventful life. As a child, he was initially sickly and protected by his widowed mother. As an adult, he was notoriously absent-minded. In 1767 a society hostess recorded in her diary: I said many things in his [AS’s] praise, but added that he was the most Absent Man that ever was … Mr Darner … made him a visit the other morning as he was going to breakfast, and, falling into discourse, Mr Smith took a piece of bread and butter, which, after he had rolled round and round, he put into the teapot and pour’d the water upon it; some time after he poured it into a cup, and when he had tasted it, he said it was the worst tea he had ever met with. (Lady Mary Coke, aunt of AS’s tutee the Duke of Buccleuch. Cited by Ross 1995, p. 226)

The absent-minded driver's problem illustrates that probabilistic strategies can give higher pay-offs than deterministic ones. We show that there are strategies using quantum entangled states that give even higher pay-offs, both for the original problem and for the generalized version with an arbitrary number of intersections and any possible set of pay-offs., Comment: LaTeX, 12 pages, 3 figures

Three experiments investigated the relationship between subjective experience and attentional lapses during sustained attention. These experiments employed two measures of subjective experience (thought probes and questionnaires) to examine how differences in awareness correspond to variations in both task performance (reaction time and errors) and psycho-physiological measures (heart rate and galvanic skin response). This series of experiments examine these phenomena during the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART, Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997). The results suggest we can dissociate between two components of subjective experience during sustained attention: (A) task unrelated thought which corresponds to an absent minded disengagement from the task and (B) a pre-occupation with one's task performance that seems to be best conceptualised as a strategic attempt to deploy attentional resources in response to a perception of environmental demands which exceed ones ability to perform the task. The implications of these findings for our understanding of how awareness is maintained on task relevant material during periods of sustained attention are discussed.

We present evidence that many households have only a vague notion of what they are spending on various consumption items. We then develop a life-cycle model that captures this absent-mindedness'. The model generates precautionary spending, whereby absent-minded agents tend to consume more than attentive ones. The model also predicts fluctuations over time in the level of attention, and thereby sheds new light on the sharp reduction in consumption both at retirement, and in cyclical downturns. Finally, we find patterns of attention in the data that are consistent with those predicted by the model.

A 79-year-old woman, with Parkinson's disease treated with cabergoline, was admitted to a hospital due to jaundice and weakness. She was found confused, absent minded, and died after 2 weeks. Autopsy showed an extrahepatic bile duct adenocarcinoma with spread to the gall bladder, the liver, and regional lymphnodes. While cleaning the hospital bed after her death, the nurses found several tablets hidden in the bed. Biological samples obtained at the autopsy were screened for common drugs and narcotics. Several drugs such as buprenorphine, codeine, paracetamol, and propranolol were detected in the blood at therapeutic levels. A method to determine cabergoline in whole blood and other forensic matrices was developed, and further investigations determined cabergoline concentrations in whole blood and liver tissue of 94 and 3100 microg/kg, respectively. The blood concentration was 100 times above the therapeutic level reported on cabergoline in plasma and in combination with her symptoms, suggest she took a fatal overdose of cabergoline.

In decision problems with absentmindedness the decision maker may manifest time-inconsistent choices in spite of unaltered preferences. In this paper we argue that this can be the case whenever the decision makeris reasoning is not appropriately modeled. More in particular, it is shown that the "paradox of the absent minded driver" can be solved if her beliefs are consistent with the behavioral strategy chosen at the information set and the individual perceives to have the same conditional expected payoff at all decision nodes.

International audience; Piccione and Rubinstein 1996 present the ''absent-minded driver paradox,'' which shows that if a decision maker's information set is allowed to intersect a decision tree path in more than one node, inconsistencies may arise. Specifically, the decision maker may wish to change her choice without any ''intrinsic'' change in preferences and without receiving any new information, apart from the mere fact that she was called upon to act. I argue that decision problems can and should be formulated in such a way that information sets do not contain more than one decision node on each path. Such formulations will not be subject to the paradox. More importantly, they follow from the classical lore of decision theory. Differently put, the absent-minded driver paradox is a result of decision modeling which violates some of the basic, though often implicit, foundations of decision theory.

We argue that in extensive decision problems (extensive games with a single player) withimperfectrecall care must be taken in interpreting information sets and strategies. Alternative interpretations allow for different kinds of analysis. We address the following issues: 1. randomization at information sets; 2. consistent beliefs; 3. time consistency of optimal plans; 4. the multiselves approach to decision making. We illustrate our discussion through an example that we call the “paradox of the absentminded driver.”Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C7, D0.

Aim This audit was undertaken to assess compliance with the Trust ‘Operational Policy and Guidance on the Use of Cytotoxic Drugs’ when chemotherapy was prescribed in order to highlight common errors and problematic protocols so that prescriber training can be more focused. It also aimed to provide a baseline error rate so that the impact of further electronic prescribing and non-medical prescribing can be assessed. Method A data collection form was designed and used to collect information from every cycle of prescribed chemotherapy (excluding UKALL03 maintenance prescriptions) over a 5 week period. Information was collected on clinical and non-clinical interventions, type/grade of prescriber, cycle of chemotherapy prescribed and whether or not the cycle was electronically prescribed or completed by hand. Each clinical intervention was graded in terms of severity by the checking pharmacist against set criteria. The grading allocated was checked by another independent pharmacist. Results 36 cycles of chemotherapy were prescribed and checked over the 5 week period by nine different prescribers. Most cycles were prescribed by consultants. 40 pharmacist interventions were made during the period with a mean intervention rate of 1.1 interventions per cycle of chemotherapy prescribed. The majority of clinical interventions (41%) were graded as minor, 33% as significant, 22% causing no harm, 6% as potentially serious and none as potentially lethal. The most common interventions were related to fluid volumes and supportive therapy. A total of eight non-clinical interventions were made with the most common being prescribers failing to identify that patients were part of a clinical trial. This was closely followed by not providing the required documentation such as oral chemotherapy records. The results also showed that transplant chemotherapy required the most pharmacist interventions. Fifteen of the cycles were prescribed using the electronic prescribing system (Chemocare). There were clear differences between the error rates when comparing electronically prescribed and hand written cycles of chemotherapy. Conclusions This audit clearly shows the importance of the role of the clinical pharmacist in paediatric chemotherapy. The majority of clinical interventions made were scored as minor with only 6% being scored as potentially serious. The most common clinical interventions relate to supportive therapy and incorrect fluid volumes. Electronic prescribing appears to be having a positive outcome in terms of clinical interventions but having the reverse effect on non-clinical interventions supporting a theory that electronic systems may encourage an absent minded approach to prescribing.