text:
John Stow

John Stow (also Stowe; 1524/25 – 5 April 1605) was an English historian and antiquarian. He wrote a series of chronicles of English history, published from 1565 onwards under such titles as The Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles, The Chronicles of England, and The Annales of England; and also A Survey of London (1598; second edition 1603). A. L. Rowse has described him as "one of the best historians of that age; indefatigable in the trouble he took, thorough and conscientious, accurate – above all things devoted to truth".

Life
John Stow was born in about 1525 in the City of London parish of St Michael, Cornhill, then at the heart of London's metropolis. His father, Thomas Stow, was a tallow chandler. Thomas Stow is recorded as paying rent of 6s 8d per year for the family dwelling, and as a youth Stow would fetch milk every morning from a farm on the land nearby to the east owned by the Minoresses of the Convent of St. Clare. There is no evidence that he ever attended a grammar school: his learning appears to have been largely self-acquired.

Stow did not take up his father's trade of tallow chandlery, instead becoming an apprentice, and in 1547 a freeman, of the Merchant Taylors' Company, by which stage he had set up business in premises close to the Aldgate Pump in Aldgate, near to Leadenhall Street and Fenchurch Street.

In about 1560 he started upon his major work, the Survey of London. His antiquarian interests attracted suspicion from the ecclesiastical authorities as a person "with many dangerous and superstitious books in his possession", and in February 1569 his house was searched. An inventory was made of all the books at his home, especially those "in defence of papistry", but he was able to satisfy his interrogators as to the soundness of his Protestantism. A second attempt to incriminate him was made in 1570 also without success.

In about 1570 he moved to the parish of St Andrew Undershaft in the Ward of Lime Street, where he lived in comfortable surroundings until his death in 1605.

Antiquarian network
Stow was in close contact with many of the leading antiquarians of his day, including Archbishop Matthew Parker, John Joscelyn, John Dee, William Fleetwood, William Lambarde, Robert Glover, Henry Savile, William Camden, Henry Ferrers and Thomas Hatcher. He was active in the first Society of Antiquaries, established in about 1586. He built up an extensive library of manuscript and printed historical sources, which became known to contemporaries as his "storehouse", and which he was generous in making available to others.

Personality
Stow was highly esteemed by his antiquarian contemporaries, probably in no small part because of his willingness to share his material. Sir George Buck wrote of "honest John Stow, who could not flatter and speak dishonestly, and who was a man very diligent and much inquisitive to uncover all things concerning the affairs or words or persons of princes", and characterised him as a "good antiquary and diligent searcher of knowledge". Edmund Howes described him in later life as being "of a pleasant and cheerful countenance; his sight and memory very good; very sober, mild, and courteous to any that required his instructions; and retained the true use of all his senses unto the day of his death, being of an excellent memory".

Nevertheless, he was drawn into several bitter quarrels and harboured longstanding grudges. One protracted feud was with his younger brother, Thomas, over their respective shares in their mother's estate before and after her death in 1568 (John believed he was entitled to a greater share as the eldest son; Thomas claimed a greater share because he had cared for their mother during her final years). He had further arguments with neighbours, including William Ditcher and a Mister Crowche. His quarrel with his rival chronicler Richard Grafton is noted below.

Later years and death
Stow's literary efforts did not prove very remunerative, but he accepted his relative poverty with cheerful spirit: Ben Jonson relates once walking with him when Stow jocularly asked two mendicant cripples "what they would have to take him to their order". From 1579 he was in receipt of a pension of £4 per annum from the Merchant Taylors' Company; and in 1590 he petitioned the Court of Aldermen for admission to the Freedom of the City of London, in order to reduce his expenses. In about the 1590s, William Camden commissioned Stow to transcribe six autograph notebooks of John Leland in exchange for a life annuity of £8: this was probably (in part) a charitable gesture towards an old but impoverished friend. In March 1604 King James I authorised Stow and his associates to collect "amongst our loving subjects their voluntary contributions and 'kind gratuities'", and himself began "the largesse for the example of others". Whilst such royal approval was welcome it reaped dividend too slowly for Stow to enjoy any substantial benefit during his lifetime.

Stow died on 5 April 1605, and was buried in the church of St Andrew Undershaft on the corner of Leadenhall Street and St Mary Axe.

Works
Stow published his first work, The woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed with divers additions whiche were never in printe before, in 1561.

This was followed in 1565 by his Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles (in small octavo format), and in 1566 by the related but distinct Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles ... Abridged (in sextodecimo format). Both works ran through multiple editions during Stow's lifetime: editions of the Summarie appeared in 1566, 1570, 1574, 1575 and 1590 (with additional posthumous editions, by Edmund Howes, in 1607, 1611 and 1618); and of the Summarie Abridged in 1567, 1573, 1584, 1587, 1598, and 1604. The Summarie Abridged makes disparaging allusions in its preface to the rival Abridgement of the Chronicles of England of Richard Grafton: the dispute between the two men continued to fester until Grafton's death in 1573.

In 1580, Stow published the more expansive The Chronicles of England, from Brute unto this present yeare of Christ, 1580. He later developed this into the still more substantial The Annales of England, of which editions appeared in 1592, 1601, and 1605 – the last being continued to 26 March 1605, or within ten days of Stow's own death. Further posthumous editions by Edmund Howes were published in 1615 and 1631.

Under Archbishop Matthew Parker's patronage, Stow was persuaded to produce a version of Flores historiarum, allegedly by "Matthew of Westminster", published in 1567; and then the Chronicle of Matthew Paris in 1571, and the Historia brevis of Thomas Walsingham in 1574. In the Chronicle of England 1590 Stow writes: "To The Honorable Sir John Hart, Lord Maior. The Chronicle written before that nothing is perfect the first time, and that it is incident to mankinde to erre and slip sometimes, but the point of fanta[s]tical fooles to preserve and continue in their errors."

At the urging of Archbishop Parker, Stow also compiled a "farre larger volume", a history of Britain entitled "A Historie of this Iland". He announced this as "ready to the presse" in 1592, but it proved too ambitious to be commercially viable, and he was unable to find a printer prepared to publish it. The manuscript is lost.

Survey of London
The work for which Stow is best known is his Survey of London (original spelling: A Survay of London), published in 1598. This was a work of chorography: a detailed ward-by-ward topographical and historical tour of the city, providing a unique account of its buildings, social conditions and customs. A second, revised edition appeared in 1603. Following Stow's death, a third edition, with additions by Anthony Munday appeared in 1618; a fourth by Munday and Humfrey Dyson in 1633; a fifth with interpolated amendments by John Strype in 1720; and a sixth by the same editor in 1754. The edition of 1598 was reprinted, edited by William John Thoms, in 1842, in 1846, and (with illustrations) in 1876. An edition based on that of 1598, edited by Henry Morley, was published in 1889, and has been reprinted on several occasions since.

A critical edition, based on that of 1603 and edited in two volumes by C. L. Kingsford, was published in 1908, and republished with additional notes in 1927. This remains the standard scholarly edition. A more popular single-volume edition was published in Everyman's Library, with an introduction by H. B. Wheatley, in 1912 (revised edition 1956), and has been frequently reprinted.

Manuscripts and collections
Many of Stow's own autograph manuscripts are now held in the British Library, notably in the Harley Collection; and others in the Bodleian Library. Some in Lambeth Palace Library (MS 306) were published in 1880 by the Camden Society, edited by James Gairdner, as Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles, with Historical Memoranda by John Stowe the Antiquary, and Contemporary Notes of Occurrences written by him.

The manuscript and printed works that made up his library are now scattered, but can often be identified through the many annotations he made to them.

Commemoration and legacy
Stow's widow commissioned a mural monument to him in St Andrew Undershaft, made of Derbyshire marble and alabaster. The work has been tentatively attributed to Nicholas Johnson. It includes an effigy of Stow, which was originally coloured: he is represented seated at a desk, writing in a book (probably the revision of his Annales, which he continued to 26 March, ten days before his death), and flanked by other books. Above him is the motto, based on an epigram of Pliny the Younger, Aut scribenda agere, aut legenda scribere ("[Blessed is he to whom it is given] either to do things that are worth writing about, or to write things that are worth reading about"). The figure holds a real quill pen, in a manner similar to the effigy of William Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon: the latter monument has been attributed, on equally tentative grounds, either to Nicholas Johnson's brother, Gerard, or more recently to Nicholas himself.

In acknowledgement of Stow's continuing reputation as the founding father of London history, the quill held by his effigy has been periodically renewed. The renewal is mentioned as taking place "annually" in 1828; and, although the custom may later have fallen into abeyance, it was revived following the monument's restoration by the Merchant Taylors' Company in 1905. In 1924, the ceremony was incorporated into a special church service, with an address by a London historian; and this service continued to be held annually every April until 1991, including the years of the Second World War. No services could be held in 1992 or 1993 because of damage to the church caused by the Baltic Exchange bomb of 1992. The service was revived in 1994, but from 1996 to 2017 was held only once every three years. The service due to take place in 2020 was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the next service took place in 2024. The services are jointly sponsored by the Merchant Taylors' Company and the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, with the quill supplied by the society. The exchange of the quill is undertaken by the Lord Mayor of London or the Master Merchant Taylor alternately.

Stow's Survey of London lends its title to the Survey of London, a comprehensive multi-volume architectural survey of the former County of London, founded in 1894 and still in progress.

Edition

 * (2 vols.) [Kingsford's "Introduction" includes a substantial life of Stow.]

title: John Stow


text:
Rewrite engine

In web applications, a rewrite engine is a software component that performs rewriting on URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), modifying their appearance. This modification is called URL rewriting. It is a way of implementing URL mapping or routing within a web application. The engine is typically a component of a web server or web application framework. Rewritten URLs (sometimes known as short, pretty or fancy URLs, search engine friendly - SEF URLs, or slugs) are used to provide shorter and more relevant-looking links to web pages. The technique adds a layer of abstraction between the files used to generate a web page and the URL that is presented to the outside world.

Usage
Web sites with dynamic content can use URLs that generate pages from the server using query string parameters. These are often rewritten to resemble URLs for static pages on a site with a subdirectory hierarchy. For example, the URL to a wiki page with title Rewrite_engine might be: http://example.com/w/index.php?title=Rewrite_engine but can be rewritten as: http://example.com/wiki/Rewrite_engine

A blog might have a URL that encodes the dates of each entry: http://www.example.com/Blog/Posts.php?Year=2006&Month=12&Day=19 It can be altered like this: http://www.example.com/Blog/2006/12/19/ which also allows the user to change the URL to see all postings available in December, simply by removing the text encoding the day '19', as though navigating "up" a directory: http://www.example.com/Blog/2006/12/

A site can pass specialized terms from the URL to its search engine as a search term. This would allow users to search directly from their browser. For example, the URL as entered into the browser's location bar: http://example.com/search term will be URL-encoded by the browser before it makes the HTTP request. The server could rewrite this to: http://example.com/search.php?q=search%20term

Benefits and drawbacks
There are several benefits to using URL rewriting:
 * The links are "cleaner" and more descriptive, improving their "friendliness" to both users and search engines.
 * They prevent undesired "inline linking", which can waste bandwidth.
 * The site can continue to use the same URLs even if the underlying technology used to serve them is changed (for example, switching to a new blogging engine).

There can, however be drawbacks as well; if a user wants to modify a URL to retrieve new data, URL rewriting may hinder the construction of custom queries due to the lack of named variables. For example, it may be difficult to determine the date from the following format: http://www.example.com/Blog/06/04/02/ In this case, the original query string was more useful, since the query variables indicated month and day: http://www.example.com/Blog/Posts.php?Year=06&Month=04&Day=02

Web frameworks
Many web frameworks include URL rewriting, either directly or through extension modules.

 * Apache HTTP Server has URL rewriting provided by the mod_rewrite module.
 * URL Rewrite is available as an extension to Microsoft IIS.
 * Ruby on Rails has built-in URL rewriting via Routes.
 * Jakarta Servlet has extendable URL rewriting via the OCPsoft URLRewriteFilter and Tuckey UrlRewriteFilter.
 * Jakarta Faces has simplified URL rewriting via the PrettyFaces: URLRewriteFilter.
 * Django uses a regular-expressions-based system. This is not strictly URL rewriting since there is no script to 'rewrite' to, nor even a directory structure; but it provides the full flexibility of URL rewriting.
 * Java Stripes Framework has had integrated functionality since version 1.5.
 * Many Perl frameworks, such as Mojolicious and Catalyst, have this feature.
 * CodeIgniter has URL rewriting provided.
 * lighttpd has a mod_rewrite module.
 * nginx has a rewrite module. For example, a multi-link multi-variable page generation from a URI like /f101,n61,o56,d/ifconfig is possible, where multiple individual parts like f101 get expanded with the help of regular expressions into variables to signify FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE and so forth.
 * Hiawatha HTTP server has a URL Toolkit which supports URL rewriting.
 * Cherokee HTTP server supports regular expressions of URL rewriting and redirections.

From a software development perspective, URL rewriting can aid in code modularization and control flow, making it a useful feature of modern web frameworks.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Rewrite engine


text:
Matthew of Westminster

Matthew of Westminster was long regarded as the author of the Flores Historiarum (in fact written by Matthew Paris), and is now thought never to have existed.

The error was first discovered in 1826 by Francis Turner Palgrave, who said that Matthew was "a phantom who never existed," and later the truth of this statement was completely proved by Henry Richards Luard. The name appears to have been taken from that of Matthew Paris, who likely authored the Flores to serve as an abridgement of his larger Chronica majora, and from Westminster Abbey, where the work was continued and copied after Paris's death.

He is sometimes surnamed Florilegus (literally "flower-gatherer"), in reference to the title of his supposed work.

title: Matthew of Westminster


text:
Charles Bémont

Charles Bémont (16 November 1848 – 21 September 1939), French scholar, was born in Paris.

Life
In 1884 he graduated with two theses, one on Simon de Montfort translated as Simon de Montfort: Earl of Leicester, 1208-1265 (1930), without the thesis' appendices of historical documents, and La Condamnation de Jean Sansterre (Revue historique, 1886). His Les Chartes des libertés anglaises (1892) has an introduction upon the history of Magna Carta, etc., and his history of medieval Europe, written in collaboration with Gabriel Monod (1896), was translated into English, as Medieval Europe from 395 to 1270.

He was also responsible for the continuation of the Gascon Rolls, the publication of which had been begun by Francisque Xavier Michel in 1885. His supplement to Volume I was published in 1896, his Volume II in 1900, and his Volume III in 1906, bringing the published years of the rolls up to 1307. He received the honorary degree of Litt. Doc. at Oxford in 1909. He was made a corresponding member of the British Academy in 1914.

A street in Croissy-sur-Seine commemorates him.

title: Charles Bémont


text:
Francisque Xavier Michel

Francisque Xavier Michel (18 February 1809, Lyon – 18 May 1887, Paris) was a French historian and philologist.

Life
He became known for his editions of French works of the Middle Ages, and the French Government, recognizing their value, sent him to England (1833) and Scotland (1837) to continue his research there. In 1837 he became a member of the Comité Historique and in 1838 chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. In 1839 he was appointed professor of foreign literature in the Faculté des lettres at the University of Bordeaux. Between 1834 and 1842 he published editions of many works written between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries in French, English, and Saxon, including the Roman de la rose and the Chanson de Roland. He got his licence in literature in 1842, and his doctorat in 1846, with a thesis in Latin on Virgil and a thesis in French, entitled: Histoire des races maudites de la France et de l'Espagne. Subsequently, he published French translations of Goldsmith, Sterne, Shakespeare, and Tennyson. In 1857 he published his important book on the Basque Country: Le Pays Basque, sa population, sa langue, ses moeurs, sa littérature et sa musique.

Publications

 * Quae vices quaeque mutationes et Virgilium ipsum et ejus carmina per mediam aetatem exceperint. (thesis, 1846).
 * Histoire des races maudites de la France et de l'Espagne (thesis, 1847)
 * Recherches sur le commerce pendant le moyen âge (1852–1854)
 * Les Ecossais en France et les français en Ecosse (1862)
 * Etudes de philologie comparée sur l'argot (1856)
 * Le Pays basque (1857)
 * Le Romancero du Pays Basque (1859)
 * Histoire du commerce et de la navigation a Bordeaux (1867–1871)
 * in conjunction with Édouard Fournier, Histoire des hôtelleries, cabarets, hotels garnis (1851–1854)

Edited texts
Michel was one of the most prolific editors of medieval French texts. His Libri Psalmorum versio antiqua gallica lists 50 of his works, both editions of Medieval texts and original works. The following is a selected bibliography.
 * Tristan; recueil de ce qui reste des poëmes relatifs à ses aventures, 1835. Edition of several poems on the subject of Tristan
 * Charlemagne an Anglo-Norman Poem of the twelfth Century, 1836
 * Chronique des ducs de Normandie par Benoît, trouvère anglo-normand du XIIe siècle, 1836-44. Three volumes, 44,544 verses in total
 * La Chanson de Roland, 1837
 * La Chanson des Saxons par Jean Bodel, 1839. Two volumes
 * Jordan Fantosme, Chronicle of the War between the English and the Scots in 1173 and 1174, 1840
 * Gérard de Rossillon, 1856
 * Libri Psalmorum versio antiqua gallica (The Oxford Psalter), 1860. Includes variants from the Winchester Psalter and the
 * Le Roman de la Rose, 1864. Two volumes
 * Le Livre des psaumes (The Eadwine Psalter), 1876
 * Les voyages merveilleux de saint Brandan, 1878

title: Francisque Xavier Michel


text:
Loch Lomond

Loch Lomond (Loch Laomainn) is a freshwater Scottish loch which crosses the Highland Boundary Fault, often considered the boundary between the lowlands of Central Scotland and the Highlands. Traditionally forming part of the boundary between the counties of Stirlingshire and Dunbartonshire, Loch Lomond is split between the council areas of Stirling, Argyll and Bute and West Dunbartonshire. Its southern shores are about 23 km northwest of the centre of Glasgow, Scotland's largest city. The Loch forms part of the Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park which was established in 2002.

Loch Lomond is 22.6 mi long and between 1 and(-) wide, with a surface area of 27.5 mi2. It is the largest lake in Great Britain by surface area; in the United Kingdom, it is surpassed only by Lough Neagh and Lough Erne in Northern Ireland. In the British Isles as a whole there are several larger loughs in the Republic of Ireland. The loch has a maximum depth of about 190 m in the deeper northern portion, although the southern part of the loch rarely exceeds 30 m in depth. The total volume of Loch Lomond is 2.6 km3, making it the second largest lake in Great Britain, after Loch Ness, by water volume.

The loch contains many islands, including Inchmurrin, the largest fresh-water island in the British Isles. Loch Lomond is a popular leisure destination and is featured in the song "The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond". The loch is surrounded by hills, including Ben Lomond on the eastern shore, which is 974 m in height and the most southerly of the Scottish Munro peaks. A 2005 poll of Radio Times readers voted Loch Lomond as the sixth greatest natural wonder in Britain.

Etymology
Loch Lomond takes its name from the highest peak in the area, Ben Lomond, Beinn Laomainn, meaning ‘beacon mountain’ i.e. a site for warning beacons. However, the region in which the loch is located is Leamhnacht anglicised as Lennox and Loch Lomond "was of old Loch Leamhna" after the River Leven which means ‘elm water’ in Gaelic.

Formation
The depression in which Loch Lomond lies was carved out by glaciers during the final stages of the last ice age, during a return to glacial conditions known as the Loch Lomond Readvance between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. The loch lies on the Highland Boundary Fault, and the difference between the Highland and Lowland geology is reflected in the shape and character of the loch: in the north the glaciers dug a deep channel in the Highland schist, removing up to 600 m of bedrock to create a narrow, fjord-like finger lake. Further south the glaciers were able to spread across the softer Lowland sandstone, leading to a wider body of water that is rarely more than 30 m deep. In the period following the Loch Lomond Readvance the sea level rose, and for several periods Loch Lomond was connected to the sea, with shorelines identified at 13, 12 and 9 metres above sea level (the current loch lies at 8 m above sea level).

The change in rock type can be clearly seen at points around the loch, as it runs across the islands of Inchmurrin, Creinch, Torrinch and Inchcailloch and over the ridge of Conic Hill. To the south lie green fields and cultivated land; to the north, mountains.

Islands
The loch contains thirty or more other islands, depending on the water level. Several of them are large by the standards of British bodies of freshwater. Inchmurrin, for example, is the largest island in a body of freshwater in the British Isles. Many of the islands are the remains of harder rocks that withstood the passing of the glaciers; however, as in Loch Tay, several of the islands appear to be crannogs, artificial islands built in prehistoric periods.

English travel writer, H.V. Morton wrote: "What a large part of Loch Lomond's beauty is due to its islands, those beautiful green tangled islands, that lie like jewels upon its surface."

Writing 150 years earlier than Morton, Samuel Johnson had however been less impressed by Loch Lomond's islands, writing: "But as it is, the islets, which court the gazer at a distance, disgust him at his approach, when he finds, instead of soft lawns and shady thickets, nothing more than uncultivated ruggedness."

Flora and fauna
The Scottish dock (Rumex aquaticus), sometimes called the Loch Lomond dock, is in Britain unique to the shores of Loch Lomond, being found mostly on around Balmaha on the eastern shore of the loch. It was first discovered growing there in 1936 (else it grows eastwards through Europe and Asia all the way to Japan).

Powan are one of the commonest fish species in the loch, which has more species of fish than any other loch in Scotland, including lamprey, lampern, brook trout, perch, loach, common roach and flounder. The river lamprey of Loch Lomond display an unusual behavioural trait not seen elsewhere in Britain: unlike other populations, in which young hatch in rivers before migrating to the sea, the river lamprey here remain in freshwater all their lives, hatching in the Endrick Water and migrating into the loch as adults.

The surrounding hills are home to species such as black grouse, ptarmigan, golden eagles, pine martens, red deer and mountain hares. Many species of wading birds and water vole inhabit the loch shore. During the winter months large numbers of geese migrate to Loch Lomond, including over 1% of the entire global population of Greenland white-fronted geese (around 200 individuals), and up to 3,000 greylag geese.

In January 2023 RSPB Scotland released a family of beavers into the southeastern area of the loch under licence from NatureScot. The beaver family, consisting of an adult pair and their five offspring, were translocated from a site in Tayside, where beaver activity was having a negative impact that could not be mitigated.

One of the loch's islands, Inchconnachan, is home to a colony of red-necked wallabies.

Conservation designations
As well as forming part of the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, Loch Lomond holds multiple other conservation designations. 428 ha of land in the southeast, including five of the islands, is designated as national nature reserve: the Loch Lomond National Nature Reserve. Seven islands and much of the shoreline form a Special Area of Conservation (SAC), the Loch Lomond Woods. This designation overlaps partially with the national nature reserve, and is protected due to the presence of Atlantic oak woodlands and a population of otters. Four islands and a section of the shoreline are designated as a Special Protection Area due to their importance for breeding capercaillie and visiting Greenland white-fronted geese: this designation overlaps partially with both the national nature reserve and the SAC. Loch Lomond is also a designated Ramsar site, again for the presence of Greenland white-fronted geese.

The loch and its surrounding are designated as a national scenic area, one of forty such areas in Scotland, which have been defined so as to identify areas of exceptional scenery and to ensure its protection from inappropriate development.

History
People first arrived in the Loch Lomond area around 5000 years ago, during the neolithic era. They left traces of their presence at places around the loch, including Balmaha, Luss, and Inchlonaig. Crannogs, artificial islands used as dwellings for over five millennia, were built at points in the loch. The Romans had a fort within sight of the loch at Drumquhassle. The crannog known as "The Kitchen", located off the island of Clairinsh, may have later been used as a place for important meetings by Clan Buchanan whose clan seat had been on Clairinsh since 1225: this usage would be in line with other crannogs such as that at Finlaggan on Islay, used by Clan Donald.

During the Early Medieval period viking raiders sailed up Loch Long, hauled their longboats over at the narrow neck of land at Tarbet, and sacked several islands in the loch.

The area surrounding the loch later become part of the province of Lennox, which covered much of the area of the later county of Dunbartonshire. Loch Lomond became a popular destination for travellers, such that when James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited the islands of Loch Lomond on the return from their tour of the Western Isles in 1773, the area was already firmly enough established as a destination for Boswell to note that it would be unnecessary to attempt any description.

Boating and watersports
Loch Lomond is one of Scotland's premier boating and watersports venues, with visitors enjoying activities including kayaking, Canadian canoeing, paddle boarding, wake boarding, water skiing and wake surfing. The national park authority has tried to achieve a balance between land-based tourists and loch users, with environmentally sensitive areas subject to a strictly enforced 11 km/h speed limit, but the rest of the loch open to speeds of up to 90 km/h.

The Maid of the Loch was the last paddle steamer built in Britain. Built on the Clyde in 1953, she operated on Loch Lomond for 29 years. She is now being restored at Balloch pier by the Loch Lomond Steamship Company, a charitable organisation, supported by West Dunbartonshire Council. Cruises also operate from Balloch, Tarbet, Inversnaid, Luss and Rowardennan.

Loch Lomond Rescue Boat provides 24-hour safety cover on the loch. The rescue boat is a volunteer organisation and a registered charity. The national park authority also have other boats on the loch such as The Brigadier. Police Scotland also operates on the loch using RIBs and jet skis and work in conjunction with the national park authority.

The loch has served as the venue for the Great Scottish Swim, which is held each year in August.

Angling
Fly and coarse fishing on Loch Lomond is regulated by the Loch Lomond Angling Improvement Association (LLAIA), who issue permits to members and visiting anglers. The association employ water bailiffs to monitor the actions of anglers on the loch and ensure angling is carried out in accordance with permit conditions.

Land-based activities
Loch Lomond Golf Club is situated on the south-western shore. It has hosted many international events including the Scottish Open. Another golf club, "The Carrick" has opened on the banks of the Loch adjacent to the Loch Lomond Club.

The West Highland Way runs along the eastern bank of the loch, and Inveruglas on the western bank is the terminus of the Cowal Way. The West Loch Lomond Cycle Path runs from Arrochar and Tarbet railway station, at the upper end of the loch, to Balloch railway station, at the south end. The 28 km long cycle path runs along the west bank.

At the southern end of the loch near Balloch is a large visitor and shopping complex named Loch Lomond Shores.

Access and camping
As with all land and inland water in Scotland there is a right of responsible access to the loch and its shoreline for those wishing to participate in recreational pursuits such as walking, camping, swimming and canoeing. In 2017 the national park authority introduced byelaws restricting the right to camp along much of the shoreline of Loch Lomond, due to issues such as litter and anti-social behaviour that were blamed on irresponsible campers. Camping is now restricted to designated areas, and campers are required to purchase a permit to camp within these areas between March and October. The byelaws were opposed by groups such as Mountaineering Scotland and Ramblers Scotland, who argued that they would criminalise camping even where it was carried out responsibly, and that the national park authority already had sufficient powers to address irresponsible behaviour using existing laws.

Transport

The main arterial route along the loch is the A82 road which runs the length of its western shore, following the general route of the Old Military Road. The road runs along the shoreline in places, but generally keeps some distance to the west of the loch in the "lowland" section to the south. Much of the southern section of the road was widened to a high quality single carriageway standard over the 1980s, at an estimated cost of £24 million (£ million as of ), while Luss itself is now bypassed to the west of the village along a single carriageway bypass constructed between 1990 and 1992. At Tarbet, the A83 branches west to Campbeltown while the A82 continues to the north end of the loch. This part of the road is currently of a lower standard than the sections further south. It is sandwiched between the shoreline of the loch and the mountains to the west, and it runs generally alongside the West Highland Line. The road narrows to less than 7.3 m in places and causes significant problems for heavy goods vehicles (HGVs), which have to negotiate tight bends and the narrow carriageway width. At Pulpit rock, the road was single-track, with traffic flow controlled by traffic lights for over 30 years. The road was widened in 2015 as part of a £9 million improvement programme, including a new viaduct bringing the carriageway width to modern standards.

The A811 runs to the south of Loch Lomond between Balloch and Drymen, following the route of another military road at a distance of between 2 and 3 kilometres from the loch. From Drymen the B837 extends north, meeting the eastern shore of the loch at Balmaha where the road terminates. A minor road extends north as far as Rowardennan, a further 11 km away, however beyond this point no road continues along the eastern shore, although there is road access to Inversnaid via another minor road that comes in from Loch Katrine to the east via the northern shore of Loch Arklet. As Loch Arklet is over 100 m above Loch Lomond and less than 2 km to the east this road must descend steeply to reach Inversnaid.

The West Highland railway line joins the western shore of the loch just north of Arrochar and Tarbet railway station. There is a further station alongside the loch at Ardlui. This line was voted the top rail journey in the world by readers of independent travel magazine Wanderlust in 2009, ahead of the iconic Trans-Siberian line in Russia and the Cuzco to Machu Picchu line in Peru. The railway system also reaches the loch at Balloch railway station, which is the terminus of the North Clyde Line.

Several different operators offer ferry services on the loch.

Since 2004 Loch Lomond Seaplanes operates an aerial tour service from its seaplane base near Cameron.

On 22 April 1940, a BOAC Lockheed Model 14 Super Electra (Loch Invar, registration G-AFKD) aircraft flying from Perth Airport to Heston Aerodrome in London crashed at Loch Lomond, killing all five passengers and crew.

Hydroelectricity
The Loch Sloy Hydro-Electric Scheme is situated on the west bank of Loch Lomond. The facility is operated by Scottish and Southern Energy, and is normally in standby mode, ready to generate electricity to meet sudden peaks in demand. It is the largest conventional hydro electric power station in the UK, with an installed capacity of 152.5 MW, and can reach full-capacity within 5 minutes from a standing start. The hydraulic head between Loch Sloy and the outflow into Loch Lomond at Inveruglas is 277 m.

Song
The loch is featured in a well-known song which was first published around 1841. The chorus is:
 * Oh, ye'll tak the high road, and I'll tak the low road,
 * And I'll be in Scotland afore ye;
 * But me and my true love will never meet again
 * On the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond.

The song has been recorded by many performers over the years. The original author is unknown. One story is that the song was written by a Scottish soldier who awaited death in enemy captivity; in his final letter home, he wrote this song, portraying his home and how much he would miss it. Another tale is that during the Jacobite rising of 1745 a soldier on his way back to Scotland during the 1745–46 retreat from England wrote this song. The "low road" may be a reference to the Celtic belief that if someone died away from his homeland, then the fairies would provide a route of this name for his soul to return home. Within this theory, it is possible that the soldier awaiting death may have been writing either to a friend who was allowed to live and return home, or to a lover back in Scotland.

Other

 * Loch Lomond (like Loch Ness) is often used as a shorthand for all things Scottish, an image partly reinforced by the self-titled song. An archetype is the Lerner and Loewe musical Brigadoon. The opening lyrics of the song "Almost Like Being in Love" are: "Maybe the sun gave me the power/For I could swim Loch Lomond and be home in half an hour/Maybe the air gave me the drive/For I'm all aglow and alive!"
 * It is mentioned in the song "You're All the World to Me" from the musical film Royal Wedding in the line: "You're Loch Lomond when autumn is the painter!"
 * The village of Luss ("Glendarroch") on the shores of the loch was the location for the TV soap Take the High Road, and the loch itself was given the fictional name Loch Darroch for the purpose of the series.
 * Luss ("Lios") and the islands nearby were used as the setting for E. J. Oxenham's first book, Goblin Island, published in 1907.
 * Loch Lomond is also the brand name of the Scotch whisky drunk by Captain Haddock in Hergé's comic book series The Adventures of Tintin, featured prominently in The Black Island. A non-fictional whisky by the same name is produced at the Loch Lomond distillery.
 * Loch Lomond is the opening track on guitarist Steve Hackett's 2011 album Beyond the Shrouded Horizon.
 * In The Three Stooges episode "Pardon My Scotch" a gentleman asks 'Are you laddies by any chance from Loch Lomond?', whereupon Curly replies 'No we're from lock jaw'.
 * One of the road signs in the Merrie Melodies short "My Bunny Lies over the Sea" points to Loch Lomond.
 * Spike Milligan created an episode of The Goon Show entitled The Treasure of Loch Lomond. The main character, Neddie Seagoon, discovers he has Scottish heritage and travels to Scotland to claim a fortune owned by his uncle, who discovered a galleon full of treasure at the bottom of the loch.
 * In the Mel Brooks film Spaceballs, the character "Snotty" delivers the line "Lock one... lock two... lock three... Loch Lomond..." while locking transporters onto "President Skroob".
 * In Santa Cruz County, California, United States, lies Loch Lomond, a small body of water named after Loch Lomond in Scotland. Near Loch Lomond, California, is Ben Lomond which was named by Scot John Burns in 1851.
 * In Canada, there is a Loch Lomond by Thunder Bay, Ontario, as well as a Hamlet named for the loch in southern Alberta.
 * Loch Lomond features as the backdrop for a song sequence in the 1998 Bollywood film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.
 * The tune of "Loch Lomond" can be heard in the first 1:13 of the song "Castle Leoch" from the Outlander, Season 1, Volume 1 soundtrack by Bear McCreary.

title: Loch Lomond


text:
User:Crown

Wikipedia? What a heck? Write your comment here! Actually, it's a test page for me.

title: User:Crown


text:
User:The Anomebot

This account is intended to be used for automated edits to the Wikipedia. See Bots for general Wikipedia policy on bots.

-- The Anomebot 11:35 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The bot is currently running at a low edit rate of around one edit every four minutes. At this rate, image loading will take many days, but Recent Changes is not excessively cluttered. When registered bot permission is granted, I intend to step this up to one edit per minute. -- The Anomebot 16:09 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Job done. For now.

title: User:The Anomebot


text:
Health Economics

Health Economics is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal published by John Wiley & Sons, covering the subject of health economics. It was established in 1992.

According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2020 impact factor of 3.046, ranking it 32nd out of 88 journals in the category "Health Policy & Services", 44th out of 108 journals in the category "Health Care Sciences & Services", and 95th out of 378 journals in the category "Economics",

title: Health Economics


text:
Decision-making

In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rational or irrational. The decision-making process is a reasoning process based on assumptions of values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, which may or may not prompt action.

Research about decision-making is also published under the label problem solving, particularly in European psychological research.

Overview
Decision-making can be regarded as a problem-solving activity yielding a solution deemed to be optimal, or at least satisfactory. It is therefore a process which can be more or less rational or irrational and can be based on explicit or tacit knowledge and beliefs. Tacit knowledge is often used to fill the gaps in complex decision-making processes. Usually, both of these types of knowledge, tacit and explicit, are used together in the decision-making process.

Human performance has been the subject of active research from several perspectives:
 * Psychological: examining individual decisions in the context of a set of needs, preferences and values the individual has or seeks.
 * Cognitive: the decision-making process is regarded as a continuous process integrated in the interaction with the environment.
 * Normative: the analysis of individual decisions concerned with the logic of decision-making, or communicative rationality, and the invariant choice it leads to.

A major part of decision-making involves the analysis of a finite set of alternatives described in terms of evaluative criteria. Then the task might be to rank these alternatives in terms of how attractive they are to the decision-maker(s) when all the criteria are considered simultaneously. Another task might be to find the best alternative or to determine the relative total priority of each alternative (for instance, if alternatives represent projects competing for funds) when all the criteria are considered simultaneously. Solving such problems is the focus of multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). This area of decision-making, although long established, has attracted the interest of many researchers and practitioners and is still highly debated as there are many MCDA methods which may yield very different results when they are applied to exactly the same data. This leads to the formulation of a decision-making paradox. Logical decision-making is an important part of all science-based professions, where specialists apply their knowledge in a given area to make informed decisions. For example, medical decision-making often involves a diagnosis and the selection of appropriate treatment. But naturalistic decision-making research shows that in situations with higher time pressure, higher stakes, or increased ambiguities, experts may use intuitive decision-making rather than structured approaches. They may follow a recognition-primed decision that fits their experience, and arrive at a course of action without weighing alternatives.

The decision-maker's environment can play a part in the decision-making process. For example, environmental complexity is a factor that influences cognitive function. A complex environment is an environment with a large number of different possible states which come and go over time. Studies done at the University of Colorado have shown that more complex environments correlate with higher cognitive function, which means that a decision can be influenced by the location. One experiment measured complexity in a room by the number of small objects and appliances present; a simple room had less of those things. Cognitive function was greatly affected by the higher measure of environmental complexity, making it easier to think about the situation and make a better decision.

Problem solving vs. decision making
It is important to differentiate between problem solving, or problem analysis, and decision-making. Problem solving is the process of investigating the given information and finding all possible solutions through invention or discovery. Traditionally, it is argued that problem solving is a step towards decision making, so that the information gathered in that process may be used towards decision-making.

 * Characteristics of problem solving:
 * Problems are merely deviations from performance standards.
 * Problems must be precisely identified and described
 * Problems are caused by a change from a distinctive feature
 * Something can always be used to distinguish between what has and has not been affected by a cause
 * Causes of problems can be deduced from relevant changes found in analyzing the problem
 * Most likely cause of a problem is the one that exactly explains all the facts, while having the fewest (or weakest) assumptions (Occam's razor).

 * Characteristics of decision-making:
 * Objectives must first be established
 * Objectives must be classified and placed in order of importance
 * Alternative actions must be developed
 * The alternatives must be evaluated against all the objectives
 * The alternative that is able to achieve all the objectives is the tentative decision
 * The tentative decision is evaluated for more possible consequences
 * The decisive actions are taken, and additional actions are taken to prevent any adverse consequences from becoming problems and starting both systems (problem analysis and decision-making) all over again
 * There are steps that are generally followed that result in a decision model that can be used to determine an optimal production plan
 * In a situation featuring conflict, role-playing may be helpful for predicting decisions to be made by involved parties

Analysis paralysis
When a group or individual is unable to make it through the problem-solving step on the way to making a decision, they could be experiencing analysis paralysis. Analysis paralysis is the state that a person enters where they are unable to make a decision, in effect paralyzing the outcome. Some of the main causes for analysis paralysis is the overwhelming flood of incoming data or the tendency to overanalyze the situation at hand. There are said to be three different types of analysis paralysis.
 * The first is analysis process paralysis. This type of paralysis is often spoken of as a cyclical process. One is unable to make a decision because they get stuck going over the information again and again for fear of making the wrong decision.
 * The second is decision precision paralysis. This paralysis is cyclical, just like the first one, but instead of going over the same information, the decision-maker will find new questions and information from their analysis and that will lead them to explore into further possibilities rather than making a decision.
 * The third is risk uncertainty paralysis. This paralysis occurs when the decision-maker wants to eliminate any uncertainty but the examination of provided information is unable to get rid of all uncertainty.

Extinction by instinct
On the opposite side of analysis paralysis is the phenomenon called extinction by instinct. Extinction by instinct is the state that a person is in when they make careless decisions without detailed planning or thorough systematic processes. Extinction by instinct can possibly be fixed by implementing a structural system, like checks and balances into a group or one's life. Analysis paralysis is the exact opposite where a group's schedule could be saturated by too much of a structural checks and balance system.

Groupthink is another occurrence that falls under the idea of extinction by instinct. Groupthink is when members in a group become more involved in the “value of the group (and their being part of it) higher than anything else”; thus, creating a habit of making decisions quickly and unanimously. In other words, a group stuck in groupthink is participating in the phenomenon of extinction by instinct.

Information overload
Information overload is "a gap between the volume of information and the tools we have to assimilate" it. Information used in decision-making is to reduce or eliminate the uncertainty. Excessive information affects problem processing and tasking, which affects decision-making. Psychologist George Armitage Miller suggests that humans' decision making becomes inhibited because human brains can only hold a limited amount of information. Crystal C. Hall and colleagues described an "illusion of knowledge", which means that as individuals encounter too much knowledge, it can interfere with their ability to make rational decisions. Other names for information overload are information anxiety, information explosion, infobesity, and infoxication.

Decision fatigue
Decision fatigue is when a sizable amount of decision-making leads to a decline in decision-making skills. People who make decisions in an extended period of time begin to lose mental energy needed to analyze all possible solutions. Impulsive decision-making and decision avoidance are two possible paths that extend from decision fatigue. Impulse decisions are made more often when a person is tired of analysis situations or solutions; the solution they make is to act and not think. Decision avoidance is when a person evades the situation entirely by not ever making a decision. Decision avoidance is different from analysis paralysis because this sensation is about avoiding the situation entirely, while analysis paralysis is continually looking at the decisions to be made but still unable to make a choice.

Post-decision analysis
Evaluation and analysis of past decisions is complementary to decision-making. See also mental accounting and Postmortem documentation.

Neuroscience
Decision-making is a region of intense study in the fields of systems neuroscience, and cognitive neuroscience. Several brain structures, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), orbitofrontal cortex, and the overlapping ventromedial prefrontal cortex are believed to be involved in decision-making processes. A neuroimaging study found distinctive patterns of neural activation in these regions depending on whether decisions were made on the basis of perceived personal volition or following directions from someone else. Patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex have difficulty making advantageous decisions.

A common laboratory paradigm for studying neural decision-making is the two-alternative forced choice task (2AFC), in which a subject has to choose between two alternatives within a certain time. A study of a two-alternative forced choice task involving rhesus monkeys found that neurons in the parietal cortex not only represent the formation of a decision but also signal the degree of certainty (or "confidence") associated with the decision. A 2012 study found that rats and humans can optimally accumulate incoming sensory evidence, to make statistically optimal decisions. Another study found that lesions to the ACC in the macaque resulted in impaired decision-making in the long run of reinforcement guided tasks suggesting that the ACC may be involved in evaluating past reinforcement information and guiding future action. It has recently been argued that the development of formal frameworks will allow neuroscientists to study richer and more naturalistic paradigms than simple 2AFC decision tasks; in particular, such decisions may involve planning and information search across temporally extended environments.

Emotions
Emotion appears able to aid the decision-making process. Decision-making often occurs in the face of uncertainty about whether one's choices will lead to benefit or harm (see also Risk). The somatic marker hypothesis is a neurobiological theory of how decisions are made in the face of uncertain outcomes. This theory holds that such decisions are aided by emotions, in the form of bodily states, that are elicited during the deliberation of future consequences and that mark different options for behavior as being advantageous or disadvantageous. This process involves an interplay between neural systems that elicit emotional/bodily states and neural systems that map these emotional/bodily states. A recent lesion mapping study of 152 patients with focal brain lesions conducted by Aron K. Barbey and colleagues provided evidence to help discover the neural mechanisms of emotional intelligence.

Decision-making techniques
Decision-making techniques can be separated into two broad categories: group decision-making techniques and individual decision-making techniques. Individual decision-making techniques can also often be applied by a group.

Group

 * Consensus decision-making tries to avoid "winners" and "losers". Consensus requires that a majority approve a given course of action, but that the minority agree to go along with the course of action. In other words, if the minority opposes the course of action, consensus requires that the course of action be modified to remove objectionable features.
 * Voting-based methods:
 * Majority requires support from more than 50% of the members of the group. Thus, the bar for action is lower than with consensus. See also Condorcet method.
 * Plurality, where the largest faction in a group decides, even if it falls short of a majority.
 * Score voting (or range voting) lets each member score one or more of the available options, specifying both preference and intensity of preference information. The option with the highest total or average is chosen. This method has experimentally been shown to produce the lowest Bayesian regret among common voting methods, even when voters are strategic. It addresses issues of voting paradox and majority rule. See also approval voting.
 * Quadratic voting allows participants to cast their preference and intensity of preference for each decision (as opposed to a simple for or against decision). As in score voting, it addresses issues of voting paradox and majority rule.
 * Delphi method is a structured communication technique for groups, originally developed for collaborative forecasting but has also been used for policy making.
 * Dotmocracy is a facilitation method that relies on the use of special forms called Dotmocracy. They are sheets that allows large groups to collectively brainstorm and recognize agreements on an unlimited number of ideas they have each wrote.
 * Participative decision-making occurs when an authority opens up the decision-making process to a group of people for a collaborative effort.
 * Decision engineering uses a visual map of the decision-making process based on system dynamics and can be automated through a decision modeling tool, integrating big data, machine learning, and expert knowledge as appropriate.

Individual

 * Decisional balance sheet: listing the advantages and disadvantages (benefits and costs, pros and cons) of each option, as suggested by Plato's Protagoras and by Benjamin Franklin.
 * Expected-value optimization: choosing the alternative with the highest probability-weighted utility, possibly with some consideration for risk aversion. This may involve considering the opportunity cost of different alternatives. See also Decision analysis and Decision theory.
 * Satisficing: examining alternatives only until the first acceptable one is found. The opposite is maximizing or optimizing, in which many or all alternatives are examined in order to find the best option.
 * Acquiesce to a person in authority or an "expert"; "just following orders".
 * Anti-authoritarianism: taking the most opposite action compared to the advice of mistrusted authorities.
 * Flipism e.g. flipping a coin, cutting a deck of playing cards, and other random or coincidence methods – or prayer, tarot cards, astrology, augurs, revelation, or other forms of divination, superstition or pseudoscience.
 * Automated decision support: setting up criteria for automated decisions.
 * Decision support systems: using decision-making software when faced with highly complex decisions or when considering many stakeholders, categories, or other factors that affect decisions.

Steps
A variety of researchers have formulated similar prescriptive steps aimed at improving decision-making.

GOFER
In the 1980s, psychologist Leon Mann and colleagues developed a decision-making process called GOFER, which they taught to adolescents, as summarized in the book Teaching Decision Making To Adolescents. The process was based on extensive earlier research conducted with psychologist Irving Janis. GOFER is an acronym for five decision-making steps:

 * 1) Goals clarification: Survey values and objectives.
 * 2) Options generation: Consider a wide range of alternative actions.
 * 3) Facts-finding: Search for information.
 * 4) Consideration of Effects: Weigh the positive and negative consequences of the options.
 * 5) Review and implementation: Plan how to review the options and implement them.

Other
In 2007, Pam Brown of Singleton Hospital in Swansea, Wales, divided the decision-making process into seven steps:

 * 1) Outline the goal and outcome.
 * 2) Gather data.
 * 3) Develop alternatives (i.e., brainstorming).
 * 4) List pros and cons of each alternative.
 * 5) Make the decision.
 * 6) Immediately take action to implement it.
 * 7) Learn from and reflect on the decision.

In 2008, Kristina Guo published the DECIDE model of decision-making, which has six parts:
 * 1) Define the problem
 * 2) Establish or Enumerate all the criteria (constraints)
 * 3) Consider or Collect all the alternatives
 * 4) Identify the best alternative
 * 5) Develop and implement a plan of action
 * 6) Evaluate and monitor the solution and examine feedback when necessary

In 2009, professor John Pijanowski described how the Arkansas Program, an ethics curriculum at the University of Arkansas, used eight stages of moral decision-making based on the work of James Rest:
 * 1) Establishing community: Create and nurture the relationships, norms, and procedures that will influence how problems are understood and communicated. This stage takes place prior to and during a moral dilemma.
 * 2) Perception: Recognize that a problem exists.
 * 3) Interpretation: Identify competing explanations for the problem, and evaluate the drivers behind those interpretations.
 * 4) Judgment: Sift through various possible actions or responses and determine which is more justifiable.
 * 5) Motivation: Examine the competing commitments which may distract from a more moral course of action and then prioritize and commit to moral values over other personal, institutional or social values.
 * 6) Action: Follow through with action that supports the more justified decision.
 * 7) Reflection in action.
 * 8) Reflection on action.

Group stages
There are four stages or phases that should be involved in all group decision-making:
 * Orientation. Members meet for the first time and start to get to know each other.
 * Conflict. Once group members become familiar with each other, disputes, little fights and arguments occur. Group members eventually work it out.
 * Emergence. The group begins to clear up vague opinions by talking about them.
 * Reinforcement. Members finally make a decision and provide justification for it.

It is said that establishing critical norms in a group improves the quality of decisions, while the majority of opinions (called consensus norms) do not.

Conflicts in socialization are divided in to functional and dysfunctional types. Functional conflicts are mostly the questioning the managers assumptions in their decision making and dysfunctional conflicts are like personal attacks and every action which decrease team effectiveness. Functional conflicts are the better ones to gain higher quality decision making caused by the increased team knowledge and shared understanding.

Rational and irrational
In economics, it is thought that if humans are rational and free to make their own decisions, then they would behave according to rational choice theory. Rational choice theory says that a person consistently makes choices that lead to the best situation for themselves, taking into account all available considerations including costs and benefits; the rationality of these considerations is from the point of view of the person themselves, so a decision is not irrational just because someone else finds it questionable.

In reality, however, there are some factors that affect decision-making abilities and cause people to make irrational decisions – for example, to make contradictory choices when faced with the same problem framed in two different ways (see also Allais paradox).

Rational decision making is a multi-step process for making choices between alternatives. The process of rational decision making favors logic, objectivity, and analysis over subjectivity and insight. Irrational decision is more counter to logic. The decisions are made in haste and outcomes are not considered.

One of the most prominent theories of decision making is subjective expected utility (SEU) theory, which describes the rational behavior of the decision maker. The decision maker assesses different alternatives by their utilities and the subjective probability of occurrence.

Rational decision-making is often grounded on experience and theories that are able to put this approach on solid mathematical grounds so that subjectivity is reduced to a minimum, see e.g. scenario optimization.

Rational decision is generally seen as the best or most likely decision to achieve the set goals or outcome.

Children
It has been found that, unlike adults, children are less likely to have research strategy behaviors. One such behavior is adaptive decision-making, which is described as funneling and then analyzing the more promising information provided if the number of options to choose from increases. Adaptive decision-making behavior is somewhat present for children, ages 11–12 and older, but decreases in presence the younger they are. The reason children are not as fluid in their decision making is because they lack the ability to weigh the cost and effort needed to gather information in the decision-making process. Some possibilities that explain this inability are knowledge deficits and lack of utilization skills. Children lack the metacognitive knowledge necessary to know when to use any strategies they do possess to change their approach to decision-making.

When it comes to the idea of fairness in decision making, children and adults differ much less. Children are able to understand the concept of fairness in decision making from an early age. Toddlers and infants, ranging from 9–21 months, understand basic principles of equality. The main difference found is that more complex principles of fairness in decision making such as contextual and intentional information do not come until children get older.

Adolescents
During their adolescent years, teens are known for their high-risk behaviors and rash decisions. Research has shown that there are differences in cognitive processes between adolescents and adults during decision-making. Researchers have concluded that differences in decision-making are not due to a lack of logic or reasoning, but more due to the immaturity of psychosocial capacities that influence decision-making. Examples of their undeveloped capacities which influence decision-making would be impulse control, emotion regulation, delayed gratification and resistance to peer pressure. In the past, researchers have thought that adolescent behavior was simply due to incompetency regarding decision-making. Currently, researchers have concluded that adults and adolescents are both competent decision-makers, not just adults. However, adolescents' competent decision-making skills decrease when psychosocial capacities become present.

Research has shown that risk-taking behaviors in adolescents may be the product of interactions between the socioemotional brain network and its cognitive-control network. The socioemotional part of the brain processes social and emotional stimuli and has been shown to be important in reward processing. The cognitive-control network assists in planning and self-regulation. Both of these sections of the brain change over the course of puberty. However, the socioemotional network changes quickly and abruptly, while the cognitive-control network changes more gradually. Because of this difference in change, the cognitive-control network, which usually regulates the socioemotional network, struggles to control the socioemotional network when psychosocial capacities are present.

When adolescents are exposed to social and emotional stimuli, their socioemotional network is activated as well as areas of the brain involved in reward processing. Because teens often gain a sense of reward from risk-taking behaviors, their repetition becomes ever more probable due to the reward experienced. In this, the process mirrors addiction. Teens can become addicted to risky behavior because they are in a high state of arousal and are rewarded for it not only by their own internal functions but also by their peers around them. A recent study suggests that adolescents have difficulties adequately adjusting beliefs in response to bad news (such as reading that smoking poses a greater risk to health than they thought), but do not differ from adults in their ability to alter beliefs in response to good news. This creates biased beliefs, which may lead to greater risk taking.

Adults
Adults are generally better able to control their risk-taking because their cognitive-control system has matured enough to the point where it can control the socioemotional network, even in the context of high arousal or when psychosocial capacities are present. Also, adults are less likely to find themselves in situations that push them to do risky things. For example, teens are more likely to be around peers who peer pressure them into doing things, while adults are not as exposed to this sort of social setting.

Cognitive and personal biases
Biases usually affect decision-making processes. They appear more when decision task has time pressure, is done under high stress and/or task is highly complex.

Here is a list of commonly debated biases in judgment and decision-making:
 * Selective search for evidence (also known as confirmation bias): People tend to be willing to gather facts that support certain conclusions but disregard other facts that support different conclusions. Individuals who are highly defensive in this manner show significantly greater left prefrontal cortex activity as measured by EEG than do less defensive individuals.
 * Premature termination of search for evidence: People tend to accept the first alternative that looks like it might work.
 * Cognitive inertia is the unwillingness to change existing thought patterns in the face of new circumstances.
 * Selective perception: People actively screen out information that they do not think is important (see also Prejudice). In one demonstration of this effect, discounting of arguments with which one disagrees (by judging them as untrue or irrelevant) was decreased by selective activation of right prefrontal cortex.
 * Wishful thinking is a tendency to want to see things in a certain – usually positive – light, which can distort perception and thinking.
 * Choice-supportive bias occurs when people distort their memories of chosen and rejected options to make the chosen options seem more attractive.
 * Recency: People tend to place more attention on more recent information and either ignore or forget more distant information (see Semantic priming). The opposite effect in the first set of data or other information is termed primacy effect.
 * Repetition bias is a willingness to believe what one has been told most often and by the greatest number of different sources.
 * Anchoring and adjustment: Decisions are unduly influenced by initial information that shapes our view of subsequent information.
 * Groupthink is peer pressure to conform to the opinions held by the group.
 * Source credibility bias is a tendency to reject a person's statement on the basis of a bias against the person, organization, or group to which the person belongs. People preferentially accept statements by others that they like (see also Prejudice).
 * Incremental decision-making and escalating commitment: People look at a decision as a small step in a process, and this tends to perpetuate a series of similar decisions. This can be contrasted with zero-based decision-making (see Slippery slope).
 * Attribution asymmetry: People tend to attribute their own success to internal factors, including abilities and talents, but explain their failures in terms of external factors such as bad luck. The reverse bias is shown when people explain others' success or failure.
 * Role fulfillment is a tendency to conform to others' decision-making expectations.
 * Underestimating uncertainty and the illusion of control: People tend to underestimate future uncertainty because of a tendency to believe they have more control over events than they really do.
 * Framing bias: This is best avoided by increasing numeracy and presenting data in several formats (for example, using both absolute and relative scales).
 * Sunk-cost fallacy is a specific type of framing effect that affects decision-making. It involves an individual making a decision about a current situation based on what they have previously invested in the situation. An example of this would be an individual that is refraining from dropping a class that they are most likely to fail, due to the fact that they feel as though they have done so much work in the course thus far.
 * Prospect theory involves the idea that when faced with a decision-making event, an individual is more likely to take on a risk when evaluating potential losses, and are more likely to avoid risks when evaluating potential gains. This can influence one's decision-making depending if the situation entails a threat, or opportunity.
 * Optimism bias is a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive events occurring in the future and underestimate the likelihood of negative life events. Such biased expectations are generated and maintained in the face of counter-evidence through a tendency to discount undesirable information. An optimism bias can alter risk perception and decision-making in many domains, ranging from finance to health.
 * Reference class forecasting was developed to eliminate or reduce cognitive biases in decision-making.

Cognitive limitations in groups
In groups, people generate decisions through active and complex processes. One method consists of three steps: initial preferences are expressed by members; the members of the group then gather and share information concerning those preferences; finally, the members combine their views and make a single choice about how to face the problem. Although these steps are relatively ordinary, judgements are often distorted by cognitive and motivational biases, include "sins of commission", "sins of omission", and "sins of imprecision".

Optimizing vs. satisficing
Herbert A. Simon coined the phrase "bounded rationality" to express the idea that human decision-making is limited by available information, available time and the mind's information-processing ability. Further psychological research has identified individual differences between two cognitive styles: maximizers try to make an optimal decision, whereas satisficers simply try to find a solution that is "good enough". Maximizers tend to take longer making decisions due to the need to maximize performance across all variables and make tradeoffs carefully; they also tend to more often regret their decisions (perhaps because they are more able than satisficers to recognize that a decision turned out to be sub-optimal).

Intuitive vs. rational
The psychologist Daniel Kahneman, adopting terms originally proposed by the psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West, has theorized that a person's decision-making is the result of an interplay between two kinds of cognitive processes: an automatic intuitive system (called "System 1") and an effortful rational system (called "System 2"). System 1 is a bottom-up, fast, and implicit system of decision-making, while system 2 is a top-down, slow, and explicit system of decision-making. System 1 includes simple heuristics in judgment and decision-making such as the affect heuristic, the availability heuristic, the familiarity heuristic, and the representativeness heuristic.

Combinatorial vs. positional
Styles and methods of decision-making were elaborated by Aron Katsenelinboigen, the founder of predispositioning theory. In his analysis on styles and methods, Katsenelinboigen referred to the game of chess, saying that "chess does disclose various methods of operation, notably the creation of predisposition-methods which may be applicable to other, more complex systems."

Katsenelinboigen states that apart from the methods (reactive and selective) and sub-methods (randomization, predispositioning, programming), there are two major styles: positional and combinational. Both styles are utilized in the game of chess. The two styles reflect two basic approaches to uncertainty: deterministic (combinational style) and indeterministic (positional style). Katsenelinboigen's definition of the two styles are the following.

The combinational style is characterized by:
 * a very narrow, clearly defined, primarily material goal; and
 * a program that links the initial position with the outcome.

In defining the combinational style in chess, Katsenelinboigen wrote: "The combinational style features a clearly formulated limited objective, namely the capture of material (the main constituent element of a chess position). The objective is implemented via a well-defined, and in some cases, unique sequence of moves aimed at reaching the set goal. As a rule, this sequence leaves no options for the opponent. Finding a combinational objective allows the player to focus all his energies on efficient execution, that is, the player's analysis may be limited to the pieces directly partaking in the combination. This approach is the crux of the combination and the combinational style of play.

The positional style is distinguished by:
 * a positional goal; and
 * a formation of semi-complete linkages between the initial step and final outcome.

"Unlike the combinational player, the positional player is occupied, first and foremost, with the elaboration of the position that will allow him to develop in the unknown future. In playing the positional style, the player must evaluate relational and material parameters as independent variables. ... The positional style gives the player the opportunity to develop a position until it becomes pregnant with a combination. However, the combination is not the final goal of the positional player – it helps him to achieve the desirable, keeping in mind a predisposition for the future development. The pyrrhic victory is the best example of one's inability to think positionally."

The positional style serves to:
 * create a predisposition to the future development of the position;
 * induce the environment in a certain way;
 * absorb an unexpected outcome in one's favor; and
 * avoid the negative aspects of unexpected outcomes.

Influence of Myers–Briggs type
According to Isabel Briggs Myers, a person's decision-making process depends to a significant degree on their cognitive style. Myers developed a set of four bi-polar dimensions, called the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The terminal points on these dimensions are: thinking and feeling; extroversion and introversion; judgment and perception; and sensing and intuition. She claimed that a person's decision-making style correlates well with how they score on these four dimensions. For example, someone who scored near the thinking, extroversion, sensing, and judgment ends of the dimensions would tend to have a logical, analytical, objective, critical, and empirical decision-making style. However, some psychologists say that the MBTI lacks reliability and validity and is poorly constructed.

Other studies suggest that these national or cross-cultural differences in decision-making exist across entire societies. For example, Maris Martinsons has found that American, Japanese and Chinese business leaders each exhibit a distinctive national style of decision-making.

The Myers–Briggs typology has been the subject of criticism regarding its poor psychometric properties.

General decision-making style (GDMS)
In the general decision-making style (GDMS) test developed by Suzanne Scott and Reginald Bruce, there are five decision-making styles: rational, intuitive, dependent, avoidant, and spontaneous. These five different decision-making styles change depending on the context and situation, and one style is not necessarily better than any other. In the examples below, the individual is working for a company and is offered a job from a different company.
 * The rational style is an in-depth search for, and a strong consideration of, other options and/or information prior to making a decision. In this style, the individual would research the new job being offered, review their current job, and look at the pros and cons of taking the new job versus staying with their current company.
 * The intuitive style is confidence in one's initial feelings and gut reactions. In this style, if the individual initially prefers the new job because they have a feeling that the work environment is better suited for them, then they would decide to take the new job. The individual might not make this decision as soon as the job is offered.
 * The dependent style is asking for other people's input and instructions on what decision should be made. In this style, the individual could ask friends, family, coworkers, etc., but the individual might not ask all of these people.
 * The avoidant style is averting the responsibility of making a decision. In this style, the individual would not make a decision. Therefore, the individual would stick with their current job.
 * The spontaneous style is a need to make a decision as soon as possible rather than waiting to make a decision. In this style, the individual would either reject or accept the job as soon as it is offered.

title: Decision-making