Credibility premium for rate-making systems

Credibility formula has been developed in many fields of actuarial sciences. Based upon Payandeh (2010 Payandeh, A.T. (2010). A new approach to the credibility formula. Insur.: Math. Econ. 46(2):334–338.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), this article extends concept of credibility formula to relatively premium of a given rate-making system. More precisely, it calculates Payandeh’s (2010 Payandeh, A.T. (2010). A new approach to the credibility formula. Insur.: Math. Econ. 46(2):334–338.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) credibility factor for zero-inflated Poisson gamma distributions with respect to several loss functions. A comparison study has been given.     

Applying a Systemic Procedure to Locate Career Decision‐Making Difficulties

Locating clients' career decision‐making difficulties is one of the first steps in career counseling. The authors demonstrate the feasibility and utility of a systematic 4‐stage procedure for locating and interpreting career decision‐making difficulties by analyzing responses of 626 college students (collected by Tai, 2007) to the Career Decision‐making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ; Gati, Krausz, & Osipow, 1996). In addition, the responses of 2 students selected from this group are individually analyzed and interpreted. The procedure makes it possible to map the various career decision‐making difficulties of undergraduate students and tailor the appropriate career counseling intervention to the unique needs of clients.     

Financial decision making in collective society—A field test on Israeli kibbutz members and city residents

This comparison of Israeli kibbutz members to city residents examines how of individualistic/collective society affects financial decision making. Findings revealed that kibbutz members are more risk averse and discount the future more than city residents, undermining the assumption that collective society accords a safety net. We claim that the collective financial management of the kibbutz reduces individuals’ financial knowledge and experience, causing them to be more risk averse in financial decisions, and thus overpowering the safety net offered by the collective society. In addition, we argue that despite privatization, individuals still operate according to collective ideas in handling their personal finances, but less than before the onset of the privatization process.     

“There is no future in it”: Pandemic and ride-hailing hustle in Africa

This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on ride-hailing drivers in Africa. It argues that, although ride-hailing offers paid work to some African workers, the commodified and informalized nature of this work results in poor job quality, the effects of which were greatly amplified during the pandemic. Drawing on a mixed methods approach involving in-depth interviews with ride-hailing drivers in Nairobi and digital ethnography, it also provides accounts of drivers' hustles to demonstrate strategies of resilience, reworking and resistance among informal workers. The article concludes by highlighting the need for adequate regulatory frameworks and on-the-ground solidarity networks to ensure decent working conditions, and to push back against precarity in the gig economy.     

Validity of the microsoft kinect system in assessment of compensatory stepping behavior during standing and treadmill walking

Background

Rapid compensatory stepping plays an important role in preventing falls when balance is lost; however, these responses cannot be accurately quantified in the clinic. The Microsoft Kinect? system provides real-time anatomical landmark position data in three dimensions (3D), which may bridge this gap.

Methods

Compensatory stepping reactions were evoked in 8 young adults by a sudden platform horizontal motion on which the subject stood or walked on a treadmill. The movements were recorded with both a 3D-APAS motion capture and Microsoft Kinect? systems. The outcome measures consisted of compensatory step times (milliseconds) and length (centimeters). The average values of two standing and walking trials for Microsoft Kinect? and the 3D-APAS systems were compared using t-test, Pearson’s correlation, Altman-bland plots, and the average difference of root mean square error (RMSE) of joint position.

Results

The Microsoft Kinect? had high correlations for the compensatory step times (r?=?0.75–0.78, p?=?0.04) during standing and moderate correlations for walking (r?=?0.53–0.63, p?=?0.05). The step length, however had a very high correlations for both standing and walking (r?>?0.97, p?=?0.01). The RMSE showed acceptable differences during the perturbation trials with smallest relative error in anterior-posterior direction (2-3%) and the highest in the vertical direction (11–13%). No systematic bias were evident in the Bland and Altman graphs.

Conclusions

The Microsoft Kinect? system provides comparable data to a video-based 3D motion analysis system when assessing step length and less accurate but still clinically acceptable for step times during balance recovery when balance is lost and fall is initiated.

     

Overseas Foreign Workers in Israel: Policy Aims and Labor Market Outcomes1

The declared aim of the Israeli government, since 1996, was to reduce radically the presence in Israel of foreign overseas workers within five years. This aim has not been achieved due to a counteracting policy: yielding to strong political pressure, the government introduced regulations that virtually indentured legal overseas foreign workers indefinitely to their employers. This depressed their wages and transformed their employment into a source of easy gains, greatly increasing the demand for them and encouraging legal workers to turn illegal. As a result, their numbers have not declined significantly, even though the Israeli economy has been on a downtrend, most of the time, since 1997.     

Proletarian Immigrants in Israel, 1948–1961

This study deals with the factors which determined the odds of Israeli immigrants becoming proletariat during the first decade of statehood. It is suggested that the factors which determine whether immigrants enter the proletariat or not are structural. Immigrants trom lesser-developed, non-industrialized countries are more likely than others to become or to remain proletariat. Class positions in the countries of immigration and emigration are compared, and various factors are examined as causes of the proletariat position. Such factors include conditions of production in the country of emigration, level of eduratirin, and year of immigration.     

Immigration,proletarianization, and deproletarianization

Conclusion The strategy of deproletarianization attempted by groups of immigrants of the First and Second Aliyot was determined by the correspondence of three structures: settler capitalism, proletarianization, and ideology. These provided the realm of opportunities from 1882 to 1914. The Great War, which led to the downfall of the Ottoman empire and the establishment of a British administration, then changed the entire economy and politics of Palestine.In this article I divide the studied period into the first and second aliyot. The reader can observe that the correspondence between the above structures was not similar in each sub-period, and that deproletarianization was differently associated with ideology. It was a natural consequence of the immigration motives of the first aliya immigrants, it was not so in the second aliya.The prevailing deteriorating feudalistic mode of production in Palestine made it possible for the immigrants in 1882 and thereafter to establish a settler capitalism. However, the other processes that then occurred were in essence dependent on the socio-economy of the new Yishuv and its relations with the regional market. Proletarianization of immigrants of the first aliya may be considered to have occurred by default. The proto-capitalist system in the Moshavot did not need a Jewish proletariat to survive, because indigenous labor was available and cheap. The immigrants who became day laborers intended to become Ikarim. The economic situation compelled them to search for a solution to their immediate problem of survival. The ideology that prevailed in the motives of these immigrant workers determined to a limited, albeit significant, extent the selection and maintenance of certain forms of deproletarianization over others. In other words, as in many other historical cases, proletarianization was imposed upon individuals who could not maintain their position in the changing socioeconomy. But the first aliya proletariat was distinctive: first, its members were forced to became proletarian through voluntary immigration to a place where their predecessors - with the same background but with the means to purchase tracts of land - had established a protocapitalist sector in the agricultural sector. Second, their proletarianization took the form of day laboring in an expanding agricultural sector, and not as one can observe in Europe, where it was industry that was expanding.Each wave of immigrants brought to Palestine ideological and, to a certain extent, political assets. These had a mediating effect on the forms of adjustment made by the individuals and groups concerned, who, lacking financial capacity, had to choose between re-emigration or proletarianization. Although both waves of immigration developed the intension of alleviating the hardship of their situation, they employed different strategies to accomplish their aims. The first aliya immigrant workers attempted to arrest the process of proletarianization and join the petty bourgeois Ikarim. The second aliya immigrants, in contrast, considered proletarianization as inevitable. But they did not acquiesce to their position. Unlike their predecessors, their resistance was coupled with a peculiar combination of Zionist and socialist motives. This induced the creation of innovative deproletarianization solutions - working-class forms of production and consumption. In essence, deproletarianization was a pursuit of the realization of certain class interests, even though the concrete boundaries of the working class were still obscure. Imported ideology shaped the priorities involved in the selection of the forms of working-class settlements.Proletarianization was forced upon the immigrants not because of a transition from a feudal to capitalist society, as was witnessed at the same period by immigrant Jews to the United States, but rather from feudalism in transition in Russian and Eastern Europe to a retrogressively still more feudalistic system in Palestine. Thus, proletarianization did not result from the disposition and subordination of peasants or artisans by burgeoning capital, (except for a certain category of Arabs) but by the specific instance of an immigrant society encountering lower conditions of production in the country of immigration.The present case study amplifies two related issues. One, that the general law of proletarianization - an inevitable outcome of capitalism- is not to be taken literally. This has already been dealt with in a number of publications on industrialization and proletarianization in nineteenth-century Europe and also the United States. Second, in definite historical circumstances proletarianization may precede the emergence of industrialization, even of proto-industrialization. This is possible, as shown in this case, when immigrants who are motivated by a certain ideology, encounter less developed conditions of production. The deproletarianization strategies discussed here were initiated on the same grounds. One was aimed at integration into the proto-capitalist formation, the other at providing a different route of integration into the country through new forms of colonization.This strategy, still in embryo, marked the future formation of the Jewish working class in Palestine, even though it applied only to a minority of this class. By the creation of a working-class economy and political organizations, this class ensured its survival and development, and, two decades later, its dominance in the Yishuv.