“Woman” in ethnology: The other of the other,and the other of the self

Paper presented at the Colloque de l’association fran?aise des anthropologues, “Vers des sociétés pluriculturelles: études comparatives et situation en France,” held in Paris on 9, 10, 11 January 1986.     

Employee financial wellness programs: Opportunities to promote financial inclusion?

ABSTRACT

Employee financial wellness programs (EFWPs) are a new practice that may promote financial inclusion by making it easier for workers with low- and moderate-incomes (LMI) to access financial services. We examine the strengths and limitations of workplace financial counseling, credit-building services, and small-dollar loans, and describe community collaboration to promote employee financial wellness. Findings suggest that these services are reaching a population that experiences financial exclusion, though evidence is mixed concerning how these services help workers with LMI resolve key financial challenges. Community collaboration focused on employee financial wellness presents opportunities to advocate for higher wages and better benefits.     

Children’s Recognition and Discrimination of Fear and Disgust Facial Expressions

Facial expressions of fear and disgust have repeatedly been found to be less well recognized than those of other basic emotions by children. We undertook two studies in which we investigated the recognition and visual discrimination of these expressions in school-age children. In Study 1, children (5, 6, 9, and 10 years of age) were shown pairs of facial expressions, and asked to tell which one depicted a target emotion. The results indicated that accuracy in 9- and 10-year-olds was higher than in 5- and 6-year-olds for three contrasts: disgust–anger, fear–surprise, and fear–sadness. Younger children had more difficulty recognizing disgust when it was presented along with anger, and in recognizing fear when it was presented along with surprise. In Study 2, children (5, 6, 9, and 10 years of age) were shown a target expression along with two other expressions, and were asked to point to the expression that was the most similar to the target. Contrary to our expectations, even 5- and 6-year-olds were very accurate in discriminating fear and disgust from the other emotions, suggesting that visual perception was not the main limiting factor for the recognition of these emotions in school-age children.     

Global sensitivity analysis of stochastic computer models with joint metamodels

The global sensitivity analysis method used to quantify the influence of uncertain input variables on the variability in numerical model responses has already been applied to deterministic computer codes; deterministic means here that the same set of input variables always gives the same output value. This paper proposes a global sensitivity analysis methodology for stochastic computer codes, for which the result of each code run is itself random. The framework of the joint modeling of the mean and dispersion of heteroscedastic data is used. To deal with the complexity of computer experiment outputs, nonparametric joint models are discussed and a new Gaussian process-based joint model is proposed. The relevance of these models is analyzed based upon two case studies. Results show that the joint modeling approach yields accurate sensitivity index estimators even when heteroscedasticity is strong.     

Lower bounds and a tabu search algorithm for the minimum deficiency problem

An edge coloring of a graph G=(V,E) is a function c:E→ℕ that assigns a color c(e) to each edge e∈E such that c(e)≠c(e′) whenever e and e′ have a common endpoint. Denoting S _v (G,c) the set of colors assigned to the edges incident to a vertex v∈V, and D _v (G,c) the minimum number of integers which must be added to S _v (G,c) to form an interval, the deficiency D(G,c) of an edge coloring c is defined as the sum ∑ _v∈V D _v (G,c), and the span of c is the number of colors used in c. The problem of finding, for a given graph, an edge coloring with a minimum deficiency is NP-hard. We give new lower bounds on the minimum deficiency of an edge coloring and on the span of edge colorings with minimum deficiency. We also propose a tabu search algorithm to solve the minimum deficiency problem and report experiments on various graph instances, some of them having a known optimal deficiency.     

Training Social Workers in Personal Finance: An Exploratory Study

Social workers have opportunities to help individuals and families with their financial problems in a variety of practice settings, yet receive no formal training to do so. Using data from an online survey of social workers and other human service professionals (N?=?56) who completed or expressed interest in a financial social work certification program, we found that respondents were able to apply what they learned to help their clients and valued the practical and interactive nature of program content. We also found that respondents were not immune from experiencing some of the same financial problems that confront their clients. Implications for educating BSW and MSW students about household finance are presented and discussed.     

What’s India’s Beef with Meat? Hindu Orthopraxis and Food Transition in India Since the 1980s

Does development affect food practices? The nutrition transition model correlates positively meat consumption levels with gross domestic product per capita, except in India. In this article, I analyze food diets in this country since the 1980s by mapping out households’ practices in animal product consumption depending on their social positions. Applying multiple factor analysis on the Consumer Expenditures data of the National Sample Survey Office, I produce a relational model of food diet segmentation to overcome the dead ends of the nutrition transition model. Two structural dimensions are highlighted. The first one differentiates beef and nonbeef meat diets and relates to the symbolic capital of caste and religion. The second one opposes diets including animal products and without, depending on the amount of economic capital. The concept of temporal homology is introduced to show that the social structure remains stable over time. This denotes the importance of sociocultural norms in food practices rather than their weakening due to “modernization” and shows how these norms are key to understand food transitions beyond linear expectations drawn from economic development.     

A Critical Discussion and Practical Recommendations on Some Issues Relevant to the Nonprobabilistic Treatment of Uncertainty in Engineering Risk Assessment

Models for the assessment of the risk of complex engineering systems are affected by uncertainties due to the randomness of several phenomena involved and the incomplete knowledge about some of the characteristics of the system. The objective of this article is to provide operative guidelines to handle some conceptual and technical issues related to the treatment of uncertainty in risk assessment for engineering practice. In particular, the following issues are addressed: (1) quantitative modeling and representation of uncertainty coherently with the information available on the system of interest; (2) propagation of the uncertainty from the input(s) to the output(s) of the system model; (3) (Bayesian) updating as new information on the system becomes available; and (4) modeling and representation of dependences among the input variables and parameters of the system model. Different approaches and methods are recommended for efficiently tackling each of issues (1)?(4) above; the tools considered are derived from both classical probability theory as well as alternative, nonfully probabilistic uncertainty representation frameworks (e.g., possibility theory). The recommendations drawn are supported by the results obtained in illustrative applications of literature.