Economic aspects of Singapore's selective family planning policy

In the mid 1980s Singapore instituted a selective family planning policy which encouraged poorly educated women to prevent pregnancy while university graduates were discouraged from using family planning. The intent of this policy was to restructure the population and the economy into a more skill-intensive industrial society and to produce effective leaders for the future governing of the country. Monetary incentives were offered to both groups of women for their compliance with the policy, including grants to poor women agreeing to undergo steriliaztion. This study undertakes a cost benefit analysis of this family planning policy, taking into account parameters of economic growth, marginal value product of labor, and the consumption levels. Results of this analysis suggest that society may benefit more by prevention the birth of a potential university student than by preventing the birth of a potential primary school graduate. However, this study does not take into account the value of educated citizens in technical advancement which would raise the productivity of the uskilled workers in the country, nor some of the real economic conditions in Singapore such as the virtually unlimited availability of labor from other Asian countries (who come without dependents and are expatriated when they become unproductive). Training cost and the timing of benefits are critical to the outcome of this analysis. It is shown that, under some reasonable conditions, the selective family planning policy might not be economically warranted.     

Characterization of Historical Methane Occurrence Frequencies from U.S. Underground Natural Gas Storage Facilities with Implications for Risk Management,Operations, and Regulatory Policy

Defining a baseline for the frequency of occurrences at underground natural gas storage facilities is critical to maintaining safe operation and to the development of appropriate risk management plans and regulatory approaches. Currently used frequency-estimation methods are reviewed and broadened in this article to include critical factors of cause, severity, and uncertainty that contribute to risk. A Bayesian probabilistic analysis characterizes the aleatoric historical occurrence frequencies given imperfect sampling. Frequencies for the three main storage facility types in the United States (depleted oil-and-gas field storage, aquifer storage, solution-mined salt cavern storage) are generally on the order of 3 to 9 × 10^–2 occurrences, of all causes (surface, well integrity, subsurface integrity) and severities (nuisance, serious, catastrophic), per facility-year. Loss of well integrity is associated with many, but not all, occurrences either within the subsurface or from there up to the surface. The probability of one serious or catastrophic leakage occurrence to the ground surface within the next 10 years, assuming constant number of facilities, is approximately 0.1–0.3% for any facility type. Storage operators and industry regulators can use occurrence frequencies, their associated probabilities and uncertainties, and forecasts of severity magnitudes to better prioritize resources, establish a baseline against which progress toward achieving a reduction target could be measured, and develop more effective mitigation/monitoring/reduction programs in a risk management plan.     

“Spokes in the wheel” and how policy gains can diversify a social movement

ABSTRACT

Activists often use their resources to pursue protective legislation, like anti-discrimination or environmental protection laws, and the results are often compromised versions of what they wanted. This process of political institutionalization requires ongoing and robust mobilization to strengthen these resulting policies or prevent them from being rescinded all together. Therefore, to understand the pros and cons of political institutionalization we must understand the recursive effects between policy reform and consequent mobilization. Quantitative and qualitative data on the animal advocacy movement, a movement existing for over a century, are used to explore the effects of policy gains on consequent mobilization and explore whether policy gains were followed by de-escalation of protest forms. The findings indicate that policy gains for animal welfare do not de-escalate mobilization, both in terms of the use of disruptive collective action and proliferation of organizations. The article explores the ways that infighting over the terms of policy reform may be an important factor in diversifying the movement.     

Underprotection of Unpredictable Statistical Lives Compared to Predictable Ones

Existing ethical discussion considers the differences in care for identified versus statistical lives. However, there has been little attention to the different degrees of care that are taken for different kinds of statistical lives. Here we argue that for a given number of statistical lives at stake, there will sometimes be different, and usually greater, care taken to protect predictable statistical lives, in which the number of lives that will be lost can be predicted fairly accurately, than for unpredictable statistical lives, where the lives are at stake because of a low‐probability event, such that most likely no one will be affected by the decision but with low probability some lives will be at stake. One reason for this difference is the statistical challenge of estimating low probabilities, and in particular the tendency of common approaches to underestimate these probabilities. Another is the existence of rational incentives to treat unpredictable risks as if the probabilities were lower than they are. Some of these factors apply outside the pure economic context, to institutions, individuals, and governments. We argue that there is no ethical reason to treat unpredictable statistical lives differently from predictable statistical lives. Moreover, lives that are unpredictable from the perspective of an individual agent may become predictable when aggregated to the level of a societal decision. Underprotection of unpredictable statistical lives is a form of market failure that may need to be corrected by altering regulation, introducing compulsory liability insurance, or other social policies.     

Exploring Social Media Contexts for Cultivating Connected Learning with Black Youth in Urban Communities: The Case of Dreamer Studio

Qualitative Sociology - Using the Connected Learning framework as a conceptual lens, this study utilizes digital ethnographic methods to explore outcomes of a Hip-Hop Based Education program...     

Groups and individuals: conformity and diversity in the performance of gendered identities

The nature and role of social groups is a central tension in sociology. On the one hand, the idea of a group enables sociologists to locate and describe individuals in terms of characteristics that are shared with others. On the other, emphasizing the fluidity of categories such as gender or ethnicity undermines their legitimacy as ways of classifying people and, by extension, the legitimacy of categorization as a goal of sociological research. In this paper, we use a new research method known as the Imitation Game to defend the social group as a sociological concept. We show that, despite the diversity of practices that may be consistent with self‐identified membership of a group, there are also shared normative expectations – typically narrower in nature than the diversity displayed by individual group members – that shape the ways in which category membership can be discussed with, and performed to, others. Two claims follow from this. First, the Imitation Game provides a way of simultaneously revealing both the diversity and ‘groupishness’ of social groups. Second, that the social group, in the quasi‐Durkheimian sense of something that transcends the individual, remains an important concept for sociology.     

Social enterprises as enabling workplaces for people with psychiatric disabilities

In recent years, western governments influenced by neoliberalism have emphasized paid work as a key route to social inclusion and community participation for people with psychiatric disabilities. Although paid work can offer many rewards, access to mainstream employment for people with psychiatric disabilities is difficult as they continue to encounter discrimination and a lack of workplace accommodation. One response to these challenges has been the creation of social enterprises as ‘alternative spaces’ of employment for people with psychiatric disabilities. On the basis of interviews with key informants from 21 different social enterprises across Ontario, Canada, this paper critically analyzes the strategies used by organizations to create jobs that are both accommodating for people, but also conducive to the ongoing success of the business.     

Survival Distributions Satisfying Benford's Law

Hill stated that “An interesting open problem is to determine which common distributions (or mixtures thereof) satisfy Benford's law …”. This article quantifies compliance with Benford's law for several popular survival distributions. The traditional analysis of Benford's law considers its applicability to datasets. This article switches the emphasis to probability distributions that obey Benford's law.     

The fertility effect of catastrophe: U.S. hurricane births

Anecdotal evidence has suggested increased fertility rates resulting from catastrophic events in an area. In this paper, we measure this fertility effect using storm advisory data and fertility data for the Atlantic and Gulf-coast counties of the USA. We find that low-severity storm advisories are associated with a positive and significant fertility effect and that high-severity advisories have a significant negative fertility effect. As the type of advisory goes from least severe to most severe, the fertility effect of the specific advisory type decreases monotonically from positive to negative. We also find some other interesting demographic effects.