Monte Carlo Sensitivity Analysis of Unknown Parameters in Hazardous Materials Transportation Risk Assessment

The US Department of Transportation was interested in the risks associated with transporting Hydrazine in tanks with and without relief devices. Hydrazine is both highly toxic and flammable, as well as corrosive. Consequently, there was a conflict as to whether a relief device should be used or not. Data were not available on the impact of relief devices on release probabilities or the impact of Hydrazine on the likelihood of fires and explosions. In this paper, a Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis of the unknown parameters was used to assess the risks associated with highway transport of Hydrazine. To help determine whether or not relief devices should be used, fault trees and event trees were used to model the sequences of events that could lead to adverse consequences during transport of Hydrazine. The event probabilities in the event trees were derived as functions of the parameters whose effects were not known. The impacts of these parameters on the risk of toxic exposures, fires, and explosions were analyzed through a Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis and analyzed statistically through an analysis of variance. The analysis allowed the determination of which of the unknown parameters had a significant impact on the risks. It also provided the necessary support to a critical transportation decision even though the values of several key parameters were not known.     

收入差距和社会公正:拉美国家社会保障体系的发展及其经验

在对拉美社会保障体系的研究中,人们的关注大多集中在其九十年代的以私有化为导向的改革中,而对于其改革成效和晚近发展讨论较少,对这些体系特点以及社会基础的解释也很不充分。拉美国家社会政策发展的教训警示我们:城市化和市场化的发展未必增进社会全体人民的生活状况,而会导致社会两极化或强化社会区隔。拉美国家私有化、民营化的经验在增强福利供给的多样性、给人们更多的选择方面起到很大作用,但其在增进社会保障程度、减少贫困率方面的效应却很弱。这些国际经验对于我们回答中国的社会实践问题可以提供相应的参照系。     

国际经验和中国社会福利体系的发展

一、从国际经验看社会福利体系发展的趋势 纵观欧美发达国家在20世纪所经历的社会福利体系发展进程,我们可以看到,当经济发展的水平超越了人均国民产值6000美元的阶段之后,政府在社会福利方面的投入将会逐渐加大,并开始构建起各自的福利国家体系.在英国,其人均GDP在上世纪40年代已达到6000美元之上(以国际元即G-KD美元作为衡量单位),而正是在这个时候,贝弗里奇提出了"福利国家"的理念.     

Shared and unique characteristics of school,cyber and family victimization among school-aged children in Hong Kong

Victimizations from online and offline violence, such as sibling violence, school violence and witness of family violence, both have negative associations with victims' mental health and may share similar individual and family characteristics. This study aims to explore the common and differentiated characteristics in the prediction of school, cyber and family victimization and whether there are unique associations within these victimization types. We employed a two-stage stratified sampling method to collect a representative sample of 5567 children aged 3–17 from a cross-sectional, school-based survey in Hong Kong. Results showed that all types of child victimization, including sibling, school and cyberbullying, as well as the witness of violence at home, were positively correlated with each other. Children's age was positively related to the occurrence and cooccurrence of all types of child victimization. Frequent family residential mobility and parents' higher education level were positively related to all types of children's victimization. The scores of all aspects of children's paediatric quality of life were found negatively related to children's school victimization. This study provides insight into the unique and shared elements of children's online and offline victimization. Knowledge of the distinguished familial gradients of child victimization at home and beyond could benefit the development of child victimization prevention.     

Solo-living and childless professional women: Navigating the ‘balanced mother ideal’ over the fertile years

One in five women are childless at midlife, and for an estimated 90 percent of these women, childlessness is not actively chosen. In this article, we explore how solo-living and childless professional women navigate the ‘balanced mother ideal’ over their fertile years and what this means for organizations and organization studies. Drawing on biographical narrative interview data from solo-living professional women in the UK, we argue that identifications with the balanced mother ideal change over the life course as a result of futurity, ambivalence, and suppression of negative emotions—part of the logic of both postfeminism and neoliberal feminism—and the ‘disenfranchized grief’ of contingent childlessness. At the point of late fertility, the absence of alternative social narratives to the balanced mother ideal appears to create a crisis point for childless women, including in the workplace. We conclude our article with recommendations for how organizations can better cater to the needs of this significant, yet largely silenced, demographic group.     

Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare,Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity1

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter‐century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.     

From sociolinguistic variation to socially strategic stylisation1

This article investigates the indexical relation between language, interactional stance and social class. Quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of a linguistic variable (the first person possessive singular) is combined with interactional analysis of the way one particular variant (possessive ‘me’, as in Me pencil's up me jumper) is used by speakers in ‘stylised’ interactional performances. The aim of this analysis is to explore: (1) how possessive ‘me’ is implicated in the construction and management of local identities and relationships; and (2) how macro‐social categories, such as social class, relate to linguistic choice. The data for this analysis comes from an ethnographic study of the language practices of nine‐ to ten‐year‐old children in two socially‐differentiated primary schools in north‐east England. A secondary aim of the article is to spotlight the sociolinguistic sophistication of these young children, in particular, the working‐class participants, who challenge the notion that the speech of working‐class children is in any way ‘impoverished’.     

Measuring Institutions: Indicators of Political and Property Rights in Malawi

This paper constructs a new set of institutional indicators for Malawi. We develop indicators of political rights, of freehold, traditional (communitarian) and intellectual property rights, based on the Malawian legislative framework. In exploring the association between our rights measures and a range of indicators of socio-economic development, we obtain limited support for a modernization process for Malawi. On the one hand, the association between the rights variables can be interpreted as a modernization nexus, with a trade-off between legally anchored private property freehold rights and political rights on the one hand, and traditional forms of communal property rights on the other. By contrast, the association between rights and a range of socioeconomic development indicators gives a more nuanced picture. For social development measures property rights measures exercise a positive impact, regardless of whether they take the form of freehold or communitarian property rights. Economic development measures respond positively only to the freehold measure, and negatively to communitarian property rights. The socioeconomic development measures are negatively associated with political rights in Malawi over the last 40 years of the twentieth century.     

官办慈善与民间慈善：中国慈善事业发展的关键问题

慈善行为既出自人们对弱者和贫困者同情的善良意志,反映了人性的光辉,也是整个社会文明程度的体现。慈善事业的发展既是政府鼓励和推进的事业,也需要全社会民众的积极参与。目前,官办慈善组织在组织公益慈善活动方面起了主导作用（甚至是支配作用）,但近日诸多公共事件的发生使这一体制遭到许多批评,并使慈善议题成为大众舆论的焦点。因此,在有关慈善事业发展的研究中,我们既要考察目前慈善事业发展中政府所起的作用,更要思考如何调动社会组织和广大民众的积极性来共同参与。分析我国的官办慈善体制所存在的问题,思考我们如何推动民间慈善和私人慈善活动的发展,使慈善事业得到全面发展,是十分有必要的。     

Responses to affirmative action: Is there a question order affect?

This paper analyzes the affect of question order on support for affirmative action. While the literature is replete with studies detailing the racial differences for support for affirmative action, there is a dearth of studies that analyze how probing, using open-ended questions, can influence individuals’ responses. Given this, we seek to analyze and explain how open-ended questions, related to affirmative action, might affect responses to close-ended questions as well as how their joint interaction help us to understand resonant attitudes. Using a split-ballot approach, we found that responses to the closedended question were significantly affected by the experimental design.