Flood Catastrophe Model for Designing Optimal Flood Insurance Program: Estimating Location‐Specific Premiums in the Netherlands

As flood risks grow worldwide, a well‐designed insurance program engaging various stakeholders becomes a vital instrument in flood risk management. The main challenge concerns the applicability of standard approaches for calculating insurance premiums of rare catastrophic losses. This article focuses on the design of a flood‐loss‐sharing program involving private insurance based on location‐specific exposures. The analysis is guided by a developed integrated catastrophe risk management (ICRM) model consisting of a GIS‐based flood model and a stochastic optimization procedure with respect to location‐specific risk exposures. To achieve the stability and robustness of the program towards floods with various recurrences, the ICRM uses stochastic optimization procedure, which relies on quantile‐related risk functions of a systemic insolvency involving overpayments and underpayments of the stakeholders. Two alternative ways of calculating insurance premiums are compared: the robust derived with the ICRM and the traditional average annual loss approach. The applicability of the proposed model is illustrated in a case study of a Rotterdam area outside the main flood protection system in the Netherlands. Our numerical experiments demonstrate essential advantages of the robust premiums, namely, that they: (1) guarantee the program's solvency under all relevant flood scenarios rather than one average event; (2) establish a tradeoff between the security of the program and the welfare of locations; and (3) decrease the need for other risk transfer and risk reduction measures.     

Social influences on sorority and fraternity member smoking

Objective: To understand how the Greek system uniquely influences smoking attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors among college students who belong to a social sorority or fraternity. Participants: Active members of sororities (n = 16) and fraternities (n = 17) were interviewed between February 2013 and October 2015. Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted examining the social influences of the Greek system on member smoking. Transcribed interviews were coded and analyzed for themes. Results: Sorority and fraternity members experienced different social influences on smoking. Sorority stigmatization of smoking outside bars or parties caused sorority members to hide their smoking. Fraternity members had no social penalties for smoking and allowed smoking at the fraternity house. Fraternity members influenced both fraternity members and sorority members to smoke by sharing cigarettes and smoking at parties. Conclusions: Sororities and fraternities have created social environments that both promote smoking and stigmatize it, presenting unique challenges in college student smoking prevention and cessation efforts.     

‘There is always this feeling of otherness’: exploring the lived experiences of visually impaired immigrant women in Canada

This paper explores the experiences of immigrant women with visual impairment in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) of Canada. Conceptually, the paper draws from feminist disability theory and critical scholarship on blindness to consider the discursive and material processes shaping women’s experiences across different socio-cultural contexts. Empirically, the paper draws from in-depth interviews with seven women. The analysis is organized around three themes. The first explores women’s understandings of visual impairment. The second examines the ways in which women’s experiences of visual impairment are shaped by meanings and attitudes that circulate within their cultural communities, and the extent to which immigration might challenge or reinforce these meanings. The third examines the shifting barriers and opportunities women face with respect to social and economic participation. We close by identifying the conceptual implications of our research.     

Can We Perceive Near Miss? An Empirical Study

Near misses are a special kind of reinforcement which increases one’s desire to play. The aim of this paper is to examine the perception of near misses in normal population. We used a slot machine simulation running on a PC, where participants had to play four rounds with different near miss ratios (0, 15, 30 and 45%). Our sample consisted of 159 individuals with mean age of 22.8 and with no or little gambling experience. For data analysis we used chi-squared goodness-of-fit test and exact binomial test. Despite the fact, that there was a notable effect of near misses results showed that the subjects could not perceive trials of them.     

Convergence rates for uniform confidence intervals based on local polynomial regression estimators

We investigate the convergence rates of uniform bias-corrected confidence intervals for a smooth curve using local polynomial regression for both the interior and boundary region. We discuss the cases when the degree of the polynomial is odd and even. The uniform confidence intervals are based on the volume-of-tube formula modified for biased estimators. We empirically show that the proposed uniform confidence intervals attain, at least approximately, nominal coverage. Finally, we investigate the performance of the volume-of-tube based confidence intervals for independent non-Gaussian errors.     

Restoring sanity through comic relief: Parody television viewers and political outlook

Parody news programs regale viewers with satirical, witty, and humorous exposés of the political world and news coverage, but they have also been criticized for creating cynicism and political disengagement. This study found that parody news viewers are self-efficacious and more politically active than viewers of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, or broadcast television news. Moreover, reliance on parody news shows does not lead to political polarization or government distrust.     

Love,Sex, and Personality Pathology: A Life History View of Personality Pathologies and Sociosexuality

Love and sex are fundamental needs of most people, yet little research has examined such aspects of life in relation to personality pathologies. We examined the associations between pathological personality traits (i.e., negative affectivity, disinhibition, antagonism, psychoticism, and detachment) and sociosexuality (i.e., short-term mating orientation, long-term mating orientation, and sexual behavior) among 702 university students. In addition, we examined the mediating role of life history speed and tested whether sex moderated the associations that these pathological personality traits had with sociosexuality. Detachment, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism had positive associations with short-term mating interests and negative associations with long-term mating interests. Life history speed mediated the associations that detachment and disinhibition had with short-term mating orientation and long-term mating orientation. Although sex did moderate the association that negative affectivity had with previous sexual behavior, we found no evidence that these mediational processes differed between men and women. Results are discussed in terms of the way personality traits shape the sociosexuality of men and women using a life history paradigm.