Helping South Asia Cope Better with Natural Disasters: The Role of Social Protection

Social protection (income) support to households in the wake of major natural disasters is assuming a growing role for the World Bank, and major cash transfers in Turkey, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Pakistan are reviewed in this article. Such support is usually best provided directly as cash to affected households; it complements other relief and reconstruction efforts, is demanded by client countries and has a positive impact on short‐term food security and long‐term recovery. It could be geared for greater impact and more efficient delivery in future by the use of a best‐practice toolkit and a right‐on‐time technical assistance facility, and its integration in emergency preparedness and capacity‐building for implementing agencies.     

TSP in spreadsheets—A fast and flexible tool

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is well-known and many specially developed solution procedures have been constructed to solve particular variants of it. This paper considers several different variants of TSP. However, developing tailored solution procedures for each is impractical. These problems are non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP hard). Solving them using standard linear programming/mixed integer programming (LP/MIP) solvers has therefore only been regarded to be feasible for very small problems. A careful consideration of the problem formulation may facilitate efficient software utilization, and for real-world problems this can have a considerable impact. Problems that were previously regarded as large and unwieldy are now easily solvable using spreadsheets, thanks to the recent advancement in general optimization software.     

The State Socialist Mortality Syndrome

Death rates for working-age men in European state socialist countries deviated from general improvements in survival observed in the rest of Europe during the 20th century. The magnitude of structural labor force changes across countries correlates with lagged increases in death rates for men in the working ages. This pattern is consistent with a hypothesis that hyper-development of heavy industry and stagnation (even contraction) of the service sector created anomic conditions leading to unhealthy lifestyles and self-destructive behavior among men moving from primary-sector to secondary-sector occupations. Occupational contrasts within countries similarly show concentration of rising male death rates among blue collar workers. Collapse of state socialist systems produced rapid corrections in labor force structure after 1990, again correlated with a fading of the state socialist mortality syndrome in following decades.     

Globally intensity-reweighted estimators for K- and pair correlation functions

We introduce new estimators of the inhomogeneous K-function and the pair correlation function of a spatial point process as well as the cross K-function and the cross pair correlation function of a bivariate spatial point process under the assumption of second-order intensity-reweighted stationarity. These estimators rely on a ‘global’ normalisation factor which depends on an aggregation of the intensity function, while the existing estimators depend ‘locally’ on the intensity function at the individual observed points. The advantages of our new global estimators over the existing local estimators are demonstrated by theoretical considerations and a simulation study.     

Becoming aware of the grand social challenges: how an international and interdisciplinary educational context may broaden students’ perspectives on human rights and public health

ABSTRACT

The understanding of contemporary social problems and challenges in an international and national perspective is a significant issue for social work because of globalisation and social problems are too complex to handle by single actors themselves. The need for interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration is important. This paper focuses on experiences from an Erasmus Intensive Programme with the title Human Rights, Public Health and Social Service Challenges on Local Government in the Nordic-Baltic Sea Area. Social work students from different countries interacted with students from other disciplines such as political science, psychology and economy to discuss common challenges and solutions in this field. The analysis of the findings shows students reflect upon human rights issues as universal rights and how challenges presented by contextual differences in preconditions for everyday life between the countries, are reflected from different disciplines/professional perspectives. The paper argues that international and interdisciplinary programmes, where students get the opportunity to meet and to work with overarching and transnational issues, have a great potential for engaging students in global development in a rapidly changing world.     

Detoxing feels good: dieting and affect in 22Days Nutrition and goop detoxes

In this paper, I examine the online platforms that present and facilitate two highly profiled diets: the vegan meal service 22Days Nutrition and goop.com’s detoxes. 22Days Nutrition and the goop detoxes are noteworthy case studies because they showcase a shift in the way dieting is approached in the contemporary moment. Rather than being concerned exclusively with weight loss, these diets stress the emotional value and reward that their highly restrictive approach to eating offers. The diets rarely equate restrictive eating with attaining thinness or weight loss, but rather with an abstract sense of “feeling good” and overall emotional wellbeing. However, this articulation of dieting as an opportunity to enable a “positive” affective experience has larger social and political implications. The article unpacks these implications, finding that the diets’ promises of wellbeing depend on not only individual, continual self-transformation but also the formation of collectives from which some bodies must necessarily be excluded.     

Policy Coherence for Sustainable Agricultural Development: Uncovering Prospects and Pretence within the Swedish Policy for Global Development

Within the European Union, promotion of ‘policy coherence’ is intended to improve co‐ordination across sectors and groups of professionals, who make competing claims for agricultural development in low‐income countries. This article examines the prospects for stakeholders in Sweden to implement such a policy, drawing on experiences from the launch of a national multi‐stakeholder platform with the participation of 99 organisations. Its findings demonstrate institutional fragmentation and struggles for legitimacy, with the internationally heralded Swedish Policy for Global Development operated largely as a tokenistic instrument, legitimised by the pretence of stakeholder engagement. It argues for improved institutional support to facilitate cross‐sectoral dialogues to deconstruct social boundaries which are no longer relevant.     

The Mediation Window: Regulation of Argumentation and Affect in Custody Mediation

High-conflict custody mediation requires working with both the emotional and the factual aspects of the conflict, while balancing unequal power relations between parents. Applying conversation analysis methods to a case of “treatment as usual” high-conflict mediation, this study offers an analysis of the process of establishing a balance point—the mediation window—where both emotional and practical concerns can be discussed efficiently. Communication patterns in the selected case are compared to an extract of the remaining corpus from which it is drawn, consisting of 38 high-conflict mediation cases. Findings are discussed with respect to the practice and ideology of custody mediation, particularly concerning empowerment, self-determination, and mediator control.     

Do your duty—demand your right: a theoretical discussion of the norm of reciprocity in social work

This article presents a literature-based critique of the principle of reciprocity in welfare and social work. The norm of reciprocity is in principle an ethical, universal norm related to the whole scope of human interaction. In this article the scope has been delimited to social work and the implementation of a policy of workfare in Norway. Emphasis is given to exploring mechanisms that may explain important characteristics of implementation practices that are not always clearly visible. The discussion includes the dialectics between overarching institutional relationships such as the body of laws and existing policies, institutional practices and the practice of social workers. The norm of reciprocity is analysed as a generative mechanism that sometimes implies problematic aspects requiring critical examination and discussion. By viewing reciprocity as a generative mechanism and as a ‘starting mechanism’, problematic aspects of implementation practices may be better understood.     

Potential support ratios: Cohort versus period perspectives

The ‘prospective potential support ratio’ has been proposed by researchers as a measure that accurately quantifies the burden of ageing, by identifying the fraction of a population that has passed a certain measure of longevity, for example, 17?years of life expectancy. Nevertheless, the prospective potential support ratio usually focuses on the current mortality schedule, or period life expectancy. Instead, in this paper we look at the actual mortality experienced by cohorts in a population, using cohort life tables. We analyse differences between the two perspectives using mortality models, historical data, and forecasted data. Cohort life expectancy takes future mortality improvements into account, unlike period life expectancy, leading to a higher prospective potential support ratio. Our results indicate that using cohort instead of period life expectancy returns around 0.5 extra younger people per older person among the analysed countries. We discuss the policy implications implied by our cohort measures.