Sport and disability: Pistorius does not fit with the categories

Oscar Pistorius presents a major issue to sports organisations, as exposed in the media. First and foremost, media wrongly perceive him as the first disabled athlete to participate in the Olympic Games. Second, they openly question the legitimacy of his participation mainly based on the inequity introduced by his prosthetic legs. Content analysis, in English and French, of written press, International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) texts, from 2004 to 2012, confirms that Pistorius presents a new puzzle to sports organizations. This is partly because they are not able to determine whether his performances are a result of his body strength or if they are biased by his artificial limbs. Furthermore, when he is competing against able-bodied athletes, sports organizsations put him in a ‘monstrous’ position. Similarly, while categorising him as an ‘athlete’ they do not grant him the characteristic feature of this category: certified comparability of performances to ultimately establish ranks.     

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.     

A Stochastic Model to Assess the Effect of Meat Inspection Practices on the Contamination of the Pig Carcasses

The objective of meat inspection is to promote animal and public health by preventing, detecting, and controlling hazards originating from animals. With the improvements of sanitary level in pig herds, the hazards profile has shifted and the inspection procedures no longer target major foodborne pathogens (i.e., not risk based). Additionally, carcass manipulations performed when searching for macroscopic lesions can lead to cross‐contamination. We therefore developed a stochastic model to quantitatively describe cross‐contamination when consecutive carcasses are submitted to classic inspection procedures. The microbial hazard used to illustrate the model was Salmonella, the data set was obtained from Brazilian slaughterhouses, and some simplifying assumptions were made. The model predicted that due to cross‐contamination during inspection, the prevalence of contaminated carcass surfaces increased from 1.2% to 95.7%, whereas the mean contamination on contaminated surfaces decreased from 1 logCFU/cm² to ?0.87 logCFU/cm², and the standard deviations decreased from 0.65 to 0.19. These results are explained by the fact that, due to carcass manipulations with hands, knives, and hooks, including the cutting of contaminated lymph nodes, Salmonella is transferred to previously uncontaminated carcasses, but in small quantities. These small quantities can easily go undetected during sampling. Sensitivity analyses gave insight into the model performance and showed that the touching and cutting of lymph nodes during inspection can be an important source of carcass contamination. The model can serve as a tool to support discussions on the modernization of pig carcass inspection.     

The Impact of Macro- and Micro-Economic Uncertainty on Family Formation in The Netherlands

In this paper, we study the impact of macro- and micro-economic uncertainty on family formation between 1970 and 2000 in The Netherlands. Using data of the Family Survey Dutch Population, we analysed the monthly hazard rates of experiencing the transition into first union, first marriage and parenthood after the start of the relationship of 365 male and 364 female partners by applying piecewise-constant exponential models. The results show that macro-economic uncertainties, i.e. high unemployment rates, lead to postponement of the first union and marriage, but not of the first child. In addition, we found that this relationship is not interpreted by individual-level employment insecurity, i.e. temporary employment or unemployment, which does not seem to prevent people from making long-term family commitments. Although hypothesized, we did not find that the negative effects of macro- and micro-level insecurities on family formation reinforce each other or that they vary between individuals with different educational qualifications.     

Utilization of Mixed Distributions in the Calculation of Polarization: The Case of Spain

Social Indicators Research - This study analyzes the evolution of salary polarization in the Spanish labor market. The paper proposes the use of mixed distributions to examine the consequences of...     

Scanner Data and the Treatment of Quality Change in Nonrevisable Price Indexes

The recently developed rolling year GEKS procedure makes maximum use of all matches in the data to construct nonrevisable price indexes that are approximately free from chain drift. A potential weakness is that unmatched items are ignored. In this article we use imputation Törnqvist price indexes as inputs into the rolling year GEKS procedure. These indexes account for quality changes by imputing the “missing prices” associated with new and disappearing items. Three imputation methods are discussed. The first method makes explicit imputations using a hedonic regression model which is estimated for each time period. The other two methods make implicit imputations; they are based on time dummy hedonic and time-product dummy regression models and are estimated on bilateral pooled data. We present empirical evidence for New Zealand from scanner data on eight consumer electronics products and find that accounting for quality change can make a substantial difference.     

The Decomposition of Economic Outcomes as a Result of Changes in Brazil’s Male Age–Education Structure

In Brazil, the age and education compositions of the male labor force is changing with great regional variation. Based on Demographic Census microdata, results indicate that cohort size has a negative impact on earnings, but this effect is decreasing over time. In this study we consider the impact on earnings by age and education, as well as estimated income inequality reduction and racial differentials. Fertility decline and improve regarding educational attainment had a significant influence on the decline of income inequality in the country. Moreover, the non-white population has been experiencing less success in relation to educational achievement, compared to the white population.     

What is Sexual Satisfaction? Thematic Analysis of Lay People's Definitions

Sexual satisfaction is an important indicator of sexual health and is strongly associated with relationship satisfaction. However, research exploring lay definitions of sexual satisfaction has been scarce. We present thematic analysis of written responses of 449 women and 311 men to the question “How would you define sexual satisfaction?” The participants were heterosexual individuals with a mean age of 36.05 years (SD = 8.34) involved in a committed exclusive relationship. In this exploratory study, two main themes were identified: personal sexual well-being and dyadic processes. The first theme focuses on the positive aspects of individual sexual experience, such as pleasure, positive feelings, arousal, sexual openness, and orgasm. The second theme emphasizes relational dimensions, such as mutuality, romance, expression of feelings, creativity, acting out desires, and frequency of sexual activity. Our results highlight that mutual pleasure is a crucial component of sexual satisfaction and that sexual satisfaction derives from positive sexual experiences and not from the absence of conflict or dysfunction. The findings support definitions and models of sexual satisfaction that focus on positive sexual outcomes and the use of measures that incorporate items linked to personal and dyadic sexual rewards for both men and women.     

Maternal union instability and childhood mortality risk in the Global South, 2010–14

Efforts to improve child survival in lower-income countries typically focus on fundamental factors such as economic resources and infrastructure provision, even though research from post-industrial countries confirms that family instability has important health consequences. We tested the association between maternal union instability and children’s mortality risk in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia using children’s actual experience of mortality (discrete-time probit hazard models) as well as their experience of untreated morbidity (probit regression). Children of divorced/separated mothers experience compromised survival chances, but children of mothers who have never been in a union generally do not. Among children of partnered women, those whose mothers have experienced prior union transitions have a higher mortality risk. Targeting children of mothers who have experienced union instability—regardless of current union status—may augment ongoing efforts to reduce childhood mortality, especially in Africa and Latin America where union transitions are common.