Surrogacy Wars: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Reproduction

ABSTRACT

State regulation of reproductive practices secure the heterosexual infrastructure of kinship through means that include elitization, institutional hostility, and plain criminalization. This article draws on personal experiences of gay fathers through transnational gestational surrogacy in Spain to show the extent to which that is the case even in those contexts where some gay and lesbian kinship rights are available. Public and academic debates on the possible regulation of gestational surrogacy will be analyzed through the lens of Gayle Rubin’s intervention in the sex wars that divided feminism in the 1980s, with which contemporary anti-surrogacy movements show crucial genealogical links. In addition, in order to unearth some gendered assumptions on the ahistorical link between surrogacy and motherhood, the role of the gestational carrier will be read in relation to the figure of the “bad mother.”     

Characterizations of Bivariate Models Using Some Dynamic Conditional Information Divergence Measures

In this article, we study some relevant information divergence measures viz. Renyi divergence and Kerridge’s inaccuracy measures. These measures are extended to conditionally specified models and they are used to characterize some bivariate distributions using the concepts of weighted and proportional hazard rate models. Moreover, some bounds are obtained for these measures using the likelihood ratio order.     

Demographic and Motivation Differences Among Online Sex Offenders by Type of Offense: An Exploration of Routine Activities Theories

This article presents an analysis of the relationship between online sexual offenders’ demographic background and characteristics indicative of motivation and offense type. Specifically, we investigate whether these characteristics can distinguish different online sexual offender groups from one another as well as inform routine activity theorists on what potentially motivates perpetrators. Using multinomial logistic regression, this study found that online sexual offenders’ demographic backgrounds and characteristics indicative of motivation do vary by offense types. Two important implications of this study are that the term “online sexual offender” encompasses different types of offenders, including some who do not align with mainstream media’s characterization of “predators,” and that the potential offender within routine activity theory can be the focus of empirical investigation rather than taken as a given in research.     

Antecedents of Job Satisfaction,Organizational Commitment and Stress in a Public Hospital: a P-E Fit Perspective

This article tests different P-E (person-environment) fit dimensions in order to assess their impact on three work outcomes: job satisfaction; organizational commitment; and stress perception. Findings shows that P-E fit dimensions have differentiated effects on its dependent variables. This study contributes to several important academic discussions. The first concerns the model tested, which contains several P-E fit dimensions. The second scientific contribution is to consider P-E fit dimensions as antecedents of three job outcomes. The third contribution concerns the development and testing of a new P-E fit dimension called “person-reforms” fit.     

La Identidad y Caracter Nacionales en Mexico—La Frontera de Tamaulipas—

Resumen

En este artículo se analizan los datos de cuatro ciudades fronterizas de México. Estas son evaluaciones sobre el carácter e identidad nacional, inferidas a partir del sentido de pertenencia y participación de los ciudadanos en las instituciones más importantes de su Estado. Los resultados muestran que los habitantes de las ciudades fronterizas tienen un sentimiento de pertenencia muy reducido y un aún menor sentimiento de participación en las instituciones.     

Power indices expressed in terms of minimal winning coalitions

A voting situation is given by a set of voters and the rules of legislation that determine minimal requirements for a group of voters to pass a motion. A priori measures of voting power, such as the Shapley–Shubik index and the Banzhaf value, show the influence of the individual players in a voting situation and are calculated by looking at marginal contributions in a simple game consisting of winning and losing coalitions derived from the legislative rules. We introduce a new way to calculate these measures directly from the set of minimal winning coalitions and derive explicit formulae for the Shapley–Shubik and Banzhaf values. This new approach logically appealing as it writes measures as functions of the rules of the legislation. For certain classes of games that arise naturally in applications the logical shortcut drastically simplifies the numerical calculations to obtain the indices. The technique generalises directly to all semivalues.     

Computations of Signatures of Coherent Systems with Five Components

The signatures of coherent systems are useful tools to compute the system reliability functions, the system expected lifetimes and to compare different systems using stochastic orderings. It is well known that there exist 2, 5, and 20 different coherent systems with 2, 3, and 4 components, respectively. The signatures for these systems were given in Shaked and Suarez-Llorens (2003 Shaked , M. , Suarez-Llorens , A. ( 2003 ). On the comparison of reliability experiments based on the convolution order . Journal of the American Statistical Association 98 : 693 – 702 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In this article, we obtain an algorithm to compute all the coherent systems with n components and their signatures. Using this algorithm we show that there exist 180 coherent systems with 5 components and we compute their signatures.     

Properties of Coherent Systems with Dependent Components

We introduce two new families of univariate distributions that we call hyperminimal and hypermaximal distributions. These families have interesting applications in the context of reliability theory in that they contain that of coherent system lifetime distributions. For these families, we obtain distributions, bounds, and moments. We also define the minimal and maximal signatures of a coherent system with exchangeable components which allow us to represent the system distribution as generalized mixtures (i.e., mixtures with possibly negative weights) of series and parallel systems. These results can also be applied to order statistics (k-out-of-n systems). Finally, we give some applications studying coherent systems with different multivariate exponential joint distributions.     

Alternative definitions of bivariate equilibrium distributions

The concept of equilibrium distribution plays an important role in survival analysis, reliability and insurance studies. If we consider the problem of extending this concept to higher dimensions, we do not have a unique solution. In this paper, alternative definitions of bivariate equilibrium distributions are studied and proposed. The Navarro et al. (2006) proposal is considered and some new results are given. We continue with the Gupta and Sankaran's (1998) definition. Necessary and sufficient conditions for its existence are stated and a characterization theorem is given. As a third alternative, a new definition based on conditional specification is introduced and several results are obtained. Reliability properties of the different versions are studied.