The momentum of mortality change

Mortality change is not usually assigned much importance as a source of population growth when future population trends are discussed. Yet it can make a significant contribution to population momentum. In populations that have experienced mortality change, cohort survivorship will continue varying for some time even if period mortality rates become constant. This continuing change in cohort survivorship can create a significant degree of mortality-induced population change, a process we call the 'momentum of mortality change'. The momentum of mortality change can be estimated by taking the ratio of e0 (the period life expectancy at birth) to CAL (the cross-sectional average length of life) for a given year. In industrialized nations, the momentum of mortality change can attenuate the negative effect on population growth of declining fertility or sustained below-replacement fertility. In India, where population momentum has a value of 1.436, the momentum of mortality change is the greatest contributor to its value.     

Approval voting and positional voting methods: Inference,relationship, examples

Approval voting is the voting method recently adopted by the Society for Social Choice and Welfare. Positional voting methods include the famous plurality, antiplurality, and Borda methods. We extend the inference framework of Tsetlin and Regenwetter (2003) from majority rule to approval voting and all positional voting methods. We also establish a link between approval voting and positional voting methods whenever Falmagne et al.s (1996) size-independent model of approval voting holds: In all such cases, approval voting mimics some positional voting method. We illustrate our inference framework by analyzing approval voting and ranking data, with and without the assumption of the size-independent model. For many of the existing data, including the Society for Social Choice and Welfare election analyzed by Brams and Fishburn (2001) and Saari (2001), low turnout implies that inferences drawn from such elections carry low (statistical) confidence. Whenever solid inferences are possible, we find that, under certain statistical assumptions, approval voting tends to agree with positional voting methods, and with Borda, in particular.Michel Regenwetter thanks the National Science Foundation for funding this research through NSF grant SBR 97-30076. Both authors thank the Fuqua School of Business for financially supporting their collaboration. Most of this research was done while Regenwetter was a faculty member at Fuqua. We thank Prof. Steven Brams for his valuable comments as a discussant of a previous version of this paper, given at the 2002 Public Choice meeting, and Prof. Donald Saari for his helpful comments in conversations and on another draft. We also thank the editor in charge and a referee for their valuable comments. Tsetlin acknowledges the support of the Centre for Decision Making and Risk Analysis at INSEAD.     

General concepts of value restriction and preference majority

Regenwetter and Grofman [17] offer a probabilistic generalization of Sen's [25, 27] classic value restriction condition when individual preferences are linear orders. They provide necessary and sufficient conditions for transitive majority preferences on linear orders. They call these conditions net value restriction and net preference majority. We study parallel generalizations for general binary relations. In general, neither net value restriction nor net preference majority is necessary for transitive majority preferences. Net value restriction is sufficient for transitive strict majority preferences, but not sufficient for transitive weak majority preferences. Net majority is sufficient for transitive majorities only if the preference relation with a net majority is a weak order. An application of our results to four U.S. National Election Study data sets reveals, in each case, transitive majorities despite a violation of Sen's original value restriction condition. We thank the National Science Foundation for funding this collaborative research through NSF grants SBR 97-30076 to Regenwetter and SBR 97-30578 to Grofman and Marley. We are indebted to the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) for access to the 1968, 1980, 1992 and 1996 U.S. National Election Study (NES) data. We thank Mark Berger for helping us with the necessary data extraction. We are grateful to the action editor and the referees for extensive and helpful comments. Most of this work was carried out while the first author was a faculty member at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, which has generously supported our collaboration. Marley was a fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Germany, during the paper's completion.     

Social security in central and eastern European countries: Continuity and change

Continued social protection in central and eastern Europe is vital in order to compensate for the loss of rights previously provided by the State, to ease the process of economic change and, not least, to maintain social cohesion without altogether subjecting populations to the vagaries of the market economy system. Long steeped in the tradition of social insurance, many of these countries had adapted their systems of protection to the Soviet model, while reflecting certain universal trends of social security policy, with an emphasis on family assistance. More recently, schemes have been complemented by unemployment benefits and by mechanisms to better take inflation into account, without prejudice to the necessary guarantee of a minimum level of assistance. They must still be adapted to facilitate occupational mobility, to promote employment, to involve the people covered by them in their management, and to deal with deteriorating health services, while taking account of problems stemming from resource limitation. Although reform must not obscure the need for continuity, uncertainty remains as to its outcome.     

Comparison of retrospective surveys with a longitudinal follow-up in Senegal: SFS,DHS and Niakhar

This study compares the data obtained from two retrospective surveys: the Senegal Fertility Survey (SFS) and the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) with the data obtained from a longitudinal follow-up study held among the Sereer, living in a rural area of Senegal (Niakhar). The study shows that the fertility level is slightly higher in the retrospective surveys than in the longitudinal follow-up, the difference being mainly due to an overestimation of the fertility rate of the age group 15–19 years. The mortality levels and trends among under five children are correctly estimated by the DHS, but are underestimated by the SFS. The age pattern of mortality is slightly biased in the DHS and SFS, owing to errors on age at the time of death in these retrospective surveys. The comparison of the nutritional status was difficult to make because of the small sample size used in the DHS.     

Logrolling and a McGarvey theorem for separable tournaments

In this note we prove a McGarvey theorem for the family of Separable Tournaments. This family arises in the analysis of Logrolling and Vote Trading in Committees.     

Managing the flow of private information on children and parents in poverty situations: Creating a panoptic eye in interorganizational networks?

In this article, we discuss how the flow of private information about children and families in poverty situations is managed in interorganizational networks that aim to combat child poverty. Although practices for sharing information and documentation between child and family social work services are highly encouraged and recommended to create supportive features for parents and children, this development often results in undesirable forms of governmentality. Interorganizational networking also creates controlling side effects because the exchange of information in networks of child and family services may wield a holistic power over families. We theorize this issue by using the Foucauldian concepts of the panopticon and pastoral power, which allows us to grapple with the major tension between support and control in the information‐ and documentation‐sharing practices of social workers. A critical analysis of our empirical data reveals four central fields of tension in which social workers and their organizations must position themselves: (a) craving control and handling uncertainty, (b) using and misusing private information and trust, (c) constructing families as subjects and objects of intervention, and (d) including and excluding families.     

The domination number of Cartesian product of two directed paths

Let γ(P _m □P _n ) be the domination number of the Cartesian product of directed paths P _m and P _n for m,n≥2. Liu et al. in (J. Comb. Optim. 22(4):651–662, 2011) determined the value of γ(P _m □P _n ) for arbitrary n and m≤6. In this work we give the exact value of γ(P _m □P _n ) for any m,n and exhibit dominating sets of minimum cardinality.     

罗莎·卢森堡关于"社会主义还是野蛮状态"的概念

20世纪90年代以来,罗莎·卢森堡政治学说中所包含的后现代社会的内容得到了世界学者的广泛重视和深入研究。在这里,我们根据2006年3月20—22日武汉大学哲学学院和马克思主义哲学研究所联合举办的“罗莎·卢森堡思想及其当代价值国际学术研讨会”就此问题的讨论特发表以下三篇论文。这三篇论文的特点是结合现时代世界历史提出的重大问题,从哲学的层面反思了罗莎·卢森堡政治学中的基本问题,反映了当代罗莎·卢森堡政治哲学研究的水平和视野。这些论文无论对于深化罗莎·卢森堡政治学的研究,还是对于中国开展马克思主义的政治哲学研究来说,都具有重要的启迪意义。本专栏发表的三篇论文由武汉大学哲学学院何萍教授组织,中南财经政法大学人文学院王雨辰教授也给予了大力协助,在此一并表示衷心的感谢。