Transgender Identities,Pressures, and Social Policy: A Study Carried Out in Spain

ABSTRACT

This article draws on a qualitative research project concerning the relationship between trans people’s mental health and wellbeing, pressures, social policy, and heteronormative gender norms in Spain. Drawing on interviews carried out with trans people from all regions and generations, we use an ecological framework to illustrate how a socially entrenched heteronormativity pressures trans people to comply with gender norms that impact negatively their mental health and wellbeing. The article argues that the legal changes in Spain are not enough in themselves to bring about social change, but, rather, Spanish social policy makers also need to challenge gender categorization and work toward transforming public discourses on gender issues if trans people are to gain full social recognition and equal social rights.     

Analytical expression for the integrated squared density partial derivative of a multivariate normal mixture distribution

This paper describes the derivation of the analytical expression for the integrated squared density partial derivative (ISDPD) in a multivariate normal mixture model. The analytical expression of the ISDPD is derived for arbitrary dimensions with partial derivative orders up to four. Although the value of the ISDPD can be obtained by using the common numerical integration via mathematical software (such as Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, etc), it suffers from the limitation of computation time when the dimension or the number of mixture components of the considered multivariate normal mixture model are large. Moreover, numerical comparison indicates the benefits of speed offered by our proposed analytical expression are far superior to the numerical integration performed by Maple. With this analytical expression, the ISDPD can apace be calculated with no assistance of numerical integration.     

Identifying ecosystem patterns from time series of anchovy (Engraulis ringens) and sardine (Sardinops sagax) landings in northern Chile

ABSTRACT

Useful knowledge acquisition from known and systematized information (data) is a big challenge for researchers, users and finally, decision makers. In this sense, knowledge discovery from data (KDD) process represents a valuable tool for information analysis. Moreover, this work presents an approach through KDD in time series pattern identification for anchovy and sardine fisheries and environmental data, in northern Chile. Time series, multivariate analysis and data mining techniques, along with technical literature review for results validation. The KDD approach and the data mining techniques implemented achieved an integration between these variables, identifying relevant patterns associated with fisheries abundance fluctuations and strong association with environmental changes such as El Niño and long-term cold–warm regimes between them, establishing anchovy and sardine pre-dominant time-periods, associated with environmental conditions are identified. The latter establishes groundwork for studying underlying functional relationships that could reduce gaps in the national fisheries management policies for those fisheries.     

The expected impact of the 2019 Brazilian pension reform on survivors’ pensions

This study analyses the expected changes in survivors’ pensions resulting from the permanent rules of the 2019 pension reform in Brazil. Actuarial annuities are used for representative worker profiles. The dispersion in the replacement rate values decreases, except for the highest income level. The rates needed to finance survivors’ pensions decrease relatively more than do the rates for old-age pensions. The internal rates of return significantly decrease. There is a heterogeneous change in the distributive aspects of the pension system. The reform shall affect the adequacy and intragenerational equity of old-age and survivors’ pensions.