Generalization of the immigration and the stable population model

Building upon an idea presented by Espenshade, Bouvier and Arthur (1982) about the eventual stationarity of a population subjected to a net reproduction rate of less than one and a constant stream of immigration, this note reports the consequences upon the birth trajectory for all possible values of the net reproduction rate. It has been shown that when the net reproduction rate is equal to one, the number of births increases linearly with time. As may be expected, the increase is exponential for values of net reproduction rate greater than one.     

Invisible or Mainstream? Disability in Surveys and Censuses in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Social Indicators Research - This paper examines to what extent household surveys and censuses in low- and middle-income countries include disability questions and the types of questions under use....     

Sacrificing Women: A Study of Ritualized Practices among Women Volunteers in India

This study addresses issues related to inequality formation and reproduction, especially in regard to gender dynamics operating in a non-western society. Grounded in a post-colonial understanding of urban educated upper and middle class women NGO volunteers in contemporary India, it analyzes how they negotiate new approaches to challenge existing traditional gender roles, yet in critical ways contribute to their reproduction, particularly the traditional concept of ideal Indian womanhood. Employing structural ritualization theory we examine how ritualized symbolic practices related to the traditional concepts of caretaking, sacrifice, and the concept of natural sexual differences continue to be emphasized in a generation confronted with conflicting expectations about modern women’s roles. Twenty-one testimonies provide the major source of evidence along with data gathered through participant observation. This research enhances our understanding of the power of rituals and how they can continue to shape the cognitions and activities of actors.

Framing the corporate responsibility-reputation linkage: The case of Tata Motors in India

This study, focusing on the emerging economy context of one of India's largest automotive companies, Tata Motors, analyzes the thematic framing of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate reputation. Five CSR frames are shown: institutionalization, community development, modernization, mainstreaming, and nation-building. Reputation is framed via: heritage, nationbuilding, technological advancement, global footprint, and responsibility. The findings suggest how firms may better align their CSR efforts with regular business, and their larger public relations campaigns with wider social perceptions of their responsibilities.     

Towards a Multidimensional Measure of Governance

This paper proposes a new index of governance based on the Alkire-Foster methodology and compares it with the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance. The proposed new index improves on existing measures of governance in two ways. First, it is able to incorporate both cardinal and ordinal variables without having to assign cardinal meaning to ordinal variables. The cardinalization of ordinal variables can lead to ambiguous rankings depending on the choice of the cardinal scale. Second, by borrowing the mechanism of cutoffs found in poverty measurement literature, the index can focus attention on nations deprived in terms of governance. The index is computed for the 48 countries of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s data. The groups of best-performing and worst-performing nations identified by each of the two methods are largely similar. However, there are some differences among the middle order governance nations. An additional advantage of the proposed methodology is that it involves counting each country’s achievements in the dimensions of governance, which can be presented in a report card of governance.     

Understanding the role of facial asymmetry in human face identification

Face recognition has important applications in forensics (criminal identification) and security (biometric authentication). The problem of face recognition has been extensively studied in the computer vision community, from a variety of perspectives. A relatively new development is the use of facial asymmetry in face recognition, and we present here the results of a statistical investigation of this biometric. We first show how facial asymmetry information can be used to perform three different face recognition tasks—human identification (in the presence of expression variations), classification of faces by expression, and classification of individuals according to sex. Initially, we use a simple classification method, and conduct a feature analysis which shows the particular facial regions that play the dominant role in achieving these three entirely different classification goals. We then pursue human identification under expression changes in greater depth, since this is the most important task from a practical point of view. Two different ways of improving the performance of the simple classifier are then discussed: (i) feature combinations and (ii) the use of resampling techniques (bagging and random subspaces). With these modifications, we succeed in obtaining near perfect classification results on a database of 55 individuals, a statistically significant improvement over the initial results as seen by hypothesis tests of proportions.     

Analyzing the Dimensionality of Place Attachment and Its Relationship with Residential Satisfaction in New Cities: The Case of Sadra,Iran

Social Indicators Research - During the recent decades, new cities have been set up around Iranian main cities, after exclusive pre-planning and investigations. However, no significant research...