A Turning Point in Gender Bias in Mortality? An Update on the Number of Missing Women

Amartya Sen started a debate about gender bias in mortality by estimating the number of “missing women,” which refers to the number of females of any age who have presumably died as a result of discriminatory treatment. Depending on the assumptions made, the combined estimates for countries exhibiting the presence of such gender bias varied between 60 and 107 million. As new population data have become available for these countries, this article examines whether the number of “missing women” has changed in the past decade. The combined estimate of the number of missing women has risen in absolute terms but has fallen slightly in relation to overall population. Considerable improvement is evident in West Asia, North Africa, and parts of South Asia, while only small improvements have occurred in India and a deterioration took place in China. Analyses of the underlying causes of gender bias in mortality suggest that improvements are largely related to improved female education and employment opportunities and rising overall incomes, while deterioration is mostly attributable to the rising incidence of sex‐selective abortions.     

Mutability of DNA base pairs: A statistical approach based on linear discrimination

A mutational spectrum measures the frequency of mutations at particular base pairs along a given DNA sequence under the influence of a particular treatment. Such spectra have been measured for several genes, in various organisms and under different treatments. This article presents a method of analysis based on the statistical discrimination between mutable base pairs and stable base pairs. The coefficients of the discriminant function characterize the mutational spectrum induced by a given treatment on a given sequence. These coefficients can be interpreted by the user without specialized statistical knowledge.     

Nun sag, wie hast du’s mit der Ethik? – Menschenbilder und Ethik im Coaching. Eine Feldstudie

The integration of theory and practice in combination with ethical standards has been clearly defined as a scheme in the field of coaching, but there is still a long way to go. Within the scope of a field study and challenged by numerous perceptions, terms like ‘ethics’ and ‘idea of man’ in the context of coaching have been closely analysed, edited in a structured way and evaluated. These steps were followed by the examination and investigation of the websites of a selected number of providers and trainers of coaching, concerning the extent to which these websites include information on the meta model as well as on the theoretical level according to A. Schreyögg. Based on the rather sobering findings, our study concludes by specifying the cornerstones of a ‘check list’. This tool may help to classify providers and trainers.     

Personality traits and knowledge sharing

In this paper, we describe an empirical study that relates three personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness) to knowledge sharing. In the existing literature considerable attention has been paid to managerial influences on knowledge sharing, technological support through information and communication systems, or individual characteristics like motivation or the perception of conflict of interest or vulnerability. Instead we concentrate on the role that personal dispositions play in individual’s knowledge sharing behavior. By means of structural equation modeling with PLS, we discover significant correlations between the personality traits and knowledge sharing within teams of an engineering company. Our results clearly contribute to the existing literature, as they offer empirical evidence of the impact of enduring individual characteristics on knowledge sharing.     

Daily Variation in Natural Disaster Casualties: Information Flows,Safety, and Opportunity Costs in Tornado Versus Hurricane Strikes

Casualties from natural disasters may depend on the day of the week they strike. With data from the Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States (SHELDUS), daily variation in hurricane and tornado casualties from 5,043 tornado and 2,455 hurricane time/place events is analyzed. Hurricane forecasts provide at‐risk populations with considerable lead time. Such lead time allows strategic behavior in choosing protective measures under hurricane threat; opportunity costs in terms of lost income are higher during weekdays than during weekends. On the other hand, the lead time provided by tornadoes is near zero; hence tornados generate no opportunity costs. Tornado casualties are related to risk information flows, which are higher during workdays than during leisure periods, and are related to sheltering‐in‐place opportunities, which are better in permanent buildings like businesses and schools. Consistent with theoretical expectations, random effects negative binomial regression results indicate that tornado events occurring on the workdays of Monday through Thursday are significantly less lethal than tornados that occur on weekends. In direct contrast, and also consistent with theory, the expected count of hurricane casualties increases significantly with weekday occurrences. The policy implications of observed daily variation in tornado and hurricane events are considered.     

The prevalence of sexual aggression and victimization among homosexual men

This study examined the prevalence of unwanted sexual contacts among a sample of 310 homosexual men with an average age of 21.8 years recruited in Berlin, Germany. A modified version of the Sexual Experiences Survey was developed to record unwanted contacts involving different means of coercion, sexual acts, and victim‐perpetrator relationships. Reports were elicited about (a) sexual victimization and (b) perpetration of sexually aggressive acts. Three methods of victimization were studied: physical force, exploitation of the victim's incapacitated state, and verbal coercion. Of the 310 respondents, about 15% reported sexual victimization through the use or threat of forcé. Twenty percent were victimized through exploitation of their inability to offer resistance when in an incapacitated state. Ten percent reported victimization through verbal coercion. In terms of being the perpetrator of sexual aggression, over 5% of respondents reported using or threatening to use physical force. Over 16% reported exploiting a person's incapacitated state, and over 6% admitted to the use of verbal coercion. Acceptance of money for sex was identified as a risk factor for both victimization and perpetration. The data show that sexual aggression is a serious problem among homosexual men which requires further exploration.     

Economic Growth and Child Undernutrition in sub‐Saharan Africa

Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in sub‐Saharan Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in Africa. We pool all DHS surveys for African countries, control for other correlates of undernutrition, and add country‐level GDP per capita. We find that a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with 1.5 to 1.7 percent lower odds of being stunted, 2.8 to 3.0 percent lower odds of being underweight, and 3.5 to 4.0 percent lower odds of being wasted. Other drivers of undernutrition, including relative socioeconomic status and mother's education and her nutritional status, are quantitatively more important. This suggests that further increases in GDP will have only a modest impact on undernutrition and broader interventions are required to accelerate progress.     

Poverty,undernutrition, and child mortality: Some inter-regional puzzles and their implicationsfor research and policy

This paper examines the relationship between measures of income poverty, undernourishment, childhood undernutrition, and child mortality in developing countries. While there is, as expected, a close aggregate correlation between these measures of deprivation, the measures generate some inter-regional paradoxes. Income poverty and child mortality is highest in Sub Saharan Africa, but childhood undernutrition is by far the highest in South Asia, while the share of people with insufficient calories (undernourishment) is highest in the Caribbean. The paper finds that standard explanations cannot account for these inter-regional paradoxes, particularly the ones related to undernourishment and childhood undernutrition. The paper suggests that measurement issues related to the way undernourishment and childhood undernutrition are measured might play a significant role in affecting these inter-regional puzzles, and points to implications for research and policy. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Introduction

This essay contrasts two different modes of iconic appropriation and organizational symbolism, with reference to a single physical structure: on the one hand, that of a local folk society, seeking to define itself and preserve its distinctiveness as against the wider nation state of which it is a part; and, on the other hand, that of the nation-state itself, seeking to incorporate the diverse elements out of which it is constituted into a coherent synthesis. Both modes operate by selecting particular elements out of the material remains and recoding them within specific ideologies, although they go about their “symbolic work” in strikingly different ways, the one technologically passive and the other technologically proactive. Moreover, of these two appropriations, one (that of the nation) is hegemonic, in that it imposes itself and pre-empts the other. By reference to diverse historical examples, the discussion in the latter part of the paper attempts to elucidate the salient features of symbolic hegemony.     

Disruptions in tightly coupled supply chain networks: the case of the US offshore oil industry

Managers have paid increasing attention to the exposure of their supply chains to disruptions and seek ways to mitigate supply chain vulnerability. The interconnectedness of tightly coupled supply chain networks makes this a challenging task, because interconnectedness and tight coupling of nodes in the network lead to an amplification of the actual risk exposure. This phenomenon can be attributed to the propagation of losses through the network, which exhibits certain dynamics. In order to investigate this mechanism, we studied the complex supply chain network of the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico. Our results provide an estimate of the economic impact of eventual random and hurricane-related disruptions and can be used as a decision support tool for risk management of supply disruptions in interconnected supply chain networks.