Latin American convergence and divergence towards the mortality profiles of developed countries

It is uncertain whether Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries are approaching a single mortality regime. Over the last three decades, LAC has experienced major public health interventions and the highest number of homicides in the world. However, these interventions and homicide rates are not evenly shared across countries. This study documents trends in life expectancy and lifespan variability for 20 LAC countries, 2000–14. By extending a previous method, we decompose differences in lifespan variability between LAC and a developed world benchmark into cause-specific effects. For both sexes, dispersion of amenable diseases through the age span makes the largest contribution to the gap between LAC and the benchmark. Additionally, for males, the concentration of homicides, accidents, and suicides in mid-life further impedes mortality convergence. Great disparity exists in the region: while some countries are rapidly approaching the developed regime, others remain far behind and suffer a clear disadvantage in population health.     

‘Rachel's not here’: Constructed dialogue in gossip

Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that gossip is a co‐constructed phenomenon, which allows participants to establish solidarity and build alignments with each other, while evaluating an absent party. Gossip can also serve important social functions, such as helping to establish and reconfirm group norms and values. The present study provides a detailed analysis of an extended gossip episode that occurred within an institutional context: a study group interaction at a U.S. university. Our analysis shows how, in gossip, constructed dialogue both prompts and legitimizes pejorative evaluations towards an absent third party, and is actually the pivot around which group members negotiate values and norms in the process of arriving at a shared moral stance. Our analysis also demonstrates that alignment in gossip interactions is tenuous and must be continuously renewed.     

A new long-term survival model with dispersion induced by discrete frailty

Lifetime Data Analysis - Frailty models are generally used to model heterogeneity between the individuals. The distribution of the frailty variable is often assumed to be continuous. However, there...     

Integrating Operational and Organizational Aspects in Interdependent Infrastructure Network Recovery

Managing risk in infrastructure systems implies dealing with interdependent physical networks and their relationships with the natural and societal contexts. Computational tools are often used to support operational decisions aimed at improving resilience, whereas economics‐related tools tend to be used to address broader societal and policy issues in infrastructure management. We propose an optimization‐based framework for infrastructure resilience analysis that incorporates organizational and socioeconomic aspects into operational problems, allowing to understand relationships between decisions at the policy level (e.g., regulation) and the technical level (e.g., optimal infrastructure restoration). We focus on three issues that arise when integrating such levels. First, optimal restoration strategies driven by financial and operational factors evolve differently compared to those driven by socioeconomic and humanitarian factors. Second, regulatory aspects have a significant impact on recovery dynamics (e.g., effective recovery is most challenging in societies with weak institutions and regulation, where individual interests may compromise societal well‐being). And third, the decision space (i.e., available actions) in postdisaster phases is strongly determined by predisaster decisions (e.g., resource allocation). The proposed optimization framework addresses these issues by using: (1) parametric analyses to test the influence of operational and socioeconomic factors on optimization outcomes, (2) regulatory constraints to model and assess the cost and benefit (for a variety of actors) of enforcing specific policy‐related conditions for the recovery process, and (3) sensitivity analyses to capture the effect of predisaster decisions on recovery. We illustrate our methodology with an example regarding the recovery of interdependent water, power, and gas networks in Shelby County, TN (USA), with exposure to natural hazards.     

Behavioral responses of rural and urban greater white-toothed shrews (Crocidura russula) to sound disturbance

Urban Ecosystems - The development of urban areas imposes challenges that wildlife must adapt to in order to persist in these new habitats. One of the greatest changes brought by urbanization has...     

Responsibilisation,social work and inclusive social security in Finland

ABSTRACT

In this article responsibilisation in social work is studied by analysing two Finnish state-level policy documents (called final report and research report) which concern a current activation initiative called inclusive social security (ISS). It is asked how social workers and clients are constructed as responsible subjects in these documents. Responsibilisation refers to the advanced liberal mode of governmentality, which aims to strengthen citizens’ abilities to self-governance through various techniques that include the intertwined elements of surveillance and empowerment. It is demonstrated that the policy documents construct the social workers’ and the clients’ responsibilities partly in different ways. The final report leads activation to be based on shared responsibility and social work to be more community-based, whereas the research report strengthens more individual-based responsibility of clients and social workers. For the clients, the interpretation of ISS based on shared responsibility would probably be less stigmatising and paternalistic than the one based on individual responsibilities, i.e. approaching long-term unemployed citizens as being personally ‘at risk’ and thus a justified target group of individualised techniques for activation. For social workers and clients, future activation appears to be a wide mix of different techniques, moral expectations and possible ways of being a responsible subject.     

Tests for time series of counts based on the probability-generating function

We propose testing procedures for the hypothesis that a given set of discrete observations may be formulated as a particular time series of counts with a specific conditional law. The new test statistics incorporate the empirical probability-generating function computed from the observations. Special emphasis is given to the popular models of integer autoregression and Poisson autoregression. The asymptotic properties of the proposed test statistics are studied under the null hypothesis as well as under alternatives. A Monte Carlo power study on bootstrap versions of the new methods is included as well as real-data examples.     

Understanding Cumulative Risk Perception from Judgments and Choices: An Application to Flood Risks

Catastrophic events, such as floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis, are rare, yet the cumulative risk of each event occurring at least once over an extended time period can be substantial. In this work, we assess the perception of cumulative flood risks, how those perceptions affect the choice of insurance, and whether perceptions and choices are influenced by cumulative risk information. We find that participants' cumulative risk judgments are well represented by a bimodal distribution, with a group that severely underestimates the risk and a group that moderately overestimates it. Individuals who underestimate cumulative risks make more risk‐seeking choices compared to those who overestimate cumulative risks. Providing explicit cumulative risk information for relevant time periods, as opposed to annual probabilities, is an inexpensive and effective way to improve both the perception of cumulative risk and the choices people make to protect against that risk.     

Inequality Assessment by Probabilistic Development Indices

Social Indicators Research - This paper analyses the Human Development Index (HDI) time series from 2010 to 2017. An alternative index is studied, which combines the same components of the HDI by...