Youth Perspectives on Social Insurance in Egypt: Qualitative Insights on the Gap between Legal and Effective Coverage

A gap between legal and effective coverage rates is a common challenge facing social insurance systems in Low‐ and Middle‐Income Countries. This article draws on an exploratory qualitative study with youth in Egypt to examine how labour market dynamics and worker preferences contribute to this gap. Labour market factors, particularly instability of employment and job mobility, were found to reduce the perceived value of social insurance. Poor understanding of how social insurance works was another contributing factor. However, youth displayed a high level of trust in the public social insurance system and saw pensions as valuable in the abstract. In combination with awareness promotion, eliminating penalties to discontinuous labour force participation could make social insurance more attractive to youth.     

Middle‐Class Parents and Urban Public Schools: Current Research and Future Directions

Middle‐class flight from urban public schools to suburban districts or private schools is a key source of educational inequality. Recently, however, a number of studies have focused on middle‐class and upper‐middle‐class families who have made a different choice, opting to remain in the city and send their children to neighborhood public schools. While the movement of advantaged families into urban public schools has received positive attention in the media, this growing body of research tells a more complicated story. Middle‐class families – with their economic, cultural, and social capital – can bring important resources to schools, resulting in widespread benefits. However, their engagement in urban public schools can also lead to marginalization and exclusion. We review the emergent literature on this topic, highlighting four themes: (i) parent preferences, identities, and values; (ii) the role of marketing campaigns and informal networks in attracting the middle class; (iii) the nature and consequences of middle‐class parent engagement in urban schooling; and (iv) the relationship between neighborhood change and school change. We conclude by outlining a research agenda aimed at deepening our understanding of the mechanisms by which middle‐class parent engagement in urban schooling may serve to mitigate, reproduce, or exacerbate educational inequalities.     

The mathematics of sex and marriage,revisited

We analyze the problem of modeling marriages in a two‐sex model of population dynamics. We first deal with the problem of incomplete and inconsistent census data and then use a simulator to compare the performance of a variety of marriage functions in modeling births and couples during the ten‐year period between consecutive U.S. censuses. Unlike most empirical methods for comparing marriage functions based on goodness of fit, the differences in the projections of the various functions in our method are of the same magnitude (or even smaller) than the errors between the projected and real data. We observe that for the population of the United States, the harmonic mean function frequently found and used in the literature is a quite poor performer when compared with many other functions in the family we use.     

Education in multicultural environment – teaching/learning support activities (on the example of Georgia)

The National Curricula of Georgia emphasises the importance of intercultural education only in a declarative way. This article investigates how specific activities can contribute to the development of intercultural competences in a diverse environment. We conclude that additional training resources are critical for the development of those competencies among students. Application of our proposed model can serve to improve the intercultural schooling and adaptation of students in diverse environments.     

Identification of the mental workload of public employees in the administrative sector at a public university

In the workplace there are risk factors that can overwhelm the health of the worker causing physical and psychological disorders. Among these disorders, is occupational stress. Thus, this research proposes to measure the mental workload of job stress from the identification of demand, control and social support. It is an observational cross-sectional epidemiological character, performed with the Rectory office workers at the State University of West Paraná (Unioeste). Data collection was due to the application of the "Job Stress Scale" (JSS) and in its reduced version adapted to Portuguese. The survey sample consisted of 44 individuals. Statistical analysis was correlated inversely with medium intensity (r = -0.404) between age and social support. For males was found between control and age (r = 0.603). According to the data obtained, we conclude that most workers are exposed to passive work, leading to loss of skills or disinterest in the job. This study highlights the importance of research in the area and the need for new actions that change the conditions of stress at work.     

Ergonomics at Volkswagen Brasil. Multidisciplinary work to equalize health, productivity and quality

Following the technological developments and presented to the multidisciplinary processes as automakers, Volkswagen Brazil, represented by its ergonomists, through this paper, shows the importance of ergonomic efficiency of management applied to various levels of life of a product, since its creation to its final implementation on production lines.The preventive work of ergonomists during the processes leading to production of a vehicle is accomplished through assessments on a simulated system called the Digital Factory. Since the initial stages to final product delivery there is a need for a multidisciplinary aligning the concepts of ergonomics, productivity and quality of product. Industrial Engineering, Process Engineering, ergonomists and workers are involved in the analysis made through the Workshop's showing the importance of discussion between the various users of the systems. The processes of series are also equipped with a set of certifications flow of job and planned audits on items that describe processes and applied ergonomics.     

The Impacts of Cash Transfers on Subjective Wellbeing and Poverty: The Case of Colombia

Cash transfer programs have been the main social policy in the fight against poverty and inequality in Latin-American countries. This paper analyzes the impacts of the program Más Familias en Acción on the perception of poverty and subjective wellbeing in Colombia. The analyses are based on data from the Encuesta Nacional de Calidad de Vida between 2008 and 2016. Two empirical strategies were compared to account for the lack of randomness in groups of beneficiary and non-beneficiary families: (i) non-experimental designs (linear and nonlinear models with cross-sectional and pooled data); (ii) quasi-experimental designs (Propensity Score Matching and Inverse Probability Weighted Regression Adjustment). The results were robust to the different empirical strategies and emphasized that: (i) transfers increase the perception of food insecurity and subjective poverty; (ii) conditionalities involve positive impacts on different indicators of subjective wellbeing, especially health and education; (iii) general impacts on the perceptions of life are nonsignificant, as a result of divergent impacts on the dimensions of the subjective wellbeing of families.     

Truncated location-scale non linear regression models

We present a class of truncated non linear regression models for location and scale where the truncated nature of the data is incorporated into the statistical model by assuming that the response variable follows a truncated distribution. The location parameter of the response variable is assumed to be modeled by a continuous non linear function of covariates and unknown parameters. In addition, the proposed model also allows for the scale parameter of the responses to be characterized by a continuous function of the covariates and unknown parameters. Three particular cases of the proposed models are presented by considering the response variable to follow a truncated normal, truncated skew normal, and truncated beta distribution. These truncated non linear regression models are constructed assuming fixed known truncation limits and model parameters are estimated by direct maximization of the log-likelihood using a non linear optimization algorithm. Standardized residuals and diagnostic metrics based on the cases deletion are considered to verify the adequacy of the model and to detect outliers and influential observations. Results based on simulated data are presented to assess the frequentist properties of estimates, and a real data set on soil-water retention from the Buriti Vermelho River Basin database is analyzed using the proposed methodology.