Frontier spaces of vulnerability: Regional change,urbanization, drought and fire hazard in Santarém,Pará, Brazil

Fire hazard is a mounting concern in tropical rainforests of the Brazilian Amazon and has raised awareness within the science community of the links between agricultural fire use, drought and accidental fire. As a result, fire is being addressed as a crisis event with mitigation focused on those who light fires, particularly smallholder agriculturalists. Little attention is paid to the historical and ongoing ways in which Amazon landscapes and peoples have been made more susceptible to fire. Frontier regions of the Brazilian Amazon serve a variety of functions within the larger Brazilian society, including as extractive reserves for economic development, as social safety valves to reduce population pressures, and as areas to support urban regional integration. Each of these functions has impacted frontier environments in ways that create more flammable landscapes and/or shape the vulnerability of people to fire hazard. This paper uses a case study inthe Brazilian Lower Amazon to understand how vulnerability to fire hazard develops. It argues that if fire mitigation remains centered on fire as a crisis event, an understanding of what constitutes frontier spaces of vulnerability, both in landscape and in populations, will be limited.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
M Hollander and D Wolfe, Nonparametric Statistical Methods
T Leonard and J.S.J Hsu, Bayesian Methods     

论证券市场化解委托代理风险的作用机制

本文首先探讨了证券市场化解股份有限公司代理人道德风险问题的作用机制 ,并进一步详尽地分析了该机制发挥作用需要具备的条件 ,包括 :证券市场存在、证券市场具有完善的信息交流功能、证券市场有效性较高等。文章继而对照上述条件分析了我国证券市场的现状。最后提出了改进的对策     

Implied Preference for Seismic Design Level and Earthquake Insurance

Seismic risk can be reduced by implementing newly developed seismic provisions in design codes. Furthermore, financial protection or enhanced utility and happiness for stakeholders could be gained through the purchase of earthquake insurance. If this is not so, there would be no market for such insurance. However, perceived benefit associated with insurance is not universally shared by stakeholders partly due to their diverse risk attitudes. This study investigates the implied seismic design preference with insurance options for decisionmakers of bounded rationality whose preferences could be adequately represented by the cumulative prospect theory (CPT). The investigation is focused on assessing the sensitivity of the implied seismic design preference with insurance options to model parameters of the CPT and to fair and unfair insurance arrangements. Numerical results suggest that human cognitive limitation and risk perception can affect the implied seismic design preference by the CPT significantly. The mandatory purchase of fair insurance will lead the implied seismic design preference to the optimum design level that is dictated by the minimum expected lifecycle cost rule. Unfair insurance decreases the expected gain as well as its associated variability, which is preferred by risk-averse decisionmakers. The obtained results of the implied preference for the combination of the seismic design level and insurance option suggest that property owners, financial institutions, and municipalities can take advantage of affordable insurance to establish successful seismic risk management strategies.     

对品牌不当延伸的思考

文章界定了品牌延伸的内涵,分析了品牌延伸的动力机制,阐述了品牌不当延伸的主要危害,如引起消费者的不良联想、破坏原有品牌形象、降低消费者对品牌的忠诚度及失去老顾客、使原有品牌价值流失等。就如何正确开展品牌延伸提出了围绕核心价值开展品牌延伸、遵循品牌延伸"近亲繁殖有益"原则、根据产品的不同分类来实行多品牌命名等观点。     

试论企业经营中的委托——代理关系与激励机制设计

企业经营中的委托—代理关系和激励机制问题显然是存在若干冲突理论和观点 的复杂课题，本文通过一个简单的数理模型对这一问题进行了理论上的阐释，同时也给出了现 阶段解决问题的一般思路。     

试论公证在电子合同中的应用价值

随着网络经济时代的到来, 人们通过缔结电子合同来进行交易的情况越来越多。由于电子合同存在种种难以预测的特殊风险, 故而需要对其加以法律控制, 而公证作为国家法律证明手段, 若应用到电子合同中, 势必能降低电子合同的特殊风险。     

抗震救灾伟大斗争彰显中国人民伟大力量

中国人民与四川汶川地震自然灾害进行的伟大斗争，向全世界展示了中国共产党的坚强领导能力、中国特色社会主义伟大旗帜的巨大号召力、人民军队的强大战斗力、社会主义中国的厚实综合国力以及中华民族精神的蓬勃生机与活力。     

BATHTUB-TYPE CURVES IN RELIABILITY AND BEYOND

Finding optimal, or at least good, maintenance and repair policies is crucial in reliability engineering. Likewise, describing life phases of human mortality is important when determining social policy or insurance premiums. In these tasks, one searches for distributions to fit data and then makes inferences about the population(s). In the present paper, we focus on bathtub‐type distributions and provide a view of certain problems, methods and solutions, and a few challenges, that can be encountered in reliability engineering, survival analysis, demography and actuarial science.     

On an adaptive version of the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm with independent proposal distribution

In this paper, we present a general formulation of an algorithm, the adaptive independent chain (AIC), that was introduced in a special context in Gåsemyr et al . [ Methodol. Comput. Appl. Probab. 3 (2001)]. The algorithm aims at producing samples from a specific target distribution Π, and is an adaptive, non-Markovian version of the Metropolis–Hastings independent chain. A certain parametric class of possible proposal distributions is fixed, and the parameters of the proposal distribution are updated periodically on the basis of the recent history of the chain, thereby obtaining proposals that get ever closer to Π. We show that under certain conditions, the algorithm produces an exact sample from Π in a finite number of iterations, and hence that it converges to Π. We also present another adaptive algorithm, the componentwise adaptive independent chain (CAIC), which may be an alternative in particular in high dimensions. The CAIC may be regarded as an adaptive approximation to the Gibbs sampler updating parametric approximations to the conditionals of Π.