T H E welfare states of the affluent democracies now stand at the centre of political discussion and social conflict. Analysts frequently portray these conflicts as fundamental struggles between supporters and opponents of the basic principles of the post-war social contract. They often emphasize that the politics of social policy are played out against the backdrop of a transformed global econ...

System dynamics has been enriched from many disciplines. This paper describes our effort to discover generic structures in the field of social psychology. Social psychologists have accumulated a body of empirical studies and theories that are reproducible and apply to a variety of social situations. Our task was to start modeling a few pivotal dynamic effects found in the social psychology lite...

In general there seems to be widespread agreement that fertility began to decline among all major population groups in South Africa prior to the end of apartheid. It occurred at a much faster level for Whites and Asians as compared to Africans and Coloureds. This occurred amidst the impoverishment of millions (especially African women), stark inequalities and the disempowerment of women. Althou...

A mark up language for tagging discourse, and for converting discourse sequences into a written format, according to highly context sensitive procedures, will be illustrated as well as a system for document annotation. The context in which a given communicative intercourse has taken place needs to be made available to ensure consistent interpretation of both single sequences of discourse and gl...

In a model with ex-ante homogenous households, income risk and a general earnings function, we derive an optimal labor tax rate and optimal education subsidies. It turns out that the distinction of risk-increasing or risk-decreasing education does not have much effect on the optimal tax rate, but is crucial for optimal education subsidies. Moreover, an optimal education policy allows for better...

Shape-based online handwriting recognition suffers on small characters, in which the distortions and variations are often commensurate in size with the characters themselves. This problem is emphasized in settings where characters may have widely different sizes and there is no absolute scale. We propose methods that use size information to adjust shape-based classification to take this phenome...

This paper starts out with a brief discussion of the historical background, the justifications and the political forces behind the built up of the modern welfare state. It also summarizes its major achievements in terms of economic efficiency and redistribution. The paper also tries to identify some major problems of contemporary welfare-state arrangements, differentiating exogenous shocks from...

For p ∈ [2,∞) the metric Xp inequality with sharp scaling parameter is proven here to hold true in Lp. The geometric consequences of this result include the following sharp statements about embeddings of Lq into Lp when 2 < q < p <∞: the maximal θ ∈ (0, 1] for which Lq admits a bi-θ-Hölder embedding into Lp equals q/p, and for m,n ∈ N the smallest possible bi-Lipschitz distortion of any embeddi...

In this paper we examine and summarize properties of several well-known risk measures that can be used in the framework of setting solvency capital requirements for a risky business. Special attention is given to the class of (concave) distortion risk measures. We investigate the relationship between these risk measures and theories of choice under risk. Furthermore we consider the problem of h...

As a telepresence robot is a robot intended for use in telecommunications, conveying the presence of a remote sender is an important issue. Even though certain characteristics of robots such as motion cues could be effective at generating a sense of remote sender presence, motion cues also have risks yielding a distortion of the remote sender presence when these are used in an inappropriate way...