The localized nature of severe weather events leads to a concentration of correlated risks that can substantially amplify aggregate event-level losses. We propose a copula-based regression model for replicated spatial data to characterize the dependence between property damage claims arising from a common storm when analyzing its financial impact. The factor copula captures the location-based spatial dependence between properties, as well as the aspatial dependence induced by the common shock of experiencing the same storm. The framework allows insurers to flexibly incorporate the observed heterogeneity in marginal models of skewed, heavy-tailed, and zero-inflated insurance losses, while retaining the model interpretation in decomposing latent sources of dependence. We present a likelihood-based estimation to address the computational challenges from the discreteness and high dimensionality in the outcome of interest. Using hail damage insurance claims data from a US insurer, we demonstrate the effect of dependence on claims management decisions.

Independent experts are routinely appointed by international organisations for specific short-term assignments. Existing scholarship has studied their career trajectories, accumulation of resources, and mobility across occupational settings to explain their power and capacity to pursue their own agendas. However, it has neglected the fact that many transnational professionals not only move between professions but also practise them simultaneously. By using the example of the United Nations special rapporteur, an independent human rights expert, this article addresses this under-theorised feature by theorising them as plural professionals, or actors who practise multiple professions simultaneously. This multiple positioning in several professional settings at once can create tensions in how they approach their work. But, as I argue, it is also the source of their expert independence, rooted in a transnational social space connecting multiple professional identities, resources, and skills. Independence viewed through this lens is a socio-historical category which is made up of the combination of professional, biographical, and institutional resources as embodied and strategically mobilised by plural professionals. This argument builds on my original dataset of the professional biographies of 122 thematic special rapporteurs and 30 biographical interviews.

We offer a new explanation for the difference between cases where an auxiliary verb can and cannot contract, such as Kim is coming versus Kim is. Rather than a banning constraint, we argue that there is a positive syntactic licensing constraint. We consider, and reject, both the familiar Gap Restriction and a range of phonological explanations. Our analysis rests on the category of grammatical relations, valent, which includes all non-adjuncts (i.e. all subjects and complements); the analysis consists of a single claim, the Following Valent Constraint: that a contracted auxiliary has an overt following valent. We show how this analysis explains the full range of data that has been discussed in the literature and how a minor variant of the constraint captures the data of the Scots locative discovery expressions. We also propose a sociolinguistic explanation for the inability of auxiliaries to contract in certain environments, such as after a preposed negative. Finally, we suggest a functional explanation for the proposed constraint: It allows the hearer to predict the presence of a following valent and thereby to manage the burden of processing.

This article considers the question whether we can have direct, non-inferential knowledge of God, as experientialists such as Alston and Plantinga claim. Moreover, this needs to be done in a way that takes religious diversity into account. I contend that two developments in recent philosophy enable us to argue for direct knowledge of God in an inter-religious manner. The first is naturalized epistemology. I use a version of it in place of the epistemology employed by the experientialists. Specifically, I use methodological continuity between epistemology of science and epistemology of religion. This would help us to overcome dangers of religious balkanization and fideism. The second development is the increased focus on the importance of nature mysticism. This helps us to maintain the autonomy of religious experience. Since these experiences are considered universal, they enable us to engage in an experientialist version of natural theology in a manner that is at once continuous and discontinuous with Aquinas. It is continuous in its universality and generality and is discontinuous in using nature mystical experiences and not sense experience, as its starting point. The knowledge of God it gives is an inchoate awareness that finds different expression in different cultures.

Bovine trichomoniasis is a venereal disease that causes significant losses in the US beef industry. The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service views bovine trichomoniasis as endemic and delegates control to state agencies and producers. Disease management’s positive externalities are not reflected in a producer’s profit maximization problem, leading to potentially suboptimal levels of control. Our objective was to assess the economic impacts of 50% and 100% reductions of herd-level bovine trichomoniasis prevalence. The cumulative present value of net welfare increased by $388.856 and $193.222 million under the 100% and 50% scenarios, respectively. Feeder cattle producers and retail beef consumers benefit most from enhanced control.

Previous research indicates that strong right-hand preference predicts performance in other skills, such as vocabulary size and executive function (EF). The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between these functions, as well as social competence (SC), in a sample of preschool children. We used parent questionnaires and/or tabletop assessments to measure hand preference, fine motor skills, language, EF, and SC in 81 three- to five-year-old children. The results strengthened the evidence of a connection between right-hand use for pointing and vocabulary performance but indicated that right-hand use was not related to EF or SC. Further, the findings revealed a reciprocal connection between vocabulary and SC as well as EF and SC, but not vocabulary and EF. We discuss the implications of these connections for early childhood development.

Each year, I brace for National Hispanic Heritage Month, the intensely rich and active national holiday that takes months to plan, weeks to execute, and days from which to recover. With community partners, we often discuss how to best make use of this public holiday to spotlight our most pressing needs. As an educator, I use this public holiday to show students and colleagues, who are ever-more concerned about curricular alignment with workforce needs, about the importance of my mother tongue and its superpower to bridge communication in our multilingual nation. In the United States, more than 40 million people speak Spanish as their first language and there are more than 50 million speakers of Spanish. We can use this national public holiday to unearth and commemorate more widely – and loudly – that Spanish is also an American language. However, we might also realize that honoring our national Hispanic heritage needs more than one month.

Charcoal economies in central-east Africa are deep and powerful: they connect military and state financing with everyday family cooking. This article, based on new fieldwork in the understudied charcoal economy in South Sudan, explores the hierarchies and systems of self-employed producers, cash-for-piecework workers, middlemen and transporters, large-scale investors, and the public and defence sector financiers, landlords, brokers and security providers who all work in this political economy of forestry and charcoal-making. Drawing on local colonial archives and extensive fieldwork over 2020–2022, we break down the forms of work, investment and exploitation across this historical post/colonial landscape of labour, tree cultures, land rights and regional trade. In doing this we expand and escape the dominant and neatening metaphor of the value chain; we present a wider view of the expansion of the armed, privatised state economy; and we highlight current debates over the value, commodification and sale of forests and rural life.

Safety accounts of knowledge intend to explain why certain true and intuitively justified beliefs fail to be knowledge in terms of such beliefs falling prey to a modal veritic type of luck. In particular, they explain why true and intuitively justified beliefs in “lottery propositions” (highly likely propositions reporting that a particular statistical outcome obtains) are not knowledge. In this paper, I argue that there is a type of case involving lottery propositions that inevitably lies beyond the scope of any reasonable safety account of epistemic luck. I offer counterexamples to accounts of epistemic luck in terms of safety conditions that involve both “locally” and “globally” reliable ways of forming beliefs in nearby worlds. All such counterexamples present a lottery case illustrating the next possibility: the process of selecting the lottery winner might be such that any world in which it delivers a different outcome is extremely far away from the actual world. In addition to being a case of safe ignorance, this type of lottery case shows that, ultimately, either veritic epistemic luck is not unsafe true belief or beliefs in lottery propositions are not epistemically luckily true.

Let M be a von Neumann algebra, let $\varphi $ be a normal faithful state on M and let $L^p(M,\varphi )$ be the associated Haagerup noncommutative $L^p$-spaces, for $1\leq p\leq \infty $. Let $D\in L^1(M,\varphi )$ be the density of $\varphi $. Given a positive map $T\colon M\to M$ such that $\varphi \circ T\leq C_1\varphi $ for some $C_1\geq 0$, we study the boundedness of the $L^p$-extension $T_{p,\theta }\colon D^{\frac {1-\theta }{p}} MD^{\frac {\theta }{p}}\to L^p(M,\varphi )$ which maps $D^{\frac {1-\theta }{p}} x D^{\frac {\theta }{p}}$ to $D^{\frac {1-\theta }{p}} T(x) D^{\frac {\theta }{p}}$ for all $x\in M$. Haagerup–Junge–Xu showed that $T_{p,{\frac {1}{2}}}$ is always bounded and left open the question whether $T_{p,\theta }$ is bounded for $\theta \not ={\frac {1}{2}}$. We show that for any $1\leq p<2$ and any $\theta \in [0, 2^{-1}(1-\sqrt {p-1})]\cup [2^{-1}(1+\sqrt {p-1}), 1]$, there exists a completely positive T such that $T_{p,\theta }$ is unbounded. We also show that if T is $2$-positive, then $T_{p,\theta }$ is bounded provided that $p\geq 2$ or $1\leq p<2$ and $\theta \in [1-p/2,p/2]$.