Delivering insurance to low-income households

Lack of insurance is recognised as a key indicator of financial exclusion in the UK, and the government is encouraging thinking on how it can be tackled. Community development finance institutions (CDFIs) have a UK-wide presence, and have experience of offering financial products to financially excluded, low-income consumers. This paper explores whether they could become effective suppliers of home contents insurance and life insurance to their current, and prospective, clients

Resisting and Persisting through Organizational Exit: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Disclosing Sexual Harassment in Collegiate Debate

Collegiate debate has documented extensive problems with sexual harassment. This manuscript uses the first author’s layered account of sexual harassment experienced as a collegiate debater, her transition to a different university, and the management of private information with her family. Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory and a plethora of studies provide a theoretical lens of the first author’s autoethnographic experience. We advance CPM theory by examining how young adult children manage their privacy through constructing more rigid privacy boundaries than their adolescent counterparts and provide the first look at how disclosure can both enable and constrain victims/survivors of sexual harassment, as well as interrogate the way in which survivors can own their experiences and perpetrators be held accountable within the debate community

Higher moments of spin-spin correlation functions for the ferromagnetic random bond Potts model

Using CFT techniques, we compute the disorder-averaged p-th power of the spin-spin correlation function for the ferromagnetic random bonds Potts model. We thus generalize the calculation of Dotsenko, Dotsenko and Picco, where the case p=2 was considered. Perturbative calculations are made up to the second order in epsilon (epsilon being proportional to the central charge deviation of the pure model from the Ising model value). The explicit dependence of the correlation function on $p$ gives an upper bound for the validity of the expansion, which seems to be valid, in the three-states case, only if p-alpha in final formula

Stability of critical behaviour of weakly disordered systems with respect to the replica symmetry breaking

A field-theoretic description of the critical behaviour of the weakly disordered systems is given. Directly, for three- and two-dimensional systems a renormalization analysis of the effective Hamiltonian of model with replica symmetry breaking (RSB) potentials is carried out in the two-loop approximation. For case with 1-step RSB the fixed points (FP's) corresponding to stability of the various types of critical behaviour are identified with the use of the Pade-Borel summation technique. Analysis of FP's has shown a stability of the critical behaviour of the weakly disordered systems with respect to RSB effects and realization of former scenario of disorder influence on critical behaviour.Comment: 10 pages, RevTeX. Version 3 adds the $\beta$ functions for arbitrary dimension of syste

Scale Invariance and Self-averaging in disordered systems

In a previous paper we found that in the random field Ising model at zero temperature in three dimensions the correlation length is not self-averaging near the critical point and that the violation of self-averaging is maximal. This is due to the formation of bound states in the underlying field theory. We present a similar study for the case of disordered Potts and Ising ferromagnets in two dimensions near the critical temperature. In the random Potts model the correlation length is not self-averaging near the critical temperature but the violation of self-averaging is weaker than in the random field case. In the random Ising model we find still weaker violations of self-averaging and we cannot rule out the possibility of the restoration of self-averaging in the infinite volume limit.Comment: 7 pages, 4 ps figure

Privacy Management as Unfinished Business: Shifting Boundaries in the Context of Infertility

Privacy dilemmas are prevalent for women who experience a fertility problem. In this study, we use communication privacy management (CPM) theory to explore how privacy boundaries shift over time as women cope with infertility. Based on interviews with 23 women, we found that women described distinctive patterns of shifting privacy boundaries, including situations in which the experience of infertility served as a change agent, patterns in which women became more or less open over time, and patterns that indicated a continuous oscillation of boundaries. These ever-changing patterns of talk indicate that managing private information about infertility is unfinished business

Critical behavior of disordered systems with replica symmetry breaking

A field-theoretic description of the critical behavior of weakly disordered systems with a $p$-component order parameter is given. For systems of an arbitrary dimension in the range from three to four, a renormalization group analysis of the effective replica Hamiltonian of the model with an interaction potential without replica symmetry is given in the two-loop approximation. For the case of the one-step replica symmetry breaking, fixed points of the renormalization group equations are found using the Pade-Borel summing technique. For every value $p$, the threshold dimensions of the system that separate the regions of different types of the critical behavior are found by analyzing those fixed points. Specific features of the critical behavior determined by the replica symmetry breaking are described. The results are compared with those obtained by the $\epsilon$-expansion and the scope of the method applicability is determined.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figure

“We Were Not Prepared to Tell People Yet”: Confidentiality Breaches and Boundary Turbulence on Facebook

Communication Privacy Management theory provides a framework for investigating confidentiality breaches that occur on Facebook. Open-ended online questionnaires served as mechanism for collecting data about privacy violations and the resulting boundary turbulence. Privacy violations validated three a priori categories (Petronio & Reierson, 2009) of confidentiality breaches (privacy ownership violations, discrepancy breaches of privacy, and pre-emptive privacy control). Findings indicated that the lack of established explicit privacy rules led to privacy violations and boundary turbulence. Results also provided insight regarding motivations of privacy violations, reactions to privacy violations, and the role of privacy rules in the violation

Chaotic Behavior in Coupled Superconducting Weak Links

Computer simulations have been carried out for a system consisting of a pair of coupled superconducting weak links described by a noncapacitive, resistively shunted equivalent circuit. Both dc and ac bias currents are assumed for each link. It is found that for certain ranges of ac amplitude, chaotic behavior occurs. Coupling is crucial to this result—without it no chaos will appear