How premarital children and childbearing in current marriage influence divorce of Swedish women in their first marriages

By using a Swedish register data set and applying hazard models with unobserved heterogeneity, this study demonstrates that the partners' childbearing history plays an important role in predicting the divorce risks of families with various combination of premarital children. Families with premarital children definitely have a higher risk of divorce than do those without premarital children. Producing a common child reduces the divorce risk, but as the youngest common child gets older, his or her role in maintaining family bond weakens. Families which the wife has premarital children by another man decidedly have a higher risk of divorce than do families with other combinations of premarital children. Other findings deviate from what has been reported in the literature.common childbearing, divorce risk, premarital children, stepfamily, Sweden

Divorce risks of Swedish women in first marriages: two cohorts born in 1950 and 1960

In this paper, we study first-marriage divorce risks in two cohorts of Swedish women, namely, those born in 1950 and 1960. We develop a hazard model with a piecewise-linear baseline log-hazard. First, we run the model without unobserved heterogeneity and second, we run the model with such a term. We have found a divorce pattern for Swedish women similar to what other researchers have found. Facilitated by having both cohort data and efficient software (aML), we were able to get a clear picture of the timing pattern of first marital dissolution risks. Our 1950 cohort model without unobserved heterogeneity does not produce any biased results; our 1960 cohort model with no unobserved heterogeneity overestimates the baseline hazard and evidently underestimates some of the coefficients.Sweden, cohorts, divorce

How premarital children and childbearing in the current marriage influence family stability

By using a Swedish register data set and applying hazard models with unobserved heterogeneity, this study demonstrates that childbearing history plays an important role in predicting the divorce risks of families with various types of premarital children. Families with premarital children definitely have a higher risk of divorce than do those without premarital children. Producing a common child cements bonds in the family but as the youngest common child grows up, his or her role of maintaining family relations weakens. Families with premarital children from the wife´s relation with another man clearly have a higher risk of divorce than do families with other types of premarital children. Additional findings deviate from what has been reported in the literature.Sweden, childbearing, divorce, premarital births

Demographic trends in Sweden

In the present note, we display the main features of recent trends in family-demographic behavior in Sweden. We update previously published indexes of marriage, divorce, and childbearing risks by calendar year in order to cover the developments up to 1999-2000, adding another two and three years of observation to our series.childbearing, divorce, marriage, Sweden

Does divorce risk depend on spouses´ relative income? A register-based study of first marriages in Sweden in 1981–1998

The relationship between increasing women’s earnings and rising divorce rates frequently has been explained by the so-called independence effect: If a wife enjoys a higher earning than her husband does, she gains less from marriage. It has also been argued that in a society with egalitarian gender attitudes this effect is less important. In this paper, we test if the independence effect applies to Sweden, a country in which egalitarian gender views dominate and female labor-force participation and divorce rates are high. Our analysis is based on a large register data set and intensity regression models. We found support for the ‘independence effect’: The linear relationship between the share of a wife’s income and the divorce risk is positive. We also found that the higher the total income of the couple, the lower their divorce risk, but this relationship appears to be less strong.Sweden, divorce, family dynamics, income, marriage

China’s popular TV dramas & their role in the party’s political communication since 2001

This thesis is one of the very few studies that have examined how Chinese Communist Party (or the Party) used its media to appropriate traditional Chinese cultural values for political purposes. It focuses on the TV dramas that have won the top Feitian Awards (China’s top official TV drama awards) from 2002 to 2011, a total of 35 TV dramas. Drawing on the insights offered by framing theory and Lévi-Strauss’s binary opposition theory in their study of media content/messages and based on framing theory, the thesis proposes and elaborates a theoretical framework—network framing—to explain the cultural appropriation in the selected TV dramas. It has proposed that traditional Chinese cultural values have been woven into network patterned TV dramas as the central organizing ideas to promote the Party-desired messages/agendas. The thesis adopts mainly a qualitative methodology, combining textual narrative analysis and contextual secondary data analysis with the former as the major research method. The results of the narrative analyses of five case-studied dramas largely confirm the relevance of the proposed network framing: all five dramas are network patterned and are organized /framed around traditional Chinese cultural values, most of which are Confucianism-based, to promote the Party-desired messages/agendas; the traditional Chinese cultural values used as the central organizing ideas and the messages/agendas promoted by the Party vary with different dramas depending on the issues/ problems covered. These network-patterned traditional-Chinese-culture-framed stories contrast sharply with the binary-oppositionally-structured class-based stories of the cultural works of the pre-reform Maoist era. Comparing the former with the latter and discussing the transition from the latter to the former, the thesis argues that the Party’s political communication since 2001 has undergone significant changes: once as the dominant concepts in the Party’s ideology in the Maoist era, class and class struggle have now been dropped out of the Party’s ideology while traditional Chinese cultural values particularly Confucianism-based ones, which for long have been rejected and condemned by the Party, have now become part of the Party’s ideology; the way the Party communicates its messages/agendas has changed from crudity and over- simplicity in pre-reform Maoist era towards refinement, subtlety and sophistication in the current post-reform era. The thesis also argues with the results of the secondary data analysis that the production of TV dramas in the current post-reform era involves various political actors such as the Party-state, its representatives such as the former SARFT, and the commercial market (or the Chinese audience) and that the textual subtlety and sophistication in communicating the Party’s messages/agendas result from the combined sophisticated influences from these different political actors. In conclusion, the Party’s cultural appropriation through TV dramas for political purposes demonstrates that the Party’s political communication has developed toward sophistication

Protecting Electrical Connectors From Corrosion

This publication describes techniques and apparatuses for protecting electrical connectors from corrosion. An electrical connector may include an electrolytic plating stack-up of layers configured to minimize electrolytic corrosion. The plating stack-ups described in this publication utilize various elements applied in multiple ways to create a cost-efficient and effective solution for minimizing electrolytic corrosion in electrical connectors, thereby improving efficiency and extending the life of electrical connectors

High-altitude gravity waves in the Martian thermosphere observed by MAVEN/NGIMS and modeled by a gravity wave scheme

First high-altitude observations of gravity wave (GW)-induced CO$_2$ density perturbations in the Martian thermosphere retrieved from NASA's NGIMS instrument on board the MAVEN satellite are presented and interpreted using the extended GW parameterization of Yi\u{g}it et al. [2008] and the Mars Climate Database as an input. Observed relative density perturbations between 180-220 km of 20-40 % demonstrate appreciable local time, latitude, and altitude variations. Modeling for the spatiotemporal conditions of the MAVEN observations suggests that GWs can directly propagate from the lower atmosphere to the thermosphere, produce appreciable dynamical effects, and likely contribute to the observed fluctuations. Modeled effects are somewhat smaller than the observed but their highly variable nature is in qualitative agreement with observations. Possible reasons for discrepancies between modeling and measurements are discussed.Comment: Accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). Special section: First Results from the MAVEN Mission to Mar