31 research outputs found
Sequences of purchases in credit card data reveal life styles in urban populations
Zipf-like distributions characterize a wide set of phenomena in physics,
biology, economics and social sciences. In human activities, Zipf-laws describe
for example the frequency of words appearance in a text or the purchases types
in shopping patterns. In the latter, the uneven distribution of transaction
types is bound with the temporal sequences of purchases of individual choices.
In this work, we define a framework using a text compression technique on the
sequences of credit card purchases to detect ubiquitous patterns of collective
behavior. Clustering the consumers by their similarity in purchases sequences,
we detect five consumer groups. Remarkably, post checking, individuals in each
group are also similar in their age, total expenditure, gender, and the
diversity of their social and mobility networks extracted by their mobile phone
records. By properly deconstructing transaction data with Zipf-like
distributions, this method uncovers sets of significant sequences that reveal
insights on collective human behavior.Comment: 30 pages, 26 figure
Child Marriages and Unions in Latin America: Understanding the Roles of Agency and Social Norms
El propĂłsito de este artĂculo es demostrar que los matrimonios y las uniones infantiles pueden infringir los derechos sexuales y reproductivos de adolescentes y jĂłvenes. Indica que las intervenciones promueven cada vez mĂĄs estrategias para transformar las normas sociales. Presenta los resultados de un anĂĄlisis de secundario de casos cruzados de tres estudios cualitativos: en Brasil, Guatemala y Honduras. Se tratĂł de entender las prĂĄcticas matrimoniales. En los tres casos, la agencia como las normas sociales siempre desempeñaron un papel en el matrimonio y/o uniones de los niños
Climate Change and Global Food Systems: Potential Impacts on Food Security and Undernutrition.
Great progress has been made in addressing global undernutrition over the past several decades, in part because of large increases in food production from agricultural expansion and intensification. Food systems, however, face continued increases in demand and growing environmental pressures. Most prominently, human-caused climate change will influence the quality and quantity of food we produce and our ability to distribute it equitably. Our capacity to ensure food security and nutritional adequacy in the face of rapidly changing biophysical conditions will be a major determinant of the next century's global burden of disease. In this article, we review the main pathways by which climate change may affect our food production systems-agriculture, fisheries, and livestock-as well as the socioeconomic forces that may influence equitable distribution
Data cooperatives as catalysts for collaboration, data sharing, and the (trans)formation of the digital commons
Network effects, economies of scale, and lock-in-effects increasingly lead to a concentration of digital resources and capabilities, hindering the free and equitable development of digital entrepreneurship (SDG9), new skills, and jobs (SDG8), especially in small communities (SDG11) and their small and medium-sized enterprises (âSMEsâ). To ensure the affordability and accessibility of technologies, promote digital entrepreneurship and community well-being (SDG3), and protect digital rights, we propose data cooperatives [1,2] as a vehicle for secure, trusted, and sovereign data exchange [3,4]. In post-pandemic times, community/SME-led cooperatives can play a vital role by ensuring that supply chains to support digital commons are uninterrupted, resilient, and decentralized [5]. Digital commons and data sovereignty provide communities with affordable and easy access to information and the ability to collectively negotiate data-related decisions. Moreover, cooperative commons (a) provide access to the infrastructure that underpins the modern economy, (b) preserve property rights, and (c) ensure that privatization and monopolization do not further erode self-determination, especially in a world increasingly mediated by AI. Thus, governance plays a significant role in accelerating communitiesâ/SMEsâ digital transformation and addressing their challenges. Cooperatives thrive on digital governance and standards such as open trusted Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that increase the efficiency, technological capabilities, and capacities of participants and, most importantly, integrate, enable, and accelerate the digital transformation of SMEs in the overall process. This policy paper presents and discusses several transformative use cases for cooperative data governance. The use cases demonstrate how platform/data-cooperatives, and their novel value creation can be leveraged to take digital commons and value chains to a new level of collaboration while addressing the most pressing community issues. The proposed framework for a digital federated and sovereign reference architecture will create a blueprint for sustainable development both in the Global South and North
Appendices from A non-equilibrium formulation of food security resilience
Resilience, the ability to recover from adverse events, is of fundamental importance to food security. This is especially true in poor countries, where basic needs are frequently threatened by economic, environmental and health shocks. An empirically sound formalization of the concept of food security resilience, however, is lacking. Here, we introduce a general non-equilibrium framework for quantifying resilience based on the statistical notion of persistence. Our approach can be applied to any food security variable for which high-frequency time-series data are available. We illustrate our method with <i>per capita</i> kilocalorie availability for 161 countries between 1961 and 2011. We find that resilient countries are not necessarily those that are characterized by high levels or less volatile fluctuations of kilocalorie intake. Accordingly, food security policies and programmes will need to be tailored not only to welfare levels at any one time, but also to long-run welfare dynamics
Results from A non-equilibrium formulation of food security resilience
Resilience, the ability to recover from adverse events, is of fundamental importance to food security. This is especially true in poor countries, where basic needs are frequently threatened by economic, environmental and health shocks. An empirically sound formalization of the concept of food security resilience, however, is lacking. Here, we introduce a general non-equilibrium framework for quantifying resilience based on the statistical notion of persistence. Our approach can be applied to any food security variable for which high-frequency time-series data are available. We illustrate our method with <i>per capita</i> kilocalorie availability for 161 countries between 1961 and 2011. We find that resilient countries are not necessarily those that are characterized by high levels or less volatile fluctuations of kilocalorie intake. Accordingly, food security policies and programmes will need to be tailored not only to welfare levels at any one time, but also to long-run welfare dynamics
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Child Marriages and Unions in Latin America: Understanding the Roles of Agency and Social Norms.
PURPOSE:Child marriages and unions can infringe upon adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health (AYSRH). Interventions increasingly promote strategies to transform social norms or foster the agency of adolescent girls. Recent empirical studies call for further understanding of how social norms and agency interact in ways that influence these practices, especially in contexts where girls' agency is central. METHODS:A secondary cross-case analysis of three qualitative studies (in Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras) was conducted to inform the investigation of how norms and agency may relate in sustaining or mitigating child marriage. RESULTS:Social norms dictating how girls/young women and how men should act indirectly led to child marriages and unions. The data showed that (1) social norms regulated girls' acceptable actions and contributed to their exercise of "oppositional" agency; (2) social norms promoted girls' "accommodating" agency; and (3) girls exercised "transformative" agency to resist harmful social norms. CONCLUSIONS:Research should advance frameworks to conceptualize how social norms interact with agency in nuanced and context-specific ways. Practitioners should encourage equitable decision-making; offer confidential, adolescent-friendly AYSRH services; and address the social norms of parents, men and boys, and community members