In 1763 King George III of Great Britain, victorious in the Seven Years War with France, issued a proclamation to organize the governance of territory newly acquired by the Crown in North America and ...the Caribbean. The proclamation reserved land west of the Appalachian Mountains for Indians, and required the Crown to purchase Indian land through treaties, negotiated without coercion and in public, before issuing rights to newcomers to use and settle on the land. Marking its 250th anniversary Keeping Promises shows how central the application of the Proclamation is to the many treaties that followed it and the settlement and development of Canada. Promises have been made to Aboriginal peoples in historic treaties from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries in Ontario, the Prairies, and the Mackenzie Valley, and in modern treaties from the 1970s onward, primarily in the North. In this collection, essays by historians, lawyers, treaty negotiators, and Aboriginal leaders explore how and how well these treaties are executed. Addresses by the governor general of Canada and the federal minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development are also included. In 2003 Aboriginal leaders formed the Land Claims Agreements Coalition to make sure that treaties – building blocks of Canada – are fully implemented. Unique in breadth and scope, Keeping Promises is a testament to the research, advocacy, solidarity, and accomplishments of this coalition and those holding the Crown to its commitments.
The aim of this project is to develop a stochastic simulation machine that generates individual claims histories of non-life insurance claims. This simulation machine is based on neural networks to ...incorporate individual claims feature information. We provide a fully calibrated stochastic scenario generator that is based on real non-life insurance data. This stochastic simulation machine allows everyone to simulate their own synthetic insurance portfolio of individual claims histories and back-test thier preferred claims reserving method.
Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, ...property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.
Abstract
In recent times, there has been growing recognition of the key role of foods and beverages in disease prevention and treatment. Thus, the production and consumption of functional foods has ...gained much importance as they provide a health benefit beyond the basic nutritional functions. At present, beverages are by far the most active functional food category because of convenience and possibility to meet consumer demands for container contents, size, shape, and appearance, as well as ease of distribution and storage for refrigerated and shelf‐stable products. Moreover, they are an excellent delivering means for nutrients and bioactive compounds including vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, ω‐3 fatty acids, plant extracts, and fiber, prebiotics, and probiotics. However, in most cases, specific concerns have been raised over their safety. This review reports on the scientific advances in the emerging area of functional beverages with a focus on commercially available products, as well as on the potential health benefits related to their consumption.
The standard GLM and GAM frequency-severity models assume independence between the claim frequency and severity. To overcome restrictions of linear or additive forms and to relax the independence ...assumption, we develop a data-driven dependent frequency-severity model, where we combine a stochastic gradient boosting algorithm and a profile likelihood approach to estimate parameters for both of the claim frequency and average claim severity distributions, and where we introduce the dependence between the claim frequency and severity by treating the claim frequency as a predictor in the regression model for the average claim severity. The model can flexibly capture the nonlinear relation between the claim frequency (severity) and predictors and complex interactions among predictors and can fully capture the nonlinear dependence between the claim frequency and severity. A simulation study shows excellent prediction performance of our model. Then, we demonstrate the application of our model with a French auto insurance claim data. The results show that our model is superior to other state-of-the-art models.
The Holocaust was not only the greatest murder in history; it was also the greatest theft. Historians estimate that the Nazis stole roughly $230 billion to $320 billion in assets (figured in today's ...dollars), from the Jews of Europe. Since the revelations concerning the wartime activities of the Swiss banks first broke in the late 1990s, an ever-widening circle of complicity and wrongdoing against Jews and other victims has emerged in the course of lawsuits waged by American lawyers. These suits involved German corporations, French and Austrian banks, European insurance companies, and double thefts of art-first by the Nazis, and then by museums and private collectors refusing to give them up. All of these injustices have come to light thanks to the American legal system.
Holocaust Justiceis the first book to tell the complete story of the legal campaign, conducted mainly on American soil, to address these injustices. Michael Bazyler, a legal scholar specializing in human rights and international law, takes an in-depth look at the series of lawsuits that gave rise to a coherent campaign to right historical wrongs. Diplomacy, individual pleas for justice by Holocaust survivors and various Jewish organizations for the last fifty years, and even suits in foreign courts, had not worked. It was only with the intervention of the American courts that elderly Holocaust survivors and millions of other wartime victims throughout the world were awarded compensation, and equally important, acknowledgment of the crimes committed against them.
The unique features of the American system of justice-which allowed it to handle claims that originated over fifty years ago and in another part of the world-made it the only forum in the world where Holocaust claims could be heard. Without the lawsuits brought by American lawyers, Bazyler asserts, the claims of the elderly survivors and their heirs would continue to be ignored.
For the first time in history, European and even American corporations are now being forced to pay restitution for war crimes totaling billions of dollars to Holocaust survivors and other victims. Bazyler deftly tells the unfolding stories: the Swiss banks' attempt to hide dormant bank accounts belonging to Holocaust survivors or heirs of those who perished in the war; German private companies that used slave laborers during World War II-including American subsidiaries in Germany; Italian, Swiss and German insurance companies that refused to pay on prewar policies; and the legal wrangle going on today in American courts over art looted by the Nazis in wartime Europe. He describes both the human and legal dramas involved in the struggle for restitution, bringing the often-forgotten voices of Holocaust survivors to the forefront. He also addresses the controversial legal and moral issues over Holocaust restitution and the ethical debates over the distribution of funds.
With an eye to the future, Bazyler discusses the enduring legacy of Holocaust restitution litigation, which is already being used as a model for obtaining justice for historical wrongs on both the domestic and international stage.
This book presents different articles focused on the role of nutritional properties and/or health-related claims on choice preferences, choice behavior, healthy eating/healthy diet, and the ...willingness to pay for certain foods.
We evaluated MarketScan, a large commercial insurance claims database, for its potential use as a stable and consistent source of information on Lyme disease diagnoses in the United States. The age, ...sex, and geographic composition of the enrolled population during 2010-2018 remained proportionally stable, despite fluctuations in the number of enrollees. Annual incidence of Lyme disease diagnoses per 100,000 enrollees ranged from 49 to 88, ≈6-8 times higher than that observed for cases reported through notifiable disease surveillance. Age and sex distributions among Lyme disease diagnoses in MarketScan were similar to those of cases reported through surveillance, but proportionally more diagnoses occurred outside of peak summer months, among female enrollees, and outside high-incidence states. Misdiagnoses, particularly in low-incidence states, may account for some of the observed epidemiologic differences. Commercial claims provide a stable data source to monitor trends in Lyme disease diagnoses, but certain important characteristics warrant further investigation.
To facilitate applications in general insurance, some extensions are proposed to cluster-weighted models (CWMs). First, we extend CWMs to have generalized cluster-weighted models (GCWMs) by allowing ...modeling of non-Gaussian distribution of the continuous covariates, as they frequently occur in insurance practice. Secondly, we introduce a zero-inflated extension of GCWM (ZI-GCWM) for modeling insurance claims data with excess zeros coming from heterogeneous sources. Additionally, we give two expectation–optimization (EM) algorithms for parameter estimation given in the proposed models. An appropriate simulation study shows that, for various settings and in contrast to the existing mixture-based approaches, both extended models perform well. Finally, a real data set based on French auto-mobile policies is used to illustrate the application of the proposed extensions.
•We extend the class of generalized linear mixture CWM models to ZI-GCWM models by proposing the methodology that allows for continuous covariates to follow a non-Gaussian distribution and additionally we develop a new CWM methodology that uses Bernoulli–Poisson partitioning method and allows for implementation of zero-inflated CWM.•We offer a rigorous, flexible, and interpretable methodology to claims frequency and severity modeling in general insurance.•The proposed methodology is highly relevant to insurance pricing and risk management.
Abstract Background Stroke patients have a high risk for recurrence, which is positively correlated with the number of risk factors. The assessment of risk factors is essential in both stroke ...outcomes research and the surveillance of stroke burden. However, methods for assessment of risk factors using claims data are not well developed. Methods We enrolled 6469 patients with acute ischemic stroke, transient ischemic attack, or intracerebral hemorrhage from hospital-based stroke registries, which were linked with Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) claims database. We developed algorithms using diagnosis codes and prescription data to identify stroke risk factors including hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, atrial fibrillation (AF), and coronary artery disease (CAD) in the claims database using registry data as reference standard. We estimated the kappa statistics to quantify the agreement of information on the risk factors between claims and registry data. Results The prevalence of risk factors in the registries was: hypertension 77.0%, diabetes 39.1%, hyperlipidemia 55.6%, AF 10.1%, and CAD 10.9%. The highest kappa statistics were 0.552 (95% confidence interval 0.528–0.577) for hypertension, 0.861 (0.836–0.885) for diabetes, 0.572 (0.549–0.596) for hyperlipidemia, 0.687 (0.663–0.712) for AF, and 0.480 (0.455–0.504) for CAD. Algorithms based on diagnosis codes alone could achieve moderate to high agreement in identifying the selected risk factors, whereas prescription data helped improve identification of hyperlipidemia. Conclusions We tested various claims-based algorithms to ascertain important risk factors in stroke patients. These validated algorithms are useful for assessing stroke risk factors in future studies using Taiwan's NHI claims data.
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