The access to leisure is unevenly distributed in the societies. Despite the status of leisure as an individual right according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as to the World ...Leisure Organization Charter for Leisure, many people still have limited or no access to leisure. These discrepancies are even more noticeable in highly unequal countries and regions such as Latin America. In particular, Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world, where the wealthiest 1% earn 28% of the national income. This article investigates how social and economic disparities lead to inequalities in the access to consumption of leisure goods and services. Data from a recent and representative Brazilian household budget survey are analysed. Different types of leisure were examined according to Dumazedier's categories. The results revealed that the expenditure on leisure items in Brazil is associated to region, race, gender, family size and composition, education, and income. These findings highlight the need for policies to promote equal leisure opportunities as a means to development and justice.
With more than three billion people in isolation, the status of digital spaces is switching from an amenity to a necessity, as they become not only the main way to access information and services, ...but also one of the only remaining vectors for economic, educational, and leisure activities as well as for social interactions to take place. However, not all are equals in terms of access to networks or connected devices, or when it comes to the skills required to navigate computerized spaces optimally. Digital inequalities were already existing, yet the COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating them dramatically. On the one hand, the crisis will worsen digital inequalities within the population. On the other hand, digital inequalities represent a major risk factor of vulnerability for exposure to the virus itself, and for the non-sanitary consequences of the crisis. Therefore, this paper aims at exploring the reciprocal impacts of the COVID-19 crisis and digital inequalities, and to propose operative solutions to help fight the nefarious consequences of the crisis. We first describe how digital inequalities are a determinant of health. We then investigate how COVID-19 can potentiate digital inequalities, and how digital inequalities potentiate vulnerability to COVID-19. Finally, in order to contribute to the mitigation of this crisis, we propose a set of multi-layered strategies focusing on actionability that can be implemented at multiple structural levels, ranging from governmental to corporate and community levels.
•The COVID-19 pandemic is increasing digital inequalities.•Digital inequalities are increasing the vulnerability to the COVID-19 virus and to the consequences of the crisis.•The impact of digital inequalities on COVID-19 vulnerability should be central in the governmental responses.•Actionability-focused mitigation strategies targeting the individuals and the messages are proposed.
f -Divergence Inequalities Sason, Igal; Verdu, Sergio
IEEE transactions on information theory,
11/2016, Volume:
62, Issue:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper develops systematic approaches to obtain f -divergence inequalities, dealing with pairs of probability measures defined on arbitrary alphabets. Functional domination is one such approach, ...where special emphasis is placed on finding the best possible constant upper bounding a ratio of f -divergences. Another approach used for the derivation of bounds among f -divergences relies on moment inequalities and the logarithmic-convexity property, which results in tight bounds on the relative entropy and Bhattacharyya distance in terms of χ 2 divergences. A rich variety of bounds are shown to hold under boundedness assumptions on the relative information. Special attention is devoted to the total variation distance and its relation to the relative information and relative entropy, including "reverse Pinsker inequalities," as well as on the E γ divergence, which generalizes the total variation distance. Pinsker's inequality is extended for this type of f -divergence, a result which leads to an inequality linking the relative entropy and relative information spectrum. Integral expressions of the Rényi divergence in terms of the relative information spectrum are derived, leading to bounds on the Rényi divergence in terms of either the variational distance or relative entropy.
In the last decade, the Jensen inequality has been intensively used in the context of time-delay or sampled-data systems since it is an appropriate tool to derive tractable stability conditions ...expressed in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). However, it is also well-known that this inequality introduces an undesirable conservatism in the stability conditions and looking at the literature, reducing this gap is a relevant issue and always an open problem. In this paper, we propose an alternative inequality based on the Fourier Theory, more precisely on the Wirtinger inequalities. It is shown that this resulting inequality encompasses the Jensen one and also leads to tractable LMI conditions. In order to illustrate the potential gain of employing this new inequality with respect to the Jensen one, two applications on time-delay and sampled-data stability analysis are provided.
We characterize the good weights for a certain weighted weak-type iterated Hardy inequality to hold. As a consequence, we get the characterizations of some weighted weak-type bilinear Hardy ...inequalities.
The entire Sombor index of a graph G was introduced by Movahedi and Akhbari 6. By motivated their work, we obtained some properties, inequalities and characterization in terms of order, size, degree ...and other degree based graphical indices. Also, we present the computed values of certain families of graphs. In addition to that, we compare the statistical behaviour of Sombor based graphical indices such as KG-Sombor index, Reformulated Sombor index and Entire Sombor index of molecular graph of linear k- alkanes.
Economic inequality that arises due to circumstances is unfair, whereas fair inequality is the one that emerges because of differences in individual efforts. We assume that an individual’s income is ...determined only by circumstances and efforts, where both factors are evident and can be ordered. We then decompose the Gini coefficient into unfair, fair, and residual Gini. The last component emerges whenever circumstance and effort jointly affect income differences, where distinguishing between fair and unfair inequalities becomes impossible.
•We decompose the Gini coefficient into fair, unfair, and the residual Gini.•Our exercise will be helpful for the distinction between fair and unfair inequality.•We contrast the procedure with the commonly used counterfactual-based methods.
Human exposure to excessively warm weather, especially in cities, is an increasingly important public health problem. This study examined heat-related health inequalities within one city in order to ...understand the relationships between the microclimates of urban neighborhoods, population characteristics, thermal environments that regulate microclimates, and the resources people possess to cope with climatic conditions. A simulation model was used to estimate an outdoor human thermal comfort index (HTCI) as a function of local climate variables collected in 8 diverse city neighborhoods during the summer of 2003 in Phoenix, USA. HTCI is an indicator of heat stress, a condition that can cause illness and death. There were statistically significant differences in temperatures and HTCI between the neighborhoods during the entire summer, which increased during a heat wave period. Lower socioeconomic and ethnic minority groups were more likely to live in warmer neighborhoods with greater exposure to heat stress. High settlement density, sparse vegetation, and having no open space in the neighborhood were significantly correlated with higher temperatures and HTCI. People in warmer neighborhoods were more vulnerable to heat exposure because they had fewer social and material resources to cope with extreme heat. Urban heat island reduction policies should specifically target vulnerable residential areas and take into account equitable distribution and preservation of environmental resources.
Background We assessed change in household catastrophic health care expenditures (CHE) and inequality in facing such expenditures in south-west Tehran. Methods A cluster-sampled survey was conducted ...in 2003 using the World Health Survey questionnaire. We repeated the survey on the same sample in 2008 (635 and 603 households, respectively). We estimated the proportion of households facing CHE using the 'household's capacity to pay'. We identified the determinants of the household CHE using regression analysis and used the concentration index to measure socio-economic inequality and decompose it into its determinants factors. Results Findings showed that the proportion of household facing CHE had no significant change in this period (12.6% in 2003 vs 11.8% in 2008). The key determinants of CHE for both years were health care utilization and health care insurance status. Socio-economic status was the main contributor to inequality in CHE, while unequal utilization of dentistry and outpatient services had reduced the inequality in CHE between socio-economic groups. Conclusions We observed no significant change in the CHE proportion despite policy interventions aimed at reducing such expenditures. Any solution to the problem of CHE should include interventions aimed at the determinants of CHE. It is essential to increase the depth of social insurance coverage by expanding the basic benefit package and reducing co-payments.
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