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A Review of Life Insurance’s Secondary Market
Get PDFThe secondary market for life insurance policies emerged to provide financial relief for terminally ill patients through viatical settlements. Over time, it expanded to include life settlements for seniors and individuals with chronic conditions. This growth was driven by demographic shifts and increased life expectancies.
This paper discusses the historical evolution of the secondary market, the types of transactions involved, and the market dynamics. It explores the benefits and challenges faced by policyholders, insurance companies, and investors. For policyholders, the market offers enhanced liquidity and fair compensation. However, it also requires insurers to adjust premium structures and manage adverse selection. Investors benefit from high returns and risk diversification, but they are also exposed to longevity risk, liquidity risk, return volatility, and regulatory changes. The study highlights the complexities of asymmetric information and emphasizes the need for sophisticated actuarial models and robust regulatory frameworks to ensure market stability and sustainability
The Countryman newspaper with an account of Blondin’s tightrope crossing at Niagara Falls, October 6, 1862
Get PDFCharles Blondin (1824-1897) was a French tightrope walker who became famous for his stunts when crossing the Niagara River. He was born Jean Francois Gravelet but was known by several different names during his life. Some of the various stunts he performed when crossing the Niagara River include crossing blindfolded, in a sack, with a wheelbarrow, on stilts, carrying his manager on his back, and standing on a chair with only one of its legs balanced on the rope.An issue of The Countryman, October 6, 1862. The Countryman was a secessionist newspaper by J.A. Turner from Turnwold, Putnam County, Georgia. Turner printed the newspaper from his plantation. It mostly contains articles about art and culture rather than politics. This issue contains a first-hand account of Charles Blondin’s stunts when crossing the Niagara River on a tightrope. The account takes up approximately half of the first page and describes how Blondin lay down on the tightrope, balanced on his head, hung with one leg hooked over the rope, cooked an omelette on a sheet-iron stove and lowered it to passengers below on the Maid of the Mist. The writer concludes by giving a physical description of Blondin, noting that “he was rather small, but looked hard, wiry and muscular. His complexion was somewhat cadaverous, his hair, moustache, and goatee nearly white. This, I suppose, was their original color, and age had nothing to do with it, for he appeared to be about thirty years old”
Exploring Youth Experiences in Nature Through a Health Equity Lens: A Qualitative Study
Get PDFResearch demonstrates that for youth, connections to nature are protective health assets and that socio-economic status impacts health outcomes and opportunities. Less is known about how the intersection of youth connections to nature and socio-economic status shape health experiences and findings that do exist are mixed. The purpose of this qualitative study is to understand how youth in the Niagara Region of Canada experience nature, with attention to their socio-economic status. Eight youth between the ages of 11 and 15 were recruited from community organizations and contacts at Brock University and participated in a semi-structured interview. These youth all self-identified as having positive experiences in nature as part of the eligibility requirements for the study. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Two themes were identified from the results 1) connections between nature and participants were strong, regardless of a participant’s socio-economic circumstances and 2) experiences in nature appear to be influenced by SES in terms of the ways youth were able to connect with nature through things like resources and access. Findings are discussed through the lens of the Central Capabilities Approach. A strengths-based approach guided this study
A Search for Integrable Evolution Equations with Lax Pairs over the Octonions
Get PDFLax pairs play a vital role in the integrability theory of evolution equations because they
are used for the inverse scattering transformation to generate multi-soliton solutions. As
an extension of integrable real evolution equations and their known Lax pair, this report
focuses on the search for octonion evolution equations u_t = F(u, u_x, u_xx, u_xxx) of KdV type
and mKdV type that have a Lax pair, where u(t, x) is an octonion variable.
A Lax pair is defined as L_t ψ = M(Lψ) − L(Mψ) with linear differential operators L
and M whose coefficients depend on u and x-derivatives of u, where ψ(t, x) is an auxiliary
octonion function. These operators act on ψ by producing a linear polynomial in ψ and x-derivatives
of ψ such that each term is a product involving u, u_x, . . . , and (x-derivatives of)
ψ in a given order. It is assumed that the evolution equation u_t = F(u, u_x, u_xx, u_xxx) as well
as both Lψ and Mψ are homogeneous under a scaling of t, x, u which is either the scaling
associated to the KdV equation or the mKdV equation. This leads to an overdetermined
system of algebraic equations for the (real-valued) coefficients of u and x−derivatives of u
in F, Lψ and Mψ. The formulation of the overdetermined system involves two important
differences compared to the case of a real variable u. Firstly, since octonions are non-associative
and non-commutative, F, Lψ and Mψ contain many more terms, with different
orderings of products. In particular, ψ (and its x-derivatives) are allowed to appear on the
left, in the middle, or on the right. Secondly, products of octonions obey certain algebraic
identities, whereby terms that are equivalent modulo these identities must be eliminated.
To solve the overdetermined system, Maple is used to do the splittings, and depending on
the complexity of the system, ’rifsimp’ in Maple or a package called ’Crack’ in Reduce are
used to solve it. As a main result, a single KdV octonion equation, three mKdV octonion
equations, and also a single potential-KdV octonion equation, each of which has more than
one Lax pair, are obtained
William B. Young letters, 1828-1835
Get PDFSeven letters by William B. Young of Toronto Township (now Mississauga, Ontario) to his son William B. Young in New York City. The letters are dated from 1828 to 1835 and describe early settlement and land speculation in the area. One letter describes at length the cholera epidemic
Influence of cover crops on invertebrate diversity in Niagara organic vineyards
Get PDFCover crops can play different functions in vineyards, such as preventing soil erosion, improving soil health, reducing the need for pesticides, and increasing nitrogen fixation in soils. Despite the potential of cover cropping, little research has been done on the influence of diverse vegetation on invertebrate functional groups. This study aimed to examine the influence of different cover crop species in the diversity of pests, neutral, and beneficial invertebrate species. The first objective of this study was to assess diversity in the invertebrate community and their functional groups in six different cover crop treatments (Trifolium incarnatum, Vicia villosa, Pennisetum glaucum, mixture of T. incarnatum, V. villosa, P. glaucum, Lolium perenne, and spontaneous vegetation) across two different organic vineyards in the Niagara region. The second objective was to test the use of sentinel plants to identify direct interactions between cover crops and invertebrates. These sentinel plants were grown in greenhouse conditions before being introduced into the field. To access the invertebrate communities involved, the deployment of sticky traps, vine sweeps and cover sweeps in June, August and September 2022 was used to obtain a comprehensive idea of invertebrate communities. The results showed that cover crop species, whether grown in monoculture or mixture, did not significantly influence invertebrate diversity and relative proportion of functional groups. Instead, factors such as vineyard management, environmental conditions, and landscape complexity may play a key role in shaping invertebrate community diversity. Additionally, temporal variation played an integral role in influencing the abundance of pest and beneficial morphospecies in both vineyards. Invertebrate interactions on sentinel plants were nonconclusive, leaving potential interactions between cover crops and invertebrates uncertain in terms of sentinel plant deployment. Also, cover crops grown in the interrow of the grapevines were not the sole vegetation species present in the area, making it challenging to attribute performance solely to a singular species in the study. The results of this study indicate how complex and intricate invertebrate community diversity can be in operating applications. Further investigation on cover crop performance in the field is warranted to better understand how they may influence invertebrate community structure dynamics
The Press, Volume 19, Issue 15, January 26, 1983
No full textThe Press, Volume 19, Issue 15 includes: Universities Nothing Special; Unhappy about OSAP loans
Teaching Community Service Providers to Support Caregiver PECS Use: An Evaluation of the PECSperts Facilitator Training Model
Get PDFResearch examining how to train facilitators to implement the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) with caregivers and children is scarce. This research gap presents a barrier to offering PECS as a community service. Currently, there is some empirical research supporting the effectiveness of behaviour skills training (BST) and pyramidal training to train facilitators to implement behavioural interventions. Building on this foundation, the present study used a quasi-experimental, non-randomized group design to explore the effectiveness of a manualized BST training model (i.e., the PECSperts Facilitator Training Package) within a pyramidal training approach. Sixteen community facilitators participated in the study. Participants who immediately received training demonstrated a significant increase in treatment integrity from pre- to post-training assessments. These results maintained during the five week follow up period and generalized to the participants’ clinical practice with families in the community. Participants who did not immediately receive training, did not demonstrate an increase in treatment integrity from pre- to post-training assessments. Later, the training procedures were replicated with the participants who did not initially receive training. After participation in the PECSperts Facilitator Training, these participants’ treatment integrity scores also significantly increased. Participants rated the training positively on a social validity questionnaire. The results provide preliminary evidence for the use of the PECSperts Facilitator Training as an effective training model for training facilitators to teach caregivers to implement PECS with their autistic children. Results of this study have implications for increasing community capacity and access to facilitator PECS training
Spotting Potential Threats: A Tool to Inform the Proactive Management of Invasive Insects on a Regional Scale
Get PDFInvasive insects present a complex modern global crisis with the potential to have dire consequences. Proactive management is considered the most effective management approach, but conservation managers often face many barriers to engagement. This study introduces a tool for managers to identify invasive insects that hold the potential to expand their range northwards on a regional scale. The tool utilizes community science, horizon scanning, and a mixture of peer-reviewed and grey literature. It is applied using a case study on the potential for Lycorma delicatula, the spotted lanternfly (SLF), to spread to the Niagara Region of Ontario, Canada. The findings affirm that the SLF demonstrates an ability to spread to the Niagara Region due to the proximity of recently established populations, the warming effects of climate change, and viable invasion pathways. The tool demonstrates the potential to be used by managers to identify other range-expanding insects and inform proactive management