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Selected AbstractsRethinking Social Security in Latin AmericaINTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SECURITY REVIEW, Issue 2-3 2005Indermit Gill In the past decade, many Latin American governments have radically restructured their old age income security systems, following the lead of Chile, which undertook its major pension reform in 1981. The defining characteristic of the reforms has been a shift in the basis of public pensions from social to individual responsibility: instead of the widely used system that "collectivized" or pooled the risk of being without the capacity to earn while aged, numerous countries in the region have adopted a system that relies on individual savings accounts. The reforms have maintained a role for a modified version of public pooling; this combination of individual and social savings to finance pensions is known as the "multipillar" approach. This article is based on a report prepared for the Office of the Chief Economist of the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the World Bank (Gill, Packard and Yermo, 2004).1 The report recognizes that the system of individual accounts, the essential aspect of the reform, has been a necessary and positive development, and one that is consistent with the economics of insurance and social welfare objectives. Beyond this recognition, however, the results of reform are much more complex. Each country has implemented its own version of the multipillar system. The article therefore draws on country evidence in order to determine: How has the new approach to public pensions in Latin America fared? In particular, have the changes left workers and their families in reform countries better off? The first section provides a brief description of the reforms. The second discusses the main macroeconomic concerns and effects. The third describes the impact on coverage levels, and other social welfare implications. The fourth evaluates the stagnation of coverage levels and presents various possible explanations. The fifth makes specific proposals to improve the multipillar pension system in Latin America. The last section concludes. [source] Front and Back Covers, Volume 26, Number 4.ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 4 2010August 2010 Front cover caption, volume 26 issue 4 Front cover THE GAZA FREEDOM FLOTILLA Mohammed Rassas, a second-generation Palestinian, sports a T-shirt declaring his longing for the homeland he has never known. Mohammed's family was forced to leave Palestine long before he was born, with no opportunity for return. Instead, Mohammed has lived most of his life between Saudi Arabia and Greece, which became his second home. For three weeks Mohammed joined dozens of Greek, Arab and Western volunteers in preparing the Greek ship Eleftheri Mesogeios (,Free Mediterranean'), to carry 2000 tons of humanitarian aid, including prefabricated houses and hospital equipment, to Gaza. The ship formed part of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, an international effort by volunteers from 36 countries that aimed to send eight ships to Gaza, carrying 700 passengers and 10,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid, in an attempt to prise open the strict embargo Israel has imposed on the Gaza strip since 2007. The Israeli army attacked the flotilla in international waters, killing eight Turkish nationals and one Turkish-American national, and injuring many more. Flotilla participants were placed behind bars. Intending to propagate their own version of events, the Israeli authorities confiscated audio-visual records made by witnesses. As an ethnographer invited to participate in the flotilla, Nikolas Kosmatopoulos was a witness to the events that took place. His notes are published in the form of a narrative in this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY. Israel has so far rejected the UN's call for an international independent inquiry. The Turkish government has threatened to cut all ties with Israel unless it apologizes or agrees to such an inquiry. Back cover CLIMATE CHANGE ,There is no planet B': an estimated 100,000 people demonstrate at the Copenhagen Climate talks, 12 December 2009. Since the débâcle of the UN Climate talks in Copenhagen last December, a broad new global coalition of resistance has begun to emerge. It includes the Climate Camp protesters who took direct action against the coal-fired Kingsnorth power station and the fourth runway at Heathrow, the tens of thousands of demonstrators who joined the Wave in London in December and the estimated 100,000 who marched at Copenhagen. They join others who have intimate experience of melting sea ice and Andean glaciers, flooding in Bangladesh and New Orleans and droughts in Africa. In April, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, a conference of 35,000 people, many of them indigenous Americans, began to organize to protect themselves and Mother Earth , Pachamama , to avert catastrophic climate change. This new social movement poses a personal and professional challenge to anthropologists to integrate climate issues and global politics into the discipline and into their lives. [source] Current experiences with robotic surgery at Severance Hospital, Yonsei University in KoreaASIAN JOURNAL OF ENDOSCOPIC SURGERY, Issue 1 2010WJ Lee Abstract We started performing laparoscopic cholecystectomies in 1991. Since that time, many surgeons have been trained in laparoscopic and minimally invasive surgery, and laparoscopic surgery has been used in numerous procedures, with patients benefitting as a result. We performed the first automated surgery in Korea using Automated Endoscopic System for Optimal Positioning in June 1996. Inspired by Inbae Yoon and assisted by his generous donation, our hospital started the IB Yoon Multi-Specialty Endoscopic Research & Training Center in 1998. Subsequently in March 2005, we started the Severance Robotic and Minimally Invasive Surgery Center. The establishment of these centers has enabled us to widen the use of laparoscopic surgery and to teach many surgeons the principles of and the techniques involved in laparoscopic and robotic surgery. We performed our first robotic surgery using the da Vinci Surgical System in July 2005. In the 4 years since introducing the da Vinci Surgical System, we have successfully performed more than 2600 robotic surgical procedures. As the collaboration between medicine and robotic engineering produces more technically advanced results, we hopefully can develop our own version of the robotic system in the near future. [source] "Perpetual Peace": A Project by Europeans for Europeans?PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 3 2008ref Aksu Immanuel Kant's classic essay Perpetual Peace has famously informed much of the neoliberal "democratic peace" scholarship in International Relations over the past few decades. It has also influenced contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism and global governance. We need to realize, however, that Kant's essay is only one representative of the eighteenth-century European thought on perpetual peace. Several other writers have produced their own versions of the perpetual peace ideal. This article surveys some notable eighteenth-century perpetual peace proposals from a specific perspective: it seeks to find out the attitude of these various proposals toward non-European peoples. It asks, in other words, whether and to what extent non-Europeans were "included" in the eighteenth-century European visions of a perpetual peace. [source] Technologies of Visibility: The Utopian Politics of Cameras, Televisions, Videos and Dreams in New BritainTHE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2006Andrew Lattas This paper explores how Melanesian villagers have harnessed modern, technological ways of seeing. It begins by analysing the politics and narrative structures of dreams and popular stories about secret photos concerning the dead. These are stories about losing control and regaining hidden, alternative representations of Melanesians. I then analyse how millenarian followers have experimented with ,constructing' their own versions of cameras, televisions and videos so as to gain access to the omniscient powers of modern technology and merge them with those of a Christian god and with the gaze of the dead. In the Pomio Kivung movement, ,televisions' and ,videos' have even been used to create new forms of moral surveillance for policing and governing communities. Here the customary shamanic worlds of dreams and possession have been modernised and redeployed to re-mediate the governmental practices and disciplinary schemes of civilisating projects originally belonging to Western churches and government. [source] | ||||||||||