We consider the estimation of rare-event probabilities using sample proportions output by naive Monte Carlo or collected data. Unlike using variance reduction techniques, this naive estimator does not have an a priori relative efficiency guarantee. On the other hand, due to the recent surge of sophisticated rare-event problems arising in safety evaluations of intelligent systems, efficiency-guaranteed variance reduction may face implementation challenges which, coupled with the availability of computation or data collection power, motivate the use of such a naive estimator. In this paper we study the uncertainty quantification, namely the construction, coverage validity, and tightness of confidence intervals, for rare-event probabilities using only sample proportions. In addition to the known normality, Wilson, and exact intervals, we investigate and compare them with two new intervals derived from Chernoff’s inequality and the Berry–Esseen theorem. Moreover, we generalize our results to the natural situation where sampling stops by reaching a target number of rare-event hits. Our findings show that the normality and Wilson intervals are not always valid, but they are close to the newly developed valid intervals in terms of half-width. In contrast, the exact interval is conservative, but safely guarantees the attainment of the nominal confidence level. Our new intervals, while being more conservative than the exact interval, provide useful insights into understanding the tightness of the considered intervals.

In 2017, on the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation, Anishinaabe-kwe performance artist Rebecca Belmore set a quartet of listening trumpets entitled Wave Sound on shorelines across Canada’s national parks. Her metallic instruments amplify the water’s frequencies by drawing them in close, inviting visitors to stop and listen to the found sounds. This technology operates on the scale of W.E.B. Du Bois’s rarely considered sci-fi “megascope,” inviting a new mode of listening to the vital and resilient voice of the lands and waters beyond narratives of settler colonialism.

The church has a growing reputation as a safe place for LGBTQIA+ people of faith. In September 2022 it received a gift of an altar frontal in the form of the Progress Pride flag, which had been removed following a complaint from outside the diocese; the present petition was for a faculty to authorise its introduction.

Critics point to increasing private lawsuits filed by students accused of campus sexual assault as evidence that Obama-era Title IX guidance overcorrected and favored victims at the expense of the due process rights of the accused. This overcorrection narrative powerfully reshaped the debate surrounding campus sexual assault and ultimately contributed to the rescinding of the guidance. Existing analytical tools from legal mobilization scholarship – emphasizing the deployment of litigation by social movement actors – are not equipped to identify the origins and dissemination of this political narrative. Drawing from legal complaints, media coverage and interviews with lawyers, we show how private practice attorneys with no visible movement ties helped craft the overcorrection narrative from individual lawsuits by (1) embedding political claims in legal filings, (2) amplifying the narrative in media and (3) collaborating with advocates in quantifying the litigation trend. We extend prior scholarship and illustrate how lawsuits can be both a vehicle of political storytelling and the story itself. We further argue that the ideology of liberal legalism can mask the politics of private lawsuits, making litigation a useful tool for social movement efforts to mobilize support for legal reform.

Usual accounts of international law-making and international legal change focus on formal secondary rules. Others include societal and institutional facts. But international law consists of ideas too. Arguably it exists only in minds. To be sure then, the conditions of ideational change codetermine when and how international law is made, unmade, and otherwise changes. This is what this article is after. It first draws a general sketch of international legal change (including its making and unmaking) to then zoom in on its ideational elements, with a narrower focus on market opportunities for ideas. These market opportunities, it is argued, are determined by: paradigm shifts, struggles between competing schools of thought, the formation of distinct epistemic subfields, the core individuals’ different capitals, and changes in beliefs.

With Sámi mythology and storytelling as dramaturgical anchors, Giron Sámi Teáhter uses the key aesthetic elements of yoik (Sámi song) and duodji (Sámi arts and crafts) to revitalize and promote Sámi language and culture. The troupe’s work nourishes pride in young Sámi audiences in their rich cultural heritage, which for centuries was suppressed by settler colonialism across Sápmi, the land of the Sámi people, which stretches across the Northern part of Norway, Sweden, and Finland all the way to the Kola Peninsula in Russia.

On 29 December 1838, the Dean of Exeter Cathedral, Whittington Landon, died. In the months that followed, the cathedral chapter repeatedly refused to elect the individuals nominated by the Crown, setting the stage for a protracted struggle that would play out in Parliament and in the Court of Queen's Bench. This is the story of R v The President and Chapter of the Cathedral Church of St Peter in Exeter.1

We analyzed invasive group A streptococcal puerperal sepsis cases in a large health zone in Alberta, Canada between 2013 and 2022. Of the 21 cases, 85.7% were adjudicated as hospital/delivery-acquired, with 2 clusters having identical isolates found through whole genome sequencing. We implemented policy interventions across Alberta aimed at preventing future infections.

One of the most fruitful concepts of recent social analysis has been that of intersectionality, the idea that the nature of oppression is multiplicative rather than additive, and that no one identity – race, class, gender, religion, ability, sexual orientation, and so on – should be considered apart from other identities, but is always materialized in terms of and by means of them. Although it was developed out of the US experience, intersectional epistemology has been dynamic and mobile, as scholars have not simply used social groupings drawn from the Western past and present but have elaborated social categories taken from local understandings as well. This article analyses some recent examples of gendered world history that also take other social hierarchies into account, and assesses how these help us better understand global processes that transformed societies. It begins with a place and time where global entanglements led quite clearly to the emergence of new social groups, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, and then more briefly examines this process in other parts of the early modern colonial world.

This article deals with a fiscal reform implemented in Chile during the late 1870s, when the country was suffering a severe economic and fiscal crisis, on the eve of the War of the Pacific. In 1879, the Chilean government introduced a new set of direct levies, taxing inheritance, income and wealth, despite the historic resistance of most of the economic elites to direct taxation in a highly unequal society. The process also shows that not all the economic elite avoided direct taxation. Despite other challenges faced by any developing country in extracting taxes from its population (e.g. lack of both proper information and human capital), during c.1879-1884 collection of these new direct taxes was successful, mainly on account of the improved extractive capacity built up during the preceding decades. Yet, by the mid-1890s all direct taxes (new and old) had been either derogated or transferred to local government (in some cases after being modified). Once again, Chilean central government depended entirely on indirect taxes, with export duties on nitrate being the most important. Nitrate provides a good example of an export boom shaping taxation for the worse; rather than increasing and diversifying the sources of revenue, a dominant sector of the Chilean economic elite decided to stop paying direct taxes and to make the state entirely dependent on the cycles of the international economy. However, some members of the economic elite, although defeated in their purpose, were aware of the wide range of benefits of keeping direct taxation: social justice, financial health and less vulnerability to trade cycles. Unfortunately, the balance of power favoured elite groups with enough power to hinder direct taxation.

Consider a company whose business carries the potential for investment losses and is additionally vulnerable to exogenous shocks. The unpredictability of the shocks makes it challenging for both the company and the regulator to accurately assess their impact, potentially leading to an underestimation of solvency capital when employing traditional approaches. In this paper, we utilize a stylized model to conduct an extreme value analysis of the tail risk of the company under a Fréchet-type and a Gumbel-type shock. Our main results explicitly demonstrate the different roles of investment risk and shock risk in driving large losses. Furthermore, we derive asymptotic estimates for the value at risk and expected shortfall of the total loss. Numerical studies are conducted to examine the accuracy of the obtained estimates.