Statistical Invisibility Research Articles

The Domestic Work Sector in the European Union: Quantification, Evolution and Policies to Combat Precariousness

This article analyzes the domestic work and paid care sector in the countries of the European Union (EU), which includes jobs mostly carried out by women, generally with a serious lack of job protection, low wages, degraded working conditions, informality, precariousness and “invisibility” of tasks, etc. However, these jobs represent essential services for society, since in addition to caring for family members and dependents, personal and domestic care needs must be covered. From an operational perspective, the very characteristics of domestic work do not facilitate the collection of specific statistics necessary for the study of working conditions. This problem of statistical invisibility further slows down progress in establishing measures to improve the quality of employment for these workers. Therefore, it is necessary to address the discussion on the conceptual delimitation of domestic work and the measurement criteria adopted internationally, with special emphasis on those observed in the EU. Finally, the most advanced national regulations that try to reconcile the improvement of the working conditions of women employed in domestic work with the fact of promoting these services to cover the assistance needs of many households with economic difficulties are analyzed.

Participatory methodologies and caring about numbers in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda

Abstract Calling for a “data revolution,” the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seek to promote progress in matters related to planet, people, prosperity, peace, and partnerships (the “5Ps”) by mobilizing an all-encompassing datafying system that heavily relies on quantification. As such, the SDGs serve as a unique window that showcases the most up-to-date materials, methods, and forms of expertise in datafying practices, while also incentivizing local and national appropriation, with all the difficulties this entails. The article looks at the policy dynamics around SDG localization and the role of participatory methodologies, especially citizen-generated data, in Brazil’s engagement with the agenda. We depart from interviews conducted with various actors involved with SDG implementation, including civil society and public servants, and from engagement with the work conducted by one NGO specialized in citizen-generated data in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro. Two important findings are highlighted: Localizing strategies, i.e., those that aim to take subnational contexts into account in the achievement of the SDGs, have been used to promote an agenda on rights and, in addition, there has been a strong focus on local narratives as central aspects of communicating scientific data, where progress on the SDGs is but one vehicle in the struggle against statistical invisibility and political exclusion. These findings lead us to argue for a politics of care that can change how we do global public policy.

Determining Gender Budgeting in Multi-Level Federalism

Gender budgeting is a public policy innovation intended to transform governments’ objectives to women’s empowerment into budgetary commitments. In the multi-level fiscal federalism in India, the political economy process of gender budgeting in India has involved four distinct phases - innovative knowledge networking, building institutional structures, reinforcing state capacity and strengthening the accountability mechanisms, at national and subnational levels. Against these policy processes, we have estimated the sector-wise quantum of gender budgeting in India emphasising the statistical invisibility of the care economy. The State-wise equally distributed equivalent (Xede) estimates of gender development showed that the state of Kerala tops the scale 0-1 scoring 0.72. Though the link between gender budgeting and these Xede scores is beyond the scope of the paper, the fiscal marksmanship (the deviation between what is budgeted and the actual spending) of gender budgeting showed a mixed scenario across sectors.

Class Matters?: Exploring the Trends in Female Workforce Participation in India after 2004-05

Recently, the issue of declining female labour force participation in Indian labour market accompanied by its impressive economic growth rate has become an important concern for both policy makers and academicians. Studies on this topic propose some probable reasons for this peculiarity in female labour force participation in India. It can be argued from mere logic that the general factors influencing the decision of women to participate in the labour market is similar to that of the men. However, there are complex interplays among the social, cultural and political factors which have more pronounced repercussions on the women's decision to work than that of the men. With this backdrop, the present paper tries to explore the possible aspects or factors which were argued to be instrumental in influencing the level and pattern of female work participation in a society. We specifically make an attempt to see how women belonging to different income categories are placed in terms of participation in work, quality of employment and their engagement in industry of economic activity. We adopt the exploratory approach to analyze the objectives of this paper. Along with the published reports of various government agencies, this paper also utilizes extensively the unit records of the employment schedule of National Sample Survey Office for two quinquennial rounds: 2004-05 and 2011-12. The paper observes that women workers in general are at the disposal of greater disadvantages in India that is particularly striking in rural areas. Employment structure in India has led to the polarization of skills such that women predominate in low paid, low skill work, both in rural and urban areas. Whatever jobs have been created, they mainly cater to the highly educated women. This paper perceives that economic growth alone is not sufficient to ensure higher participation of women in the labour market and also emphasizes that removal of statistical invisibility of women workers be debated intensively.

Robust information hiding in low-resolution videos with quantization index modulation in DCT-CS domain

Video information hiding and transmission over noisy channels leads to errors on video and degradation of the visual quality notably. In this paper, a video signal fusion scheme is proposed to combine sensed host signal and the hidden signal with quantization index modulation (QIM) technology in the compressive sensing (CS) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. With quantization based signal fusion, a realistic solution is provided to the receiver, which can improve the reconstruction video quality without requiring significant extra channel resource. The extensive experiments have shown that the proposed scheme can effectively achieve the better trade-off between robustness and statistical invisibility for video information hiding communication. This will be extremely important for low-resolution video analytics and protection in big data era.

Making the Invisible Visible: Disability Inclusive Development in Solomon Islands

International and national level disability inclusive discourse, policy and strategy typically render invisible the institutional structures, political economies and socio-cultural power relations that constitute the lived experience of disability. The lack of robust information on disability extends these theoretical blind spots to the absence of disability in official statistics, political dialogue and social policy. Empirically grounded, inclusive research that recognises disability as embedded in globalised political economies and culturally specific power relations is required to address the theoretical, statistical and programmatic invisibility of disability. Such research will provide a solid knowledge base on which to build effective inclusive interventions.

Where have all the nomads gone? Fifty years of statistical and demographic invisibilities of African mobile pastoralists

There is considerable interest in the numbers and population dynamics of mobile African pastoralists alongside a recognition that they are probably undercounted or excluded from many data sources because of the difficulties in enumerating mobile individuals. In the Sustainable Development Goals where it is anticipated that everyone will be counted and their characteristics measured, it is important to develop appropriate strategies for including mobile pastoralists. I document the extent to which mobile African pastoralists have been invisible in the demographic record in the last half century and analyse the diverse pathways by which these invisibilities have been brought about in census and survey data collection exercises in different countries. A careful review of available documentation for censuses and Demographic and Health Surveys for the band of countries from Mauritania across to Kenya reveals heterogeneous patterns of pastoral nomad statistical invisibility with different forms and intensities according to national and socio-political context. Whereas there was substantial statistical invisibility of mobile pastoralists in the 1980s and 1990s in both data sources, deliberate exclusion has been much reduced in recent years, although there remain issues of clarity and definition. Although the availability of demographic and statistical data on mobile pastoralists is improving, it is impossible to document with any accuracy any transformations in the numbers of these populations over the last half century. Considerable work on developing appropriate categories and definitions needs to be undertaken if statistics on the characteristics of mobile pastoralists are to be appropriately represented in the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Invisibility of Wage Employment in Statistics on the Informal Economy in Africa: Causes and Consequences

This article challenges the claim, along with the statistics that support it, that self-employment is by far the dominant employment status in the informal economy. The article begins by reviewing key insights from relevant literature on the informal economy to argue that conventional notions of ‘wage employment’ and ‘self-employment’, while unfit for capturing the nature and variety of employment relations in developing countries, remain central to the design of surveys on the workforce therein. After putting statistics on Tanzania’s informal economy and labour force into context, the analysis reviews the type of wage employment relationships that can be found in one instance of the informal economy in urban Tanzania. The categories and terms used by workers to describe their employment situation are then contrasted with those used by the latest labour force survey in Tanzania. The article scrutinises how key employment categories have been translated from English into Swahili, how the translation biases respondents’ answers towards the term ‘self-employment’, and how this, in turn, leads to the statistical invisibility of wage labour in the informal economy. The article also looks at the consequences of this ‘statistical tragedy’ and at the dangers of conflating varied forms of employment, including wage labour, that differ markedly in their modes of operation and growth potential. Attention is also paid to the trade-offs faced by policy-makers in designing better labour force surveys.

Secret data embedding scheme modifying the frequency of occurrence of image brightness values

The main purpose of this presented work is to develop a data embedding method based on a new digital image histogram modification approach. The proposed scheme fundamentally is concerned about the frequency of occurrence of the image brightness values of the cover image for the data embedding procedures. The proposed scheme effectively realizes both perceptual invisibility and statistical invisibility so that obtained covered images are highly robust against common perceptual and statistical steganalysis techniques. The scheme provides reasonably higher payload values than its counterparts, as well as providing comparatively improved PSNR results.

Biomedical Image Watermarking in Wavelet Domain for Data Integrity Using Bit Majority Algorithm and Multiple Copies of Hidden Information

The current paper presents a novel and unique scheme for biomedical image watermarking in wavelet domain by hiding multiple copies of the same data in the cover image using bit replacement in the horizontal (HL) and vertical (LH) resolution approximation image components. The proposed scheme uses an approach for recovering the hidden information from the damaged copies due to unauthorized alteration of the data by applying an algorithm to find the closest twin of the embedded information by bit majority algorithm. Experimental results of the proposed watermarking technique show much enhancement in the visual and statistical invisibility of hidden information after data recovery that supports the improvement in performance.

A Comparative Study between LSB and Modified Bit Replacement (MBR) Watermarking Technique in Spatial Domain for Biomedical Image Security

The current paper proposes a biomedical image watermarking technique through modified bit replacement algorithm in spatial domain. In this algorithm, multiple copies of the same information are hidden in the biomedical images. Detection is performed by applying bit majority algorithm which can reconstruct the hidden information from different recovered sets subjected to some common attacks. Keys for watermark recovery are also embedded in the cover image. The superiority of the proposed modified bit replacement scheme over the LSB technique is indicated through evaluation of image quality metrics that shows much enhancement in the visual and statistical invisibility of hidden data.

A Secure Video Steganography Based on ECC and DCT

Video steganographic algorithm has the advantage of large hiding capacity, but we neglect the security when seek the capacity. In order to balance the two aspects, both to meet the high capacity of improving the load of video carrier and can safely protect the secret information. This paper presents the error-correcting code which can effectively correct burst errors and use it in video steganography. The secret information is hidden in error-correcting code first and then integrated the code with secret information with the video carrier’s DCT coefficients to insert the secret information in video carrier. The experiment results show that: this algorithm not only has great visual and statistical invisibility, also the safety of secret information is more significant. And achieve the objective of effective protect the secret information.

Counting Deviance: Revisiting a Decade’s Production of Surveys among Muslims in Western Europe

Abstract This article looks at the emergence of Muslims as a category of knowledge in surveys and opinion polls that have been conducted as a reaction to the rising demand for data about Muslim populations in Western Europe within the last ten years. The most prevalent feature of the conceptualization of Muslims is that they are inherently immigrants, or of immigrant descent, who are living within a certain nation state. This creates a continuous statistical invisibility of certain Muslims, for instance those without immigration backgrounds, as well as Muslims with national backgrounds other than Muslim majority countries. Further, this identification of the Muslim as immigrant, even if unintended, contributes to upholding a subtle exclusion of Muslims from the national community as always foreign and always potentially in need of integration.

Reversible Digital Image Watermarking Scheme Using Bit Replacement and Majority Algorithm Technique

The current paper presents a new digital watermarking method through bit replacement technology, which stores mul-tiple copies of the same data that is to be hidden in a scrambled form in the cover image. In this paper an indigenous approach is described for recovering the data from the damaged copies of the data under attack by applying a majority algorithm to find the closest twin of the embedded information. A new type of non-oblivious detection method is also proposed. The improvement in performance is supported through experimental results which show much enhancement in the visual and statistical invisibility of hidden data.

HYSA: HYbrid steganographic approach using multiple steganography methods

AbstractThe aim of image steganography is to hide data in an image with visual and statistical invisibility. There have been a number of steganography techniques proposed over the past few years. In sequence, the development of these methods has led to an increased interest in steganalysis techniques. Most of the steganalysis methods attempt to estimate cover image statistics. One way to provide a secure steganography method is to disturb the estimation of steganalyzers. The main concern of this paper is to resist against steganalysis methods and utilize a mechanism to securely embed more secret data into an image. We present HYbrid steganographic approach (HYSA), which embeds secret data with randomized embedding algorithms in randomized regions of the cover image. HYSA embeds secret data in only some regions of the image not all over the image. In addition, HYSA can employ more than one steganography method for embedding secret data in the image. Random selection of embedding regions and steganography methods leaves a combination of several types of distortion on the image, which are difficult to be recognized by the steganalysis methods. Experimental results by applying some well‐known and efficient steganalysis methods illustrate that the proposed steganographic approach is more undetectable than some popular steganography methods. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Genetic algorithms for optimality of data hiding in digital images

This paper investigates the scope of usage of Genetic Algorithms (GA) for data hiding in digital images. The tool has been explored in this topic of research to achieve an optimal solution in multidimensional nonlinear problem of conflicting nature that exists among imperceptibility, robustness, security and payload capacity. Two spatial domain data hiding methods are proposed where GA is used separately for (i) improvement in detection and (ii) optimal imperceptibility of hidden data in digital images respectively. In the first method, GA is used to achieve a set of parameter values (used as Key) to represent optimally the derived watermark in the form of approximate difference signal used for embedding. In the second method, GA is used for finding out values of parameters, namely reference amplitude (A) and modulation index (μ) both with linear and non linear transformation functions, for achieving the optimal data imperceptibility. Results on robustness for both the methods against linear, non linear filtering, noise addition, and lossy compression as well as statistical invisibility of the hidden data are reported here for some benchmark images.

Statistical invisibility for collusion-resistant digital video watermarking

We present a theoretical framework for the linear collusion analysis of watermarked digital video sequences, and derive a new theorem equating a definition of statistical invisibility, collusion-resistance, and two practical watermark design rules. The proposed framework is simple and intuitive; the basic processing unit is the video frame and we consider second-order statistical descriptions of their temporal inter-relationships. Within this analytical setup, we define the linear frame collusion attack, the analytic notion of a statistically invisible video watermark, and show that the latter is an effective counterattack against the former. Finally, to show how the theoretical results detailed in this paper can easily be applied to the construction of collusion-resistant video watermarks, we encapsulate the analysis into two practical video watermark design rules that play a key role in the subsequent development of a novel collusion-resistant video watermarking algorithm discussed in a companion paper.

Spatially localized image-dependent watermarking for statistical invisibility and collusion resistance

We develop a novel video watermarking framework based on the collusion-resistant design rules formulated in a companion paper. We propose to employ a spatially-localized image dependent approach to create a watermark whose pairwise frame correlations approximate those of the host video. To characterize the spread of its spatially-localized energy distribution, the notion of a watermark footprint is introduced. Then we explain how a particular type of image dependent footprint structure, comprised of subframes centered around a set of visually significant anchor points, can lead to two advantageous results: pairwise watermark frame correlations that more closely match those of the host video for statistical invisibility, and the ability to apply image watermarks directly to a frame sequence without sacrificing collusion-resistance. In the ensuing overview of the proposed video watermark, two new ideas are put forward: synchronizing the subframe locations using visual content rather than structural markers and exploiting the inherent spatial diversity of the subframe-based watermark to improve detector performance. Simulation results are presented to show that the proposed scheme provides improved resistance to linear frame collusion, while still being embedded and extracted using relatively low complexity frame-based algorithms.

POLICE, MINORITIES, AND THE FRENCH REPUBLICAN IDEAL*

This paper examines the strained relationship between French police agencies and ethnic minorities and discusses evidence of ethnic discrimination by the police and the criminal justice system. Until recently, the idea that ethnic composition of a police force ought to reflect, to some degree, the community it polices, seemed odd in France. We argue that there are two main reasons for this viewpoint: first, a conception of the role of the police in the State as accountable to the government rather than to the citizens; secondly, a conception of Republic and citizenship denying any political significance to the personal identities of citizens. We conclude that ethnic diversification of police forces is but one aspect of a more encompassing struggle against discrimination that requires a degree of accommodation with the present legal and statistical invisibility of racial/ethnic groups.