Note—Developing a Global Diversification Measure

Global Loss Diversification in the Insurance Sector

We study the possibility for international diversi cation of catastrophe risk by the insurance sector. Adopting the argument that large insurance losses may be a `globalizing factor' for the industry, we study the dependence of geographically distant insurance markets via equity returns. In particular, we employ conditional copula theory to model the bivariate dependence of the insurance indust...

Global diversification rates of passerine birds.

The distribution of species richness in families of passerine birds suggests that the net rate of diversification was significantly higher than average in as many as 7 out of 47 families. However, the absence of excess species richness among the 106 tribes within these families indicates that these high rates were transient, perhaps associated in some cases with tectonic movements or dispersal ...

A global measure of perceived stress.

A Global Contour Measure for Image Segmentation

The global approach to image segmentation defines a function of image partitions whose maxima correspond to perceptually salient segments. We extend previous approaches following this framework by requiring that our image model sharply decreases in its power to organize the image as a segment’s boundary is perturbed from its true position. Instead of making segment boundaries prefer image edges...

Clade size is not always an appropriate measure of diversification.

Lanfear et al. [1] reported an interesting association between mutation rate and net diversification in birds that had not been as evident in other groups of organisms. More specifically, their data showed a correlation between synonymous substitution rate and net diversification that cannot be explained by selection, effective population size, or some plausibly covarying life-history trait. To...