No Time to be Sick: Why Everyone Suffers When Workers Don't Have Paid Sick Leave

Paid sick leave gives workers an opportunity to regain their health, return to full productivity at work, and avoid spreading disease to their co-workers, all of which reduces employers' overall absence expense. When used to care for sick children, it helps them get well faster and reduces job turnover of working parents. Workers who care for adult relatives, including the elderly, need paid sick leave to take care of their loved ones' chronic and acute medical problems. However, new analysis of data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals the inadequacy of paid sick leave coverage: more than 59 million workers have no such leave.Even more -- nearly 86 million -- do not have paid sick leave to care for sick children. Full-time workers, those in the public sector, and union members have the best sick leave coverage, while part-timers and low-wage workers have very low coverage rates. Expansion of paid sick leave and integration of family caregiving activities into authorized uses of paid sick leave are crucial work and health supports for workers, their families, employers, and our communities at large

Sustainable economic growth within environmental limits. volume 1: guidance for the east midlands

LUC and GHK have developed a tool for setting environmental limits that local communities and other stakeholders can use. The three-step approach is based on the participation of the local community and other interested stakeholders, such as statutory agencies and businesses. It enables them to debate the use of important national, regional and local environmental assets, and the potential economic and social implications of setting environmental limits. The approach also provides a tool that can usefully support and inform other assessment requirements, such as Sustainability Appraisal/Strategic Environmental Assessment, Habitats Regulations Assessment and Equality Impact Assessment/Health Impact Assessment

Building a Common Ground – The Use of Design Representation Cards for Enhancing Collaboration between Industrial Designers and Engineering Designers

To achieve success in today’s commercial environment, manufacturers have progressively adopted collaboration strategies. Industrial design has been increasingly used with engineering design to enhance competitiveness. Research between the two fields has been limited and existing collaboration methods have not achieved desired results. This PhD research project investigated the level of collaboration between industrial designers and engineering designers. The aim is to develop an integration tool for enhanced collaboration, where a common language would improve communication and create shared knowledge. An empirical research using questionnaires and observations identified 61 issues between industrial designers and engineering designers. The results were grouped and coded based on recurrence and importance, outlining 3 distinct problem categories in collaborative activity: conflicts in values and principles, differences in design representation, and education differences. A taxonomy further helped categorise design representations into sketches, drawings, models and prototypes. This knowledge was indexed into cards to provide uniform definition of design representations with key information. They should benefit practitioners and educators by serving as a decision-making guide and support a collaborative working environment. A pilot study first refined the layout and improved information access. The final validation involving interviews with practitioners revealed most respondents to be convinced that the tool would provide a common ground in design representations, contributing to enhanced collaboration. Additional interviews were sought from groups of final-year industrial design and engineering design students working together. Following their inter-disciplinary experience, nearly all respondents were certain that the cards would provide mutual understanding for greater product success. Lastly, a case study approach tested the cards in an industry-based project. A design diary captured and analysed the researchers’ activities and observations on a daily basis. It revealed positive feedback, reinforcing the benefits of the cards for successful collaboration in a multi-disciplinary environment. Keywords Industrial Design, Engineering Design, Collaboration, Design Representation, New Product Development.</p

A new crystal form of penicillin acylase from Escherichia coli

A new crystal form of penicillin acylase (penicillin amidohydrolase, E.C. 3.5.1.11) from Escherichia coli W (ATCC 11105) is reported. The crystals were grown using a combination of hanging-drop and streak-seeding methods. The crystals are in the monoclinic space group P2(1) with cell dimensions a = 51.52, b = 131.95, c = 64.43 Angstrom, beta = 106.12 degrees. There is one heterodimer in the asymmetric unit (Vm = 2.45 Angstrom(3) Da(-1)) and the solvent content is 49%. Preliminary data have been collected to d(min) = 2.7 Angstrom using a MAR Research image plate and a rotating-anode X-ray source. Subsequent experiments show diffraction beyond 1.3 Angstrom at a synchrotron radiation source

Living at the cutting edge: Women's experiences of protection orders. Volume 1: The women's stories

This report examines the experiences of 43 Māori, Pakeha, Pasifika and other ethnic minority women who were victims of male partner violence, the impact of the violence on them and their children, and their experiences of the justice system when they reached out for protection. The objectives of the project were to: a.identify and describe the experiences of a sample of women in obtaining protection orders, the impact of protection orders and the response to breaches of protection orders; b.identify those aspects that are working well (that is, positive experiences of protection orders); and c.identify areas for improvement including barriers that prevent women from applying for and obtaining protection orders

Word matching using single closed contours for indexing handwritten historical documents

Effective indexing is crucial for providing convenient access to scanned versions of large collections of historically valuable handwritten manuscripts. Since traditional handwriting recognizers based on optical character recognition (OCR) do not perform well on historical documents, recently a holistic word recognition approach has gained in popularity as an attractive and more straightforward solution (Lavrenko et al. in proc. document Image Analysis for Libraries (DIAL’04), pp. 278–287, 2004). Such techniques attempt to recognize words based on scalar and profile-based features extracted from whole word images. In this paper, we propose a new approach to holistic word recognition for historical handwritten manuscripts based on matching word contours instead of whole images or word profiles. The new method consists of robust extraction of closed word contours and the application of an elastic contour matching technique proposed originally for general shapes (Adamek and O’Connor in IEEE Trans Circuits Syst Video Technol 5:2004). We demonstrate that multiscale contour-based descriptors can effectively capture intrinsic word features avoiding any segmentation of words into smaller subunits. Our experiments show a recognition accuracy of 83%, which considerably exceeds the performance of other systems reported in the literature

Conductivity of Mono- and Divalent Cations in the Microporous Zincosilicate VPI-9

Impedance spectroscopy is used to investigate the long-range ionic conductivity of the microporous, zincosilicate VPI-9 (Si/Zn = 4.0) (International Zeolite Association framework type VNI) containing the alkali cations Li^+, Na^+, K^+, Rb^+, and Cs^+, and the alkaline earth cations Mg^(2+), Ca^(2+), and Sr^(2+). Monovalent cation-exchanged samples Li- and Na-VPI-9 lose X-ray crystallinity upon vacuum dehydration at 450 °C, whereas K-, Rb-, and Cs-VPI-9 remain crystalline and exhibit conductivities of 1.7 × 10^(−4), 3.5 × 10^(−4), and 4.9 × 10^(−4) S/cm, respectively, at 450 °C and activation energies of 0.72, 0.64, and 0.69 eV, respectively, in the temperature range 150−450 °C. Divalent cation-exchanged sample Mg-VPI-9 also loses X-ray crystallinity, but Ca- and Sr-VPI-9 remain crystalline and exhibit conductivities of 2.3 × 10^(−6) S/cm and 7.7 × 10^(−7) S/cm, respectively, at 450 °C, and activation energies of 0.88 and 0.91 eV, respectively, over the temperature range 150−450 °C. When compared to aluminosilicate zeolite X (Si/Al = 1.25) exchanged with the same cations, all crystalline M-VPI-9 materials have greater conductivities than M-X, with the exception of K-X (1.6 × 10^(−3) S/cm at 450 °C), with the greatest differences arising between the divalent exchanged materials. Dense, crystalline zincosilicate samples with the compositions K_2ZnSi_xO_(2(x+1)) (x = 2−5), Rb_2ZnSi_5O_(12), and Cs_2ZnSi_5O_(12) are also prepared and characterized for comparison with the microporous materials and exhibit much lower conductivities than their microporous counterparts at the same composition

Credit, Financial Liberalization and Manufacturing Investment in Colombia

This paper evaluates the degree to which Colombian firms face credit restrictions that alter their investment decisions. It analyzes whether the evolution of the financial sector during the 1990s, characterized by an intense financial liberalization, an increase in size and a deepening of the activity, reduced the credit restrictions faced by firms and stimulated investment. The paper also explores whether, on the contrary, financial restrictions intensified during the recent 1998-2000 crisis. The paper provides empirical evidence suggesting that Colombian firms are indeed restricted by external resources and are compelled to resort to internal resources. The paper demonstrates that financial liberalization and the greater credit availability reduced such restrictions, and that the financial crisis had a strong and negative effect on investment and its financing. It compares the behavior of different groups of firms: (i) firms belonging to conglomerates vs. non-conglomerates, and (ii) firms with direct foreign investment vs. domestic firms. It shows that both groups face fewer financial restrictions and that they benefited less from financial liberalization. Finally, the paper evaluates the effects of indebtedness; the results suggest firms acquire debt before investing and/or that the acquired debt in the past serves as a sign of good credit history for the acquisition of new resources.

Non-Gaussian dynamic Bayesian modelling for panel data

A first order autoregressive non-Gaussian model for analysing panel data is proposed. The main feature is that the model is able to accommodate fat tails and also skewness, thus allowing for outliers and asymmetries. The modelling approach is to gain sufficient flexibility, without sacrificing interpretability and computational ease. The model incorporates individual effects and we pay specific attention to the elicitation of the prior. As the prior structure chosen is not proper, we derive conditions for the existence of the posterior. By considering a model with individual dynamic parameters we are also able to formally test whether the dynamic behaviour is common to all units in the panel. The methodology is illustrated with two applications involving earnings data and one on growth of countries.autoregressive modelling; growth convergence; individual effects; labour earnings; prior elicitation; posterior existence; skewed distributions