"A hard day’s night?" The effects of Compressed Working Week interventions on the health and work-life balance of shift workers: a systematic review

Objective: To systematically review studies of the effects of the Compressed Working Week on the health and work-life balance of shift workers, and to identify any differential impacts by socio-economic group. Methods: Systematic review. Following QUORUM guidelines, published or unpublished experimental and quasi-experimental studies were identified. Data were sourced from 27 electronic databases, websites, bibliographies, and expert contacts. Results: Forty observational studies were found. The majority of studies only measured self-reported outcomes and the methodological quality of the included studies was not very high. Interventions did not always improve the health of shift workers, but in the five prospective studies with a control group, there were no detrimental effects on self-reported health. However, work-life balance was generally improved. No studies reported differential impacts by socio-economic group; however, most of the studies were conducted on homogeneous populations. Conclusion: This review suggests that the Compressed Working Week can improve work-life balance, and that it may do so with a low risk of adverse health or organisational effects. However, better designed studies that measure objective health outcomes are needed

Photon Structure and Quantum Fluctuation

Photon structure derives from quantum fluctuation in quantum field theory to fermion and anti-fermion, and has been an experimentally established feature of electrodynamics since the discovery of the positron. In hadronic physics, the observation of factorisable photon structure is similarly a fundamental test of the quantum field theory Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). An overview of measurements of hadronic photon structure in e+e- and ep interactions is presented, and comparison made with theoretical expectation, drawing on the essential features of photon fluctuation into quark and anti-quark in QCD.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figures, to appear in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences

Determination of the QCD color factor ratio CA/CF from the scale dependence of multiplicity in three jet events

I examine the determination of the QCD color factor ratio CA/CF from the scale evolution of particle multiplicity in e+e- three jet events. I fit an analytic expression for the multiplicity in three jet events to event samples generated with QCD multihadronic event generators. I demonstrate that a one parameter fit of CA/CF yields the expected result CA/CF=2.25 in the limit of asymptotically large energies if energy conservation is included in the calculation. In contrast, a two parameter fit of CA/CF and a constant offset to the gluon jet multiplicity, proposed in a recent study, does not yield CA/CF=2.25 in this limit. I apply the one parameter fit method to recently published data of the DELPHI experiment at LEP and determine the effective value of CA/CF from this technique, at the finite energy of the Z0 boson, to be 1.74+-0.03+-0.10, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic.Comment: 20 pages including 6 figures Version 2 corrects typographical error in equation (2

Precedence-constrained scheduling problems parameterized by partial order width

Negatively answering a question posed by Mnich and Wiese (Math. Program. 154(1-2):533-562), we show that P2|prec,$p_j{\in}\{1,2\}$|$C_{\max}$, the problem of finding a non-preemptive minimum-makespan schedule for precedence-constrained jobs of lengths 1 and 2 on two parallel identical machines, is W[2]-hard parameterized by the width of the partial order giving the precedence constraints. To this end, we show that Shuffle Product, the problem of deciding whether a given word can be obtained by interleaving the letters of $k$ other given words, is W[2]-hard parameterized by $k$, thus additionally answering a question posed by Rizzi and Vialette (CSR 2013). Finally, refining a geometric algorithm due to Servakh (Diskretn. Anal. Issled. Oper. 7(1):75-82), we show that the more general Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling problem is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by the partial order width combined with the maximum allowed difference between the earliest possible and factual starting time of a job.Comment: 14 pages plus appendi

Inclusive B-Meson Production in e^+ e^- and p p-bar Collisions

We provide nonperturbative fragmentation functions for B mesons, both at leading and next-to-leading order in the MS-bar factorization scheme with five massless quark flavors. They are determined by fitting the fractional energy distribution of B mesons inclusively produced in e^+ e^- annihilation at CERN LEP1. Theoretical predictions for the inclusive production of B mesons with high transverse momenta in p p-bar scattering obtained with these fragmentation functions nicely agree, both in shape and normalization, with data recently taken at the Fermilab Tevatron.Comment: 20 pages (Latex), 6 figures (Postscript