Variations and trends in state nursing facility capacity: 1978-93.

The demand for nursing facility (NF) beds has been growing with the aging of the population and many other factors. As the need for nursing home care grows, the Nation's capacity to provide such care is the subject of increasing concern. This article examines licensed NFs and beds, presenting data on trends from 1978-93. Measures of the adequacy of NF beds in States are examined over time, including the ratio of beds per aged population, occupancy rates, and State official's opinions of the adequacy of supply. State and regional variations are shown over time, and we speculate on the factors which may be associated with the variation

IE WP 23/04 Prospective Voluntary Agreements to Escape Carbon Lock-in

The paper looks for co-evolutionary policy responses to carbon lock-in – a persistent state that creates systemic market and policy barriers to carbon low technological alternatives. We address the coordination role for authorities rather than the corrective optimisation and analyse experiences from environmental voluntary agreements and foresight activities. The paper argues that combining the virtues of these tools into a new policy tool, named Prospective Voluntary Agreement (PVA), can help facilitate an escape from carbon lock-in and provide policy resources for addressing lock-in related issues. The merit of PVA lies with the enhancement of collaborative policy culture and inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary stakeholder learning that creates commitment to desired action for escaping lock-in.environmental voluntary agreement; foresight; increasing returns; lock-in; path-dependence

Recruitment Policy When Firms Observe Workers' Employment Status: an Equilibrium Search Approach

This paper considers an equilibrium search model, where firms use information on a worker's labour market status when recruiting new hires, and all workers search for a job. We show that firms segment their workforce in two. Unemployed workers are offered a lower wage than the workers they recruit from employment in a competing firm even when these workers have the same productivity. The unique equilibrium is given by the Diamond outcome in the market for unemployed workers and the Burdett and Mortensen (B-M) outcome in the market for employed workers. We show that the offer and earnings distributions derived in the model are first order stochastically dominated by the ones given in B-M and all workers are worse off. We also show that in this environment information on employment status is sufficient for firms to obtain the same profits as if they had complete information about workers' reservation wages and outside offers

Wage-Experience Contracts and Employment Status

The objective of this paper is to study equilibrium in a labour market in which identical firms post wage-contracts and ex-ante identical workers search on the job. The main novelty of this paper is to generate dispersion in contract offers by allowing firms to condition their offers on workers' initial experience and employment status although these characteristics do not affect productivity. In this context I show that changes in firms' information set at the moment of recruiting can have strong effects on wage dispersion and turnover without changing the agents' payoffs. I construct an equilibrium in which firms compete in promotion contracts. Employed and more experience workers are offered better contracts with shorter time-to-promotion periods. This implies contract offers are disperse within and between experience levels. The earnings distribution within the firm is then such that workers who have acquired more 'outside' firm experience and more tenure are higher in the earnings scale. This generates workers cohort effects within a firm that depend on the level of experience at which they where hired

A reflective characterisation of occasional user

This work revisits established user classifications and aims to characterise a historically unspecified user category, the Occasional User (OU). Three user categories, novice, intermediate and expert, have dominated the work of user interface (UI) designers, researchers and educators for decades. These categories were created to conceptualise user's needs, strategies and goals around the 80s. Since then, UI paradigm shifts, such as direct manipulation and touch, along with other advances in technology, gave new access to people with little computer knowledge. This fact produced a diversification of the existing user categories not observed in the literature review of traditional classification of users. The findings of this work include a new characterisation of the occasional user, distinguished by user's uncertainty of repetitive use of an interface and little knowledge about its functioning. In addition, the specification of the OU, together with principles and recommendations will help UI community to informatively design for users without requiring a prospective use and previous knowledge of the UI. The OU is an essential type of user to apply user-centred design approach to understand the interaction with technology as universal, accessible and transparent for the user, independently of accumulated experience and technological era that users live in

Managing knowledge in the context of sustainable construction

The 21st century has been a growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability agenda. Moreover for construction, it has become increasingly important as clients are pushing for a more sustainable product to complement their organisations’ own strategic plans. Sustainable development can be defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Sustainable construction is therefore seen as the application of sustainable practices to the activities of the construction sector. One of the key factors in making construction projects more sustainable is overcoming the obstacles of capturing and managing the knowledge required by project teams to effect such change. Managing this knowledge is key to the construction industry because of the unique characteristics of its projects, i.e. multi-disciplinary teams, dynamic participation of team members, heavy reliance on previous experiences/heuristics, the one-off nature of the projects, tight schedules, limited budget, etc. Initiatives within the industry and academic research are developing mechanisms and tools for managing knowledge in construction firms and projects. Such work has so far addressed the issues of capturing, storing, and transferring knowledge

Rho meson form factors in a confining Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model

Elastic electromagnetic form factors for the $\rho^+$ meson are calculated in a Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model which incorporates quark confinement through the use of the proper-time regularization scheme. A comparison is made with recent lattice QCD results and previous quark model calculations for static quantities and the Sachs form factors. The results are qualitatively in good agreement with the lattice QCD calculations, with the exception of the quadrupole moment and corresponding form factor, which may be related to a lack of spherical symmetry on the lattice.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figure

Planning and implementation of effective collaboration in construction projects

The 21st century is now seen as the time for the construction industry to embrace new ways of working if it is to continue to be competitive and meet the needs of its ever demanding clients. Collaborative working is considered by many to be essential if design and construction teams are to consider the whole lifecycle of the construction product. Much of the recent work on collaborative working has focused on the delivery of technological solutions with a focus on web (extranets), CAD (visualisation), and knowledge management technologies. However, it is now recognised that good collaboration does not result from the implementation of information technology solutions alone. The organisational and people issues, which are not readily solved by pure technical systems, need to be resolved. However, approaches that exclusively focus on organisational and people issues will not reap the benefits derived from the use of technology, especially in the context of distributed teams which are the norm in construction. Work currently being undertaken at Loughborough University aims to bring together the benefits enabled by the technology, with the organisational, and its people issues to provide a framework enabling high level strategic decisions to be made to implement effective collaboration. This paper reports on the initial stages of the project: the background to the project, the methodology used, and findings from the literature survey and the requirements capture survey conducted as part of the project