Job quality in Europe

Promoting job quality and gender equality are objectives of the European Employment Strategy (EES) in spite of a downgrading of the attention given to both in the revised employment guidelines and the re-launch of the Lisbon Process. However, advances on both of these objectives may be important complements to the employment rate targets of the EES, as access to good quality jobs for both sexes is likely to help sustain higher employment rates. While the European Commission has a broad view of the concept of job quality in practice, it relies on a selection of labour market type indicators that say little about the quality of the actual jobs people do. Using data from the 2005 European Working Conditions survey, we analyse job quality along three dimensions: job content, autonomy and working conditions. We conclude that gender and occupational status, along with other job characteristics such as working time and sector, have more influence on an individual’s job quality than the country or ‘national model’ they are situated in. Our results also demonstrate the value of developing indicators of job quality that are both gender sensitive and derived at the level of the job rather than the labour market in order to advance EU policy and academic debate on this topic

Portraits and the Artist: Richard Rothwell’s Roman Adventures

Richard Rothwell was an Irish portraitist who was successful in Londonin the late 1820s. Despite this achievement he felt he had to leave Londonto acquaint himself with the Italian Masters and see what trends were indemand in Rome in the early 1830s. This chapter analyses how the Italianexperience affected his creativity and examines the reasons for his proclivitytowards genre and landscape over portraits in works produced up tohis death in 1868. Attention is paid to the Rothwell holdings in the NationalGallery of Ireland and the National Museum of Northern Ireland.The reasons for the negative reaction to Rothwell’s “Italian” art on his returnto England are examined while it is also argued that he may haveretained his initial success as a portrait painter had he never gone to Italy

Abandoning ‘a Lifetime of Habits’ to Avoid the ‘Sins of the Past’: De-Congregating Institutions with Deeply Ingrained Traditions

While many studies have identified the problem of reproducing small institutions in community settings, few have explored why. This article explores how staff preserve and defend institutionalised beliefs and practices in community settings. We apply the concepts of disruptive and defensive institutional work to analyse the findings of qualitative interviews at six Irish residential institutions that were identified as priority sites for a national de-congregation programme. Reflecting on their roles, staff conceptualised their practices as historical, traditional, and reflective of a bygone era. However, the findings indicate that it would be misleading to represent institutional practices as relics of the past. The programme offered an olive branch for staff members who wanted to distance themselves from a ‘lifetime of habits’ and ‘sins of the past’

Local History, Practice, and Statistics: A Study on the Influence of Race on the Administration of Capital Punishment in Hamilton County, Ohio (January 1992-August 2017)

Anthony Amsterdam urged litigators and scholars to focus on individual prosecutors’ offices or counties and to identify “a set of local institutions, conventions, and practices which are manifestly the residues of classic Southern apartheid”; to “conduct analyses of the impact of race in the sentencing patterns . . . in those specific counties or venues”; and to “investigate, analyze, and prepare evidence of the legacy of apartheid embedded in the counties’ political, economic, and social life, particularly as it bears on law enforcement, prosecution, and courthouse customs.” The goal, Amsterdam says, is “to build a case not solely on statistical evidence of discrimination but to supplement it with evidence of anecdotes and local custom.” Hamilton County, Ohio, lies technically just north of the South, but it is close. Its history reflects the emblematic segregation and overt racism associated with the South. This paper documents this history. It also remains in the top 2% of counties producing a majority of executions nationally. This history and ongoing use of the death penalty made it an ideal candidate for the kind of hyper-localized inquiry that Amsterdam suggested. This article reports a study of all cases charged with aggravated murder in Hamilton County from January 1992 to August 2017, including controlled analyses on three outcome measures. The model for the prosecutor’s decision to charge a case capitally showed, after taking into account potentially relevant race-neutral factors, that a case with at least one white victim faced odds of being charged capitally that were 4.54 times the odds of a similarly situated case with no white victims. The model of the decision to impose a death sentence overall (combining the charging and sentencing decisions) found that a black defendant who killed at least one white victim faced odds of receiving a death sentence that were 3.79 times those of all other similarly situated defendants. Finally, in a model of the death sentencing decisions limited to death-specified cases (that is, the cases in which the state sought death), a black defendant with at least one white victim faced odds of receiving a death sentence that were 5.33 higher than all other cases. These findings are both theoretically and statistically significant (p < .01). The local practice and history, bolstered by the statistical analysis, makes a strong case that race has influenced the administration of capital punishment in Hamilton County, Ohio

Effect of acute citalopram on self-referential emotional processing and social cognition in healthy volunteers

This study was funded by the UK National Productivity Investment Fund awarded to C.H. through the GW4 BioMed Medical Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership. This study was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Health Service, the NIHR or the Department of Health. ICMJE forms are in the supplementary material, available online at https://doi.org/10.1192/bjo.2020.107.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Cellular Therapies in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and Richter’s Transformation: Recent Developments in Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cells, Natural Killer Cells, and Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplant

Cellular therapies can be viewed as both the newest and oldest techniques for treating chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and Richter’s transformation (RT). On one hand, allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (alloHSCT) has been available for decades, though its use is diminishing with the increasing availability of effective novel targeted agents, especially in CLL. Among newer techniques, chimeric antigen receptor T-cells (CAR-T) have demonstrated astounding efficacy in several hematologic malignancies, leading to FDA approval and use in clinical practice. However, though CLL is the earliest disease type for which CAR-T were studied, development has been slower and has yet to lead to regulatory approval. Owing partially to its rarity but also due to the aggressive behavior of RT, CAR-T in RT have only been minimally explored. Here, we will focus on the applications of cellular therapies in CLL and RT, specifically reviewing more recent data related to alloHSCT in the novel-agent era and CAR-T cell development in CLL/RT, focusing on safety and efficacy successes and limitations. We will review strategies to improve upon CAR-T efficacy and discuss ongoing trials utilizing CAR-T in CLL/RT, as well as emerging technologies, such as allogeneic CAR-T and natural killer CAR (CAR NK) cells

Incidence of WHO stage 3 and 4 conditions following initiation of Anti-Retroviral Therapy in resource limited settings

To determine the incidence of WHO clinical stage 3 and 4 conditions during early anti-retroviral therapy (ART) in resource limited settings (RLS)