The impact on health of employment and welfare transitions for those receiving out-of-work disability benefits in the UK

Employment status has a dynamic relationship with health and disability. There has been a striking increase in the working age population receiving out-of-work disability benefits in many countries, including the UK. In response, recent UK welfare reforms have tightened eligibility criteria and introduced new conditions for benefit receipt linked to participation in return-to-work activities. Positive and negative impacts have been suggested but there is a lack of high quality evidence of the health impact when those receiving disability benefits move towards labour market participation. Using four waves of the UK’s Understanding Society panel survey (2009–2013) three different types of employment and welfare transition were analysed in order to identify their impact on health. A difference-in-difference approach was used to compare change between treatment and control groups in mental and physical health using the SF-12. To strengthen causal inference, sensitivity checks for common trends used pre-baseline data and propensity score matching. Transitions from disability benefits to employment (n = 124) were associated on average with an improvement in the SF12 mental health score of 5.94 points (95% CI = 3.52–8.36), and an improvement in the physical health score of 2.83 points (95% CI = 0.85–4.81) compared with those remaining on disability benefits (n = 1545). Transitions to unemployed status (n = 153) were associated with a significant improvement in mental health (3.14, 95% CI = 1.17–5.11) but not physical health. No health differences were detected for those who moved on to the new out-of-work disability benefit. It remains rare for disability benefit recipients to return to the labour market, but our results indicate that for those that do, such transitions may improve health, particularly mental health. Understanding the mechanisms behind this relationship will be important for informing policies to ensure both work and welfare are ‘good for health’ for this group

Resuscitation of Newborn Babies

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Insolvency Counselling--Innovation Based on the Fourteenth Century

In the fourteenth century, poverty (previously viewed as a virtue) was redefined by both church and state as illegal and immoral. This view persists in Canada today. The 1992 amendments to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (BIA) included a provision that makes two counselling sessions mandatory for all persons going through bankruptcy. The author reviews The BIA Insolvency Counsellor\u27s Qualification Course that was developed in support of this amendment, and concludes that it is not up to the task. The mandatory counselling presumes a bankrupt person\u27s irresponsibility, addiction, and need for referral to community service agencies. However, these presumptions are based on inadequate data and unsupported assumptions about the lives and characters of bankrupt persons. They are not derived from an unbiased, accurate assessment of a bankrupt person\u27s learning needs. The author suggests that, rather than being innovative, Canada\u27s approach to bankruptcy perpetuates a fourteenth century stereotype of people in financial difficulty

Evaluating the impact of the Alcohol Act on off-trade alcohol sales: a natural experiment in Scotland

<b>Background and aims</b> A ban on multi-buy discounts of off-trade alcohol was introduced as part of the Alcohol Act in Scotland in October 2011. The aim of this study was to assess the impact of this legislation on alcohol sales, which provide the best indicator of population consumption.<p></p> <b>Design Setting and Participants</b> Interrupted time-series regression was used to assess the impact of the Alcohol Act on alcohol sales among off-trade retailers in Scotland. Models accounted for underlying seasonal and secular trends and were adjusted for disposable income, alcohol prices and substitution effects. Data for off-trade retailers in England and Wales combined (EW) provided a control group.<p></p> <b>Measurements</b> Weekly data on the volume of pure alcohol sold by off-trade retailers in Scotland and EW between January 2009 and September 2012.<p></p> <b>Findings</b> The introduction of the legislation was associated with a 2.6% (95% CI -5.3 to 0.2%, P = 0.07) decrease in off-trade alcohol sales in Scotland, but not in EW (-0.5%, -4.6 to 3.9%, P = 0.83). A statistically significant reduction was observed in Scotland when EW sales were adjusted for in the analysis (-1.7%, -3.1 to -0.3%, P = 0.02). The decline in Scotland was driven by reduced off-trade sales of wine (-4.0%, -5.4 to -2.6%, P < 0.001) and pre-mixed beverages (-8.5%, -12.7 to -4.1%, P < 0.001). There were no associated changes in other drink types in Scotland, or in sales of any drink type in EW.<p></p> <b>Conclusions</b> The introduction of the Alcohol Act in Scotland in 2011 was associated with a decrease in total off-trade alcohol sales in Scotland, largely driven by reduced off-trade wine sales

Dwarf minke whale tourism monitoring program (2003--2008)

This report provides a comprehensive account of interactions with dwarf minke whales by swimming-with-whales (SWW) endorsed vessels in the Cairns/Cooktown Management Area of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park over the period 2003 to 2008. Results presented in this report are primarily based on analyses of Great Barrier Reef tourism industry-collected Whale Sighting Sheets. Key management processes and outcomes, arising from bi-annual stakeholder workshops (held pre- and post-season) during the 2003–2008 Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority-funded Dwarf Minke Whale Tourism Monitoring Program are also summarised and discussed. During the latter three years of this program, three PhD studies (by Mangott, Sobtzick and Curnock) contributed significantly to our knowledge of this unique aggregation of dwarf minke whales, their interactions with humans in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and the sustainable management of these interactions. Some of the key findings of these three PhD studies are included in this report

On the relationship between attitudes and environmental behaviors of key Great Barrier Reef user groups

© 2018 by the author(s). Urgent action is required to address threats to ecosystems around the world. Coral reef ecosystems, like the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), are particularly vulnerable to human impacts such as coastal development, resource extraction, and climate change. Resource managers and policymakers along the GBR have consequently initiated a variety of programs to engage local stakeholders and promote conservation activities to protect the environment. However, little is known about how and why stakeholders feel connected to the GBR nor how this connection affects the proenvironmental behaviors they undertake. We present the results of 5891 surveys and show that the attitudes that residents, tourists, and tourism operators have about the GBR are closely tied to the behaviors and activities they take to protect the environment. Our findings suggest that the responsibility, pride, identity, and optimism that people associate with the GBR are significantly correlated to several proenvironmental behaviors, including recycling, participation in conservation groups, and certain climate change mitigation activities. Respondents who feel the strongest connection to the GBR take the most action to protect the environment. Tourism operators who strongly identify with the GBR take more action to protect the environment than those who do not. Encouraging individual identification with the GBR via targeted messages and engagement campaigns may assist not only in GBR conservation, but a wider sustainability movement as well. A better understanding of the individual attitudes and beliefs held by local stakeholders is a key first step toward effective communication to influence conservation activities

Individual minke whale recognition using deep learning convolutional neural networks

The only known predictable aggregation of dwarf minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata subsp.) occurs in the Australian offshore waters of the northern Great Barrier Reef in May-August each year. The identification of individual whales is required for research on the whales’ population characteristics and for monitoring the potential impacts of tourism activities, including commercial swims with the whales. At present, it is not cost-effective for researchers to manually process and analyze the tens of thousands of underwater images collated after each observation/tourist season, and a large data base of historical non-identified imagery exists. This study reports the first proof of concept for recognizing individual dwarf minke whales using the Deep Learning Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN).The “off-the-shelf” Image net-trained VGG16 CNN was used as the feature-encoder of the perpixel sematic segmentation Automatic Minke Whale Recognizer (AMWR). The most frequently photographed whale in a sample of 76 individual whales (MW1020) was identified in 179 images out of the total 1320 images provided. Training and image augmentation procedures were developed to compensate for the small number of available images. The trained AMWR achieved 93% prediction accuracy on the testing subset of 36 positive/MW1020 and 228 negative/not-MW1020 images, where each negative image contained at least one of the other 75 whales. Furthermore on the test subset, AMWR achieved 74% precision, 80% recall, and 4% false-positive rate, making the presented approach comparable or better to other state-of-the-art individual animal recognition results

Common and Antarctic Minke Whales: Conservation Status and Future Research Directions

Minke whales comprise some of the most widely distributed species of baleen whales, some populations of which are still regularly targeted by commercial whaling. Here, we review the conservation status of common (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) and Antarctic (Balaenoptera bonaerensis) minke whale populations, against the backdrop of ongoing whaling operations and other anthropogenic threats, including climate change, entanglement in fishing gear, ship strikes, and noise pollution. Although some coastal minke whale populations have been studied in detail, others, which inhabit remote and ecologically sensitive locations, such as the Antarctic ice shelf, are among the least understood populations of marine mammals. The unresolved taxonomy of dwarf minke whales further highlights some of the existing knowledge gaps concerning these species. Due to their relatively small size and elusive behaviors, large uncertainties exist for almost all minke whale populations with respect to behavior, migratory routes and winter distributions, hindering effective conservation and management. However, recent advances in research technology, such as passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), unmanned aerial systems (UAS), multisensor recording tags, and machine learning assisted photo-identification, are increasingly being applied to study minke whales and their habitat, and are starting to open new windows into their life history and ecology. In future research, these non- and less-invasive methods should be integrated in larger-scale comparative studies aiming to better understand minke whale behavior, ecological interactions and their varying habitats to drive and support effective species conservation