Stress and support in the New Zealand construction industry : a study of project supervisors and managers : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Business Studies (MBS) at Massey University, Distance, New Zealand

The impact that stress has in the lives of individuals is considerable. Although it is a common concept, it is often misunderstood by many individuals. Stress is the way in which an individual responds to a range of environmental stressors. Thus, interventions for stress have received an increasing amount of attention in management literature. A portion of this field that has received a considerably less amount of attention is the role of support as an intervention for stress in the construction industry. This study seeks to explore the impacts of support on stress in construction managers. The first phase of the study utilised a social cross-sectional questionnaire approach and the second half used a semi-structured interview. Participants were sought from the four different sectors within the industry, the quantitative study had 47 respondents and the qualitative study had 11 participants. It is important to note that although a quantitative approach was the original intention of this study, it is the qualitative findings that have contributed the most to the overall findings. The findings of this study, developed using thematic analysis methodology, are conveyed through a matrix which explores the different types of support at different levels during stressful events. The study has concluded that support at a team level is made up of all four types of support: emotional, tangible, informational and companionship. However, as the provider of the support becomes further removed from the individual, the type of support experienced moved towards an informational support focus

Many uses, many annotations for large speech corpora: Switchboard and TDT as case studies

This paper discusses the challenges that arise when large speech corpora receive an ever-broadening range of diverse and distinct annotations. Two case studies of this process are presented: the Switchboard Corpus of telephone conversations and the TDT2 corpus of broadcast news. Switchboard has undergone two independent transcriptions and various types of additional annotation, all carried out as separate projects that were dispersed both geographically and chronologically. The TDT2 corpus has also received a variety of annotations, but all directly created or managed by a core group. In both cases, issues arise involving the propagation of repairs, consistency of references, and the ability to integrate annotations having different formats and levels of detail. We describe a general framework whereby these issues can be addressed successfully.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

DEMAND FOR AGRICULTURAL ECONOMIC INFORMATION

Using data gathered in two surveys we analyze the movement of information in agriculture. The relative importance of varying classes of information providers are assessed by classes of users. A network based framework expands models of human capital and bounded rationality to assess the calculus of choice of information.information, bounded rationality, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Quasistationary distributions for one-dimensional diffusions with killing

We extend some results on the convergence of one-dimensional diffusions killed at the boundary, conditioned on extended survival, to the case of general killing on the interior. We show, under fairly general conditions, that a diffusion conditioned on long survival either runs off to infinity almost surely, or almost surely converges to a quasistationary distribution given by the lowest eigenfunction of the generator. In the absence of internal killing, only a sufficiently strong inward drift can keep the process close to the origin, to allow convergence in distribution. An alternative, that arises when general killing is allowed, is that the conditioned process is held near the origin by a high rate of killing near infinity. We also extend, to the case of general killing, the standard result on convergence to a quasistationary distribution of a diffusion on a compact interval.Comment: 40 pages, final version accepted for Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. except for a graphi