Health and Employment amongst Older Workers*

Health and employment are strongly correlated. This paper reviews the existing evidence and brings in new evidence on the following issues: (a) the measurement of health; (b) the impact of health on employment rather than just the association between health and employment; (c) the mechanisms by which health impacts employment; and (d) the likely effect of recent retirement and disability policy changes in the UK. Although the magnitude of the estimated effect of health on employment varies greatly from study to study, some of this variation is driven by the health measure used. Given our preferred measure, the evidence suggests that 5–10 per cent of the employment decline between ages 50 and 70 is due to declining health in England, with the largest effects among low‐educated men. Most of the effect comes through declining preferences for work and lower productivity when in bad health, although some of the effect is from government‐provided incentives to not work when in bad health, such as from disability benefits

Quantifying imperfect detection in an invasive pest fish and the implications for conservation management

In managing non-native species, surveillance programmes aim to minimise the opportunity for invasions to develop from initial introductions through early detection. However, this is dependent on surveillance methods being able to detect species at low levels of abundance to avoid false-negative recordings through imperfect detection. We investigated through field experimentation the ability to detect Pseudorasbora parva, a highly invasive pest fish in Europe, in relation to their known density and sampling method. Secure pond mesocosms of area 100 m2 contained P. parva densities from 0.02 to 5.0 m"122; each density was in triplicate. These were searched using point sampling electric fishing and deployment of fish traps (non-baited and baited). No fish were captured at densities 0.5 m"122, whereas for electric fishing it only exceeded 0.95 at 5.0 m"122 using high searching effort. These data reveal that small pest fishes such as P. parva may be prone to imperfect detection when at low densities and this is consistent with a number of other invasive species. This indicates the importance of designing surveillance programmes using methods of known statistical power to optimise conservation resource expenditure and enhance management outcomes

Morphologic Parameters for Successful Lunar Landing Sites

The Moon, with its abundant resources, intriguing science questions, and vast unexplored surface area, is the most attainable and useful near-term target for future human exploration. In recognition of this fact, Presidential Space Policy Directive 1 (PSPD-1) has directed the United States to return to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, beginning with the 7th American human lunar landing by 2024 and building to sustainable surface presence by 2028

Spatial synchronization and extinction of species under external forcing

We study the interplay between synchronization and extinction of a species. Using a general model we show that under a common external forcing, the species with a quadratic saturation term in the population dynamics first undergoes spatial synchronization and then extinction, thereby avoiding the rescue effect. This is because the saturation term reduces the synchronization time scale but not the extinction time scale. The effect can be observed even when the external forcing acts only on some locations provided there is a synchronizing term in the dynamics. Absence of the quadratic saturation term can help the species to avoid extinction.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Aligned Across Difference: Structural Injustice, Sex Work, and Human Trafficking

Feminist scholars and activists engage in meaningful, contentious debates about the relationships among sex, gender, power, and society. One of the most recent iterations of these arguments reinscribes the pleasure of sex positivity and danger of patriarchal exploitation onto new subjects: sex work and human trafficking. This paper brings together two separate empirically based research projects, one working with sex workers and the other working with members of the anti-trafficking community. As scholars working across these topics, we provide new normative propositions that may bridge these different approaches to resilience, survival, danger, and risk. We find that the real threat identified by our participants was the wide reach of the carceral state onto migrating, working, and trafficked bodies. Our projects find unexpected commonality in shared perceptions of pleasure, agency, and danger among sex workers, human trafficking survivors, and service providers working with trafficked persons. Current debates ignore the lived experiences of our participants, who attempt to find pleasure in context-specific agency and survival, and who locate danger in the looming forces of the security state, criminality, and structural inequalities

The Impact of Health on Labor Supply Near Retirement

Estimates of how health affects employment vary considerably. We assess how different methods and health measures impact estimates of the impact of health on employment using a unified framework for the US and England. We find that subjective and objective health measures, and subjective measures instrumented by objective measures produce similar estimates when using sufficiently rich objective measures. Moreover, a single health index can capture the relevant health variation for employment. Health deterioration explains up to 15% of the decline in employment between ages 50 and 70. Effects are larger for the US than England, and for the low educated

Predicting the contributions of novel marine prey resources from angling and anadromy to the diet of a freshwater apex predator

1. Anadromous fishes can be important prey resources for piscivorous fauna in lowland rivers. Freshwater anglers exploiting large-bodied cypriniform fishes use high quantities of pelletized marine fishmeal baits that can contribute substantially to fish diets. This marine-derived energy pathway also potentially provides a marine prey resource for freshwater piscivores. However, large-bodied cypriniform fishes are often in a size refuge against predation due to their large sizes. 2. Stable isotope (δ15N and δ13C) analysis assessed how novel marine prey resources influenced the diet of a freshwater apex predator, Northern pike Esox lucius, in an impounded river basin (lower River Severn, Western England). Up to three groups of prey resources were present: anadromous European shad (Alosa spp.), cypriniform fishes with dietary specialisms based on marine fishmeal baits, and freshwater prey. The availability of these prey resources to E. lucius varied according to river connectivity and levels of angling exploitation in different river reaches. 3. Where the three prey groups were present, E. lucius were more enriched in δ13C values (range: -24.74 to -16.34 ‰) compared to river reaches where aspects of the marine prey groups were absent. (range: -28.30 to -21.47) In all reaches, δ13C increased as E. lucius length increased. In the reach where all prey groups were present, the isotopic niches of three E. lucius size classes were strongly partitioned; this was not apparent in reaches where the marine pathways were unavailable. 4. Stable isotope mixing models suggested that freshwater prey were the most important prey item, contributing between 42 and 96 % to the diet of individual E. lucius. However, where present, anadromous fishes and cypriniform fishes specialising on marine fishmeal baits were also important prey items, contributing substantially to the diet of larger E. lucius (length > 650 mm). The total dietary contributions of the marine resources varied considerably among the individual larger fish (22 to 58 % of total diet). 5. The presence of two marine resource pathways in a lowland river thus strongly influenced the diet of an apex predator, but with contributions being a function of their spatial availability, E. lucius body size and individual trophic specialisations. These results emphasise how the anthropogenic activities of river engineering and human subsidies can affect the trophic dynamics of apex predators

European Non-native Species in Aquaculture Risk Analysis Scheme - a summary of assessment protocols and decision support tools for use of alien species in aquaculture

The European Non-native Species in Aquaculture Risk Analysis Scheme (ENSARS) was developed in response to European 'Council Regulation No. 708/2007 of 11 June 2007 concerning use of alien and locally absent species in aquaculture' to provide protocols for identifying and evaluating the potential risks of using non-native species in aquaculture. ENSARS is modular in structure and adapted from non-native species risk assessment schemes developed by the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organisation and for the UK. Seven of the eight ENSARS modules contain protocols for evaluating the risks of escape, introduction to and establishment in open waters, of any non-native aquatic organism being used (or associated with those used) in aquaculture, that is, transport pathways, rearing facilities, infectious agents, and the potential organism, ecosystem and socio-economic impacts. A concluding module is designed to summarise the risks and consider management options. During the assessments, each question requires the assessor to provide a response and confidence ranking for that response based on expert opinion. Each module can also be used individually, and each requires a specific form of expertise. Therefore, a multidisciplinary assessment team is recommended for its completion

Randomized Benchmarking of Quantum Gates

A key requirement for scalable quantum computing is that elementary quantum gates can be implemented with sufficiently low error. One method for determining the error behavior of a gate implementation is to perform process tomography. However, standard process tomography is limited by errors in state preparation, measurement and one-qubit gates. It suffers from inefficient scaling with number of qubits and does not detect adverse error-compounding when gates are composed in long sequences. An additional problem is due to the fact that desirable error probabilities for scalable quantum computing are of the order of 0.0001 or lower. Experimentally proving such low errors is challenging. We describe a randomized benchmarking method that yields estimates of the computationally relevant errors without relying on accurate state preparation and measurement. Since it involves long sequences of randomly chosen gates, it also verifies that error behavior is stable when used in long computations. We implemented randomized benchmarking on trapped atomic ion qubits, establishing a one-qubit error probability per randomized pi/2 pulse of 0.00482(17) in a particular experiment. We expect this error probability to be readily improved with straightforward technical modifications.Comment: 13 page