Agency workers and zero hours : the story of hidden exploitation

This report highlights the extent and experiences of workers on temporary agency and zero-hours contracts.Using interviews with the workers themselves and data from the Annual Population Surveys it examines the impacts of hidden exploitation. It makes a number of recommendations to tackle the harsh and imposed regimes of temporary agency work and zero-hours contracts

Pruning Algorithms for Pretropisms of Newton Polytopes

Pretropisms are candidates for the leading exponents of Puiseux series that represent solutions of polynomial systems. To find pretropisms, we propose an exact gift wrapping algorithm to prune the tree of edges of a tuple of Newton polytopes. We prefer exact arithmetic not only because of the exact input and the degrees of the output, but because of the often unpredictable growth of the coordinates in the face normals, even for polytopes in generic position. We provide experimental results with our preliminary implementation in Sage that compare favorably with the pruning method that relies only on cone intersections.Comment: exact, gift wrapping, Newton polytope, pretropism, tree pruning, accepted for presentation at Computer Algebra in Scientific Computing, CASC 201

Child protection outcomes of the Australian Nurse Family Partnership Program for Aboriginal infants and their mothers in Central Australia

© 2018 Segal et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Background The Nurse Family Partnership Program developed in the USA, designed to improve mother and infant/child outcomes, has reported lower rates of child protection system involvement. The study tested the hypothesis that an adapted Nurse Family Partnership Program implemented in an Aboriginal community in Central Australia (the FPP) would improve Child Protection outcomes. Methods This was a retrospective and prospective cohort study drawing on linked administrative data, including birth registry, primary health care client information system, FPP program data, and child protection data. Participants were children of women eligible for the FPP program (an exposed and a control group of women, eligible but not referred) live-born between 1/3/2009 (program commencement) and 31/12/2015. Child protection data covered all reports, investigations, substantiations and out-of-home care placements from the time of the child’s birth to 31/12/2016. Generalised linear modelling was used to estimate the relative risk (RR) of involvement with child protection and type of involvement (report, investigation, substantiation, out-of-home-care placement) among FPP and control children. Results FPP mothers (n = 291) were on average younger, were more likely to be first-time mothers and experiencing housing instability than control mothers (n = 563). Among younger mothers 20 years, FPP children had statistically significantly lower rates of involvement with child protection (ARRreport = 0.49, 95% CI: 0.29 to 0.82; ARRinvestigation = 0.34, 95% CI: 0.19 to 0.64; ARRsubstantiation = 0.45, 95% CI: 0.21 to 0.96) and experience fewer days in care (ARR = 0.10, 95% CI: 0.02 to 0.48). Among children of first-time mothers, FPP children also had statistically significantly lower rates of involvement with child protection (ARRreport = 0.50, 95% CI: 0.30 to 0.83; ARRinvestigation = 0.36, 95% CI: 0.19 to 0.67; ARRsubstantiation = 0.38, 95% CI: 0.18 to 0.80) and fewer days in care (ARR = 0.06, 95% CI: 0.01 to 0.27). Conclusion Study results suggest a modified Nurse Family Partnership delivered by an Indigenous community-controlled organisation may have reduced child protection system involvement in a highly vulnerable First Nations population, especially in younger or first-time mothers. Testing these results with an RCT design is desirable

Importance of site of infection and antibiotic selection in the treatment of carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa sepsis

ABSTRACT In a retrospective analysis of 215 patients with carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa sepsis, we observed a significantly higher risk of mortality associated with respiratory tract infection (risk ratio [RR], 1.20; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.04 to 1.39; P = 0.010) and lower risk with urinary tract infection (RR, 0.80; 95% CI, 0.71 to 0.90; P = 0.004). Aminoglycoside monotherapy was associated with increased mortality, even after adjusting for confounders (adjusted RR, 1.72; 95% CI, 1.03 to 2.85; P = 0.037), consistent across multiple sites of infection. </jats:p

Relative Equilibria in the Four-Vortex Problem with Two Pairs of Equal Vorticities

We examine in detail the relative equilibria in the four-vortex problem where two pairs of vortices have equal strength, that is, \Gamma_1 = \Gamma_2 = 1 and \Gamma_3 = \Gamma_4 = m where m is a nonzero real parameter. One main result is that for m > 0, the convex configurations all contain a line of symmetry, forming a rhombus or an isosceles trapezoid. The rhombus solutions exist for all m but the isosceles trapezoid case exists only when m is positive. In fact, there exist asymmetric convex configurations when m < 0. In contrast to the Newtonian four-body problem with two equal pairs of masses, where the symmetry of all convex central configurations is unproven, the equations in the vortex case are easier to handle, allowing for a complete classification of all solutions. Precise counts on the number and type of solutions (equivalence classes) for different values of m, as well as a description of some of the bifurcations that occur, are provided. Our techniques involve a combination of analysis and modern and computational algebraic geometry

Feature integration in natural language concepts

Two experiments measured the joint influence of three key sets of semantic features on the frequency with which artifacts (Experiment 1) or plants and creatures (Experiment 2) were categorized in familiar categories. For artifacts, current function outweighed both originally intended function and current appearance. For biological kinds, appearance and behavior, an inner biological function, and appearance and behavior of offspring all had similarly strong effects on categorization. The data were analyzed to determine whether an independent cue model or an interactive model best accounted for how the effects of the three feature sets combined. Feature integration was found to be additive for artifacts but interactive for biological kinds. In keeping with this, membership in contrasting artifact categories tended to be superadditive, indicating overlapping categories, whereas for biological kinds, it was subadditive, indicating conceptual gaps between categories. It is argued that the results underline a key domain difference between artifact and biological concepts

Adjusting for sampling variability in sparse data: geostatistical approaches to disease mapping

Abstract Background Disease maps of crude rates from routinely collected health data indexed at a small geographical resolution pose specific statistical problems due to the sparse nature of the data. Spatial smoothers allow areas to borrow strength from neighboring regions to produce a more stable estimate of the areal value. Geostatistical smoothers are able to quantify the uncertainty in smoothed rate estimates without a high computational burden. In this paper, we introduce a uniform model extension of Bayesian Maximum Entropy (UMBME) and compare its performance to that of Poisson kriging in measures of smoothing strength and estimation accuracy as applied to simulated data and the real data example of HIV infection in North Carolina. The aim is to produce more reliable maps of disease rates in small areas to improve identification of spatial trends at the local level. Results In all data environments, Poisson kriging exhibited greater smoothing strength than UMBME. With the simulated data where the true latent rate of infection was known, Poisson kriging resulted in greater estimation accuracy with data that displayed low spatial autocorrelation, while UMBME provided more accurate estimators with data that displayed higher spatial autocorrelation. With the HIV data, UMBME performed slightly better than Poisson kriging in cross-validatory predictive checks, with both models performing better than the observed data model with no smoothing. Conclusions Smoothing methods have different advantages depending upon both internal model assumptions that affect smoothing strength and external data environments, such as spatial correlation of the observed data. Further model comparisons in different data environments are required to provide public health practitioners with guidelines needed in choosing the most appropriate smoothing method for their particular health dataset

Residual Strength Predictions with Crack Buckling

Fracture tests were conducted on middle crack tension, M(T), and compact tension, C(T), specimens of varying widths, constructed from 0.063 inch thick sheets of 2024-T3 aluminum alloy. Guide plates were used to restrict out-of-plane displacements in about half of the tests. Analyses using the three-dimensional, elastic-plastic finite element code WARP3D simulated the tests with and without guide plates using a critical CTOA fracture criterion. The experimental results indicate that crack buckling reduced the failure loads by up to 40%. Using a critical CTOA value of 5.5 deg., the WARP3D analyses predicted the failure loads for the tests with guide plates within +/- 10% of the experimentally measured values. For the M(T) tests without guide plates, the WARP3D analyses predicted the failure loads for the 12 and 24 inch tests within 10%, while over predicting the failure loads for the 40 inch wide tests by about 20%