Taking the pulse at work : an employment relations scorecard for Australia

This study, and the project behind it, is an attempt 100 years on from the Webbs to comprehensively assess the health of the industrial relations/employment relations system by ‘taking the pulse’ of the employment relationship. If, as we argue, the relative health and performance of the employment relationship remains the key dependent variable of the field of employment relations today, there have been remarkably few attempts to audit and measure its critical dimensions. This study, founded on a large representative survey of workers and managers across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, attempts to do just that, and produces in this article, results of those survey questions for Australia. The article is novel since this kind of employment diagnostic is based on a unique nationally representative survey of employers and employees. The study is also innovative, in that it presents the results of the health of the system in the form of an employment relations scorecard and is the first such attempt to do so in industrial relations

The effect of time on optical coating mechanical loss and implications for LIGO-India

We report on the persistence of mechanical loss with time of ion beam sputtered dielectric coatings made from alternating layers of Ta_2O_5 and SiO_2 deposited onto fused silica substrates. From this, we predict the coating thermal noise in gravitational wave interferometers, after the coated optics have been stored for years. We measured the modal mechanical quality factor, Q, of two coated fused silica samples in 2015. These samples also had their modal Q's measured in 2002. We conclude that storing the coated silica disks for 13 years does not change their mechanical loss and thus the storage of Advanced LIGO gravitational wave detector optics until their future installation in India will not degrade their achievable thermal noise

The effect of time on optical coating mechanical loss and implications for LIGO-India

We report on the persistence of mechanical loss with time of ion beam sputtered dielectric coatings made from alternating layers of Ta_2O_5 and SiO_2 deposited onto fused silica substrates. From this, we predict the coating thermal noise in gravitational wave interferometers, after the coated optics have been stored for years. We measured the modal mechanical quality factor, Q, of two coated fused silica samples in 2015. These samples also had their modal Q's measured in 2002. We conclude that storing the coated silica disks for 13 years does not change their mechanical loss and thus the storage of Advanced LIGO gravitational wave detector optics until their future installation in India will not degrade their achievable thermal noise