Employers' (Lack of) Response to the Retirement Income Challenge

Employers have long had a significant impact on workers’ retirement prospects. Aside from Social Security, employer retirement income plans are the most important source of income for the great majority of retirees. How long workers can stay employed also largely depends on employer hiring and retention and retirement decisions. Both of these functions – retirement income support and the separation process – are now in flux given scheduled declines in Social Security replacement rates, the shift from traditional defined benefit pensions to 401(k)-type defined contribution plans, and the decline in career employment relationships. To assess the employers’ response to changes in retirement income support and the work-separation process, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College conducted a nationally representative survey of 400 employers. The survey was conducted in 2006 and focused on the employers’ response to the prospects of employees in their 50s. As reported in previous Issue in Briefs, the survey found that employers expect: 1) half these employees will lack the resources needed to retire at the organization’s traditional retirement age; 2) one out of four will respond by wanting to stay on the job at least two years past that traditional retirement age; but 3) the employers are lukewarm about creating opportunities for even half of these employees to work longer. Note that the survey was conducted well before the financial crisis; the retirement preparedness of workers has deteriorated since the survey – making potential employer responses all the more important...

Internal-tide interactions with the Gulf Stream and Middle Atlantic Bight shelfbreak front

Internal tides in the Middle Atlantic Bight region are found to be noticeably influenced by the presence of the shelfbreak front and the Gulf Stream, using a combination of observations, equations, and data-driven model simulations. To identify the dominant interactions of these waves with subtidal flows, vertical-mode momentum and energy partial differential equations are derived for small-amplitude waves in a horizontally and vertically sheared mean flow and in a horizontally and vertically variable density field. First, the energy balances are examined in idealized simulations with mode-1 internal tides propagating across and along the Gulf Stream. Next, the fully nonlinear dynamics of regional tide-mean-flow interactions are simulated with a primitive-equation model, which incorporates realistic summer-mesoscale features and atmospheric forcing. The shelfbreak front, which has horizontally variable stratification, decreases topographic internal-tide generation by about 10% and alters the wavelengths and arrival times of locally generated mode-1 internal tides on the shelf and in the abyss. The (sub)mesoscale variability at the front and on the shelf, as well as the summer stratification itself, also alter internal-tide propagation. The Gulf Stream produces anomalous regions of math formula(20 mW m−2) mode-1 internal-tide energy-flux divergence, which are explained by tide-mean-flow terms in the mode-1 energy balance. Advection explains most tide-mean-flow interaction, suggesting that geometric wave theory explains mode-1 reflection and refraction at the Gulf Stream. Geometric theory predicts that offshore-propagating mode-1 internal tides that strike the Gulf Stream at oblique angles (more than thirty degrees from normal) are reflected back to the coastal ocean, preventing their radiation into the central North Atlantic.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant OCE-1061160 (ShelfIT))United States. Office of Naval Research (grant N00014-11-1-0701 (MURI-IODA))National Science Foundation (U.S.) (N00014-12-1-0944 (ONR6.2))National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant N00014-13-1-0518 (Multi-DA)

Living in a Material World: Learning Material Properties from Full-Waveform Flash Lidar Data for Semantic Segmentation

Advances in lidar technology have made the collection of 3D point clouds fast and easy. While most lidar sensors return per-point intensity (or reflectance) values along with range measurements, flash lidar sensors are able to provide information about the shape of the return pulse. The shape of the return waveform is affected by many factors, including the distance that the light pulse travels and the angle of incidence with a surface. Importantly, the shape of the return waveform also depends on the material properties of the reflecting surface. In this paper, we investigate whether the material type or class can be determined from the full-waveform response. First, as a proof of concept, we demonstrate that the extra information about material class, if known accurately, can improve performance on scene understanding tasks such as semantic segmentation. Next, we learn two different full-waveform material classifiers: a random forest classifier and a temporal convolutional neural network (TCN) classifier. We find that, in some cases, material types can be distinguished, and that the TCN generally performs better across a wider range of materials. However, factors such as angle of incidence, material colour, and material similarity may hinder overall performance.Comment: In Proceedings of the Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV'23), Montreal, Canada, Jun. 6-8, 202

Persistent organic pollutant burden, experimental POP exposure and tissue properties affect metabolic profiles of blubber from grey seal pups

Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are toxic, ubiquitous, resist breakdown, bioaccumulate in living tissue and biomagnify in food webs. POPs can also alter energy balance in humans and wildlife. Marine mammals experience high POP concentrations, but consequences for their tissue metabolic characteristics are unknown. We used blubber explants from wild, grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) pups to examine impacts of intrinsic tissue POP burden and acute experimental POP exposure on adipose metabolic characteristics. Glucose use, lactate production and lipolytic rate differed between matched inner and outer blubber explants from the same individuals and between feeding and natural fasting. Glucose use decreased with blubber dioxin-like PCBs (DL-PCB) and increased with acute experimental POP exposure. Lactate production increased with DL-PCBs during feeding, but decreased with DL-PCBs during fasting. Lipolytic rate increased with blubber dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and its metabolites (DDX) in fasting animals, but declined with DDX when animals were feeding. Our data show that POP burdens are high enough in seal pups to alter adipose function early in life, when fat deposition and mobilisation are vital. Such POP-induced alterations to adipose glucose use may significantly alter energy balance regulation in marine top predators with the potential for long term impacts on fitness and survival

Therapeutic Challenges Of Multi-Being

This paper emerges from an attempt to shift the locus of understanding human action from the individual to relationship. In doing so we come to see persons as multi-beings, that is, as constituted within multiple relationships from which they emerge with multiple, incoherent, and often conflicting potentials. Therapy, in this context, becomes a collaborative relationship with the aim of transforming the client\u27s broader relational network. In this view, schooling in a singular practice of therapy artificially limits the therapist\u27s potential, and thus the possible outcomes of the client–therapist relationship. Invited, then, is a reflective eclecticism, in which the myriad potentials of both the therapist and client are considered in tandem. This view is illustrated by contrasting three relational conditions in which clients find themselves, each of which invites a different form of self-expression from the therapist

Adaptation of Models to Evolving Metamodels

The problem of automatic or semi-automatic adaptation of models to their evolving metamodels is gaining importance in the Model-Driven community. Recent approaches propose to adapt models using predefined information (i.e., a trace of changes). Unfortunately, this information is not always available in practice. In many situations metamodels evolve without keeping track of the applied changes. We propose a more general two step solution. First step computes equivalences and differences between the metamodels and saves these into a ``weaving model''. This weaving model acts as a high-level specification of adaptation transformation. Second step translates this model into an executable transformation. This technical report shows the results obtained in applying the approach on two concrete scenarios: a Petri net metamodel, and the Netbeans Java metamodel

A Domain Specific Language for Expressing Model Matching

National audienceA matching strategy computes mappings between two models by executing a set of heuristics. In this paper, we introduce the AtlanMod Matching Language (AML), a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for expressing matching strategies. AML is based on the Model-Driven paradigm, i.e., it implements model matching strategies as chains of model transformations. A matching model transformation takes a set of models as input, and yields a mapping model as output. We present a compiler that takes AML programs and generates ATL (AtlanMod Transformation Language) and Apache Ant code. The ATL code instruments the matching model transformations, and the Ant code orchestrates their execution. We evaluate this implementation on two strategies including robust matching transformations from the literature

A Coupled-Mode Shallow-Water Model for Tidal Analysis: Internal Tide Reflection and Refraction by the Gulf Stream

A hydrostatic, coupled-mode, shallow-water model (CSW) is described and used to diagnose and simulate tidal dynamics in the greater Mid-Atlantic Bight region. The reduced-physics model incorporates realistic stratification and topography, internal tide forcing from a priori estimates of the surface tide, and advection terms that describe first-order interactions of internal tides with slowly varying mean flow and mean buoyancy fields and their respective shear. The model is validated via comparisons with semianalytic models and nonlinear primitive equation models in several idealized and realistic simulations that include internal tide interactions with topography and mean flows. Then, 24 simulations of internal tide generation and propagation in the greater Mid-Atlantic Bight region are used to diagnose significant internal tide interactions with the Gulf Stream. The simulations indicate that locally generated mode-one internal tides refract and/or reflect at the Gulf Stream. The redirected internal tides often reappear at the shelf break, where their onshore energy fluxes are intermittent (i.e., noncoherent with surface tide) because meanders in the Gulf Stream alter their precise location, phase, and amplitude. These results provide an explanation for anomalous onshore energy fluxes that were previously observed at the New Jersey shelf break and linked to the irregular generation of nonlinear internal waves.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant OCE-1061160 (ShelfIT))National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant OCE-1060430)United States. Office of Naval Research (Grants N000 14-11-1-0701 (MURI- IODA))United States. Office of Naval Research (N00014-12-1-0944 (ONR6.2)

Benchmarking database systems for Genomic Selection implementation

Motivation: With high-throughput genotyping systems now available, it has become feasible to fully integrate genotyping information into breeding programs. To make use of this information effectively requires DNA extraction facilities and marker production facilities that can efficiently deploy the desired set of markers across samples with a rapid turnaround time that allows for selection before crosses needed to be made. In reality, breeders often have a short window of time to make decisions by the time they are able to collect all their phenotyping data and receive corresponding genotyping data. This presents a challenge to organize information and utilize it in downstream analyses to support decisions made by breeders. In order to implement genomic selection routinely as part of breeding programs, one would need an efficient genotyping data storage system. We selected and benchmarked six popular open-source data storage systems, including relational database management and columnar storage systems. Results: We found that data extract times are greatly influenced by the orientation in which genotype data is stored in a system. HDF5 consistently performed best, in part because it can more efficiently work with both orientations of the allele matrix