Worker voice in the context of the re-regulation of employment: Employer tactics and statutory union recognition in the UK.

NoSince the introduction of the statutory recognition procedure the vast majority of new agreements have been voluntary in nature, yet increasingly employers are using this ambiguous state regulation as a means of avoiding recognition.The legislation allows for the game of voluntarism to be enshrined within the micro level politics and social relationships of work and employment: it crystallizes the culture and history of voluntarism in the regulation itself. It is, in effect, ironic in how it balances change with tradition. It makes the new regulation pliable and difficult to see as a step to a state-led approach.There is a resistant trend to unions generally even if recognition cases may vary in terms of employer orientations.This article focuses on such issues by addressing a broader understanding of regulation through an ethnographic case study analysis

A Benchmark for Geometric Facial Beauty Study

2nd International Conference on Medical Biometrics, ICMB 2010, Hong Kong, 28-30 June 2010This paper presents statistical analyses for facial beauty study. A large-scale database was built, containing 23412 frontal face images, 875 of them are marked as beautiful. We focus on the geometric feature defined by a set of landmarks on faces. A normalization approach is proposed to filter out the non-shape variations - translation, rotation, and scale. The normalized features are then mapped to its tangent space, in which we conduct statistical analyses: Hotelling's T2 test is applied for testing whether female and male mean faces have significant difference; Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to summarize the main modes of shape variation and do dimension reduction; A criterion based on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is proposed to evaluate different hypotheses and models. The KL divergence measures the distribution difference between the beautiful group and the whole population. The results show that male and female faces come from different Gaussian distributions, but the two distributions overlap each other severely. By measuring the KL divergence, it shows that multivariate Gaussian model embodies much more beauty related information than the averageness hypothesis and the symmetry hypothesis. We hope the large-scale database and the proposed evaluation methods can serve as a benchmark for further studies.Department of Computin

Spectroscopy of short-lived radioactive molecules: A sensitive laboratory for new physics

The study of molecular systems provides exceptional opportunities for the exploration of the fundamental laws of nature and for the search for physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. Measurements of molecules composed of naturally occurring nuclei have provided the most stringent upper bounds to the electron electric dipole moment to date, and offer a route to investigate the violation of fundamental symmetries with unprecedented sensitivity. Radioactive molecules - where one or more of their atoms possesses a radioactive nucleus - can contain heavy and deformed nuclei, offering superior sensitivity for EDM measurements as well as for other symmetry-violating effects. Radium monofluoride, RaF, is of particular interest as it is predicted to have an appropriate electronic structure for direct laser cooling. Furthermore, some Ra isotopes are known to be octupole deformed, thereby resulting in a large enhancement of their symmetry-violating nuclear moments. Until now,however, no experimental measurements of RaF have been performed, and their study is impeded by major experimental challenges, as no stable isotopes of radium exist. Here, we present a novel experimental approach to study short-lived radioactive molecules using the highly sensitive collinear resonance ionisation method. With this technique we have measured, for the first time, the energetically low-lying electronic states for each of the isotopically pure RaF molecules at the ISOLDE-CERN. Our results provide strong evidence of the existence of a suitable laser-cooling scheme for these molecules and constitute a pivotal step towards high-precision studies in these systems. Our findings open up new opportunities in the synthesis, manipulation and study of short-lived radioactive molecules, which will have a direct impact in many-body physics, astrophysics, nuclear structure, and fundamental physics research

Food allergy across the globe

The prevalence of food allergy (FA) is increasing in some areas of the globe, highlighting the need for better strategies for prevention, diagnosis, and therapy. In the last few decades, we have made great strides in understanding the causes and mechanisms underlying FAs, prompting guideline updates. Earlier guidelines recommended avoidance of common food allergens during pregnancy and lactation and delaying the introduction of allergenic foods in children aged between 1 and 3 years. Recent guidelines for allergy prevention recommend consumption of a healthy and diverse diet without eliminating or increasing the consumption of allergenic foods during pregnancy or breast-feeding. Early introduction of allergenic foods is recommended by most guidelines for allergy prevention after a period of exclusive breast-feedng (6 months [World Health Organization] or 4 months [European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology]). New diagnostics for FA have been developed with varied availability of these tests in different countries. Finally, the first oral immunotherapy drug for FA was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency in 2020. In this review, we will address the global prevalence of FA, our current understanding of the causes of FA, and the latest guidelines for preventing, diagnosing, and treating FA. We will also discuss similarities and differences between FA guidelines. © 2021 American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunolog

Observation of the distribution of nuclear magnetization in a molecule

International audienceRapid progress in the experimental control and interrogation of molecules, combined with developments in precise calculations of their structure, are enabling new opportunities in the investigation of nuclear and particle physics phenomena. Molecules containing heavy, octupole-deformed nuclei such as radium are of particular interest for such studies, offering an enhanced sensitivity to the properties of fundamental particles and interactions. Here, we report precision laser spectroscopy measurements and theoretical calculations of the structure of the radioactive radium monofluoride molecule, $^{225}$Ra$^{19}$F. Our results allow fine details of the short-range electron-nucleus interaction to be revealed, indicating the high sensitivity of this molecule to the distribution of magnetization, currently a poorly constrained nuclear property, within the radium nucleus. These results provide a direct and stringent test of the description of the electronic wavefunction inside the nuclear volume, highlighting the suitability of these molecules to investigate subatomic phenomena

Observation of the distribution of nuclear magnetization in a molecule

Rapid progress in the experimental control and interrogation of molecules, combined with developments in precise calculations of their structure, are enabling new opportunities in the investigation of nuclear and particle physics phenomena. Molecules containing heavy, octupole-deformed nuclei such as radium are of particular interest for such studies, offering an enhanced sensitivity to the properties of fundamental particles and interactions. Here, we report precision laser spectroscopy measurements and theoretical calculations of the structure of the radioactive radium monofluoride molecule, $^{225}$Ra$^{19}$F. Our results allow fine details of the short-range electron-nucleus interaction to be revealed, indicating the high sensitivity of this molecule to the distribution of magnetization, currently a poorly constrained nuclear property, within the radium nucleus. These results provide a direct and stringent test of the description of the electronic wavefunction inside the nuclear volume, highlighting the suitability of these molecules to investigate subatomic phenomena

Precision spectroscopy and laser-cooling scheme of a radium-containing molecule

International audienceMolecules containing heavy radioactive nuclei are predicted to be extremely sensitive to violations of the fundamental symmetries of nature. The nuclear octupole deformation of certain radium isotopes massively boosts the sensitivity of radium monofluoride molecules to symmetry-violating nuclear properties. Moreover, these molecules are predicted to be laser coolable. Here we report measurements of the rovibronic structure of radium monofluoride molecules, which allow the determination of their laser cooling scheme. We demonstrate an improvement in resolution of more than two orders of magnitude compared to the state of the art. Our developments allowed measurements of minuscule amounts of hot molecules, with only a few hundred per second produced in a particular rotational state. The combined precision and sensitivity achieved in this work offer opportunities for studies of radioactive molecules of interest in fundamental physics, chemistry and astrophysics

Pinning down electron correlations in RaF via spectroscopy of excited states

International audienceWe report the spectroscopy of 11 electronic states in the radioactive molecule radium monofluoride (RaF). The observed excitation energies are compared with state-of-the-art relativistic Fock-space coupled cluster (FS-RCC) calculations, which achieve an agreement of >99.71% (within ~8 meV) for all states. High-order electron correlation and quantum electrodynamics corrections are found to be important at all energies. Establishing the accuracy of calculations is an important step towards high-precision studies of these molecules, which are proposed for sensitive searches of physics beyond the Standard Model