Trends in the distribution of income in Australia

The paper examines the recent trends in Australia\u27s individual and household income distributions. It examines the proximate factors that help explain aggregate trends to provide a more detailed understanding of the composition of the income distribution (in terms of both the groups represented within it and the different kinds of income they receive). It also examines whether the Australian experience mirrors general trends across OECD countries. Key findings: Between 1988-89 and 2009-10, the incomes of individuals and households in Australia have risen substantially in real terms and in comparison to trends in other OECD countries, with particularly strong growth between 2003-04 and 2009-10. – The increase has mainly been driven by growth in labour force earnings, arising from employment growth, more hours worked (by part-time workers) and increased hourly wages. While real individual and household incomes have both risen across their distributions, increases have been uneven. – The rate of growth has been higher at the ‘top end’ of the distributions than the ‘bottom end’. – Incomes for those in the middle of the distribution have spread out (that is, they have become less concentrated around the average). These changes underlie the recently observed increases in summary measures of inequality (such as the Gini Coefficient) in Australia for individual and household incomes. – At the individual level, the key drivers are the widening dispersion of hourly wages of full-time employees and (to a lesser extent) the relatively stronger growth in part-time employment. – At the household level, the key driver has been capital income growth amongst higher income households. The impact of growing dispersion of hourly wages on the distribution of labour income has been offset by increased employment of household members including a decline in the share of jobless households. Final income is also influenced by government taxes and transfers. These have a substantial redistributive impact on the distribution of household income, substantially reducing measured inequality. Although the progressive impact of the tax and transfer system declined slightly from the early 2000s (with the introduction of the GST and a fall in the number of recipients of government benefit payments associated with higher employment), real growth in the value of direct and indirect transfers contributed to growth in incomes for low income households. The analysis highlights the need to examine the changes in various income components and population subgroups in order to understand the changes in the distribution of income and inequality measures such as the Gini coefficient. – Differences in individual income, and therefore household income levels, occur for a variety of reasons including personal choices and innate characteristics as well as opportunities and inheritances. These differences combine with broader economic forces and policy settings to influence the distribution of income over time

A Study of Histological Aging of the Human Clavicle

This study attempted to augment the Stout and Paine (1992) and Stout and colleagues\u27 (1996) methods of histological aging for the clavicle. In the 1992 study, the predictive equation was generated from a sample of only 40 individuals taken from an autopsy population (mean ages 28.6 years) with no prior sampling strategy. The 1996 expansion (Stout et al., 1996) tested the 1992 equation, added 41 males and 42 females from a Swiss cemetery sample to the original autopsy sample to generate a new predictive equation based on all 123 individuals. In this study, an independent autopsy population was used to construct a sample of 95 individuals with a random stratified profile and an approximately equal number of individuals from each decade between the ages of 22 and 88 years. Roughly equal numbers of males (n = 50) and females (n = 45) were included in the sample. Construction of an independent sample assured comparability of all measures and excluded possibility of intraobserver error. This sample was used to achieve four research goals: 1) Test for sexual dimorphism in the OPD variable. 2) Generate predictive equations using inverse calibration, the method most commonly used in histological aging methods, achieved by regressing age upon the histological variable OPD. 3) Test the 1992, 1996, and current equations using both the Stout and Paine (1992) and the current samples. 4) Generate predictive equations for the Stout and Paine (1992) and current sample using classical calibration, which is regression of the OPD variable upon age. The generation of predictive equations using both the inverse and classical calibration allowed comparison of the characteristic distributions associated with each, and tests for accuracy of their estimates. While females exhibited a greater correlation between age and the OPD variable (r2 = .5763) than males (r2 = .2489), this difference did not result in a significant difference in the OPD variable between males and females: Based on the full sample, the relationship between age and the OPD variable was found to be highly significant (p \u3c .0001). A linear response and plateau function (lrp) was performed on the data to locate the most likely asymptote, a point where further remodeling activity cannot be detected. The lrp placed the most likely start of the plateau at the age of 73 years. Based upon this result, a subsample of those individuals between the ages of 22 and 73 years were used to generate all predictive equations (n = 74). The inverse predictive equation reported by Stout and colleagues (1996) provided the most accurate age estimates for the current sample, followed by the equation produced from the subsample in the current study. The classical calibration equations generated for the current subsample and Stout and Paine (1992) samples both resulted in greater mean squared error values than the their inverse counterparts when applied to the full current sample. Comparison of the mean squared error values for the classical and inverse predictive equations for the current subsample (n = 74) showed that while the inverse calibration equation shows evidence of slight bias, the error for the inverse calibration estimates is smaller than those for the classical equation across all age ranges (22 - 73 years). This suggest the inverse form of the predictive equation is the calibration method of choice for histological age estimation for the clavicle

‘Getting under our skin’: Introducing banked allograft skin to burn surgery in South Africa

Deceased donor skin possesses many of the properties of the ideal biological dressing, and a well-stocked skin bank has become a critically important asset for the modern burn surgeon. Without it, managing patients with extensive burns and wounds becomes far more challenging, and outcomes are significantly worse. With the recent establishment of such a bank in South Africa, the challenge facing the medical fraternity is to facilitate tissue donation so that allograft skin supply can match the enormous demand

User-centered development of a Virtual Research Environment to support collaborative research events

This paper discusses the user-centred development process within the Collaborative Research Events on the Web (CREW) project, funded under the JISC Virtual Research Environments (VRE) programme. After presenting the project, its aims and the functionality of the CREW VRE, we focus on the user engagement approach, grounded in the method of co-realisation. We describe the different research settings and requirements of our three embedded user groups and the respective activities conducted so far. Finally we elaborate on the main challenges of our user engagement approach and end with the project’s next steps

Neratinib protects pancreatic beta cells in diabetes

The loss of functional insulin-producing β-cells is a hallmark of diabetes. Mammalian sterile 20-like kinase 1 (MST1) is a key regulator of pancreatic β-cell death and dysfunction; its deficiency restores functional β-cells and normoglycemia. The identification of MST1 inhibitors represents a promising approach for a β-cell-protective diabetes therapy. Here, we identify neratinib, an FDA-approved drug targeting HER2/EGFR dual kinases, as a potent MST1 inhibitor, which improves β-cell survival under multiple diabetogenic conditions in human islets and INS-1E cells. In a pre-clinical study, neratinib attenuates hyperglycemia and improves β-cell function, survival and β-cell mass in type 1 (streptozotocin) and type 2 (obese Leprdb/db) diabetic mouse models. In summary, neratinib is a previously unrecognized inhibitor of MST1 and represents a potential β-cell-protective drug with proof-of-concept in vitro in human islets and in vivo in rodent models of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes