A STUDY OF GENDER IN SENIOR CIVIL SERVICE POSITIONS IN IRELAND. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 66 DECEMBER 2017

Women make up the majority of those employed in the civil service but are underrepresented at the most senior grades, where key policy and operational decisions are taken. Action 8 of the Civil Service Renewal Plan commits to improving gender balance at each level, including senior grades. The present study was commissioned by a high-level steering group set up to oversee implementation of this action. It draws on a combination of administrative data, reanalysis of the Civil Service Employee Engagement Survey conducted in 2015, and in-depth work history interviews with 50 senior civil servants across four departments. In addition, in-depth interviews were conducted with staff involved in recruitment and promotion within the public service. This rich combination of data yields new insights into the processes shaping gender differences in representation at the most senior grades of the civil service and thus provides a strong evidence base to inform future policy and practice

The Changing Workplace. ESRI Research Bulletin 2011/1/3

How are Irish workplaces changing? Recent reports† give a detailed picture, based on two nationally representative surveys – one of employers and another of employees – carried out in 2009. These surveys replicate many aspects of the first national workplace surveys, carried out in 2003 in the midst of an economic boom. The new surveys took place in dramatically changed economic circumstances. In the private sector, the economic crisis threatened the very survival of many firms. In the public sector, budget cuts and recruitment constraints created severe challenges in delivering public services

SensorNet API development report

This report describes the development of a prototype web based application for the dissemination and analysis of sensor network data as held in the corporate database for virtual sensor data, referred to throughout this report as SensorNet. The first part of the report introduces the project and the context of this particular bit of work. The following sections describe the approach taken, the technologies considered, how long each element of the work took, a summary of the results so far and an outline of future tasks

JOB STRESS AND WORKING CONDITIONS: IRELAND IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 84 NOVEMBER 2018

Stress in the workplace is an issue of growing concern. There is an increasing recognition that job stress has significant implications for the physical and mental wellbeing of workers and costs for employers and the economy. The British Health and Safety Executive estimates the cost of work-related stress, anxiety and depression to be in the region of £5.2 billion in the UK for the year 2013/2014. Health and Safety legislation in Ireland, and the EU more widely, specifies that employers have a duty of care to ensure that the safety, health and welfare of employees are not unreasonably compromised by work. The duty of care extends to personal injury and the mental health of workers. In the current study, we use two waves of a European-wide dataset, the European Working Conditions Survey, carried out in 2010 and 2015, to examine the working conditions that are associated with job stress. We focus in particular on Ireland and the UK, but also make comparisons with other countries in Western Europe. We draw on prevailing theories and the extensive research-evidence base to identify a range of job demands that are potential stressors and job resources that are proposed to moderate the effects of high work demands, and thus reduce job stress

RISK TAKING AND ACCIDENTS ON IRISH FARMS: AN ANALYSIS OF THE 2013 HEALTH AND SAFETY AUTHORITY SURVEY. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 60 MAY 2017

The agricultural, fishing and forestry sector in Ireland has the highest rate of both fatal and non-fatal work-related injuries compared to other sectors (Health and Safety Authority (HSA), 2016). The HSA commissioned a 2013 nationwide research study to examine farm safety issues. That study involved a postal survey of farmers selected at random from the HSA database of farms, with a small booster sample of questionnaires completed by face-to-face interview at marts. Findings were presented in a report focusing on descriptive results regarding intentions to work safely, published in 2014 (HSA, 2014). The present study involves an in-depth analysis of the same survey data, but goes beyond the original report in calibrating the data to represent all farms and conducting detailed statistical analysis to identify the most important factors related to risk taking and how this is linked to accidents on farms

Composite Structure with Load Distribution Devices, and Method for Making Same

An improved composite structure and method for making same has been provided. The provided improved composite structure has locally strengthened areas within a reinforcement region. The locally strengthened areas within the reinforcement region have load distribution devices to redistribute load in order to (i) locally strengthen an area around damage induced by an initial momentary and direct transmitted load, and (ii) limit growth and propagation of damage induced by an initial momentary and direct transmitted load during a subsequent unbalance load. The improved composite structure reduces the impact of the fan blade out phenomenon in a weight efficient manner

The Structure of High Strehl Ratio Point-Spread Functions

We describe the symmetries present in the point-spread function (PSF) of an optical system either located in space or corrected by an adaptive o to Strehl ratios of about 70% and higher. We present a formalism for expanding the PSF to arbitrary order in terms of powers of the Fourier transform of the residual phase error, over an arbitrarily shaped and apodized entrance aperture. For traditional unapodized apertures at high Strehl ratios, bright speckles pinned to the bright Airy rings are part of an antisymmetric perturbation of the perfect PSF, arising from the term that is first order in the residual phase error. There are two symmetric second degree terms. One is negative at the center, and, like the first order term, is modulated by the perfect image's field strength -- it reduces to the Marechal approximation at the center of the PSF. The other is non-negative everywhere, zero at the image center, and can be responsible for an extended halo -- which limits the dynamic range of faint companion detection in the darkest portions of the image. In regimes where one or the other term dominates the speckles in an image, the symmetry of the dominant term can be exploited to reduce the effect of those speckles, potentially by an order of magnitude or more. We demonstrate the effects of both secondary obscuration and pupil apodization on the structure of residual speckles, and discuss how these symmetries can be exploited by appropriate telescope and instrument design, observing strategies, and filter bandwidths to improve the dynamic range of high dynamic range AO and space-based observations. Finally, we show that our analysis is relevant to high dynamic range coronagraphy.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 20 pages, 4 figure

The Changing Workplace: A Survey of Employees’ Views and Experiences. The National Workplace Surveys 2009, Vol.2 Employees

Abstract included in text