Discrimination, labour markets and the Labour Market Prospects of Older Workers: What Can a Legal Case Teach us?

As governments become increasingly concerned about the fiscal implications of the ageing population, labour market policies have sought to encourage mature workers to remain in the labour force. The ‘human capital’ discourses motivating these policies rest on the assumption that older workers armed with motivation and vocational skills will be able to return to fulfilling work. This paper uses the post-redundancy recruitment experiences of former Ansett Airlines flight attendants to develop a critique of these expectations. It suggests that policies to increase older workers’ labour market participation will not succeed while persistent socially constructed age- and gender- typing shape labour demand. The conclusion argues for policies sensitive to the institutional structures that shape employer preferences, the competitive rationality of discriminatory practices, and the irresolvable tension between workers’ human rights and employers’ property rights

The inverse problem of determining the filtration function and permeability reduction in flow of water with particles in porous media

The original publication can be found at www.springerlink.comDeep bed filtration of particle suspensions in porous media occurs during water injection into oil reservoirs, drilling fluid invasion of reservoir production zones, fines migration in oil fields, industrial filtering, bacteria, viruses or contaminants transport in groundwater etc. The basic features of the process are particle capture by the porous medium and consequent permeability reduction. Models for deep bed filtration contain two quantities that represent rock and fluid properties: the filtration function, which is the fraction of particles captured per unit particle path length, and formation damage function, which is the ratio between reduced and initial permeabilities. These quantities cannot be measured directly in the laboratory or in the field; therefore, they must be calculated indirectly by solving inverse problems. The practical petroleum and environmental engineering purpose is to predict injectivity loss and particle penetration depth around wells. Reliable prediction requires precise knowledge of these two coefficients. In this work we determine these quantities from pressure drop and effluent concentration histories measured in one-dimensional laboratory experiments. The recovery method consists of optimizing deviation functionals in appropriate subdomains; if necessary, a Tikhonov regularization term is added to the functional. The filtration function is recovered by optimizing a non-linear functional with box constraints; this functional involves the effluent concentration history. The permeability reduction is recovered likewise, taking into account the filtration function already found, and the functional involves the pressure drop history. In both cases, the functionals are derived from least square formulations of the deviation between experimental data and quantities predicted by the model.Alvarez, A. C., Hime, G., Marchesin, D., Bedrikovetski, P