The Effect of Health Changes and Long-term Health on the Work Activity of Older Canadians

Using longitudinal data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS), we study the relationship between health and employment among older Canadians. We focus on two issues: (1) the possible endogeneity of self- reported health, particularly "justification bias", and (2) the relative importance of health changes and long-term health in the decision to work. The NPHS contains the HUI3, an "objective" health index which has been gaining popularity in empirical work. We contrast estimates of the impact of health on employment using self-assessed health, the HUI3, and a "purged" health measure similar to that employed by Bound et al. (1999) and Disney et al. (2003). A direct test suggests that self-assessed health suffers from justification bias. However, the HUI3 provides estimates that are similar to the "purged" health measure. We also corroborate recent U.S. and U.K. findings that changes in health are important in the work decision.Health; Health Changes; Employment; Older Workers; NPHS

The Effect of Health Changes and Long-term Health on the Work Activity of Older Canadians

Using longitudinal data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS), we study the relationship between health and employment among older Canadians. We focus on two issues: (1) the possible problems with self- reported health, including endogeneity and measurement error, and (2) the relative importance of health changes and long-term health in the decision to work. We contrast estimates of the impact of health on employment using self-assessed health, an objective health index contained in the NPHS - the HUI3, and a "purged" health stock measure. Our results suggest that health has an economically significant effect on employment probabilities for Canadian men and women aged 50 to 64, and that this effect is underestimated by simple estimates based on self-assessed health. We also corroborate recent U.S. and U.K. findings that changes in health are important in the work decision.health, health changes, employment, older workers

Product Design of a Measurement Solution for Cooking & Baking

This report is part of a Master Thesis Project in Mechanical Engineering with Industrial Design at the Faculty of Engineering LTH at Lund University. The project was performed in collaboration with Hammarplast Consumer Ab, a Swedish company founded in 1947 manufacturing household items in plastic. Hammarplast Consumer Ab is part of the Orthex group, which is the leading Nordic company within the field of household items. The goal of this project was to design and develop a consumer product for measuring dry and liquid ingredients in the context of cooking and baking. The project concerned the design of appearance and functionality as well as technical requirements and considerations. The preparation of cuisine always requires measuring to some extent. Recipes provide guidelines for inexperienced chefs with instructions and quantities of the ingredients that make up a meal. The act of cooking relates to cultural identities and traditions. The project commenced with an exploration of the concept of measuring and measurement systems. Further investigation into the attitudes of chefs at home and professionals followed. Interviews and observations were used to gain knowledge of the user, the environment and context in which cooking and measuring of ingredients is performed. A market analysis of products for the kitchen and brands operating in the field of kitchen appliances was performed. The market research revealed a saturated market and presented a challenge to come up with an innovative solution. Knowledge gained from observations and interviews was the point of departure for the ideation process. A persona was formed to gain a clear target for aesthetic and functional design considerations. Initial concept designs were further developed through subsequent evaluations with supervisors at Hammarplast Consumer Ab and the division of Industrial Design and Machine Design at Lund University. Among four concepts presented at the mid-point of the project, two were further developed. The final concept was decided upon in discussions with the company. The result of this thesis is a production-ready design concept for measuring of dry and liquid ingredients. A user-centered design process revealed that measuring devices present an interface between users and ingredients. This insight led to innovative features in the final product

Self-employment among the Armed Forces Community

The Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick, QinetiQ and X-Forces Enterprise were commissioned by Forces in Mind Trust to understand what more could be done to support the Armed Forces Community in pursuing self-employment and thereby help to maximise their chances of a successful and sustainable transition. This research seeks to fill the current gap in knowledge and contribute to policy-making and service delivery

Endocytosis of PEGylated nanoparticles accompanied by structural and free energy changes of the grafted polyethylene glycol

AbstractNanoparticles (NPs) are in use to efficiently deliver drug molecules into diseased cells. The surfaces of NPs are usually grafted with polyethylene glycol (PEG) polymers, during so-called PEGylation, to improve water solubility, avoid aggregation, and prevent opsonization during blood circulation. The interplay between grafting density σp and grafted PEG polymerization degree N makes cellular uptake of PEGylated NPs distinct from that of bare NPs. To understand the role played by grafted PEG polymers, we study the endocytosis of 8 nm sized PEGylated NPs with different σp and N through large scale dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) simulations. The free energy change Fpolymer of grafted PEG polymers, before and after endocytosis, is identified to have an effect which is comparable to, or even larger than, the bending energy of the membrane during endocytosis. Based on self-consistent field theory Fpolymer is found to be dependent on both σp and N. By incorporating Fpolymer, the critical ligand-receptor binding strength for PEGylated NPs to be internalized can be correctly predicted by a simple analytical equation. Without considering Fpolymer, it turns out impossible to predict whether the PEGylated NPs will be delivered into the diseased cells. These simulation results and theoretical analysis not only provide new insights into the endocytosis process of PEGylated NPs, but also shed light on the underlying physical mechanisms, which can be utilized for designing efficient PEGylated NP-based therapeutic carriers with improved cellular targeting and uptake

Impacts of State Reopening Policy on Human Mobility

This study quantifies the effect of state reopening policies on daily mobility, travel, and mixing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. We harness cell device signal data to examine the effects of the timing and pace of reopening plans in different states. We quantify the increase in mobility patterns during the reopening phase by a broad range of cell-device-based metrics. Soon (four days) after reopening, we observe a 6% to 8% mobility increase. In addition, we find that temperature and precipitation are strongly associated with increased mobility across counties. The mobility measures that reflect visits to a greater variety of locations responds the most to reopening policies, while total time in vs. outside the house remains unchanged. The largest increases in mobility occur in states that were late adopters of closure measures, suggesting that closure policies may have represented more of a binding constraint in those states. Together, these four observations provide an assessment of the extent to which people in the U.S. are resuming movement and physical proximity as the COVID-19 pandemic continues

Mask-Free Video Instance Segmentation

The recent advancement in Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) has largely been driven by the use of deeper and increasingly data-hungry transformer-based models. However, video masks are tedious and expensive to annotate, limiting the scale and diversity of existing VIS datasets. In this work, we aim to remove the mask-annotation requirement. We propose MaskFreeVIS, achieving highly competitive VIS performance, while only using bounding box annotations for the object state. We leverage the rich temporal mask consistency constraints in videos by introducing the Temporal KNN-patch Loss (TK-Loss), providing strong mask supervision without any labels. Our TK-Loss finds one-to-many matches across frames, through an efficient patch-matching step followed by a K-nearest neighbor selection. A consistency loss is then enforced on the found matches. Our mask-free objective is simple to implement, has no trainable parameters, is computationally efficient, yet outperforms baselines employing, e.g., state-of-the-art optical flow to enforce temporal mask consistency. We validate MaskFreeVIS on the YouTube-VIS 2019/2021, OVIS and BDD100K MOTS benchmarks. The results clearly demonstrate the efficacy of our method by drastically narrowing the gap between fully and weakly-supervised VIS performance. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/SysCV/MaskFreeVis.Comment: Accepted in CVPR 2023; Code: https://github.com/SysCV/MaskFreeVis; Project page: http://vis.xyz/pub/maskfreevi