Job quality and labour market performance

CEPS Working Document No. 330/June 2010, http://www.ceps.eu/book/job-quality-and-labour-market-performanceJob quality is a multidimensional concept, but the empirical analysis of job quality in Europe leads to three main types of result. First, it reveals important differences across countries, with four main regimes prevalent in Europe. Second, it supports the hypothesis that a higher level of job quality is associated with better labour market and economic performance. Finally, it emphasises the heterogeneity of quality across social groups, especially according to gender, age, and education

The Point of Narratology: Part 2

Resisting the current fashion of calling everything, and ourselves as scholars, “post- ” something, as well as the unnoticed scholarly privileging of the present, or “presentism” that comes with it, I return in this article to an age-old novel, written by someone who was severely traumatized. Miguel de Cervantes Saveedra wrote his world-famous novel Don Quijote after having been held as a slave in Algiers. “Trauma” is a state of stagnation and the impossibility of subjective remembrance that result from traumatogenic events; not the events themselves; the distortion of time and its forms that result, rather than the violence that causes the trauma. This implies that the traumatic state challenges narratological concepts such as event, development, and other temporal categories. Therefore, I will concentrate my discussion on focalisation and temporality as both problematic as well as indispensable, and end up arguing that the traditional interpretation can also be reversed: the hero did not go mad because he read too much, but escaped in reading to evade the traumatizing reality. In this article I revisit the concept of focalisation, in its tight connection, but not identity, to related concepts such as the gaze, looking, and imagining. The hypothesis that readers envision, that is, create, images from textual stimuli, cuts right through semantic theory, grammar, and rhetoric, to foreground the presence and crucial importance of images in reading; of imaging as part of that activity

Affective history, working class communities and self-determination

Using a concept of affective history, this paper explores the common creation of everyday being-ness, producing common meanings that may have existed and been passed down over hundreds of years. Indeed, some of those meanings clearly become potent symbols binding us together. Thus, common meanings, held for many hundreds of years can have an effect in relation to the construction of communal beingness in the present. Applying this approach to research in working class communities with a history of suffering or displacement, often understood by agencies as ‘hard to reach’, demands that we take a creative approach to research. Methodologically, this work came out of listening to a fragmentary history of movement and exclusion that emerged out of attending to the collection of often small, anecdotal, details in conversations and interviews. This approach is explored with reference to using a co-production research framework

THz transition radiation of electron bunch laser-accelerated in long-scale near-critical density plasmas

Direct laser electron acceleration in near-critical density plasma produces collimated electron beams with high charge $Q$ (up to $\mu$C). This regime could be of interest for high energy THz radiation generation, as many of the mechanisms have a scaling $\propto Q^2$. In this work we focused specifically on challenges that arise during numerical investigation of transition radiation in such interaction. Detailed analytical calculations that include both diffraction and decoherence effects of characteristics of transition radiation in the THz range were conducted with the input parameters obtained from 3D PIC and hydrodynamic simulations. The calculated characteristics of THz radiation are in good agreement with the experimentally measured ones. Therefore, this approach can be used both to optimize properties of THz radiation and distinguish the transition radiation contribution if several mechanisms of THz radiation generation are considered

Estudo da marcha de crianças em idade escolar que transportam mochilas às costas usando cinemática

Este estudo teve como objectivo analisar a cinemática do ciclo da marcha de crianças em idade escolar, transportando mochilas às costas. Foram estudadas 4 crianças (3 do sexo masculino e 1 do sexo feminino) do 3º ano do primeiro ciclo do ensino básico (8 anos idade). Cada criança caminhou num tapete rolante a velocidades incrementais (1.11 m.s-1, 1.38 m.s -1e 1.67 m.s -1) e com diferentes cargas relativas à massa corporal (0 %, 10 % e 20 %) numa mochila escolar. Todos os procedimentos foram filmados no plano sagital e frontal e tratados com software específico para análise cinemática do movimento humano. Foi efectuada a análise cinemática de um ciclo completo, para cada carga e velocidade. Foram avaliados os parâmetros gerais do ciclo da marcha, parâmetros de cinemática angular, assim como, parâmetros de cinemática linear. Como principais conclusões deste estudo pode-se afirmar que de 0 % para 10 % de carga os parâmetros seguem uma tendência e para cargas superiores a 10 % e com marcha mais rápida essa tendência não se mantém. Será portanto espectável que o valor de carga máxima a transportar na mochila esteja entre 10 e 20 % da massa corporal

Making more microtubules by severing: a common theme of noncentrosomal microtubule arrays?

Two related enzymes, katanin and spastin, use the energy from ATP hydrolysis to sever microtubules. Two new studies (one in this issue; see McNally et al., p. 881) show that microtubule severing by katanin provides a means for increasing microtubule density in meiotic spindles. Interestingly, loss of spastin leads to a sparser microtubule array in axons and synaptic boutons. Together, these studies hint at a wider role for microtubule-severing enzymes in the formation and organization of noncentrosomal microtubule arrays by generating new seeds for microtubule growth

A LOSSY CODING SCHEME FOR IMAGES BY USING THE HAAR WAVELET TRANSFORM AND THE THEORY OF IDEAL CROSS-POINTS REGIONS

This paper presents Lossy Coding Scheme for Images by Using The Haar Wavelet Transform and The Theory of Cross-points Regions with Ideal Cross-points Regions (HWTICR). The base of this statement is the effect of Gray coding on cross-points which are neighbor to the points of grey levels 2n. After Gray coding these regions always contain only 1-bits or 0-bits depending on the number of each bit plane after bit plane decomposition. The optimization of probability in each bit plane has important effects on encoding and decoding processes of lossless image compression for data transmission. The framework itself is founded upon a wavelet transformed domain, the scheme will show how The Haar Wavelet Transform combines with the theory of Ideal Cross-points Regions to become a lossy coding scheme for images. The goal of the method is to build a lossy coding scheme for images with high compression ratio and low distortion factor in comparison with some other methods. Finally, some initial results of the scheme are also presented and compared to the other methods. The algorithm can be used in medical and photographic imaging