Alternative work schedule interventions in the Australian construction industry: A comparative case study analysis

Project-based construction workers in the Australian construction industry work long and irregular hours and experience higher levels of work-to-family conflict and burnout than office-based workers, giving rise to an interest in alternative work schedules as a means of supporting work-life balance. Alternative work schedules were implemented in four case study construction projects in Australia. Interventions differed between projects, with two implementing a compressed work week, and the others introducing reduced hours schedules (one of which was optional). Data were collected from each case study project, using various combinations of focus groups, surveys, interviews and daily diary collection methods. The results were mixed. The compressed work week appears to have been favourably received where it was introduced. However, waged workers still expressed concerns about the impact on their weekly 'take-home' pay. Attempts to reduce work hours by changing from a six- to a five-day schedule (without extending the length of the working day between Monday and Friday) were less favourably received. Waged workers, in particular, did not favour reduced hours schedules. The results confirm the existence of two distinct labour markets operating in the Australian construction industry and markedly different responses to alternative work schedules, based upon whether workers are waged or salaried. The results clearly show that attempts to improve work-life balance must take the structural characteristics of the industry's labour markets into consideration in the design of interventions. The impact of alternative work schedules is likely to be moderated by institutional working time regimes within the construction industry

Into the depths of C: Elaborating the de facto standards

C remains central to our computing infrastructure. It is notionally defined by ISO standards, but in reality the properties of C assumed by systems code and those implemented by compilers have diverged, both from the ISO standards and from each other, and none of these are clearly understood. We make two contributions to help improve this error-prone situation. First, we describe an in-depth analysis of the design space for the semantics of pointers and memory in C as it is used in practice. We articulate many specific questions, build a suite of semantic test cases, gather experimental data from multiple implementations, and survey what C experts believe about the de facto standards. We identify questions where there is a consensus (either following ISO or differing) and where there are conflicts. We apply all this to an experimental C implemented above capability hardware. Second, we describe a formal model, Cerberus, for large parts of C. Cerberus is parameterised on its memory model; it is linkable either with a candidate de facto memory object model, under construction, or with an operational C11 concurrency model; it is defined by elaboration to a much simpler Core language for accessibility, and it is executable as a test oracle on small examples. This should provide a solid basis for discussion of what mainstream C is now: what programmers and analysis tools can assume and what compilers aim to implement. Ultimately we hope it will be a step towards clear, consistent, and accepted semantics for the various use-cases of C.We acknowledge funding from EPSRC grants EP/H005633 (Leadership Fellowship, Sewell) and EP/K008528 (REMS Programme Grant), and a Gates Cambridge Scholarship (Nienhuis). This work is also part of the CTSRD projects sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), under contract FA8750-10-C-0237.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Association for Computing Machinery via http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2908080.290808

An immunotherapy survivor population: health-related quality of life and toxicity in patients with metastatic melanoma treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors

© The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Purpose The immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have resulted in subgroups of patients with metastatic melanoma achievinghigh-quality durable responses. Metastatic melanoma survivors are a new population in the era of cancer survivorship. The aimofthis study was to evaluate metastatic melanoma survivors in terms of health-related quality of life (HRQoL), immune-relatedadverse events (irAEs) and exposure to immunosuppressive agents in a large single centre in the UK.Methods We defined the survivor population as patients with a diagnosis of metastatic melanoma who achieved a durableresponse to an ICI and had been followed-up for a minimum of 12 months from initiation of ICI without disease progression.HRQoL was assessed using SF-36. Electronic health records were accessed to collect data on demographics, treatments, irAEsand survival. HRQoL data was compared with two norm-based datasets.Results Eighty-four metastatic melanoma survivors were eligible and 87% (N = 73) completed the SF-36. ICI-related toxicity ofany grade occurred in 92%of patients and 43%had experienced a grade 3 or 4 toxicity. Almost half (49%) of the patients requiredsteroids for the treatment of ICI-related toxicity, whilst 14% required treatment with an immunosuppressive agent beyondsteroids.Melanoma survivors had statistically significant lower HRQoL scores with regard to physical, social and physical rolefunctioning and general health compared with the normative population. There was a trend towards inferior scores in patientswith previous exposure to ipilimumab compared with those never exposed to ipilimumab.Conclusions Our results show that metastatic melanoma survivors have potentially experienced significant ICI-related toxicityand experience significant impairments in specific HRQoL domains. Future service planning is required to meet this population’sunique survivorship needs.Peer reviewe

Interdisciplinary communication in the intensive care unit

Background. Patient safety research has shown poor communication among intensive care unit (ICU) nurses and doctors to be a common causal factor underlying critical incidents in intensive care. This study examines whether ICU doctors and nurses have a shared perception of interdisciplinary communication in the UK ICU. Methods. Cross-sectional survey of ICU nurses and doctors in four UK hospitals using a previously established measure of ICU interdisciplinary collaboration. Results. A sample of 48 doctors and 136 nurses (47% response rate) from four ICUs responded to the survey. Nurses and doctors were found to have differing perceptions of interdisciplinary communication, with nurses reporting lower levels of communication openness between nurses and doctors. Compared with senior doctors, trainee doctors also reported lower levels of communication openness between doctors. A regression path analysis revealed that communication openness among ICU team members predicted the degree to which individuals reported understanding their patient care goals (adjR2 = 0.17). It also showed that perceptions of the quality of unit leadership predicted open communication. Conclusions. Members of ICU teams have divergent perceptions of their communication with one another. Communication openness among team members is also associated with the degree to which they understand patient care goals. It is necessary to create an atmosphere where team members feel they can communicate openly without fear of reprisal or embarrassment

Похибка розрахунку характеристик гармонійного сигналу

Встановлено основні джерела похибок програм визначення коефіцієнта гармонік для звичайної та подвійної точності розрахунку. Аналізуються похибки заокруглення, пов’язані із знаходженням тригонометричних функцій стандартними програмами, похибки розрахунку коефіцієнта гармонік гармонійного сигналу, на який накладено постійний складник, похибки розрахунку коефіцієнта гармонік від кількості дискретних відліків на періоді сигналу, похибки квантування по рівню, величина яких залежить від розрядності аналогово-цифрового перетворювача (АЦП). Шляхом моделювання визначено величину порогу чутливості по коефіцієнту гармонік.The basic sources of the errors of software for calculation of the harmonic factor for an ordinary and double accuracy of calculation are established. Errors in rounding, related to the calculation of trigonometric functions by standard programs, errors of calculation of the harmonic factor of a harmonic signal with an imposed permanent constituent, errors of calculation of the harmonic factor from the number of discrete counts on the signal period, errors of quantum by level the value which depends from the value ADC bits are analyzed. The threshold value of sensitivity by a harmonic factor was evaluated by modelling.Рассмотрены основные источники погрешностей программ расчета коэффициента гармоник с обычной и двойной точностью вычислений. Анализируются погрешности округления, связанные с вычислением тригонометрических функций стандартными программами, погрешности расчета коэффициента гармоник гармонического сигнала с постоянной составляющей, погрешности расчета коэффициента гармоник от количества дискретных отсчетов на периоде гармонического сигнала, погрешности квантования по уровню, величина которых зависит от разрядности аналого-цифрового преобразователя (АЦП). Путем моделирования определена величина порога чувствительности по коэффициенту гармоник

Galaxy Zoo builder:four-component photometric decomposition of spiral galaxies guided by citizen science

Multicomponent modeling of galaxies is a valuable tool in the effort to quantitatively understand galaxy evolution, yet the use of the technique is plagued by issues of convergence, model selection, and parameter degeneracies. These issues limit its application over large samples to the simplest models, with complex models being applied only to very small samples. We attempt to resolve this dilemma of "quantity or quality" by developing a novel framework, built inside the Zooniverse citizen-science platform, to enable the crowdsourcing of model creation for Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies. We have applied the method, including a final algorithmic optimization step, on a test sample of 198 galaxies, and examine the robustness of this new method. We also compare it to automated fitting pipelines, demonstrating that it is possible to consistently recover accurate models that either show good agreement with, or improve on, prior work. We conclude that citizen science is a promising technique for modeling images of complex galaxies, and release our catalog of models

Peer assessment of outpatient consultation letters – feasibility and satisfaction

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Written correspondence is one of the most important forms of communication between health care providers, yet there is little feedback provided to specialists. The objective of this study was to determine the feasibility and satisfaction of a peer assessment program on consultation letters and to determine inter-rater reliability between family physicians and specialists.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A rating scale of nine 5-point Likert scale items including specific content, style items, education value of the letter and an overall rating was developed from a previous validated tool.</p> <p>Nine Internal Medicine specialists/subspecialists from two tertiary care centres submitted 10 letters with patient and physician identifiers removed. Two Internal Medicine specialists, and 2 family physicians from the other centre rated each letter (to protect writer anonymity). A satisfaction survey was sent to each writer and rater after collation of the results. A follow-up survey was sent 6–8 months later.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>There was a high degree of satisfaction with the process and feedback. The rating scale information was felt to be useful and appropriate for evaluating the quality of consultation letters by 6/7 writers. 5/7 seven writers felt that the feedback they received resulted in immediate changes to their letters. Six months later, 6/9 writers indicated they had maintained changes in their letters.</p> <p>Raters rank ordered letters similarly (Cronbach's alpha 0.57–0.84) but mean scores were highly variant. At site 1 there were significant differences in scoring brevity (p < 0.01) between family physician and specialist raters; whereas, at site 2 there were differences in scoring of history (p < 0.01), physical examination (p < 0.01) and educational value (p < 0.01) of the letter.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Most participants found peer assessment of letters feasible and beneficial and longstanding changes occurred in some individuals. Family physicians and specialists appear to have different expectations on some items. Further studies on reliability and validity, with a larger sample, are required before high stakes professional assessments include consultation letters.</p