Crossing the Tracks? More on Trends in the Training of Male and Female Workers in Great Britain

A small number of recent empirical studies for several countries has reported the intriguing finding that the ‘advantage’ previously enjoyed by men in respect of training incidence and reported in earlier work in the literature has been reversed. The present paper explores the sources of the gender differential in training incidence using Labour Force Survey data, updating previous U.K. studies and providing further insights into the above phenomenon. The results suggest that the greater part of the ‘gap’ typically relates to differences in characteristics, among which the most important relate to occupation, industry and sector (public/private).

Disability and labor market outcomes

In Europe, about one in eight people of working age report having a disability; that is, the presence of a long-term limiting health condition. Despite the introduction of a range of legislative and policy initiatives designed to eliminate discrimination and facilitate retention of and entry into work, disability is associated with substantial and enduring employment disadvantages. Identifying the reasons for this is complex, but critical to determine effective policy solutions that reduce the social and economic costs of disability disadvantage

Disability and Skill Mismatch

This paper integrates two strands of literature on overskilling and disability using the 2004 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS). It finds that the disabled are significantly more likely to be mismatched in the labour market, to suffer from a pay penalty and to have lower job satisfaction, the effects being stronger for the work-limited disabled. Giving workers more discretion over how they perform their work would significantly reduce these negative effects.skills, disability, job matching, earnings, job satisfaction

Quantization Design for Distributed Optimization

We consider the problem of solving a distributed optimization problem using a distributed computing platform, where the communication in the network is limited: each node can only communicate with its neighbours and the channel has a limited data-rate. A common technique to address the latter limitation is to apply quantization to the exchanged information. We propose two distributed optimization algorithms with an iteratively refining quantization design based on the inexact proximal gradient method and its accelerated variant. We show that if the parameters of the quantizers, i.e. the number of bits and the initial quantization intervals, satisfy certain conditions, then the quantization error is bounded by a linearly decreasing function and the convergence of the distributed algorithms is guaranteed. Furthermore, we prove that after imposing the quantization scheme, the distributed algorithms still exhibit a linear convergence rate, and show complexity upper-bounds on the number of iterations to achieve a given accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms and the theoretical findings for solving a distributed optimal control problem

Demystifying Functions: The Historical and Pedagogical Difficulties of the Concept of the Function

In this study, the author discusses the concept of function from a historical and pedagogical perspective. The historical roots, ranging from ancient civilizations all the way to the twentieth century, are summarized. The author then details several different function representations that have emerged over the course of the concept\u27s history. Special attention is paid to the idea of abstraction and how students understand functions at different levels of abstraction. Several middle school, high school, and college textbooks are then analyzed and evaluated based on their portrayal of the function concept. The author describes several common misconceptions that students have about functions and finally proposes a short educational module designed to help older high school students grow to a deeper level of understanding of this complex and often misunderstood concept

The Defence of Ethnic Identity in Malaysia

The changing dynamics of interstate conflict in the post-Cold War environment led scholars to debate the relevance of established security theory. While traditionalists maintained that the state-centric theory should retain its primacy, others argued for a security agenda, not only broadened or widened to include other sectors, but one deepened or extended to include the individual and larger societal groupings as referent objects of security. In the 1990s, the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute developed a reformulated and expanded security agenda which recognized five dimensions of security – political, military, economic, environmental and societal. Societal security has been defined as the defence of identity with identity accepted as the way in which communities think about themselves and the manner in which individuals identify themselves as members of a particular community. The Institute’s research on societal security was further expanded by Paul Roe in his 2005 study on ethnic conflict in the Balkan states. The determination of successive Malaysian governments to inculcate Islamic values throughout its infrastructure and society was borne from the inter-communal violence in May 1969, a civil reaction to the unexpected election results. The loss of parliamentary majority, for so long the domain of the Malays, confirmed a significant shift in political power and the increasingly influential role of the non-Malay voice in the political process. The inter-ethnic hostility resulted in a Federation-wide state of emergency and the suspension of parliamentary democracy for 20 months during which time the country was led by the National Operations Council under the leadership of Tun Abdul Razak. The National Operations Council and subsequent administrations progressively introduced policy to restore Malay political supremacy and redress societal imbalance. Despite the obvious success of Malaysia’s social transformation, research has indicated that policy introduced to lessen the economic and social inequality of the Malays has, in effect, led to a polarising of ethnicities. Political historians and analysts are mindful that increasing ethnic tension along with tacit ethnic segregation are salient reminders of the violence of the 1969 ethnic riots. With the theoretical framework on societal security provided by the CPRI, this thesis proposes to analyse the impact of the post-1969 political paradigm on Malaysian society with particular focus on inter-societal relations

Thinking Style Differences of Female College and University Presidents: A National Study

The purpose of this study was to identify thinking style preferences of female college and university presidents and determine if differences in thinking style exist with regard to the independent variables of Carnegie classification, institutional control, highest academic degree earned, academic background/specialty, age, and total years of presidential experience. The Inquiry Mode Questionnaire (InQ) and a demographic data form were distributed to all 595 female presidents with institutions classified as Associate’s or higher by the Carnegie system. Responses were received from 369 (62.02%), with 328 (55.13%) utilized for data analysis. Descriptive statistics, MANOVA and ANOVA tests were used to address the seven primary queries, with significance noted at

Job Anxiety, Work-Related Psychological Illness and Workplace Performance

This paper uses matched employee-employer data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2004 to examine the determinants of employee job anxiety and work-related psychological illness. Job anxiety is found to be strongly related to the demands of the job as measured by factors such as occupation, education and hours of work. Average levels of employee job anxiety, in turn, are positively associated with work-related psychological illness among the workforce as reported by managers. The paper goes on to consider the relationship between psychological illness and workplace performance as measured by absence, turnover and labour productivity. Work-related psychological illness is found to be negatively associated with several measures of workplace performance.job anxiety, stress, absence, labour productivity