Some Crucial Issues Concerning the Safety Provided by Occupational Health Standards

Traditionally occupational health standards for chemicals and other hazards in the workplace have been established by "expert committees" with no involve1nent of the victims of the effects of the hazards, namely the workers themselves. This has led to standards that do not protect workers against all ill effects. The example of trichloroethylene is typical. The New Zealand standard lags behind the World Health Organisation and Swedish standards. Workers have a moral right to be involved in the standard setting and the enforcement procedures. The crucial issue for them is the definition of the "acceptable risk" for a particular hazard, as they are putting their own health at stake. It is 34 years since Sweden established the system of workers health and safety representatives in all workplaces and in government agencies dealing with occupational health. Maybe it is time for New Zealand to follow this example

Diagnostic Prediction Using Discomfort Drawings with IBTM

In this paper, we explore the possibility to apply machine learning to make diagnostic predictions using discomfort drawings. A discomfort drawing is an intuitive way for patients to express discomfort and pain related symptoms. These drawings have proven to be an effective method to collect patient data and make diagnostic decisions in real-life practice. A dataset from real-world patient cases is collected for which medical experts provide diagnostic labels. Next, we use a factorized multimodal topic model, Inter-Battery Topic Model (IBTM), to train a system that can make diagnostic predictions given an unseen discomfort drawing. The number of output diagnostic labels is determined by using mean-shift clustering on the discomfort drawing. Experimental results show reasonable predictions of diagnostic labels given an unseen discomfort drawing. Additionally, we generate synthetic discomfort drawings with IBTM given a diagnostic label, which results in typical cases of symptoms. The positive result indicates a significant potential of machine learning to be used for parts of the pain diagnostic process and to be a decision support system for physicians and other health care personnel.Comment: Presented at 2016 Machine Learning and Healthcare Conference (MLHC 2016), Los Angeles, C

Factorized Topic Models

In this paper we present a modification to a latent topic model, which makes the model exploit supervision to produce a factorized representation of the observed data. The structured parameterization separately encodes variance that is shared between classes from variance that is private to each class by the introduction of a new prior over the topic space. The approach allows for a more eff{}icient inference and provides an intuitive interpretation of the data in terms of an informative signal together with structured noise. The factorized representation is shown to enhance inference performance for image, text, and video classification.Comment: ICLR 201

Privatization in Turkey

State capitalism has been a basic tenet of the developing strategy for Turkey for half a century, with import-substituting industrialization through state economic enterprises (SEEs) as a guiding principle. By 1980 a serious economic and political crisis called for a reassessment of economic policies. Policy reorientation was radical : from import substitution to export promotion, from interventionism to market forces, and from promotion of SEEs to promotion of the private sector. The state's role in the economy was reduced and emphasis has instead been put on broadly defined privatization, with the additional objectives of developing the domestic capital markets and generating revenue for the treasury. Initial operations were in the form of sales of revenue-sharing bonds and minority share sales. The first attempt at stock sales flopped. The approach was then quietly switched to block sales without thorough preparation of the legal ground.d. Since the government had not prepared the legal and political base for privatization, it had no clear strategy or concrete program. The assumption that privatization could be treated as an administrative matter was proven wrong. The cancelation of block sales coincided with a boom on the stock market with the strategy switched back to stock market sales of minority shares. For the moment, privatization has thus shrunk to a budget-deficit financing technique, with the targets of enhanced efficiency pushed into the background.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Stabilization

Workplace heat stress, health and productivity – an increasing challenge for low and middle-income countries during climate change

BACKGROUND Global climate change is already increasing the average temperature and direct heat exposure in many places around the world. OBJECTIVES To assess the potential impact on occupational health and work capacity for people exposed at work to increasing heat due to climate change. DESIGN A brief review of basic thermal physiology mechanisms, occupational heat exposure guidelines and heat exposure changes in selected cities. RESULTS In countries with very hot seasons, workers are already affected by working environments hotter than that with which human physiological mechanisms can cope. To protect workers from excessive heat, a number of heat exposure indices have been developed. One that is commonly used in occupational health is the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT). We use WBGT to illustrate assessing the proportion of a working hour during which a worker can sustain work and the proportion of that same working hour that (s)he needs to rest to cool the body down and maintain core body temperature below 38 degrees C. Using this proportion a 'work capacity' estimate was calculated for selected heat exposure levels and work intensity levels. The work capacity rapidly reduces as the WBGT exceeds 26-30 degrees C and this can be used to estimate the impact of increasing heat exposure as a result of climate change in tropical countries. CONCLUSIONS One result of climate change is a reduced work capacity in heat-exposed jobs and greater difficulty in achieving economic and social development in the countries affected by this somewhat neglected impact of climate change.The research was supported by funds from the Australian National University and Lund University