Pay Transparency in Europe: First Experiences with Gender Pay Reports and Audits in Four Member States

In light of the limited action in many Member States to introduce or review gender pay transparency instruments as recommended, in November 2017 the European Commission announced the possible need for further targeted measures at EU level. This report reviews experiences in four Member States – Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Finland – based on their company-level gender pay reports and audits. Evaluations point to a ‘bumpy ride’ in terms of compliance – at least in the initial phase of rolling out the instruments in some countries – and highlight room for improvement in engaging employee representatives and in raising employees’ awareness. The need to tackle knowledge gaps around the instruments right from the start is a lesson to be learnt from the experiences of the first movers. Soft measures to accompany enforceable mandatory requirements seem to be in demand and to be working well. Ultimately, the success of the instrument depends on the attitudes of the actors, the extent to which they acknowledge the existence of unjustified gender pay gaps and their willingness to engage in a meaningful dialogue and follow-up

Wearable, wireless oximeter final progress report

Wearable, wireless oximeter with blood pressure measurement capabilit

Developments in Collectively Agreed Pay 2012

EIRO’s annual analysis of collectively agreed pay for 2012 finds that although average nominal agreed increases were slightly greater than in 2011 in many countries, the rise in prices diminished people’s purchasing power. In real terms, only a handful of countries had positive collective pay increases on average – and, if so, then very modest. In 2012, these were Sweden (+1.7%), Austria (+0.8%), Germany (+0.6%), France (+0.4%) and Belgium (+0.4%, already including indexation). In the case of Austria, this was a return to positive figures after two years of real decline on average. In countries where some form of pay indexation mechanisms are in place, the increases set via these mechanisms did – by and large (with the exception of Italy) – compensate for the rise in prices in 2012, while they had failed to do so in 2011. The report also examines collectively agreed pay increases in three selected sectors (metal, banking and local government) and developments in statutory minimum wages

Analysis of conditions for operating the S193 Rad/Scat in the solar pointing mode

The S193 Rad/Scat, although initially programmed for operating in the earth pointing mode, can be operated in the solar pointing mode as well. The usual coordinate systems for describing the S193 in orbit are defined. The instructions for the operation of the radiometer and scatterometer are presented in terms of standard Euler angles for these coordinate systems. A sample analysis for the scatterometer is described. The relationships between the various Euler angles and physically meaningful orbit parameters are defined

Exploratory Analysis of Pairwise Interactions in Online Social Networks

In the last few decades sociologists were trying to explain human behaviour by analysing social networks, which requires access to data about interpersonal relationships. This represented a big obstacle in this research field until the emergence of online social networks (OSNs), which vastly facilitated the process of collecting such data. Nowadays, by crawling public profiles on OSNs, it is possible to build a social graph where "friends" on OSN become represented as connected nodes. OSN connection does not necessarily indicate a close real-life relationship, but using OSN interaction records may reveal real-life relationship intensities, a topic which inspired a number of recent researches. Still, published research currently lacks an extensive exploratory analysis of OSN interaction records, i.e. a comprehensive overview of users' interaction via different ways of OSN interaction. In this paper we provide such an overview by leveraging results of conducted extensive social experiment which managed to collect records for over 3,200 Facebook users interacting with over 1,400,000 of their friends. Our exploratory analysis focuses on extracting population distributions and correlation parameters for 13 interaction parameters, providing valuable insight in online social network interaction for future researches aimed at this field of study.Comment: Journal Article published 2 Oct 2017 in Automatika volume 58 issue 4 on pages 422 to 42

Burnout in the Workplace: A Review of the Data and Policy Responses in the EU

This report looks at the extent of burnout experienced by workers in the EU, based on national research. As a starting point, the report sets out to consider whether burnout is viewed as a medical or occupational disease. It then examines the work determinants associated with burnout and looks at the effects of burnout, including psychosocial and physical work factors, work intensity and work organisation. It also reviews national strategies and policies regarding this issue, the involvement of the social partners in the current debate, as well as preventive actions currently in place

Active Sports Tourism in Slovenia: Preliminary Research

Researches from last years in the Alpine space and countries that develop active tourism, shows that tourist, that are interested into active holidays targeting sport oriented or relaxing holidays with elements of sports, are better consumers, higher on the social scale and live in bigger cities. At the same time this consumers spend their holidays several times a year, on a shorter base. Sport is also starting to be one of the main decision-making factors for majority of tourist in this region. This is proved by constant increase of Active sport holidays or Sport related holidays in development of successful tourist destinations in Europe. Goal of this work is to present preliminary research of potentials for active holidays in part of Slovenian mountain region. The research is made in the sample of tourists that are based in hotels and apartments of Slovenian tourist destination Kranjska Gora in the facilities of Hit Alpinea (HA) company. The habits, plans, consumption and type of accommodation related to active holidays were examined. This work is licensed under a&nbsp;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</p

Adultized child of early and preschool age in the modern concept of upbringing and education

The paper deals with an image of a modern child of early and preschool age in the context of current pedagogical paradigm. Modern society, interested in improving its economic system through knowledge, has a specific interest in the upbringing and education of individuals. The modern pedagogical concept of knowledge society is based on the theory of learning – constructivism. Accordingly, a child is predominantly understood as the one who learns while establishing partnerships with adults. A child is given a specific responsibility for his own developmental well-being, he is adultized. The modern approach to the child, which is based on the sociological concept of his rights, neglects the views of psychological discourse which considers his developmental needs, which consequently reflects on the character of the modern educational relationship and leads to a crisis of upbringing. This paper discusses the specific impact of modern pedagogical starting points, such as the one on equal partnership between child and educator, child as an autonomous subject or space as the third educator, on certain aspects of development of adultized early and preschool children. The paper points out the importance of conceptual redefining, instead of rejecting, the concept of upbringing as a central subject of pedagogical science

The impact of the design of the facade on energy consumption in the building

It is known that nowadays more and more energy is used for maintenance of buildings but this will have to change in near future. In standby on this that all the new buildings will be someday near zeroenergy and that they will have to limit the energy consumption, today we all pay attention on different factors at the design of the building, whether it's a new construction or renovation.\ud In this Graduated thesis I have dealt with the impact of design of the facade on energy consumption and analyzed how the quantity of transparent elements and orientation influence on it. I did it throught the software Comfen. In first part of analysis I was adding windows to baseline variant with zero windows and monitoring the differences which were presented thrue the calculations. In second part I was changing the orientation to the wall which had three windows and was at first turned to the south. In addition to the consumption of energy, I also monitored the solar gains which have also big influence on design of the building. At the end I examineded all the variants and tried to find the most rational combination of both factors