Portable sick leave in the Victorian building industry : managing cumulative employee benefits in the absence of employment security

The trend away from full-time permanent employment raises questions about the relevance of traditional approaches to managing and compensating employees. Employment in the Australian building industry is characterised by short-term, project-based employment. Employers and unions in the industry have adopted alternative compensation models to accommodate the short-term nature of employment, most notably through portable benefit schemes. In 1997, the Victorian building industry extended the range of portable benefits to include sick leave. Empirical evidence suggests a relationship between employee absence behaviour and accrual entitlement models. Research reported here supports this link, and suggests that both employers and employees can benefit from an alternative, portable, approach to accrued entitlements. Employers can benefit because employees may be less likely to take an instrumental approach to their entitlements. Employees benefit because they are able to accrue entitlements for the period they remain in the building industry, irrespective of the extent to which they change jobs.

Psychological and cumulative cardiovascular effects of repeated angry ruminaton and visuospatial suppression

Brooding rumination is associated with depressed mood, increased negative affect, prolonged anger and inhibited cardiovascular (CV) recovery. Distraction from rumination on a stressful interpersonal encounter is associated with faster CV recovery and decreased negative affect. Studies have suggested that a concurrent visuospatial (VS) task inhibits the maintenance of imagery associated with the perseveration of intrusive negative memories. 120 healthy participants were recruited for the study. As an analogue of repeated angry rumination, the authors explored the effects of repeated visual recall of a provocative confederate and the subsequent impact of two visuospatial (VS) distraction tasks on negative affect, blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR). Repeated recall of the provocation generated repeatedly elevated HR with a cumulative trend that may have CV disease risk implications for chronic ruminators. VS distraction did not aid recovery compared with the Control task.

Cumulative morbidity and prognostic staging of illness in the systematic treatment enhancement program for Bipolar Disorder (STEP-BD)

Objective: Staging models may provide heuristic utility for intervention selection in psychiatry. Although a few proposals have been put forth, there is a need for empirical validation if they are to be adopted. Using data from the Systematic Treatment Enhancement Program for Bipolar Disorder (STEP-BD), we tested a previously elaborated hypothesis on the utility of using the number of previous episodes as a relevant prognostic variable for staging in bipolar disorder.

Methods: This report utilizes data from the multisite, prospective, open-label study ‘Standard Care Pathways’ and the subset of patients with acute depressive episodes who participated in the randomized trial of adjunctive antidepressant treatment. Outpatients meeting DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder (n = 3345) were included. For the randomized pathway, patients met criteria for an acute depressive episode (n = 376). The number of previous episodes was categorized as less than 5, 5–10 and more than 10. We used disability at baseline, number of days well in the first year and longitudinal scores of depressive and manic symptoms, quality of life and functioning as validators of models constructed a priori.

Results: Patients with multiple previous episodes had consistently poorer cross-sectional and prospective outcomes. Functioning and quality of life were worse, disability more common, and symptoms more chronic and severe. There was no significant effect for staging with regard to antidepressant response in the randomized trial.

Conclusions: These findings confirm that bipolar disorder can be staged with prognostic validity. Stages can be used to stratify subjects in clinical trials and develop specific treatments.

Cumulative restricted Boltzmann machines for ordinal matrix data analysis

Ordinal data is omnipresent in almost all multiuser-generated feedback - questionnaires, preferences etc. This paper investigates modelling of ordinal data with Gaussian restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs). In particular, we present the model architecture, learning and inference procedures for both vector-variate and matrix-variate ordinal data. We show that our model is able to capture latent opinion profile of citizens around the world, and is competitive against state-of-art collaborative filtering techniques on large-scale public datasets. The model thus has the potential to extend application of RBMs to diverse domains such as recommendation systems, product reviews and expert assessments.

Estimating cumulative exposure of wildlife to non-lethal disturbance using spatially explicit capture-recapture models

Impact assessments often focus on short-term behavioral responses of animals to human disturbance. However, the cumulative effects caused by repeated behavioral disruptions are of management concern because these effects have the potential to influence individuals' survival and reproduction. We need to estimate individual exposure rates to disturbance to determine cumulative effects. We present a new approach to estimate the spatial exposure of minke whales to whalewatching boats in Faxaflõi Bay, Iceland. We used recent advances in spatially explicit capture-recapture modeling to estimate the probability that whales would encounter a disturbance (i.e., whalewatching boat). We obtained spatially explicit individual encounter histories of individually identifiable animals using photo-identification. We divided the study area into 1-km2 grid cells and considered each cell a spatially distinct sampling unit. We used capture history of individuals to model and estimate spatial encounter probabilities of individual minke whales across the study area, accounting for heterogeneity in sampling effort. We inferred the exposure of individual minke whales to whalewatching vessels throughout the feeding season by estimating individual whale encounters with vessels using the whale encounter probabilities and spatially explicit whalewatching intensity in the same area, obtained from recorded whalewatching vessel tracks. We then estimated the cumulative time whales spent with whalewatching boats to assess the biological significance of whalewatching disturbances. The estimated exposure levels to boats varied considerably between individuals because of both temporal and spatial variations in the activity centers of whales and the whalewatching intensity in the area. However, although some whales were repeatedly exposed to whalewatching boats throughout the feeding season, the estimated cumulative time they spent with boats was very low. Although whalewatching boat interactions caused feeding disruptions for the whales, the estimated low cumulative exposure indicated that the whalewatching industry in its current state likely is not having any long-term negative effects on vital rates.

Time cumulative complexity modeling and analysis for space-based networks

In this paper, the notion of the cumulative time varying graph (C-TVG) is proposed to model the high dynamics and relationships between ordered static graph sequences for space-based information networks (SBINs). In order to improve the performance of management and control of the SBIN, the complexity and social properties of the SBIN's high dynamic topology during a period of time is investigated based on the proposed C-TVG. Moreover, a cumulative topology generation algorithm is designed to establish the topology evolution of the SBIN, which supports the C-TVG based complexity analysis and reduces network congestions and collisions resulting from traditional link establishment mechanisms between satellites. Simulations test the social properties of the SBIN cumulative topology generated through the proposed C-TVG algorithm. Results indicate that through the C-TVG based analysis, more complexity properties of the SBIN can be revealed than the topology analysis without time cumulation. In addition, the application of attack on the SBIN is simulated, and results indicate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed C-TVG and C-TVG based complexity analysis for the SBIN.