Working hours, work-life conflict and health in precarious and "permanent" employment

OBJECTIVE: The expansion of precarious employment in OECD countries has been widely associated with negative health and safety effects. Although many shiftworkers are precariously employed, shiftwork research has concentrated on full-time workers in continuing employment. This paper examines the impact of precarious employment on working hours, work-life conflict and health by comparing casual employees to full-time, "permanent" employees working in the same occupations and workplaces. METHODS: Thirty-nine convergent interviews were conducted in two five-star hotels. The participants included 26 full-time and 13 casual (temporary) employees. They ranged in age from 19 to 61 years and included 17 females and 22 males. Working hours ranged from zero to 73 hours per week. RESULTS: Marked differences emerged between the reports of casual and full-time employees about working hours, work-life conflict and health. Casuals were more likely to work highly irregular hours over which they had little control. Their daily and weekly working hours ranged from very long to very short according to organisational requirements. Long working hours, combined with low predictability and control, produced greater disruption to family and social lives and poorer work-life balance for casuals. Uncoordinated hours across multiple jobs exacerbated these problems in some cases. Health-related issues reported to arise from work-life conflict included sleep disturbance, fatigue and disrupted exercise and dietary regimes. CONCLUSIONS:This study identified significant disadvantages of casual employment. In the same hotels, and doing largely the same jobs, casual employees had less desirable and predictable work schedules, greater work-life conflict and more associated health complaints than "permanent" workers.

Shiftworking families: parents' working schedule and sleep patterns of adolescents attending school in two shifts

OBJECTIVE: To explore whether parents' engagement in shift work affects the sleep habits of their adolescent children who attend school in two shifts. METHODS: The data were drawn from an extensive survey of sleep and daytime functioning of adolescents attending school one week in the morning and the other in the afternoon. The participants were 1,386 elementary and high school students (11-18 years old) whose parents were both employed. The data were analyzed using MANOVA, with parents' work schedule, adolescents' gender and type of school as between-subject factors. RESULTS: Parents' working schedule significantly affected the sleep patterns of high school adolescents. When attending school in the morning, adolescents whose parents were both day workers woke up somewhat later than adolescents with one shiftworking parent. In addition, they slept longer than adolescents whose parents were both shift workers. On weekends, adolescents whose parents both worked during the day went to bed earlier than adolescents whose parents were both shiftworkers. They also had smaller bedtime delay on weekends with respect to both morning and afternoon shifts than adolescents for whom one or both parents worked shifts. A significant interaction between parents' working schedule, adolescents' gender and type of school was found for sleep extension on weekends after afternoon shift school. CONCLUSIONS: Parental involvement in shift work has negative effects on the sleep of high school adolescents. It contributes to earlier wake-up time and shorter sleep in a week when adolescents attend school in the morning, as well as to greater bedtime irregularity.

BASS 4: a software system for ergonomic design and evaluation of working hours

OBJECTIVE: To extend an existing computer programme for the evaluation and design of shift schedules (BASS 3) by integrating workload as well as economic aspects. METHODS: The redesigned prototype BASS 4 includes a new module with a suitable and easily applicable screening method (EBA) for the assessment of the intensity of physical, emotional and cognitive workload components and their temporal patterns. Specified criterion functions based on these ratings allow for an adjustment of shift and rest duration according to the intensity of physical and mental workload. Furthermore, with regard to interactive effects both workload and temporal conditions, e.g. time of day, are taken into account. In a second new module, important economic aspects and criteria have been implemented. Different ergonomic solutions for scheduling problems can now also be evaluated with regard to their economic costs. RESULTS: The new version of the computer programme (BASS 4) can now simultaneously take into account numerous ergonomic, legal, agreed and economic criteria for the design and evaluation of working hours. CONCLUSIONS: BASS 4 can now be used as an instrument for the design and the evaluation of working hours with regard to legal, ergonomic and economic aspects at the shop floor as well as in administrative (e.g. health and safety inspection) and research problems.

Memory as discourse in Harold Pinter's old times, betrayal and a kind of Alaska

This paper aims at developing the topic of identity and the narration of the self through the other in Harold Pinter’s plays Old Times, Betrayal and A Kind of Alaska. In these plays Pinter deploys strategies to convey multiple implications which are based on the power of memory in which the structure of the plays is concocted.

The Past, Polish politics of memory, and stereotyping: an intercultural perspective

The main idea of the article is to consider the interdependence between Politics of Memory (as a type of narrating the Past) and Stereotyping. The author suggests that, in a time of information revolution, we are still constructing images of others on the basis of simplification, overestimation of association between features, and illusory correlations, instead of basing them on knowledge and personal contact. The Politics of Memory, national remembrance, and the historical consciousness play a significant role in these processes, because – as the author argues – they transform historically based 'symbolic analogies' into 'illusory correlations' between national identity and the behavior of its members. To support his theoretical investigation, the author presents results of his draft experiment and two case studies: (a) a social construction of images of neighbors based on Polish narrations about the Past; and (b) various processes of stereotyping based on the Remembrance of the Holocaust. All these considerations lead him to state that the Politics of Memory should be recognized as an influential source of commonly shared stereotypes on other cultures and nations.

Runtime Elision of Transactional Barriers for Captured Memory

In this paper, we propose a new technique that can identify transaction-local memory (i.e. captured memory), in managed environments, while having a low runtime overhead. We implemented our proposal in a well known STM framework (Deuce) and we tested it in STMBench7 with two different STMs: TL2 and LSA. In both STMs the performance improved significantly (4 times and 2.6 times, respectively). Moreover, running the STAMP benchmarks with our approach shows improvements of 7 times in the best case for the Vacation application.

Projeto raízes : um olhar sobre. Mediação cultural e educação patrimonial na ilha de S. Miguel, Açores

II Congreso Internacional de Educación y Accesibilidad en Museos y Patrimonio: En y con todos los sentidos, hacia la integración social en igualdad. Huesca, 2, 3 y 4 de mayo de 2014.

Working in and on groups: an illustration of the principles of exploratory practice in an esp classroom

Neste artigo, descrevo e analiso uma actividade de trabalho em grupo desenvolvida para uma aula da disciplina de Língua Inglesa VI das turmas do 3º ano do Curso de Línguas e Secretariado do Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto (ISCAP). No enquadramento teórico, abordam-se questões relacionadas com o trabalho em grupo numa aula de língua estrangeira, nomeadamente a dimensão social da sala de aula em geral e da interacção aluno-aluno em particular. Apresentam-se então os princípios da Exploratory Practice, com ênfase na possibilidade preconizada por esta abordagem de se poder transformar uma actividade de reflexão e discussão sobre o processo de ensino/aprendizagem numa unidade pedagógica. Segue-se a apresentação da proposta didáctica, respectivo plano de aula e alguns exemplos dos textos produzidos pelos alunos. O artigo termina com a apresentação de alguns comentários críticos, realçando-se a contribuição da Exploratory Practice para o desenvolvimento de uma maior consciencialização por parte dos alunos do seu processo de aprendizagem.

Health-related quality of life and working conditions among nursing providers

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate working conditions associated with health-related quality of life (HRQL) among nursing providers. METHODS: Cross-sectional study conducted in a university hospital in the city of São Paulo, Southeastern Brazil, during 2004-2005. The study sample comprised 696 registered nurses, nurse technicians and nurse assistants, predominantly females (87.8%), who worked day and/or night shifts. Data on sociodemographic information, working and living conditions, lifestyles, and health symptoms were collected using self-administered questionnaires. The following questionnaires were also used: Job Stress Scale, Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) and Medical Outcomes Study 36-Item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36). Ordinal logistic regression analysis using proportional odds model was performed to evaluate each dimension of the SF-36. RESULTS: Around 22% of the sample was found to be have high strain and 8% showed an effort-reward imbalance at work. The dimensions with the lowest mean scores in the SF-36 were vitality, bodily pain and mental health. High-strain job, effort-reward imbalance (ERI>1.01), and being a registered nurse were independently associated with low scores on the role emotional dimension. Those dimensions associated to mental health were the ones most affected by psychosocial factors at work. CONCLUSIONS: Effort-reward imbalance was more associated with health than high-strain (high demand and low control). The study results suggest that the joint analysis of psychosocial factors at work such as effort-reward imbalance and demand-control can provide more insight to the discussion of professional roles, working conditions and HRQL of nursing providers.

Stressful working conditions and poor self-rated health among financial services employees

OBJECTIVE: To assess the association between exposure to adverse psychosocial working conditions and poor self-rated health among bank employees. METHODS: A cross-sectional study including a sample of 2,054 employees of a government bank was conducted in 2008. Self-rated health was assessed by a single question: "In general, would you say your health is (...)." Exposure to adverse psychosocial working conditions was evaluated by the effort-reward imbalance model and the demand-control model. Information on other independent variables was obtained through a self-administered semi-structured questionnaire. A multiple logistic regression analysis was performed and odds ratio calculated to assess independent associations between adverse psychosocial working conditions and poor self-rated health. RESULTS: The overall prevalence of poor self-rated health was 9%, with no significant gender difference. Exposure to high demand and low control environment at work was associated with poor self-rated health. Employees with high effort-reward imbalance and overcommitment also reported poor self-rated health, with a dose-response relationship. Social support at work was inversely related to poor self-rated health, with a dose-response relationship. CONCLUSIONS: Exposure to adverse psychosocial work factors assessed based on the effort-reward imbalance model and the demand-control model is independently associated with poor self-rated health among the workers studied.

Software transactional memory as a building block for parallel embedded realtime systems

The recent trends of chip architectures with higher number of heterogeneous cores, and non-uniform memory/non-coherent caches, brings renewed attention to the use of Software Transactional Memory (STM) as a fundamental building block for developing parallel applications. Nevertheless, although STM promises to ease concurrent and parallel software development, it relies on the possibility of aborting conflicting transactions to maintain data consistency, which impacts on the responsiveness and timing guarantees required by embedded real-time systems. In these systems, contention delays must be (efficiently) limited so that the response times of tasks executing transactions are upper-bounded and task sets can be feasibly scheduled. In this paper we assess the use of STM in the development of embedded real-time software, defending that the amount of contention can be reduced if read-only transactions access recent consistent data snapshots, progressing in a wait-free manner. We show how the required number of versions of a shared object can be calculated for a set of tasks. We also outline an algorithm to manage conflicts between update transactions that prevents starvation.

WCET analysis considering contention on memory bus in COTS-based multicores

The usage of COTS-based multicores is becoming widespread in the field of embedded systems. Providing realtime guarantees at design-time is a pre-requisite to deploy real-time systems on these multicores. This necessitates the consideration of the impact of the contention due to shared low-level hardware resources on the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) of the tasks. As a step towards this aim, this paper first identifies the different factors that make the WCET analysis a challenging problem in a typical COTS-based multicore system. Then, we propose and prove, a mathematically correct method to determine tight upper bounds on the WCET of the tasks, when they are co-scheduled on different cores.

Response time analysis of COTS-Based multicores considering the contention on the shared memory bus

The current industry trend is towards using Commercially available Off-The-Shelf (COTS) based multicores for developing real time embedded systems, as opposed to the usage of custom-made hardware. In typical implementation of such COTS-based multicores, multiple cores access the main memory via a shared bus. This often leads to contention on this shared channel, which results in an increase of the response time of the tasks. Analyzing this increased response time, considering the contention on the shared bus, is challenging on COTS-based systems mainly because bus arbitration protocols are often undocumented and the exact instants at which the shared bus is accessed by tasks are not explicitly controlled by the operating system scheduler; they are instead a result of cache misses. This paper makes three contributions towards analyzing tasks scheduled on COTS-based multicores. Firstly, we describe a method to model the memory access patterns of a task. Secondly, we apply this model to analyze the worst case response time for a set of tasks. Although the required parameters to obtain the request profile can be obtained by static analysis, we provide an alternative method to experimentally obtain them by using performance monitoring counters (PMCs). We also compare our work against an existing approach and show that our approach outperforms it by providing tighter upper-bound on the number of bus requests generated by a task.

Memória de longo prazo nos retornos acionistas dos índices de referência da euronext, implicações para a hipótese de mercados eficientes e contributo fractal para aperfeiçoamento do capital asset pricing model

Não existe uma definição única de processo de memória de longo prazo. Esse processo é geralmente definido como uma série que possui um correlograma decaindo lentamente ou um espectro infinito de frequência zero. Também se refere que uma série com tal propriedade é caracterizada pela dependência a longo prazo e por não periódicos ciclos longos, ou que essa característica descreve a estrutura de correlação de uma série de longos desfasamentos ou que é convencionalmente expressa em termos do declínio da lei-potência da função auto-covariância. O interesse crescente da investigação internacional no aprofundamento do tema é justificado pela procura de um melhor entendimento da natureza dinâmica das séries temporais dos preços dos ativos financeiros. Em primeiro lugar, a falta de consistência entre os resultados reclama novos estudos e a utilização de várias metodologias complementares. Em segundo lugar, a confirmação de processos de memória longa tem implicações relevantes ao nível da (1) modelação teórica e econométrica (i.e., dos modelos martingale de preços e das regras técnicas de negociação), (2) dos testes estatísticos aos modelos de equilíbrio e avaliação, (3) das decisões ótimas de consumo / poupança e de portefólio e (4) da medição de eficiência e racionalidade. Em terceiro lugar, ainda permanecem questões científicas empíricas sobre a identificação do modelo geral teórico de mercado mais adequado para modelar a difusão das séries. Em quarto lugar, aos reguladores e gestores de risco importa saber se existem mercados persistentes e, por isso, ineficientes, que, portanto, possam produzir retornos anormais. O objetivo do trabalho de investigação da dissertação é duplo. Por um lado, pretende proporcionar conhecimento adicional para o debate da memória de longo prazo, debruçando-se sobre o comportamento das séries diárias de retornos dos principais índices acionistas da EURONEXT. Por outro lado, pretende contribuir para o aperfeiçoamento do capital asset pricing model CAPM, considerando uma medida de risco alternativa capaz de ultrapassar os constrangimentos da hipótese de mercado eficiente EMH na presença de séries financeiras com processos sem incrementos independentes e identicamente distribuídos (i.i.d.). O estudo empírico indica a possibilidade de utilização alternativa das obrigações do tesouro (OT’s) com maturidade de longo prazo no cálculo dos retornos do mercado, dado que o seu comportamento nos mercados de dívida soberana reflete a confiança dos investidores nas condições financeiras dos Estados e mede a forma como avaliam as respetiva economias com base no desempenho da generalidade dos seus ativos. Embora o modelo de difusão de preços definido pelo movimento Browniano geométrico gBm alegue proporcionar um bom ajustamento das séries temporais financeiras, os seus pressupostos de normalidade, estacionariedade e independência das inovações residuais são adulterados pelos dados empíricos analisados. Por isso, na procura de evidências sobre a propriedade de memória longa nos mercados recorre-se à rescaled-range analysis R/S e à detrended fluctuation analysis DFA, sob abordagem do movimento Browniano fracionário fBm, para estimar o expoente Hurst H em relação às séries de dados completas e para calcular o expoente Hurst “local” H t em janelas móveis. Complementarmente, são realizados testes estatísticos de hipóteses através do rescaled-range tests R/S , do modified rescaled-range test M - R/S e do fractional differencing test GPH. Em termos de uma conclusão única a partir de todos os métodos sobre a natureza da dependência para o mercado acionista em geral, os resultados empíricos são inconclusivos. Isso quer dizer que o grau de memória de longo prazo e, assim, qualquer classificação, depende de cada mercado particular. No entanto, os resultados gerais maioritariamente positivos suportam a presença de memória longa, sob a forma de persistência, nos retornos acionistas da Bélgica, Holanda e Portugal. Isto sugere que estes mercados estão mais sujeitos a maior previsibilidade (“efeito José”), mas também a tendências que podem ser inesperadamente interrompidas por descontinuidades (“efeito Noé”), e, por isso, tendem a ser mais arriscados para negociar. Apesar da evidência de dinâmica fractal ter suporte estatístico fraco, em sintonia com a maior parte dos estudos internacionais, refuta a hipótese de passeio aleatório com incrementos i.i.d., que é a base da EMH na sua forma fraca. Atendendo a isso, propõem-se contributos para aperfeiçoamento do CAPM, através da proposta de uma nova fractal capital market line FCML e de uma nova fractal security market line FSML. A nova proposta sugere que o elemento de risco (para o mercado e para um ativo) seja dado pelo expoente H de Hurst para desfasamentos de longo prazo dos retornos acionistas. O expoente H mede o grau de memória de longo prazo nos índices acionistas, quer quando as séries de retornos seguem um processo i.i.d. não correlacionado, descrito pelo gBm(em que H = 0,5 , confirmando- se a EMH e adequando-se o CAPM), quer quando seguem um processo com dependência estatística, descrito pelo fBm(em que H é diferente de 0,5, rejeitando-se a EMH e desadequando-se o CAPM). A vantagem da FCML e da FSML é que a medida de memória de longo prazo, definida por H, é a referência adequada para traduzir o risco em modelos que possam ser aplicados a séries de dados que sigam processos i.i.d. e processos com dependência não linear. Então, estas formulações contemplam a EMH como um caso particular possível.

Finding an upper bound on the increase in execution time due to contention on the memory bus in COTS-based multicore systems

Contention on the memory bus in COTS based multicore systems is becoming a major determining factor of the execution time of a task. Analyzing this extra execution time is non-trivial because (i) bus arbitration protocols in such systems are often undocumented and (ii) the times when the memory bus is requested to be used are not explicitly controlled by the operating system scheduler; they are instead a result of cache misses. We present a method for finding an upper bound on the extra execution time of a task due to contention on the memory bus in COTS based multicore systems. This method makes no assumptions on the bus arbitration protocol (other than assuming that it is work-conserving).