This study aimed to evaluate the effects of an intervention on objective working-hour characteristics. The intervention involved making modifications to the collective agreement that would limit employees' entitlement to time off as compensation. The intervention group consisted of 493 and the control group of 2,303 health and social care shift workers, respectively. We analysed the objective p...

A study of senior house officers' daytime work activities was conducted in the accident and emergency department of the Cardiff Royal Infirmary. Activities were timed every 15 seconds by a single observer and were subdivided into working periods, meal periods and periods when no patient was waiting to be seen. A total of 96.1 h was analysed. The SHOs were found to be working for 78% of their ti...

Using data drawn from the March Current Population Survey, we find that state and federal minimum wage increases between 2003 and 2007 had no effect on state poverty rates. When we then simulate the effects of a proposed federal minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour, we find that such an increase will be even more poorly targeted to the working poor than was the last federal increa...

The paper presents two useful extensions of the incremental SVM in the context of online learning. An online support vector data description algorithm enables application of the online paradigm to unsupervised learning. Furthermore, online learning can be used in the large-scale classification problems to limit the memory requirements for storage of the kernel matrix. The proposed algorithms ar...

INTRODUCTION Japan is rapidly becoming a full-fledged aged society, and physician shortage is a significant concern. The Japanese government has increased the number of medical school enrollments since 2008, but some researchers warn that this increase could lead to physician surplus in the future. It is unknown how many physicians will be required to accommodate future healthcare needs. MATE...

Taiwan’s Labor Standards Law (LSL) requires employers to implement overtime working hour restrictions. These restrictions have a greater effect on women, who are not allowed to work as many overtime working hours as men. This paper examines two hypotheses: First, as the hour restrictions can encourage the efficiency of workers, it will increase wages for women in the covered sector relative to ...