Fatigue effects of noise on aeroplane mechanics

Subjective fatigue and reaction time performance were measured in a group of 24 aeroplane mechanics, during 1 week of high noise exposure and 1 week of low noise exposure. Subjective ratings were collected before and after each work day. On the last day of each week subjects also completed a reaction time task before and after work. The mechanics felt more sleepy and less energetic during the high noise week. This effect was most evident towards the end of the day and there was a build-up of the effect during the week. Reaction times were prolonged during the high noise week. Possible confounding factors are discussed and found to be less likely explanations of the effects.     

How philanthropy can alter our view of the past: a look at Colonial Williamsburg

The restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, serves as an important study in the history of philanthropy in the United States. Williamsburg demonstrates how the investments of philanthropists such as the Rockefeller family can be used to subtly alter Americans' perceptions of their past. This manipulation resulted in the promotion of the Rockefellers' ideological interpretation of history at Williamsburg. This history stressed the role of Williamsburg as a monument to the ideals of Americanism: democracy, republicanism and individual achievement. Through times of domestic and international crisis, from the Red Scare of the 1920s through the Cold War of the 1950s, the Rockefeller family held up Williamsburg as a beacon to which Americans could look as a steadying force. In doing so, the Rockefellers created a past which never truly existed. They downplayed the roles of women and blacks, who were all but ignored in the early presentation of the town, in favour of the aristocrats of the age: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and George Wythe. The presentation which emerged during the restoration's first half-century was one that failed to acknowledge the roles played by less prominent groups and over-accentuated the importance of a small minority of illustrious townspeople.     

Risk Perception and New Age Beliefs

This is a study of risk perception in relation to New Age (NA) beliefs, including traditional folk superstition and belief in paranormal phenomena, as well as use of alternative healing practices. Data were also obtained on trust dimensions and on personality and psychopathology variables, as well as religious involvement. It was found that four factors accounted for the investigated NA beliefs, which were termed higher consciousness beliefs, denial of analytic knowledge, traditional superstition, and belief in the physical reality of the soul. NA beliefs were strongly and positively related to religious involvement, and negatively to educational level. These beliefs were also positively related to maladjustment and to concerns over tampering with nature. In regression analyses, it was found that NA beliefs explained about 15% of the variance of perceived risk, and that the most powerful explanatory factors were higher consciousness beliefs and beliefs in paranormal phenomena. Traditional superstition and use of healing practices did not contribute to explaining perceived risk.     

Recurrence,eruptions, and a transnational turn: Three decades of strained relations between migrants to Norway and the Child Welfare Services

The relations between the Norwegian Child Welfare Services (CWS) and various migrant groups are notably strained. Numerous media accounts and a growing body of research reveal that many migrants to Norway fear the CWS. By combining quantitative and qualitative analyses of media accounts, this paper addresses the historical evolvement of such strained relations in Norway. Previous research has neglected this aspect. Findings show that migration issues related to the CWS have been topics of public debate in Norway for three decades, with foster care being a particularly intractable concern. With the onset of the decade beginning in 2010, however, matters have intensified and taken on transnational dimensions. In the discussion of our findings, we emphasize in particular how digital and social media have contributed to the recent changes.     

Alcohol and drug abuse among young adults who grew up in substitute care — Findings from a Swedish national cohort study

To what extent substitute long term care modifies intergenerational transmission of substance abuse has rarely been investigated. Using register data, we followed a national cohort born 1973–1985 consisting of 1012 national adoptees, 2408 former children from long term foster care, 348/846 environmental siblings of adoptees/foster children, and 952,935 majority population peers, from their 15th birthday to age 27–35. Using Cox regression, we calculated hazard ratios (HR) for hospital care and criminality associated with illicit drug/alcohol abuse, with adjustments for socio-demographic indicators of caring families, and substance abuse in caring and birth parents.     

Trainee programme reactions and work performance: the moderating role of intrinsic motivation

This study investigated the moderating role of intrinsic motivation on the relationship between trainee programme reactions and work performance among trainees enrolled in formal trainee programmes. The results from a cross-sectional survey among 114 trainees representing three Norwegian service organizations showed that the relationships between perception of the trainee programme and facets of self-reported work performance were positive only for trainees low in intrinsic motivation. Implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.     

The Effort-Reward Imbalance model of psychosocial stress at the workplace—a comparison of ERI exposure assessment using two estimation methods

It is not unusual for old data to be used in epidemiological studies. Recently developed instruments for measuring work-related stress did not exist when the data collection was carried out. Therefore, approximate questions are sometimes used. An apparent problem is the lack of validation of proxy questions. The aim of this study was to compare the original questions for measuring Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) with approximate questions. The study population corresponded with a subgroup in the WOLF-n (WOrk, Lipids, Fibrinogen–north) cohort study of cardiovascular risk in a working population in the north of Sweden: 655 men and 178 women. The agreement in exposure between the original and the approximate ERI single questions was relatively low throughout, whereas the correlation between the ERI subscales and the ERI ratios was reasonable. The latter agreement between the original and the approximate ERI ratio indicates that the approximate measures might have been useful in the past. Yet, whenever possible the implementation of the original questionnaire in study protocols is recommended since a complete measurement of ERI might help to further improve the internal consistency and the predictive validity of this exposure to effort-reward imbalance.     

Covariance structure approximation via gLasso in high-dimensional supervised classification

Recent work has shown that the Lasso-based regularization is very useful for estimating the high-dimensional inverse covariance matrix. A particularly useful scheme is based on penalizing the ?₁ norm of the off-diagonal elements to encourage sparsity. We embed this type of regularization into high-dimensional classification. A two-stage estimation procedure is proposed which first recovers structural zeros of the inverse covariance matrix and then enforces block sparsity by moving non-zeros closer to the main diagonal. We show that the block-diagonal approximation of the inverse covariance matrix leads to an additive classifier, and demonstrate that accounting for the structure can yield better performance accuracy. Effect of the block size on classification is explored, and a class of asymptotically equivalent structure approximations in a high-dimensional setting is specified. We suggest a variable selection at the block level and investigate properties of this procedure in growing dimension asymptotics. We present a consistency result on the feature selection procedure, establish asymptotic lower an upper bounds for the fraction of separative blocks and specify constraints under which the reliable classification with block-wise feature selection can be performed. The relevance and benefits of the proposed approach are illustrated on both simulated and real data.