Usability and decision support systems in emergency management

The actors in charge of an emergency response are confronted with severe difficulties in coordination and decision making, especially in major accidents. To facilitate coordination, various decision support systems (DSS) integrated in communication systems have been developed. However, many DSS in the rescue service organizations are afflicted with under-use and other usability problems. Drawing on both a literature review and an analysis of recently obtained survey data from rescue personnel concerning usability of common communication system in Swedish emergency organizations, this paper addresses the issue of usability of DSS. It is concluded that the impetus for developing DSS in many cases has been the technological possibilities per se, not taking the decision makers task structure and contextual factors into account. It is argued that priority should be given to functions that provide a visual overview of the event and facilitate storing of the series of decisions made during the response.     

Indicators of healthy work environments--a systematic review

The purpose of this study was to systematically review the scientific literature and search for indicators of healthy work environments. A number of major national and international databases for scientific publication were searched for research addressing indicators of healthy work environments. Altogether 19,768 publications were found. After excluding duplicates, non-relevant publications, or publications that did not comply with the inclusion criteria 24 peer-reviewed publications remained to be included in this systematic review. Only one study explicitly addressing indicators of healthy work environments was found. That study suggested that the presence of stress management programs in an organization might serve as indicator of a 'good place to work', as these organizations were more likely to offer programs that encouraged employee well-being, safety and skill development than those without stress management programs. The other 23 studies either investigated employee's views of what constitute a healthy workplace or were guidelines for how to create such a workplace. Summarizing, the nine most pronounced factors considered as important for a healthy workplace that emerged from these studies were, in descending order: collaboration/teamwork: growth and development of the individual; recognition; employee involvement; positive, accessible and fair leader; autonomy and empowerment; appropriate staffing; skilled communication; and safe physical work.     

Transfer of control system interface solutions from other domains to the thermal power industry

In a thermal power plant the operators' roles are to control and monitor the process to achieve efficient and safe production. To achieve this, the human-machine interfaces have a central part. The interfaces need to be updated and upgraded together with the technical functionality to maintain optimal operation. One way of achieving relevant updates is to study other domains and see how they have solved similar issues in their design solutions. The purpose of this paper is to present how interface design solution ideas can be transferred from domains with operator control to thermal power plants. In the study 15 domains were compared using a model for categorisation of human-machine systems. The result from the domain comparison showed that nuclear power, refinery and ship engine control were most similar to thermal power control. From the findings a basic interface structure and three specific display solutions were proposed for thermal power control: process parameter overview, plant overview, and feed water view. The systematic comparison of the properties of a human-machine system allowed interface designers to find suitable objects, structures and navigation logics in a range of domains that could be transferred to the thermal power domain.     

Fathers' encounters with the Child Welfare Service

In this article, we examined fathers who were or had been in contact with the Child Welfare Services in Norway. All of the fathers included in this study had children with women who were unable to take care of them, either because of substance abuse or mental health problems. Hence, the fathers had the primary responsibility for the children. We looked at how these fathers experienced being met and assessed as caregivers by the Child Welfare Service, as well as how they experienced their own competency as caregivers. To explore these themes, seven fathers who were in contact with or had recently been in contact with the Child Welfare Service were interviewed. The discourses on fatherhood, inspired by Scourfield (2003), were used as a framework for the analysis, and interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to analyse the interviews. We found the fathers' experiences to be considered within the discourses on “fathers as a threat”, “fathers as irrelevant” and “fathers as better than mothers”. In addition, we shed light on topics such as the cultural lag, being single-handedly responsible for the children, and the fathers' views on what is important in their contact with the children.Our goal was to increase awareness about fathers who are in contact with the Child Welfare Service so that they are met in a way that helps to support them in their role as fathers for the benefit of their children.     

Childcare Cash Benefits and Fertility Timing in Norway

In 1998 a new cash benefit for parents with young children was introduced in Norway. Its purpose was to provide a cash payment to parents who either preferred to care for their children at home or to compensate those who were not offered external childcare provision. It has been argued that the new policy encouraged women to stay at home with their children, possibly reducing labour supply. The policy was consequently considered gender-biased, creating reduced incentives for women to participate in the labour market and therefore encouraging a more traditional division of labour of husbands and wives. Given this background of the policy, we undertake an analysis in two parts. We ask first the question “who takes the cash benefit?” Second, by applying simple matching techniques, we ask the question “Do couples taking the benefit behave differently in terms of their fertility timing?” Using information from Norwegian registers we find that more traditional households (in a broad sense) are more likely to take the cash benefit. Those taking the benefit accelerate childbearing significantly, though the reasons why they do so varies by socio-economic groups.     

Parameter estimation for a deformable template model

In recent years, a number of statistical models have been proposed for the purposes of high-level image analysis tasks such as object recognition. However, in general, these models remain hard to use in practice, partly as a result of their complexity, partly through lack of software. In this paper we concentrate on a particular deformable template model which has proved potentially useful for locating and labelling cells in microscope slides Rue and Hurn (1999). This model requires the specification of a number of rather non-intuitive parameters which control the shape variability of the deformed templates. Our goal is to arrange the estimation of these parameters in such a way that the microscope user's expertise is exploited to provide the necessary training data graphically by identifying a number of cells displayed on a computer screen, but that no additional statistical input is required. In this paper we use maximum likelihood estimation incorporating the error structure in the generation of our training data.     

A hierarchical frailty model applied to two-generation melanoma data

We present a hierarchical frailty model based on distributions derived from non-negative Lévy processes. The model may be applied to data with several levels of dependence, such as family data or other general clusters, and is an alternative to additive frailty models. We present several parametric examples of the model, and properties such as expected values, variance and covariance. The model is applied to a case-cohort sample of age at onset for melanoma from the Swedish Multi-Generation Register, organized in nuclear families of parents and one or two children. We compare the genetic component of the total frailty variance to the common environmental term, and estimate the effect of birth cohort and gender.     

Employment Protection and the Incidence of Unemployment: A Theoretical Framework

Abstract. The present paper aims to analyse the effects of employment protection on a heterogeneous labour force. To this end, a standard matching model with employment protection has been extended to allow for the existence of two types of workers differing from each other only in the probability of becoming less productive while holding a job. In working out the model it turns out that in equilibrium workers with a relatively higher probability of becoming less productive face both a higher turnover and a longer duration of unemployment. Therefore, employment protection here raises the unemployment rate of this worker category, a result which looks consistent with consolidated evidence but contrasts with standard theoretical results.     

Educational attainment and employment of young adults ageing out of care: A registry study based on the Finnish birth cohort 1987

Adolescents growing up outside their birth homes are at major risk for multiple adversities in early adulthood, including low education and unemployment. The transition from out-of-home placement to independent living overlaps with the transition from school to work and higher education. However, the support during this critical phase is often inadequate. Adolescents ageing out of care are also more likely to have faced adversities in their birth families. Yet, the interplay between different risk factors and having aged out of care has gained little attention. This study aimed to assess known risk factors for low education and unstable employment and their interaction with ageing out of care, controlling for birth-home-related adversities. We assessed this topic using logistic and linear regression modelling based on the Finnish birth cohort 1987 (n = 59 476) registry. Our analysis showed that obtaining upper secondary and higher education was much less likely among those ageing out of care, and they had spent 52–80 fewer days annually in employment after graduation. Few interactions with other risk factors were, however, found. Efforts are needed to prevent inequalities in education and employment for those ageing out of care in the transition phase from school to work.