Structured Programming Research Articles

Occupational inequality in disability pension among persons with diabetes and comorbidity

Abstract Background Persons with type 2 diabetes (DM2) have higher probability of an early exit from the labour market and to receive permanent disability pension compared with persons without DM2. Objectives To assess the association between occupational class and disability pension among persons without disease, with DM2 only and DM2 with six comorbid conditions (CVD, musculoskeletal disorders, mental disease, cancer, cerebrovascular disease and ≥2 comorbid diseases). Methods All employed persons aged 40-64 living in Denmark in the period 2011-2017(n, year 2011=1,454,649) were stratified according to DM2 and six major concomitant diseases. We estimated the relative risk of disability pension dependent on DM2 comorbidity status and occupational class by means of a log-binomial regression. Reference group was upper non manual employees with no disease. Results The highest risks of disability pension were seen for DM2 + mental disease, age 40-59 (RR = 2.45 [2.3-2.5]), DM2 + cerebrovascular disease (RR = 2.45 CI 95% [2.1-2.8]) and DM2 + ≥2 diseases (RR = 2.98 [2.9-3.1]). Unskilled and manual workers were more likely to receive disability pension. The occupational inequality was highest among younger persons and groups of persons with DM2 only and DM2 + CVD and lowest for persons with more than one concomitant disease. Conclusions The results suggest that among people with DM2, labour market exit depend on both comorbid conditions and occupational class. Overall, our results show that the relative effects of occupational class on disability pension decrease in cases with severe comorbid conditions. In younger persons the mechanisms may be more nuanced, suggesting that persons with DM2 + comorbid conditions in particular have difficulties fulfilling the working requirements of lower occupational jobs. Practitioners may use the results in targeting prevention interventions to persons in high risk of early labour market exit. Key messages Low occupational class and comorbidity increase the risks of disability pension among persons with DM2. Constrained work-flexibility of low occupational jobs may influence diabetes self-care and explain high inequality in disability pension.

DO REEMPLOYMENT PROGRAMS FOR THE UNEMPLOYED WORK FOR YOUTH? EVIDENCE FROM THE GREAT RECESSION IN THE UNITED STATES

We present experimental evidence on the effects of four U.S. reemployment programs for youth unemployment insurance (UI) recipients during the Great Recession. The three programs that emphasized monitoring and service referrals reduced UI receipt but had minimal effects on employment and earnings; these programs mainly induced the early exit of participants. The fourth program, which combined mandatory job counseling with monitoring, caused the largest reductions in UI receipt and clearly increased employment and earnings. Both early participant exits and effective job counseling underlie these impacts. We conclude that policymakers should require job counseling for youth UI recipients during recessions. (JEL J0, J6, H4)

Accelerating on-device DNN inference during service outage through scheduling early exit

In recent years, the rapid development of edge computing enables us to process a wide variety of intelligent applications at the edge, such as real-time video analytics. However, edge computing could suffer from service outage caused by the fluctuated wireless connection or congested computing resource. During the service outage, the only choice is to process the deep neural network (DNN) inference at the local mobile devices. The obstacle is that due to the limited resource, it may not be possible to complete inference tasks on time. Inspired by the recently developed early exit of DNNs, where we can exit DNN at earlier layers to shorten the inference delay by sacrificing an acceptable level of accuracy, we propose to adopt such mechanism to process inference tasks during the service outage. The challenge is how to obtain the optimal schedule with diverse early exit choices. To this end, we formulate an optimal scheduling problem with the objective to maximize a general overall utility. However, the problem is in the form of integer programming, which cannot be solved by a standard approach. We therefore prove the Ordered Scheduling structure, indicating that a frame arrived earlier must be scheduled earlier. Such structure greatly decreases the searching space for an optimal solution. Then, we propose the Scheduling Early Exit (SEE) algorithm based on dynamic programming, to solve the problem optimally with polynomial computational complexity. Finally, we conduct trace-driven simulations and real-world experiment to compare SEE with two benchmarks. The result shows that the utility gain of SEE can outperform the benchmarks by 50.9% in the simulation and by 57.79% in the real-world experiment.

The influence of unhealthy behaviours on early exit from paid employment among workers with a chronic disease: A prospective study using the Lifelines cohort

ObjectivesThis study examined the risk of unhealthy behaviours and the additive effects of multiple unhealthy behaviours on exit from paid employment among workers with a chronic disease and investigated effect modification by gender and educational level. MethodsData from the Lifelines cohort, collected between 2006 and 2013, were enriched with registry data from Statistics Netherlands with up to 11 years follow-up. Workers with a chronic disease were selected (n = 11,467). The influence of unhealthy behaviours (physical inactivity, smoking, unhealthy diet, high alcohol intake, and obesity) on exit from paid employment (unemployment, disability benefits, early retirement, and economic inactivity) was examined using competing risk models. To examine effect modification by gender and educational level, interaction terms were added. ResultsSmoking and low fruit intake increased the risk to exit paid employment through unemployment and disability benefits. Low vegetable intake increased the risk of unemployment, obesity the risk of receiving disability benefits, and high alcohol intake the risk of early retirement. Physical inactivity was not associated with any exit from paid employment. Having multiple unhealthy behaviours increased the risk of both unemployment and of receiving disability. No consistent effect modification for gender or educational level was found. ConclusionsUnhealthy behaviours increased the risk to exit paid employment through unemployment and disability benefits among workers with a chronic disease, and this risk increased when having multiple unhealthy behaviours. Health promotion to support workers with chronic diseases to make healthier choices may help to extend their working life.

Does reduced employment protection increase the employment disadvantage of workers with low education and poorer health?

BackgroundDeclines in employment protection may have disproportionate effects on employment opportunities of workers with low education and poorer health. This study investigates the impact of changes in employment protection levels...

Why Should We Add Early Exits to Neural Networks?

Deep neural networks are generally designed as a stack of differentiable layers, in which a prediction is obtained only after running the full stack. Recently, some contributions have proposed techniques to endow the networks with early exits, allowing to obtain predictions at intermediate points of the stack. These multi-output networks have a number of advantages, including: (i) significant reductions of the inference time, (ii) reduced tendency to overfitting and vanishing gradients, and (iii) capability of being distributed over multi-tier computation platforms. In addition, they connect to the wider themes of biological plausibility and layered cognitive reasoning. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive introduction to this family of neural networks, by describing in a unified fashion the way these architectures can be designed, trained, and actually deployed in time-constrained scenarios. We also describe in-depth their application scenarios in 5G and Fog computing environments, as long as some of the open research questions connected to them.

Wing patterning in faster developing Drosophila is associated with high ecdysone titer and wingless expression

‘Developmental robustness’ is the ability of biological systems to maintain a stable phenotype despite genetic, environmental or physiological perturbations. In holometabolous insects, accurate patterning and development is guaranteed by alignment of final gene expression patterns in tissues at specific developmental stage such as molting and pupariation, irrespective of individual rate of development. In the present study, we used faster developing Drosophila melanogaster populations that show reduction of ~22% in egg to adult development time. Flies from the faster developing population exhibit phenotype constancy, although significantly small in size. The reduction in development time in faster developing flies is possibly due to coordination between higher ecdysteroid release and higher expression of developmental genes. The two together might be ensuring appropriate pattern formation and early exit at each development stage in the populations selected for faster pre-adult development compared to their ancestral controls. We report that apart from plasticity in the rate of pattern progression, alteration in the level of gene expression may be responsible for pattern integrity even under reduced development time.

Valuation of non-recourse stock loan using an integral equation approach

An integral equation approach is adopted to price American-style non-recourse stock loans with finite maturities. In particular, we use Fourier transform to reduce the partial differential equation governing the price of an American-style non-recourse stock loan into an ordinary differential equation, the solution of which can be easily found (in the Fourier space) and analytically inverted into the original space. As a result, we can decompose the price of an American non-recourse stock loan into two main components: the price of its European counterpart and the early exit premium. This decomposition allows us to break the pricing problem of American stock loans into two simple steps: 1) finding the optimal exit prices; 2) calculating the American non-recourse stock loans. Our obtained numerical results appear to fit very well with those obtained from literature.

1068 Using Sleep to Avoid Inpatient PTSD Treatment

Abstract Introduction During inpatient psychiatric treatment, mattress actigraphy can be used to track nightly sleep in a zero-burden fashion to examine its relationships with other markers of treatment progress. We report here on associations between actigraphic sleep parameters and treatment markers in combat veteran engaged in inpatient treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder. We focus first on sleep scheduling, the best-validated outcome available from actigraphic data. Methods 140 combat veteran inpatients provided between 5 and 164 nights of mattress actigraphy over the course of their inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations. The sample was characterized by multiple traumas and a high prevalence of comorbid mood and substance use disorders. Approximately one-half of the sample had undergone objective screening for OSA and for this subsample AHI < 20 was used as an inclusion criterion. Unscreened participants were required to have a BMI < 35. Inclusion also required mean actigraphic SE > 60%. The PTSD Checklist and Combat Exposure Scale were obtained at admission, from which a trauma load index was created by adding z-scores obtained from standardizing these scales. Results In a multiple regression analysis, after accounting for secular change in LOS, higher trauma loads (p < 0.001) and earlier bed times (p = 0.001) were both significantly associated with shorter lengths of stay (LOS; F(3,137) = 10.4, p < 0.001; adj. R-squared = 0.17). Trauma load and bed time did not interact (p = 0.7). Conclusion Avoidance is a criterial symptom of PTSD. Early bed times and early exits from treatment may both reflect the impact of syndromal avoidance on treatment, limiting its dosage and benefit. If so, prescribing later bed times may have utility in inpatient treatment programming. Support Award W81XWH-15-2-0005 from the Department of Defense, Military Operational Medicine Research Program and the Department of Veterans Affairs. This material is the result of work supported with resources and the use of facilities at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center.

"I Just Can't Take It Anymore": How Specific Work Characteristics Impact Younger Versus Older Nurses' Health, Satisfaction, and Commitment.

Given the increasing shortage of active nurses in industrialized countries throughout the world, it is of utmost importance to protect their health, satisfaction, and commitment so that they can continue working in their healthcare institution. Building upon the proposed pattern of specific relationships developed by Houkes et al. (2003), we investigated a model of relationships among working conditions (quantitative, emotional, and physical demands), labor relations (quality of interpersonal relations and psychological support), work content (meaning of work, influence at work), and employment conditions (opportunities for development) on the one hand, and health, job satisfaction, and institutional affective commitment on the other hand, for younger versus older nurses. We used data of 3,399 nurses from the Netherlands and 3,636 nurses from Poland from the larger European Nurses’ Early Exit Study (NEXT) and performed longitudinal structural equation modeling (SEM) and multi-group analyses. The results showed that the proposed pattern of relationships generally holds, but that the nurses’ level of commitment is more determined by meaning of work than by opportunities for development and that psychological support is associated with job satisfaction (and not only with burnout as hypothesized, in both the Netherlands and Poland). Comparing younger (<40 years) versus older (≥40 years) nurses, we found ample support for differences in the proposed model relationships across age category, some being in line with and some being contradictory to our expectations. We argue that a non-normative, tailor-made approach to aging at work might help us to protect the nurses’ career sustainability across the life span. This study provides evidence-based practical recommendations on how to enhance the health, job satisfaction, and commitment of nurses throughout their working life.

Early exit from neonatal therapeutic hypothermia: A single institution experience using MRI to guide decision-making.

To evaluate the feasibility of a protocol using combined magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), clinical data, and electroencephalogram (EEG) to identify neonates with mild neonatal encephalopathy (NE) treated with therapeutic hypothermia (TH) who are eligible for "early exit". Retrospective chart review of TH cases at a single Level III NICU over a 5-year period was used to describe the demographic, clinical, and outcome data in neonates that received early exit in contrast to 72 hour TH treatment. Two hundred and eight TH cases, including 18 early exit cases (9%) and 9 cases (4%) evaluated for early exit with MRI but continued on 72 hours of TH, were identified. Early exit and 72 hour treatment groups did not differ in demographics or cord gas measures, although early exit neonates had a shorter length of stay (p < 0.05). Consistent with the early exit protocol, no early exit infants had evidence of moderate or severe encephalopathy on EEG or evidence of hypoxic ischemic injury on MRI at 24 hours of life. Neurology follow up between age 1 and 18 months was available for 10 early exit infants, 8 of whom had a normal examination. Early MRI at 24 hours of age, alongside clinical and EEG criteria, is feasible as part of a protocol to identify neonates eligible for early exit from therapeutic hypothermia.

Efficient adaptive inference for deep convolutional neural networks using hierarchical early exits

Early exits are capable of providing deep learning models with adaptive computational graphs that can readily adapt on-the-fly to the available resources. Despite their advantages, existing early exit methods suffer from many limitations which limit their performance, e.g., they ignore the information extracted from previous exit layers, they are unable to efficiently handle feature maps with large sizes, etc. To overcome these limitations we propose a Bag-of-Features (BoF)-based method that is capable of constructing efficient hierarchical early exit layers with minimal computational overhead, while also providing an adaptive inference method that allows for early stopping the inference process when the network is confident enough for its output, leading to significant performance benefits. To this end, the BoF model is extended and adapted to the needs of early exits by constructing additive shared histogram spaces that gradually refine the information extracted from the various layers of a network, in a hierarchical manner, while also employing a classification layer reuse strategy to further reduce the number of parameters needed per exit layer. Note that the proposed method is generic and can be readily combined with any neural network architecture. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using five different image datasets, proving that early exits can be readily transformed into a practical tool, which can be effectively used in various real-world embedded applications.

Gender perspective in the analysis of the relationship between health and work cessation, and how to deal with it.

The main objective of this study is to examine the relationship between health and an early exit from paid employment in the Finnish, Polish, and Spanish populations. The authors have addressed the following 3 issues: who chooses not to work according to gender patterns, whether the health status is a determinant of being non-employed, and what diseases are associated with being non-employed. The studied material consists of data from the Collaborative Research on Ageing in Europe (COURAGE in Europe) project. The analysis was based on a sample of 5868 individuals, including 1214 from Finland, 2152 from Poland and 2532 from Spain. In the paper, these data were complemented with the results of the PArticipation To Healthy Workplaces And inclusive Strategies in the Work Sector (PATHWAYS) project. The results of the study revealed that self-rated health was a strong predictor of being non-employed for different reasons. Chronic diseases, such as arthritis, angina, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression and hypertension, were typically associated with an increased risk of being non-employed due to health problems and early retirement. Women more frequently reported arthritis and depression, while a higher proportion of men suffered from angina and diabetes. The results obtained by the authors highlight the importance of evaluating gender patterns in work cessation and, at the same time, the importance of gender-focused actions in terms of preventing withdrawal from the labor market. In principle, all chronic diseases have some impact on participation in the labor market. It is worth noting, however, that each of them affects workforce participation in a different manner, depending on the specific disease, country and gender. For this reason, tailored support to every individual's needs is highly recommended. Int J Occup Med Environ Health. 2020;33(3):365-84.

Educational differences in the influence of health on early work exit among older workers

ObjectivesPrevious research has shown that poor physical and mental health are important risk factors for early work exit. We examined potential differences in this association in older workers (50+) across...

Substitution and spill‐overs between early exit pathways in times of extending working lives in Europe

AbstractThis article investigates to what extent instrument substitution between early exit pathways took place in Europe between 1995 and 2015. Using Eurostat aggregate data on labour market inactivity and employment rates among the population aged 55–64 in 19 European countries, we analyse substitution effects between pathways and overall spill‐over effects into non‐employment. In spite of a strong decline in early exit and rises in older workers’ employment rates, findings suggest that instrument substitution was common especially between early retirement and disability. Reductions in early exit coincided with considerable spill‐overs into non‐employment, yet these spill‐overs were limited when pathways contracted simultaneously.

A study on the emotional experiences of child care teachers and changes in their daily routine in centers after COVID-19

본 연구는 코로나 19가 영유아를 담당하는 보육교사의 정서와 어린이집 일상에 미친 영향을 탐색하는 것을 목적으로 한다. 연구 참여자는 경기, 서울, 인천, 충남 어린이집에 종사하고 있는 105명 교사(원장, 원감, 교사)이다. 자료수집을 위해 서술적 질문지를 실시하였고, 이를 바탕으로 면담을 진행하였다. 자료 분석은 Giorgi의 현상학적 방법을 통해 2개의 상위주제와 11개의 주제로 분석되었다. 연구결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 코로나 19 상황에서 보육교사는 두려움을 넘은 공포, 피해 주는 것에 대한 걱정과 스트레스, 부정적 시선에 대한 속상함과 스트레스, 불안 상황에서 예민함, 확진 교사에게 감정이입과 같은 정서적 경험을 하였다. 둘째, 코로나 19 감염병은 어린이집의 평소 일상모습을 바꾸었다. 즉 마스크 속에 갇힌 유아와 교사, 사라진 접촉, 텅 빈 교실과 조기 퇴소, 의심자와 외부인 경계, 혼란의 2월, 매일의 소독 그리고 코로나 교육이 일상이 되었다. 이 연구는 신종감염 상황에서 보육교사들이 경험하는 정서와 어린이집 일상과 관련하여 처음으로 국내에서 수행된 연구라는 점에 의의가 있다. 연구결과는 전염병에 대한 보육교사 교육, 지원, 심리 상담 등에 관한 시사점을 제공할 것이다.The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of COVID-19 on the emotions of child care teachers and daily routine in the centers. The subjects of this study were the 105 teachers including center director, assistant director, and teachers who work in day care centers in Gyeonggi, Seoul, Incheon, and Chungnam. Data were collected from a narrative questionnaire, and interview were conducted based on the questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed by Giorgi s phenomenological method into two main theme and eleven topics. The results of the study were as follows. First, the child care teachers experienced emotions such as a phovia beyond fear, worry and stress about avoiding damage, to others, upset and stress about negative gaze, sensitivity in anxiety situations, and empathy to confirming teachers under COVID-19 infection situation. Second, COVID-19 infectious disease changed the daily routine of child-care centers. Children and teachers were trapped in masks all time, missing contact with others, experiencing empty classrooms, early exit, vigilance between suspects and outsiders, chaotic February, daily disinfection and daily COVID-19 education. This study has significance in that it is the first study conducted in South Korea in relation to child care teachers’ emotional experience in the case of new infections and changes in daily life in child care centers. The findings provide implications for the necessity of providing child care teachers with education, support, and psychological counseling on infectious disease.

Who maintains good health functioning? The contribution of social, work-related and behavioural factors to mental and physical health functioning trajectories in ageing employees

ObjectivesThe determinants of poor functioning and subsequent early exit from work are well established but very little is known about the positive determinants of maintaining good functioning among the ageing...

Optimized training and scalable implementation of Conditional Deep Neural Networks with early exits for Fog-supported IoT applications

The incoming IoT big data era requires efficient and resource-constrained mining of large sets of distributed data. This paper explores a possible approach to this end, combining the two emerging paradigms of Conditional Neural Networks with early exits and Fog Computing. Apart from describing the general framework, we provide four specific contributions. First, after reviewing the basic architectures of CDNNs with early exits and characterizing their computational capacity, we consider three basic algorithms for their supervised training (namely the End-to-End, Layer-Wise and Classifier-Wise training algorithms), and, then, formally characterize and compare the resulting tradeoffs in a Fog-supported implementation. Second, after presenting a reference architecture for the local classifiers equipping the considered CDNNs, we develop an optimized framework for the parallel and distributed setting of their decision thresholds. Third, we propose a greedy algorithm for placing the early exits efficiently on the considered CDNNs and prove its linear scaling complexity. Fourth, we analytically characterize in closed-form and analyze the energy performance of the optimal CDNN-onto-Fog mapping. Finally, extensive numerical tests are presented, in order to test and compare the energy-vs.-implementation complexity-vs.-accuracy performance of the resulting optimized CDNN-over-Fog platforms under the IoT-oriented SVHN and FER-2013 datasets.

Do Reemployment Programs for the Unemployed Work for Youth? Evidence from the Great Recession in the United States

We present experimental evidence on the effects of four U.S. reemployment programs for youth Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients during the Great Recession. The three programs that emphasized monitoring and service referrals reduced UI receipt but had minimal effects on employment and earnings; these programs mainly induced the early exit of participants. The fourth program, which combined mandatory job counseling with monitoring, caused the largest reductions in UI receipt and clearly increased employment and earnings. Both early participant exits and effective job counseling underlie these impacts. We conclude that policymakers should require job counseling for youth UI recipients during recessions.

Self-preservation comes at a cost: Why British National Health Service paramedics might be choosing a healthier, but poorer, retirement

Objectives:To explore and portray the perspectives of National Health Service Ambulance personnel related to the latest rise in the National Health Service occupational pension age.Methods:Data gathering took the form of 35 in-depth interviews. A thematic analysis was used to characterise and articulate key concepts and meanings. The analysis applied interpretive techniques, as views expressed were from personal experiences, and allowed for an in-depth analysis of shared meanings.Results:The themes reported captured the desire of many Ambulance personnel to exit their employment well in advance of their retirement age, despite satisfaction gained from patient care. This early exit is being driven by increased worry that the work demands of the job are unsustainable, especially for older workers, as clinical responsibilities increase and their social support diminishes. Also, Ambulance personnel feel betrayed by their employers, because their retirement is being delayed further by another change in their pensionable age.Conclusion:There is an increased orientation for ‘living for today’ and indications of a willingness to sacrifice salary and pension income in order to protect their health in older age, which has implications for long-term financial and general well-being in retirement.