Normal Business Hours Research Articles

Traumatic occupational fatalities in the retail industry, United States 1992-1996

Retail is a growing economic sector and employs an increasing number of the overall workforce, yet little is known about the incidence and characteristics of work-related deaths in the retail industry. Workplace deaths were examined using the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries from 1992 through 1996. Occupational fatality rates were calculated by age, gender, and type of establishment, and characteristics of occupational deaths in the retail industry were compared to other industries. Liquor stores had the highest work-related fatality rates in the retail industry. The two leading causes of death in the retail industry were violence (69.5%) and motor vehicle crashes (19.3%). Females, younger, minority, and foreign-born workers were more likely to be killed in retail than other industries. Deaths in the retail industry were more likely to be in small businesses, after normal business hours, and in urban settings. Workers in the retail industry were at lower risk of most types of workplace deaths but had a markedly increased risk of violent death than workers in other industries.

Automatic Mapping of Dynamic Office Environments

We present a robot, InductoBeast, that greets a new office building by learning the floorplan automatically, with minimal human intervention and a priori knowledge. Our robot architecture is unique because it combines aspects of both abductive and inductive mapping methods to solve this problem. We present experimental results spanning three ofiice environments, mapped and navigated during normal business hours. We hope these results help to establish a performance benchmark against which robust and adaptive mapping robots of the future may be measured.

Health insurance and access to primary care for children.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that insurance status influences the amount of ambulatory care received by children, but few have assessed the role of insurance as a determinant of children's access to primary care. We studied the effect of health insurance on children's access to primary care. We analyzed a sample of 49,367 children under 18 years of age from the 1993-1994 National Health Interview Survey, a nationwide household survey. The overall rate of response was 86.5 percent. The survey included questions on insurance coverage and access to primary care. An estimated 13 percent of U.S. children did not have health insurance in 1993-1994. Uninsured children were less likely than insured children to have a usual source of care (75.9 percent vs. 96.2 percent, P<0.001). Among those with a usual source of care, uninsured children were more likely than insured children to have no regular physician (24.3 percent vs. 13.8 percent, P<0.001), to be without access to medical care after normal business hours (11.8 percent vs. 7.1 percent, P<0.001), and to have families that were dissatisfied with at least one aspect of their care (19.6 percent vs. 14.0 percent, P=0.01). Uninsured children were more likely than insured children to have gone without needed medical, dental, or other health care (22.2 percent vs. 6.1 percent, P<0.001). Uninsured children were also less likely than insured children to have had contact with a physician during the previous year (67.4 percent vs. 83.8 percent, P<0.001). All differences remained significant after we controlled for potential confounders using linear and logistic regression. Among children, having health insurance is strongly associated with access to primary care. The new children's health insurance program enacted as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 may substantially improve access to and use of primary care by children.

Work and Family in the Virtual Office: Perceived Influences of Mobile Telework

WORK AND FAMILY IN THE VIRTUAL OFFICE PERCEIVED INFLUENCES OF MOBILE TELEWORK* E. Jeffrey Hill, Alan J. Hawkins, and Brent C. Miller** Telework is a rapidly emerging reality in the workplace. This study explores the influence of mobile telework on family life as reported by teleworkers in a large national corporation (n = 157). In addition, this group is compared to an equivalent group of office workers (n = S9) from the same corporation. Mobile teleworkers reported much greater work flexibility. Some reported that their families thrived because of this flexibility. Others reported that their families struggled because workplace and schedule flexibility blurred the boundaries between work and family life. Suggestions are given for how family life educators might help mobile teleworkers ease the transition from traditional work to the virtual office. Watching masses of peasants scything a field three hundred years ago, only a madman would have dreamed that the time would have come when the fields would be depopulated, when people would crowd into urban factories to earn their daily bread. And only a madman would have been right. Today it takes an act of courage to suggest that our biggest factories and office towers may, within our lifetimes, stand half empty, reduced to use as ghostly warehouses or converted into living space. Yet this is precisely what the new mode of production makes possible: a return to industry on a new, higher, basis, and with it a new emphasis on the home as the center of society. ([my emphasis) Toffler, 1980, p. 210) Since Toffler's (1980) Third Wave, many futurists have written about the promise of the electronic cottage to benefit family life. Advocates for family-friendly work policies have long called upon companies and governments to establish work-at-home programs as part of a flexible work agenda (Galinsky, 1992). The recent advent of truly portable work tools and significant changes in work organizations have created the opportunity for millions of information workers to move into this frontier of flexible work. Still, there has been little research on how flexibility in the timing and location of work affects family life. The impetus for this exploratory study is the need to look at the perceived influence of the virtual office on the personal/family life of the mobile teleworker. The Beginnings of Telework The general term for doing work away from the office via telecommunications equipment is telework (see Bureau of National Affairs, 1992; Callentine, 1995; Nilles, 1994; Olson, 1988; Pitt-Catsouphes & Marchetta, 1991; U.S. Department of Transportation, 1993). Although telework was foreseen as early as 1950, it did not become practical until the advent of personal computers and portable modems in the early 1970s (U.S. Department of Transportation, 1993). In 1973, the term telecommuting was introduced to emphasize that telework could eventually replace the daily commute to the work site (Nilles, 1994). Companies first seriously considered the possibility of telework as a means to make them less vulnerable to fuel shortages during the OPEC oil crisis in the early and mid 1970s (Tolbert & Simons, 1994). During the last decade, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of American teleworkers. Ten years ago there were fewer than one million employees who teleworked away from the office at least 8 hours per week during normal business hours (Callentine, 1995). The number of teleworkers has grown more than eightfold, to about 8.4 million today (Henkoff, 1995). The number is projected to grow about 10% to 20% per year through the end of the 1990s to about 10-20 million (Greengard, 1994). Most early teleworkers were telecommuters who voluntarily worked from home one or more days per week. In recent years, a companymandated virtual office form of telework, sometimes called mobile telework, has been a significant factor in the increase of teleworkers (Greengard, 1994). …

Mariposa: a wide-area distributed database system

The requirements of wide-area distributed database systems differ dramatically from those of local-area network systems. In a wide-area network (WAN) configuration, individual sites usually report to different system administrators, have different access and charging algorithms, install site-specific data type extensions, and have different constraints on servicing remote requests. Typical of the last point are production transaction environments, which are fully engaged during normal business hours, and cannot take on additional load. Finally, there may be many sites participating in a WAN distributed DBMS.In this world, a single program performing global query optimization using a cost-based optimizer will not work well. Cost-based optimization does not respond well to site-specific type extension, access constraints, charging algorithms, and time-of-day constraints. Furthermore, traditional cost-based distributed optimizers do not scale well to a large number of possible processing sites. Since traditional distributed DBMSs have all used cost-based optimizers, they are not appropriate in a WAN environment, and a new architecture is required.We have proposed and implemented an economic paradigm as the solution to these issues in a new distributed DBMS called Mariposa. In this paper, we present the architecture and implementation of Mariposa and discuss early feedback on its operating characteristics.

Telephone consultation for a “managed care” population

Summary Health care reform efforts created an opportunity for our emergency department to develop a formal program for answering calls related to the managed care plan after normal business hours, to communicate information to primary care providers, and to strengthen the way in which we provide general medical advice for the community.

Use of the Mental Health On-Call System on a University Campus

Over the course of 1 calendar year, clinicians at a university mental health service collected data on every clinical case in which students presented after normal business hours or on weekends for urgent mental health consultation. During the year, 50 such incidents were recorded, which translated to a rate of 6.6 on-call events per year per 1,000 students. Students were primarily self-referred or referred by the student health center or residence life staff. Suicidal concerns, panic/anxiety, and depressive states were the three most common presenting complaints. Average clinician time per case was 1 1/2 hours, with sexual assault cases taking the most time per case, followed by substance abuse and suicidality. Follow-up outpatient counseling was employed in 76% of the cases. The results highlight the importance of on-call mental health services on college campuses.

Seasonality of demand

Fluctuation in demand is a troublesome area for managers in the service economy (Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry 1985). Over the annual cycle, the greatest fluctuation in demand for tourism occurs due to changes in the seasons (Sasser 1976). Such fluctuations have been termed seasonality of demand (SOD). For many firms competing successfully in tourism, SOD constrains profitability, while for other firms it may determine their survival. Consequently, understanding and adjusting to SOD dominates many of the decisions made by tourism managers (Soesilo and Mings 1987). This study reports on the seasonality of demand faced by tourism businesses in Alaska. First, the investigation examines the level of SOD confronted by these tourism businesses. Currently the literature does not provide an empirical assessment of the level of SOD found for a cross section of firms in a tourism region. Secondly, organizational, environmental, and demand structure variables of the firms are correlated with the level of SOD. This portion of the analysis endeavors to describe which factors relate to levels of SOD. Data and Method. Travel businesses within the state of Alaska comprised the universe for the study. The marketing manager or owner of a tourism business was contacted by telephone during normal business hours in March 1987. Out of the 187 firms participating in the study, 179 provided sufficient information for the study. In the survey, the level of SOD for each firm was measured using the percent of revenue generated during the peak summer months. The three major types of independent variables (organizational, environmental, and demand structures) were measured either as dummy variables or as continuous variables. Findings. Table 1 shows the frequency distribution which monitors the level

Stock return variances: The arrival of information and the reaction of traders

Asset prices are much more volatile during exchange trading hours than during non-trading hours. This paper considers three explanations for this phenomenon: (1) volatility is caused by public information which is more likely to arrive during normal business hours; (2) volatility is caused by private information which affects prices when informed investors trade; and (3) volatility is caused by pricing errors that occur during trading. Although a significant fraction of the daily variance is caused by mispricing, the behavior of returns around exchange holidays suggests that private information is the principle factor behind high trading-time variances.