Beyond accident: A model for the compensation of work-related harm in New Zealand

<p>This thesis examines the compensation of work-related injuries and illnesses under the Accident Compensation Act 2001 (ACA). It proposes a set of legislative reforms to enable fairer and more equitable access to compensation for workers and improvements to work health and safety. This thesis approaches the development of a model for reform as an endeavour within labour law (rather than welfare or insurance law) and adopts a labour law theoretical framework for analysis. This thesis argues that the current coverage problems are a product of the scheme’s unique political history, and starts by outlining the historical origins of the scheme and the political compromises, theoretical tensions, and ideological shifts that have led to the current ACA. It also examines the challenges posed by changes in the nature of work, the workforce, and the ways workers are engaged to perform work. This thesis focusses on the cover of chronic work-related health problems, and, in particular, the complex relationships of causation in work-stress related depression, cardiovascular disease and musculoskeletal conditions. While particular attention is paid to the complexities associated with work-stress-related illness the model proposed is intended to improve the cover of, and data collection on, all work-related health problems in New Zealand. This thesis proposes a new Act to replace the ACA, with a new structure, new purpose section and definitions, new cover test, and the creation of a new work-health review panel. The reform proposal is intended to achieve fairer coverage of work-related health problems, and contribute to improvements in work health and safety in New Zealand, ensuring compensation, treatment and rehabilitation is available to the increasing numbers of workers affected, and making those conditions more visible within the workplace injury and illness statistics.</p>

Beyond accident: A model for the compensation of work-related harm in New Zealand

<p>This thesis examines the compensation of work-related injuries and illnesses under the Accident Compensation Act 2001 (ACA). It proposes a set of legislative reforms to enable fairer and more equitable access to compensation for workers and improvements to work health and safety. This thesis approaches the development of a model for reform as an endeavour within labour law (rather than welfare or insurance law) and adopts a labour law theoretical framework for analysis. This thesis argues that the current coverage problems are a product of the scheme’s unique political history, and starts by outlining the historical origins of the scheme and the political compromises, theoretical tensions, and ideological shifts that have led to the current ACA. It also examines the challenges posed by changes in the nature of work, the workforce, and the ways workers are engaged to perform work. This thesis focusses on the cover of chronic work-related health problems, and, in particular, the complex relationships of causation in work-stress related depression, cardiovascular disease and musculoskeletal conditions. While particular attention is paid to the complexities associated with work-stress-related illness the model proposed is intended to improve the cover of, and data collection on, all work-related health problems in New Zealand. This thesis proposes a new Act to replace the ACA, with a new structure, new purpose section and definitions, new cover test, and the creation of a new work-health review panel. The reform proposal is intended to achieve fairer coverage of work-related health problems, and contribute to improvements in work health and safety in New Zealand, ensuring compensation, treatment and rehabilitation is available to the increasing numbers of workers affected, and making those conditions more visible within the workplace injury and illness statistics.</p>

Mobile phone surveys: The Slovenian case study

In 2004, the number of mobile phone subscriptions in Slovenia reached the total number of inhabitants. Consequently, the fixed telephone coverage has started to decline; almost 10% of households are now available only over the mobile phone. With this, Slovenia positions itself as a typical EU country and can serve as a case study for issues related to mobile phone interview surveys. The paper addresses the general context of mobile phone usage and the calculations of mobile phone coverage rates. It also discusses the non-coverage problems related to mobile and mobile-only households. It is shown, that even with a relatively small non-coverage the corresponding estimates can be considerably biased, as in the case of the unemployment rate in the Slovenian Labour Force Survey. There are severe methodological problems with mobile phone interview surveys. In particular, a pilot mobile phone survey confirmed the disadvantages of costs, frames and response rates, at least when compared to fixed telephone surveys. In addition, the response rates are dramatically lower for less intensive mobile phone users. The comparisons of respondents in mobile phone surveys with the corresponding sub-samples in Labour Force Surveys and in fixed telephone surveys revealed some specific discrepancies in the socio-demographic structure. Due to non-coverage, the respondents in the mobile phone survey tend to be younger, higher educated, from larger households and are represented by a larger share of males. The non-response mechanism can additionally reinforce these effects (e.g, gender), however it can also cancel them (e.g., age, household size). Special complexity arises from the diverse effects of the non-response components (refusal vs. non-contact). According to their attitudes towards mobile phone use, mobile phone users compose three distinct segments (intensive pragmatic and emotional users, less intensive users) that may behave differentially also during the mobile phone survey process.

Computationally-Efficient Distributed Algorithms of Navigation of Teams of Autonomous UAVs for 3D Coverage and Flocking

This paper proposes novel distributed control methods to address coverage and flocking problems in three-dimensional (3D) environments using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Two classes of coverage problems are considered in this work, namely barrier and sweep problems. Additionally, the approach is also applied to general 3D flocking problems for advanced swarm behavior. The proposed control strategies adopt a region-based control approach based on Voronoi partitions to ensure collision-free self-deployment and coordinated movement of all vehicles within a 3D region. It provides robustness for the multi-vehicle system against vehicles’ failure. It is also computationally-efficient to ensure scalability, and it handles obstacle avoidance on a higher level to avoid conflicts in control with the inter-vehicle collision avoidance objective. The problem formulation is rather general considering mobile robots navigating in 3D spaces, which makes the proposed approach applicable to different UAV types and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). However, implementation details have also been shown considering quadrotor-type UAVs for an example application in precision agriculture. Validation of the proposed methods have been performed using several simulations considering different simulation platforms such as MATLAB and Gazebo. Software-in-the-loop simulations were carried out to asses the real-time computational performance of the methods showing the actual implementation with quadrotors using C++ and the Robot Operating System (ROS) framework. Good results were obtained validating the performance of the suggested methods for coverage and flocking scenarios in 3D using systems with different sizes up to 100 vehicles. Some scenarios considering obstacle avoidance and robustness against vehicles’ failure were also used.

Cell Area-Based Method for Analyzing the Coverage Capacity of Satellite Constellations

Constellation-to-ground coverage analysis is an important problem in practical satellite applications. The classical net point method is one of the most commonly used algorithms in resolving this problem, indicating that the computation efficiency significantly depends on the high-precision requirement. On this basis, an improved cell area-based method is proposed in this paper, in which a cell is used as the basic analytical unit. By calculating the accuracy area of a cell that is partly contained by the ground region or partly covered by the constellation, the accurate coverage area can be obtained accordingly. Experiments simulating different types of coverage problems are conducted, and the results reveal the correctness and high efficiency of the proposed analytical method.

Euler Transformation of Polyhedral Complexes

We propose an Euler transformation that transforms a given [Formula: see text]-dimensional cell complex [Formula: see text] for [Formula: see text] into a new [Formula: see text]-complex [Formula: see text] in which every vertex is part of the same even number of edges. Hence every vertex in the graph [Formula: see text] that is the [Formula: see text]-skeleton of [Formula: see text] has an even degree, which makes [Formula: see text] Eulerian, i.e., it is guaranteed to contain an Eulerian tour. Meshes whose edges admit Eulerian tours are crucial in coverage problems arising in several applications including 3D printing and robotics. For [Formula: see text]-complexes in [Formula: see text] ([Formula: see text]) under mild assumptions (that no two adjacent edges of a [Formula: see text]-cell in [Formula: see text] are boundary edges), we show that the Euler transformed [Formula: see text]-complex [Formula: see text] has a geometric realization in [Formula: see text], and that each vertex in its [Formula: see text]-skeleton has degree [Formula: see text]. We bound the numbers of vertices, edges, and [Formula: see text]-cells in [Formula: see text] as small scalar multiples of the corresponding numbers in [Formula: see text]. We prove corresponding results for [Formula: see text]-complexes in [Formula: see text] under an additional assumption that the degree of a vertex in each [Formula: see text]-cell containing it is [Formula: see text]. In this setting, every vertex in [Formula: see text] is shown to have a degree of [Formula: see text]. We also present bounds on parameters measuring geometric quality (aspect ratios, minimum edge length, and maximum angle of cells) of [Formula: see text] in terms of the corresponding parameters of [Formula: see text] for [Formula: see text]. Finally, we illustrate a direct application of the proposed Euler transformation in additive manufacturing.

Molecular and epidemiologic characterization of the diphtheria outbreak in Venezuela

In 2016, Venezuela faced a large diphtheria outbreak that extended until 2019. Nasopharyngeal or oropharyngeal samples were prospectively collected from 51 suspected cases and retrospective data from 348 clinical records was retrieved from 14 hospitals between November 2017 and November 2018. Confirmed pathogenic Corynebactrium isolates were biotyped. Multilocus Sequence Typing (MLST) was performed followed by next-generation-based core genome-MLST and minimum spanning trees were generated. Subjects between 10 and 19 years of age were mostly affected (n = 95; 27.3%). Case fatality rates (CFR) were higher in males (19.4%), as compared to females (15.8%). The highest CFR (31.1%) was observed among those under 5, followed by the 40 to 49 age-group (25.0%). Nine samples corresponded to C. diphtheriae and 1 to C. ulcerans. Two Sequencing Types (ST), ST174 and ST697 (the latter not previously described) were identified among the eight C. diphtheriae isolates from Carabobo state. Cg-MLST revealed only one cluster also from Carabobo. The Whole Genome Sequencing analysis revealed that the outbreak seemed to be caused by different strains with C. diphtheriae and C. ulcerans coexisting. The reemergence and length of this outbreak suggest vaccination coverage problems and an inadequate control strategy.