PROFESSIONAL RETRAINING IN PRE-RETIREMENT ADULTS: CHALLENGES AND RISKS

The article addresses pre-retirement adults as a subject of retraining, while giving special consideration to the correlation between psychological wellbeing and successful education, as well as to the importance of psychological treatment for overcoming challenges at this stage of life. Purpose of our study is to find the prohibitory and contributory factors of pre-retirement professional retraining. Increased retirement age and, as a result, extended work life have become a burning question in Russian society. New pre-retirement adults are facing new challenges – they have to make choices to determine their future career. At the same time, occurring limitations (age, personality, experience, etc.) are causing risks and difficulties in further training. Crucial component of successful acquisition of new information, completion of professional retraining programs and subsequent employment is psychological well-being. National government has developed, implemented, and funded retraining programs. According to the Russian Ministry of Labor and Social Protection, 2019 exceeded the target for fulfilling retraining contracts. However, the statistics does not state if people are actually content with their retraining. Apart from age, there are other factors that can influence education efficiency. Pre-retirement is an important life stage having an array of aspects to be considered in work with this group as they can affect one's mental health. The study results might be used by specialists of employment centers, professional retraining educators, and pre-retirement psychologists.

Queries and Cues: Textual Stimuli for Reflective Thinking in Digital Mind-Mapping

Mind-mapping is useful for externalizing ideas and their relationships surrounding a central problem. However, balancing between the exploration of different aspects (breadth) of the problem with respect to the detailed exploration of each of its aspects (depth) can be challenging, especially for novices. The goal of this paper is to investigate the notion of “reflection-in-design” through a novel interactive digital mind-mapping workflow that we call “QCue”. The idea behind this workflow is to incorporate the notion of reflective thinking through two mechanisms: (1) offering suggestions to promote depth exploration through user's queries (Q), and (2) asking questions (Cue) to promote reflection for breadth exploration. This paper is an extension of our prior work where our focus was mainly on the algorithmic development and implementation of a cognitive support mechanism behind QCue enabled by ConceptNet (a graph-based rich ontology with “commonsense” knowledge). In this extended work, we first present a detailed summary of how QCue facilitated the breadth-depth balance in a mind-mapping task. Second, we present a comparison between QCue and conventional digital mind-mapping i.e. without our algorithm through a between-subjects user study. Third, we present new detailed analysis on the usage of different cognitive mechanisms provided by QCue. We further consolidate our prior quantitative analysis and build a connection with our observational analysis. Finally, we discuss in detail the different cognitive mechanisms provided by QCue to stimulate reflection in design.

Boundaryless working hours and recovery in Germany

Objective Due to recent trends such as globalization and digitalization, more and more employees tend to have flexible working time arrangements, including boundaryless working hours. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationships of various aspects of boundaryless working hours (overtime, Sunday work, and extended work availability) with employees’ state of recovery. Besides, we examined the mediating and moderating role of recovery experiences (psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control) in these relationships. Methods We used data from 8586 employees (48% women; average age of 48 years) who took part in the 2017 BAuA-Working Time Survey, a representative study of the German working population. Regression analyses were conducted to test main effects as well as mediation and moderation. Results Overtime work, Sunday work, and extended work availability were negatively related to state of recovery. Psychological detachment mediated these relationships. Furthermore, we found that relaxation and control mediated the association between extended work availability and state of recovery. However, no relevant moderating effects were found. Conclusions Altogether, our findings indicate that various aspects of boundaryless working hours pose a risk to employees’ state of recovery and that especially psychological detachment is a potential mechanism in these relationships. In addition, the results suggest that a high level of recovery experiences cannot attenuate these negative relationships in leisure time. Therefore, employers and employees alike should try to avoid or minimize boundaryless working hours.

Demonstrating the Utility of Egocentric Relational Event Modeling Using Focal Follow Data from Congolese BaYaka Children and Adolescents Engaging in Work and Play

Temporal aspects of child and adolescent time allocation in diverse cultural settings have been difficult to model using conventional statistical techniques. A new statistical approach, Egocentric Relational Event Modelling (EREM), allows for the simultaneous modelling of activity frequency, duration, and sequencing. Here, EREM is applied to a focal follow dataset of Congolese BaYaka forager child and adolescent play and work activities. Results show that, as children age, they engage in less frequent and extended play bouts and more frequent and extended work bouts. Bout frequency and duration were a more sensitive measure for early sex differences than overall time allocation. Sequential patterns of work and play suggest that these activities have short-term energetic trade-offs. This article demonstrates that EREM can reveal stable and variable patterns in child development.

Rethinking editorial management and productivity in the COVID-19 pandemic

The indirect costs of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically extended work absenteeism and possible loss of productivity, are discussed focusing on the research community and its publishing. We suggest that the community should learn strategic and innovative decision-making as well as crisis management from business management to think ahead, especially about working effectively and being productive in times of crisis. The main challenges are: 1) communicating scientific and credible information about the pandemic,2) focusing on being productive to provide some certainty, and3) adopting a new mindset and being open to unexpected opportunities.

Derrida’s Unfinished Book

This chapter draws from the provocations of Derrida’s thought to undo heuristic assumptions (including some of Derrida’s own) about what constitutes a book. From the beginning of his career, Derrida resisted the idea of the book, which he regarded as a powerful metaphor of, and technology for, gathering things together. But in fact the book has never been a certain bulwark against the dissipative, fissiparous effects of writing. In the broadened sense Derrida gives the term, writing is that which happens. The book can then be said to be an adapted environment: not a shelter, however brief, from history but, on the contrary, a point of its uncontrolled accretion and acceleration. For Derrida’s most provocative thoughts on the nature of the book we will in the future need to look to his dispersed and extended work on questions of the archive.

Repulsion leads to coupled dislocation motion and extended work hardening in bcc metals

Work hardening in bcc single crystals at low homologous temperature shows a strong orientation-dependent hardening for high symmetry loading, which is not captured by classical dislocation density based models. We demonstrate here that the high activation barrier for screw dislocation glide motion in tungsten results in repulsive interactions between screw dislocations, and triggers dislocation motion at applied loading conditions where it is not expected. In situ transmission electron microscopy and atomistically informed discrete dislocation dynamics simulations confirm coupled dislocation motion and vanishing obstacle strength for repulsive screw dislocations, compatible with the kink pair mechanism of dislocation motion in the thermally activated (low temperature) regime. We implement this additional contribution to plastic strain in a modified crystal plasticity framework and show that it can explain the extended work hardening regime observed for [100] oriented tungsten single crystal. This may contribute to better understanding the increase in ductility of highly deformed bcc metals.

Limit Cycles of a Class of Polynomial Differential Systems Bifurcating from the Periodic Orbits of a Linear Center

In this paper, we study the number of limit cycles of a new class of polynomial differential systems, which is an extended work of two families of differential systems in systems considered earlier. We obtain the maximum number of limit cycles that bifurcate from the periodic orbits of a center using the averaging theory of first and second order.