Economic and Social Research Council

Here is a challenging study on the effects of work and unemployment on health. Examined in this comprehensive study are issues such as why some people are more harmed by unemployment than others; why certain job transitions are more difficult; and what we mean by mental health and how we can measure it. The author introduces nine characteristics of any environment and shows how they give rise to the harmful and beneficial consequences of work and unemployment. The book gathers integrates the extensive and widely-dissemenated research into the topic and places it in an original and logical conceptual framework.

New instruments are described for the measurement of both job‐related and non‐job mental health. These cover two axes of affective well‐being, based upon dimensions of pleasure and arousal, and also reported competence, aspiration and negative job carry‐over. Baseline data are presented from a sample of 1686 job‐holders, and earlier uses of the well‐being scales are summarized. The instruments appear to be psychometrically acceptable, and are associated with demographic and occupational features in expected ways. For example, older employees report greater job‐related well‐being; occupational level is positively correlated with job depression‐enthusiasm but negatively associated with job anxiety‐contentment; depression‐enthusiasm is more predictable from low‐to‐medium opportunity for skill use and task variety, whereas anxiety‐contentment is more a function of workload or uncertainty.

The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR), for many years almost exclusively studied by the pharmacology/toxicology field for its role in mediating the toxicity of xenobiotics such as 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), has more recently attracted the attention of immunologists. The evolutionary conservation of this transcription factor and its widespread expression in the immune system point to important physiological functions that are slowly being unraveled. In particular, the emphasis is now shifting from the role of AhR in the xenobiotic pathway toward its mode of action in response to physiological ligands. In this article, we review the current understanding of the molecular interactions and functions of AhR in the immune system in steady state and in the presence of infection and inflammation, with a focus on barrier organs such as the skin, the gut, and the lung.

Whether the native language of bilingual individuals is active during second-language comprehension is the subject of lively debate. Studies of bilingualism have often used a mix of first- and second-language words, thereby creating an artificial "dual-language" context. Here, using event-related brain potentials, we demonstrate implicit access to the first language when bilinguals read words exclusively in their second language. Chinese-English bilinguals were required to decide whether English words presented in pairs were related in meaning or not; they were unaware of the fact that half of the words concealed a character repetition when translated into Chinese. Whereas the hidden factor failed to affect behavioral performance, it significantly modulated brain potentials in the expected direction, establishing that English words were automatically and unconsciously translated into Chinese. Critically, the same modulation was found in Chinese monolinguals reading the same words in Chinese, i.e., when Chinese character repetition was evident. Finally, we replicated this pattern of results in the auditory modality by using a listening comprehension task. These findings demonstrate that native-language activation is an unconscious correlate of second-language comprehension.

The Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations (MIBBI) project aims to foster the coordinated development of minimum-information checklists and provide a resource for those exploring the range of extant checklists.

In this paper, we examine the growth effects of government expenditure for a panel of 30 developing countries over the 1970s and 1980s, with a particular focus on disaggregated government expenditures. Our methodology improves on previous research on this topic by explicitly recognizing the role of the government budget constraint and the possible biases arising from omitted variables. Our primary results are twofold. First, the share of government capital expenditure in GDP is positively and significantly correlated with economic growth, but current expenditure is insignificant. Second, at the disaggregated level, government investment in education and total expenditures in education are the only outlays that are significantly associated with growth once the budget constraint and omitted variables are taken into consideration.

INTRODUCTION: Statistics Denmark has a number of registers about labour market affiliation, which includes information on employees, establishments and the relation between employees and establishments. CONTENT: The registers describe a person's attachment to the labour market, information on the establishments and information on the relations between persons and establishments. The registers presented either include information at one specific point in time each year (end of November) or during the year. VALIDITY AND COVERAGE: Both the validity and coverage of the registers are considered to be high. CONCLUSION: These registers provide valuable information on personal labour market affiliation and can be used to study determinants and consequences of labour market affiliation.

Contemporary discussions of art and technology continue to work on the assumption that making entails the imposition of form upon the material world, by an agent with a design in mind. Against this hylomorphic model of creation, I argue that the forms of things arise within fields of force and flows of material. It is by intervening in these force-fields and following the lines of flow that practitioners make things. In this view, making is a practice of weaving, in which practitioners bind their own pathways or lines of becoming into the texture of material flows comprising the lifeworld. Rather than reading creativity ‘backwards’, from a finished object to an initial intention in the mind of an agent, this entails reading it forwards, in an ongoing generative movement that is at once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic. To illustrate what this means in practice, I compare carpentry and drawing. In both cases, making is a matter of finding the grain of the world's becoming and following its course. Historically, it was the turn from drawing lines to pulling them straight, between predetermined points, which marked the transition from the textilic to the architectonic, debasing the former as craft while elevating the latter as technology.

A total of 117 depressed clients, stratified for severity, completed 8 or 16 sessions of manualized treatment, either cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy (CB) or psychodynamic-interpersonal psychotherapy (PI). Each of 5 clinician-investigators treated clients in all 4 treatment conditions. On most measures, CB and PI were equally effective, irrespective of the severity of depression or the duration of treatment. However, there was evidence of some advantage to CB on the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961). There was no evidence that CB's effects were more rapid than those of PI, nor did the effects of each treatment method vary according to the severity of depression. There was no overall advantage to 16-session treatment over 8-session treatment. However, those presenting with relatively severe depression improved substantially more after 16 than after 8 sessions.

Recent research has highlighted several job characteristics salient to employee well-being and behavior for which there are no adequate generally applicable measures. These include timing and method control, monitoring and problem-solving demand, and production responsibility. In this article, an attempt to develop measures of these constructs provided encouraging results. Confirmatory factor analyses applied to data from 2 samples of shop-floor employees showed a consistent fit to a common 5-factor measurement model. Scales corresponding to each of the dimensions showed satisfactory internal and test–retest reliabilities. As expected, the scales also discriminated between employees in different jobs and employees working with contrasting technologies.

It is now established that native language affects one's perception of the world. However, it is unknown whether this effect is merely driven by conscious, language-based evaluation of the environment or whether it reflects fundamental differences in perceptual processing between individuals speaking different languages. Using brain potentials, we demonstrate that the existence in Greek of 2 color terms--ghalazio and ble--distinguishing light and dark blue leads to greater and faster perceptual discrimination of these colors in native speakers of Greek than in native speakers of English. The visual mismatch negativity, an index of automatic and preattentive change detection, was similar for blue and green deviant stimuli during a color oddball detection task in English participants, but it was significantly larger for blue than green deviant stimuli in native speakers of Greek. These findings establish an implicit effect of language-specific terminology on human color perception.

In a study of 170 junior house officers who were followed up from their fourth year in medical school mean levels of stress were higher than in other reported occupational groups, and the estimated prevalence of emotional disturbance was 50%, with 28% of the subjects showing evidence of depression. Nearly a fifth of the subjects reported occasional or frequent bouts of heavy drinking, a quarter took drugs for physical illness, and a few took drugs for recreation. Those who were emotionally distressed at the initial study and the follow up were more empathetic and more self critical than those who had low levels of stress on both occasions. Overwork was the most stressful aspect of their jobs, though the number of hours worked was not related to stress levels, unlike diet and sleep. The more stressed they were the more unfavourably they viewed aspects of their jobs. The incidence of distress is unacceptably high in junior house officers, and both they and the hospitals need to deal with the causes of the distress.

Harry Collins and Rob Evans (Collins & Evans, 2002) offer a typically forthright normative vision for the 'Third Wave' of science studies, after what they call the earlier waves of post-war rationalism, then the postKuhnian 'cultural revolution' from the 1970s. They propose to redefine the accepted qualifications for expert standing in the countless areas of decision-making in which scientific knowledge has held presumptive sway as exclusive (but relentlessly disputed and increasingly eroded) public authority. Collins & Evans (2002) start from the problem of public legitimacy that has been widely recognized to beset science in recent times (House of Lords, 2000; European Union, 2000). They argue that 'the problem of legitimacy' for science has been mistakenly replaced by 'the problem of extension', in which real distinctions between experts and publics are dissolved and 'technical decision-making rights' (as they call them) are thus extended indiscriminately. Their aim of redefining competences for 'technical decision-making' in the public sphere, so as to include practical experience-based expertise alongside 'certified science', would be more inclusive compared with existing boundaries, but more exclusive compared with the apparent assumptions (of infinite 'extension') of the participation in science 'movements'. They use the case studies of Cumbrian sheep farmers (Wynne, 1992) and HIV-AIDS activists (Epstein, 1996) to illustrate this argument. Significantly, and as issues I take up later, for them the public sphere involves an accumulation of completely unrelated 'decisions' about what they define as exclusively 'propositional' decision-questions, such as whether nuclear power, anti-misting kerosene or UK beef is safe,

Abstract Karasek (1979) drew attention to the possibilities that job characteristics may be non-linearly associated with employee well-being, and that they may combine interactively in relation to well-being. This paper examines those issues, and finds that both linear and non-linear components are present in relationships between job features and well-being. However, there is no evidence for a synergistic interaction between decision latitude and job demands. Those job features are differentially predictive of two aspects of well-being: job-related depression-enthusiasm and anxiety-contentment.

Abstract Until recently, the concept of tacit knowledge has been neglected by academics and managers alike, but this has now changed as lacit know-how has become recognized as palying a key role in firm growth and economic competitivenss. Tacit knowledge forms an important element in a firm's knowledge base and has a central role in organizational learning. This analysis stresses the need to view tacit knowledge in a dynamic setting, and that tacit knowledge can be acquired and transferred on a variety of levels: individual, group, firm and inter-firm basis. The paper then explores the policy implications of technology transfer initiatives which seek of shift tacit know-how between firms and analyzes the ways that this can be achieved. Current address: PREST; 8 John Adum Street, London WC2N 6EZ, UK Current address: PREST; 8 John Adum Street, London WC2N 6EZ, UK Notes Current address: PREST; 8 John Adum Street, London WC2N 6EZ, UK

Here we describe the requirements of an e-Infrastructure to enable faster, better, and different scientific research capabilities. We use two application exemplars taken from the United Kingdom's e-Science Programme to illustrate these requirements and make the case for a service-oriented infrastructure. We provide a brief overview of the UK "plug-and-play composable services" vision and the role of semantics in such an e-Infrastructure.

This paper provides an order-of-magnitude assessment of the marginal social costs of greenhouse gas emissions. The calculations are based on a stochastic greenhouse damage model in which key parameters are random. This allows a closer representation of current scientific understanding and also enables calculation of a damage probability distribution. Thus, we account explicitly for the uncertain nature of the global warming phenomenon. We estimate social costs of C02 emissions in the order of 20 $/tC for emissions between 1991 and 2000, a value which rises over time to about 28 $/tC in 20212030. Similar figures for CH4 and N20 are also provided. As a consequence of the prevailing uncertainty, the standard deviation of the estimates is rather high. The distribution is positively skewed, which implies that the currently predominant method of using best guess values will lead to an underestimation of the expected costs of emissions.

SUMMARY There is increasing emphasis on the need for effective ways of sharing knowledge to enhance environmental management and sustainability. Knowledge exchange (KE) are processes that generate, share and/or use knowledge through various methods appropriate to the context, purpose, and participants involved. KE includes concepts such as sharing, generation, coproduction, comanagement, and brokerage of knowledge. This paper elicits the expert knowledge of academics involved in research and practice of KE from different disciplines and backgrounds to review research themes, identify gaps and questions, and develop a research agenda for furthering understanding about KE. Results include 80 research questions prefaced by a review of research themes. Key conclusions are: (1) there is a diverse range of questions relating to KE that require attention; (2) there is a particular need for research on understanding the process of KE and how KE can be evaluated; and (3) given the strong interdependency of research questions, an integrated approach to understanding KE is required. To improve understanding of KE, action research methodologies and embedding evaluation as a normal part of KE research and practice need to be encouraged. This will foster more adaptive approaches to learning about KE and enhance effectiveness of environmental management.

A strategy based on the gene trap was developed to prescreen mouse embryonic stem cells for insertional mutations in genes encoding secreted and membrane-spanning proteins. The "secretory trap" relies on capturing the N-terminal signal sequence of an endogenous gene to generate an active beta-galactosidase fusion protein. Insertions were found in a cadherin gene, an unc6-related laminin (netrin) gene, the sek receptor tyrosine kinase gene, and genes encoding two receptor-linked protein-tyrosine phosphatases, LAR and PTP kappa. Analysis of homozygous mice carrying insertions in LAR and PTP kappa showed that both genes were effectively disrupted, but neither was essential for normal embryonic development.

Within the context of the British labor market, 11 investigations into the mental health impact of unemployment are described. These reveal significant decrements for people of all ages as a result of moving into unemployment, and for middle‐aged men additional effects of continuing joblessness. Research into factors mediating the harmful impact of unemployment has covered time since job loss, employment commitment, social relationships, gender, ethnic group membership, social class, local unemployment rate, and personal vulnerability. Findings with respect to each are summarized, and a model of influential environmental characteristics is introduced. Additional British investigations are cited throughout the paper.