Migrant workers in the East Midlands labour market 2007

This report provides a profile of international migrants in the East Midlands and their role in the regional labour marke

East Midlands FRESA targets project

Reviewed employment and skills targets in use by organisations in the East Midlands in order to inform the development of targets for the East Midlands Framework for Employment and Skills action (FRESA). Established target development process later adopted by emda for 2006 RES. Developed criteria for applying to future selection of economic performance monitoring metrics - especially for skills, based on extant best practice, such as the Treasury's 'Green Book'

Exploring the links between skills and productivity

An assessment of the direct and indirect link between skills and productivity in the context of the Treasury's '5 drivers' of growth. Based on a literature review covering the debate around the extent and nature of the contribution of skills to economic performance, tested through an analysis of labour market data for the East Midlands region

Migrant workers in the East Midlands labour market 2010

This report is an update of previous intelligence (Migrant Workers in the East Midlands Labour Market 2007) on the profile and economic impact of migrant labour in the East Midlands economy

Scoping analytical usability evaluation methods: A case study

Analytical usability evaluation methods (UEMs) can complement empirical evaluation of systems: for example, they can often be used earlier in design and can provide accounts of why users might experience difficulties, as well as what those difficulties are. However, their properties and value are only partially understood. One way to improve our understanding is by detailed comparisons using a single interface or system as a target for evaluation, but we need to look deeper than simple problem counts: we need to consider what kinds of accounts each UEM offers, and why. Here, we report on a detailed comparison of eight analytical UEMs. These eight methods were applied to it robotic arm interface, and the findings were systematically compared against video data of the arm ill use. The usability issues that were identified could be grouped into five categories: system design, user misconceptions, conceptual fit between user and system, physical issues, and contextual ones. Other possible categories such as User experience did not emerge in this particular study. With the exception of Heuristic Evaluation, which supported a range of insights, each analytical method was found to focus attention on just one or two categories of issues. Two of the three "home-grown" methods (Evaluating Multimodal Usability and Concept-based Analysis of Surface and Structural Misfits) were found to occupy particular niches in the space, whereas the third (Programmable User Modeling) did not. This approach has identified commonalities and contrasts between methods and provided accounts of why a particular method yielded the insights it did. Rather than considering measures such as problem count or thoroughness, this approach has yielded insights into the scope of each method

In-work poverty in the East Midlands

Research that explores the nature and scale of in-work poverty in the East Midlands, using several established measures

Job creation and regional change under New Labour : a shift-share analysis

The paper examines changes in UK regional employment during the period of the New Labour administration, 1997–2010, with the Blair and Brown administrations considered separately. The paper employs a shift-share analysis of workplace employment data by industry and subregion, using annual data from the UK Labour Force Survey. The results reveal significant regional shifts, with interesting spatial dynamics in and around the capital and resilient employment growth in the provinces

Share capitalism and worker wellbeing

We show that worker wellbeing is determined not only by the amount of compensation workers receive but also by how compensation is determined. While previous theoretical and empirical work has often been preoccupied with individual performance-related pay, we find that the receipt of a range of group-performance schemes (profit shares, group bonuses and share ownership) is associated with higher job satisfaction. This holds conditional on wage levels, so that pay methods are associated with greater job satisfaction in addition to that coming from higher wages. We use a variety of methods to control for unobserved individual and job-specific characteristics. We suggest that half of the share-capitalism effect is accounted for by employees reciprocating for the “gift”; we also show that share capitalism helps dampen the negative wellbeing effects of what we typically think of as “bad” aspects of job quality

Decays of metastable vacua in SQCD

The decay rates of metastable SQCD vacua in ISS-type models, both towards supersymmetric vacua as well as towards other nonsupersymmetric configurations arising in theories with elementary spectators, are estimated numerically in the semiclassical approximation by computing the corresponding multifield bounce configurations. The scaling of the bounce action with respect to the most relevant dimensionless couplings and ratios of scales is analyzed. In the case of the decays towards the susy vacua generated by nonperturbative effects, the results confirm previous analytical estimations of this scaling, obtained by assuming a triangular potential barrier. The decay rates towards susy vacua generated by R-symmetry breaking interactions turn out to be more than sufficiently suppressed for the phenomenologically relevant parameter range, and their behavior in this regime differs from analytic estimations valid for parametrically small scale ratios. It is also shown that in models with spectator fields, even though the decays towards vacua involving nonzero spectator VEVs don't have a strong parametric dependence on the scale ratios, the ISS vacuum can still be made long-lived in the presence of R-symmetry breaking interactions.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure

Flavor of quiver-like realizations of effective supersymmetry

We present a class of supersymmetric models which address the flavor puzzle and have an inverted hierarchy of sfermions. Their construction involves quiver-like models with link fields in generic representations. The magnitude of Standard-Model parameters is obtained naturally and a relatively heavy Higgs boson is allowed without fine tuning. Collider signatures of such models are possibly within the reach of LHC in the near future.Comment: LaTeX, 17 pages, 3 figures. V2: reference adde