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This article focuses on an ad hoc body, the UK Local Government Pay Commission, as a means of developing a broader argument on the relationship between collective dispute resolution and the nature of public service reform. It suggests that the character of disputes in this sector and the `fitness for purpose' of those institutions designed to resolve them are critically related to an industrial relations agenda, which is in turn shaped by changing forms of public service provision. An extended period of public service `modernization' in local government led to a restructuring of collective bargaining with substantive and procedural consequences: new issues emerged and related tensions arose that could not be managed by the traditional bargaining machinery or by the use of existing third-party conciliation or arbitration mechanisms. It required relatively novel arrangements in the form of the LGPC whose nature and operation and lessons are discussed.

Probabilistic programming is an area of research that aims to develop general inference algorithms for probabilistic models expressed as probabilistic programs whose execution corresponds to inferring the parameters of those models. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic programming language (PPL) based on abductive logic programming for performing inference in probabilistic models involving categorical distributions with Dirichlet priors. We encode these models as abductive logic programs enriched with probabilistic definitions and queries, and show how to execute and compile them to boolean formulas. Using the latter, we perform generalized inference using one of two proposed Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithms: an adaptation of uncollapsed Gibbs sampling from related work and a novel collapsed Gibbs sampling (CGS). We show that CGS converges faster than the uncollapsed version on a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) task using synthetic data. On similar data, we compare our PPL with LDA-specific algorithms and other PPLs. We find that all methods, except one, perform similarly and that the more expressive the PPL, the slower it is. We illustrate applications of our PPL on real data in two variants of LDA models (Seed and Cluster LDA), and in the repeated insertion model (RIM). In the latter, our PPL yields similar conclusions to inference with EM for Mallows models.

Autism spectrum conditions (autism) affect ~1% of the population and are characterized by deficits in social communication. Oxytocin has been widely reported to affect social-communicative function and its neural underpinnings. Here we report the first evidence that intranasal oxytocin administration improves a core problem that individuals with autism have in using eye contact appropriately in real-world social settings. A randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subjects design is used to examine how intranasal administration of 24 IU of oxytocin affects gaze behavior for 32 adult males with autism and 34 controls in a real-time interaction with a researcher. This interactive paradigm bypasses many of the limitations encountered with conventional static or computer-based stimuli. Eye movements are recorded using eye tracking, providing an objective measurement of looking patterns. The measure is shown to be sensitive to the reduced eye contact commonly reported in autism, with the autism group spending less time looking to the eye region of the face than controls. Oxytocin administration selectively enhanced gaze to the eyes in both the autism and control groups (transformed mean eye-fixation difference per second = 0.082; 95% CI:0.025-0.14, P = 0.006). Within the autism group, oxytocin has the most effect on fixation duration in individuals with impaired levels of eye contact at baseline (Cohen's d = 0.86). These findings demonstrate that the potential benefits of oxytocin in autism extend to a realtime interaction, providing evidence of a therapeutic effect in a key aspect of social communication. 5 2 Cited By :42; Export Date: 17 July 2017

Stochastic Processes are ubiquitous, from automated engineering, through financial markets, to space exploration. These systems are typically highly dynamic, unpredictable and resistant to analytic methods; coupled with a need to orchestrate long control sequences which are both highly complex and uncertain. This report examines some existing single- and multi-agent modelling frameworks, details their strengths and weaknesses, and uses the experience to identify some fundamental tenets of good practice in modelling stochastic processes. It goes on to develop a new family of frameworks based on these tenets, which can model single- and multi-agent domains with equal clarity and flexibility, while remaining close enough to the existing frameworks that existing analytic and learning tools can be applied with little or no adaption. Some simple and larger examples illustrate the similarities and differences of this approach, and a discussion of the challenges inherent in developing more flexible tools to exploit these new frameworks concludes matters.

This article presents the findings of a comparative survey done in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Belgium. Against the background of the European debates on active ageing as well as on flexicurity, the main goal of this survey is to investigate to what extent 'flexicurity arrangements' are being implemented and used among workers aged 50-plus in the workplaces. The main conclusion is that there are large cross-national variances. The Dutch and Danish companies have implemented in a greater and broader extent Human Resources Management (HRM)-policies that provide flexibility for the company and at the same time job/work security for the older workers. This can be an explanation for the higher and more increasing employment rates among the 50-plus workers in these countries, compared tot the other two countries: Belgium and Germany. Although the national policy shifts in the four countries go in the same directions (life long learning, prevention of early retirement, etc.) the survey show large differences in the implementation at the company level. Furthermore, we see different approaches and initiating actors in the policies for the senior workers in the countries. Besides the cross-national variance we see large cross-sectional variance in the intensity and characteristics of flexicurity facilities.

Examines successful cases of equality bargaining. The particular sites selected are: a retail bank with 27,000 employees, 63 per cent female; a food supermarket chain with almost 66,000 employees, 74 per cent female; non industrial civil service with 51 per cent female employees, and a city council employing around 2,700 people in the non- manual grades, 52 per cent female.