Good ergonomics and team diversity reduce absenteeism and errors in car manufacturing

Prior research suggests that ergonomics work design and mixed teams (in age and gender) may compensate declines in certain abilities of ageing employees. This study investigates simultaneous effects of both team level factors on absenteeism and performance (error rates) over one year in a sample of 56 car assembly teams (N = 623). Results show that age was related to prolonged absenteeism and more mistakes in work planning, but not to overall performance. In comparison, high-physical workload was strongly associated with longer absenteeism and increased error rates. Furthermore, controlling for physical workload, age diversity was related to shorter absenteeism, and the presence of females in the team was associated with shorter absenteeism and better performance. In summary, this study suggests that both ergonomics work design and mixed team composition may compensate age-related productivity risks in manufacturing by maintaining the work ability of older employees and improving job quality.     

广东高校大学生心理健康及对自杀态度的调查

为了解广东高校在校大学生的心理健康状况及其对自杀的认识,对广东五所高校近500名学生进行了心理健康装康即对自杀态度的调查,文章分析了调查的结果,并对结果进行讨论,希望能重视大学生的心理健康教育,减少因心理问题而导致大学生自杀的现象.     

PRIVACY LEAKAGE IN HEALTH SOCIAL NETWORKS

Members of health social networks may be susceptible to privacy leaks by the amount of information they leave behind. The threat to privacy increases when members of these networks reuse their pseudonyms in other social networks. The risk of re‐identifying users from such networks requires quantitative estimates to evaluate its magnitude. The estimates will enable managers and members of health social communities to take corrective measures. We introduce a new re‐identification attack, the social network attack, that takes advantage of the fact that users reuse their pseudonyms. To demonstrate the attack, we establish links between MedHelp and Twitter (two popular social networks) based on matching pseudonyms. We used Bayesian networks to model the re‐identification risk and used stylometric techniques to identify the strength of the links. On the basis of our model 7‐11. 8% of the MedHelp members in the sample population who reused their pseudonyms in Twitter were re‐identifiable compared with 1% who did not. The risk estimates were measured at the 5% risk threshold. Our model was able to re‐identify users with a sensitivity of 41% and specificity of 96%. The potential for re‐identification increases as more data is accumulated from these profiles, which makes the threat of re‐identification more serious.     

陈家冲垃圾填埋场地下水环境健康风险评价

垃圾填埋是目前国内处理城市生活垃圾的主要方式,由垃圾渗滤液引发地下水环境污染已成为当前主要的水环境问题之一。选择武汉市陈家冲垃圾填埋场为研究对象,通过对该区周边地下水布孔取样和监测,分析了垃圾填埋场对其周围地下水环境的影响。结果表明:研究区地下水的主要污染因子为Pb、Cd和Fe,且各污染物的浓度与采样深度、井距呈负相关关系。垃圾填埋场产生污染的影响范围主要在距离800m以内、深度小于5.5m的地下水。为进一步了解该区地下水对人体健康危害的风险程度,对研究区地下水进行了水环境健康风险评价,结果显示:研究区各采样井地下水的总风险值在2.71×10~(-4)/a~7.12×10~(-3)/a,均超过国际辐射防护委员会(ICRP)推荐的最大可接受值5.0×10~(-5)/a,主要风险因子为基因毒物质Cd和Cr(VI)以及躯体毒物质硝态氮;其中,Cd和硝态氮所致的健康风险值超标率100%,而Cr(VI)的健康风险值超标率为50%,对暴露人群存在健康危害风险。此外,对男性和女性健康风险值的研究显示,研究区地下水环境中污染物的男性健康危害风险值普遍高于女性。     

Impacts of Nile Perch,Lates niloticus,introduction on the ecology,economy and conservation of Lake Victoria,East Africa

Nile perch were secretly introduced into Lake Victoria in the 1950s, and officially in the 1960s, amid unresolved controversy. Proponents were of the view that the introduction would improve fisheries production and sport fishing. Although the former objective was achieved, the side effects were dire, including extinction of many native species, especially the ecologically important haplochromines, because of predation. The introduction also changed the habitat, trophic dynamics and water clarity. The change in water clarity is thought to be responsible for hybridization of haplochromines, further contributing to the loss of species diversity among cichlids. The establishment and expansion of the Nile perch also altered the fishery and socio‐economic settings characterizing the lake. A local economy which, until the early 1980s, was based on native fish species has been replaced by an export‐oriented exotic fish processing industry that destroyed the once‐cherished traditional resource. Other socio‐economic issues associated with Nile perch include the high HIV/AIDS prevalence among fishers, and border conflicts attributable to the migratory and transboundary nature of the fishery resource. Conservation measures for the fishery should include establishment of co‐management units that have so far registered both successes and challenges. Other efforts include establishment of the Nile perch Fisheries Management Plans that focus on curbing overfishing and eradicating illegal fishing.     

Gquest: Modeling patient questionnaires and administering them through a mobile platform application

Background

The use of surveys is becoming popular in the health care industry for acquiring information useful to the accomplishment of several studies. Besides their exploitation on a large scale for conducting epidemiological studies, surveys are being increasingly carried out on a narrower perspective through the administration of questionnaires aimed at assessing the quality of life perceived by patients or their clinical status during mid- or long-term treatments. This is useful for managing resources or optimizing and individualizing treatments.

Objectives

This paper describes Gquest, a platform for modeling, generating and administering questionnaires through mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. Gquest was motivated by the need of administering questionnaires during home treatments, albeit its applicability is rather general. The main requirement was to have a very simple, clean and easy to use platform able to support (a) physicians in the design and delivery of questionnaires and (b) outpatients in sending self-recorded outcomes to the clinical staff.

Methods

Gquest has two basic components. The first one is a model devised for representing questionnaires which is extremely flexible. It allows the generation of questions and answers of different types, supports adaptivity in the dialog with the user and enforces simple consistency rules for checking his input. The second component is an application able to run instances of those questionnaires. It downloads questionnaires over the air in terms of XML files from a server and stores them locally into the mobile repository. Questionnaires become then available to the user, who in our case is a patient or one of his relatives. The user can select which one to fill-in, according to his needs and/or the specific treatment protocol. The selected questionnaire may be filled-in all at once or be completed in subsequent steps over time since any input provided is persisted on a local database. Finally, when a questionnaire is closed all the answers are transparently synchronized to a server for further evaluation or statistical purposes.

Results

The platform has been exploited and tested in two medical domains where questionnaires have very different purposes; a quality of life pilot survey involving patients with atrial fibrillation within the EU-funded project MobiGuide, and an investigation of the users’ needs during the requirements elicitation phase of a telemedicine project for the safe discharge of fragile patients.

Conclusions

Gquest proved to be a suitable tool for dealing with a wide variety of question types and has been positively accepted by the patients enrolled in the pilot study.     

Event-driven,pattern-based methodology for cost-effective development of standardized personal health devices

Experiences applying standards in personal health devices (PHDs) show an inherent trade-off between interoperability and costs (in terms of processing load and development time). Therefore, reducing hardware and software costs as well as time-to-market is crucial for standards adoption. The ISO/IEEE11073 PHD family of standards (also referred to as X73PHD) provides interoperable communication between PHDs and aggregators. Nevertheless, the responsibility of achieving inexpensive implementations of X73PHD in limited resource microcontrollers falls directly on the developer. Hence, the authors previously presented a methodology based on patterns to implement X73-compliant PHDs into devices with low-voltage low-power constraints. That version was based on multitasking, which required additional features and resources. This paper therefore presents an event-driven evolution of the patterns-based methodology for cost-effective development of standardized PHDs. The results of comparing between the two versions showed that the mean values of decrease in memory consumption and cycles of latency are 11.59% and 45.95%, respectively. In addition, several enhancements in terms of cost-effectiveness and development time can be derived from the new version of the methodology. Therefore, the new approach could help in producing cost-effective X73-compliant PHDs, which in turn could foster the adoption of standards.     

Particle filtering for sensor fault diagnosis and identification in nonlinear plants

We propose a novel method for sensor monitoring and fault-tolerant estimation in systems described by general stochastic nonlinear and/or non-Gaussian state-space models. Faults are defined as abruptly occurring calibration errors, causing the sensor readings to be biased or scaled. Actuators and the process itself are assumed to be fault free. The main novelty of the work is an adaptive particle filter, whose configuration changes in order to diagnose sensor faults and to compensate for their effects. The presence, type and magnitude of sensor faults are determined through hypothesis testing and maximum likelihood estimation, based on the difference between the measurements and the particle filter estimates. The validity of the proposed approach was demonstrated through simulations on a drum-boiler model, although its effectiveness is not conditioned on any particular feature of the considered example.     

离子水--21世纪的保健品

离子水是一种新型的保健饮用水.本文主要对饮用水、离子水的功能和作用进行了概述,阐述了离子水对人类生活和健康的影响,且指出了离子水具有良好的发展、开发和推广的前景.     

变化环境下河流健康评价研究进展

全球以温度升高为主要特征的气候变化耦合人类活动影响,造成了全球性变化环境背景下大范围的水资源危机、水环境污染和水生态退化问题,威胁河流健康,已成为当今世界各国急需解决的难题。针对变化环境背景,分别从河流健康的概念和内涵、河流健康评价的内容、方法及应用等方面,评述近年来国内外河流健康评价的研究进展。将河流健康定义为,特定时期一定的社会公众价值体系下,在保障河流自身基本生存需求的前提下,能够持续地为人类社会提供高效合理的生态服务功能,并实现服务功能综合价值最大化。在前人研究基础上,指出变化环境下河流健康评价研究存在的主要问题,如河流健康概念及内涵仍存在争议,河流健康变化的驱动机制尚不明确,河流健康评价的理论及方法有待完善,河流健康评价实践滞后及评价结果未能有效指导河流管理等。提出变化环境下河流健康评价的发展趋势:以流域为基本空间尺度结合多时间尺度开展河流健康评价与调控研究,因地制宜开展河流健康评价指标体系及评价标准研究,开展基于3S等技术的河流健康评价研究,建立长期且全面的河流健康监测网络,科学界定河流健康的"基准点",以及开展河流健康评价与水资源调控的集成研究等。