Equal task,equal exposure? Are men and women with the same tasks equally exposed to awkward working postures?

The aim of the study was to determine whether men and woman with equal tasks perform these tasks in the same way. Video recordings of 37 male and 43 female workers in six task groups were observed, from which data regarding frequency and duration of exposure to awkward postures were derived. These data were also compared to self-reported exposures. The results showed that when level, duration and frequency of exposure were analysed at the same time, men and women had slightly different exposure patterns. However, these differences were not found when duration and frequency were analysed separately. From the questionnaires it appeared that men and women generally report similar exposures, but they seemed to over-report their exposure compared to the observed exposures. It is concluded that gender differences in exposure to awkward postures within the same task were small at most and cannot explain the female excess in musculoskeletal symptoms.     

Basic-needs to globalization: Are ICTs the missing link?

The discourse on globalization intersects with assumptions about how new information and communication technologies can generate economic growth in less developed countries. This paper is a critical review of some of these assumptions. It argues that the current processes of globalization cannot on their own foster economic development because globalization is inherently dialectical. It can create wealth for some countries while at the same time, it can impoverish others thus further accentuating the marginalization of many countries. The paper concludes by suggesting ways in which less developed countries can stay “connected” with the global economy while at the same time pursuing development strategies that will meet the basic needs of the majority of their populations.     

Are IEEE-1500-Compliant Cores Really Compliant to the Standard?

Editor's note:Functional verification of complex SoC designs is a challenging task, which fortunately is increasingly supported by automation. This article proposes a verification component for IEEE Std 1500, to be plugged into a commercial verification tool suite.—Erik Jan Marinissen, IMEC     

Tools to Improve the Production of Emergency Plans for Floods: Are They Being Used by the People that Need Them?

Recently emergency plans for floods have started to be developed in England and France. At present, tools, such as checklists, guidance and specialized software appear to be used rarely to improve the effectiveness of these plans. Research was undertaken with flood managers in the two countries. The objective was to establish why tools that can usefully contribute to improving emergency plans for floods are often not being used. Many flood managers are not aware of the tools that are available to assist them in formulating emergency plans for floods. It was concluded that there is a need for guidance on the tools and how they can be used to help to improve emergency planning for floods.     

Is it really good to talk? Testing the impact of providing concurrent verbal protocols on driving performance

Abstract

Questions have been raised regarding the impact that providing concurrent verbal protocols has on task performance in various settings; however, there has been little empirical testing of this in road transport. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of providing concurrent verbal protocols on driving performance. Participants drove an instrumented vehicle around a set route, twice whilst providing a concurrent verbal protocol, and twice without. A comparison revealed no differences in behaviour related to speed, braking and steering wheel angle when driving mid-block, but a significant difference in aspects of braking and acceleration at roundabouts. When not providing a verbal protocol, participants were found to brake harder on approach to a roundabout and accelerate more heavily coming out of roundabouts. It is concluded that providing verbal protocols may have a positive effect on braking and accelerating. Practical implications related to driver training and future research are discussed.

Practitioner Summary: Verbal protocol analysis is used by ergonomists to understand aspects of cognition and decision-making during complex tasks such as driving and control room operation. This study examines the impact that it has on driving performance, providing evidence to support its continued use in ergonomics applications.     

Are learning styles useful indicators to discover how students use Scrum for the first time?

Teaching agile practices is in the cutting-edge of Software Engineering education since agile methodologies are widely used in the industry. An effective strategy to teach agile practices is the use of a capstone project, in which students develop requirements following an agile methodology. To improve students’ learning experience, professors have to keep track and analyze the information generated by the students during the capstone project development. The problem here arises from the large amount of information generated in the learning process, which hinders professors to meet each student’s learning profile. Particularly, to know the students skills and preferences are key aspects on a learner-centered approach of education in order to personalize the teaching. In this work, we aim to discover the relationships between students’ performance along a Scrum-based capstone project and their learning style according to the Felder–Silverman model, towards a first step to build the profiles. To address this issue, we mined association rules from the interaction of 33 Software Engineering students with Virtual Scrum, a tool that supports the development of the capstone project in the course. In the present work we describe promising results in experiments with a case-study.     

How to get proteomics to the clinic? Issues in clinical proteomics,exemplified by CE‐MS

Clinical proteomics is defined as application of proteome analysis aiming at improving the current clinical situation. As such, the success of clinical proteomics should be assessed based on the clinical impact following implementation of the findings. While we have experienced significant technological advancements in mass spectrometry in the last years, based on the above measure, this has not at all resulted in similar advancements in clinical proteomics. Although a large number of proteomic biomarkers have been described, most of them were not subsequently validated, and certainly have had no impact in clinical decision making as yet. Under the current conditions, it appears likely that the situation will not change significantly: we will be flooded by reports on biomarkers, but not see any implementation. In this article, some key issues in proteomic biomarker research are pinpointed, based on the experience with CE‐MS, likely also holding true for biomarkers resulting from other analysis domains.     

One framework to rule them all? Carrying forward the conversation started by Wise and Schwarz

In this brief squib, I take up the first of the provocations put forward by Wise and Schwarz in their recent article and make an attempt to spark further discussion. Specifically, I argue that instead of attempting to agree on an overarching, unified conceptual framework for CSCL from the top down, and rather than synthesizing findings from CSCL research from the bottom up, we could take a taxonomy of CSCL support dimensions as a starting point and engage in a concerted research effort with the aim of working towards a comprehensive framework of CSCL support. I therefore propose such a taxonomy, which currently comprises 12 dimensions. By referring to some of my own research, I demonstrate how the proposed process of providing evidence-based design principles for CSCL support that cut across and interleave the dimensions of the taxonomy could work.     

Are we breaking bubbles as we move? Using a large sample to explore the relationship between urban mobility and segregation

Segregation often dismantles common activity spaces and isolates people of different backgrounds, leading to irreconcilable inequalities that disfavour the poor and minorities and intensifies societal fragmentation. Therefore, segregation has become an increasing concern and topic of research with studies typically concentrating on the residential communities of a particular racial or socioeconomic group. This paper enhances the residential view of segregation and examines the topic in the context of urban mobility. Specifically, it expands upon prior research by employing large-sample, seamless telecommunication logs of London, UK to provide a holistic view of mobility across the entire socioeconomic spectrum. A method is developed to transform the data to flows between geographic areas with different socioeconomic statuses. Spatial interaction models are then calibrated to examine the impact of both geographical distance and socioeconomic distance on the deterrence of flows and the analysis is extended to analyze the interaction of the two factors. Overall, socioeconomic distance is found to have a subtle effect compared to geographical distance. However, different effects are observed depending on the socioeconomic distance between flows and the deterrence of mobility tends to be the greatest when both physical and socioeconomic distance are high, suggesting that both factors may play a role creating and maintaining segregation.     

How to assess privacy violations in the age of Big Data? Analysing the three different tests developed by the ECtHR and adding for a fourth one

It is commonly believed that privacy cases are resolved by balancing the private interest (e.g. personal autonomy) and the common interest (e.g. national security) involved with a particular privacy violation. Clearly, this approach no longer holds in the age of Big Data, in which massive amounts of personal data are gathered without a pre-established goal. Not only is the balancing test inapplicable because it is often unclear how certain data gathering and processing initiatives improve the societal interest, but it is also hard to demonstrate whether and if so how an individual has suffered from such massive data processing systems. Besides the balancing test, however, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) applies two other tests when dealing with privacy issues. Both have an added value when applied to privacy violations following from Big Data processes. Still, if Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is to retain its significance in the new technological environment, it might be necessary to develop a new test, the rudiments of which might already be found in the Court's case law.     

Is it possible to increase hit rates in structure-based virtual screening by pharmacophore filtering? An investigation of the advantages and pitfalls of post-filtering

We have investigated the influence of post-filtering virtual screening results, with pharmacophoric features generated from an X-ray structure, on enrichment rates. This was performed using three docking softwares, zdock+, Surflex and FRED, as virtual screening tools and pharmacophores generated in UNITY from co-crystallized complexes. Sets of known actives along with 9997 pharmaceutically relevant decoy compounds were docked against six chemically diverse protein targets namely CDK2, COX2, ER, fXa, MMP3, and NA. To try to overcome the inherent limitations of the well-known docking problem, we generated multiple poses for each compound. The compounds were first ranked according to their scores alone and enrichment rates were calculated using only the top scoring pose of each compound. Subsequently, all poses for each compound were passed through the different pharmacophores generated from co-crystallized complexes and the enrichment factors were re-calculated based on the top-scoring passing pose of each compound. Post-filtering with a pharmacophore generated from only one X-ray complex was shown to increase enrichment rates in all investigated targets compared to docking alone. This indicates that this is a general method, which works for diverse targets and different docking softwares.