A visual ergonomics intervention in mail sorting facilities: effects on eyes, muscles and productivity

Visual requirements are high when sorting mail. The purpose of this visual ergonomics intervention study was to evaluate the visual environment in mail sorting facilities and to explore opportunities for improving the work situation by reducing visual strain, improving the visual work environment and reducing mail sorting time. Twenty-seven postmen/women participated in a pre-intervention study, which included questionnaires on their experiences of light, visual ergonomics, health, and musculoskeletal symptoms. Measurements of lighting conditions and productivity were also performed along with eye examinations of the postmen/women. The results from the pre-intervention study showed that the postmen/women who suffered from eyestrain had a higher prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) and sorted slower, than those without eyestrain. Illuminance and illuminance uniformity improved as a result of the intervention. The two post-intervention follow-ups showed a higher prevalence of MSD among the postmen/women with eyestrain than among those without. The previous differences in sorting time for employees with and without eyestrain disappeared. After the intervention, the postmen/women felt better in general, experienced less work induced stress, and considered that the total general lighting had improved. The most pronounced decreases in eyestrain, MSD, and mail sorting time were seen among the younger participants of the group.     

Cognitive conflict in human-automation interactions: a psychophysiological study

The review of literature in sociology and distributed artificial intelligence reveals that the occurrence of conflict is a remarkable precursor to the disruption of multi-agent systems. The study of this concept could be applied to human factors concerns, as man-system conflict appears to provoke perseveration behavior and to degrade attentional abilities with a trend to excessive focus. Once entangled in such conflicts, the human operator will do anything to succeed in his current goal even if it jeopardizes the mission. In order to confirm these findings, an experimental setup, composed of a real unmanned ground vehicle, a ground station is developed. A scenario involving an authority conflict between the participants and the robot is proposed. Analysis of the effects of the conflict on the participants' cognition and arousal is assessed through heart-rate measurement (reflecting stress level) and eye-tracking techniques (index of attentional focus). Our results clearly show that the occurrence of the conflict leads to perseveration behavior and can induce higher heart rate as well as excessive attentional focus. These results are discussed in terms of task commitment issues and increased arousal. Moreover, our results suggest that individual differences may predict susceptibility to perseveration behavior.     

现代建筑艺术设计的创新研究——以镶嵌玻璃材料的设计及应用为例

文章分析以现代艺术发展为背景的现代建筑空间中的镶嵌玻璃艺术的发展走向与转型特征,认为传承建筑设计的人文思想,以公共艺术创作理念为根本,从现代建筑的结构与空间出发,拓展镶嵌玻璃的工艺技巧,不断突破传统镶嵌玻璃的创作观念,是进入当代镶嵌玻璃艺术设计语境的前提条件,并进一步结合建筑市场以及大众审美需求,从镶嵌玻璃的艺术价值出发,联系文化产业的发展现状,对镶嵌玻璃艺术发展的可能性做出预测。     

L'échelle de dramatisation face à la douleur PCS-CF: Adaptation canadienne en langue fran?aise de l'échelle Pain Catastrophizing Scale.

This study examined the psychometric properties of the PCS-CF, a French-Canadian adaptation of the Pain Catastrophizing Scale (Sullivan, Bishop & Pivik, 1995). One hundred and twenty undergraduate students (83 women; 37 men) completed the PCS-CF and measures of anxiety and depression prior to immersing their hand in ice water for 1-minute. A subset of 39 participants (28 females; 11 males) also completed a second pain task involving an ascending series of electrocutaneous stimulations. Participants' verbal and non-verbal pain behaviours during and immediately after the immersion task were recorded and subsequently independently coded. Reliability analyses revealed that the PCS-CF total score and subscale scores have a high degree of internal consistency and test-retest reliabilities that are comparable to the original Pain Catastrophizing Scale. PCS-CF scores were associated with higher levels of self-reported pain during the ice water immersion task and decreased pain tolerance during electrocutaneous stimulation. Individuals with elevated PCS-CF scores also displayed a more diverse repertoire of pain behaviours than their low PCS-CF counterparts. Previous findings that catastrophizing scores are able to discriminate criterion groups of males and females were also replicated. Given the highly correlated factors obtained in analyses of the dimensionality of the PCS-CF, the structure suggested by the authors of the original scale is only partially supported. However, the results taken together suggest that the PCS-CF is both a reliable and valid measure of the pain catastrophizing construct that is psychometrically comparable to the original PCS. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the coherence of component protocols

Component-based programming promises to ease the construction of large-scale applications. The construction of applications using components relies on the notion of interfaces. However, the notion of interfaces provided by current component models is restricted: In particular, it does not include behavioral information to define the protocols of the components: Sequences of service requests. The lack of behavioral information limits our trust in components: Security, reuse, and quality relate directly on this missing information. In this paper, we consider the problem of verifying if a component implementation respects the protocol specified during its design. First, we define a notion of coherence between protocols and an algorithm to verify the coherence between two protocols. Then, we describe an algorithm to extract the protocol of a component from its source code. Finally, we present a tool that enables the static verification and enforcement of the notion of coherence.     

Natural resonance-based feature extraction with reduced aspect sensitivity for electromagnetic target classification

This paper presents a model-based electromagnetic feature extraction technique that makes use of time-frequency analysis to extract natural resonance-related target features from scattered signals. In this technique, the discrete auto-Wigner distribution of a given signal is processed to obtain a partitioned energy density vector with a significantly reduced sensitivity to aspect angle. Each partition of this vector contains, in the approximate sense, spectral distribution of the signal energy confined to a particular subinterval of time. Selection of sufficiently late-time partitions provides target features with a markedly increased target discrimination capacity. The potential of the suggested technique and the practical issues in its implementation are demonstrated by applying it to realistic target classification problems with very encouraging results.     

Compiling CSPs into Tree-Driven Automata for Interactive Solving

Constraint programming techniques are widely used to model and solve decision problems and many algorithms have been developed to solve automatically and efficiently families of CSPs; nevertheless, they do not help solve interactive decision support problems, like product configuration. In such problems, the user chooses the values of the variables, and the role of the system is not to solve the CSP, but to help the user in this task. Dynamic global consistency maintaining is one of the most useful functionalities that should be offered by such a CSP platform. Unfortunately, this task is intractable in the worst case. Since interactivity requires short response times, intractability must be circumvented some way. To this end, compilation methods have been proposed that transform the original problem into a data structure allowing a short response time. In this paper, we extend the work of Amilhastre et al. [1] and Vempaty [15] by the use of a new structure, tree-driven automata, that takes advantage of the structural characteristics of configuration problems (decomposition of the components into independent subcomponents). Tree-driven automata can be far more compact than classical automata while keeping their good properties, especially a tractable complexity for the maintenance of global consistency.     

General view on current conveyors

We propose a new current conveyor terminology and explain how these terms are coined. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.