Work fatigue and physiological symptoms in different occupations of high-elevation construction workers

The objective of this study is to investigate whether work fatigue and physiological symptoms that high-elevation construction workers experience would be affected by the occupations. Questionnaires of demographic data and subjective fatigue symptoms as well as some physiological measurements were carried out, pre- and post-shift, on scaffolders, steel fixers, formworkers, electrician-plumbers, concreters and miscellaneous workers at a high-rise building construction site. This study found that some subjective fatigue symptoms coincide with the life style of some workers and that the extent of fatigue symptoms and physiological strains varies among different occupations of construction workers. Scaffolders, steel fixers and formworkers are categorized as physically demanding fatigue type of workers, while concreters, electrician-plumbers and miscellaneous workers as general type. The prevalence and occurrence of subjective fatigue symptoms indicate high-elevation workers have more complaints of “projection of physical impairment” than “drowsiness and dullness” and “difficulty in concentration”. Some unexpected changes (i.e., post-shift measurements are greater than pre-shift ones) in some strength tests in scaffolders and concreters were consistent with the observations of how they exercised their bodies during work shift. Considerable variation of average heart rate among occupations was found, with scaffolders the highest and concreters the lowest. This study concludes that questionnaires of subjective fatigue symptoms and some physiological measurements can be used as indicators to predict the extent of strains or hazards which construction workers encounter. In terms of management program of safety and health, more attention should be paid to those physically demanding workers, such as scaffolders, workers with lower sense of safety and health, such as miscellaneous workers, and workers with older age, such as concreters.     

On the diameter of geometric path graphs of points in convex position

For a set S of n points in convex position in the plane, let P(S) denote the set of all plane spanning paths of S. The geometric path graph of S, denoted by Gn, is the graph with P(S) as its vertex set and two vertices P,Q∈P(S) are adjacent if and only if P and Q can be transformed to each other by means of a single edge replacement. Recently, Akl et al. [S.G. Akl, K. Islam, H. Meijer, On planar path transformation, Inform. Process. Lett. 104 (2007) 59-64] showed that the diameter of Gn is at most 2n−5. In this note, we derive the exact diameter of Gn for n?3.     

A genetic algorithm with gene rearrangement for K-means clustering

In this paper, a new clustering algorithm based on genetic algorithm (GA) with gene rearrangement (GAGR) is proposed, which in application may effectively remove the degeneracy for the purpose of a more efficient search. A new crossover operator that exploits a measure of similarity between chromosomes in a population is also presented. Adaptive probabilities of crossover and mutation are employed to prevent the convergence of the GAGR to a local optimum. Using the real-world data sets, we compare the performance of our GAGR clustering algorithm with K-means algorithm and other GA methods. An application of the GAGR clustering algorithm in unsupervised classification of multispectral remote sensing images is also provided. Experiment results demonstrate that the GAGR clustering algorithm has high performance, effectiveness and flexibility.     

System supports for protocol and application adaptation in vertical handoffs

In overlay networks, the network characteristics before and after a vertical handoff would be drastically different. Consequently, in this paper, we propose an end‐to‐end based scheme to support protocol and application adaptation in vertical handoffs. First, we proposed a Vertical‐handoff Aware TCP, called VA‐TCP. VA‐TCP can identify the packet losses caused by vertical handoffs. If segments losses are due to vertical handoffs, VA‐TCP only retransmits the missing segments but does not invoke the congestion control procedure. Moreover, VA‐TCP dynamically estimates the bandwidth and round‐trip time in a new network. Based on the estimated bandwidth and round‐trip time, VA‐TCP adjusts its parameters to respond to the new network environment. Second, during a vertical handoff, applications also need to be adapted accordingly. Therefore, we design a programming interface that allows applications to be notified upon and adapt to changing network environments. To support our interface, we utilize the signal mechanism to achieve kernel‐to‐user notification. Nevertheless, signals cannot carry information. Thus, we implement the shared memory mechanism between applications and the kernel to facilitate parameters exchange. Finally, we also provide a handoff‐aware CPU scheduler so that tasks that are interested in the vertical‐handoff event are given preference over other processes to attain a prompt response for new network conditions. We have implemented a prototype system on the Linux kernel 2.6. From the experimental results, our proposed protocol and application adaptation mechanisms are shown to effectively improve the performance of TCP and applications during vertical handoffs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Flow simulations in arbitrarily complex cardiovascular anatomies – An unstructured Cartesian grid approach

Image guided computational fluid dynamics is attracting increasing attention as a tool for refining in vivo flow measurements or predicting the outcome of different surgical scenarios. Sharp interface Cartesian/Immersed-Boundary methods constitute an attractive option for handling complex in vivo geometries but their capability to carry out fine-mesh simulations in the branching, multi-vessel configurations typically encountered in cardiovascular anatomies or pulmonary airways has yet to be demonstrated. A major computational challenge stems from the fact that when such a complex geometry is immersed in a rectangular Cartesian box the excessively large number of grid nodes in the exterior of the flow domain imposes an unnecessary burden on both memory and computational overhead of the Cartesian solver without enhancing the numerical resolution in the region of interest. For many anatomies, this added burden could be large enough to render comprehensive mesh refinement studies impossible. To remedy this situation, we recast the original structured Cartesian formulation of Gilmanov and Sotiropoulos [Gilmanov A, Sotiropoulos F. A hybrid Cartesian/immersed boundary method for simulating flows with 3D, geometrically complex, moving bodies. J Comput Phys 2005;207(2):457–92] into an unstructured Cartesian grid layout. This simple yet powerful approach retains the simplicity and computational efficiency of a Cartesian grid solver, while drastically reducing its memory footprint. The method is applied to carry out systematic mesh refinement studies for several internal flow problems ranging in complexity from flow in a 90° pipe bend to flow in an actual, patient-specific anatomy reconstructed from magnetic resonance images. Finally, we tackle the challenging clinical scenario of a single-ventricle patient with severe arterio-venous malformations, seeking to provide a fluid dynamics prospective on a clinical problem and suggestions for procedure improvements. Results from these simulations demonstrate very complex cardiovascular flow dynamics and underscore the need for high-resolution simulations prior to drawing any clinical recommendations.     

Using phrases as features in email classification

In this paper, we report our experience on the use of phrases as basic features in the email classification problem. We performed extensive empirical evaluation using our large email collections and tested with three text classification algorithms, namely, a naive Bayes classifier and two k-NN classifiers using TF-IDF weighting and resemblance respectively. The investigation includes studies on the effect of phrase size, the size of local and global sampling, the neighbourhood size, and various methods to improve the classification accuracy. We determined suitable settings for various parameters of the classifiers and performed a comparison among the classifiers with their best settings. Our result shows that no classifier dominates the others in terms of classification accuracy. Also, we made a number of observations on the special characteristics of emails. In particular, we observed that public emails are easier to classify than private ones.     

Linkless Octree Using Multi‐Level Perfect Hashing

The standard C/C++ implementation of a spatial partitioning data structure, such as octree and quadtree, is often inefficient in terms of storage requirements particularly when the memory overhead for maintaining parent‐to‐child pointers is significant with respect to the amount of actual data in each tree node. In this work, we present a novel data structure that implements uniform spatial partitioning without storing explicit parent‐to‐child pointer links. Our linkless tree encodes the storage locations of subdivided nodes using perfect hashing while retaining important properties of uniform spatial partitioning trees, such as coarse‐to‐fine hierarchical representation, efficient storage usage, and efficient random accessibility. We demonstrate the performance of our linkless trees using image compression and path planning examples.     

Procedural Synthesis using Vortex Particle Method for Fluid Simulation

We propose a fast and effective technique to improve sub‐grid visual details of the grid based fluid simulation. Our method procedurally synthesizes the flow fields coming from the incompressible Navier‐Stokes solver and the vorticity fields generated by vortex particle method for sub‐grid turbulence. We are able to efficiently animate smoke which is highly turbulent and swirling with small scale details. Since this technique does not solve the linear system in high‐resolution grids, it can perform fluid simulation more rapidly. We can easily estimate the influence of turbulent and swirling effect to the fluid flow.     

Roaming across wireless local area networks using SIM-based authentication protocol

Wireless local area networks provide high speed data transferring rate to a mobile device. And it is crucial to integrate together two critical issues, the authentication and roaming in heterogeneous networks. For this, Tsai and Chang proposed a SIM-based authentication mechanism for wireless local area networks in 2006. Tsai and Chang's scheme provides an integration method of mobile cellular networks and wireless local area networks. Unfortunately, we found that there are some weaknesses existing in their scheme. In this paper, we propose an improved version for a user roaming in heterogeneous networks. Besides, we also proposed a mobile IP model to provide a better efficiency for a mobile user in WLAN environment.