Physical workload of flight attendants when pushing and pulling trolleys aboard aircraft

The musculoskeletal loads from moving trolleys aboard aircraft were assessed by observation of trolley handling on planes and by physical workload analyses of pushing and pulling of trolleys in a laboratory set up. Trolley handling by a total of 15 female flight attendants was observed on 10 short- and medium-distance flights in different types of aircraft. About 25 selected flight attendants (22 females; 3 males) of five German airlines took part in the laboratory study, which comprised three-dimensional (3D) measurements of posture and hand forces during pushing and pulling of trolleys in a variety of configurations. From the on-flight observations performed, between 150 and 250 trolley movements can be projected for a work shift. The greatest physical workload is to be expected at the beginning of service: The trolleys are fully laden then, and the cabin floor can still be inclined up to 8°, as the aircraft is still climbing, particularly on short-distance flights. The laboratory investigation revealed that the musculoskeletal workload from pushing and pulling depends essentially on the trolley load and on the gradient of the cabin floor. In addition, the degree of stressing depends significantly on the trolley type, mode of handling and personal dexterity. The up/down force component perpendicular to the direction of motion often achieved considerable amplitudes-in some cases equal to or exceeding the force in the direction of movement. The posture analysis demonstrated that pulling forced the flight attendants to adopt ergonomically unfavourable postures such as pronounced flexion of the back, particularly among female subjects. The highest values for flexion of the back occurred while pulling the half-size trolley. The results demonstrate that female flight attendants are likely to overload themselves if they frequently have to move heavily laden trolleys unaided on an inclined cabin floor.

Relevance to industry

On short distance flights, flight attendants have been complaining increasingly of high physical workload from manoeuvring trolleys. On the basis of the presented data airline companies may improve the trolley handling skills of their flight attendances by practical trainings and may ergonomically optimize the general service procedures aboard aircrafts.     

Algorithms for Graphs Embeddable with Few Crossings per Edge

We consider graphs that can be embedded on a surface of bounded genus such that each edge has a bounded number of crossings. We prove that many optimization problems, including maximum independent set, minimum vertex cover, minimum dominating set and many others, admit polynomial time approximation schemes when restricted to such graphs. This extends previous results by Baker and Eppstein to a much broader class of graphs. We also prove that for the considered class of graphs, there are balanced separators of size where n is a number of vertices in the graph. On the negative side, we prove that it is intractable to recognize the graphs embeddable in the plane with at most one crossing per edge.     

Modeling Instrumental Rationality, Land Tenure and Conflict Resolution

Full instrumental rationality and perfect institutions are two cornerstoneassumptions underlying neoclassical models. However, in the real world, thesetwo assumptions never hold, especially not in developing countries. In thispaper, we develop a game theoretical model to investigate if relaxations inthe full instrumental rationality and perfect institutions premise can explainthe conflicts that have been occurring between the various principals in theNarok district in Kenya with regard to land tenure and use.     

A General Framework for Expressing Preferences in Causal Reasoning and Planning

We consider the problem of representing arbitrary preferencesin causal reasoning and planning systems. In planning, a preferencemay be seen as a goal or constraint that is desirable, but notnecessary, to satisfy. To begin, we define a very general querylanguage for histories, or interleaved sequences of world statesand actions. Based on this, we specify a second language inwhich preferences are defined. A single preference defines abinary relation on histories, indicating that one history ispreferred to the other. From this, one can define global preferenceorderings on the set of histories, the maximal elements of whichare the preferred histories. The approach is very general andflexible; thus it constitutes a ‘base’ languagein terms of which higher-level preferences may be defined. Tothis end, we investigate two fundamental types of preferencesthat we call choice and temporal preferences. We consider concretestrategies for these types of preferences and encode them interms of our framework. We suggest how to express aggregatesin the approach, allowing, e.g. the expression of a preferencefor histories with lowest total action costs. Last, our approachcan be used to express other approaches and so serves as a commonframework in which such approaches can be expressed and compared.We illustrate this by indicating how an approach due to Sonand Pontelli can be encoded in our approach, as well as thelanguage PDDL3.     

Listener-based analysis of surface importance for acoustic metrics

Acoustic quality in room acoustics is measured by well defined quantities, like definition, which can be derived from simulated impulse response filters or measured values. These take into account the intensity and phase shift of multiple reflections due to a wave front emanating from a sound source. Definition (D50) and clarity (C50) for example correspond to the fraction of the energy received in total to the energy received in the first 50 ms at a certain listener position. Unfortunately, the impulse response measured at a single point does not provide any information about the direction of reflections, and about the reflection surfaces which contribute to this measure. For the visualization of room acoustics, however, this information is very useful since it allows to discover regions with high contribution and provides insight into the influence of all reflecting surfaces to the quality measure. We use the phonon tracing method to calculate the contribution of the reflection surfaces to the impulse response for different listener positions. This data is used to compute importance values for the geometry taking a certain acoustic metric into account. To get a visual insight into the directional aspect, we map the importance to the reflecting surfaces of the geometry. This visualization indicates which parts of the surfaces need to be changed to enhance the chosen acoustic quality measure.We apply our method to the acoustic improvement of a lecture hall by means of enhancing the overall speech comprehensibility (clarity) and evaluate the results using glyphs to visualize the clarity (C50) values at listener positions throughout the room.     

From the field to the web: implementing best-practice recommendations in documentary linguistics

New methods of documenting languages with digital technologies has led to a multitude of different formats that are difficult to reuse over time. To overcome the problems surrounding the portability of digital language documentation, linguists are in the process of formulating best-practice recommendations to increase the likelihood of their work's long-term survival. This paper describes the implementation of a comprehensive set of current best-practice recommendations pertaining to content, format, discovery, access, citation, preservation, and rights in the context of the language documentation efforts of the Texas German Dialect Project. This project is different from others in that it is not primarily concerned with digitizing and archiving existing recordings. Instead, the archive it is creating is the end-result of a research project whose workflow begins with data-collection in the filed and ends with depositing digitized and annotated language materials in a web-accessible digital archive of Texas German. This paper shows how a number of conflicting best-practice recommendations can be resolved, thereby satisfying the diverse needs of academic research, teaching, and outreach to the community. As such, the results reported here are an important contribution to the search for strategies guaranteeing the long-term survival of digital language documentation resources.

Polychlorierte Biphenyle (PCB) in Lebensmitteln

Zusammenfassung Im Rahmen eines koordinierten Forschungsprogramms des BMFT wurde eine orientierende Studie an möglichst repräsentativen Stichproben durchgeführt. Trotz relativ großer Streubreiten zeichnen sich die Bereiche der wichtigsten Lebensmittelgruppen deutlich voneinander ab mit Mittelwerten um 0,005 /g für fettarme pflanzliche Grundnahrungsmittel, um 0,05 /g für pflanzliche Nahrungsfette, um 0,3 /g für Milch-, Käse und Butterfette, um 0,15 /g für sonstige Nahrungsfette von Landtieren, um 0,03 /g für Hühnereier und um 10 /g für Fischfett. Wichtet man die Gehalte entsprechend der durchschnittlichen Diät in der BRD, so ergibt sich eine tägliche PCB-Aufnahme von rund 29 aus tierischen Fetten und rund 6 aus den übrigen Lebensmitteln. Die Gesamtaufnahme von ca. 35 g pro Tag und capita entspricht etwa dem Wert, der von der WHO als ADI-Wert für HCB (Hexachlorbenzol) in Aussicht genommen wurde.

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Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) in foodThe situation in the Federal Republic of Germany

Summary In a coordinated research program of the Federal Ministry of Research and Technology (BMFT), a screening study was carried out with representative samples. In spite of rather large ranges of PCB concentrations, the most important food-stuffs show clearly defined clusters with mean values of approx. 0.005 /g in low fat food components of plant origin such as cereals or potatoes, approx. 0.05 /g in vegetable fats, approx. 0.3 /g in fat from milk, butter and cheese, approx. 0.15 gg/g in animal fat, approx. 0.03 in chicken eggs and approx. 10 /g in fish fat. Considering the mean diet in the FRG, a daily PCB intake of about 29 g from animal fat and of 6 from the other food-stuffs results. The total intake of about 35 g per day and capita is almost the same as the figure conditionally suggested by the WHO as the acceptable daily HCB (hexachlorobenzene) intake.

     

Time-dependent thermal convection in dilute solutions of 3He in superfluid 4He

Time-dependent thermal convection can occur in a unity-aspect-ratio Rayleigh-Beard convection cell containing a dilute solution of ³He in superfluid ⁴He when the fluid is heated from above. Results are presented primarily for a 0.24 mole % He solution at 0.925 K. Means is provided for introducing heat at the top and separately for a central plug and an outer ring such that both are at a constant temperature gDT above the bottom. A critical temperature difference T _cfor convection can be defined above which both steady and time-dependent convection occur. The time-dependent effects include a region of T. near T _cand characterized only by excessive noise, a region of somewhat higher T where there are intermittent major changes in the plug heating rate with a time distribution like that for random events, and a region at still higher T where periodic but nonsinusoidal variation of the heat flow is observed. When a long enough time, several months, has elapsed after cooling down the apparatus, time-dependent states no longer occur, and the heat flow above T _cis limited to steady convection. Briefly raising the temperature of the apparatus to 77 K is sufficient to restore the possibility of time-dependent states.     

Sequential architecture models for Prolog: A performance comparison

In this paper we investigate the relation between architectural support for Prolog and performance. We will show that partial support for tags does perform as well as full support, but it only reduces the execution time by approximately 10%. With respect to special addressing modes, auto address modification (post/pre increment, decrement on loads and stores) only yields a cycle reduction of approximately 6% and the introduction of a single shadow register set yields around 8%. Combining these optimizations, a performance gain of 20 to 25% can be achieved, depending on the memory system. Usingvliw techniques, which exploit instruction-level parallelism, the performance can be doubled, using three processing elements. Two processing elements already provide a significant speedup, but the use of four processing elements is not justified if we compare the gain in performance with the cost of the extra hardware. In general we observe only a small performance improvement (around 20%) when moving fromrisc to special-purposerisc architectures, an improvement which can also be achieved by applying advanced compiler technology, such as compiler optimization, optimizations forwam, and optimal scheduling techniques forvliw architectures. Unfortunately these hardware and software effects do not add up, as a better compiler reduces the effect of hardware support. Finally, the cycle time is essential for comparing the performance of different (micro)-architectures, but it is not always clear what the effects of the different tradeoffs are on the maximum achievable cycle time.     

Pre‐convolved Radiance Caching

The incident indirect light over a range of image pixels is often coherent. Two common approaches to exploit this inter‐pixel coherence to improve rendering performance are Irradiance Caching and Radiance Caching. Both compute incident indirect light only for a small subset of pixels (the cache), and later interpolate between pixels. Irradiance Caching uses scalar values that can be interpolated efficiently, but cannot account for shading variations caused by normal and reflectance variation between cache items. Radiance Caching maintains directional information, e.g., to allow highlights between cache items, but at the cost of storing and evaluating a Spherical Harmonics (SH) function per pixel. The arithmetic and bandwidth cost for this evaluation is linear in the number of coefficients and can be substantial. In this paper, we propose a method to replace it by an efficient per‐cache item pre‐filtering based on MIP maps — such as previously done for environment maps — leading to a single constant‐time lookup per pixel. Additionally, per‐cache item geometry statistics stored in distance‐MIP maps are used to improve the quality of each pixel's lookup. Our approximate interactive global illumination approach is an order of magnitude faster than Radiance Caching with Phong BRDFs and can be combined with Monte Carlo‐raytracing, Point‐based Global Illumination or Instant Radiosity.