low back pain (lbp) is a widespread musculoskeletal disorder worldwide. it causes disability that influence work performance in individuals. the aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence and risk factors of lbp in the middle-aged office workers in the lebanese population. in this observational, cross-sectional study performed in 2013, overall, 250 office workers aged between 20 and 64 ye...

In most firms a worker in any period is either promoted, left in the same job, or fired (demotions are typically rare), and there is no specific date by which a promotion needs to occur. In other employment situations, however, up-or-out contracts are common, i.e., if a worker is not promoted by a certain date the worker must leave the firm. This paper develops a theory that explains why and wh...

An estimated 500,000 laboratory workers in the United States are at risk of exposure to infectious agents that cause disease ranging from inapparent to life-threatening infections, but the precise risk to a given worker unknown. The emergence of human immunodeficiency virus and hantavirus, the continuing problem of hepatitis B virus, and the reemergence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis have renewe...

A side-effect of the national debate about employer-provided benefits has been to focus attention on the cost of hiring and retaining employees. This has led to renewed interest in the issue of when a worker is an employee vs. an independent contractor. The IRS must make determinations regarding worker status. This determination process which has evolved through judicial precedent, is subjectiv...

In this paper, we introduce SmartSource, a crowdsourcing based mobile Question & Answer (Q&A) system that aims to provide mobile information seekers with timely, trustworthy and accurate answers while ensuring that information providers are not inappropriately burdened. We tackle this challenge by taking advantage of both static and dynamic context and semantics from mobile users (e.g., geoloca...

Distributed computations, dealing with large amounts of data, are scheduled in Grid clusters today using either a task-centric mechanism, or a worker-centric mechanism. Because of the large data sets, the execution time is bounded by the cost of data transfer. In this paper, we introduce new worker-centric scheduling strategies that are novel in that they aim to implicitly exploit the locality ...

For TREC Crowdsourcing 2011 (Stage 2) we propose a networkbased approach for assigning an indicative measure of worker trustworthiness in crowdsourced labelling tasks. Workers, the gold standard and worker/gold standard agreements are modelled as a network. For the purpose of worker trustworthiness assignment, a variant of the PageRank algorithm, named TurkRank, is used to adaptively combine ev...

Social insects provide good model systems for testing trade-offs in decision-making because of their marked reproductive skew and the dilemma workers face when to reproduce. Attaining reproductive skew requires energy investment in aggression or fertility signaling, creating a trade-off between reproduction and dominance. This may be density-dependent because the cost of achieving dominance may...

This volume, the fourth annual supplement to Dr. Hans Selye's book "Stress", is unlikely to be of interest to the majority of readers. Although it does contain several original articles by authors of international repute on subjects of general clinical interest, the bulk of the 750 pages are taken up by an extremely comprehensive bibliography relating to recent research on the Stress Theory of ...

What motivates a company to become politically connected and what impact does political connectedness have on corporate policies? To address this question, we exploit an exogenous Supreme Court decision (Citizens United) that lifted all restrictions on corporate political contributions. We find a significant increase in the cash holdings levels of historically politically connected firms relati...