The purpose of this study was to explore whether sleep-related cardiac sympathetic activity is significantly lower in rotating shift workers than in permanent night shift workers, in order to evaluate whether shift work is preferable to permanent night work. Our sample comprised of twelve permanent night shift nurses and twelve rotating three-shift nurses. All female nurses slept in their dormi...

Many foraging animals return to feeding sites to harvest replenishing resources, but little is known about efficient tactics for doing this. Can animals with adequate cognitive abilities increase their efficiency by modifying their behavior according to memories of past experience at particular sites? We developed a simulation model of animals harvesting renewable resources from isolated patche...

In Australia, progress towards measles elimination has recently seen a shift from an ’outbreak control‘ phase to an ’elimination phase‘ with the publication of supportive comprehensive guidelines; 5 this is encouraging. Strategies accompanying this change in policy are similar to those adopted in the Americas and include modification of the vaccination schedule to improve coverage rates through...

Software pipelining loops containing multiple paths is a very diicult problem. Loop shifting ooers the possibility of a close to optimal schedule with acceptable code growth. Deciding how often to shift each operation is diicult, and existing heuristics are rather ad hoc. We separate loop shifting from scheduling, and present new, non-greedy heuris-tics. Experimental results show that our appro...

A cross-sectional study of shiftwork-related problems was carried out among health care workers at hospitals of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Islamic Republic of Iran. Data on personal details, shift schedule and adverse effects of shiftwork were collected from 432 randomly selected subjects by questionnaire. Sleep, social and subjective problems were more prevalent in shiftworkers tha...

OBJECTIVES To determine the off-shift sleep strategies of bi-ethnic night-shift nurses, the relationship between these sleep strategies and adaptation to shift work, and identify the participant-level characteristics associated with a given sleep strategy. METHODS African-American and non-Hispanic White female, night-shift nurses from an academic hospital were recruited to complete a survey o...

Shift-work, particularly night-work, interferes with the physiological circadian rhythm and has the potential to induce psycho-physiological disturbances. A nurse population was investigated to establish whether shift-work can induce changes in a number of immune variables. Lymphocyte immunophenotype and proliferative response, NK cytotoxicity, cytokines and cortisol were determined in 68 shift...

Shift work is a ubiquitous phenomenon and its adverse effects on workers' physical and mental health have been documented. In the sleep literature, differentiating between the symptoms of fatigue and sleepiness, and developing appropriate objective and subjective measures, have become very important endeavors. From such research, fatigue and sleepiness have been shown to be distinct and indepen...