BACKGROUND The persistence of knee pain (KP) and its relationship with occupational factors were investigated in two prospective cohorts of French workers: retirees of the Gazel cohort and workers in the Cosali cohort. METHODS KP was defined according to the Nordic questionnaire (>1 day in the last year), and the information was extracted from two questionnaires in 2006 and 2012 for the Gazel...

Two analytical models are developed to study the impact of interrupt overhead on operating system performance of network hosts with limited-size or finite buffer. Under heavy network traffic such as that of Gigabit Ethernet, the system performance will be negatively affected due to interrupt overhead caused by incoming traffic. In particular, packet loss, excessive latency and significant degra...

Youth and adolescents are routinely engaged in manual material handling (MMH) tasks that may exceed their strength capability to perform the task and may place them at excessive risk for musculoskeletal disorders. This paper reports on a two-dimensional biomechanical model that was developed to assess MMH tasks performed by youth 3–21 years of age. The model uses age, gender, posture of the you...

Patient handling continues to represent a high risk task for low back pain (LBP) among health caregivers. Previous studies indicated that manual transfers of patients impose unacceptable loads on the spine even when two caregivers perform the transfer. Patient lift devices are considered a potential intervention; however, few biomechanical analyses have investigated the spine loads and LBP risk...

This paper addresses the unfairness problem appearing in 802.6-based DQDB MANs. Traffic load demand is characterized as low (below 0.4 of the channel capacity), normal (from 0.4 to 0.9 of the channel capacity) or heavy (greater than 0.9 of the channel capacity). At low loads the 802.6 protocol is acceptably fair. At normal loads, however, the protocol performance is markedly unfair. The unfairn...

The manual handling of solutions (known as “beaker chemistry”) remains the Achilles Heel of modern analytical instrumentation. It is currently being replaced by flow injection analysis (FIA), which is computer compatible and allows automated handling of sample and reagent solutions with a strict control of reaction conditions. The flow injection analysis (FIA) was preceded by the success of seg...