The effect of frequency on psychophysical responses to lifting.

One of the main goals of ergonomics is to establish task requirements in order to prevent injury. This is of particular importance in manual materials handling (MMH), as manual lifting represents a major cause of injury to workers and a significant cost to industry. In spite of the existence of established guidelines, there is evidence that the majority of injuries are caused by overexertion (Ayoub, 1992). In support of Oborne (1987), Charteris and Scott (1993) have argued that frequency is one of several task-related variables that have an influence on the demands of a lifting task. Clearly, all other factors being equal, as the pace of the work is increased, so the load should decrease. Utilising fifteen male volunteer subjects (average age 21.3 years), this study investigated psychophysical responses to a lifting task at three different frequencies - 5, 10 and 15 lifts per minute - with the total task duration being 15 minutes. Heart rate (HR) and Ratings of Perceived Exertion (RPE) data were recorded, and the tasks were analysed using LIFTRISK and NIOSH. There were significant differences between successive frequencies for all data recorded. As expected, HR and RPE increased with lifting frequency. There was no significant correlation between HR and RPE for any of the conditions. Correlations were, however, higher at low work intensities. RPE Central values were somewhat lower than Overall values; this finding seems to lend support to the contention that Central factors do not play as important a role in the perceptions of exertion as was originally thought (Pandolf, 1982; Olivier and Scott, 1993). In conclusion, this study investigated the effect of frequency on psychophysical responses for a task with inherent high-risk characteristics. As lift frequency increased, the correlation between HR and RPE decreased. With low subject numbers precluding a firm conclusion, this study tentatively proposes that caution should be exercised when using RPE in self-determination of task limitations for a MMH task

Novel phosphite and nutrient application to control Phytophthora cinnamomi disease

Systemic treatment of stems with injections of phosphite liquid and novel soluble capsule implants of phosphite, PHOSCAP® (phosphorous, potassium, iron, manganese, zinc, boron, copper, magnesium and molybdenum) and MEDICAP MD® (nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, iron, manganese, and zinc), were applied to Banksia grandis and Eucalyptus marginata trees to control Phytophthora cinnamomi. Four weeks after treatment application, excised branches were under-bark inoculated with P. cinnamomi. In B. grandis, phosphite implants and liquid injections significantly reduced lesion length compared to the control, and MEDICAP MD® implants; however, there was no significant difference in lesion length between trees treated with phosphite implants and liquid injections and PHOSCAP implants. In E. marginata, phosphite implants and liquid injections significantly reduced lesion length compared to the control, PHOSCAP® and MEDICAP MD® implants. In B. grandis and E. marginata, PHOSCAP® and MEDICAP MD® implants reduced the average lesion length compared to the control; however, the interactions were not significant. Results show that both liquid phosphite injections and novel phosphite implants are effective at controlling lesion extension in B. grandis and E. marginata, caused by P. cinnamomi. Further work is required to determine if nutrient application reduces Phytophthora disease through improving plant health

Arm versus leg stressed differentiated ratings of perceived exertion.

Although Borg's RPE scale is a universally accepted assessment of an individual's subjective rating of the physical demands of the task on hand, the differentiated scale does not appear to have been put to much practical use in working situations, particularly manual materials-handling tasks. The object of this project was to demonstrate the importance of differentiated RPE scores. A homogeneous sample of well-conditioned male marathon runners participated in two contrasting working conditions: in one, the emphasis was on the lower limbs (treadmill running), whereas the other was a predominately upper-limb activity (arm cranking ergometer). Subjects were required to work for 20 minutes with heart rate and differentiated RPE scores collected every 2 minutes. The same working heart rate was recorded in both sessions and yet there were significant increases in all RPE ratings in the arm cranking condition. It is evident that, although the cardiovascular output was similar in both conditions, the subjects perceived the unfamiliar arm cranking task to be more demanding. While recognising the value of the use of RPE scores in assessing the worker's perception of the demands of working tasks, the results of this study would strongly indicate the use of local, central and overall ratings of perceived demands in order to maximise the benefits of using RPE scores when acquiring the total perception of the work demands

Liver copper concentrations in cull cattle in the UK: are cattle being copper loaded?

With the release of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs/Advisory Committee on Animal Feed Guidance Note for Supplementing Copper to Bovines it was noted that the current copper status of the national herd was not known. Liver samples were recovered from 510 cull cattle at a single abattoir across a period of three days. The samples were wet-ashed and liver copper concentrations determined by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry analysis. Breed, age and previous location information were obtained from the British Cattle Movement Service. Dairy breeds had higher liver copper concentrations than beef breeds. Holstein-Friesian and ‘other’ dairy breeds had 38.3 per cent and 40 per cent of cattle above the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AHVLA) reference range (8000 µmol/kg dry matter), respectively, whereas only 16.9 per cent of animals in the combined beef breeds exceeded this value. It was found that underlying topsoil copper concentration was not related to liver copper content and that age of the animal also had little effect on liver concentration. In conclusion, over 50 per cent of the liver samples tested had greater-than-normal concentrations of copper with almost 40 per cent of the female dairy cattle having liver copper concentrations above the AHVLA reference range, indicating that a significant proportion of the UK herd is at risk of chronic copper toxicity

Phytophthora multivora sp. nov., a new species recovered from declining Eucalyptus, Banksia, Agonis and other plant species in Western Australia

A new Phytophthora species, isolated from rhizosphere soil of declining or dead trees of Eucalyptus gomphocephala, E. marginata, Agonis flexuosa, and another 13 plant species, and from fine roots of E. marginata and collar lesions of Banksia attenuata in Western Australia, is described as Phytophthora multivora sp. nov. It is homothallic and produces semipapillate sporangia, smooth-walled oogonia containing thick-walled oospores, and paragynous antheridia. Although morphologically similar to P. citricola, phylogenetic analyses of the ITS and cox1 gene regions demonstrate that P. multivora is unique. Phytophthora multivora is pathogenic to bark and cambium of E. gomphocephala and E. marginata and is believed to be involved in the decline syndrome of both eucalypt species within the tuart woodland in south-west Western Australia

The matricial relaxation of a linear matrix inequality

Given linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) L_1 and L_2, it is natural to ask: (Q1) when does one dominate the other, that is, does L_1(X) PsD imply L_2(X) PsD? (Q2) when do they have the same solution set? Such questions can be NP-hard. This paper describes a natural relaxation of an LMI, based on substituting matrices for the variables x_j. With this relaxation, the domination questions (Q1) and (Q2) have elegant answers, indeed reduce to constructible semidefinite programs. Assume there is an X such that L_1(X) and L_2(X) are both PD, and suppose the positivity domain of L_1 is bounded. For our "matrix variable" relaxation a positive answer to (Q1) is equivalent to the existence of matrices V_j such that L_2(x)=V_1^* L_1(x) V_1 + ... + V_k^* L_1(x) V_k. As for (Q2) we show that, up to redundancy, L_1 and L_2 are unitarily equivalent. Such algebraic certificates are typically called Positivstellensaetze and the above are examples of such for linear polynomials. The paper goes on to derive a cleaner and more powerful Putinar-type Positivstellensatz for polynomials positive on a bounded set of the form {X | L(X) PsD}. An observation at the core of the paper is that the relaxed LMI domination problem is equivalent to a classical problem. Namely, the problem of determining if a linear map from a subspace of matrices to a matrix algebra is "completely positive".Comment: v1: 34 pages, v2: 41 pages; supplementary material is available in the source file, or see http://srag.fmf.uni-lj.si

Protection against neonatal respiratory viral infection via maternal treatment during pregnancy with the benign immune training agent OM‐85

Objectives Incomplete maturation of immune regulatory functions at birth is antecedent to the heightened risk for severe respiratory infections during infancy. Our forerunner animal model studies demonstrated that maternal treatment with the microbial-derived immune training agent OM-85 during pregnancy promotes accelerated postnatal maturation of mechanisms that regulate inflammatory processes in the offspring airways. Here, we aimed to provide proof of concept for a novel solution to reduce the burden and potential long-term sequelae of severe early-life respiratory viral infection through maternal oral treatment during pregnancy with OM-85, already in widespread human clinical use. Methods In this study, we performed flow cytometry and targeted gene expression (RT-qPCR) analysis on lungs from neonatal offspring whose mothers received oral OM-85 treatment during pregnancy. We next determined whether neonatal offspring from OM-85 treated mothers demonstrate enhanced protection against lethal lower respiratory infection with mouse-adapted rhinovirus (vMC0), and associated lung immune changes. Results Offspring from mothers treated with OM-85 during pregnancy display accelerated postnatal seeding of lung myeloid populations demonstrating upregulation of function-associated markers. Offspring from OM-85 mothers additionally exhibit enhanced expression of TLR4/7 and the IL-1β/NLRP3 inflammasome complex within the lung. These treatment effects were associated with enhanced capacity to clear an otherwise lethal respiratory viral infection during the neonatal period, with concomitant regulation of viral-induced IFN response intensity. Conclusion These results demonstrate that maternal OM-85 treatment protects offspring against lethal neonatal respiratory viral infection by accelerating development of innate immune mechanisms crucial for maintenance of local immune homeostasis in the face of pathogen challenge

Chytridiomycosis causes catastrophic organism-wide metabolic dysregulation including profound failure of cellular energy pathways

Chytridiomycosis is among several recently emerged fungal diseases of wildlife that have caused decline or extinction of naive populations. Despite recent advances in understanding pathogenesis, host response to infection remains poorly understood. Here we modelled a total of 162 metabolites across skin and liver tissues of 61 frogs from four populations (three long-exposed and one naive to the fungus) of the Australian alpine tree frog (Litoria verreauxii alpina) throughout a longitudinal exposure experiment involving both infected and negative control individuals. We found that chytridiomycosis dramatically altered the organism-wide metabolism of clinically diseased frogs. Chytridiomycosis caused catastrophic failure of normal homeostatic mechanisms (interruption of biosynthetic and degradation metabolic pathways), and pronounced dysregulation of cellular energy metabolism. Key intermediates of the tricarboxylic acid cycle were markedly depleted, including in particular a-ketoglutarate and glutamate that together constitute a key nutrient pathway for immune processes. This study was the first to apply a non-targeted metabolomics approach to a fungal wildlife disease and specifically to dissect the host-pathogen interface of Bd-infected frogs. The patterns of metabolite accumulation we have identified reveal whole-body metabolic dysfunction induced by a fungal skin infection, and these findings have broad relevance for other fungal diseases

New results on the mathematical foundations of asymptotic complexity analysis of algorithms via complexity spaces

Schellekens [The Smyth completion: A common foundation for denotational semantics and complexity analysis, Electron. Notes Theor. Comput. Sci. 1 (1995), pp. 211-232.] introduced the theory of complexity (quasi-metric) spaces as a part of the development of a topological foundation for the asymptotic complexity analysis of programs and algorithms in 1995. The applicability of this theory to the asymptotic complexity analysis of divide and conquer algorithms was also illustrated by Schellekens in the same paper. In particular, he gave a new formal proof, based on the use of the Banach fixed-point theorem, of the well-known fact that the asymptotic upper bound of the average running time of computing of Mergesort belongs to the asymptotic complexity class of n log(2) n. Recently, Schellekens' method has been shown to be useful in yielding asymptotic upper bounds for a class of algorithms whose running time of computing leads to recurrence equations different from the divide and conquer ones reported in Cerda-Uguet et al. [The Baire partial quasi-metric space: A mathematical tool for the asymptotic complexity analysis in Computer Science, Theory Comput. Syst. 50 (2012), pp. 387-399.]. However, the variety of algorithms whose complexity can be analysed with this approach is not much larger than that of algorithms that can be analysed with the original Schellekens method. In this paper, on the one hand, we extend Schellekens' method in order to yield asymptotic upper bounds for a certain class of recursive algorithms whose running time of computing cannot be discussed following the techniques given by Cerda-Uguet et al. and, on the other hand, we improve the original Schellekens method by introducing a new fixed-point technique for providing, contrary to the case of the method introduced by Cerda-Uguet et al., lower asymptotic bounds of the running time of computing of the aforementioned algorithms and those studied by Cerda-Uguet et al. We illustrate and validate the developed method by applying our results to provide the asymptotic complexity class (asymptotic upper and lower bounds) of the celebrated algorithms Quicksort, Largetwo and Hanoi.The authors are thankful for the support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, grant MTM2009-12872-C02-01.Romaguera Bonilla, S.; Tirado Peláez, P.; Valero Sierra, Ó. (2012). 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Applications of the complexity space to the General Probabilistic Divide and Conquer Algorithms. Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, 348(1), 346-355. doi:10.1016/j.jmaa.2008.07.026Künzi, H.-P. A. (2001). Nonsymmetric Distances and Their Associated Topologies: About the Origins of Basic Ideas in the Area of Asymmetric Topology. History of Topology, 853-968. doi:10.1007/978-94-017-0470-0_3Rodríguez-López, J., Romaguera, S., & Valero, O. (2008). Denotational semantics for programming languages, balanced quasi-metrics and fixed points. International Journal of Computer Mathematics, 85(3-4), 623-630. doi:10.1080/00207160701210653Rodríguez-López, J., Schellekens, M. P., & Valero, O. (2009). An extension of the dual complexity space and an application to Computer Science. Topology and its Applications, 156(18), 3052-3061. doi:10.1016/j.topol.2009.02.009Romaguera, S., & Schellekens, M. (1999). Quasi-metric properties of complexity spaces. Topology and its Applications, 98(1-3), 311-322. doi:10.1016/s0166-8641(98)00102-3Romaguera, S., & Valero, O. (2008). On the structure of the space of complexity partial functions. International Journal of Computer Mathematics, 85(3-4), 631-640. doi:10.1080/00207160701210117Romaguera, S., Schellekens, M. P., & Valero, O. (2011). The complexity space of partial functions: a connection between complexity analysis and denotational semantics. International Journal of Computer Mathematics, 88(9), 1819-1829. doi:10.1080/00207161003631885Schellekens, M. (1995). The Smyth Completion. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 1, 535-556. doi:10.1016/s1571-0661(04)00029-5Scott, D. S. 1970. Outline of a mathematical theory of computation. Proceedings of the 4th Annual Princeton Conference on Information Sciences and Systems. March26–271970, Princeton, NJ. pp.169–176