Ambulatory assessment of psychophysiological stress among police officers: A proof-of-concept study.

Occupational stress has been widely recognized as a global challenge and has received increased attention by the academic community. Ambulatory Assessment methodologies, combining psychophysiological measures of stress, offer a promising avenue for future prevention and/or rehabilitation stress research. Considering that policing is well known for being a particularly stressful occupation, Emergency Responders Officers (EROs) stress levels were investigated. Particularly, this study analyzed: (i) physiological stress data obtained during shifts and compared these data with baseline levels (days off), as well as (ii) with normative values for healthy populations; (iii) stress symptoms differences from beginning to end of shift; (iv) stress events and events intensity and (v) the acceptability and feasibility of this proof-of-concept study in a highly stressful occupation. A Geo-location event system was used to help retrospective accounts of psychological stress, combined with electrocardiogram (ECG) data and mobile self-reports, that include stress symptoms, event types and event intensity. Results suggest that EROs experience high levels of stress (both on-duty and off duty) when compared to healthy populations. Stress symptoms increase from the beginning to end of the shift. However, the mean events intensity was very low. It can be concluded that stress may not always be diagnosed when using merely self-reports. These findings highlight the importance of combining both self-report and physiological stress measures in occupational health contexts. Finally, results confirm the acceptability and feasibility of the multi-method used. Key implications for policy makers and applied practitioners in the area of occupational health and future research directions are discussed

A New Approach to Measuring Work-Related Well-Being

The main aim of this study was to develop a short questionnaire to assess work-related well-being from the organizational behaviour perspective. The short well-being questionnaire enables measuring longitudinal work-related well-being. Work-related well-being was assessed with a 147-item questionnaire covering both organizational and intrinsic factors of work-related well-being. The questionnaire consisted of 27 categories. The respondents were 114 women (65%) and 62 men (35%), mean age 39.2 years, in various occupations. From the extensive questionnaire a shorter questionnaire with 33 items was developed by principal component analysis. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure to test the sampling adequacy of 27 factor solutions varied from .62 to .91 and Cronbachʼs α was .74–.94. Most κ values of the shorter questionnaire were .50–.94 (p < .001). The reliability of the short version was comparable to that of the original questionnaire. The short one could also be suitable for Internet and mobile questionnaire applications

A New Approach to Measuring Work-Related Well-Being

The main aim of this study was to develop a short questionnaire to assess work-related well-being from the organizational behaviour perspective. The short well-being questionnaire enables measuring longitudinal work-related well-being. Work-related well-being was assessed with a 147-item questionnaire covering both organizational and intrinsic factors of work-related well-being. The questionnaire consisted of 27 categories. The respondents were 114 women (65%) and 62 men (35%), mean age 39.2 years, in various occupations. From the extensive questionnaire a shorter questionnaire with 33 items was developed by principal component analysis. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure to test the sampling adequacy of 27 factor solutions varied from .62 to .91 and Cronbachʼs α was .74–.94. Most κ values of the shorter questionnaire were .50–.94 (p < .001). The reliability of the short version was comparable to that of the original questionnaire. The short one could also be suitable for Internet and mobile questionnaire applications

4W single transverse-mode VECSEL utilising intra-cavity diamond heat spreader

An optically pumped semiconductor vertical external cavity surface emitting laser, with high output power and excellent beam quality operating at a wavelength near 1.05 mm, is reported. A transparent diamond heat spreader was used for thermal management of the laser.The gain structure grown by molecular beam epitaxy includes 13 compressively strained InGaAs quantum wells. Maximum output power of 4 W with diffraction-limited beam (M21.15) was achieved using a 2% output coupler and incident pump power of 20 W. It is shown that power scalability is feasible with the presented laser geometry

Perceived Mental Stress and Reactions in Heart Rate Variability—A Pilot Study Among Employees of an Electronics Company

In this study perceived mental stress during occupational work was compared to heart rate variability (HRV) using a traditional questionnaire and a novel wristop heart rate monitor with related software. The aim was to find HRV parameters useful for mental stress detection. We found the highest correlation between perceived mental stress with the differences between the values of triangular interpolation of rythm-to-rythm (RR) interval histogram (TINN) and the root mean square of differences of successive RR intervals (RMSSD) obtained in the morning and during the workday (r = –.73 and r = –.60, respectively). The analysis shows that as the RMSSD and TINN value differences increase from night to morning, the stress decreases

Successful reuse of software components:a report from the open source perspective

A promising way of software reuse is component-based software development (CBSD). There is an increasing number of OSS products available that can be freely used in product development. However, OSS communities themselves have not yet taken full advantage of the “reuse mechanism”. Many OSS projects duplicate effort and code, even when sharing the same application domain and topic. One successful counter-example is the FFMpeg multimedia project, since several of its components are widely and consistently reused into other OSS projects. This paper documents the history of the libavcodec library of components from the FFMpeg project, which at present is reused in more than 140 OSS projects. Most of the recipients use it as a blackbox component, although a number of OSS projects keep a copy of it in their repositories, and modify it as such. In both cases, we argue that libavcodec is a successful example of reusable OSS library of components