The effect of occupational-related low back pain on the functional activities among manual workers in construction companies

INTRODUCTION: Low back pain is the most prevalent musculoskeletal condition and one of the most common causes of disability in the world. The disability resulting from low back pain continues to plague the construction industry leading to absenteeism and early retirement among construction manual workers. PURPOSE: The aim of the review was to explore global literature concerning the effect of occupational-related low back pain on the functional activities among manual workers in construction companies. METHOD: A retrospective search of articles published from January 2000 to April 2010. The following electronic data bases, Google Scholar, Academic search premier, CINAHL, ERIC, Health source-consumer Edition, Health source: Nursing/Academic Edition, Master FILE Premier, MEDLINE, MLA Directory of Periodicals, Science direct, MLA International Bibliography, Pre-CiNAHL and PubMed were individually searched using specifically developed search strategies. Methodological quality was evaluated using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) tool and was done by two independent reviewers. RESULTS: The search yielded eleven articles of sound quality. There is evidence that a high percentage of construction workers suffer permanent disability and fail to return to work forcing them to go into early retirement due to occupational related low back pain. The cohort studies have shown that poor performance, reduction in productivity, restrictions on usual activity and participation and incurring high medical costs all pose a challenge to construction manual workers and their employers as a result of occupational related low back. CONCLUSION: The findings support that occupational related low back pain is a challenge among construction manual workers causing serious disability. Further well designed research in Africa into the most effective strategies to prevent and manage occupational related low back pain among construction manual workers is needed

The effect of occupationally-related low back pain on functional activities among male manual workers in a construction company in Cape Town, South Africa

This study determined the prevalence as well as the effect of occupationally-related low back pain on the functional activities of workers in a construction company in Cape Town. A cross-sectional, descriptive survey using a validated questionnaire was carried out. The questionnaire comprising demographic data, low back pain symptoms information, functional limitations scale and the participation restriction scale was used as a closed ended interview guide. Workers suffered physical, emotional, fi nancial and functional problems with 41.5% reporting sickness absence. Lifting and bending were the most affected activities associated to low back pain (p<0.05) while walking/running, recreational activities and carrying out of everyday tasks were among the restricted activities. The one year prevalence of low back pain was 25%, comparable with that of developed countries. Occupationally-related low back pain is a challenge among construction workers which they perceive to cause serious functional activity limitation. All stakeholders must be procured for the prevention and management of occupationally-related low back pain in order to prevent functional activity limitations among construction workers. Physiotherapists should raise the levels of awareness and monitor construction activities on site in order to prevent disability at primary level.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Price modeling of IaaS providers - An approach focused on enterprise application integration

One of the main advances in information technology today is cloud computing. It is a great alternative for users to reduce costs related to the need to acquire and maintain computational infrastructure to develop, implement and execute software applications. Cloud computing services are offered by providers and can be classified into three main modalities: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructureas-a-Service (IaaS). In IaaS, the user has a virtual machine at their disposal with the desired computational resources at a given cost. Generally, the providers offer infrastructure services divided into instances, with preestablished configurations. The main challenge faced by companies is to choose the instance that best fits their needs among the many options offered by providers. Frequently, these companies need a large computational infrastructure to manage and improve their business processes and, due to the high cost of maintaining local infrastructure, they have begun to migrate applications to the cloud in order to reduce these costs. In this paper, we introduce a proposal for price modeling of instances of virtual machines using linear regression. This approach analyzes a set of simplified hypotheses considering the following providers: Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Windows Azure.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Physically Versus Synthetically Replicated Trackers: Is There A Difference In Terms Of Risk?

This article presents the two methods of constructing exchange traded funds and questions whether investors should privilege one structure over the other. To do so, the authors detail the sources of tracking error and risks inherent in each method. As synthetically-created funds include an additional dimension of risk, the authors seek to determine to what measure investors are compensated for this added risk

Modelagem de preços de provedores de IaaS utilizando regressão múltipla

Uma alternativa para usuários reduzirem custos de aquisição e manutenção de infraestrutura computacional para desenvolver, implementar e executar suas aplicações é a computação em nuvem. Os serviços de computação em nuvem são oferecidos por provedores e podem ser classificados em três modalidades: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) e Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Em IaaS, os provedores oferecem os serviços divididos em instâncias e o usuário tem à disposição uma máquina virtual com os recursos computacionais que desejar a um determinado valor. O principal desafio enfrentado pelas empresas é escolher, além do provedor, a instância que melhor se adapta as suas necessidades. Frequentemente, estas empresas precisam de uma grande infraestrutura computacional para gerir e aperfeiçoar seus processos de negócio e, diante do alto custo para manter uma infraestrutura local, têm migrado suas aplicações para a nuvem. Este trabalho busca fornecer subsídios capazes de auxiliar as empresas no processo de seleção do melhor provedor/instância para implantar e executar suas soluções de integração na nuvem. Para isso, um estudo preliminar para a elaboração de uma nova proposta de modelagem dos preços das instâncias de máquinas virtuais usando regressão linear é apresentado. Nesta abordagem são considerados os provedores Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine e Microsoft Windows Azure.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

High-fidelity simulations of gravity currents using a high-order finite-difference spectral vanishing viscosity approach

This numerical work investigates the potential of a high-order finite-difference spectral vanishing viscosity approach to simulate gravity currents at high Reynolds numbers. The method introduces targeted numerical dissipation at small scales through altering the discretisation of the second derivatives of the viscous terms in the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations to mimic the spectral vanishing viscosity (SVV) operator, originally designed for the regularisation of spectral element method (SEM) solutions of pure advection problems. Using a sixth-order accurate finite-difference scheme, the adoption of the SVV method is straightforward and comes with a negligible additional computational cost. In order to assess the ability of this high-order finite-difference spectral vanishing viscosity approach, we performed large-eddy simulations (LES) of a gravity current in a channelised lock-exchange set-up with our SVV model and with the well-known explicit static and dynamic Smagorinsky sub-grid scale (SGS) models. The obtained data are compared with a direct numerical simulation (DNS) based on more than 800 million mesh nodes, and with experimental measurements. A framework for the energy budget is introduced to investigate the behaviour of the gravity current. First, it is found that the DNS is in good agreement with the experimental data for the evolution of the front location and velocity field as well as for the stirring and mixing inside the gravity current. Secondly, the LES performed with less than 0.4% of the total number of mesh nodes compared to the DNS, can reproduce the main features of the gravity currents, with the SVV model yielding slightly more accurate results. It is also found that the dynamic Smagorinsky model performs better than its static version. For the present study, the static and dynamic Smagorinsky models are 1.8 and 2.5 times more expensive than the SVV model, because the latter does not require the calculation of explicit SGS terms in the Navier-Stokes equations nor spatial filtering operations

Direct Photons at RHIC

The PHENIX experiment has measured direct photons in $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200$ GeV Au+Au collisions and p+p collisions. The fraction of photons due to direct production in Au+Au collisions is shown as a function of $p_T$ and centrality. This measurement is compared with expectation from pQCD calculations. Other possible sources of direct photons are discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, presented at Hot Quarks 2004, Taos, N

Application of Structural Principles to the Design of Triptycene-Based Molecular Gears with Parallel Axes

This perspective discusses the important aspects of the design of molecular gear systems based on triptycene. Molecular systems are categorized into three classes according to the orientation of the gear axes: i) bent (bevel gears), ii) linear, and ii) parallel (spur gears). To date, no examples of molecular gears in which the axes of rotation lie in parallel have been reported; correspondingly, the bulk of this report focuses on the factors one must evaluate to construct such systems