Statistical Analysis Of The Effect Of Work Conditions On Safety And Health In The U.s. Long-Haul Trucking Industry: Evidence From The Niosh Survey Data

Chapter 1 reviews the literature which analyzes the effect of compensation and work conditions on safety and health. Chapter 2 analyzes how truck drivers’ compensation affects their safety performance, using moving violations as a proxy for safety. In addition to drivers’ pay per mile driven, we employ fringe benefits as independent variables. The result suggests that the rate of pay per mile driven, and employment-based health insurance, significantly decrease the probability of moving violations. The result provides support for the hypothesis that high compensation for drivers improve drivers’ safety performance, though other forms of compensation are not significantly related to the incidence of moving violations. Chapter 3 analyzes how truck drivers’ working conditions affect health. We use hypertension as a proxy for health. Hypertension is a common illness among commercial motor vehicle drivers, including long-haul truck drivers. Few studies analyze how working conditions, including wages and work hours, might lead to hypertension among long-haul truck drivers. We hypothesize that long-haul truck drivers’ hypertension is due to excessive work hours rather than age or BMI. Using a multinomial logit model, we find that that longer work hours are associated with a higher probability of suffering from hypertension, as expected. However, drivers who take medication for hypertension also work fewer hours per week, suggesting that they are proactive in reducing their work intensity as well as taking their medicine in order to combat this illness. Since drivers face trade-off between income and health, drivers who take medication for hypertension also seem to accept lower overall earnings by working fewer hours in order to forestall worsening hypertension. Chapter 4 In the trucking industry, truck drivers’ duties include not only driving trucks but also non-driving labor. However, non-driving work is not necessarily paid. This paper analyzes how the payment for non-driving duties (non-driving pay) affects truck drivers’ work hours. This study finds that remunerating drivers for non-driving duties decreases drivers’ work hours. The policy implication of this result is that paying non-driving pay can prevent drivers from working excessively long hours, which may mitigate fatigue. Thus, pay for non-driving labor may possibly enhance their safety and health. Chapter 5 is the conclusion

DETERMINATION OF THE OPTIMAL NUMBER OF RIGID-BODY SEGMENTS TO REPRESENT THE TRUNK USING AKAIKE’S INFORMATION CRITERION

The purpose of this study was to determine the optimal number of rigid body segments to sufficiently represent the trunk movements, using Akaike’s information criterion. The trunk in static and dynamic conditions was modelled with one, two, three, or six linked rigid-body representations. The difference in the three-dimensional position between the actual and modelled data was calculated to quantify how well these models describe the actual trunk kinematics. The Akaike’s information criterion was calculated using the difference in position data to evaluate the goodness-of-fit for each model. Our findings suggest that two-linked rigid-body representation may be good enough when analysing trunk movements except when the movement includes a large axial rotation, for which the three-linked rigid-bodies would be better. These results would be useful in determining the optimal number of rigid body representation to sufficiently represent the trunk movements

Crystal structures and superconducting properties of metallic double-chain based cuprate Pr2Ba4Cu7O15-delta

We demonstrated the lattice structures and the superconducting phases of metallic double-chain based cuprate Pr2Ba4Cu7O15-delta exhibiting higher Tc. After the oxygen heat treatment on citrate pyrolysis precursors, their reduction treatment followed by a quench procedure caused higher Tc samples with 26.5-30 K. The crystal structural parameters for the superconducting sample (delta = 0.81) were analyzed from the powder synchrotron X-ray diffraction data using RIETAN-FP program. The effect of magnetic field on the superconducting phase of these samples with different oxygen defects (delta =0.73, 0.81 and 0.87) was examined, for our understanding of the superconducting magnetic field-temperature phase diagram. For delta = 0.87 sample with Tc = 30 K, the resistive critical field Hc* was estimated to be 13 T at 4.2 K. The oxygen deficiency dependence on Tc,on for our samples was compared with the data of several other groups.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

EGUIDE project and treatment guidelines

Aim: Although treatment guidelines for pharmacological therapy for schizophrenia and major depressive disorder have been issued by the Japanese Societies of Neuropsychopharmacology and Mood Disorders, these guidelines have not been well applied by psychiatrists throughout the nation. To address this issue, we developed the ‘Effectiveness of Guidelines for Dissemination and Education in Psychiatric Treatment (EGUIDE)’ integrated education programs for psychiatrists to disseminate the clinical guidelines. Additionally, we conducted a systematic efficacy evaluation of the programs. Methods: Four hundred thirteen out of 461 psychiatrists attended two 1‐day educational programs based on the treatment guidelines for schizophrenia and major depressive disorder from October 2016 to March 2018. We measured the participants’ clinical knowledge of the treatment guidelines using self‐completed questionnaires administered before and after the program to assess the effectiveness of the programs for improving knowledge. We also examined the relation between the participants’ demographics and their clinical knowledge scores. Results: The clinical knowledge scores for both guidelines were significantly improved after the program. There was no correlation between clinical knowledge and participant demographics for the program on schizophrenia; however, a weak positive correlation was found between clinical knowledge and the years of professional experience for the program on major depressive disorder. Conclusion: Our results provide evidence that educational programs on the clinical practices recommended in guidelines for schizophrenia and major depressive disorder might effectively improve participants’ clinical knowledge of the guidelines. These data are encouraging to facilitate the standardization of clinical practices for psychiatric disorders

Diffusion-weighted MR imaging in gynecologic cancers

Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) reflects changes in proton mobility caused by pathological alterations of tissue cellularity, cellular membrane integrity, extracellular space perfusion, and fluid viscosity. Functional imaging is becoming increasingly important in the evaluation of cancer patients because of the limitations of morphologic imaging. DWI is being applied to the detection and characterization of tumors and the evaluation of treatment response in patients with cancer. The advantages of DWI include its cost-effectiveness and brevity of execution, its complete noninvasiveness, its lack of ionizing radiation, and the fact that it does not require injection of contrast material, thus enabling its use in patients with renal dysfunction. In this article, we describe the clinical application of DWI to gynecological disorders and its diagnostic efficacy therein

Link analysis with Kernels

We show that a family of graph kernels provides a unified perspective on the three measures proposed for link analysis: relatedness, global importance, and relative importance. This framework establishes relative importance as an intermediate between relatedness and global importance, in which the bias between relatedness and importance is naturally controlled by a parameter characterizing individual kernels in the family. In particular, we demonstrate that (1) the Neumann kernels due to Kandola et al. clarify the relationship between the co-citation and bibliographic coupling relatedness and Kleinberg’s HITS importance, and (2) incorporating the graph Laplacian into formulation overcomes some limitations of co-citation relatedness. The property of these measures is examined with a real-world network of bibliographic citations.http://library.naist.jp/mylimedio/dllimedio/show.cgi?bookid=100042508&oldid=7869