BACKGROUND Associations of socioeconomic position with lung function are reported mostly from cross-sectional studies. The aim of this study was to investigate the associations between socioeconomic position both in adulthood and childhood with changes in lung function over a 20-year period. METHODS A socioeconomically representative cohort of 7735 British men aged 40-59 years was followed-up...

We analyse the description of the operation of the Airbus A320 braking systems contained in the Flight Crew Operating Manual. We use the predicate-action diagrams of Lamport to express and to complete the description, and give reasons why such a more rigorous expression is preferable.

This paper presents a directory of heterogeneous web services, which addresses the issue of service discovery involving heterogeneous description languages such as OWL-S, SAWSDL, WSDL and plain text. Service descriptions are mapped into a unified description model, which captures various important elements in different service description approaches. Our directory then performs service registra...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study is to describe the inequalities in mortality by occupational category and sex in a retrospective cohort of civil servants working in the city council of Barcelona (Spain). METHODS The cohort was followed for the period 1984-1993. There were 11 647 men and 9001 women. Age-adjusted hazard ratios (HR) of death for occupational categories and manual versus n...

High-integrity systems operate in hostile environment and must guarantee a continuous operational state, even if unexpected events happen. In addition, these systems have stringent requirements that must be validated and correctly translated from high-level specifications down to code. All these constraints make the overall development process more time-consuming. This becomes especially comple...