............................................................................... . VII Acknowledgement .......................................................................... IX Publications ............................................................................ X List of Figures ........................................................................... XII Chapter 1 Background and Intr...

background: there is a significant proportion of workers with mental disorders who either are struggling at work or who are trying to return to work from a disability leave. objective: using a population-based survey of working adults in ontario, canada, this paper examines the perceptions of workers towards mental disorders in the workplace. methods: data are from a sample of 2219 working adul...

Visits to antenatal clinics are meant to detect, prevent or manage abnormalities in early pregnancy and prepare mothers for safe deliveries. Risk assessment, using risk scores, is one of the tools used for this purpose. This study describes the working procedure and the services delivered in a working clinic in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, analyses antenatal visits and describes various aspects of the...

The increase in use of endoscopic procedures in diagnosis and surgical treatment has underlined the need for safe cleaning methods for these instruments. While decontamination has been reviewed by several Working Groups in Britain, the problems relating to the prevention of contamination of rinse water and its monitoring procedures have not been addressed previously. This report from the Joint ...

In the recent functional linguistic literature, the notion of syntactic complexity and similar concepts have received considerable attention. Yet, when trying to operationalize syntactic complexity as an independent variable in statistical research designs, it soon emerges that the notion is somewhat underdefined. I will report the results from an experiment comparing three measures of syntacti...

We use experimental methods to investigate whether pledges of commitment can improve cooperation in endogenously-formed partnerships facing a social dilemma. Treatments vary in terms of the individual’s: (1) opportunity to commit to their partner; (2) the cost of dissolving committed partnerships; and (3) the distribution of these dissolution costs between partners. Our findings show that pledg...

This paper introduces a new approach to the control of robot manipulators in a way that is safe for humans in the robot's workspace. Conceptually the robot is viewed as a tool with limited autonomy. The limited perception capabilities of automatic systems prohibits the construction of failsafe robots with the capabilities of people. Instead, the goal of our control scheme is to make the interac...