OBJECTIVE To assess if organizational factors are predictors of workers' health and productivity after the World Trade Center attacks. METHODS We conducted a survey of 750 workers and compared those who had direct exposures to the World Trade Center attacks (south of Canal Street workers; primary victims) with those less directly exposed (north of Canal Street workers; other victims and non-v...

Options have been shown to be a key step in extending reinforcement learning beyond low-level reactionary systems to higher-level, planning systems. Most of the options research involves hand-crafted options; there has been only very limited work in the automated discovery of options. We extend early work in automated option discovery with a flexible and robust method.

Specific, situated participatory design (PD) practices have always been at the heart of Participatory Design research. The role of the very situat edness and specificity of PD practice for theory-building within PD research is, however, seldom discussed explicitly. In this article, we explore why and in which ways the specificity and situatedness of PD practices are crucial for PD research. We ...

BACKGROUND Organizations have moral and legal duties to consider the psychological needs of their workforce following exposure to potentially traumatic events related to the workplace. Additionally, it makes economic sense to avoid loss of valuable personnel to the effects of psychological trauma. There have been attempts to provide a range of psychological interventions for staff after exposur...

Stress, whether daily stress, work stress or traumatic stress, is unhealthy. This lecture covers three recent theoretical approaches in explaining the mechanisms underlying the influence of psychological stress on somatic health. It is argued that stress research should focus less on stressors themselves and put more emphasis on prolonged stress responses. Three mechanisms are identified that c...

Fragmentation can strongly influence population persistence and expression of life-history strategies in spatially-structured populations. In this study, we directly estimated size-specific dispersal, growth, and survival of stream-dwelling brook trout in a stream network with connected and naturally-isolated tributaries. We used multiple-generation, individual-based data to develop and paramet...

We study the distribution of interstellar matter near the galactic plane on the basis of open star clusters and reviewed the correlation of extinction with different physical parameters of the clusters to understand the galactic structure. It is seen from the extinction towards open clusters that about 90% of the absorbing material lie within −5◦ ≤ b ≤ 5◦ of the galactic plane. The mean thickne...

1.INTRODUCTION Some forty years ago, most opening supports and reinforcements were designed using empirical rules defining ground loads acting on the supporting structures. This approach is still popular and interest in it has been renewed by the use of rock mass classification systems (Barton et al. 1974, Bieniawski, 1974,1976,1989). Correlations between rock mass conditions and the type of su...

one of the most important issues in educational psychology is school engagement and academic achievement among students. based on self system model, a set of contextual factors (relations with teachers like perceived autonomy, structure, and involvement) through personal psychological characteristics (autonomy, relatedness, competence) is related to school engagement. the purpose of this study ...