AIMS To test whether (1) physically demanding work is less frequent for older than younger employees, and whether (2) the association of physically demanding work with decline of physical functioning is stronger for older employees than their younger counterparts. The gender differences in these associations were examined. METHODS Subjects of the study were 40-60 year old employees of the Cit...

We present and test a formal framework for expressing the idea that taking account of the multiple meanings conveyed by natural language may help economists to better understand the impact of pre-play free-form communication. We model coordination games where each player simultaneously requests others to take a particular action. We assume requests include two independent features: the desired ...

Shared-nothing clusters are a well known and cost-effective approach to database server scalability, in particular, with highly intensive read-only workloads typical of many 3-tier web-based applications. The common reliance on a centralized component and a simplistic propagation strategy employed by mainstream solutions however conduct to poor scalability with traditional on-line transaction p...

Two distinct theses are sometimes argued for, or against, together in the debate on early mindreading: that infants mindread, and that this occurs thanks to innate mental notions. When this is the case, the underlying assumption is that mental notions cannot be learned early in infancy, and therefore at that stage they must be either innate or not present at all. I do not intend to directly arg...

Inefficient visual search can become efficient with practice [Vision Research 35 (1995) 2037; 40 (2000) 2925]. In this study, we wondered whether this improvement depends on unique visual features associated with the target, on differences in item-specific brightness distribution between target and distractors, or only on a change in the allocation of attention and thus global search strategy. ...

Psychophysiological evaluation of mental workload in humancomputer interaction has generally been limited to situations with little physical load. This paper examines the viability of using heart rate, skin conductance, respiration and peripheral skin temperature as psychophysiological indicators in a physically demanding task performed in a simple virtual environment. Respiratory rate was foun...