Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is believed to be highly prevalent today because of recent increases in life expectancy and body mass index (BMI), but this assumption has not been tested using long-term historical or evolutionary data. We analyzed long-term trends in knee OA prevalence in the United States using cadaver-derived skeletons of people aged ≥50 y whose BMI at death was documented and who l...

This article formulates a new technique for behavior analysis of systems through fuzzy Kolmogorov's differential equations and Particle Swarm Optimization. For handling the uncertainty in data, differential equations have been formulated by Markov modeling of system in fuzzy environment. First solution of these derived fuzzy Kolmogorov's differential equations has been found by Runge-Kutta four...

The industrial sector accounts for about a third of the energy usage in the United States. Given the potential of energy savings from the industrial sector, it is important to look at the factors influencing industrial firms’ decision to adopt energy efficiency measures. The Industrial Assessment Centers (IAC) program offered by U.S. Department of Energy provides free energy efficiency assessme...

Any account of industrial health in the U.S.A. should start with Dr. Alice Hamilton.t The autobiography of this remarkable woman records not only the author's life-long devotion to the cause of the American industrial worker, but gives a picture of conditions in American industry which, when she first began her work, were a veritable jungle of ignorance, prejudice, and suspicion. But if Dr. Ham...

Each new generation brings the reemergence of many of the fears of the past, requiring the repetition of old explanations to put them to rest. Today there is a renewed concern that technological advancement may displace much of the manufacturing (and other) work force, creating widespread unemployment, social disruption, and human hardship. For example, in 1983 the Upjohn Institute for Employme...

China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide, with industrial carbon emissions (ICE) accounting for approximately 65% of the country’s total emissions. Understanding the ICE decoupling patterns and factors influencing the decoupling status is a prerequisite for balancing economic growth and carbon emissions. This paper provides an overview of ICE based...

In this paper a novel direct adaptive fuzzy system is proposed to control flexible-joints robot including actuator dynamics. The design includes two interior loops: the inner loop controls the motor position using proposed approach while the outer loop controls the joint angle of the robot using a PID control law. One novelty of this paper is the use of a PSO algorithm for optimizing the contro...