UNLABELLED Environmental conditions such as lighting and thermal comfort are influencing factors on sleep quality and visual tiredness. The purpose of this study was the determination of the relationship between thermal comfort and light intensity with the sleep quality and eye fatigue in shift nurses. METHOD This cross-sectional research was conducted on 82 shift-work personnel of 18 nursing...

Wind comfort and wind safety for pedestrians are important requirements in urban areas. Many city authorities request studies of pedestrian wind comfort and wind safety for new buildings and new urban areas. These studies involve combining statistical meteorological data, aerodynamic information and criteria for wind comfort and wind safety. Detailed aerodynamic information can be obtained usin...

Longitudinal acceleration comfort is one of the essential metrics used to evaluate the ride comfort of train. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using hand grip force as a correlate of longitudinal acceleration comfort of rapid transit trains. In the paper, a motion simulation system was set up and a two-stage experiment was designed to investigate the role of the gri...

PURPOSE To assess subjective comfort during the first three months of continuous wear of hyper-transmissible soft and rigid contact lenses. METHODS One hundred subjects (50 experienced wearers and 50 neophytes) were fitted with either the Focus Night & Day lens (CIBA Vision, Duluth, GA) or the Z alpha lens (Menicon, Nagoya, Japan). Comfort was monitored at regular intervals using a vertical a...

This study investigated whether communication modality affects talkers’ speech adaptation to an interlocutor exposed to background noise. It was predicted that adaptations to lip gestures would be greater and acoustic ones reduced when communicating face-to-face. We video recorded 14 Australian-English talkers (Talker A) speaking in a face-toface or auditory only setting with their interlocutor...

The present study examined the psychometric properties and construct validity of the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory--Revised (OCI-R) with the aim of replicating and extending previous findings, and addressing limitations of previous investigations. Individuals with OCD (n = 167) and other anxiety disorders (n = 155) completed the OCI-R, measures of OCD and related symptom severity, and measures...

This paper examines the performance of the U.S. commercial banking industry over 1984–2002. Rather than measuring performance relative to the unknown (and difficultto-estimate) boundary of the production set, performance for a given bank is measured relative to expected maximum output among m banks using no more of each input than the given bank. This approach permits fully non-parametric estim...

This paper was presented at: • SME (Society of Manufacturing Engineers), June 1993, Nashville, Tenn • International Conference on Structural Dynamics, Vibration, Noise, and control, December 1995, Hong Kong. • InterNoise ’96 (1996 International Congress on Noise Control Engineering), August 1996, Liverpool, U.K. • This paper is also printed in “Mfg.”, which is the Brown and Sharpe in-house tech...

This paper proposes a local motion-based approach for recognizing group activities in soccer videos. Given the SIFT keypoint matches on two successive frames, we propose a simple but effective method to group these keypoints into the background point set and the foreground point set. The former one is used to estimate camera motion and the latter one is applied to represent group actions. After...

Seats need to be more lightweight for airplanes, cars, busses and even trains to contribute to a better environment and to reduce energy consumption. However, a reduction in comfort due to weight reduction is not preferable, which opens a new area of research: improving comfort with a minimum of material or with lightweight materials and systems. In this paper three experiments are performed to...