The investigation of attitudes towards people with disabilities has been a consistent research focus for the past 20 years. It appears that during the past decade, in particular, a considerable amount of attention has been invested in investigating the attitudes of a range of health and social care professionals towards people with learning disabilities. Indeed this has been the specific focus of several recent studies. This paper reviews recent research findings concerning the attitudes of health and social care professionals to people with learning disabilities. The implications of these findings for the education of practitioners and further research studies are also explored that clearly demonstrate the need for further carefully controlled studies. Such studies would have the potential to isolate those variables that might most effectively bring about a positive influence on attitudes towards people with learning disabilities.

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The construction industry has been forever blighted by delay and disruption. To address this problem, this study proposes the Fitzsimmons Method (FM method) to improve the scheduling performance of activities on the Critical Path before the project execution. The proposed FM method integrates Bayesian Networks to estimate the conditional probability of activity delay given its predecessor and Support Vector Machines to estimate the time delay. The FM method was trained on 302 completed infrastructure construction projects and validated on a £40 million completed road construction project. Compared with traditional Monte Carlo Simulation results, the proposed FM method is 52% more accurate in predicting the projects' time delay. The proposed FM method contributes to leveraging the vast quantities of data available to improve the estimation of time risk on infrastructure and construction projects.

Observing seated posture is important for ergonomic assessment; proper chair fit and chair adjustment should be considered for the entire context of work demands. Recommending only one seated posture presumes that all seated work has a similar location of visual targets, shoulder reach distances, and support surfaces. The nature of work tasks may influence posture more than does chair adjustment, and field observation of sitting should focus specifically on lumbar spine posture when work may cause forward movement of the torso. I suggest that the position and movement of the pelvis in relation to the torso is a reasonable and important indicator of spinal posture.