IntroductionEmergency physicians are interrupted during patient care with such tasks as reading electrocardiograms (ECGs). This phenomenon is known as task-switching which may be a teachable skill. Our objective was to evaluate the potential of a video game for simulating the cognitive demands required of task-switching.MethodsEmergency medicine residents took a pretest on ECG interpretation and then a posttest while attending to a video game, Asteroids®.ResultsThe 35 residents (63%) who participated, scored worse on the ECG posttest then they did on the pretest (p<.001; effect size=1.14). There were no differences between genders or training level.ConclusionInterpreting ECGs while playing the Asteroids® game significantly lowered ECG interpretation scores. This shows the potential of this activity for training residents in task-switching ability. The next phase of research will test whether ECG reading performance while task-switching improves with practice.

Air pollution is the emission of undesirable substances into the atmosphere such as gases, dust, heavy metals and fumes that could be harmful to the health or comfort of humans and animals [1]. One of the most critical pollutants is heavy metals. Unlike other pollutants, these metals are not degraded and persist for a long time in the environment [2]. Anthropogenic activities such as steel and iron industry, mining, cement, paper, leather and paint manufacturing, smelting procedures, traffic and agriculture activities are the most dangerous sources of heavy metals distribution in the environment [3]. Indoor and outdoor industrial air pollutants in the workplace negatively affect the health of workers [4]. Harmful pollutants such as gases, vapours, fumes and smoke may be produced during the melting, moulding, mould drying, furnace preheating, electric arc furnace processes and cooling in the iron and steel industry [5, 6]. Outdoors, the concentration of pollutants is lower compared with the level in the indoors of the industry due to fine size of emitted particulates [7]. In a furnace,

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Since particulates are a sort of air pollution and seriously impact on environmental conditions, a considerable amount of programs to assess and control air pollution are regarded, since there are only a few studies on dust deposition in Iraq and since there have been drought conditions in last few years. In the Iraqi Kurdistan region, an experiment on dust accumulation as indoor and outdoor air pollution was undertaken in Erbil City and surrounding areas from November 2008 to April, 2009. The amount of deposited dry dust in the deferent studied location and surrounding area was between 9.1 and 48.3 gm.m 2 . per 2 months. The results revealed that the concentration of some chemical characteristics like total acidity, total alkalinity and sulphate ranged between 7-33, 50-88 and 15-180 mg/l respectively. Also determining elements in accumulated dry dust such as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and sodium ranged from 20.3-95.3, 6.3-2.06, 8.02-66.7 and 0.9-43.6 mg/l respectively. However, heavy metals including Zn +2 , Fe +3 , Cr +3, CU +2 and Pb +2 were at a range of 0. 54-3.8, 15.4-67.3, 0.04-1.22, 0.025-0.47 and 0.21-2.17 mg/l respectively. Radiation levels ranged from 0.02 to 0.08 msv/h (mile sever/hour). Finally, the values of studied parameters -indoor and outdoor -of decomposed dust composition were not more than limited values or levels of most other countries.