In their analysis, Park and his colleagues found that the bank tellers, clergy, aircraft mechanics and hairdressers had highest odds of dying from Alzheimer’s disease. For Parkinson's disease, the highest risks were among biological scientists, teachers, clergy members and other religious workers.

The risk of death from presenile dementia -- a form of dementia that arises before the age of 65 -- was greatest among dentists, graders and sorters in industries other than agriculture and, again, clergy.

Veterinarians, hairdressers and graders and sorters had the highest risks of dying from motor neuron disease, the most common form of which is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease — an invariably fatal degeneration of the central nervous system that causes muscle wasting and paralysis.

In late 2004, Stephen Gillett was in the running for a choice job at Yahoo! - a senior management position in engineering. He was a strong contender. Gillett had been responsible for CNET's backend, and he had helped launch a number of successful startups. But he had an additional qualification his prospective employer wasn't aware of, one that gave him a decisive edge: He was one of the top guild masters in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft.

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In this way, the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace.

And that's exactly what Gillett is doing. He accepted Yahoo!'s offer and now works there as senior director of engineering operations. "I used to worry about not having what I needed to get a job done," he says. "Now I think of it like a quest; by being willing to improvise, I can usually find the people and resources I need to accomplish the task." His story - translating experience in the virtual world into success in the real one - is bound to become more common as the gaming audience explodes and gameplay becomes more sophisticated. The day may not be far off when companies receive resumes that include a line reading "level 60 tauren shaman in World of Warcraft."

"The labor market picture remains a bit cloudy," said Ken Goldstein, labor economist with The Conference Board. "There are some bright spots where the job market may be picking up, but it's by no means a clear picture."

Online job ads declined in February in all nine census regions. The largest decline was in the East South Central region including the states Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. This region saw a 9.1 percent dip in online job ads.

Adjusting job ads for the size of the local labor force, February's data shows San Diego leading with 3.17 jobs per 100 persons, while Detroit remains behind all the metropolitan areas at 0.68 online job ads per 100 persons.

The Conference Board Help-Wanted Online Data Series measures the number of new, first-time online job ads posted on more than 1,200 major Internet job boards and smaller job boards that serve niche market and smaller geographic areas.

Among workers who believe their Internet use is monitored by their bosses, one-quarter use their work computer for job-hunting, according to research conducted for professional staffing company Hudson Highland Group Inc.

"It's one of the ways employees deal with work-life balance issues," said Robert Morgan, chief operating officer at Hudson Talent Management, one of the company's divisions. "Because we're spending so much time at work, that's the only time we have to schedule some of those appointments."

One-third of workers who think their managers are unaware of their personal Web surfing use their work computer to find a new job, according to the study.

Half of the workers surveyed said their companies monitor their computer use, while three-quarters said they believe their bosses know how much they use the Internet for nonwork activities.

Here's the kicker: Sometimes bloggers mention job openings at their companies or others. Or they report they're changing jobs, which, to a careful reader, might indicate a position is opening up.

Also, companies are eager to recruit the people reading the blogs because they're likely to be the sort of folks they'd want to have on board.

Blogs find passive job seekers, said Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster, an online, Seattle-based job board with a built-in referral feature.

The new system included plenty of work surfaces and display shelves; partitions were a part of it, intended to provide privacy and places to pin up works in process. The Action Office even included varying desk levels to enable employees to work part of the time standing up, thereby encouraging blood flow and staving off exhaustion.

But inventions seldom obey the creator's intent. "The Action Office wasn't conceived to cram a lot of people into little space," says Joe Schwartz, Herman Miller's former marketing chief, who helped launch the system in 1968. "It was driven that way by economics."

Economics was the one thing Propst had failed to take into account. But it was also what triggered the cubicle's runaway success. Around the time the Action Office was born, a growing breed of white-collar workers, whose job titles fell between secretary and boss, was swelling the workforce. Also, real estate prices were rising, as was the cost of reconfiguring office buildings, making the physical office a drag on the corporate budget. Cubicles, or "systems furniture," as they are euphemistically called, offered a cheaper alternative for redoing the floorplan.

Another critical factor in the cubicle's rapid ascent was Uncle Sam. During the 1960s, to stimulate business spending, the Treasury created new rules for depreciating assets. The changes specified clearer ranges for depreciation and established a shorter life for furniture and equipment, vs. longer ranges assigned to buildings or leasehold improvements. (Today companies can depreciate office furniture in seven years, whereas permanent structures--that is, offices with walls--are assigned a 39.5-year rate.)

The upshot: A company could recover its costs quicker if it purchased cubes. When clients told Herman Miller of that unexpected benefit, it became a new selling point for the Action Office. After only two years on the market, sales soared. Competitors took notice.

One factor may be scarcity. In fields like engineering, a company may get one woman and seven men applying for a job, Farrell said. If the company wants to hire the woman, they may have to pay a premium to get her.

That's because she may have more competing offers than her male counterparts. The reason: not only is she a top performer who can boost a company's profitability but employing her helps a company improve its equal-opportunity standing, which in turn can help it secure government contracts.

Also, where women can combine technical expertise with people skills – such as those required in sales and other arenas where customers may prefer dealing with a woman - that's likely to contribute to a premium in pay.

"She gives people the best of both worlds," Farrell said.

Senior citizens are leaving the labor force sooner than they did 50 years ago, even though they are living longer, healthier lives, according to a landmark analysis of census data released Thursday.

This is one of several surprising findings in the report on aging, which comes as the first baby boomers are nearing retirement age. The oldest baby boomers turn 60 this year, and the new report suggests that many of them already have left the labor force.

The report attributes the declining work rate among older Americans to the growth in private pensions and Social Security and Medicare benefits. As benefits for older Americans grew in the last half of the 20th century, fewer saw the need to work beyond age 65, said Mitra Toossi, an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That may change as more companies turn away from guaranteed pensions and Social Security and Medicare face substantial deficits in coming decades.

A survey of 941 remote and mobile workers around the world finds that 10 percent of telecommuters work nude. The survey found that all respondents relaxed their personal habits when working remotely. While about 39% of respondents of both sexes said they wear sweats while working from home, 12% of males and 7% of females wear nothing at all. 44% of women said they showered on work-at-home days, as opposed to men, who were slightly more likely to shave (33%) than wash (30%).

An Israeli company has developed an automated system to handle the first stage of the human resources process, analyzing the applicant's voice responses to questions to see how trustworthy an employee they are likely to be.

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Nemesysco's HR1 Automated Integrity Profiling/Risk Assessment system, which was unveiled at the beginning of February, requires a job applicant to speak into a telephone-like handset attached to a desktop PC and answer questions on various topics, from loyalty and honesty to drug usage, theft from a place of employment, bribery, kickbacks, fraud and deceit. The test questions, which the company developed together with a human resources expert based on standard HR methodology, are displayed on the screen and spoken out loud, so that people with visual or hearing difficulties can use the system. HR1 is currently available in English, Hebrew, Russian and Spanish but can be translated into any language.

HR1 uses Nemesysco's Layered Voice Analysis (LVA) technology, which employs over 800 algorithms to analyze 129 different parameters related to the emotional content of the responder's voice when answering, regardless of the language they are speaking.

"The technology doesn't care what you are saying," explains Nemesysco's founder and CEO, Amir Liberman. "The technology analyzes the different paths that your brain is taking while it is deciding what to say next. For example, if you are excited, your voice gets higher and faster. If you are confused, your speech slows down. You can try and mask your reaction at the level that you can hear, but computers can hear much better."

Within the next four years, nearly a third of all U.S. workers--including tens of thousands of tech pros--will be over the age of 50, leaving a potential gap of business-tech and vertical industry skills, which could also be worsened on the front end by a shortage of young people entering the technology fields.

Nearly two dozen industry associations, ranging from technology to trucking organizations, have bonded together to create a new Alliance for an Experienced Workforce, a collaborative effort aimed at getting employers to develop strategies of keeping aging American workers viable in the workplace.

"The older worker brings a benefit of knowing how things are done at a company and in an industry, and why," says John Venator, president and CEO of the Computing Technology Industry Association, a member of the new Alliance. CompTIA is encouraging employers to offer older IT workers programs, such as skills certification and training opportunities, to help those pros acquire new tech skills that can complement their decades of industry and business experience, boosting their workforce relevance in the years to come.

In addition to skills training for "hot" IT jobs, including those currently in-demand related to RFID, project management, and security, Venator says employers also need to consider other perks that might entice older tech pros to stay in the workforce, including job-sharing, flex-time, and part-time work.