14 research outputs found
Parent(-ing) at work: how employees navigate parenthood at work
No full textRecent studies indicate that both work and nonwork experiences influence each other, leading to a highly interconnected and blended work-life experience for employees. This insight challenges the traditional assumption that the institutionalized nature of work and home confines roles to specific times and spaces. However, this insight has yet to be sufficiently incorporated into management scholarship, hindering our ability to fully understand how work-nonwork roles overlap and are managed. The parent role constitutes a dominant nonwork role that impacts work in a range of ways. Scholars disproportionately focus on the incompatibility between parent and work roles without addressing the outcomes of this incompatibility for employees’ lives or how it is managed. Our symposium presents five papers that exhibit the consequences of combining parenthood and work for the lives of employees as well as its navigation in both work and nonwork domains. Contributors draw on diverse theoretical perspectives¬—relational exchange, infrastructure shock, gender schema, role theory, boundary work, and identity—and unique contexts—entrepreneurship, a religious community, COVID-19, and fishermen community—to provide a broad vision of the parenthood-work overlap dynamic and its navigation. To foster meaningful discussions between the authors and the audience, our symposium will use a round table format instead of featuring a discussant after the paper presentations. When Motherhood and Entrepreneurship Collide Author: Elinor Flynn; London Business School Author: Vanessa Conzon; Boston College Passing As Stay-At-Home Moms: When Women Work in Patriarchal Societies Author: Elise B. Jones; U.S. Coast Guard Academy Author: Christine Deborah Bataille; Work-Family Infrastructure Shock: Challenging the Status Quo of Ideal Parent and Worker Author: Keimei Sugiyama; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Author: Jamie Jocelyn Ladge; Boston College Hockey Moms and Ballet Dads: On Forming a Parent Social Identity at Work Author: Namrata Sandhu; George Mason University Author: Heather Ciara Vough; George Mason University Fishing (for) Identity: Intergenerational Work Identity among Fathers and Sons Author: Muhammad Aqeel Awan; London School of Economics and Political Science Author: Niranjan Srinivasan Janardhanan
A Study on Kalanchaga Padai (காளாஞ்சக படை)
Full text linkAIM AND OBJECTIVES:
The disease “Azhal Keel Vayu” is a major ailment of the elderly.
Though there is no mortality in this disease, its clinical condition worsens in
elderly people. The purpose of author’s work is to elucidate a good medicine
from ancient Siddha literatures and to create hope and faith in their treatment.
Their being a preliminary endeavour by the author, as if it would be a helping
hand to the sufferers. With this view this dissertation subject was undertaken.
1. To prove the efficacy of our Siddha Medicine to the world.
2. To study the clinical cause of the disease “Azhal Keel Vayu”
with keen observation on the Aetiology, Pathology, Diagnosis,
Prognosis, Complications and the Treatment by making use of
Siddha aspect.
3. To expose the unique diagnostic methods mentioned by Siddhars,
to know the disease “Azhal Keel Vayu” alters the normal
condition under the topic Mukkutram, Poripulangal, Ezhu Udal
Kattukkal and Envagai thervugal.
4. To know the extent of correlation of Aetiology, Classification,
Signs and Symptoms of Azhal Keel Vayu in Siddha aspect with
Osteo arthritis in Modern medicine.
5. To have an idea about the incidence of the disease with age, sex,
socio-economic status and climatic conditions.
6. To have a detailed clinical investigations.
7. To have a clinical trial on Azhal Keel Vayu tha author has given
the drugs, Perarathai Chooranam as internal medicine and
Nathaichoori Thylam as external medicine.
8. To evaluate the Bio-chemical and Pharmacological effects of trial
medicine.
9. To use modern parameters to confirm the diagnosis and prognosis
of the disease.
10. To pave way for further research work in future.
SUMMARY:
Fifty five cases with Azhal Keelvayu, diagnosed clinically. Out of them
thirty cases were admitted in the in-patient PG Sirappu Maruthuvam Ward,
Govt. Siddha Medical College Hospital, Palayamkottai were observed for
clinical diagnosis, lab diagnosis and treatment by the trial medicines. Out of
them twenty cases were selected for study. Twenty five cases were treated as
out patients.
1. Clinical diagnosis of Azhal Keel vayu was done on the basis of clinical
features described in Sabapathi Manuscript .
2. Before starting the treatment, careful detailed history was taken out and
recorded for the 20 seleceted cases.
3. The various Siddha aspects of examination of the disease were carried
out and data were recorded in the proforma.
4. Laboratory diagnosis of Azhal Keelvayu was done by modern methods
of examination in the Govt. Siddha Medical College Hospital,
Palayamkottai.
5. The trial medicine chosen for both internal and external treatment and
the management of Azhal Keelavayu
• Perarathai chooranam as per the severity of the complaints, the
dosage were given 1 gm two times a day with luke warm water for twenty days and above.
• Nathaichoori Ennai (Externally).
6. During the period of treatment, all the patients were put under strict pathiyam-a specific dietary regimen.
7. The observation made during the clinical study shows that the main drug
Perarthai chooranam (Internally) is clinically effective. It has moderate
analgesic action and significant anti inflammatory action.
8. The action of Nathaichoori Ennai (Externally) over the affected joint was also clinically effective.It has Significant anti inflammatory action.
9. A periodical laboratory investigation were made for all the case for blood, urine and motion test etc., along with radiological reports.
10. Since Azhal Keel vayu is a chronic disease, it required minimum treatment for twenty days, treated both internally and externally to minimize the severe pain, tenderness and swelling, but also slight disappearance of the crepitation.
11. Thoug there was appreciable clinical improvement, there was not much remarkable radiographic changes.
12. The advantages of the selected drugs were listed as,
• The drugs were found to be free from adverse effects.
• The raw materials were available in almost all seasons.
• And finally it is economic.
These merits were essential in promoting this drug in future globally
New design methodology for adaptive switching gain based discrete-time sliding mode control
No full textThe adaptive sliding mode control technique relaxes the assumption of known bound of the disturbance in discrete-time systems. However, the existing technique of gain adaptation in discrete-time sliding mode control has issues of gain overestimation and underestimation. Therefore, this paper proposes a technique to adapt the switching gain such that the adaptive gain can tackle the uncertainty without any knowledge of the bound of uncertainty while overcoming the over- and under-estimation problems of switching gain.Ship Design, Production and Operation
Computationally assessing the visual qualilty of a web page
No full textThough there are millions of websites on the internet, half of the ones we come across do not provide an enjoyable user experience to people. This could be in the sense of usability, functionality, aesthetics or credibility. The aim of this thesis is to apply and improve algorithms for image recognition on web pages to assess their visual quality. Techniques such as Spatial Pyramid Matching, Support Vector Machines, etc. have been successfully applied for feature matching and classification. In this thesis, the author tries to apply this approach to web pages under the assumption that a similar pattern or a feature set could be extracted from the image of a web page. In other words, the aim is to obtain an image classifier with the feature set which can be used to assess web pages. For this a database of web page images was created and labelled as aesthetically appealing and non-appealing based on ground truth from a number of subjects. These were then classified into training and testing datasets. Features were first extracted from the training set and used for dictionary creation, spatial pyramid matching and SVM training. Feature extraction and pyramid matching were done on the testing data as well. Following this a number of experiments were run to find the best values for parameters such as weightage for various features, cost, pyramid levels and dictionary size. The analysis of these results produced some expected and some surprising results that could have an impact on the use of image recognition techniques for assessment of web page quality.Bachelor of Engineerin
Relationship of individual and organizational factors and employee performance : moderating effects of psychological empowerment in the ceramic tile industry (Abstract and Table of content only)
Full text linkThe Malaysia ceramic tile industry is facing many challenges which include competition from cheap imported tiles from China, increasing costs to procure raw materials as well as the continual increases in natural gas prices, hence causing the production costs to be very high which will have an impact on the industry’s survival. Therefore, one way to boost productivity in order to reduce the labour costs is to have a team of high performing employees. For this reason, this research was initiated to study the factors that could optimize individual employee performance in this industry. Factors that had an influence on employees’ performance in this research were divided into two categories, the first being the independent variables or organisational factors consisting of rewards, procedural justice, organizational culture and psychological empowerment and the second category were the individual factors or demographic factors consisting of employees’ academic background and their tenure at their organizations. Psychological empowerment was also studied to see if it could moderate the relationship between rewards, employees’ academic background and their tenure at their organizations, and employee performance. Based on the factors above, 10 research hypotheses were developed to study their relationships with employee performance. The respondents, totalling 600 employees, were from the supervisory level as they play a significant role in the success or failure of any organization. Questionnaires were given to all respondents and the response rate was 39 %. The completed questionnaires were analysed using SPSS version 20. The results obtained showed that all the independent variables and demographic factors influenced individual employee performance. However, when all the variables were combined together, rewards and employees’ academic background were unable to influence employee performance. The study also found that psychological empowerment did not moderate the relationship between employees’ tenure and their performance. The theoretical implication of this study was that expectancy and goal setting theories were observed by the respondents. The practical implication to employers is that the respondents highlighted the importance of feeling psychologically empowered in order to perform well on their job. The limitation of this study was that it only looked at the supervisory level in the ceramic tile manufacturing sector. Therefore, future research could consider different levels of management and different industries to determine whether if there is any similarity with the results from this study. Besides, this research considered psychological empowerment as a variable and did not study the impact of the four cognitions separately. [ABSTRACT BY AUTHOR
Bidirectional branch and bound for controlled variable selection. Part II: exact local method for self-optimizing control
Full text linkThe selection of controlled variables (CVs) from available measurements through
enumeration of all possible alternatives is computationally forbidding for
large-dimensional problems. In Part I of this work [Cao, Y., & Kariwala, V.
(2008). Bidirectional branch and bound for controlled variable selection: Part
I. Principles and minimum singular value criterion. Comput. Chem. Eng., 32
(10),2306-2319], we proposed a bidirectional branch and bound (BAB) approach for
subset selection problems and demonstrated its efficiency using the minimum
singular value criterion. In this paper, the BAB approach is extended for CV
selection using the exact local method for self-optimizing control. By
redefining the loss expression, we show that the CV selection criterion for
exact local method is bidirectionally monotonic. A number of novel determinant
based criteria are proposed for fast pruning and branching purposes resulting in
a computationally inexpensive BAB approach. We also establish a link between the
problems of selecting a subset and combinations of measurements as CVs and
present a partially bidirectional BAB method for selection of measurements,
whose combinations can be used as CVs. Numerical tests using randomly generated
matrices and binary distillation column case study demonstrate the computational
efficiency of the proposed methods. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Robust sliding mode control for discrete stochastic systems with mixed time delays, randomly occurring uncertainties, and randomly occurring nonlinearities
No full textThis is the post-print version of the paper. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 IEEEThis paper investigates the robust sliding mode control (SMC) problem for a class of uncertain nonlinear stochastic systems with mixed time delays. Both the sectorlike nonlinearities and the norm-bounded uncertainties enter into the system in random ways, and such randomly occurring uncertainties and randomly occurring nonlinearities obey certain mutually uncorrelated Bernoulli distributed white noise sequences. The mixed time delays consist of both the discrete and the distributed delays. The time-varying delays are allowed in state. By employing the idea of delay fractioning and constructing a new Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, sufficient conditions are established to ensure the stability of the system dynamics in the specified sliding surface by solving a certain semidefinite programming problem. A full-state feedback SMC law is designed to guarantee the reaching condition. A simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SMC scheme.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61028008, 60825303 and 60834003, National 973 Project under Grant 2009CB320600, the Fok Ying Tung Education Fund under Grant 111064, the Special Fund for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of China under Grant 2007B4, the Key Laboratory of Integrated Automation for the Process Industry Northeastern University) from the Ministry of Education of China, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the U.K. under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the U.K., and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany
Author Correction: Performance assessment and economic analysis of a human Liver-Chip for predictive toxicology
No full textAvaliação da atividade antitumoral do extrato bruto e supercrítico de Cordia verbenacea
Full text linkDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Ciências Biológicas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Bioquímica, Florianópolis, 2010O câncer está entre as causas mais freqüentes de morte no mundo. É considerado um importante problema de saúde pública em países desenvolvidos e em desenvolvimento, sendo a segunda causa de morte no Brasil e no mundo, superado somente pelas doenças do sistema cardiovascular. Apesar disto até o momento não existe uma terapia efetiva para o tratamento de todos os tipos de câncer além de que a maioria dos quimioterápicos em uso apresentam elevada toxicidade. Esforços vêm sendo dirigidos no sentido de desenvolver fármacos antitumorais tão ou mais eficazes do que os quimioterápicos já disponíveis, porém com menor toxicidade e potencial para desenvolver resistência terapêutica. Muitos dos medicamentos utilizados atualmente resultaram da purificação de produtos naturais, principalmente vegetais. Neste contexto, o presente projeto objetivou avaliar o potencial antitumoral de Cordia verbenacea planta medicinal brasileira, vulgarmente conhecida como erva baleeira que é popularmente utilizada em Santa Catarina para tratamento de tumores e inflamações. Para se atingir tal objetivo foram realizados experimentos para avaliar a atividade citotóxica e antiproliferativa in vitro e antitumoral in vivo. Para tanto, realizou-se os ensaios de viabilidade celular (MTT) em células de tumor ascítico de Ehrlich (TAE) e MCF-7, proliferação celular (incorporação de [3H] timidina) e capacidade pró-poptótica (Brometo de etídio/Laranja de acridina (BE/LA)) em células TAE. Além disso, verificou-se o possível efeito dos extratos sobre o DNA plasmidial (atividade nucleásica) assim como a capacidade protetora do extrato sobre o DNA (com a geração de espécies reativas de oxigênio com Fe-EDTA). Foi avaliada a expressão da COX-2 através de Wertern blot em células MCF-7. A determinação da atividade antitumoral in vivo foi realizada em camundongos Balb/c inoculados com o TAE e tratados com extrato bruto (EB) e supercrítico (ESC) nas concentrações de 37,5; 75 e 150 mg/Kg. Nos ensaios do MTT e incorporação de timidina triciada os resultados demonstraram que o EB e ESC reduziram de maneira significativa a viabilidade e proliferação celular. A coloração com BE/LA revelou que o provável tipo de morte celular induzida pelos tratamentos trata-se de apoptose, uma vez que a grande maioria das células adquiriram uma coloração laranja-avermelhada, característica de células apoptóticas. Os extratos mostraram-se ineficazes no teste de ativação nucleásica. O ESC foi capaz de reduzir significativamente a expressão da COX-2 em células MCF-7. Os ensaios in vivo demonstram que tanto EB quanto ESC apresentaram efeitos antitumorais, sendo os melhores resultados observados para a dose de 150 mg/Kg. O tratamento com os extratos também causou importante inibição do crescimento tumoral nos camundongos, principalmente o ESC. EB e ESC elevaram a proporção de células inviáveis/viáveis em mais de duas vezes quando comparado ao controle negativo. EB e ESC aumentaram o tempo médio de sobrevida e a concentração de GSH. De acordo com os resultados podemos concluir que ESC apresentou atividade antitumoral mais potente que o extrato bruto. Os resultados obtidos foram favoráveis à validação da utilidade de C. verbenacea como potencial agente antitumoral. Além disso, foi considerado que o método de extração supercrítica pode aprimorar a atividade antitumoral de C. verbenacea, como demonstrado com os resultados apresentados acima, uma vez que estes efeitos provavelmente se devam à presença de ?-humuleno e ?-cariofileno presente nos extratos, especialmente no extrato supercrítico. Também a partir dos resultados obtidos podemos supor que um possível mecanismo de ação antitumoral dos extratos possa ser a redução da expressão da COX-2, o que poderia levar a um bloqueio da sobrevivência celular e indução da apoptose
Impact of Sisal Fiber Reinforcement on the Mechanical and Physical Properties of One-Part Geopolymer Mortar with a Ternary Binder System
Full text linkThis study investigates the influence of chemical treatment and fiber content on the mechanical and durability properties of sisal fiber-reinforced one-part geopolymer mortar (OP-GPM) incorporating a ternary binder system of diatomite, feldspar, and ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS). Sisal fibers were treated with 0.5%, 5%, and 10% NaOH solutions for 2 and 24 h and incorporated at 0.5–2% by binder weight. The workability, compressive strength (CS), flexural strength (FS), split tensile strength (STS), ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV), water absorption, and chemical resistance were evaluated. Optimal performance was achieved with 1% fiber content and fibers treated with 5% NaOH for 2 h, leading to a 15% increase in CS (54 MPa) and notable improvements in FS (8.62 MPa) and STS (5.88 MPa). Alkali treatment significantly enhanced fiber crystallinity and tensile strength, with a 208% reduction in fiber water absorption. However, excessive fiber content (>1%) reduced workability and mechanical performance. Regression analysis showed strong correlations between the strength properties. The study confirms that properly treated sisal fibers improve the mechanical and durability performance of OP-GPM, offering a sustainable alternative to conventional reinforcement in geopolymer composites
