1,720,963 research outputs found
Effect of Service Quality, Brand Image and Trust on Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty towards Waterworks Engineering Group Services Co., Ltd (Win Mar Soe, 2025)
Full text linkThe objectives of this study are to examine the influencing factors on service quality, to analyze the effect of service quality, brand image and trust on customer loyalty, brand image and trust, to analyze the mediating effect of customer satisfaction on the relationship between service quality, brand image, trust and customer loyalty towards Waterworks Engineering Group Services Co., Ltd. Total population is 162 and the sample size is 115 customers by using Raosoft sample size calculator. Simple random sampling method is applied to select the respondents. Primary data are collected online survey method. Through the structured questionnaire with 5-point Likert scale. Secondary data are gathered from relevant text books, papers, websites, international dissertations and other MBA research papers from the library. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis are used to analyze the collected data. According to regression results, firstly the results show that both technical quality and functional quality have significant and positive effect on service quality. Secondly, the price has a significant and positive effect on brand image. Thirdly, ability and integrity have positive and significant effect on trust. Fourthly, service quality and trust have significant and positive effect on customer loyalty. Fifthly, there is the mediating effect of customer satisfaction on the relationship between service quality and customer loyalty. Finally, there is the mediating effect of customer satisfaction between trust and customer loyalty. Based on these findings, the company should prioritize enhancing service quality, strengthening brand reputation, and building deeper customer trust in order to improve satisfaction and foster long-term customer loyalty
Novel strategies for wound treatment
No full textConventional wound care involves topical applications of antibiotics, oral antibiotics and silver containing bandages. Traditional wound care merely treats wound infections while allowing body's immune system to take charge of the natural healing process. It is common during the treatment of wounds to encounter persistence of drug resistant infections caused by presence of biofilms and delay of wound healing caused by antimicrobial agents applied to treat wounds. As wound healing is a complex process, wound care cannot be a single dimensional entity. Modern approach proposed in this study of wound care entails 3 main factors into consideration: possible invasion of multidrug resistant bacteria, biofilms formation associated with the wounds and physiological stages of wound repair. Despite the rise of multidrug resistant bacteria, production of new antibiotics has been declined in the recent years. The urgent need to combat the multidrug resistant organisms caused a resurgence of interest in phytochemicals because of their ubiquitous and antimicrobial nature. Phytochemicals that act synergistically with antibiotics to kill bacteria are especially the center of interest as they can reduce toxicity and delay resistance development. In this study, the antimicrobial effects of phytochemicals in combination with the conventional antibiotics were investigated by employing checkerboard assay and time kill assay using 6 strains of Staphylococcus aureus. Ethyl gallate was found to be synergistic with mupirocin, fusidic acid, tetracycline, cefoxitin and indifferent with vancomycin. Mechanism of action of phytochemicals can be postulated depending on their behavior of interaction with antibiotics. Ethyl gallate's synergistic interaction with protein synthesis inhibitors and its indifference with a cell wall synthesis inhibitor raised an interest in its possible mechanism of action on cell wall. Scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy observation of bacteria cells after treatment with ethyl gallate further confirmed its action on cell wall. Computational docking studies were performed with lipoteichoic acid synthase enzyme where the results revealed that ethyl gallate was inhibiting the cell wall synthesis by inhibition of polymerization of peptidoglycan. Furthermore, the cytotoxicity assays also ensured that the phytochemicals under study were not toxic to human peripheral blood mononuclear cells.Infected wounds plagued with biofilms of bacteria are recalcitrant to treatment with antimicrobials. Moreover, dissemination of biofilm associated bacteria can result in fatal complications. Eradication of bacteria in biofilms needs thousand fold concentrations of antibiotics which narrow the therapeutic index of antimicrobials. The biofilm inhibition potential of phytochemicals and antibiotics were studied and compared as single agents and in combinations. Synergistic phytochemical-antibiotic combinations were found to have anti-biofilm activities investigated by microtiter plate assay and scanning electron microscopy. Staphylococcus aureus which is a common casual organism of wound infection is infamous for its drug resistance properties. When antibiotics are used in therapeutic regimes, it is important to take mutant selection window into consideration. Mutant selection window and mutant prevention concentrations for each of the phytochemicals and antibiotics in focus were studied and compared. Mutant strains of Staphylococcus aureus were studied and the duration taken for each antimicrobial was noted along with the mutation frequency of bacteria under treatment. The presence of ethyl gallate was found to close the mutant selection window, decrease mutant prevention concentration and reduce mutation frequency while prolonging the duration of resistance development. Chitosan and alginate are well known biocompatible natural polymers and have potential to form polyelectrolyte membrane in solutions. Employing this concept a novel natural polymeric polyelectrolyte membrane was synthesized and synergistic combination of fusidic acid and ethyl gallate were incorporated as a model drug combination. Effects of polyelectrolyte membrane on various aspects of wound healing process were determined. Drug eluting polyelectrolyte membrane developed in this study was able to help the wound healing activity by allowing gaseous exchange, retaining moisture in the wound, enabling slow release of drug combination, and assisting the proliferation as well as the metabolic activity of fibroblastsDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (MAE
Analysis on drug combinations for bacteria causing skin infections
No full textMethicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is the one of the most common bacteria that causes skin infections. MRSA has been emerging as important threat to the health of the society as it has developed resistance to more newly synthesized antibiotics. This study emphasize on the combination of western and eastern drugs to combat the problem of MRSA resistance. Four Western drugs and four eastern drugs are used in this study which forms a matrix to give 16 combinations. Checkerboard method for broth microdilution is adopted in the drug interaction studies and time killing curves were done for the interactions which show significant interactions. Ths study can conclude that Eastern Drugs can be very good candidates for the combination therapy for treatment of MRSA skin infections.Master of Science (Biomedical Engineering
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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