Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A quantitative analysis of the relationship between empowerment practices and service quality outcomes

Australian banks have focused their attention on service quality as a strategic tool for increasing organizational effectiveness and gaining a competitive advantage. Many forms of organizational change have been prescribed by researchers and practitioners alike, involving such techniques as redesign, restructuring, re-engineering and total quality management (TQM). The underpinning concept in all of these change programmes is empowerment of workers (Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Forrester, 2000). The literature, however, shows very little research that tests the relationship between empowerment practices and service quality. This paper reports on a cross- sectional study based on a survey instrument developed for quantitative data collection. Based on a stratified sample selected from a target population consisting of three major banks. The study achieved a response rate of 40%. Quantitative analysis based on multivariate analysis techniques indicates that empowerment practices when simultaneously implemented, have a favourable effect on employee well being, productivity, performance and service quality. Based on the results of the study we conclude that a holistic approach must be taken to implement empowerment practices into banks in order to maximize service quality improvements. The results of this study show that empowering the workforce is a powerful strategy that substantially improves service quality in the banks studied. It is important that management understand the need to implement empowerment practices in a holistic and planned manner where practices are successful in promoting employee autonomy.
Can green creativity be fostered? Unfolding the roles of perceived green human resource management practices, dual mediation paths, and perceived environmentally-specific authentic leadership

Abstract Employee eco-initiatives can contribute to organizational green sustainability. Nonetheless, mechanisms underlying employee green creativity have not been fully understood. Our study aims to investigate if perceived green human resource management (HRM) practices can foster green creativity among employees via dual mediation paths of green crafting and harmonious environmental passion. A two-wave survey process was conducted to garner responses from 712 employees and 106 managers from tour operators operating in Vietnam. Results revealed the mediating roles of green crafting and harmonious environmental passion for the linkage between perceived green HRM practices and employee green creativity. Perceived environmentally-specific authentic leadership was unpacked as a moderator for the impacts of perceived green HRM practices on green crafting and harmonious environmental passion. By identifying these mediating and moderating effects, our inquiry advances the stream of research on the HRM-creativity linkage in the green management domain.
A Bidirectional Active-Alignment Control System for LED Communication

LED-based free-space optical communication is becoming a promising alternative to the traditional acoustics mode of underwater communication because of its low cost, high data rate, and low power consumption. However, a fundamental challenge associated with the free space optical communication systems is to establish and maintain line-of-sight (LOS) between the two communicating agents. It becomes even more challenging when the agents are in motion, requiring an alignment system that enables each agent to point itself towards the LOS direction continuously. This paper presents a bi-directional active alignment control approach for the LED-based communication system of two robots, where the robots navigate in a three-dimensional (3D) space. We propose an extended Kalman filter (EKF) based alignment approach, where the estimates of azimuthal and elevation components of heading bias with the LOS are used to correct the alignment. We introduce and implement a new circular scanning technique on a two-degree-of-freedom (2DOF) rotational system mounted on each robot that enables consecutive independent measurements from a single photo-diode to satisfy the observability constraints of the EKF. Furthermore, we explore a synchronized alternating scheme to address the bidirectional nature of the problem. The scanning amplitude is further adjusted based on the EKF estimation covariance, to balance the trade-off between estimation accuracy and actuation effort. The presented results support the efficacy of the proposed method in the presence of slow relative motion between two robots, and demonstrate its superiority over an extremum-seeking (ES) based approach across a wide range of distances between the robots.
15.1: Research, Development, and Application of Crystalline Oxide Semiconductor

The study of IGZO was started by Kimizuka et al. in 1985. IGZO is developed as a material for displays. We found crystalline IGZO having c‐axis alignment and have studied its application to displays, memories, processors, etc. Crystalline IGZO is expected to be used in a variety of applications.
Influence of Air Density on Electrical Strength of Transmission Line Insulation

Flashover tests were conducted at the Leadville EHV Test Facility of the Public Service Company of Colorado and Project EHV at Pittsfield, Mass. , to obtain comparative data to evaluate the influence of air density on switching surge and impulse flashover strength of transmission line insulation. The tests showed that negative polarity flashover voltages are greater than those of positive polarity. Therefore, positive polarity will be the critical requirement for transmission line design for switching surge duty.
Robotizing meaningful work

Purpose Robots have a history of replacing human labor in undesirable, dirty, dull and dangerous tasks. With robots now emerging in academic and human-centered work, this paper aims to investigate psychological implications of robotizing desirable and socially rewarding work. Design/methodology/approach Testing the holistic stress model, this study examines educational professionals’ stress responses as mediators between robotization expectations and future optimism in life. The study uses survey data on 2,434 education professionals. Findings Respondents entertaining robotization expectations perceived their work to be less meaningful and reported more burnout symptoms than those with no robotization expectations. Future optimism about life was not affected by robotization expectations alone, but meaninglessness and burnout symptoms mediated the relation between expectations of robotization and future optimism. Practical implications Robotization may be viewed as challenging the meaningfulness of educational work by compromising ethical values and interaction. To prevent excess stress among personnel, robotization should be planned together with employees in co-operation negotiations. This implicates the need for co-designing technological changes in organizations especially in the cases of social use of robots. Originality/value Work’s meaningfulness in robotization is a novel research topic and a step toward socially sustainable robotization.
Mobility Analysis of Persons with Disabilities

This study presents the results of the research on travel behaviour for persons with different types of disabilities. Persons with disabilities are a group of participants with specific traffic requirements often not included in traffic research and consequently adequate planning of urban transport. To obtain the data, a home interview was conducted on a representative sample. The paper presents the main results of the research and indicates the specificity of the requirements of this group of users. The results are compared with the results of the same research conducted for the development of the Smart Plan of Novi Sad and the results of similar research abroad. The main goal is to obtain a qualitative and quantitative database of the requirements of this group of users as a basis for creating sustainable urban mobility plans.
Fabrication and characterization of an ultrasensitive acousto-optical cantilever

A cantilever-type silicon device for sensing changes in pressure has been designed, fabricated and characterized. The microfabrication process is based on two-sided etching of silicon-on insulator (SOI) wafers. The rectangular cantilevers are 9.5 µm thick, and cover an area of a few square millimeters. The cantilevers are surrounded by thick and tight frames, since on the three free sides there are only narrow, micrometer sized air gaps between the cantilever and the frame. This design and excellent mechanical properties of single crystal silicon enable sensitive detection of time-dependent gas pressure variations, i.e. acoustic waves. The mechanical properties of the cantilever have been characterized by analyzing its dynamic behavior. The resonance frequency and the mechanical vibrational mode patterns have been determined using finite-element method (FEM) simulations and laser interferometry. These results are found to be in good agreement with each other. Initially this mechanical door-like cantilever was designed to be used in ultra-high sensitivity photoacoustic gas sensing, but it can also be applied quite generally in various kinds of sound wave detection schemes.
Impact Analysis of Large-Scale Lean Manufacturing Initiatives Upon Manufacturing Process Innovation in Irish Companies

Lean manufacturing is a strategic tool that is used to reduce waste and to generally improve the efficiency and competitiveness of many companies and organisations. Many industries that have implemented lean manufacturing have achieved improved performance over time. This dissertation focuses on two medical device companies based in the South of Ireland and their views on the many issues involved in implementing lean in their respective companies. The purpose of this dissertation is to determine the extent to which the main principles of lean manufacturing have been and/or still being carried out in both companies. Also this dissertation aims to establish some of the main issues involved in the execution of those principles over time in each of the processes. In general this dissertation aims to provide a theoretical guide to understanding key concepts of lean manufacturing and the practical issues that occur in the implementation of the methodology in both companies. Semi-structured interviews were carried out in both companies in order to extract the key findings and lessons learned from the implementation of the lean process. The respondents in each company were chosen for their experience and expertise in lean manufacturing and production areas. The research findings indicate that both companies have made some great improvements in terms of the value streams of their respective plants and also in the reduction of waste and inventory. One of the main benefits that both companies have seen in implementing lean initiatives is continuous improvement that delivers sustained value to customers and stakeholders and provides a platform for future business growth. In conclusion, lean manufacturing is considered a strategic tool to help improve the competitive position of an organisation. Although there have been several barriers and obstacles to get by, it can be seen that lean has been a huge success in both organisations involved in this study and the future hopes of each company include lean initiatives to help both plants compete more strongly in their individual markets.
Global evaluation of the precipitable-water-vapor product from MERSI-II (Medium Resolution Spectral Imager) on board the Fengyun-3D satellite

Abstract. Atmospheric water vapor plays a key role in Earth's radiation balance and hydrological cycle, and the precipitable-water-vapor (PWV) product under clear-sky conditions has been routinely provided by the advanced Medium Resolution Spectral Imager (MERSI-II) on board Fengyun-3D since 2018. The global evaluation of the PWV product derived from MERSI-II is performed herein by comparing it with PWV from the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA) based on a total of 462 sites (57 219 matchups) during 2018–2021. The monthly averaged PWV from MERSI-II presents a decreasing distribution of PWV from the tropics to the polar regions. In general, a sound consistency exists between PWV values of MERSI-II and IGRA; their correlation coefficient is 0.951, and their root mean squared error (RMSE) is 0.36 cm. The histogram of mean bias (MB) shows that the MB is concentrated around zero and mostly located within the range from −1.00 cm to 0.50 cm. For most sites, PWV is underestimated with the MB between −0.41 and 0.05 cm. However, there is also an overestimated PWV, which is mostly distributed in the area surrounding the Black Sea and the middle of South America. There is a slight underestimation of MERSI-II PWV for all seasons with the MB value below −0.18 cm, with the bias being the largest magnitude in summer. This is probably due to the presence of thin clouds, which weaken the radiation signal observed by the satellite. We also find that there is a larger bias in the Southern Hemisphere, with a large value and significant variation in PWV. The binned error analysis revealed that the MB and RMSE increased with the increasing value of PWV, but there is an overestimation for PWV smaller than 1.0 cm. In addition, there is a higher MB and RMSE with a larger spatial distance between the footprint of the satellite and the IGRA station, and the RMSE ranged from 0.33 to 0.47 cm. There is a notable dependency on solar zenith angle of the deviations between MERSI-II and IGRA PWV products.
Identification and Assessment of Risks to Successful Exploitation of ERP Systems in China

The research presented in this paper aims at identifying, assessing and discussing potential risks that Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOE) may encounter when using, maintaining and enhancing their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in the post-implementation phase. The need for the research emerged from the growing awareness in the filed that there is a lack of studies addressing the organisational exploitation of ERPs after the implementation stage. The study adopted a deductive research design based on a cross-sectional questionnaire survey. This survey was preceded by a Political, Economic, Social and Technological (PEST) analysis and a set of Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat (SWOT) analyses. The PEST and SWOT analyses enabled the researchers to narrow the scope of the study and identify an appropriate industry sector and region to base the study on, namely the Electronic and Telecommunication Manufacturing Sector in Guangdong province. The questionnaire design was based on a theoretical risk ontology drawn from a systematic literature review process, which consisted of 40 predefined ERP risks. The questionnaire was sent to the operational managers and the information technology (IT) managers of 118 SOEs in Guangdong in China, from which 42 (84 questionnaires) valid and usable responses were received and analysed. The findings identified a set of 16 top prioritised ERP exploitation risks, which concentrate around operational, analytical, organisation-wide and technical issues. The study also explored and identified 10 correlations between the risks identified.
Large-scale Wireless Local-area Network Measurement and Privacy Analysis

The edge of the Internet is increasingly becoming wireless. Understanding the wireless edge is therefore important for understanding the performance and security aspects of the Internet experience. This need is especially necessary for enterprise-wide wireless local-area networks (WLANs) as organizations increasingly depend on WLANs for mission-critical tasks. To study a live production WLAN, especially a large-scale network, is a difficult undertaking. Two fundamental difficulties involved are (1) building a scalable network measurement infrastructure to collect traces from a large-scale production WLAN, and (2) preserving user privacy while sharing these collected traces to the network research community. In this dissertation, we present our experience in designing and implementing one of the largest distributed WLAN measurement systems in the United States, the Dartmouth Internet Security Testbed (DIST), with a particular focus on our solutions to the challenges of efficiency, scalability, and security. We also present an extensive evaluation of the DIST system. To understand the severity of some potential trace-sharing risks for an enterprise-wide large-scale wireless network, we conduct privacy analysis on one kind of wireless network traces, a user-association log, collected from a large-scale WLAN. We introduce a machine-learning based approach that can extract and quantify sensitive information from a user-association log, even though it is sanitized. Finally, we present a case study that evaluates the tradeoff between utility and privacy on WLAN trace sanitization.
Human thermal sensation and comfort in transient and non-uniform thermal environments

Most existing thermal comfort models are only applicable only in uniform, steady-state thermal environments. This thesis presents results from 109 human subject tests that were performed under non-uniform and transient conditions in the UC Berkeley Controlled Environmental Chamber. In these tests, local body surfaces of the subjects were independently heated or cooled while the rest of the body was exposed to a warm, neutral or cool environment. Skin temperatures, core temperature, thermal sensation and comfort responses were collected at one- to three-minute intervals. Based on these tests, we have developed predictive models of local and overall thermal sensation and comfort: Local thermal sensation for 19 body parts Local thermal comfort model for 19 body parts Overall sensation model Overall comfort model A separate set of tests was carried out in an automobile in a climate-controlled wind tunnel at the Delphi Harrison facility in Lockport, NY. These tests simulated conditions found in vehicles during both hot and cold weather. The subjects’ body temperatures, thermal sensation and thermal comfort were measured similarly to those in the UCB chamber tests. The results of the Delphi tests were primarily used for model validation. The validation results show that the models predicted the actual sensation and comfort votes well. The models will be useful for designing and evaluating non-uniform and transient environments in buildings, vehicles, and outdoors.
Cable vibrations at Dubrovnik bridge

The only cable-stayed bridge in Croatia, the Dubrovnik bridge, was opened for traffic in 2002. The main cable-stayed bridge with composite superstructure is jointed in span to the prestressed concrete approach bridge by a hinge-type connection. The bridge has experienced vibrations of cable stays under certain wind conditions, as with many other cable-stayed bridges around the world. After a short review of results of wind tunnel tests and various numerical analyses, field observations of cable-stay vibrations are highlighted. Only after extremely violent movements of cable stays and the superstructure under a heavy, damp snowstorm occurred, resulting in substantial damage, was it decided to apply vibration mitigation measures. Adjustable cable dampers, based on the latest MagnetoRheological (MR) technology, were installed on the bridge to raise low structural damping of the most affected cable stays.
Stability and asymptotic properties of dissipative evolution equations coupled with ordinary differential equations

In this paper, we obtain some stability results of systems corresponding to the coupling between a dissipative evolution equation (set in an infinite dimensional space) and an ordinary differential equation. Many problems from physics enter in this framework, let us mention dispersive medium models, generalized telegraph equations, Volterra integro-differential equations, and cascades of ODE-hyperbolic systems. The goal is to find sufficient (and necessary) conditions on the involved operators that garantee stability properties of the system, i.e., strong stability, exponential stability or polynomial one. We also illustrate our abstract statements for different concrete examples, where new results are achieved.
Non-random organization of flux control mechanisms in yeast central metabolic pathways

Metabolic flux can be regulated by a variety of different mechanisms, but the organization of these mechanisms within the metabolic network has remained unknown. Here we test the hypothesis that flux control mechanisms are not distributed randomly in the metabolic network, but rather organized according to pathway. Combining proteomics, phosphoproteomics, and metabolic modeling, we report the largest collection of flux-enzyme-phosphoenzyme relationships to date in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In support of the hypothesis, we show that (i) amino acid metabolic pathways are predominantly regulated by enzyme abundance stemming from transcriptional regulation; (ii) upper glycolysis and associated pathways, by inactivating enzyme phosphorylation; (iii) lower glycolysis and associated pathways, by activating enzyme phosphorylation; and (iv) glycolipid/glycophospholipid pathways, by a combination of enzyme phosphorylation and metabolic compartmentalization. We delineate the evolutionary history for the observed organization of flux control mechanisms in yeast central metabolic pathways, furthering our understanding of the regulation of metabolism and its evolution.
Long-term outcomes after peri-implantitis treatment and their influencing factors: a retrospective study

Purpose This study aimed to determine the long-term outcomes after peri-implantitis treatment and the factors affecting these outcomes. Methods This study included 92 implants in 45 patients who had been treated for peri-implantitis. Clinical data on the characteristics of patients and their implants were collected retrospectively. The change in the marginal bone level was calculated by comparing the baseline and the most recently obtained (≥3 years after treatment) radiographs. The primary outcome variable was progression of the disease after the treatment at the implant level, which was defined as further bone loss of >1.0 mm or implant removal. A 2-level binary logistic regression analysis was used to identify the effects of possible factors on the primary outcome. Results The mean age of the patients was 58.7 years (range, 22–79 years). Progression of peri-implantitis was observed in 64.4% of patients and 63.0% of implants during an observation period of 6.4±2.7 years (mean±standard deviation). Multivariable regression analysis revealed that full compliance to recall visits (P=0.019), smoking (P=0.023), placement of 4 or more implants (P=0.022), and marginal bone loss ≥4 mm at baseline (P=0.027) significantly influenced the treatment outcome. Conclusions The long-term results of peri-implantitis treatment can be improved by full compliance on the part of patients, whereas it is impaired by smoking, placement of multiple implants, and severe bone loss at baseline. Encouraging patients to stop smoking and to receive supportive care is recommended before treatment.