Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Labouring for leisure? Achieving work-life balance through compressed working weeks

Abstract Flexible work practices spreading work times across the entire week have reduced the time to engage in leisure activities and for some have compounded the problem of a lack of defined break between work weeks. This study examines time spent outside of the workplace through a multiple case study of working time and leisure in the construction industry. A framework of synchronous leisure is used to examine the interplay of work and non-work arrangements. The effects of changing work arrangements to deliver a longer break between working weeks and the consequent impact on leisure activities are analysed. Interviews and focus groups across four construction sites revealed that while leisure is important to relieve fatigue and overwork, a work schedule allowing a long break between working weeks, specifically on a weekend, enables workers to achieve synchronous time, particularly with family, and improves work-life balance satisfaction. It was found that a well-defined break across a weekend also offers the opportunity to synchronize schedules with others to spend time away on short breaks.
Efficacy and cultural appropriateness of psychosocial interventions for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander paediatric burn patients and caregivers: a systematic review.

Background: Paediatric burns are highly painful and traumatising injuries that are overrepresented among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Paediatric burn patients’ pain remains poorly managed by pharmacological interventions, leading to increased anxiety, distress and trauma in patients and their caregivers. Non-pharmacological psychosocial interventions have been suggested as effective in reducing pain and psychological morbidities among paediatric burn patients and their caregivers; however, the degree of effectiveness and appropriateness for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is unclear. Methods: A non-date restricted systematic review was conducted through four databases. Studies published in English assessing psychosocial interventions on paediatric burn patients’ physical pain along with theirs and/or their caregiver’s anxiety, distress, or trauma symptoms were identified and included in this review. Included studies were assessed for their ability to reduce one of the outcomes of interests and for their reflection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ perspectives of health. Results: Of the 3,178 identified references, 17 were eligible. These include distraction based techniques (n=8), hypnosis/familiar imagery (n=2), therapeutic approaches (n=4), and patient preparation/procedural control (n=3). Distraction techniques incorporating procedural preparation reduced pain, while discharge preparation and increased ‘patient control’ reduced patient and caregiver anxiety; and internet based Cognitive Behaviour Therapy reduced short-term but not long-term post-traumatic stress symptoms. No interventions reflected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ perspectives of health; and few targeted caregivers and focused on reducing their symptoms. Conclusions: The development and assessment of psychosocial interventions to appropriately meet the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander paediatric burn patients is required.
Factors leading to work stress and its impact on employee performance. A case study of Reliance Fresh, India

Research Objectives 1)To investigate factors that leads to work stress among employees of Reliance Fresh 2)To assess the mental and physical dangers and impact of stress on employees of Reliance Fresh 3)To identify the impact of stress on employees performance at Reliance Fresh 4)To assess the overall impact of work stress on organizational productivity 5)To make recommendations about stress management to Reliance Fresh for future considerations
Chresta artemisiifolia (Vernonieae, Asteraceae), a new endangered species from a recently created protected area in the Brazilian Caatinga

Chresta artemisiifolia, a new species from northern Bahia, is described and illustrated. This species occurs on rock outcrops amidst the dry Caatinga domain, and is morphologically related with C. harleyi, C. hatschbachii, C. martii and C. subverticillata. It is endemic to a region known as Boqueirão da Onça, where a national park has recently been created. We hope that the description of this taxon contributes to the efforts in the preservation of this area.
A 16S ribosomal RNA TaqMan real-time reverse transcription PCR for specific detection of Salmonella in blood

Background : The Gram -negative bacterium Salmonella enterica is an important human pathogen causing a huge public health burden worldwide. Reference diagnosis of Salmonella bloodstream infections (BSI) in patients is based on in vitro blood culture followed by biochemical and serotype identification. We have developed a TaqMan real-time reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) assay for the specific detection of Salmonella 16S rRNA molecules. The specificity was confirmed on a bacterial test panel grown in 5 ml BBL TM culture medium broth, comprising of six Salmonella enterica serovars (Typhi, Paratyphi A, Typhimurium, Enteritidis, Heidelberg and Weltevreden) and 10 non- Salmonella bacterial species that are known to cause human BSI.Results : The limit of detection (LOD) of the assay in serial dilutions of purified Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium RNA was 40 pg RNA per reaction, corresponding to ~2500 colony forming units (CFU). When applied directly in blood experimentally spiked with Salmonella Typhimurium, the assay showed an LOD of 10 5 CFU/ml which is 100x more sensitive than 16S rDNA detection using the same primers and probe set. In 10 ml whole blood spiked with Salmonella Typhimurium at 5 CFU/ml followed by incubation in an automatic blood culture instrument, the assay detected 16S rRNA after 10 hours incubation compared to 12 hours for 16S rDNA detection.Conclusion : Although prior in vitro incubation of blood samples is required, we here delivered the proof-of-concept of specific detection of Salmonella in clinical specimens by targeting its 16S rRNA molecule.
A Bibliometric Study on Innovation and Firm Performance: Building a Research Framework

In response to a rising interest in the connection between innovation and firm performance, this paper examines the body of research on this link and takes a closer look into the influences on innovation, firm performance or both. The basis for this study is a bibliometric analysis of 3,462 scientific publications. We identified 27 innovation domains with an influence on firm performance, showed the rising interest in the topic and found that most types of innovation have a positive impact on firm performance. We provide an overview of which indicators researchers used to measure innovativeness and firm performance and what methods they used to establish the link between the two. Additionally, we stress the importance of sustainable innovation and show that these also positively influence firm performance. In the end, we structure all research fronts into three different groups and based on that, develop a framework that visualizes research on innovation and firm performances.
A hybrid differential evolution for multi-objective optimisation problems

In order to effectively use differential evolution (DE) to solve multi-objective optimisation problems, it is necessary to consider how to ensure the search ability of DE. However, the search ability of DE is affected by related parameters and mutation mode. Based on decomposition, this paper proposed a hybrid differential evolution (HMODE/D) for solving multi-objective optimisation problems. First, when generation satisfies a certain condition, the local optimum is selected using the information of neighbour individual objective values to produce mutation offspring. Then, the heuristic crossover operator is established by using a uniform design method to produce better crossover individuals. Next, an external archive is set for each individual to store the individuals beneficial to the optimisation objective functions. Then, the individual is selected from the external archive to generate mutation offspring. In addition, considering that the performance of DE is determined by parameters, using the relevant information of the objective space function value, the self-adaptive adjustment strategy is adopted for the relevant parameter. Finally, a series of test functions with 5-, 10-, and 15-objectives are performed in the experiments to evaluate the superiority of HMODE/D. The results show that HMODE/D can solve the multi-objective optimisation problem very well.
Graduating Professional Engineers and Management Skills - are they adequate for the workplace?

This paper considers the notion that for the majority of engineers, the development of managerial skills will be essential and cannot be 'picked up on the job'. Engineers increasingly need to understand the interactions between design, quality, sustainability product planning, organisation, management of people, team work and finance. This paper considers the need to develop managerial skills and will discuss the development of a survey to be carried out in an Australian context. The survey will cover a range of firms and governmental bodies that employ graduate engineers. The questions will cover a wide range of non-engineering skills that could be expected of engineers within the first five years of the commencement of their careers. The two disciplines, Engineering and Management have enjoyed a rather difficult relationship for some time. Each needs the other because complex engineering tasks cannot be carried out in an increasingly challenging business environment without an integrated management focus. Engineers are finding they need to take on more complex tasks which include very significant managerial issues. Most engineering faculties have attempted to teach managerial skills in their engineering curricula. However, management education has often been viewed as secondary to technical skills and hence does not encompass the integrated range of skills needed. This has not motivated students to become interested in and committed to the management aspects of their future profession with the result that management education for engineers remains an enigma. This paper considers some of the contemporary literature on teaching management to engineers. Some ideas are discussed outlining possible research which will be carried out and reported by the authors, aimed at documenting current shortcomings with a view to developing a more effective future strategy for engineering management education.
Wirksamkeit von Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen in Deutschland : empirische Befunde mikroökonometrischer Analysen (Effectiveness of job creation schemes in Germany : empirical findings from microeconometric studies)

"In a number of empirical studies, the effects of job creation schemes for participating individuals in Germany were analysed from various standpoints by means of microeconometric evaluation. Based on the findings of those studies, we assess the effectiveness of the programmes with regard to the aims stipulated by law. For this purpose the empirical results of the various studies are summarised and discussed critically. Two current studies are presented in particular detail that analyse the effects of job creation schemes using a data set which is so far unique as regards scope and information content. In the assessment it becomes clear that the studies are orientated towards the integration objective of job creation schemes. Moreover, it is clearly ascertainable that the evaluation of job creation schemes has to consider heterogeneity. For instance the measures are useful for some explicit target groups, whilst they reduce the labour market prospects of the majority of participants. " (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
Employing static excitation control and tie line reactance to stabilize wind turbine generators

This study presents an analytical representation of a wind turbine generator which employs blade pitch angle feedback control. A mathematical model is formulated. With the functioning MOD-0 wind turbine serving as a practical case study, results of computer simulations of the model as applied to the problem of dynamic stability at rated load are presented. The effect of the tower shadow is included in the input to the system. Different configurations of the drive train, and optimal values of the tie line reactance are used in the simulations. Computer results reveal that a static excitation control system coupled with optimal values of the tie line reactance will effectively reduce oscillations of the power output, without the use of a slip clutch.
Short-Term Load Forecasting for a Captive Power Plant Using Artificial Neural Network

The irregularity of Indian grid system increases, with increase in the power demand. The quality of power supplied by the power grid is also poor due to continuous variation in frequency and voltage. To overcome this problem of power deficit, Captive Power Plants installed capacity has grown at a faster rate. Here short term load forecasting of Yara Fertilizers India Private limited installed at Babrala, Uttar Pradesh is performed using multi-layer feed-forward Neural network in MATLAB. The algorithm used is a Levenberg Marquardt algorithm. However, the training and results from ANN are very fast and accurate. Inputs given to the Neural Network are time, ambient air temperature from the compressor, cool air temperature at the compressor and IGV opening. The need, benefits and growth of CPP in India and use of ANN for short term load forecasting of CPP has been explained in detail in the paper.
Process optimization and effect of thermal, alkaline, H2O2 Oxidation and combination pre-treatment of sewage sludge on solubilisation and anaerobic digestion

Background This study investigated the feasibility of enhancing anaerobic digestion of sewage sludge with triple, dual, and individual pre-treatment of waste activated sludge with heat, alkalinity, and hydrogen peroxide. These pre-treatments disrupt sludge flocs, organisms’ cell walls, extracellular polymeric substance, and intracellular organic matter, which increase biodegradability and hydrolysis rate of organic matter. In addition, the influence of various variables on methane production was analyzed using the response surface methodology with the quadratic model. Eventually, an optimized temperature and chemical concentration for the highest methane production and lowest chemical usage is suggested.Results The highest amount of methane production was obtained from the sludge pretreated with triple pretreatment (heat (90°C), alkalinity (pH=12), and hydrogen peroxide (30 mg H2O2 /g TS)), which had better performance with 96% higher than that of the control sample with Temperature of 25°C approximately and alkalinity of pH=8. Response surface methodology with the quadratic model was also used for analyzing the influence of temperature, pH, and hydrogen peroxide concentration on anaerobic digestion efficiency. It was revealed that the optimized temperature, pH, and hydrogen peroxide concentration for maximizing methane production and solubilisation of organic matter and minimizing thermal energy and chemical additives of the pre-treatments are 83.2°C, pH=10.6 and 34.8 mg H2O2 /g TS, respectively, has the desirability of 0.67. Conclusion This study reveals that triple pre-treatment of waste activated sludge performs better than dual and individual pre-treatment, Respectively. The enhanced methane production can be used as an important renewable energy resource in wastewater treatment plants for producing electrical and thermal energy. Furthermore, exploiting a higher amount of methane in the anaerobic digestion stage decreases methane emission to the atmosphere in dewatering and landfilling stages and enhances the quality of digested sludge, bringing about environmentally friendly and economically attractive sewage sludge treatment process.
Combating Phone Harassment through VoiceAnalysis Filtration of Anonymous Reports

Given the increasing popularity of smartphones as all-in-one computing devices for corporate work and everyday personal use, it is no wonder that mobile devices have become the most appealing attack surface for today's cyber criminals. In that case obscene or harassing phone calls can be one of the most stressful and frightening invasions of privacy a person experiences. Thus Mobile security has become increasingly important in mobile computing. There exist various applications that block spam calls through the SIM card numbers by establishing a spam database which identities the source of income calls. But unfortunately, their effciency of work is not up to the mark, since its usually pointless to track and block the SIM card number, as the number of spam callers is constantly changed. Considering this point, we are presenting a new concept in which frauds will be recognized through their vocals, even in a noisy environment, with a few seconds of speech, as one can change his number several times but can't change his voice. Here we have used several algorithms and techniques, such as speaker verification, speaker identification, forensic speaker recognition (FSR), spectrogram masking, voice ltering, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coeffcient (MFCC) and a combination of Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Moreover, this system doesn't require any kind of personal information of the users. In this consequence, safety issues also remain in force. Findings of this study will be useful for lawyers, law enforcement agencies, and judges in the courts to recognize their suspects.
Coping With Misbehavior in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

In this work, we address the question of how to enable a system to operate despite the presence of misbehavior. Specifically, in a mobile ad-hoc network, how can we keep the network functional for normal nodes when other nodes do not route and forward correctly? Node misbehavior due to selfish or malicious reasons or faulty nodes can significantly degrade the performance of mobile ad-hoc networks. Existing approaches such as economic incentives or secure routing by cryptographic means alleviate some of the problems, but not all. For instance, nodes can still forward packets on bogus routes. We propose a protocol called CONFIDANT (Cooperation Of Nodes — Fairness In Dynamic Ad-hoc NeTworks) to cope with misbehavior. It enables nodes to detect misbehavior by first-hand observation and use of second-hand information provided by other nodes. The view a node has about the behavior of another node is captured in a reputation system, which is used to classify nodes as misbehaving or normal. Once a misbehaving node is detected, it is isolated from the network. Reputation systems can, however, be tricked by the spread of false reputation ratings, be it false accusations or false praise. Simple solutions such as exclusively relying on one's own direct observations have drawbacks, as they do not make use of all the information available. To solve this problem, we propose a fully distributed reputation system that can cope with false information and effectively use second-hand information in a safe way. Our approach is based on a modified Bayesian estimation and classification procedure. In our approach, each node maintains a reputation rating and a trust rating about all other nodes it cares about. Reputation ratings capture the quality of the behavior of a node as an actor in the network performing routing and forwarding tasks. From time to time first-hand reputation information is exchanged with others; using a modified Bayesian approach we designed, second-hand reputation information is only accepted if it is compatible with the current reputation rating. Reputation ratings are only slightly modified by accepted information. Trust ratings capture the quality of a node as an actor in the reputation system and reflect whether the reported first hand information summaries published by node are likely to be true. Trust ratings are updated based on the compatibility of second-hand reputation information with prior reputation ratings. We enable node redemption and prevent the sudden exploitation of good reputation built over time by introducing reputation fading. Data is entirely distributed, the reputation and trust value of a node is the collection of ratings maintained by others. We use simulation to evaluate and demonstrate the performance. We found that CONFIDANT can keep the network performance high even when up to half of the network population misbehaves. We show that our approach of using second-hand information significantly speeds up the detection of misbehaving nodes while keeping the number of false positives and negatives negligibly low.
Cost-benefit analysis of conservation programs

A carefully planned and implemented conservation program can reduce water consumption by 10-30 percent. This reduction will help meet demand, may postpone the construction of capital facilities, and can also help alleviate problems such as overburdened wastewater treatment facilities. For a conservation program to gain acceptance and support, it must be thoroughly analyzed. This article describes a technique to calculate the water savings, benefits, and costs of water conservation programs.
Global sensitivity analysis of a pure steam dropwise condensation heat transfer model

Established heat transfer models for dropwise condensation (DWC) consider wetting behavior, surface structure and nucleation dynamics to calculate the heat flux. However, model results often deviate from experiments, in part due to uncertainties of the model input parameters. In this study, we apply quantitative sensitivity analysis to a pure steam DWC heat transfer model in order to attribute the variation of the model result to its input parameters. Four scenarios with different variations of the model parameters are discussed and sensitivity coefficients for each parameter are calculated. Our results show a high sensitivity of the model result towards the coating thickness, the contact angle and the nucleation site density, underlining the need to accurately determine these parameters in DWC experiments.
Hybrid Bridges in Texas

To address the high cost and low stiffness of fiber-reinforced polymers (FRP) in infrastructure applications, the Texas Department of Transportation developed a testing program to combine FRP beams and conventionally reinforced concrete in a hybrid system. This system discussed in this paper uses glass FRP beams with a conventionally reinforced concrete deck and can effectively sustain traffic loading by means of composite action. One promising application of structural beams made from FRP is for short-span bridges near the Gulf Coast of Texas. The paper describes the design and construction of a replacement bridge that was designed based on experimental work from the testing program. The research demonstrates that composite action from a reinforced concrete deck can help overcome deflection limitations inherent in FRP beams with traditional cross sections.