bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Performance improvement of large area GaN MSM photodiode with thin AlGaN surface layer
Authors: Chuah L.S. , Hassan Z. , Abu Hassan H. 
Published: June 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose a new structure of GaN based metal‐semiconductor‐metal (MSM) photodiode, in which a thin unintentionally doped n‐type AlGaN layer is added on the conventional GaN on Si(111) device structure.Design/methodology/approachA thin Al0.50Ga0.50N cap layer of 100 nm was incorporated in GaN MSM photodiode to enhance the effective Schottky barrier height and reduce the dark current. When the incident light with photon energy higher than the band edge of GaN but lower than the bandgap of AlGaN illuminates the front face of photodiode, the light can be transparent in the top AlGaN layer and is only absorbed by the GaN layer. As a result, the photogenerated carriers in the GaN layer would be influenced by the interface states of AlGaN/GaN. It is known that the density of the interface states is normally lower than that of surface states, so the recombination of photogenerated electron‐hole pairs will be reduced. A barrier height of 0.54 eV for normal GaN MSM photodiode was increased to the effective barrier height of 0.60 eV.FindingsThe resulting MSM photodiode shows a dark current of as low as 8.0×10−4 A at 5 V bias, which is about two orders of magnitude lower than that of normal GaN (1.0×10−2 A at 5 V bias) MSM photodiode.Originality/valueThe paper reports on barrier enhanced GaN Schottky MSM photodiode using a thin AlGaN cap layer. AlGaN cap layers were found to effectively suppress the leakage current of the GaN Schottky MSM photodiode, resulting in improved device characteristics. The dark current for the Schottky contact with the AlGaN cap layer was shown to be about about two orders of magnitude smaller than that of conventional GaN Schottky MSM photodiode.
Zinc oxide microrods prepared by sol‐gel immerse technique
Authors: Ashikin Kamaruddin Sharul , Zainizan Sahdan Mohd , Chan Kah‐Yoong , Rusop Mohamad , Saim Hashim 
Published: June 2010

PurposeZinc oxide (ZnO) is an emerging optoelectronic material due to its various functional behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to report on the fabrication and characterizations of ZnO microrods.Design/methodology/approachZnO microrods were synthesized using sol‐gel immerse technique on oxidized silicon (Si) substrates. The oxidized Si substrates were immersed in ZnO aqueous solution for different times ranging from three to five hours. The surface morphologies of the ZnO microrods were examined using scanning electron microscope (SEM). In order to investigate the structural properties, the ZnO microrods were measured using an X‐ray diffractometer (XRD). The optical properties were measured using a photoluminescence (PL) spectrophotometer.FindingsCharacterization from SEM shows an enhanced growth of the ZnO rods with increasing immerse time. XRD characterizations demonstrate sharp and narrow diffraction peaks peculiar to ZnO, which implies that the rod is of high crystallinity. Based on the PL spectra, long immerse time results in the high peak in the UV region.Originality/valueThis paper concludes that the immerse time exerts an influence on the ZnO microrods. A longer immerse duration is preferred in the fabrication of the ZnO microrod, which is considered an emerging material for many advanced electronic and optoelectronic applications.
Flexible working times: effects on employees' exhaustion, work‐nonwork conflict and job performance
Authors: Kattenbach Ralph , Demerouti Evangelia , Nachreiner Friedhelm 
Published: June 2010

PurposeThe aim of this study is to provide a useful conceptualization of flexible working times and to examine the relationships between flexible working times and employees' well‐being and peer ratings of performance. It is supposed that an employee's “time‐autonomy” would be positively related to performance and well‐being. On the contrary, an unfavorable effect of “time restriction” on well‐being is expected.Design/methodology/approachA questionnaire‐study was conducted among 167 German employees from 17 different organizations. Information about in‐role and extra‐role performance was also obtained via peer evaluations.FindingsThe data support a two‐factor structure of flexibility. The time restriction factor adds to the degree of exhaustion and the work‐nonwork conflict, while time autonomy diminishes these outcome variables. However, the flexibility dimensions are unrelated to performance.Originality/valueThe multidimensional conceptualization of flexibility allows for the detection of advantages and drawbacks regarding the effectiveness of flexible working time models.
Are Ghanaian MFIs' performance associated with corporate governance?
Authors: Aboagye Anthony Q. , Otieku James 
Published: June 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to determine whether in Ghana, corporate governance, outreach to clients, reduced dependence on subsidies and use of modern technology (together called corporate governance plus) are associated with the performance of rural and community banks (RCBs), which are microfinance institutions (MFI), in the context of newly adopted codes of conduct and regulations, ownership rules and quality of management.Design/methodology/approachA total of 30 randomly sampled RCBs were categorized into four groups based on analysis of several dimensions of financial performance. Next, RCBs were again categorized into four groups based on their corporate governance plus. A chi‐squared test of independence between the two groupings was performed.FindingsThe authors found no association between RCBs' categories based on corporate governance plus and their categories based on financial performance.Practical implicationTo enhance performance, corporate governance plus must impact financial performance as documented by OECD. Laws and codes of conduct recently designed to guide the conduct of business should be allowed to work. The restriction on individual ownership of RCBs to 30 percent should be relaxed. And RCBs should pay attention to developing the competencies of their boards and senior management.Originality/valueThis is the first formal test of the association between state of corporate governance plus and financial performance of microfinance institutions in Ghana.
Turbulent times require a greater focus on board effectiveness
Authors: Petri Tobias , Soublin Regis 
Published: June 2010

PurposeThis paper seeks to explore the necessary considerations in assessing and improving board performance in a Fortune 50 organization facing complex strategy execution challenges.Design/methodology/approachFace‐to‐face interviews with all non‐executive directors, the CEO and other senior executives were used to conduct a detailed evaluation of board performance, so as to highlight any potential areas of execution or governance risk and underperformance arising from gaps in competence, process or culture. In addition, analysis was carried out of overall board effectiveness and of individual board member contribution using detailed 360‐degree and aggregate questionnaires completed by board and key members of the management team. Further insight was gained from detailed benchmarking against global peers.FindingsThe work highlights that for a board to be a valuable differentiating asset to a company it is vital to balance the governance and oversight role of the board with a supportive and partnering relationship with executive management. This requires that a board should possess the necessary depth and breadth of experience to gain the respect and trust of the executive; that the chairman and CEO should define a contract that describes the nature of the relationship and the division of responsibilities between executive and board; and that the chairman should strive to create an open and challenging dynamic and constantly seek to improve board behaviors and interaction.Practical implicationsIt sets out clear objectives in building boards with complementary skill sets and experience and in embedding a culture of continuous self‐assessment and improvement.Originality/valueStrategic HR practitioners are encouraged to consider the value of the board to management as a differentiating asset for the organization.
Fostering employee innovation: leveraging your “ground level” creative capital
Authors: Self Dennis R. , Bandow Diane , Schraeder Mike 
Published: June 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to argue for the importance of allowing operational or ground level employees to participate in the process of organizational innovation.Design/methodology/approachThe paper looks at various examples of employee innovation. It suggests five ways of enacting active empowerment of employees.FindingsParticipation of operational or ground level employees in the innovation process can be facilitated through active empowerment. Active empowerment can be fostered through sharing accurate information, active listening, encouraging employees to take risks, using failure as a learning tool, and fostering mutual trust.Practical implicationsOrganizations can enhance the overall innovation process by empowering employees to participate in the process. This approach leverages creative resources that may, otherwise, remain untapped.Social implicationsLeveraging employee innovation through active empowerment will not only enhance the overall organization, but will also encourage employee learning, thus collectively contributing to the workforce within society.Originality/valueA discussion on the importance of allowing employees to participate in the process of innovation lead to the identification of five suggestions for enacting active empowerment.
Index futures trading, margin trading and securities lending in China finally launched
Authors: Dare Bryan Paget , TieCheng Yang , Phua Patrick 
Published: June 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the trial implementation of stock index futures trading, margin trading and securities lending in China – approved in principle by the State Council and confirmed by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) on January 8, 2010.Design/methodology/approachThe paper describes various preliminary rules and regulations for stock index futures trading, margin trading, and securities lending that have been issued starting in 2006 and the latest regulatory developments, requirements and timing related to the trial implementation.FindingsThe stringent requirements imposed by CSRC highlights its cautious approach to the trial process for margin trading and securities lending. By defining “securities lending” as the borrowing of securities and the subsequent sale of those securities in the 2006 Trial Administrative Measures, the regulator appears to leave open the possibility of short selling.Practical implicationsThe Announcement has been warmly welcomed by market participants because index futures trading, margin trading and securities lending are expected to significantly add to the Chinese equity market's liquidity and price discovery process in the long run.Originality/valueThe paper provides practical guidance from experienced securities lawyers.
SEC amends the Advisers Act custody rule
Authors: Forbes Jessica , Molle Mark 
Published: June 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explain amendments to the Investment Advisers Act custody rule, that recently became effective, which are intended to provide advisory clients with additional protections when a registered investment adviser has access to client assets.Design/methodology/approachThe paper explains changes to the custody rule related to the definition of custody, delivery of account statements, surprise examinations, exemptions related to pooled investment vehicles, required internal control reports for advisers who maintain client assets themselves, the surprise examination requirement for privately offered securities, and amendments to Form ADV. It also explains effective and compliance dates.FindingsAdvisers should consider how to revise and tailor their written policies and procedures relating to custody; whether to continue the use of affiliated custodians; how to allocate the expenses for compliance with the new requirements, including accountants' fees for surprise examinations, internal control reports and liquidation audits; and whether to amend fund disclosure documents or separate account agreements to address expense allocation or other issues arising as a result of the new requirements.Originality/valueThe paper provides practical guidance from experienced securities lawyers.
Efficient evaluation of relevance feedback algorithms for XML content‐based retrieval systems
Authors: Sayed Awny , Radwan Ahmed A. , Abdallah Mohamed M. 
Published: June 2010

PurposeInformation retrieval (IR) and feedback in Extensible Markup Language (XML) are rather new fields for researchers; natural questions arise, such as: how good are the feedback algorithms in XML IR? Can they be evaluated with standard evaluation tools? Even though some evaluation methods have been proposed in the literature it is still not clear yet which of them are applicable in the context of XML IR, and which metrics they can be combined with to assess the quality of XML retrieval algorithms that use feedback. This paper aims to elaborate on this.Design/methodology/approachThe efficient evaluation of relevance feedback (RF) algorithms for XML collection posed interesting challenges on the IR and database researchers. The system based on the keyword‐based queries whether on the main query or in the RF processing instead of the XPath and structure query languages which were more complex. For measuring the efficiency of the system, the paper used the extended RF algorithms (residual collection and freezeTop) for evaluating the performance of the XML search engines. Compared to previous approaches, the paper aimed at removing the effect of the results for which the system has knowledge about their relevance, and at measuring the improvement on unseen relevant elements. The paper implemented the proposed evaluation methodologies by extending a standard evaluation tool with a module capable of assessing feedback algorithms for a specific set of metrics.FindingsIn this paper, the authors create an efficient XML retrieval system that is based on a query refinement by making a feedback processing and extending the main query terms with new terms mostly related to the main terms.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors are working on more efficient retrieval algorithms to get the top‐ten results related to the submitted query. Moreover, they plan to extend the system to handle complex XPath expression.Originality/valueThis paper presents an efficient evaluation of RF algorithms for XML collection retrieval system.
Efficient data representation for XML in peer‐based systems
Authors: Tripney Brian , Foley Christopher , Gourlay Richard , Wilson John 
Published: June 2010

PurposeNew directions in the provision of end‐user computing experiences mean that the best way to share data between small mobile computing devices needs to be determined. Partitioning large structures so that they can be shared efficiently provides a basis for data‐intensive applications on such platforms. The partitioned structure can be compressed using dictionary‐based approaches and then directly queried without firstly decompressing the whole structure.Design/methodology/approachThe paper describes an architecture for partitioning XML into structural and dictionary elements and the subsequent manipulation of the dictionary elements to make the best use of available space.FindingsThe results indicate that considerable savings are available by removing duplicate dictionaries. The paper also identifies the most effective strategy for defining dictionary scope.Research limitations/implicationsThis evaluation is based on a range of benchmark XML structures and the approach to minimising dictionary size shows benefit in the majority of these. Where structures are small and regular, the benefits of efficient dictionary representation are lost. The authors' future research now focuses on heuristics for further partitioning of structural elements.Practical implicationsMobile applications that need access to large data collections will benefit from the findings of this research. Traditional client/server architectures are not suited to dealing with high volume demands from a multitude of small mobile devices. Peer data sharing provides a more scalable solution and the experiments that the paper describes demonstrate the most effective way of sharing data in this context.Social implicationsMany services are available via smartphone devices but users are wary of exploiting the full potential because of the need to conserve battery power. The approach mitigates this challenge and consequently expands the potential for users to benefit from mobile information systems. This will have impact in areas such as advertising, entertainment and education but will depend on the acceptability of file sharing being extended from the desktop to the mobile environment.Originality/valueThe original work characterises the most effective way of sharing large data sets between small mobile devices. This will save battery power on devices such as smartphones, thus providing benefits to users of such devices.
Parallel holistic twig joins on a multi‐core system
Authors: Machdi Imam , Amagasa Toshiyuki , Kitagawa Hiroyuki 
Published: June 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose general parallelism techniques for holistic twig join algorithms to process queries against Extensible Markup Language (XML) databases on a multi‐core system.Design/methodology/approachThe parallelism techniques comprised data and task parallelism. As for data parallelism, the paper adopted the stream‐based partitioning for XML to partition XML data as the basis of parallelism on multiple CPU cores. The XML data partitioning was performed in two levels. The first level was to create buckets for creating data independence and balancing loads among CPU cores; each bucket was assigned onto a CPU core. Within each bucket, the second level of XML data partitioning was performed to create finer partitions for providing finer parallelism. Each CPU core performed the holistic twig join algorithm on each finer partition of its own in parallel with other CPU cores. In task parallelism, the holistic twig join algorithm was decomposed into two main tasks, which were pipelined to create parallelism. The first task adopted the data parallelism technique and their outputs were transferred to the second task periodically. Since data transfers incurred overheads, the size of each data transfer needed to be estimated cautiously for achieving optimal performance.FindingsThe data and task parallelism techniques contribute to good performance especially for queries having complex structures and/or higher values of query selectivity. The performance of data parallelism can be further improved by task parallelism. Significant performance improvement is attained by queries having higher selectivity because more outputs computed by the second task is performed in parallel with the first task.Research limitations/implicationsThe proposed parallelism techniques primarily deals with executing a single long‐running query for intra‐query parallelism, partitioning XML data on‐the‐fly, and allocating partitions on CPU cores statically. During the parallel execution, presumably there are no such dynamic XML data updates.Practical implicationsThe effectiveness of the proposed parallel holistic twig joins relies fundamentally on some system parameter values that can be obtained from a benchmark of the system platform.Originality/valueThe paper proposes novel techniques to increase parallelism by combining techniques of data and task parallelism for achieving high performance. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first paper of parallelizing the holistic twig join algorithms on a multi‐core system.
Gender, entrepreneurship and motivational factors in an Irish context
Authors: Laure Humbert Anne , Drew Eileen 
Published: June 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore and critically analyse the relationship between gender and entrepreneurial motivations theories in an Irish context. The paper examines potential differences in motivational factors for entering entrepreneurship between men and women, with a particular emphasis on the distinction between push and pull factors, but also with respect to other social factors such as being a parent, marital status or age.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws upon data obtained from a national survey of 832 entrepreneurs undertaken in Ireland in 2003/2004. This survey is based on a sample of 3,498 Irish entrepreneurs, which was predominantly constructed using theKompass Directory2001and the majority of the city and county enterprise boards throughout Ireland. The analysis relies on ordinal logistic modelling to examine the impact of gender and other social factors on entrepreneurial motivations.FindingsThe paper shows that there is a strong gender effect on some motivational factors, but that gender itself needs to be examined along with other social factors in order to understand differences in motivations. In particular, marital status, being a parent and/or age, as well as their interaction with gender, are useful in explaining differences in pathways into entrepreneurship for men and women.Originality/valueMotivations and gender have been widely debated in the international literature on entrepreneurship, but relatively little is known about gender and entrepreneurship in an Irish context. This paper seeks to address this gap. The results will be useful to other researchers in the field of gender and entrepreneurship, as well as practitioners and business support agencies.