Too good to leave, too bad to stay: anti-retaliation precautionary measures for whistle blowers

Whistle blowing is an act of exposing the wrongdoings in an organization, either committed by its members of the lower level or the top management. Many have agreed that whistle blowing is an effective means of deterring and detecting organizational mishaps. Whistle blowers have been referred to as canaries in the coal mine. The idea of telling the truth however, may result in exposure to uncontrolled risk by the whistle blower. The extent to which the whistle blower is protected and safe after information is leaked to the public or the relevant authority remains unknown. In the Malaysian context, whistle blowing is not new. Being honest is a custom among Malaysians. Honesty is deeply rooted in Malaysian culture and is supported by the high value Malaysian place on spiritual belief which also put a premium on moral virtue. But being loyal to the management is another thing. A critical issue that whistle blowers face is the tension between the virtues of honesty and the virtues of loyalty. The ethical dilemmas faced by the whistle blowers place them in situations where there are significant and difficult ethical conflicts. Recently, the Parliament of Malaysia has passed the Whistle Blowing Protection Act which was seen as an holistic approach to cover all Malaysians who were willing to blow the whistle. Some do not feel confident that such program under the Act can be accomplished in Malaysia as the Malaysian culture believing keeping things to ourselves. Thus the paper intends to explore the anti-retaliation precautionary factors mediate by the culture that will most likely explain motivational issues subordinates face in publicizing the wrongs that are harmful to the organization in Malaysia.

Towards power consumption-delay tradeoff by workload allocation in cloud-fog computing

Fog computing, characterized by extending cloud computing to the edge of the network, has recently received considerable attention. The fog is not a substitute but a powerful complement to the cloud. It is worthy of studying the interplay and cooperation between the edge (fog) and the core (cloud). To address this issue, we study the tradeoff between power consumption and delay in a cloud-fog computing system. Specifically, we first mathematically formulate the workload allocation problem. After that, we develop an approximate solution to decompose the primal problem into three subproblems of corresponding subsystems, which can be independently solved. Finally, based on extensive simulations and numerical results, we show that by sacrificing modest computation resources to save communication bandwidth and reduce transmission latency, fog computing can significantly improve the performance of cloud computing.

Strengthening leave entitlements for workers in Australia

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) commissioned me to work during October-December 2015 to prepare this preliminary research report on ways to strengthen leave entitlements for workers in Australia. The report considers how portable entitlements might be extended in a highly casualised Australian workforce continually affected by new technological arrangements.