Towards a theoretical framework for human performance modelling within manufacturing systems design

The performance of direct workers has a significant impact on the competitiveness of many manufacturing systems. Unfortunately, system designers are ill equipped to assess this impact during the design process. An opportunity exists to assist designers by expanding the capabilities of popular simulation modelling tools, and using them as a vehicle to better consider human factors during the process of system design manufacture. To support this requirement, this paper reports on an extensive review of literature that develops a theoretical framework, which summarizes the principal factors and relationships that such a modelling tool should incorporate.

New developments in the study of optical parabolic pulses in normally dispersive fibers

We report two recent studies dealing with the evolution of parabolic pulses in normally dispersive fibres. On the one hand, the nonlinear reshaping from a Gaussian intensity profile towards the asymptotic parabolic shape is experimentally investigated in a Raman amplifier. On the other hand, the significant impact of the fourth order dispersion on a passive propagation is theoretically discussed: we numerically demonstrate flat-top, coherent supercontinuum generation in an all-normal dispersion-flattened photonic crystal fiber. This shape is associated to a strong reshaping of the temporal profile what becomes triangular.

Internal branding to influence employees' brand promise delivery:a case study in Thailand

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the internal branding process from the perspective of service providers in Thailand. It will reveal the key internal branding mechanisms and empirically assess the relationship between internal branding and employees' brand attitudes and performance. Design/methodology/approach – A case study representing the Thai hotel industry is adopted with mixed methodologies. In-depth interviews are first carried out with 30 customer-interface employees in six major hotels in Thailand. On a census basis, a quantitative survey with 699 respondents from five major hotels in Thailand follows. Findings – Internal branding coordinating marketing with human resource management has a statistically significant impact on attitudinal and behavioural aspects of employees in their delivery of the brand promise. As employees' brand commitment do not have a statistically significant relationship with employees' brand performance, it is not regarded as a mediator in the link between internal branding and employees' brand performance. Practical implications – A number of significant managerial implications are drawn from this study, for example using both internal communication and training to influence employees' brand-supporting attitudes and behaviours. Still, it should be noted that the effect of internal branding on employee behaviours could be dependent on the extent to which it influences their brand attitudes. Originality/value – The paper provides valuable insights, from the key internal audience's perspectives, into an internal branding process. It has empirically shown the relationship between internal branding and the behavioural outcome as well as the partial meditating effects of employees' brand identification, commitment and loyalty.

A systematic and mechanistic evaluation of aspartic acid as filler for directly compressed tablets containing trimethoprim and trimethoprim aspartate

The generally accepted paradigm of 'inert' and 'mono functional' excipient in dosage form has been recently challenged with the development of individual excipients capable of exhibiting multiple functions (e.g. binder-disintegrants, surfactant which affect P-gp function). The proposed study has been designed within the realm of multifunctionality and is the first and novel investigation towards evaluation of aspartic acid as a filler and disintegration enhancing agent for the delivery of biopharmaceutical class IV model drug trimethoprim. The study investigated powder characteristics using angle of repose, laser diffractometry and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The prepared tablets were characterised using Heckel analysis, disintegration time and tensile strength measurements. Although Heckel analysis revealed that both TMP and TMP aspartate salt have high elasticity, the salt form produced a stronger compact which was attributed to the formation of agglomerates. Aspartic acid was found to have high plasticity, but its incorporation into the formulations was found to have a negative impact on the compaction properties of TMP and its salt. Surface morphology investigations showed that mechanical interlocking plays a vital role in binding TMP crystals together during compaction, while the small particle size of TMP aspartate agglomerates was found to have significant impact on the tensile strength of the tablets. The study concluded that aspartic acid can be employed as filler and disintegrant and that compactability within tablets was independent of the surface charge of the excipients.

The Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome-Quality of Life Scale for children and adolescents (C&A-GTS-QOL):development and validation of the Italian version

BACKGROUND: Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) is a chronic childhood-onset neuropsychiatric disorder with a significant impact on patients' health-related quality of life (HR-QOL). Cavanna et al. (Neurology 2008; 71: 1410-1416) developed and validated the first disease-specific HR-QOL assessment tool for adults with GTS (Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome-Quality of Life Scale, GTS-QOL). This paper presents the translation, adaptation and validation of the GTS-QOL for young Italian patients with GTS. METHODS: A three-stage process involving 75 patients with GTS recruited through three Departments of Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry in Italy led to the development of a 27-item instrument (Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome-Quality of Life Scale in children and adolescents, C&A-GTS-QOL) for the assessment of HR-QOL through a clinician-rated interview for 6-12 year-olds and a self-report questionnaire for 13-18 year-olds. RESULTS: The C&A-GTS-QOL demonstrated satisfactory scaling assumptions and acceptability. Internal consistency reliability was high (Cronbach's alpha > 0.7) and validity was supported by interscale correlations (range 0.4-0.7), principal-component factor analysis and correlations with other rating scales and clinical variables. CONCLUSIONS: The present version of the C&A-GTS-QOL is the first disease-specific HR-QOL tool for Italian young patients with GTS, satisfying criteria for acceptability, reliability and validity. © 2013 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.

Which institutions encourage entrepreneurs to create larger firms

We develop entrepreneurship and institutional theory to explain variation in different types of entrepreneurship across individuals and institutional contexts. Our framework generates hypotheses about the negative impact of higher levels of corruption, weaker property rights and especially intellectual property rights, and a larger state on entrepreneurs who plan to grow faster. We test these hypotheses using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor surveys in 55 countries for 2001-2006, applying a multilevel estimation framework. We confirm our main hypotheses but we find no significant impact from intellectual property rights.

Imaging of the human fundus in the clinical setting:past present and future

The human fundus is a complex structure that can be easily visualized and the world of ophthalmology is going through a golden era of new and exciting fundus imaging techniques; recent advances in technology have allowed a significant improvement in the imaging modalities clinicians have available to formulate a diagnostic and treatment plan for the patient, but there is constant on-going work to improve current technology and create new ideas in order to gather as much information as possible from the human fundus. In this article we shall summarize the imaging techniques available in the standard medical retina clinic (i.e. not limited to the research lab) and delineate the technologies that we believe will have a significant impact on the way clinicians will assess retinal and choroidal pathology in the not too distant future.

The relative influence of organisational commitment and job-satisfaction on service quality of customer-contact employees in banking call centres

An inter-disciplinary approach is adopted to provide a deeper understanding of the human resource-service quality relationship. The paper tests the relationships organisational commitment and job satisfaction have with service quality of customer-contact employees. Hypotheses are constructed by reviewing literature in the areas of human resource management and services marketing. A study comprising 342 employees was conducted in four telephone call centres of a major UK retail bank. Investigates how different forms of organisational commitment and job satisfaction influence the service quality delivered by contact employees. Findings indicate that job satisfaction and organisational commitment of employees have a significant impact on service quality delivered. The affective component of commitment was found to be more important than job satisfaction in determining service quality of customer-contact employees.

Pragmatic development of service based real-time change data capture

This thesis makes a contribution to the Change Data Capture (CDC) field by providing an empirical evaluation on the performance of CDC architectures in the context of realtime data warehousing. CDC is a mechanism for providing data warehouse architectures with fresh data from Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) databases. There are two types of CDC architectures, pull architectures and push architectures. There is exiguous data on the performance of CDC architectures in a real-time environment. Performance data is required to determine the real-time viability of the two architectures. We propose that push CDC architectures are optimal for real-time CDC. However, push CDC architectures are seldom implemented because they are highly intrusive towards existing systems and arduous to maintain. As part of our contribution, we pragmatically develop a service based push CDC solution, which addresses the issues of intrusiveness and maintainability. Our solution uses Data Access Services (DAS) to decouple CDC logic from the applications. A requirement for the DAS is to place minimal overhead on a transaction in an OLTP environment. We synthesize DAS literature and pragmatically develop DAS that eciently execute transactions in an OLTP environment. Essentially we develop effeicient RESTful DAS, which expose Transactions As A Resource (TAAR). We evaluate the TAAR solution and three pull CDC mechanisms in a real-time environment, using the industry recognised TPC-C benchmark. The optimal CDC mechanism in a real-time environment, will capture change data with minimal latency and will have a negligible affect on the database's transactional throughput. Capture latency is the time it takes a CDC mechanism to capture a data change that has been applied to an OLTP database. A standard definition for capture latency and how to measure it does not exist in the field. We create this definition and extend the TPC-C benchmark to make the capture latency measurement. The results from our evaluation show that pull CDC is capable of real-time CDC at low levels of user concurrency. However, as the level of user concurrency scales upwards, pull CDC has a significant impact on the database's transaction rate, which affirms the theory that pull CDC architectures are not viable in a real-time architecture. TAAR CDC on the other hand is capable of real-time CDC, and places a minimal overhead on the transaction rate, although this performance is at the expense of CPU resources.

An investigation of the prevalence and measurement of teams in organisations:the development and validation of the real team scale

This thesis begins with a review of the literature on team-based working in organisations, highlighting the variations in research findings, and the need for greater precision in our measurement of teams. It continues with an illustration of the nature and prevalence of real and pseudo team-based working, by presenting results from a large sample of secondary data from the UK National Health Service. Results demonstrate that ‘real teams’ have an important and significant impact on the reduction of many work-related safety outcomes. Based on both theoretical and methodological limitations of existing approaches, the thesis moves on to provide a clarification and extension of the ‘real team’ construct, demarcating this from other (pseudo-like) team typologies on a sliding scale, rather than a simple dichotomy. A conceptual model for defining real teams is presented, providing a theoretical basis for the development of a scale on which teams can be measured for varying extents of ‘realness’. A new twelve-item scale is developed and tested with three samples of data comprising 53 undergraduate teams, 52 postgraduate teams, and 63 public sector teams from a large UK organisation. Evidence for the content, construct and criterion-related validity of the real team scale is examined over seven separate validation studies. Theoretical, methodological and practical implications of the real team scale are then discussed.

Chinese host country nationals' willingness to help expatriates:the role of social categorization

In this study, we examine Chinese host country nationals' (HCNs') willingness to offer role information and social support to expatriates from the United States. Using data from 132 Chinese managers, we find that ethnocentrism, interpersonal affect, and guanxi significantly impact HCNs' willingness to offer help to expatriates. Furthermore, we find that the job level of the expatriate has a significant impact on HCNs' willingness to offer role information but not on willingness to offer social support. The results suggest that paying attention to the perceptions and reactions of HCNs toward expatriates is imperative for multinational companies if expatriates are to succeed on their assignments. ©2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

An investigation into the acceptance of online banking in Saudi Arabia

Although a regional leader, Internet banking in Saudi Arabia is yet to be fully utilised as a value-adding tool to improve customer relationships and achieve cost advantages. The aim of this study was to identify the factors that encourage customers to adopt online banking in Saudi Arabia. The research constructs were developed based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) and incorporated some extra important control variables. The model was empirically verified to examine the factors influencing the online banking adoption behaviour of 400 customers. The findings of the study suggests that the quality of the Internet connection, the awareness of online banking and its benefits, the social influence and computer self-efficacy have significant effects on the perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) of online banking acceptance. Education, trust and resistance to change also have significant impact on the attitude towards the likelihood of adopting online banking. The implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions for future research are presented.

Brain structural changes associated with chronicity and antipsychotic treatment in schizophrenia

Accumulating evidence suggest a life-long impact of disease related mechanisms on brain structure in schizophrenia which may be modified by antipsychotic treatment. The aim of the present study was to investigate in a large sample of patients with schizophrenia the effect of illness duration and antipsychotic treatment on brain structure. Seventy-one schizophrenic patients and 79 age and gender matched healthy participants underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). All images were processed with voxel based morphometry, using SPM5. Compared to healthy participants, patients showed decrements in gray matter volume in the left medial and left inferior frontal gyrus. In addition, duration of illness was negatively associated with gray matter volume in prefrontal regions bilaterally, in the temporal pole on the left and the caudal superior temporal gyrus on the right. Cumulative exposure to antipsychotics correlated positively with gray matter volumes in the cingulate gyrus for typical agents and in the thalamus for atypical drugs. These findings (a) indicate that structural abnormalities in prefrontal and temporal cortices in schizophrenia are progressive and, (b) suggest that antipsychotic medication has a significant impact on brain morphology. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. and ECNP.

ICT diffusion and foreign direct investment:a comparative study between Asia-Pacific and the Middle Eastern economies

This chapter investigates the impact of inward and outward FDI on ICT diffusion in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East regions for the period 1996-2008. The results indicate that while inward FDI has generally had a positive and significant impact on ICT diffusion in Asia-Pacific economies, its impact on the Middle Eastern countries has been detrimental. In contrast, the results of this study also show that outward FDI has had, in general, the inverse effect, it has been in general positive and significant for the Middle East countries but insignificant for Asia-Pacific economies.

Do foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade openness explain the disparity in ICT diffusion between Asia-Pacific and the Islamic Middle Eastern countries?

This study investigates the impact of FDI and trade openness on ICT diffusion in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East regions from 1996-2005. The results indicate that while dissimilarities exist between the economies included in this study in terms of their level of socio-economic and political development, education and the growth of GDP have had a positive impact on ICT diffusion in both regions. However, while FDI has generally had a positive and significant impact on ICT diffusion in Asia-Pacific economies, its impact on Middle Eastern economies has been detrimental. The results of this study also show that trade-openness has had, in general, a positive and significant impact on ICT diffusion. Copyright © 2010, IGI Global.