2015 Working Papers

Constructive Pathways: Stimulating and Safeguarding Components of WPShttps://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/wps/1001/thumbnail.jp

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

Knowledge and Management Models for Sustainable Growth

In the last years sustainability has become a topic of global concern and a key issue in the strategic agenda of both business organizations and public authorities and organisations. Significant changes in business landscape, the emergence of new technology, including social media, the pressure of new social concerns, have called into question established conceptualizations of competitiveness, wealth creation and growth. New and unaddressed set of issues regarding how private and public organisations manage and invest their resources to create sustainable value have brought to light. In particular the increasing focus on environmental and social themes has suggested new dimensions to be taken into account in the value creation dynamics, both at organisations and communities level. For companies the need of integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues into strategy and daily business operations, pose profound challenges, which, in turn, involve numerous processes and complex decisions influenced by many stakeholders. Facing these challenges calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge as well as the development of proper management models, approaches and tools aimed to contribute to the development and realization of environmentally and socially sustainable business strategies and practices

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia

Individual Education Program (IEP) Paperwork : A Narrative Review

The Individual Education Program (IEP) is a statement of a set of educational goals for students with special needs, which contains description of the support services obtained by the students to achieve their educational goals. Although teachers understand the benefits of IEP, teachers consider the preparation of IEP as a burden of administrative duties. The purpose of this narrative review is to illustrate how long the teacher completed the IEP administrative tasks, to explain why the compilation and implementation of IEP is viewed by the teacher as a burden, and to describe the strategies to minimize obstacles related to the administrative burden of IEP. The narrative review procedure includes several stages. First, journals reviewed in this paper are traced through e-journal databases, using the certain keywords. Secondly, the journals used in this review are based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Then, the authors searched and selected relevant studies on the topic, i.e. studies on the administrative burden of IEP paperwork. The result of this review shows that special needs teachers spend more time doing IEP administrative tasks than assessing students’ assignments, communicating with parents, sharing and discussing with colleagues. IEP paperwork takes up more than 10% of working time. The reasons why teachers perceive the IEP paperwork as burdens, are because of the large number of IEP forms and details, the multiple IEP service lines, the lack of knowledge and skills of the personnels relating to the preparation or implementation of IEPs, the lack of assistance of administrative staff to complete the IEP paperwork, and the short / limited deadlines for administrative duties of IEP. The proposed strategies to minimize the administrative burden of IEP are improving appropriate technology, streamlining the contents of IEP forms, group IEP and increase the IEP administrative skills of the teachers