Why So Cynical? The Effect of Job Burnout as a Mediator on the Relationship Between Perceived Organizational Support and Organizational Cynicism

The current study represents a noteworthy step towards a better understanding of how perceived organizational support influences burnout and cynicism of healthcare staff. It explores whether perceived organizational support reduces job burnout and organizational cynicism and whether job burnout plays a mediating role in the relationship between POS and organizational cynicism. Data were collected from 211 personnel working in the healthcare industry in Saudi Arabia. Findings indicate that a high level of perceived organizational support ameliorates the experienced burnout symptoms, and allay cynical attitudes, emotions, and behaviors at work. The study also unfolds that burnout is mediating the relationship between POS and organizational cynicism, which highlights the importance of properly managing burnout. The study suggested that healthcare organizations should imperatively provide the necessary organizational support wherever and whenever it is needed and utilize the appropriate interventions to minimize the effects of burnout and cynicism. This is the first study that analyzed the impact of POS on organizational cynicism through the mediating variable of job burnout, and the first paper that investigates POS, organizational cynicism, and job burnout of healthcare staff in a single study. It adds to the growing body of literature on antecedents of organizational cynicism, job burnout, and POS as a mean to reduce negative workplace phenomena. Keywords: perceived organizational support, job burnout, organizational cynicism, social exchange theory, job demand model, healthcare industry, healthcare staff. DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/13-7-04 Publication date: April 30th 202

UML Artefacts for a Blockchain-enabled Platform for Fairtrade

Fairtrade-certified products have successfully entered the mainstream distribution channels, mostly in developed countries, and these products are now sold in famous supermarket chains. Nonetheless, the packaging and labeling of products as “Fairtrade” command premium pricing in the marketplace. How much of this, however, is valid and justified? Despite the reputable certification mechanisms for quality assurance, mass media reports suggest that much of the “surplus value” goes to the accreditation agencies themselves instead of the producers. This article proposes an agenda to set this right with a blockchain platform that provides “trust-free” assurances of verifiable labeling. Using an Action Design Research methodology, we have specified a research prototype of a Blockchain-enabled Fair-Trade platform Unified Modelling Language artifacts. We believe this will set the direction for social inclusion as part of information systems scholars’ aspiration to promote “tech for good.

Integration of Distributed Generations in Smart Distribution Networks Using Multi-Criteria Based Sustainable Planning Approach

Energy planning has become more complicated in the 21st century of sustainable development due to the inclusion of numerous standards such as techno-economic, and environmental considerations. This paper proposes multi-criteria sustainable planning (MCSP) based optimization approach for identifying DGs’ optimal allocations and rating powers. The main objectives of this paper are the reduction of the network’s total power loss, voltage profile improvement, energy loss saving maximization, and curtailing environmental emissions and water consumption to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 3, 6, 7, 13, and 15) by taking the constraints into consideration. Different alternatives are evaluated across four aspects of performance indices; technical, cost-economic, environmental, and social (TEES). In terms of TEES performance evaluations, various multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches are used to determine the optimal trade-off among the available solutions. These methods are gaining wide acceptance due to their flexibility while considering all criteria and objectives concurrently. Annual energy loss saving is increased by 97.13%, voltage profile is improved to 0.9943 (p.u), and emissions are reduced by 82.45% using the proposed technique. The numerical results of the proposed MCSP approach are compared to previously published works to validate and may be used by researchers and energy planners as a planning tool for ADN schemes

Psychometric Characteristics of Tool for Assessing Eating Problems among Autistic Students

The present study aims to develop a tool for assessing eating problems among autistic students and identify its psychometric characteristics on a sample in the Saudi environment. The final sample of the study consisted of (122) eight-to-twelve students (age average 10.28., S.D. = 1.439), (85) of them enrolled in Eastern Riyadh Intellectual Education Institute, and (37) of them enrolled in Western Riyadh Intellectual Education Institute. The study found that the eating problems among autistic students scale is highly valid and reliable in the Saudi environment, and therefore can be used in discovering and diagnosing Saudi autistic students with eating problems

A Forensic Scheme for Revealing Post-processed Region Duplication Forgery in Suspected Images

Recent researches have demonstrated that local interest points alone can be employed to detect region duplication forgery in image forensics. Authentic images may be abused by copy-move tool in Adobe Photoshop to fully contained duplicated regions such as objects with high primitives such as corners and edges. Corners and edges represent the internal structure of an object in the image which makes them have a discriminating property under geometric transformations such as scale and rotation operation. They can be localised using scale-invariant features transform (SIFT) algorithm. In this paper, we provide an image forgery detection technique by using local interest points. Local interest points can be exposed by extracting adaptive non-maximal suppression (ANMS) keypoints from dividing blocks in the segmented image to detect such corners of objects. We also demonstrate that ANMS keypoints can be effectively utilised to detect blurred and scaled forged regions. The ANMS features of the image are shown to exhibit the internal structure of copy moved region. We provide a new texture descriptor called local phase quantisation (LPQ) that is robust to image blurring and also to eliminate the false positives of duplicated regions. Experimental results show that our scheme has the ability to reveal region duplication forgeries under scaling, rotation and blur manipulation of JPEG images on MICC-F220 and CASIA v2 image datasets

A New Combined European Permanent Network Station Coordinates Solution

The EUREF (International Association of Geodesy (IAG) Reference Frame Sub-Commission for Europe) network of continuously operating GPS stations (EPN) was primarily established for reference frame maintenance, and also plays an important role for geodynamical research in Europe. The main goal of this paper is to obtain an independent homogeneous time-series of the EPN station coordinates, which is also available in SINEX format. A new combined solution of the EPN station coordinates was computed. The combination was performed independently for every week, in three steps: 1. the stated constraints on the coordinates were removed from the individual solutions of the Analysis Centers; 2. the de-constrained solutions were aligned to ITRF2000; 3. the resulting solutions were combined using the Helmert block-ing technique. All the data from GPS week 900 to week 1302 (April 1997 - December 2004) were used. We investigated in detail the behavior of the transformation parameters aligning the new combined solution to ITRF2000. In general, the time-series of the transformation parameters show a good stability in time although small systematic effects can be seen, most likely caused by station instabilities. A comparison of the new combined solution to the official EUREF weekly combined solution is also presented

A Survey on Retrieval of Mathematical Knowledge

We present a short survey of the literature on indexing and retrieval of mathematical knowledge, with pointers to 72 papers and tentative taxonomies of both retrieval problems and recurring techniques.Comment: CICM 2015, 20 page

Prospects of Hybrid Energy in Saudi Arabia, Exploring Irrigation Application in Shaqra

Dynamics in rainfall patterns due to climate change are posing a threat to crop production globally. The core issue of food security is expected to intensify, and improving crop yield using motorized power irrigation mechanisms can help in curtailing the impact of drought and changing weather patterns to meet the crop water requirement. To meet the energy demand of irrigation systems, this paper explores the use of hybrid energy sources, i.e., wind and solar energy, taking Shaqra Saudi Arabia as case study. This paper presents a systematic case study that evaluates crop water requirements for 3 different crops using the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s software CROPWAT 8.0 and converts the water requirement into energy demand to design the water pumping system. The energy requirement water pumping system is used to design a hybrid energy system using HOMER PRO 3.14.4 that can reliably meet the energy demand. The results suggests that, contrary to the common consideration in Saudi Arabia, a hybrid of wind and solar energy proves to be more cost effective and yields a higher amount of energy. The results suggest that a significant reduction in cost can be achieved with a hybrid energy system as compared to a solar PV system only

Preferential Solvation Study of the Synthesized Aldose Reductase Inhibitor (SE415) in the {PEG 400 (1) + Water (2)} Cosolvent Mixture and GastroPlus-Based Prediction

This article presents evidence that the binary cosolvent system can be a promising approach for enhanced oral absorption in controlling diabetes mellitus (DM) and associated complications in humans

Assessment of Wind and Solar Hybrid Energy for Agricultural Applications in Sudan

In addition to zero-carbon generation, the plummeting cost of renewable energy sources (RES) is enabling the increased use of distributed-generation sources. Although the RES appear to be a cheaper source of energy, without the appropriate design of the RES with a true understanding of the nature of the load, they can be an unreliable and expensive source of energy. Limited research has been aimed at designing small-scale hybrid energy systems for irrigation pumping systems, and these studies did not quantify the water requirement, or in turn the energy required to supply the irrigation water. This paper provides a comprehensive feasibility analysis of an off-grid hybrid renewable energy system for the design of a water-pumping system for irrigation applications in Sudan. A systematic and holistic framework combined with a techno-economic optimization analysis for the planning and design of hybrid renewable energy systems for small-scale irrigation water-pumping systems is presented. Different hybridization cases of solar photovoltaic, wind turbine and battery storage at 12 different sites in Sudan are simulated, evaluated, and compared, considering the crop water requirement for different crops, the borehole depth, and the stochasticity of renewable energy resources. Soil, weather, and climatic data from 12 different sites in Sudan were used for the case studies, with the key aim to find the most robust and reliable solution with the lowest system cost. The results of the case studies suggest that the selection of the system is highly dependent on the cost, the volatility of the wind speed, solar radiation, and the size of the system; at present, hybridization is not the primary option at most of sites, with the exception of two. However, with the reduction in price of wind technology, the possibility of hybrid generation will rise