Towards an understanding of the HRM bundle for lean service in the UK

Applying the principles of lean enables service organisations to improve service delivery processes and provide customers with better value. A growing body of evidence suggests that without a proper utilisation of enabling human resource management (HRM) practices, service organisations fail to orient their employees to conduct lean projects and support its practices. Enabling HRM practices provide supportive activities that assist organisations to direct their workforce to support lean practices. How service organisations utilise enabling HRM practices for that purpose has, as yet, not received significant attention in the existing literature. This study sets out to explore enabling HRM practices to support lean service. It is a scholarly attempt to thoroughly understand how service organisations utilise these practices to support their lean programmes. In doing so, it attempts to answer how relevant enabling HRM practices are to lean service and what those practices are. It also answers how and why these practices are utilised to support lean service. The research is based on five case studies directed towards answering an exploratory research question. Such a question grants the choice of a case study as an appropriate research strategy to collect contextual qualitative data through naturalistic data collection techniques. Purposive sampling is utilised to select the case studies and cross comparison is conducted for in-depth analysis. The case study organisations were adjudged to be at four lean maturity stages according to S-curve theory (Netland and Ferdows, 2016): Beginner , In-transition , Advanced and Cutting-edge , thus providing a richness of data reflecting variety of similar and different service activities and lean maturity stages. A total of thirty-one semi-structured interviews including four to eight interviews from each organisation were conducted. The interviews were supplemented with observation during site visits and multiple sources of secondary data. The data was coded by means of the NVIVO 10 software package. Rigorous thematic analysis was conducted with reference to Braun and Clark s (2006) six-stage approach of theme generation and 15-point checklist for good thematic analysis. As a main contribution, the analysis identifies 18 enabling HRM practices to support lean service: recruitment and selection, role profiling, capacity planning, absence management, retention and release, succession planning, training, career development, performance management, reward and recognition, groups and teamwork, employee voice, employee communication and collaboration, labour relations, employee motivation, employee involvement, employee empowerment and employee health and safety. The novelty of the research lies in providing a comprehensive list of practices which is rooted in contextual data and reflects the real-world context. The identified 18 enabling HRM practices lead to the development of a novel HRM bundle that covers seven areas of activities of people management to support lean service: (i) employee resourcing, (ii) training and development, (iii) performance management, (iv) reward and recognition, (v) employee relations, (vi) employee behaviour and (vii) employee health and safety. Furthermore, the lean-specific HRM bundle is used to develop a PDCA (plan-do-check-act), based on the Deming Cycle (Deming, 2000), showing lean service planning, provision and monitoring. Moreover, the bundle theory, contingency and configuration theories are used to explain bundling HRM practices and justify the findings. Borrowing bundle theory (Casullo, 1988) to justify bundling HRM practices serves as another novelty of this research. It is evidently clear from the findings that this study provides an empirical and grounded understanding of enabling HRM practices to support lean service. The theoretical contribution of the thesis is therefore elaborating, refining and extending the existing understanding of enabling HRM practices to support lean service. In addition, the practical contribution is increasing the awareness of service organisations of the 18 enabling HRM practices, a lean-specific HRM bundle of seven areas of activities of people management and a continuous improvement model that they can utilise to orient their employees to support lean programmes

Analysis of Adipokines and some Steroid Hormones in Myocardial Infarction

الموت الشامل بسبب أمراض القلب والأوعية الدموية هو السبب السائد للوفاة، ومرض القلب الإقفاري هو السبب البارز. هناك ميل لزيادة حساسية الأساليب في المختبر المعاصر لتشخيص الأمراض القلبية الوعائية، وتقييم المفتاح كمؤشرات حيوية للأمراض القلبية الوعائية. المهمة العاجلة هي البحث عن مؤشرات مختلفة كأداة للكشف المبكر عن احتشاء عضلة القلب ومراقبته. ضمت هذه المحاولة ١١٧ متطوعًا، تم تسجيلهم من كلا الجنسين في الفئة العمرية من ٣٢ إلى ٦٤ عامًا. تم تصنيف المتطوعين إلى مجموعتين: ٦٧ مريضًا من احتشاء عضلة القلب، واحتضنت المجموعات الأخرى ٥٠ فردًا سليمًا. تم جمع عينات الدم وتوجيهها للتحليل الكيميائي الحيوي لتقييم مستويات هرمون الاستراديول والتستوستيرون والبروجسترون والأديبونكتين واللبتين والدهون في كل مجموعة. بناءً على التقييم الإحصائي لمعلمات المؤشر الحيوي، يمكن الإعلان عن الاستنتاج التالي من هذه الدراسة، وهو انخفاض كبير في مستويات هرمون التستوستيرون والبروتين  الدهني عالي الكثافة (P <0.001) في احتشاء عضلة القلب، ضمن P <0.061 المرتفعة بشكل ملحوظ من مستويات البروجسترون في عضلة القلب مرضى الاحتشاء بالمقارنة مع الأفراد الأصحاء. أشارت الاختبارات الكيميائية الحيوية المتبقية إلى مستويات مرتفعة بشكل ملحوظ في المرضى الذين يعانون من احتشاء عضلة القلب مثل استراديول (P <0.001) ، أديبونكتين (P <0.001)، ليبتين (P <0.001) ، الكلي الكوليسترولالكوليسترول (P <0.001) ، الدهون الثلاثية P) <0.001) ومستويات البروتين الدهني منخفض الكثافة ) P <0.001). تُظهر الأديبوكينات (أديبونكتين ، لبتين) وبعض هرمونات الستيرويد (استراديول ، هرمون التستوستيرون) أدوارًا حاسمة في تحسين أمراض التمثيل الغذائي والقلب والأوعية الدموية ويمكن استخدامها كمؤشر حيوي للتعرض لاحتشاء عضلة القلب، والسلوك الطبي والشدة. يقدم هذا الإقرار التشخيص المبكر للمرض وتطوره.The most common cause of death is cardiovascular disease (CVD), with ischemic heart disease being the most notable type.  There is a propensity to raise the sensitivity of methods in contemporary laboratory for diagnosing of CVD, and assessing key as CVD bio-indicators. The urgent task is to seek for different indicators as a hopeful tool for early detection and monitoring of myocardial infarction in blood samples only. This study comprised 117 Volunteers, recorded with both genders in the age range of 32-64 years old. The volunteers were categorized into two groups: 67patients of myocardial infarction, other group embraced 50 healthy individuals. The samples of blood were collected and directed for biochemical analysis to evaluate estradiol, testosterone, progesterone, adiponectin, leptin, and lipid profile [total cholesterol, triglycerides, high density lipoprotein (HDL), and low-density lipoprotein (LDL)] levels in each group. The following conclusion can be drawn from this study based on statistical assessment of bio-indicator parameters, significantly reduced of testosterone and HDL (P <0.001) levels in myocardial infarction, within non-significantly elevated P <0.061 of progesterone levels in myocardial infarction patients as compared with healthy individuals. The remaining biochemical tests indicated significantly elevated levels in patients with myocardial infarction such as estradiol (P <0.001), adiponectin (P <0.001), leptin (P <0.001), total cholesterol (P <0.001), triglycerides (P <0.001) and LDL (P <0.001) levels. Adipokines (adiponectin, leptin) and some steroid hormones (estradiol, testosterone) show crucial roles in the improvement of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases and may be utilized as bio-pointer for myocardial infarction exposure, medical conduct and severity. This acknowledgment offers early diagnosis of disease and progression.

Data-driven short-term load forecasting for heating and cooling demand in office buildings

Short-term forecasts of energy demand in buildings serve as key information for various operational schemes such as predictive control and demand response programs. Despite this, developing forecast models for heating and cooling loads has received little attention in the literature compared to models for electricity load. In this paper, we present data-driven approaches to forecast hourly heating and cooling energy use in office buildings based on temporal, autoregressive, and exogenous variables. The proposed models calculate hourly loads for a horizon between one hour and 12 hours ahead. Individual models based on artificial neural networks (ANN) and change-point models (CPM) as well as a hybrid of the two methods are developed. A case study is conducted based on hourly thermal load data collected from several office buildings located on the same campus in Ottawa, Canada. The models are trained with more than two years of hourly energy-use data and tested on a separate part of the dataset to enable unbiased validation. The results show that the ANN model can achieve higher forecasting accuracy for the longest forecast horizon and outperforms the results obtained by a Naïve approach and the CPM. However, the performance of the hybrid CPM-ANN method is superior compared to individual models for all studied buildings

Pengaruh Insektisida Deltametrin Terhadap Perilaku Orientasi Parasitoid Anagrus Nilaparvatae (Pang Et Wang) (Hymenoptera: Mymaridae)

Host searching behaviour by a parasitoid includes orientation to the volatile compounds (odor) relesead by host or host plant. The aim of this study was to determine the changes in the orientation behaviour of Anagrus nilaparvatae (Pang et Wang), the egg parasitoid of rice brown planthoppers (Nilaparvata lugens (Stål)), after being exposed to sublethal concentrations of deltamethrin. The impact of residue on plants to the behaviour of parasitoid was also studied. The sublethal concentrations (LC10 and LC40) used were 0.023 ppm and 2.235 ppm, respectively. Deltamethrin applied to the rice plants were 12.5 ppm and 6.25 ppm, and its effect was observed at 3 hours, 1, 3 and 7 days after application. Orientation behavior was studied using Y-tube olfactometer. Application of deltamethrin at subletal concentration reduced the ability of surviving A. nilaparvatae to detect odors (volatile ompounds) released by the host, N. lugens. The higher the concentration of deltamethrin applied to the parasitoid or to the rice plants, the more prominent effect observed in the changing in the parasitoid behavious, in particular disruption to the parasitoid's orientation to find their host. As consequences, effects of deltamethrin may lead to reduce the effectiveness of A. nilaparvatae as biological control agents in the field as a result of declining their searching capacity

Toward a Commonly Shared Public Policy Perspective for Analyzing Risk Coping Strategies

The concept of risk has received scholarly attention from a variety of angles in the social, technical, and natural sciences. However, public policy scholars have not yet generated a comprehensive overview, shared understanding and conceptual framework of the main problem-solving approaches applied by governments in coping with risks. In this regard, our main aim is to examine existing perspectives on prevailing risk coping strategies, find a common denominator among them and contribute to current policy and risk science literature through providing a conceptual framework that systematically spans the spectrum of risk coping strategies and incorporates the essence of the most relevant insights. To this end, we first examine the concept of risk in-depth by exploring various definitions and types of risk. We then review different approaches proposed by different strands of research for addressing risk. Finally, we assess current knowledge and develop an amalgamated perspective for examining how risks can be addressed by classifying them into six general types of response (no response; prevention; control; precaution; toleration; and adaptation) as well as indicators to identify these responses. We argue that these strategies can function as a heuristic tool fo

A probable outbreak of toxoplasmosis among boarding school students in Turkey

ABSTRACTIn total, 171 students from a boarding school in Izmir, Turkey, with mild and non-specific symptoms of toxoplasmosis, were screened during September–October 2002. All 171 students were seropositive for Toxoplasma gondii IgG and IgM. Of 43 students tested, 40 (93%) had low IgG avidity. None showed evidence of ophthalmic involvement. The data suggest that T. gondii may spread rapidly in close living conditions, possibly following exposure to cat litter. This is the largest recent outbreak of toxoplamosis described in the medical literature