COVID – 19: Lessons to Learn.

We witness a dramatic change, in all aspect of Life, throughout the world after Covid-19. It started in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China where few cases of atypical pneumonia presented in late November and early December 2019.  Clinical picture mimicking viral pneumonia1. According to an unpublicized report from the Chinese government, the first case can be traced back to 17 November 2019; the person was a 55-year-old citizen in the Hubei province. There were four men and five women reported to be infected in November.  The number of coronavirus cases in Hubei gradually increased, reaching 60 by 20 December and at least 266 by 31 December2. A coronavirus was soon identified as the cause of the outbreak and tentatively named as the 2019-nCoV by the World Health Organization. On 11 Feb 2020, the World Health Organization officially named it SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2) and the SARS-CoV-2 infection was named COVID-19.1 One can easily understand the impact upon routine life just by seeing these numbers; As on 30 Nov 2020, there were 63, 360234 confirmed cases and 1, 475825 confirmed deaths.

Transformational Leadership Style and Talent Retention in Pakistani Banks: A Serial Multiple Mediation Model

The objective of this research was to determine factors that mediate between transformational leadership style and retention of employees, as talent retention is an emerging issue for organizations due to workplace diversity. This study provides a guideline to the supervisors and leaders in managing their workforce. By using structural equation modeling (SEM), the result exhibited a positive impact between transformational leadership and talent retention, transformational leadership and job satisfaction, transformational leadership, and psychological ownership. The study also revealed a positive impact on job satisfaction and talent retention, psychological ownership, and talent retention. This model is an attempt to find out the further factors and measures that affect employee retention in the banking sector of Pakistan.JEL Classification: J28, J54, G21How to Cite:Mir, M. M., Khan, A., & Abbas, Q. (2020). Transformational Leadership Style and Talent Retention in PakistaniBanks: A Serial Multiple Mediation Model. Etikonomi: Jurnal Ekonomi, 19(1), 63 – 76. https://doi.org/10.15408/etk.v19i1.11264

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TYPES OF REWARDS AND JOB SATISFACTION OF EMPLOYEES: EVIDENCE FROM KHYBER PAKHTUNKHWAH

The main objectives of this research study were to gauge theprevailing level of job satisfaction amongst employees. Furthermore to find an association among the levels of rewards (task significance, task involvement, task autonomy, organizational rewards, social rewards) and job satisfaction of employee’s doing jobs in private sector organizations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwah. 240 employees of five private sector universities and eight private sector banks participated in this study. A Cronbach’s Alpha, Multiple Regression and Pearson Correlation are used to test the proposed hypothesis.The findings reveal that there exists significant and positiveassociation between job satisfaction and rewards (task involvement, task autonomy and task significance). The results show that job satisfaction is insignificantly associated with organizational rewards and social rewards. The findings of this research and their implication for future research are also discussed

UAV-Empowered Disaster-Resilient Edge Architecture for Delay-Sensitive Communication

The fifth-generation (5G) communication systems will enable enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable low latency, and massive connectivity services. The broadband and low-latency services are indispensable to public safety (PS) communication during natural or man-made disasters. Recently, the third generation partnership project long term evolution (3GPPLTE) has emerged as a promising candidate to enable broadband PS communications. In this article, first we present six major PS-LTE enabling services and the current status of PS-LTE in 3GPP releases. Then, we discuss the spectrum bands allocated for PS-LTE in major countries by international telecommunication union (ITU). Finally, we propose a disaster resilient three-layered architecture for PS-LTE (DR-PSLTE). This architecture consists of a software-defined network (SDN) layer to provide centralized control, an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) cloudlet layer to facilitate edge computing or to enable emergency communication link, and a radio access layer. The proposed architecture is flexible and combines the benefits of SDNs and edge computing to efficiently meet the delay requirements of various PS-LTE services. Numerical results verified that under the proposed DR-PSLTE architecture, delay is reduced by 20% as compared with the conventional centralized computing architecture.Comment: 9,

Review on Huawei Fusion Sphere Security

The cloud computing virtualization stage is another method for giving computing resources that give clients available and financially savvy benefits, and bring hazards in meantime. In this way, ensuring the privacy, trustworthiness and accessibility of client information turns out to be significantly more basic to distributed computing frameworks. Huawei gives the virtualization stage security answers for confronting the dangers and difficulties postured to the distributed computing framework. This article portrays the techniques and measures received by Huawei cloud computing virtualization stage to react to the security dangers and alsodangerous to distributed computing frameworks. Huawei cloud computing virtualization stage is intended to give secure and solid server virtualization solutions for clients

Role of Social Commerce Forums in Establishing Purchase Intention: A Nexus Between Credibility, Trust and E-Commerce Satisfaction

Social media is persuading to consumers in field of social commerce (S-Commerce) by providing goods or services and fulfill their demands in a very short period of time. Electronic-satisfaction (e-satisfaction) and credibility have distinctive activities of social media that motivate and successively build the trust at various stages of purchase intentions. For better understanding it is necessary to recognize the factors of social commerce such as referrals, reviews & ratings because they have a strong influence on buying behaviour of ecommerce consumers. A quantitative and descriptive approach has been projected through simple random sampling. A cross-sectional data of 250 participants were collected by a survey questionnaire from social commerce users examined through Partial Least Square- Structural Educational Modeling-3 (PLS-SEM-3). A social support theory has supported relationship on trust through social media activities, surface credibility, and presumedcredibility as well as e-commerce satisfaction. Interestingly trust, surface and presumed credibility considerably significant impact on e-commerce and social commerce satisfaction that leads to develop purchase intention. The current study theoretically contributes novel indicator, presumed credibility in the social commerce industry and practically it promotes specific websites that triggers trust

Robust Watermarking Using FFT and Cordic QR Techniques

Digital media sharing and access in today’s world of the internet is very frequent for every user. The management of digital rights may come into threat easily as the accessibility of data through the internet become wide. Sharing digital information under security procedures can be easily compromised due to the various vulnerabilities floating over the internet. Existing research has been tied to protecting internet channels to ensure the safety of digital data. Researchers have investigated various encryption techniques to prevent digital rights management but certain challenges including external potential attacks cannot be avoided that may give unauthorized access to digital media. The proposed model endorsed the concept of watermarking in digital data to uplift media security and ensure digital rights management. The system provides an efficient procedure to conduct over-watermarking in digital audio signals and confirm the avoidance of ownership of the host data. The proposed technique uses a watermark picture as a signature that has been initially encrypted with Arnold's cat map and cyclic encoding before being embedded. The upper triangular R-matrix component of the energy band was then created by using the Fast Fourier transform and Cordic QR procedures to the host audio stream. Using PN random sequences, the encrypted watermarking image has been embedded in the host audio component of the R-matrix. The same procedure has been applied to extract the watermark image from the watermarked audio. The proposed model evaluates the quality of the watermarked audio and extracted watermark image. The average PSNR of the watermarked audio is found to be 37.01 dB. It has also been seen that the average PSNR, Normal cross-correlation, BER, SSMI (structure similarity index matric) value for the extracted watermark image is found to be 96.30 dB, 0.9042 units, 0.1033 units, and 0.9836 units respectively. Further, the model has been tested using various attacks to check its robustness. After applying attacks such as noising, filtering, cropping, and resampling on the watermarked audio, the watermark image has been extricated and its quality has been checked under the standard parameters. It has been found that the quality of the recovered watermark image satisfying enough to justify the digital ownership of the host audio. Hence, the proposed watermarking model attains a perfect balance between imperceptibility, payload, and robustness

Analysis of Pre and Post Merger and Acquisition Financial Performance of Banks in Pakistan

Merger and Acquisition is a strategy adopted by the organizations globally to meet the needs of dynamic business environment. This strategy also has much importance in Pakistan mostly in banking sector. Therefore, the objective of the study is to assess the impact of M&A on the financial performance of banks in Pakistan. The accounting and financial data of 10 banks were used in this study. Data was taken from the financial statement analysis (FSA) by State Bank of Pakistan from the period of 20062011. For the analysis of pre and post Merger and Acquisition performance 15 financial ratios were used in the study. To compare the results Paired sample t-Test was used to measure the significant difference between pre and post M&A financial performance. The overall results show that there is no significant difference in financial performance. It is concluded that there is insignificant difference between pre and post M&A performance of banks in Pakistan

Prognosis of Severe Covid-19 patients after treatment with Therapeutic Plasma Exchange (TPE)

OBJECTIVE: To demonstrate the effective role of plasmapheresis in the treatment of Cytokine Release Syndrome associated with severe Covid 19 pneumonia. INTRODUCTION: Covid-19 disease is a deadly contagious disease with milder symptoms to a more severe form with acute respiratory failure, septic shock leading to even death. Literature study showed  that  in severe  Covid-19  patients, a hyper-inflammatory response  to  initial  infection could accelerate  to  severe  hyper-cytokinaemia that  could  lead to  an  underlying endothelial  dysfunction and multiple organ dysfunction. Thus, removal of these inflammatory cytokines by Therapeutic Plasma Exchange is considered to be an essential part of the treatment of critically ill patients in order to improve their survival rates. METHODOLOGY:  Retrospective observational study which included 150 RT-PCR positive patients admitted in Covid ITC, from the time period of 1st February 2021 to 31st July 2021 –removed for blind review---Data was analyzed using SPSS software version 16. Frequencies were calculated along with mean and standard deviation. Chi square and ANOVA test was applied to the data. P value <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Linear regression study was applied to predict the prognosis. RESULTS: Out of 150 patients, 51 patients (34%) were of severe ARDS category of whom 13 (25.5%) developed Cytokine Release Syndrome. They received plasmapheresis therapy subsequently and 7 out of those 13 (53.8%) patients got improved. P- value was found to be significant ( <0.05). Overall, the mortality rate was low with 120/150 (80%) getting discharged successfully. CONCLUSION:  Our findings suggest that Therapeutic plasma exchange is beneficial in Cytokine storm caused by SARS-CoV2 removing the inflammatory cytokines and improving symptoms, thereby, avoiding intubation. KEY WORDS: , Therapeutic plasma exchange, Hypercytokinaemia, Cytokine Release Syndrom