Task and Relationship Conflicts, Employee Agility, and Perceived Job Performance

The investigation into the impact of conflict on the modern approach of employee agility as well as employees’ perceived job performance seems to be a critical topic that has not relatively been touched on yet. The present study aims to look at the influence of conflict on employees’ agility and employee’s perceived job performance. This research divides conflict into two separate dimensions as task and relationship conflict to investigate the impact of each on agility and job performance. The data is collected by employing a self-structured questionnaire using 23 items and a 5-point Likert scale from the employees of a hygiene and sanitation company in Cameroon. The proposed model is examined via PLS-SEM. Overall, the study reveals that there is a negative coefficient in the relationship between relationship conflict and employee’s agility; a significant positive relationship between task conflict and employee agility; and a positive significant relationship between employee’s agility and employee perceived job performance. The generated results validate that task conflict is vital and welcome to workers; thus, managers are expected not to blindly avoid conflicts. The consequence of a constructive conflict can be employee agility which in itself will lead to a high level of job performance

The impact of traditional and social media marketing on customers’ brand trust and purchase intentions in the Turkish airline market

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of customers' attitudes towards traditional and social media marketing on brand trust and purchase intention. Reviewing the extant literature unveiled that the subject of traditional versus social media marketing in the airline market is not sufficiently studied. Thus, we studied the mentioned subject in Turkey because the aviation sector has shown noteworthy improvements due to a significant increasing volume of e-commerce, not only on the passenger side but also on the cargo side as well. On the other hand, thanks to the passenger demand growth since starting the recent century, the Turkish airline industry leads a giant contribution to the enlargement of the global economy due to the increasing number of connections and falling air transport costs. Data was gathered in Istanbul airports from 341 passengers of the airlines of Turkey to compare the impact of traditional and social media marketing on brand trust and purchase intention of customers and analyzed by using structural equation modeling. The findings reveal that in recent years digital marketing and online advertising campaigns has been more effective than traditional marketing for augmenting brand trust and purchase intention of the passengers

Satisfaction of Mobile Users with mobile Application "Identification, Prevention, and Control of Bed Bugs": Designing and Developing Mobile Health Application

Introduction: Bed bugs are considered as public health nuisance insects, which can feed on humans and cause psychological distress, insomnia, anxiety, anemia, and skin itching in individuals. The aim of this study was to design and implement a mobile application "identification, prevention, and control of bed bug", and also to assess the satisfaction of mobile users with this application. Method: In the first phase of this study, the mobile application that includes three steps of identification, prevention, and control of bed bug, was designed and installed on the people's mobile phone. In the second phase, a descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on 100 mobile users using an electronic questionnaire. Descriptive data were analyzed by SPSS version 18. Results: The satisfaction rate of the application users in most of the questions was at high level (more than 80%). According to the users' answers to the question about the impact of educational data presented through this application, its impact was high (78%). Conclusion: Due to high accessibility, this application increases individuals' knowledge, saves cost and time to control bed bugs, therefore, the use of this mobile health application is recommended

A supervisory active fault tolerant control framework for constrained linear systems*

In this paper, a supervisory active fault tolerant control (SAFTC) scheme is presented for linear systems with constraints. The SAFTC framework is composed of a fault diagnosis module, a reconfigurable controller and a pre-designed command governor. In the presence actuator faults, constraints are guaranteed by governing the setpoint to the nearest admissible value. The command governor is adopted in such a way that no recalculation and reconfiguration is needed even in the presence of actuator fault occurrence and reconfiguration of the main controller. The input redundancy assumption, needed to recover the closed-loop tracking performance of system with faulty constrained actuator, is relaxed. A simulation study on VTOL aircraft is performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Pediatric emergency medicine practice

Ancillary Service Demand Response (ASDR) programs, recently introduced by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), is integrated to an n-k Contingency Constrained Unit Commitment (CCUC) problem to investigate the capability of the Demand Response Providers (DRPs), newly added ancillary market participants, in mitigating the impacts of simultaneous multiple contingencies in a power system. In the proposed model, an n-k security criterion by which power balance constraint is satisfied under any contingency state comprising simultaneous outages in generation units is investigated in the presence of the ASDR programs. Demand side reserve is supplied by DRPs, which have the responsibility of aggregating and managing customer responses to offer a bid-quantity to the ISO. The proposed formulation is a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) problem based on primal-dual optimization, reported recently in literature. In addition, a detailed discussion about versatile effects of ASDR programs on n-k security criterion is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model

Contribution of emergency demand response programs in power system reliability

Nowadays, demand response has become one of the essential components of recent deregulated power systems as it can offer many distinguished features, such as availability, quickness, and applicability. DRPs (Demand response programs), announced by the federal energy regulatory commission, are among the most accepted and practical features of demand side management. DRPs not only can contribute in mitigating the intermittent effects of renewable energy resources but also can be used either to lower high energy prices, occurred in wholesale electricity markets, or when the security of power systems is at risk. In this paper, the influence of emergency demand response programs in improving reliability in case of failure of generation units is investigated. In the proposed reliability based optimization approach, the generation failure is modeled based on its forced outage rate. The proposed method can help independent system operators to schedule day-ahead generating units in a more reliable manner and can facilitate the participation of consumers to increase the total social welfare in the case of an emergency. Moreover, the mixed integer programming formulation allows implementing the proposed method by using available tractable linear solvers. Eventually, the applicability of the proposed model is tested on the IEEE 24-bus reliability test system and its effects on the value of lost load and the expected load not served are discussed

Design and Development of a Mobile-Based Application for Identification, Prevention, and Control of Head Lice and Survey of User Satisfaction

Introduction: Using mobile phones is one of the ways to increase people's knowledge and awareness. The objective of this study was to design and develop a mobile-based application for “identification, prevention, and control of head lice” and also to assess the satisfaction of mobile users with this educational application. Method: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in two stages including design and development of an educational application for head lice and assessment of the level of satisfaction among 140 users using electronic questionnaires. Finally, the data were analyzed by SPSS software (version 24) using descriptive statistics indices. Results: The descriptive findings of this study showed that 61.4% of users participating in the study were women, 45.8% of them were in the age group of 20 to 30 years, and 42.1% had high school diploma. Moreover, more than 95% of users stated that the scientific content in the application was easy to understand and the data were up-to-date. Overall, the results revealed that 81% of users in this study preferred to use this educational application over reading texts when exposed to head lice infestation and the effect of using the educational information of this mobile-based application was reported to be at high level (61%). Conclusion: The target population including families involved with head lice, school teachers, health center experts, and medical students are recommended to use this educational application

Chitosan: A versatile bio-platform for breast cancer theranostics.

Breast cancer is considered one of the utmost neoplastic diseases globally, with a high death rate of patients. Over the last decades, many approaches have been studied to early diagnose and treat it, such as chemotherapy, hormone therapy, immunotherapy, and MRI and biomarker tests; do not show the optimal efficacy. These existing approaches are accompanied by severe side effects, thus recognizing these challenges, a great effort has been done to find out the new remedies for breast cancer. Main finding: Nanotechnology opened a new horizon to the treatment of breast cancer. Many nanoparticulate platforms for the diagnosis of involved biomarkers and delivering antineoplastic drugs are under either clinical trials or just approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is well known that natural phytochemicals are successfully useful to treat breast cancer because these natural compounds are safer, available, cheaper, and have less toxic effects. Chitosan is a biocompatible and biodegradable polymer. Further, it has outstanding features, like chemical functional groups that can easily modify our interest with an exceptional choice of promising applications. Abundant studies were directed to assess the chitosan derivative-based nanoformulation's abilities in delivering varieties of drugs. However, the role of chitosan in diagnostics and theranostics not be obligated. The present servey will discuss the application of chitosan as an anticancer drug carrier such as tamoxifen, doxorubicin, paclitaxel, docetaxel, etc. and also, its role as a theranostics (i.e. photo-responsive and thermo-responsive) moieties. The therapeutic and theranostic potential of chitosan in cancer is promising and it seems that to have a good potential to get to the clinic