Analyses On The Stability Of Irrigation Channel Embankment With Geosynthethic Reinforcement [TA455.G44 S525 2008 f rb].

Dalam saliran pengairan, aras air dalam saliran selalunya berubah bergantung kepada keperluan air oleh petani. In irrigation channels, the water level in the channel is always changing depend on the water demand by farmers

Supply Chain And Outsourcing Practices In The Food Processing Industry

The Malaysian food processing industry has been experiencing a major transformation, driven by the emergence of large retail chains and the changing consumption patterns and lifestyles. However, no empirical studies have been conducted to investigate the attempts undertaken by companies in the industry in taking advantage of supply chain management and outsourcing applications. Moreover, a critical review of outsourcing models from literature showed that the majority of the models developed were ambiguous, assumed outsourcing is only limited to non-core functions and lack a clear-cut decision making methodology. Also, none of the examined models was developed specifically for the food processing industry. Therefore, this research aims to provide a detailed analysis of the outsourcing and the supply chain activities in the Malaysian Food processing industry and develop a model for outsourcing decision making in the food processing industry that will allow companies to decide their outsourcing policy for any intended outsourcing project. Data for this research were collected through literature review, expert interviews, and survey questionnaire. The survey questionnaire was used to gather empirical data on outsourcing and supply chain management issues in the Malaysian food processing industry. Five hundred questionnaires were mailed to randomly chosen companies in a 5-month period that yielded a response rate of 11%. The outsourcing decision making model was developed using the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP), and validated by conducting structured interviews with 25 purchasing managers from different food processing companies and analyzed using the Expert Choice Software (v. 9.5). The results indicated that modern SCM principles have not penetrated well into the Malaysian food processing sector. Only 44% of the respondents have strategic partnership(s), and 39% indicated an increase in strategic partnerships(s) in the last three years. Companies outsource both core and non-core function. The top five outsourced functions were packaging (60.4%), import/export management (58.3%), transportation management (58.3%), processing (56.3%), and warehousing (54.2%). Main reasons influenced the respondents to resort to outsourcing included suppliers’ compatibility (83%), lack of in-house capability (73%), and complexity of function (56%). Lack of advanced communication systems and competition scored the highest as the most obstacles faced in SC execution with 3.39 and 3.32 respectively. The outsourcing model output indicated that those companies that outsource to solve short-term problems tend to adopt a short-term outsourcing policy which does not emphasize on relationship. On the contrary, companies that tend to outsource to transform their businesses through significant improvements tend to outsource strategically in which strategic partnership must be sought. Otherwise, investing and performing internally is the best alternative. The contribution of this research is that it has presented empirical evidence on the practices of outsourcing and SCM in the Malaysian food processing industry. Moreover, an outsourcing model was developed to assist food processing companies in identifying their outsourcing policies in accordance with the objectives of the outsourcing project

Management of Violence and Aggression in Emergency Environment; a Narrative Review of 200 Related Articles

Context: The aim of this study is to reviewing various approaches for dealing with agitated patients in emergency department (ED) including of chemical and physical restraint methods. Evidence acquisition: This review was conducted by searching “Violence,” “Aggression,” and “workplace violence” keywords in these databases: PubMed, Scopus, EmBase, ScienceDirect, Cochrane Database, and Google Scholar. In addition to using keywords for finding the papers, the related article capability was used to find more papers. From the found papers, published papers from 2005 to 2018 were chosen to enter the paper pool for further review. Results: Ultimately, 200 papers were used in this paper to conduct a comprehensive review regarding violence management in ED. The results were categorized as prevention, verbal methods, pharmacological interventions and physical restraint. Conclusion: In this study various methods of chemical and physical restraint methods were reviewed so an emergency medicine physician be aware of various available choices in different clinical situations for agitated patients

Gamification for Volunteer Cloud Computing.

Requirements engineering is a preliminary and cru- cial phase for the correctness and quality of software systems. Despite the agreement on the positive correlation between user involvement in requirements engineering and software success, current development methods employ a too narrow concept of that “user” and rely on a recruited set of users considered to be representative. Such approaches might not cater for the diversity and dynamism of the actual users and the context of software usage. This is especially true in new paradigms such as cloud and mobile computing. To overcome these limitations, we propose crowd-centric requirements engineering (CCRE) as a revised method for requirements engineering where users become primary contributors, resulting in higher-quality requirements and increased user satisfaction. CCRE relies on crowdsourcing to support a broader user involvement, and on gamification to motivate that voluntary involvement

Four Reference Models for Transparency Requirements in Information Systems

Transparency is a key emerging requirement in modern businesses and their information systems. Transparency refers to the information which flows amongst stakeholders for the purpose of informed decision-making and taking the right action. Transparency is generally associated with positive connotations such as trust and accountability. However, it has been shown that it could have adverse effects such as information overload and affecting decisions objectiveness. This calls for systematic approaches for transparency to ensure its cost-effectiveness and avoid such adverse side effects. This is especially true considering that the relatively few works in the literature on transparency requirements have focused mainly on making information available and accessible and have paid little focus on the information receivers’ side and making it meaningful for them. In this paper, we reflect on our previous research on transparency and its multi-faceted constructs and review multi-disciplinary conceptualisation and propose four reference models which are meant to form a holistic conceptual baseline for transparency require- ments in information systems. These reference models cover transparency actors, transparency meaningfulness, transparency usefulness, and information quality in transparency. We also discuss the interdependencies amongst these four reference models and their implications for requirements engineers and information system analysts. As a proof of concept, we analyse a mainstream transparency document, the United Kingdom Freedom of Information Act, in the light of our reference models and demonstrate the need to consider transparency more holistically and the need to include the information receiver’s perspective and the inter-relations amongst various properties and constituents of transparency as well. We then highlight areas of improvement informed by our analysis

Towards a Code of Ethics for Gamification at Enterprise

Gamification is an emerging technique which utilises the “fun the- ory” mainly to motivate people to change their perception and attitude towards certain subjects. Within enterprises, gamification is used to motivate employees to do their tasks more efficiently and perhaps more enjoyably and sometimes to increase their feeling of being members of the enterprise as a community. While the literature has often emphasised the positive side of gamification, mainly from economic and business perspectives, little emphasis has been paid to the ethical use of gamification within enterprises. In this paper we report an empirical re- search to explore the ethical aspects of using gamification. We follow a mixed methods approach involving participants who are gamification experts, employ- ees and managers. Our findings show that, for gamification, there is a fine line between being a positive tool to motivate employees and being a source of ten- sion and pressure which could then affect the social and mental well-being within the workplace. This paper will evaluate that dual effect and clarify that fine line

A NEW ALGORITHM IN NONLINEAR ANALYSIS OF STRUCTURES USING PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION

Solving systems of nonlinear equations is a difficult problem in numerical computation. Probably the best known and most widely used algorithm to solve a system of nonlinear equations is Newton-Raphson method. A significant shortcoming of this method becomes apparent when attempting to solve problems with limit points. Once a fixed load is defined in the first step, there is no way to modify the load vector should a limit point occur within the increment. To overcome this defect, displacement control methods for passing limit points can be used. In displacement control method, the load ratio in the first step of an increment is defined so that a particular key displacement component will change only by a prescribed amount. In this paper the load ratio is obtained using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm so that the complex behavior of structures can be followed, automatically. Design variable is load ratio and its unbalanced force is also considered as objective function in optimization process. Numerical results are performed under geometrical nonlinear analysis, elastic post-buckling analysis and inelastic post-buckling analysis. The efficiency and accuracy of proposed method are demonstrated by solving these examples. 

Configuring Crowdsourcing for Requirements Elicitation

Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm which utilises the power of the crowd in contributing information and solving problems. Crowdsourcing can support requirements elicitation, especially for systems used by a wide range of users and working in a dynamic context where requirements evolve regularly. For such systems, traditional elicitation methods are typically costly and limited in catering for the high diversity, scale and volatility of requirements. In this paper, we advocate the use of crowdsourcing for requirements elicitation and investigate ways to configure crowdsourcing to improve the quality of elicited requirements. To confirm and enhance our argument, we follow an empirical approach starting with two focus groups involving 14 participants, users and developers, followed by an online expert survey involving 34 participants from the Requirements Engineering community. We discuss our findings and present a set of challenges of applying crowdsourcing to aid requirements engineering with a focus on the elicitation stage