Workplace Psychosocial Factors and Mental Health among a Sample of Expatriates and the Country’s Nationals Who Working at King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia

Worplace stress is the harmful physical and emotional response that occurs when there is a poor match between job demands and the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker. Mental health is an important issue in the workplace, particularly in developing countries. This study was aimed to explore the workplace psychosocial factors and mental health among expatriates and the country’s nationals; examine the relationship between workplace psychosocial factors and mental health. . The sample was composed of 518 country's nationals and 554 expatriates teaching staff on job at King Khalid University. Two tools were used for data collection: Socio-demographic data sheet, and Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ). The study results indicated that Poor mental health had a strongly statistically significant positive correlation with “quantitative  demands”,” Work-family conflict”, and “Emotional demands “ in total country’s nationals and expatriates   (p<0.01). While it was a strongly statistically significant negative  correlation with “Work pace”, “Influence at work”, “Social support from colleague”, “Social support from supervisors”, “Meaning of work”, “Commitment to the workplace” “Predictability”, and  “Recognition” (p<0.01). It was concluded that country's nationals experience worse mental health than expatriates and  this  to some extent caused by exposure to psychosocial factors at work. It has indicated the importance of taking action to reduce psychosocial factors, as this would benefit both country’s nationals and expatriate workers. Key words: Expatriates , country's nationals , workplace psychosocial factors, mental health

Performance Degradation and Cost Impact Evaluation of Privacy Preserving Mechanisms in Big Data Systems

Big Data is an emerging area and concerns managing datasets whose size is beyond commonly used software tools ability to capture, process, and perform analyses in a timely way. The Big Data software market is growing at 32% compound annual rate, almost four times more than the whole ICT market, and the quantity of data to be analyzed is expected to double every two years. Security and privacy are becoming very urgent Big Data aspects that need to be tackled. Indeed, users share more and more personal data and user-generated content through their mobile devices and computers to social networks and cloud services, losing data and content control with a serious impact on their own privacy. Privacy is one area that had a serious debate recently, and many governments require data providers and companies to protect users’ sensitive data. To mitigate these problems, many solutions have been developed to provide data privacy but, unfortunately, they introduce some computational overhead when data is processed. The goal of this paper is to quantitatively evaluate the performance and cost impact of multiple privacy protection mechanisms. A real industry case study concerning tax fraud detection has been considered. Many experiments have been performed to analyze the performance degradation and additional cost (required to provide a given service level) for running applications in a cloud system

Exhaled Nitric Oxide is Not a Biomarker for Pulmonary Tuberculosis.

To reduce transmission of tuberculosis (TB) in resource-limited countries where TB remains a major cause of mortality, novel diagnostic tools are urgently needed. We evaluated the fractional concentration of exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) as an easily measured, noninvasive potential biomarker for diagnosis and monitoring of treatment response in participants with pulmonary TB including multidrug resistant-TB in Lima, Peru. In a longitudinal study however, we found no differences in baseline median FeNO levels between 38 TB participants and 93 age-matched controls (13 parts per billion [ppb] [interquartile range (IQR) = 8-26] versus 15 ppb [IQR = 12-24]), and there was no change over 60 days of treatment (15 ppb [IQR = 10-19] at day 60). Taking this and previous evidence together, we conclude FeNO is not of value in either the diagnosis of pulmonary TB or as a marker of treatment response

Decreased functional connectivity within a language subnetwork in benign epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes.

OBJECTIVE: Benign epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BECTS, also known as Rolandic epilepsy) is a common epilepsy syndrome that is associated with literacy and language impairments. The neural mechanisms of the syndrome are not known. The primary objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that functional connectivity within the language network is decreased in children with BECTS. We also tested the hypothesis that siblings of children with BECTS have similar abnormalities. METHODS: Echo planar magnetic resonance (MR) imaging data were acquired from 25 children with BECTS, 12 siblings, and 20 healthy controls, at rest. After preprocessing with particular attention to intrascan motion, the mean signal was extracted from each of 90 regions of interest. Sparse, undirected graphs were constructed from adjacency matrices consisting of Spearman's rank correlation coefficients. Global and nodal graph metrics and subnetwork and pairwise connectivity were compared between groups. RESULTS: There were no significant differences in graph metrics between groups. Children with BECTS had decreased functional connectivity relative to controls within a four-node subnetwork, which consisted of the left inferior frontal gyrus, the left superior frontal gyrus, the left supramarginal gyrus, and the right inferior parietal lobe (p = 0.04). A similar but nonsignificant decrease was also observed for the siblings. The BECTS groups had significant increases in connectivity within a five-node, five-edge frontal subnetwork. SIGNIFICANCE: The results provide further evidence of decreased functional connectivity between key mediators of speech processing, language, and reading in children with BECTS. We hypothesize that these decreases reflect delayed lateralization of the language network and contribute to specific cognitive impairments

Relative Navigation, Microdischarge Plasma Thruster, and Distributed Communications Experiments on the FASTRAC Mission

Enabling technologies for nanosatellite formations will be demonstrated under the Formation Autonomy Spacecraft with Thrust, Relnav, Attitude, and Crosslink (FASTRAC) program. Two °ight-ready nanosatellites will be designed, fabricated, integrated, and tested during the two year design period. Three speci¯c new and innovative technologies which will be demonstrated during the mission are Relative Navigation, Plasma Microthrusters, and Distributed Communications. A sensor set consisting of Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, magnetometer, and MEMS Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) will be used to determine position and coarse attitude. Using a radio crosslink, the two satellites will exchange state vector information and perform sub-meter level accuracy relative navigation. Each satellite will also contain a Microdischarge Plasma Thruster (MPT) developed at UT-Austin. This innovative device is capable of generating low-thrust, high-e±ciency propulsion at low power levels using microdischarge plasmas. The ability of the MPT to extend the life of the orbit will be determined by monitoring the orbit decay rates of the two vehicles as well as the MEMS IMU. A distributed tracking network with multiple university partners will be utilized to track the low Earth orbit satellites. Amateur radio experimenters, high schools, universities, and other interested parties will be encouraged to record telemetry from the satellites and report their data to a project web site for processing. Although the main purpose of the mission is technology demonstration, science goals will also be pursued. These include post-processing sensor measurements to determine satellite drag, as well as Earth atmospheric and magnetospheric studies