Karakteristik Biografis dan Pengaruhnya terhadap Kinerja Individual yang Dimediasi oleh Kepuasan Kerja

Tujuan Penelitian – Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui apakah terdapat pengaruh dari karakteristik biografis terhadap kepuasan kerja dan kinerja individual serta apakah kepuasan kerja mampu menjadi variabel mediasi antara karakteristik biografis dengan kinerja individual.Desain/Metodologi/Pendekatan – Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian kausalitas dan data yang digunakan adalah data kuantitatif. Data dikumpulkan dengan menggunakan kuesioner dengan jumlah sampel 220 orang. Data dianalisis menggunakan analisis jalur.Temuan – 1) Tidak ada pengaruh karakteristik biografis terhadap kinerja individual, 2) Ada pengaruh karakteristik biografis dan kepuasan kerja secara bersama-sama terhadap kinerja individual, dan 3) Kepuasan kerja mampu menjadi variabel mediasi (intervening) antara karakteristik biografis dan kinerja individual dosen.Keterbatasan Penelitian – Untuk penelitian selanjutnya dapat ditambahkan variabel lainnya seperti karakteristik pekerjaan dan karakteristik organisasi

Academic research groups: evaluation of their quality and quality of their evaluation

In recent years, evaluation of the quality of academic research has become an increasingly important and influential business. It determines, often to a large extent, the amount of research funding flowing into universities and similar institutes from governmental agencies and it impacts upon academic careers. Policy makers are becoming increasingly reliant upon, and influenced by, the outcomes of such evaluations. In response, university managers are increasingly attracted to simple indicators as guides to the dynamics of the positions of their various institutions in league tables. However, these league tables are frequently drawn up by inexpert bodies such as newspapers and magazines, using rather arbitrary measures and criteria. Terms such as "critical mass' and "metrics" are often bandied about without proper understanding of what they actually mean. Rather than accepting the rise and fall of universities, departments and individuals on a turbulent sea of arbitrary measures, we suggest it is incumbent upon the scientific community itself to clarify their nature. Here we report on recent attempts to do that by properly defining critical mass and showing how group size influences research quality. We also examine currently predominant metrics and show that these fail as reliable indicators of group research quality.Comment: Presented at the International Conference on Computer Simulation in Physics and Beyond in Moscow, 2015. The Proceedings will appear in Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS

Identification of biomolecule mass transport and binding rate parameters in living cells by inverse modeling

BACKGROUND: Quantification of in-vivo biomolecule mass transport and reaction rate parameters from experimental data obtained by Fluorescence Recovery after Photobleaching (FRAP) is becoming more important. METHODS AND RESULTS: The Osborne-Moré extended version of the Levenberg-Marquardt optimization algorithm was coupled with the experimental data obtained by the Fluorescence Recovery after Photobleaching (FRAP) protocol, and the numerical solution of a set of two partial differential equations governing macromolecule mass transport and reaction in living cells, to inversely estimate optimized values of the molecular diffusion coefficient and binding rate parameters of GFP-tagged glucocorticoid receptor. The results indicate that the FRAP protocol provides enough information to estimate one parameter uniquely using a nonlinear optimization technique. Coupling FRAP experimental data with the inverse modeling strategy, one can also uniquely estimate the individual values of the binding rate coefficients if the molecular diffusion coefficient is known. One can also simultaneously estimate the dissociation rate parameter and molecular diffusion coefficient given the pseudo-association rate parameter is known. However, the protocol provides insufficient information for unique simultaneous estimation of three parameters (diffusion coefficient and binding rate parameters) owing to the high intercorrelation between the molecular diffusion coefficient and pseudo-association rate parameter. Attempts to estimate macromolecule mass transport and binding rate parameters simultaneously from FRAP data result in misleading conclusions regarding concentrations of free macromolecule and bound complex inside the cell, average binding time per vacant site, average time for diffusion of macromolecules from one site to the next, and slow or rapid mobility of biomolecules in cells. CONCLUSION: To obtain unique values for molecular diffusion coefficient and binding rate parameters from FRAP data, we propose conducting two FRAP experiments on the same class of macromolecule and cell. One experiment should be used to measure the molecular diffusion coefficient independently of binding in an effective diffusion regime and the other should be conducted in a reaction dominant or reaction-diffusion regime to quantify binding rate parameters. The method described in this paper is likely to be widely used to estimate in-vivo biomolecule mass transport and binding rate parameters

From green technology development to green innovation: inducing regulatory adoption of pathogen detection technology for sustainable forestry

Technological entrepreneurship has been widely acknowledged as a key driver of modern industrial economies, and more recently, a panacea for environmental and social problems. However, our current understanding of how green-technology ventures emerge and diffuse more sustainable innovations remains limited. We advance theory on green entrepreneurship by drawing on institutional work to refine and extend our understanding of how entrepreneurs may influence government policies and practices in their attempts to diffuse green technology. We develop a theoretical framework that combines institutional work with a search tool, the technological, commercial, organizational, and societal (TCOS) framework of innovative uncertainties, which identifies key opportunities, hurdles, and potential unintended consequences at early stages of technology development. We present a detailed case study of a potential university-based green-tech venture developing pathogen detection technology for forestry protection. Foreign pathogens spread by international trade can have major detrimental impacts on forests and the industries that rely on them. Our analysis found that green technology demonstrating technological feasibility is necessary but not sufficient; green-tech ventures must also engage in institutional work, in this case, articulating the technology’s benefits to regulators to establish legitimacy and avoid misuse that can hinder its adoption. We thus add to previous studies by emphasizing that institutional work could be a main activity for a green-tech venture, a core entrepreneurial strategy rather than an afterthought

End-user centred infrastructure operation: Towards integrated end-use service delivery

Reliable provision of water, energy and transportation, all supplied through infrastructure, is necessary for the most basic human and economic development to occur. Such development however, is not enabled by specific end-use products (e.g. litres of water, kWh of electricity, litres of diesel and petrol), or by infrastructure itself (i.e. the systems of energy, transport, digital information, water, waste and flood protection assets), but rather through the infrastructure end-use services (e.g. hygiene, thermal comfort, communication, or accessibility). The present form of infrastructure operation consists of supply systems provisioning unconstrained demand of end-use products, with larger consumption volumes corresponding to higher economic revenue. Providing infrastructure capacity to meet unmanaged growing demand is ultimately unsustainable, both in environmental and economic terms. Past research has focused on physical infrastructure assets on the one hand, and sustainable consumption and production on the other, often neglecting infrastructure end-use services. An important priority for sustainable infrastructure operation is therefore to analyse the infrastructure end-use service demands, and the variety of end-users’ wants and behaviours. This paper outlines the key aspects of an end-user and service-centred approach to infrastructure operation. It starts with an overview of relevant research areas and literature. It then describes the infrastructure end-use services provided by different infrastructure streams quantitatively, with the UK domestic sector as an illustration. Subsequently, insights into infrastructure integration at the end-user level are presented. Finally, the infrastructure end-use service perspective is described as a holistic framework for intervention: understanding technological changes in context, acting directly on end-use demand, and including social implications of service-based solutions

Crowds in or crowds out? The effect of foreign direct investment on domestic investment in Chinese cities

This study investigates the empirical relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and domestic investment (DI) in China using a comprehensive city-level panel over the period from 2003 to 2011. System-generalized method-of-moment estimation reveals mixed results. At the national level, FDI neither crowds in nor crowds out DI, indicating a neutral FDI–DI nexus. However, when the full sample is segmented by geographical topology, a positive and significant FDI–DI nexus can be found in eastern and, to a lesser extent, central cities. A negative, although insignificant, association is reported among western cities. Further, the empirical nexus is conditional on several local absorptive capacities including human capital, financial development, and institutional quality. These findings suggest that a region-based FDI strategy in general and local governments should strengthen their absorptive capacities to fully internalize FDI spillovers