Causes, Effects, and Remedies in Conflict Management

While workplace conflicts have been widely studied in the literature, this researchprovides a holistic view of the causes and effects of such, and how managers or amanagement can resolve the conflicts among their teams and organization througha detailed, multidimensional framework carried out on one of the biggest textilefirms of Pakistan. With an initial sample of 145 respondents, 37 questionnaireswere dropped because of invalid and incomplete answers; therefore, the studywas carried out on 108 respondents. Conflicts are a part of human nature, butmanagement should play an important role in dealing with these issues, as therecan be enormous chances of conflicts due to a diverse workforce. Conflict alsoresults in poor work performance and low productivity; therefore, it’s suggestedto create teams or groups which may encourage a competitive culture in theorganization. Additionally, a few remedies are identified, which may resolve someissues; managers must look at those techniques for a better culture.&nbsp

Electrokinetic desalination of porous building materials

The deterioration of porous building materials and structures by the crystallization of water soluble salts is a well known phenomenon. The threats posed by salts to building materials can be minimized either by controlling the environment or by removing the salts from the deteriorated zone. In building materials electro kinetic desalination aims to remove salts from the affected zone, mainly by electro migration, by application of an external electric field. However, in addition to enhancing the transport of dissolved salt ions, the applied electric field might also introduce new ionic species, due to reactions at the electrodes. In particular, H and OH ions can be introduced at the positively and negatively biased electrodes, respectively. This results in acidic and alkaline fronts entering the material, which can affect the desalination process. In addition, the acidic environment can induce corrosion in reinforced concrete and damage the mortar in masonry structures. In this thesis the effect of an applied DC electric field on the migration of salt (Na) ions in fired-clay brick has been investigated by performing non-destructive measurements of the time evolution of the moisture and Na profiles using a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technique. Furthermore, the effect of an applied electric field on the evolution of the acidic and alkaline fronts and the electric potential gradients within the brick sample has been studied. In order to interpret the experimental observations a numerical model, based on the Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations, has been developed. The results of this model were in good agreement with the experimental data. The results of the study indicate that the evolution of the acidic and alkaline severely affects or even halts the transport of salt ions, which drastically limits the applicability of the electro kinetic method to the desalination of porous building materials

Learning Optimal Control of Synchronization in Networks of Coupled Oscillators using Genetic Programming-based Symbolic Regression

Networks of coupled dynamical systems provide a powerful way to model systems with enormously complex dynamics, such as the human brain. Control of synchronization in such networked systems has far reaching applications in many domains, including engineering and medicine. In this paper, we formulate the synchronization control in dynamical systems as an optimization problem and present a multi-objective genetic programming-based approach to infer optimal control functions that drive the system from a synchronized to a non-synchronized state and vice-versa. The genetic programming-based controller allows learning optimal control functions in an interpretable symbolic form. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated in controlling synchronization in coupled oscillator systems linked in networks of increasing order complexity, ranging from a simple coupled oscillator system to a hierarchical network of coupled oscillators. The results show that the proposed method can learn highly-effective and interpretable control functions for such systems.Comment: Submitted to nonlinear dynamic

Perang Wacana Islamisme Di Mesir: Perspektif Linguistik

Egypt is the ‘Mecca\u27 of modern Islamic thoughts. From Egypt, Islamic thoughts, both secular and traditional, have been distributed to all parts of the Islamic world. In his book, Jacob Hoigilt seeks to record and present the fierce discourse between Islamism vis-a-vis West-secularism from the perspective of linguistic disciplines. The authors conducts a critical analysis of the language (language/parole) used by Islamic thinkers in their polemic about Islamism, its meaning construction, as well as social situation underlying the polemic in Egypt. The author thoroughly scrutinizes the texts of the islamist thinkers, as well as clarifies the issues of symbolic power struggles, orthodoxy, and ideology that divide the intellectuals into liberalist and Islamist poles

Scaling Properties of Ge-SixGe1-x Core-Shell Nanowire Field Effect Transistors

We demonstrate the fabrication of high-performance Ge-SixGe1-x core-shell nanowire field-effect transistors with highly doped source and drain, and systematically investigate their scaling properties. Highly doped source and drain regions are realized by low energy boron implantation, which enables efficient carrier injection with a contact resistance much lower than the nanowire resistance. We extract key device parameters, such as intrinsic channel resistance, carrier mobility, effective channel length, and external contact resistance, as well as benchmark the device switching speed and ON/OFF current ratio.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices (in press