A five-year profile of employee satisfaction for UK local government buildings

A substantial five-year database, totalling over 20,000 responses across more than four hundred UK local government office buildings, is used to analyse employee satisfaction towards their work environment. Within this database, twenty-seven employee satisfaction attributes have been collected, for different sets of individuals and buildings, by an annual online survey for five years. The collective views of these responses in each of those years have been compared. The results have been strikingly consistent. The problematic areas are persistently the same. They appear to be the control of heating and ventilation and the need for, and ability to use, quiet areas for concentration, followed by document storage facilities, provision of meeting rooms, car parking facilities, and other personal needs related facilities, such as toilets and kitchen facilities. These areas are important concerns which need to be brought to the attention of local authorities and should not be neglected by decision makers. The findings by the comparison should also stimulate the proposals of improvement initiatives. This five-year profile provides a baseline against which the future investigations can be compared in the same sector. This study also provides an analytic method for performing other satisfaction related investigations. Keywords: employee satisfaction, work environment, local governmen

Banks' roles in preventing financial crisis

This paper focuses on the critical role of banks play in preventing financial crisis.Banks have always been viewed as playing a crucial role in financial markets.A country’s economy would be unable to function properly without the many forms of bank services. However, Banks were blamed as the cause of 2008 U.S financial crisis due the excessive competition in the banking sector that stimulated banks to extend too much credit (over-lending).Thus, this paper is to identify the banks’ roles in preventing financial crisis and how far Malaysian banks have played their roles in preventing financial crisis. The analysis is done from three perspectives i.e long term financial integrity, banks’ capital adequacy and prudent supervision. Analysis method used in this analysis is content analysis

System dynamics of oxyfuel power plants with liquid oxygen energy storage

Traditional energy storage systems have a common feature: the generating of secondary energy (e.g. electricity) and regenerating of stored energy (e.g. gravitational potential, and mechanical energy) are separate rather than deeply integrated. Such systems have to tolerate the energy loss caused by the second conversion from primary energy to secondary energy. This paper is concerned with the system dynamics of oxyfuel power plants with liquid oxygen energy storage, which integrates the generation of secondary energy (electricity) and regeneration of stored energy into one process and therefore avoids the energy loss caused by the independent process of regeneration of stored energy. The liquid oxygen storage and the power load of the air separation unit are self-adaptively controlled based on current-day power demand, day-ahead electricity price and real-time oxygen storage information. Such an oxyfuel power plant cannot only bid in the day-ahead market with base load power but also has potential to provide peak load power through reducing the load of the air separation unit in peak time. By introducing reasoning rules with fuzzy control, the oxygen storage system has potential to be further extended by integrating renewable energy resources into the system to create a cryogenic energy storage hub

On the geometry of wave solutions of a delayed reaction-diffusion equation

The aim of this paper is to study the existence and the geometry of positive bounded wave solutions to a non-local delayed reaction-diffusion equation of the monostable type.Comment: 25 pages, several important modifications are made. Some references added to the previous versio

Ansiedad al Contagio COVID-19, estrés académico en el rendimiento académico de estudiantes de una institución educativa pública de Chanchamayo, 2023

En el mundo, Latinoamérica y Perú, el COVID-19 trajo consigo diversas modificaciones psicológicas negativas en los estudiantes, provocando abruptas variaciones en su vida cotidiana, provocando cambios en su comportamiento al retornar a la presencialidad en las aulas; como objetivo se buscó determinar la influencia de la ansiedad por el contagio COVID-19 y el estrés académico en su rendimiento académico de los estudiantes de Chanchamayo, usando un enfoque cuantitativo de diseño transversal correlacional causal explicativo, se aplicó en 150 estudiantes de quinto año de secundaria, tres instrumentos validados a través de juicio de experto; cuyos resultados encontrados demostraron que: 69,6% presentan ansiedad al contagio COVID-19, 81.4% tienen estrés académico entre los niveles moderado y severo, el 26.6% presentaron un bajo rendimiento académico, con una dependencia porcentual entre las variables de 58,9% (coeficiente de Nagelkerke) y un p-valor = 0,000 < 0,05 determinando su influencia; concluyéndose que: cuando la ansiedad al contagio COVID-19 se encuentre en moderado nivel y un estrés académico en niveles leve a moderado el rendimiento académico del estudiante será mediano; confirmando su influencia

La Influencia del Liderazgo en la Gestión Administrativa de la Facultad de Ciencias Contables en LA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DEL PERÚ - PUCP, 2018

A inicios de los noventa el concepto de gestión administrativa adquiere gran importancia como un factor de gran determinación en la actividad educativa, que como referencia busca dinamizar los distintos procesos y funcionamiento de las instituciones, por tanto, este concepto representa un conjunto de procesos teórico – prácticos que se integran tanto vertical, como horizontalmente para cumplir metas planteadas dentro del plan institucional de las instituciones formativas, situación que no es ajena a la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (en adelante PUCP), por tanto busca realizar los cambios adecuados que le permitan mantener o mejorar la calidad de los procesos dentro de la facultad y la institución. La presente investigación pretende determinar cuál es la influencia existente entre tipos de liderazgo y la gestión que realiza el personal administrativo dentro de la Facultad de Ciencias Contables de la PUCP, en la ciudad de Lima para el periodo 2018, durante el cambio de gestión del nuevo decano, situación que se ve directamente vinculada a los procesos de gestión, ya que como líder es parte fundamental de la columna vertebral de la institución, y el encargado de dar respuesta y solución a las necesidades reales, motivando y dinamizando a su área a cargo, por ende sus acciones y toma de decisiones influirán directamente en las actividades y resultados que día a día se presentan. Es importante resaltar que la práctica de gestión administrativa se encuentra vinculada directamente a los procesos y resultados de la institución, por ende es importante tomar en cuenta el desempeño y liderazgo del encargado del área, además del apoyo que recibe este por parte de la comunidad y personal a su cargo.At the beginning of the nineties the concept of administrative management acquires great importance as a factor of great determination in the educational activity, which as a reference seeks to invigorate the different processes and functioning of the institutions, therefore, this concept represents a set of theoretical processes - practical that are integrated both vertically and horizontally to meet goals set within the institutional plan of training institutions, a situation that is not alien to the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (hereinafter PUCP), therefore seeks to make the appropriate changes that allow maintain or improve the quality of the processes within the faculty and the institution. The present investigation intends to determine what is the influence existing between types of leadership and the management carried out by the administrative staff within the accounting faculty of the PUCP, in the city of Lima for the period 2018, during the change of management of the new dean , a situation that is directly linked to the management processes, since as a leader it is a fundamental part of the backbone of the institution, and the person in charge of responding to and solving real needs, motivating and energizing your area, therefore their actions and decision making will directly influence the activities and results that are presented every day. It is important to highlight that the practice of administrative management is directly linked to the processes and results of the institution, therefore it is important to take into account the performance and leadership of the manager of the area, as well as the support received by the community and staff at your expense.Trabajo de investigació

Consideration of COVID-19 beyond the human-centred approach of prevention and control:the ONE-HEALTH perspective

Most of the new emerging and re-emerging zoonotic virus outbreaks in recent years stem from close interaction with dead or alive infected animals. Since late 2019, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread into 221 countries and territories resulting in close to 300 million known infections and 5.4 million deaths in addition to a huge impact on both public health and the world economy. This paper reviews the COVID-19 prevalence in animals, raise concerns about animal welfare and discusses the role of environment in the transmission of COVID-19. Attention is drawn to the One Health concept as it emphasizes the environment in connection with the risk of transmission and establishment of diseases shared between animals and humans. Considering the importance of One Health for an effective response to the dissemination of infections of pandemic character, some unsettled issues with respect to COVID-19 are highlighted

A targeted gene panel that covers coding, non-coding and short tandem repeat regions improves the diagnosis of patients with neurodegenerative diseases

Genetic testing for neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) is highly challenging because of genetic heterogeneity and overlapping manifestations. Targeted-gene panels (TGPs), coupled with next-generation sequencing (NGS), can facilitate the profiling of a large repertoire of ND-related genes. Due to the technical limitations inherent in NGS and TGPs, short tandem repeat (STR) variations are often ignored. However, STR expansions are known to cause such NDs as Huntington\u27s disease and spinocerebellar ataxias type 3 (SCA3). Here, we studied the clinical utility of a custom-made TGP that targets 199 NDs and 311 ND-associated genes on 118 undiagnosed patients. At least one known or likely pathogenic variation was found in 54 patients; 27 patients demonstrated clinical profiles that matched the variants; and 16 patients whose original diagnosis were refined. A high concordance of variant calling were observed when comparing the results from TGP and whole-exome sequencing of four patients. Our in-house STR detection algorithm has reached a specificity of 0.88 and a sensitivity of 0.82 in our SCA3 cohort. This study also uncovered a trove of novel and recurrent variants that may enrich the repertoire of ND-related genetic markers. We propose that a combined comprehensive TGPs-bioinformatics pipeline can improve the clinical diagnosis of NDs