Employee Retention in Recessionary Period - A Review

Employee Retention involves taking measures to encourage employees to remain in the organization for the maximum period of time. The top organizations value their employees and try and keep them glued to the organization. Focusing on employee retention at a time when companies are experiencing mass layoffs may seem like an oxymoron. Yet, high-level players will always be in demand. Inspiring, satisfying and retaining top players in an organization are the key business objectives in any economic environment. In a recession, the challenge is to motivate them to perform their 200% to achieve results. Recession purifies the system and helps in selecting the best from the rest. Employee retention is especially important in a difficult economy. The high-performers want to be involved. They want to be engaged and be part of the solution. If company doesn’t take advantage of that, these high-performers may look for employment elsewhere. Best recruitment tool to be selected is retention. According to Karen Campbell “Good retention practices go together with customer satisfaction and employee productivity.''  Retention can be achieved by following simple tactics as mentioned below:Communicate effectively and be a great motivator, innovator, and leaderSearch for ways to redeploy employees and treat them fairly and respectfullyProvide alternate work schedules.Companies have to take excellent initiative for engaging and retaining valuable employees by developing corporate programs that help to avoid burnout by promoting a healthy balance between life and work

Obesity Detrimental to Women’s Health

Obesity is the detrimental to overall health and physical performance. Excess amount of body fat is linked to several diseases including type 2 diabetes mellitus, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, cardiovascular diseases and certain type of cancers, and they increase the morbidity and mortality. The mortality rate increases by 50% to 100% when the body mass index (BMI) is equal to or greater than 30Kg.m-2. Most of the women after 30‘s suffered from abdominal obesity or disproportion in hip and waist ratio. It appears to serve as platform for variety of clinical health problems, in addition to greater risk of serious illness. It poses other mechanical limitation that limit performance of daily activities. As individual ages, they may lose the ability to regulate energy intake based on physiologic cues, leading to overeating and weight gain. High caloric food with low in nutrients density and sedentary life style are two major causes of obesity. Several methods are used to determine a person‘s ideal body weight; however in many cases especially for athletes, ideal body weight may be unrealistic. Thus, it is better to focus on a healthy body weight rather than ideal body weight. Healthy body weight is different for each individual, athlete or non athlete, and is one that is relative to a person‘s overall health profile. Prevention of weight gain would likely to decrease chronic disease, improve quality of life and decrease health care cost. So, weight management is required by an every individual by increasing the physical activity every day with proper diet

Prosody Generation in Neutral Speech for Storytelling Application Using Tilt Model

This paper proposes Intonation Modeling for Prosodygeneration in Neutral speech for Marathi (language spoken inMaharashtra, India) story telling applications. Now a day’s audiostory telling devices are very eminent for children. Emotion putsprecise meaning in the audio to understand content in speech. Inthis paper, we proposed tilt model for stressed words in Marathifor speech modification. Tilt model predicts modification in toneof neutral speech. GMM is used to identify stressed words formodification

Evaluation of wound healing activity of topical phenytoin in an excision wound model in rats

Background: Wound healing is a significant healthcare problem in today’s medical practice. Despite extensive treatment modalities that are supposed to hasten the wound healing process, the outcomes of existing methods are far from optimal. One such agent that has been tried previously and found controversial in wound healing is phenytoin. Therefore, this study was planned to evaluate and compare wound healing effect of topical phenytoin with povidone iodine ointment in rats.Methods: This study was conducted after approval from Institutional Animal Ethics Committee (IAEC). Wound healing activity of topical phenytoin (1 g% and 2 g%) was assessed in excision wound model in Sprague Dawley rats (n=8), which was compared with topical petroleum jelly and povidone iodine ointment. Parameters studied included wound area on day 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, percentage wound contraction, percentage wound healing from day 0 to day 20 and period of re-epithelisation.Results: Wound surface area decreased in all treatment groups from day 0 through day 20 and the percentage wound closure was better in both the preparations (1% and 2%) of phenytoin when compared wih control and povidone iodine, but this was not statistically significant. Furthermore, the days required for complete re-epithelisation were less with phenytoin treated groups. There was no statistical difference between both the preparations of phenytoin.Conclusion: In this study, it was found that topical phenytoin accelerates wound healing process in an excision wound model

Life Cycle Assessment of Tyre Manufacturing Process

Due to the phenomenal growth in the transport sector as a part of rapid urbanization, especially in the Indian sub-continent where transportation of goods and people are essentially done through the existing road associated with production of tyres and to identify the grey areas in which enough network, tyre industries have seen a rapid growth. In view of this, it is important that sustainability of tyre industry is maintained without its adverse effect on the environment. The objectives of this particular study are to identify and quantify the potential environmental impacts scope is there for further improvements. Life cycle assessment is a tool to evaluate the environmental impacts of any product or a process. In this work, life cycle assessment has been used to identify the environmental impacts associated with the tyre manufacturing process. The gate-to-gate approach has been used for this study of tyre production. The detailed data required for this study were obtained from MRF Industries, Usgao, Goa, India. Computations of the life cycle impact assessment results are achieved using SimaPro software with IMPACT 2002+ method. From the results it is noted that there is a significant impact on the environment due to emissions from the generation of electrical energy and steam in the plant under study along with emissions due to various operations in the tyre production process. The major environmental impact categories which are affected due to these processes are respiratory inorganics, aquatic acidification, terrestrial acidification/nitrification and to some extent aquatic eutrophication. Further, it is also observed that there is significant emission of particulate matter from the Banbary section of the tyre production process. This study reveals that the emissions of particulate matter, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide from tyre production process are significant. The life cycle assessment results obtained for the MRF tyre are compared with the life cycle assessment results of the Tweel tyre invented by Michelin, Bridgestone tyre, Goodyear tyre, Nokia tyre and comparative life cycle assessment results for a conventional tyre and a guayule rubber-based tyre. From a comparison among all above mentioned case studies, it is observed that major environmental impacts of tyres depend primarily on product design and usage. Significant reduction in environmental impact due to tyre production is possible if the source of electricity is nonconventional. Reduction in weight and rolling resistance of the tyre will also lead in significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions during its use

Modelling Studies on Reactive Absorption of Carbon Dioxide in Monoethanolamine Solution from Flue Gas in Coal Based Thermal Power Plants

In this paper the detailed theoretical investigation on absorption of carbon dioxide, from flue gas in coal based thermal power plants has been presented. For absorption studies, monoethanolamine solution is considered as a solvent. The mathematical model for the absorption column has been developed by considering thin film model approach. Unified method is used for an overall estimation of carbon dioxide absorption. The carbon dioxide concentration profile at a given stage, using the thin film layer model, has been predicted at 298 K and 318 K. From the results it is noted that carbon dioxide concentration decreases from interface concentration at equilibrium to a minimum of 0 kmol/m3 up to a distance of ±2 micrometers. Overall estimation of carbon dioxide absorption has been carried out using the unified model approach. The total amount of carbon dioxide absorbed in absorption column is estimated to be 95.60% of the inlet carbon dioxide with 30 trays, L/G ratio of 8.5 and carbon dioxide flow rate of 95.74 kmol/m3. The results revealed that reactive absorption is very effective in absorbing carbon dioxide into monoethanolamine solvent

1-(2-Bromo­benz­yl)-3-isopropyl­benz­imid­azolin-2-one

In the structure of the title compound, C17H17BrN2O, the central phenyl and imidazol-2-one rings are coplanar (dihedral angle between planes of 0.73 (11)°). The angles subtended by the substituents on the N atoms of the imidazol-2-one ring range from 109.71 (14)° to 128.53 (15) due to steric hindrance of these substituents with the phenyl H atoms. The carbonyl O and Br both make two weak C—H⋯O and C—H⋯Br inter­actions with two adjacent mol­ecules, thus forming an three-dimensional array

Study of effects of donepezil and aspirin on working memory in rats using electroconvulsive shock model

Background: Memory is the most common cognitive ability lost with dementia commonly seen in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Donepezil was the first cholinesterase inhibitor to be licensed in UK for AD. There is preliminary evidence that aspirin decreases the risk and delays the onset of AD. Low dose aspirin users had numerically lower prevalence of Alzheimer’s dementia and had better cognitive function than non-users.Methods: Retention of conditioned avoidance response (CAR) was assessed by using repeated electroconvulsive shocks (ECS) in rats. Rats were divided into five groups: control (pretreated with distilled water), ECS (150 V, 50 Hz, with intensity of 210 mA for 0.5 sec) pretreated, combined aspirin (6.75 mg/kg) and pretreated ECS, combined donepezil (0.32 mg/kg) and pretreated ECS, combined aspirin, donepezil and pretreated ECS groups. Data were analyzed using the Chi-square test and ANOVA.Results: Findings show that administration of ECS daily for 8 days results in transient amnesia and disruption of retention of CAR. Aspirin and donepezil administration significantly increased the retention of CAR in comparison to ECS. However, aspirin failed to show an increase in the retention of CAR as compared to donepezil. The combination of the two drugs showed statistically significant increase in the retention of CAR than either of these drugs given alone.Conclusion: Neuroinflammation plays an important role in the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative disorder like AD. Combination of aspirin with donepezil increased the nootropic and neuroprotective effect of aspirin and thus may hold great clinical significance in such disorders

Physics of Bubble-Propelled Microrockets

© 2018 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim A popular method to induce synthetic propulsion at the microscale is to use the forces created by surface-produced gas bubbles inside the asymmetric body of a catalytic swimmer (referred to in the literature as microrocket). Gas bubbles nucleate and grow within the swimmer and migrate toward one of its openings due to asymmetric geometric confinement, generating a net hydrodynamic force which propels the device. Here, numerical simulations are used to develop a joint chemical (diffusive) and hydrodynamic (Stokes) analysis of the bubble growth within a conical catalytic microrocket and of the associated bubble and microrocket motion. With this computational model, the bubble dynamics are solved for over one bubble cycle ranging from its nucleation to its exiting the conical rocket, and the propulsion characteristics are identified as a function of all design parameters (geometry and chemical activity of the motor, surface tension, physicochemical constants). The results suggest that hydrodynamics and chemistry partially decouple in the motion of the bubbles, with hydrodynamics determining the distance travelled by the microrocket over each cycle while chemistry sets the bubble ejection frequency. This numerical model allows for the identification of an optimal microrocket shape and size for which the distance travelled per cycle duration is maximized