Exploring the barriers to work-life balance for women in Saudi Arabia

In recent years, the increasing demands of organisations on their employees, together with more family and non-work commitments, raise questions of how to balance these conflicting demands. This is especially relevant currently for women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), as they have high levels of educational attainment and are being encouraged into the workforce by government initiatives, yet are still expected to perform the traditional domestic roles assigned to them by religion and culture. Flexible work is considered in some cultures as one of the solutions that might resolve conflicts between employees' family life and work. The purpose of this research is to explore the barriers to work-life balance for women in Saudi Arabia. To achieve this aim, three questions are raised: 1) Do women in Saudi Arabia have autonomy and flexibility in their work? 2) Do women in Saudi Arabia desire to have autonomy and flexibility in their work? What might be the benefits for their work-life balance? 3) What barriers do women in Saudi Arabia face to achieving flexibility? Moreover, this study explores the impact of religion and national culture on the context of work-life balance, and the potential of flexible work and job crafting for achieving an environment of work-life balance. In order to assist in the identification and interpretation of issues influencing women's ability to achieve work-life balance, this thesis draws on work-family border theory. Semi-structured interviews were used in collecting data. Thirty-one women employees in the health, education, and banking sectors were interviewed, these being the main sectors of female employment in Saudi Arabia. The findings of this research show that women largely lack autonomy and flexibility in their work due to lack of formal policy, bureaucracy and stereotypical attitudes in the workplace. However, they desire to have autonomy and flexibility in their work, and perceive benefits to themselves, their families and their employers if such opportunities were made available. In addition, the findings provide a deeper understanding of the different problems which Saudi women face in achieving work-life balance. The factors identified in this study that prevent working women in Saudi Arabia from achieving a satisfactory balance between work and home include the culture, religion, transportation, lack of suitable childcare, and family and work responsibilities. The study shows how border theory can be developed by adding new constructs to expand Clark’s (2000) model to make better sense of the issues faced by Saudi working women, specifically the interacting influence of personal and institutional (including cultural) factors on the strategies employed by women to negotiate work/family borders. By drawing attention to dynamics previously neglected in the border theory literature, the study contributes to debates on how border theory can inform understanding of work-life balance in previously unresearched cultural contexts

The Effect of Distributed Generation on Distributed Network

The work has a practical model which is feasible and applicable in King Abdulaziz University Hospital KAUH Intensive Care Unit ICU that consists of 9-bus system. Because of solar energy generation is a part of distributed generation; the solar PV was represented as distributed generators. The research focus on applying power flow method on 9 bus network. The power flow was studied with/without added distributed generators (DGs). Keywords: Distributed Generators DGs, Distributed netowrk, Power Flow, Voltage Profile, Power Losses

A Study of Nutritional Awareness of Jordanians’ Consumers towards Functional Foods

The functional food industry has expanded yet research into consumer perceptions of functional foods is limited. This study was carried out to investigate consumers’ awareness, acceptance and attitudes towards functional foods in Jordan. Six hundred and twenty eight Jordanian consumers were randomly recruited at shopping areas, universities and public places. 55.8% of this population sample was male and 44.2% were female, and they were aged between 18 and 70 years. A questionnaire consists of three parts was given to participants to fill it by themselves. It was shown in this study that 74.4 of participants had used olive oil, 55.6% of the participants had used herbal tea, and 37.3% of the participants had used bread with whole grain. The results show that older respondents were 4.233 times more aware of functional food than younger respondents. Also, it was shown that the female respondents were 3.176 times more aware of functional food than the male respondents. Similarly, the likelihood of respondents having awareness of functional food was 2.237 times greater among those who had a higher educational level than among those with a lower educational level. Consumers who used vitamin supplements were 1.831 times more aware of functional food than other consumers. Also, the likelihood of their awareness of functional food was 2.532 times greater among respondents who had a higher income than among those with a lower income. Participants scoring high on the reward from using functional foods were more likely to have consumed milk fortified with calcium, bread with whole grain, and olive oil than participants with low scores. On the other hand, respondents scoring high on the taste of functional foods were more likely to have consumed fruit juices fortified with vitamin C, yoghurt with probiotics, eggs with increased omega-3, breakfast cereals fortified with vitamins and minerals, and herbal tea than participants who scored low. As a conclusion, this study has shown that socio-demographic characteristics such as age, education and income levels, and prices are important indicators that influence consumers’ awareness and consumption of functional food. These results suggest that this type of knowledge could affect consumers’ interest in functional foods and therefore educational strategies might be necessary to encourage the consumption of functional foods. Keywords: Functional food, awareness, acceptance, attitude, probiotics, fortifie

An Intelligent Tutoring System for Teaching Grammar English Tenses

The evolution of Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) is the result of the amount of research in the field of education and artificial intelligence in recent years. English is the third most common languages in the world and also is the internationally dominant in the telecommunications, science and trade, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomatic language as most of the areas of work now taught in English. Therefore, the demand for learning English has increased. In this paper, we describe the design of an Intelligent Tutoring System for teaching English language grammar to help students learn English grammar easily and smoothly. The system provides all topics of English grammar and generates a series of questions automatically for each topic for the students to solve. The system adapts with all the individual differences of students and begins gradually with students from easier to harder level. The intelligent tutoring system was given to a group of students of all age groups to try it and to see the impact of the system on students. The results showed a good satisfaction of the students toward the system

Modelling Government Expenditures and Economic Growth Nexus in Saudi Arabia: 1968 -2010

Economic growth and development remains an important policy issue for most of the states in the world, which is a particular issue for late developing countries, as they have very much relied on ‘state’ for economic growth and development. As a result, the experience in the 20th century demonstrates a secular increase in the growth of government expenditures all over the world. Hence, the role of government expenditures in contributing to long run economic growth continues to be an important topic and the subject of much debate. Saudi Arabia economy is one of late developing countries. While its economy is characterised by an open and private economy, the government remains to have a large role in the economy through its expenditures financed largely by revenues generated from oil. While the Saudi economy has grown and developed, the government has also responded to the increased demand for social services such as education and healthcare in addition to other infrastructure investments for development purpose. Therefore, the process of economic growth and development has resulted in growth of government expenditures. This research, thus, aims at modelling of government expenditures and economic growth nexus in the case o Saudi Arabia for the period of 1968-2010 by testing a number of models developed in the literature: Wagner’s Law, Keynesian Relations and Peacock and Wiseman’s Displacement Effect. The analysis modelled within the time series econometric techniques including co-integration test, Granger causality test and the error correction model (ECM). The findings obtained from the analyses find that the Wagnerian proposition can explain the growth of government in Saudi Arabia, which holds for both the oil and non-oil income cases. The result indicates the existence of strong feedback causality for all the versions of Wagner’s law in the long run. The findings also note that the three versions of Keynesian Relations found to be held for both general income and non-oil income in the case of Saudi Arabia. In addition, the findings also support for the Displacement Effect mainly due to international political developments and trends in oil prices, as such events resulted deviation from the linear growth in the government expenditures over the average growth and it is observed that government expenditure growth continued its gradual growth from the new level. This study, thus, concludes that growing economic activity of the state has marked the Saudi Arabian economy over the period in question. While this partly can be explained due to economic reasons such as the need for economic development and responding to the demands of a growing population, but also the rentier economy nature of the Saudi political economy necessitates increasing government expenditures for political stability

Hepatorenal syndrome: a review

The hepatorenal syndrome [HRS]is a reversible functional acute renal failure secondary to intense renal cortical vasoconstriction in a patient with liver disease. It affects around 40% of patients with cirrhosis and ascites1. The exact cause of the syndrome is not well understood. The state of liver dysfunction [Child-Pugh score] does not predict the occurrence of the disease. Genetic factors play no important role except as risk for liver disease and there is no sex difference. Patients with HRS characteristically have increased cardiac output, low arterial pressure, and reduced systemic vascular resistance. Diagnosis of HRS is one of exclusion. The definitive treatment is liver transplant. Nevertheless, a lot of work was done on medical therapy with promising results. Sudan Journal of Medical Sciences Vol. 1(1) 2006: 59-6

Ubitrack: A Study on Lost Person Activity Estimation Using Accelerometer Data from Smartphones

As smartphones become very more popular, applications are being developed with new and innovative ways to solve problems faced in the day-to-day lives of users. One area of smartphone technology that has been developed in recent years is human activity recognition HAR. This technology uses various sensors that are built into the smartphone to sense a person\u27s activity in real time. Applications that incorporate HAR can be used to track a person\u27s movements and are very useful in areas such as health care. In our research, we use this type of motion sensing technology, specifically, using data collected from the accelerometer sensor. The purpose of this study is to estimate the pilgrim who may become lost on the annual pilgrimage to Hajj. The application is capable of estimating the movements of people in a crowded area, and of indicating whether or not the person is lost in a crowded area based on his/her movements as detected by the smartphone. This will be a great benefit to anyone interested in crowd management strategies, specifically regarding Hajj. In this thesis, we review related literature and research that has given us the basis for our own research. For example, we could not create this application without the use of HAR technology and without specific classification algorithms. We also detail research on lost person behavior. We looked at the typical movements a person will likely make when he/she is lost and used these movements to indicate lost person behavior. We then describe the creation of the application, all of its components, and the testing process. Finally, we discuss the results of our trials and plans for future work

The Impact Of Employee Perceptions On Organizational Commitment

Kajian ini dijalankan untuk mengkaji hubungan antara persepsi kakitangan bank-bank di Gaza, Palestin dan kesan persepsi tersebut dengan komitmen kakitangan terhadap bank-bank berkenaan. This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between the perception of the employees of the banks in Gaza, Palestine and the impact of such a perception on their commitment to these banks

Error-triggered Three-Factor Learning Dynamics for Crossbar Arrays

Recent breakthroughs suggest that local, approximate gradient descent learning is compatible with Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). Although SNNs can be scalably implemented using neuromorphic VLSI, an architecture that can learn in-situ as accurately as conventional processors is still missing. Here, we propose a subthreshold circuit architecture designed through insights obtained from machine learning and computational neuroscience that could achieve such accuracy. Using a surrogate gradient learning framework, we derive local, error-triggered learning dynamics compatible with crossbar arrays and the temporal dynamics of SNNs. The derivation reveals that circuits used for inference and training dynamics can be shared, which simplifies the circuit and suppresses the effects of fabrication mismatch. We present SPICE simulations on XFAB 180nm process, as well as large-scale simulations of the spiking neural networks on event-based benchmarks, including a gesture recognition task. Our results show that the number of updates can be reduced hundred-fold compared to the standard rule while achieving performances that are on par with the state-of-the-art