Salmonella: Clever Bacteria

A recent outbreak of salmonella caused many grocery stores to recall their onions and many unknowing consumers to become ill. A major produce supplier from California, Thompson International Inc., had announced a recall on August 1st for all onion types distributed by the company starting May 1st of 2020. This caused a recall from over hundreds of grocery stores, even our familiar Kroger and Walmart grocery stores

Can a Piece of Gum Keep You Running?

More than 50 percent of adults over the age of 18 drink coffee every day. Students on our own campus are not unfamiliar with the idea of a cup of coffee, or more, a day. But, could there be an alternative to this morning routine? Do we have to run on Dunkin? Kent Chen and Ryan Yoshimura worked with surgeons from UCLA to develop an exciting new energizer that would provide better results than the energizers used in the past. In 2015, they introduced Neurogum to the market. Its purpose is to boost energy, cognition, and focus whether it is to study for a test or run a mile

NeuralSTA: a software tool for neural stimulation and recording applications with a laser control

The subject of this thesis is a software tool created in Matlab ® for neural stimulation and recording of the evoked potentials. The stimulation output can be delivered in electrical units for immediate use for neural stimulation or as a power control signal to a laser. NeuralSTA is designed to generate arbitrary waveforms of stimulation and simultaneously record the neural response while implementing the spike triggered averaging (STA) method, hence the name NeuralSTA. The output (stimulation) signal can be created in monophasic, biphasic or inverted monophasic forms (for laser control applications). Controls for pulse modulation allow shaping of the pulse waveform, and the controls for the signal allow for modulation of the entire stimulation pattern. In addition to generating arbitrary waveforms, NeuralSTA can also be programmed for repetitive generation of the output stimulation pattern as well as a stepwise increase of the amplitude during each repetition. NeuralSTA was tested in several animal experiments during a year, and continuously updated to meet the specific requirements that were noticed during each testing. As a result, many options are provided to the user in order to meet typical requirements in most common applications of neural stimulation and recording

High Commitment Human Resource Management Practices and Employee Outcomes, HR Attribution Theory and a Proposed Model in the Context of Bangladesh

Human resource management (HRM) practices have been studied as a composite or bundle approach with different names including different practices. Each bundle includes common HRM practices of staffing, compensation, training and development, performance appraisal, job design and career development issues with varying dimensions. The present study refers these HRM practices as High Commitment HRM (HCHRM) practices. Prior studies identify these HCHRM practices related to employee outcomes of satisfaction, commitment and retention. Consistent with early findings, the present study believes a relation between HCHRM and employee outcomes. Additionally, HR attribution theory is discussed here to explain the causal relationship between HCHRM practices and employee outcomes. Based on the review of HCHRM practices literatures and existing HRM practices of Bangladesh, a research model is proposed and propositions are developed, The model is expected to be tested in future to identify the relationship among HCHRM practices, HR attribution and employee outcomes in the context of Bangladesh. The proposed model can be tested in other countries as well

Green HRM for Green Services: A Proposed Best Practices Green HRM Model for Green Banking Performance in Bangladesh

The study proposes best practices Green HRM model to improve and innovate green banking services of the banking organizations of Bangladesh. The proposed model provides insights into what extent HRM practices can be linked to capitalize green banking services for greening the economy. Therefore, it can increase the environmental awareness and the theoretical and managerial insights for an effective implementation of green banking through green HRM practices. The banking sector in Bangladesh is at a stage of planning ecological adaptation in response to global green efforts. The present study develops a HRM model suggesting that bank management should link HRM practices to use bank employee capabilities for improving and innovating green banking services in their green strategies. Furthermore, the review on extant literature on green banking across the globe provides evidences of financial sector responses to global ecological concern. This study addresses future empirical study on the proposed model to justify green HRM impact on green services in banking industry and other industries within and beyond Bangladesh. Keywords: Green HRM, Green Management, Best Practices Green HRM, Green Banking, Bangladesh

Does Emotionality Prevail Over Rationality? Evaluating The Dynamics of Human Cognitions and Affections in Hotel Service Satisfaction

This paper attempts to measure the relative importance of cognitive and affective factors in the context of hotel service satisfaction. Although the literature talks about the relative influence of cognitive and affective factors on satisfaction, it is generally mute on the “Impact Overlap” that may exist due to the simultaneity of the influence. The confoundedness created by this impact overlap is the research gap, which this paper tries to disentangle. Principal Component Analysis has been used to construct cognitive and affective indices based on the factors identified from the previous literature. The relative importance of the cognitive and affective factors that a consumer considers while deciding to stay in a hotel is assessed using regression analysis. Our findings from the regression analyses suggest that cognitive factors such as infrastructure and location significantly increases customer service satisfaction. Amongst the affective factors, personalization and word of mouth have a significant positive impact on service satisfaction, even after controlling for brand name. Furthermore, results from the regressions testing the interaction effect of cognitive and affective factors reveal that for customers valuing affective factors, the impact of cognitive factors on satisfaction is relatively less. However, the converse is not necessarily true. This finding therefore implies that affective factors play a relatively important role than cognitive factors in deriving service satisfaction

Global accounting convergence: Quality, acceptability and enforceability of IFRS in Nigeria

In view of the pressing demands to converge with IFRS as the international accounting benchmark and to serve as common global accounting language, coupled with the concerns expressed by critics over its uniform suitability and relevance in diverse economic, political and institutional settings across the globe, it is increasingly significant to empirically investigate; the quality, acceptability and enforceability of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in countries of different settings. Therefore, this study investigates the perception of financial reporting users and preparers on global accounting convergence in terms of IFRS quality, IFRS acceptability and IFRS enforceability in Nigeria. Data was collected using online and self-administered survey approach. Based on the empirical findings, it was concluded that despite the possible issues and challenges associated with convergence to IFRS, it could yet be considered as a right step, in a right direction and at a right time for Nigeria. Convergence to IFRS is in the best interest of the country in order to tap its full economic potential and her deserving leadership within the global financial market. It has been proven that convergence to IFRS has positive impact to the country's reporting system with improvement in reporting quality leading to reduction in income smoothing, and increased in value relevance of reported incom

Climate Change Impact in a Shallow Coastal Mediterranean Aquifer, at Saïdia, Morocco

A density dependent numerical flow model was applied to study the climate change impact in an unconfined shallow aquifer in the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. The stresses imposed to the model were derived from the IPCC emission scenarios and included recharge variations, rising sea level and advancing seashore. The simulations show that there will be a significant decline in the renewable freshwater resources and that salinity increases can be quite large but are limited to a restricted area