Effect of Motivation on Employee Retention: Mediating Role of Perceived Organizational Support

Employees play crucial role for the success and failure of any organization. In modern competitive work environment, employee retention is meaningful for the achievement of organizational goals. The aim of the study is to investigate the effect of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on employee retention. Along with that, the study also examined the mediating role of perceived organizational support on motivation-retention relationship. Primary data was collected from the commercial banks of Lahore, Pakistan. A sample size of 342 banking sector employees in commercial banks of Lahore, Pakistan was selected. Partial Least Square- Structural Equation Modeling was used to analyze the data. The findings revealed that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation has a significant impact over employee retention and perceived organizational support mediates the relationship between extrinsic, intrinsic motivation, and employee retention. By empirically testing the research contributes academically to Social Exchange Theory, Hertzberg Two Factor and Organizational Support Theory

The social construction of Muslim minority groups in Canada

This dissertation explores Canadian mainstream print media's discourse on Muslim minority groups in Canada in the pre- and post-9/11 timeframe. By using critical discourse analysis (CDA) of three Canadian English newspapers as well as focus group discussions, and individual interviews, this study explores the issues of racialization, Islamophobia, and the role of Canadian mainstream print media in the construction of stereotypical images of the Muslim minority groups in Canada. The data reveal the frequent usage of stereotypical racialized terms in three Canadian newspapers (two national and one local) directed toward Muslims in the post-9/11 period cultivated moral panics in Canadian society. Although Muslim were negatively portrayed in these newspapers before 9/11, the situation escalated in the post-9/11 era. Participants in the focus group discussion and individual interviews also stated that the post-9/11 moral panics augmented and perpetuated the negative feelings towards Muslims. An increased trend in racial and religious discrimination against Muslims was observed throughout Canada after the 9/11 incident in New York. The negative portrayal of Muslims stemmed from a lack of understanding of Muslim minority groups, their culture and/or international distortion of Muslims by media personnel, who did not differentiate between the small number of Muslims who engaged in or support terrorist acts, and the majority of Muslims who do not. By neglecting to recognize this conflation of the different perspectives of Muslims on these matters, the selected newspapers contributed to the escalation of moral panics in Canadian society, which resulted in increased negative attitudes towards Muslims

The effect of Foreign Direct Investment on economic growth of Pakistan

This study assesses the relationship between foreign direct investment and economic growth of Pakistan. The method of ordinary least square (OLS) has been used, utilizing time series data for the period 1980-2013. Our study found that, in case of Pakistan the results are significant showing that there is important relationship between economic growth and foreign direct investment. The study also give some recommendations including; making law & order situation better, provision of electricity, political stability and establishment of separate bench on the ministry of finance to attract foreign investment. Key words: Economic growth, foreign direct investment, developing country

Fuzzy Query Routing in Unstructured Mobile Peer-to-Peer Networks

© 2016 IEEE. Due to the disparity between the peer-to-peer (P2P) and the physical networks, we study the challenging problems of mobile routing in unstructured P2P networks over mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). To route queries and objects of interest, the existing mobile P2P protocols widely adopted an inflexible techniques which experience a relatively high delivery time due to remarkable network traffic, nodes mobility and broken links. The bond between routing and mobility is crucial to obtain efficient searching in mobile P2P network. To solve this problem, we proposed fuzzy search controller [1] which reduced search time but due to peer mobility the protocol causes low hit rate and high overhead. Thus, this article proposes novel fuzzy controller based possibilistic routing for unstructured mobile P2P networks to reduce routing time. The possibilistic routing is based on ultrapeer mobility, active time and location. The inference rules are defined to select the best route to forward query walker. Simulations show that the fuzzy search controller gives better performance than the competing protocols in terms of reducing response time and increasing hit rate in different mobility scenarios

A fuzzy logic scheme for real-time routing in wireless sensor networks

© 2015 IEEE. Real-time communications is still remain a major research challenge due to the limited energy supply, limited computing power, and limited bandwidth of the wireless links connecting sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Due to these limitations, sensor nodes are not powerful enough to accommodate the complexity of the real-time WSNs protocol. In real-time WSNs, to increase reliability of data delivery the high hit rate and reduction of packet losses is required. To solve these problems, we proposed a new fuzzy controller based routing algorithm to optimize real-time communication in WSNs. The main objectives of the proposed fuzzy controller are 1) to reduce energy consumption among nodes in order to increase network lifetime, 2) to meet real-time packet deadline, reduce end-to-end delay and packet losses. Furthermore, the proposed scheme adjusting the transmission range of surplus nodes to shortened end-to-end delay. We show through extensive simulation results that our proposed fuzzy algorithm considerably reduces energy consumption and noticeable improved real-time performance in comparison with existing schemes

Tracking the sedentary lifestyle using smartphone: A pilot study

© 2016 Global IT Research Institute (GiRI). Smartphone is most ubiquitous device and provides unique opportunity of continuous and automated tracking of sedentary lifestyle with the help of embedded sensors. In this paper, we present the evaluation of our pilot study results to track the sedentary lifestyle. The proposed model works well in real-time and inside the smartphone environment to process the sensory data. We compute the time and frequency domain features over the acceleration signals and classify the context with non-parametric nearest neighbor algorithm. To analyze the lifestyle patterns, information is transferred to the cloud server for archiving, further computation and its availability anywhere, anytime for visualization. It facilitates users to maintain and monitor their everyday lifestyle patterns and assists them to change their unhealthy sedentary behaviour identified by the proposed research. Furthermore, achieved results demonstrate the applicability of the proposed research in real-world scenarios

Compromised user credentials detection using temporal features: A prudent based approach

© 2017 ACM. This study exposes a serious and rapidly growing cyber threat of compromised legitimate user credentials which is very effective for cyber-criminals to gain trusted relationships with the account owners. Such a compromised user\u27s credentials ultimately result in damage incurred by the attacker at large-scale. Moreover, the detection of compromised legitimate user activities is crucial in competitive and sensitive organizations because wrong data is more difficult to clean from the database. The proposed study presents a novel approach to detect compromised users\u27 activity in a live database. Our approach uses a composition of prudence analysis, ripple down rules (RDR) and simulated experts (SE) to detect and identify accounts that experience a sudden change in behavior. We collected data from a sensitive running database for a period of Six months and evaluate the proposed technique. The results show that this combined model can fully detect outlier user\u27s activity and can provide useful information for the concerned decision maker

Pakistan's Relations with the United States and China in the Post-9/11 Era

This paper intends to explore the key elements that contribute to reshaping Pakistan's relations with the United States (US) and China in the post-9/11 era. In addition, the reasons contributing to how the US and China are perceived in Pakistan have been examined. The US and China both use different approaches in their relations with Pakistan. The US makes unilateral decisions, poses economic and security threats to Pakistan in pursuing its objectives, while China makes bilateral decisions and asserts itself as a soft power in its relations with Pakistan. The Pew Research Center's public opinion poll data shows that the US has become increasingly unpopular in Pakistan even after its substantial economic and military aid to Pakistan. China, on the other hand, has been able to win the hearts and minds of Pakistanis even though its economic and military aid to Pakistan in comparison to the US aid package is not nearly as significant. The study also reveals that Pakistan has grave concerns about future developments in the region after the US withdraws its forces from Afghanistan

Forecasting selectivity of Au-based partial oxidation catalysts via temperature programmed desorption studies on the Au(111) model catalyst

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-86).Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Thesis (M.S.): Bilkent University, The Department of Chemistry and the Graduate School of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2014.Gold-based heterogeneous catalysts have attracted significant attention due to their selective partial oxidation capabilities which are comparable to that of the industrial homogeneous benchmark catalysts. In the current study, a planar Au(111) single crystal model catalyst surface was utilized to understand the behavior of different organic compounds (alcohols, aldehydes, esters etc.) in conjunction to the partial oxidation reactions. Stability of different organic compounds were investigated on the Clean Au(III) surface. The stability of a particular organic compound on the Au(III) model catalyst surface was found to be closely related to the variety of generated products. Surface sensitive analytical techniques such as Temperature Programmed Desorption (TPD) and Low Energy Electron Diffraction (LEED) were used to investigate the interaction of organic compounds with the clean Au(111) single crystal surfaces under ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) conditions. Organic compounds were dosed onto atomically clean Au(III) surfaces at the liquid nitrogen temperature. All organic compounds desorbed non-dissociatively on the clean Au(111) surface. All organic compounds reveal monolayer and multilayer desorption signals but in the case of aldehydes, desorption is quite different, as they lead to polymerization on the surface with high desorption temperatures. Zeroth order desorption kinetics was observed for multilayers, while 1st order desorption was seen for the monolayer. In most cases, the multilayer feature can be observed with two distinct desorption peaks associated with amorphous and crystalline phases. In this work, it is confirmed that majority of the studied compounds have relatively low adsorption energies on Au(111). The species with lower desorption energies on Au(111) tend to undergo partial oxidation rather than total oxidation. Thus, desorption energy appears as an important descriptor for predicting the extent of oxidation in partial/total oxidation in oxidative coupling reactions.by Shah, Syed Asad Ali.M.S