Role Clarity and Job Performance among the Employees in Small and Medium IT Industries

The Indian IT industry faces many challenges in managing their employees in the context of fast changing technology landscape. Defining roles and responsibilities, identifying skills for the employees’ development, providing performance feedback to the employees, performance management etc. Large IT companies have more employees and can have an advantage of defining clear roles for their employees in various groups and providing a structured feedback mechanism for their employees. However, the small and medium IT companies may not have that advantage. The authors in the present research paper investigated the relationship between employees’ role clarity, performance feedback and the employees’ perception on their performance. A survey was conducted in small and medium sized IT companies in Coimbatore city of Tamil Nadu, India. The relationship between role clarity related dimensions and various demographic characteristics of the employees and their perception of their performance was analysed. The data for the survey was collected using self-administered questionnaire which was based on COPSOQ and industry employee effectiveness surveys covering role clarity and job satisfaction. The data was quantitatively analysed using Z-test and Chi-square test. The analysis results indicate that there is a significant correlation between role clarity, performance feedback, and employee satisfaction on the perception of performance. Also, a significant correlation was found to be existing for the performance feedback and the perception on their performance. There is a significant correlation existing between the age group, experience of the employee and the performance feedback. Further, this paper presents the limitations of the study and suggestions for the improvement they're performance perception amongst the small, medium IT industry in defining the roles and responsibilities and performance feedback system. Keywords: Perception of Employee Performance, Role Clarity, IT Industry, Performance Feedback

On the monophonic and monophonic domination polynomial of a graph

A set S of vertices of a graph G is a monophonic set of G if each vertex u of G lies on an u − v monophonic path in G for some u, v ∈ S. M ⊆ V (G) is said to be a monophonic dominating set if it is both a monophonic set and a dominating set. Let M(G, i) be the family of monophonic sets of a graph G with cardinality i and let m(G, i) = |M(G, i)|. Then the monophonic polynomial M(G, x) of G is defined as M(G, x) = Ʃⁿi=m(G) m(G, i)xⁱ, where m(G) is the monophonic number of G. In this article, we have introduced monophonic domination polynomial of a graph. We have computed the monophonic and monophonic domination polynomials of some specific graphs. In addition, monophonic and monophonic domination polynomial of the Corona product of two graphs is derived.Publisher's Versio

Independent Monophonic Sets in Graphs

In this paper, we obtain two variables for the connected (p,q)-graphs G which is the minimum size of an independent monophonic set and an outer independentmonophonic set of G, termed as an independent monophonic number and an outer independent monophonic number of the connected (p,q)-graphs G, respectively

Edge Monophonic Domination Number of Graphs

In this paper the concept of edge monophonic domination num-ber of a graph is introduced.A set of vertices D of a graph G is edge mono-phonic domination set (EMD set) if it is both edge monophonic set and adomination set of G.The edge monophonic domination number (EMD num- ber) of G, me(G) is the cardinality of a minimum EMD set. EMD number of some connected graphs are realized.Connected graphs of order n with EMD number n are characterised.It is shown that for any two integers p and q such that 2 p q there exist a connected graph G with m(G) = p and me(G) = q.Also there is a connected graph G such that (G) = p;me(G) = q and me(G) = p +

(SI10-054) Nonsplit Edge Geodetic Domination Number of a Graph

In this paper, we have defined an inventive parameter called the nonsplit edge geodetic domination number of a graph, and some of its general properties are studied. The nonsplit edge geodetic domination number of some standard graph is obtained. In this work, we also determine the realization results of the nonsplit edge geodetic domination number and the edge geodetic number of a graph

Cellular membranes and lipid-binding domains as attractive targets for drug development

Interdisciplinary research focused on biological membranes has revealed them as signaling and trafficking platforms for processes fundamental to life. Biomembranes harbor receptors, ion channels, lipid domains, lipid signals, and scaffolding complexes, which function to maintain cellular growth, metabolism, and homeostasis. Moreover, abnormalities in lipid metabolism attributed to genetic changes among other causes are often associated with diseases such as cancer, arthritis and diabetes. Thus, there is a need to comprehensively understand molecular events occurring within and on membranes as a means of grasping disease etiology and identifying viable targets for drug development. A rapidly expanding field in the last decade has centered on understanding membrane recruitment of peripheral proteins. This class of proteins reversibly interacts with specific lipids in a spatial and temporal fashion in crucial biological processes. Typically, recruitment of peripheral proteins to the different cellular sites is mediated by one or more modular lipid-binding domains through specific lipid recognition. Structural, computational, and experimental studies of these lipid-binding domains have demonstrated how they specifically recognize their cognate lipids and achieve subcellular localization. However, the mechanisms by which these modular domains and their host proteins are recruited to and interact with various cell membranes often vary drastically due to differences in lipid affinity, specificity, penetration as well as protein-protein and intramolecular interactions. As there is still a paucity of predictive data for peripheral protein function, these enzymes are often rigorously studied to characterize their lipid-dependent properties. This review summarizes recent progress in our understanding of how peripheral proteins are recruited to biomembranes and highlights avenues to exploit in drug development targeted at cellular membranes and/or lipid-binding proteins

Content Analysis of 150 Years of British Periodicals

Previous studies have shown that it is possible to detect macroscopic patterns of cultural change over periods of centuries by analyzing large textual time series, specifically digitized books. This method promises to empower scholars with a quantitative and data-driven tool to study culture and society, but its power has been limited by the use of data from books and simple analytics based essentially on word counts. This study addresses these problems by assembling a vast corpus of regional newspapers from the United Kingdom, incorporating very fine-grained geographical and temporal information that is not available for books. The corpus spans 150 years and is formed by millions of articles, representing 14% of all British regional outlets of the period. Simple content analysis of this corpus allowed us to detect specific events, like wars, epidemics, coronations, or conclaves, with high accuracy, whereas the use of more refined techniques from artificial intelligence enabled us to move beyond counting words by detecting references to named entities. These techniques allowed us to observe both a systematic underrepresentation and a steady increase of women in the news during the 20th century and the change of geographic focus for various concepts. We also estimate the dates when electricity overtook steam and trains overtook horses as a means of transportation, both around the year 1900, along with observing other cultural transitions. We believe that these data-driven approaches can complement the traditional method of close reading in detecting trends of continuity and change in historical corpora

Women are seen more than heard in online newspapers

Feminist news media researchers have long contended that masculine news values shape journalists’ quotidian decisions about what is newsworthy. As a result, it is argued, topics and issues traditionally regarded as primarily of interest and relevance to women are routinely marginalised in the news, while men’s views and voices are given privileged space. When women do show up in the news, it is often as “eye candy,” thus reinforcing women’s value as sources of visual pleasure rather than residing in the content of their views. To date, evidence to support such claims has tended to be based on small-scale, manual analyses of news content. In this article, we report on findings from our large-scale, data-driven study of gender representation in online English language news media. We analysed both words and images so as to give a broader picture of how gender is represented in online news. The corpus of news content examined consists of 2,353,652 articles collected over a period of six months from more than 950 different news outlets. From this initial dataset, we extracted 2,171,239 references to named persons and 1,376,824 images resolving the gender of names and faces using automated computational methods. We found that males were represented more often than females in both images and text, but in proportions that changed across topics, news outlets and mode. Moreover, the proportion of females was consistently higher in images than in text, for virtually all topics and news outlets; women were more likely to be represented visually than they were mentioned as a news actor or source. Our large-scale, data-driven analysis offers important empirical evidence of macroscopic patterns in news content concerning the way men and women are represented

Enrichment for chemoresistant ovarian cancer stem cells from human cell lines

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are defined as a subset of slow cycling and undifferentiated cells that divide asymmetrically to generate highly proliferative, invasive, and chemoresistant tumor cells. Therefore, CSCs are an attractive population of cells to target therapeutically. CSCs are predicted to contribute to a number of types of malignancies including those in the blood, brain, lung, gastrointestinal tract, prostate, and ovary. Isolating and enriching a tumor cell population for CSCs will enable researchers to study the properties, genetics, and therapeutic response of CSCs. We generated a protocol that reproducibly enriches for ovarian cancer CSCs from ovarian cancer cell lines (SKOV3 and OVCA429). Cell lines are treated with 20 µM cisplatin for 3 days. Surviving cells are isolated and cultured in a serum-free stem cell media containing cytokines and growth factors. We demonstrate an enrichment of these purified CSCs by analyzing the isolated cells for known stem cell markers Oct4, Nanog, and Prom1 (CD133) and cell surface expression of CD177 and CD133. The CSCs exhibit increased chemoresistance. This method for isolation of CSCs is a useful tool for studying the role of CSCs in chemoresistance and tumor relapse