Burnout and optimism among health workers during the period of COVID-19

Aim: The investigation of the level of burnout and optimism as well as the effect of socio-demographic and other factors on the above two variables among health workers during the period of covid-19. Methods: The following two psychometric tools were used to collect the research data: the Maslach Burnout Inventory to assess burnout and the Revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R) to assess the level of optimism. Results: In the present study 10 men (24.4%) and 31 women (75.6%) participated. The majority of them were between 36-45 years (36.6%), married and unmarried (48.8% and 48.8% respectively), holding bachelor degree (61.0%) and with 11-25 years of work experience (53.7%). Very high levels of exhaustion and especially emotional exhaustion and depersonalization were observed with also a high degree of personal achievement. The levels of optimism were high. There were statistically significant differences between the two genders in terms of burnout (only the dimension of emotional exhaustion) with women showing higher rates. Employees aged 25-35 years and those who had 1-10 years of work seemed to have higher levels of emotional exhaustion (all differences were considered statistically significant for p<0.05). Finally, a statistically significant correlation took place between burnout and optimism (p<0.05). Conclusions: The level of burnout among health workers seems to be high during the period of covid-19. In addition, various socio-demographic and occupational factors appear to influence burnout

Flexible SLA negotiation using semantic annotations

Abstract. Moving towards a global market of services requires flexible infrastructures that will deal with the inevitable semantic heterogeneity that occurs during the negotiation that precedes the trading of a service. In order to reach an agreement, the negotiating parties need to understand the concepts describing the Quality of Service (QoS) terms which are part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The use of semantic annotations can increase the level of flexibility and automation, allowing the two parties to use their own terminology as long as it is related to the commonly understood conceptual model. This paper discusses how SLA negotiation will benefit from the use of a lightweight backwards compatible semantic annotation mechanism

An overview of S-OGSA: A Reference Semantic Grid Architecture

The Grid's vision, of sharing diverse resources in a flexible, coordinated and secure manner through dynamic formation and disbanding of virtual communities, strongly depends on metadata. Currently, Grid metadata is generated and used in an ad hoc fashion, much of it buried in the Grid middleware's code libraries and database schemas. This ad hoc expression and use of metadata causes chronic dependency on human intervention during the operation of Grid machinery, leading to systems which are brittle when faced with frequent syntactic changes in resource coordination and sharing protocols. The Semantic Grid is an extension of the Grid in which rich resource metadata is exposed and handled explicitly, and shared and managed via Grid protocols. The layering of an explicit semantic infrastructure over the Grid Infrastructure potentially leads to increased interoperability and greater flexibility. In recent years, several projects have embraced the Semantic Grid vision. However, the Semantic Grid lacks a Reference Architecture or any kind of systematic framework for designing Semantic Grid components or applications. The Open Grid Service Architecture ( OGSA) aims to define a core set of capabilities and behaviours for Grid systems. We propose a Reference Architecture that extends OGSA to support the explicit handling of semantics, and defines the associated knowledge services to support a spectrum of service capabilities. Guided by a set of design principles, Semantic-OGSA ( S-OGSA) defines a model, the capabilities and the mechanisms for the Semantic Grid. We conclude by highlighting the commonalities and differences that the proposed architecture has with respect to other Grid frameworks. (c) 2006 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved

Leadership Profiling of Ocean Going Ship Masters1

Ship Masters of ocean going ships are team leaders and decision makers in charge of managing usually diverse teams that have to confront unexpected situations that might risk the life safety of crewmembers and the loss of the asset. Despite their critical role, research on the Masters’ leading role is rather limited. Lack of relevant research becomes even more noticeable if one takes into account that the ocean going ship as a productive unit and working environment is paralleled with the “total institution”, i.e. an isolated, enclosed social system that controls aspects of its members’ lives. This paper focuses on the ocean going ship Masters and aims at identifying their leadership profiles and understanding their attitudes and reactions in given circumstances. It analyses and discusses the results of a field study of ship officers of different nationalities employed as Masters on board ships of a leading international maritime group. Results of the research reveal that the characteristics and the competencies of ship Masters as identified using the specially developed questionnaire, are compatible with those proposed by situational leadership theories. Ship Masters seem to give priority to the people on board and their needs and try to be supportive in their decisions

F100-PW-229 Engine Fault Detection Based on Real Time Data

Gas turbine engines exhibit very high maintenance costs. Moreover, in the case of aero applications an in-flight engine incidence, shall, by all means, be avoided, a condition that drives total maintenance costs even higher. A measure in favor of balancing these costs is to monitor continuously the variation of engine performance data recorded during flight, establish methods to deduce useful information regarding the engine “health” status and, as a result, take appropriate actions to maintain a good engine operating condition. The current work presents such a method tailored on the “F100-PW-229” engine that is operated by the ellenic Air Force as the propulsion system of the “F-16 block 52M” aircraft [3]. CEDATS and MS Excel were the computational tools used for the current engine performance study. CEDATS is a software developed for the engine users. It provides basic data trend monitoring functions and engine fault warnings. It is well known that there is always space for improvement for such health monitoring tools since there are cases where engine operating faults are not captured. Within the frame of the current work, a data post – processing method on the engine performance data time series was applied using MS Excel, in order to raise early warnings of an uncaptured compressor operating fault

Semantically supported SLA negotiation

The evolution of services market raises the need for automatic support for negotiating service use criteria. In order to reach an agreement, the negotiating parties need to develop a common understanding of the Quality of Service (QoS) terms which are part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The use of semantic annotations together with reasoning can increase the level of flexibility and automation in SLA management. A framework is presented for SLA negotiation allowing the two parties to use their own terminologies

Burnout and optimism among health workers during the period of COVID-19

Aim: The investigation of the level of burnout and optimism as well as the effect of socio-demographic and other factors on the above two variables among health workers during the period of covid-19. Methods: The following two psychometric tools were used to collect the research data: the Maslach Burnout Inventory to assess burnout and the Revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R) to assess the level of optimism. Results: In the present study 10 men (24.4%) and 31 women (75.6%) participated. The majority of them were between 36-45 years (36.6%), married and unmarried (48.8% and 48.8% respectively), holding bachelor degree (61.0%) and with 11-25 years of work experience (53.7%). Very high levels of exhaustion and especially emotional exhaustion and depersonalization were observed with also a high degree of personal achievement. The levels of optimism were high. There were statistically significant differences between the two genders in terms of burnout (only the dimension of emotional exhaustion) with women showing higher rates. Employees aged 25-35 years and those who had 1-10 years of work seemed to have higher levels of emotional exhaustion (all differences were considered statistically significant for p<0.05). Finally, a statistically significant correlation took place between burnout and optimism (p<0.05). Conclusions: The level of burnout among health workers seems to be high during the period of covid-19. In addition, various socio-demographic and occupational factors appear to influence burnout. Conflicts of interest: None. Acknowledgements: None