Perceived Workload and Work Outcomes Among Computer Professionals

This research examined the effects of workload on three work outcomes – work exhaustion, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. Data collected from a questionnaire survey were used to test the relationships proposed in this research. The results showed that (a) workload was positively related to work exhaustion and job satisfaction; (b) work exhaustion was positively related to turnover intention and negatively related to job satisfaction, and (c) job satisfaction was negatively related to turnover intention. These results indicate that workload affects turnover intention in different ways, depending on the mediating effects of work exhaustion and job satisfaction. The paper discussed the implications of the effects of workload on computer professionals

The Perceptions of Macao Undergraduates Regarding Help Websites for Problem Gambling

This study conducted a web-surfing exercise and a questionnaire survey among a group of Macao undergraduate students regarding the websites that offered help with problem gambling. The results of this study found that most help websites in Macao and Hong Kong provided basic information-sharing service. The students indicated that they would choose their preferred help organization based on factors such as trust, familiarity, and the characteristics of the websites. They also gave comments/suggestions related to the publicity, design, contents, and focus of the websites. This study discussed the results and their implications for future research and practice

Factors Influencing Intention to Gamble Online

The objective of this research was to validate a model on online gambling intention. Given that there are many forms of online gambling, this research focused on sports betting. We adopted the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as our research model. Additionally, we included subjective norm as an antecedent to online gambling intention. We tested the model using data collected from a questionnaire survey. We collected 212 returns from students in a Chinese tertiary institution. The results provide support for the six hypotheses proposed in our research. We discussed the implications of the results for industry practitioners and gambling counselors

Research on Problem Gambling Websites

This is a continuation of a series of studies on problem gambling websites. It has been noted in prior studies that one avenue problem gamblers might look for help was to go online to perform a web search. Online help is practical as help can be located immediately and this can help to ease the gamblers’ concerns that they are left alone to handle their own problems. While there are some anecdotal evidences regarding the success of problem gambling websites, there have been few empirical studies that relate directly to the perceptions and usefulness of the websites for the problem gamblers. This conference session will help to booster research in this area by discussing the results of a pilot study regarding the perceptions of Macao undergraduates on problem gambling websites. The study found that issues such as trust, familiarity, website-related factors, as well as the type of help organizations, are important consideration with online users when seeking help. This conference session will also discuss the implications and limitations of the research results. And then going forward, the it will suggest future research areas to further enhance our knowledge regarding online help for problem gambling. For example, future research can examine the use of smart devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and other technological instruments, to provide help. Research on online help for problem gambling is scare and studies on this subject area will be beneficial to service providers in targeting their clients and services more effectively

Consumers’ Adoption of B2C E-Commerce in Macao

This research sets out to determine factors that influence consumers’ adoption of B2C E-commerce in Macao. While prior research has shown that there are many factors that influence E-commerce adoption, this research hypothesized that two variables – namely, trust and willingness to use credit cards for online transactions – influence E-commerce adoption in Macao. This research further hypothesized that trust and willingness to use credit card interact to influence adoption. Using data collected from a questionnaire survey, the results of this study found that the two hypothesized variables are positively related to intention to adopt E-commerce. The results also support the interaction effect. The nature of interaction showed that trust is related to E-commerce adoption only when willingness to use credit card for online transaction is high. Also, willingness to use credit card for online transaction is related to E-commerce adoption only when the level of trust is high. These results provide a richer understanding of the relationship between the hypothesized variables and Ecommerce adoption. This study also collected interview data related to Internet users’ adoption of E-commerce. The interview data provide a better understanding on why Macao people are afraid of using credit card for online transactions. The researchers gathered more information about interviewees’ credit card usage and habits, their attitudes toward credit card security, and their thoughts regarding identity theft. The interviews also uncovered other factors that may influence E-commerce adoption

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

Background: In an era of shifting global agendas and expanded emphasis on non-communicable diseases and injuries along with communicable diseases, sound evidence on trends by cause at the national level is essential. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) provides a systematic scientific assessment of published, publicly available, and contributed data on incidence, prevalence, and mortality for a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive list of diseases and injuries. Methods: GBD estimates incidence, prevalence, mortality, years of life lost (YLLs), years lived with disability (YLDs), and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) due to 369 diseases and injuries, for two sexes, and for 204 countries and territories. Input data were extracted from censuses, household surveys, civil registration and vital statistics, disease registries, health service use, air pollution monitors, satellite imaging, disease notifications, and other sources. Cause-specific death rates and cause fractions were calculated using the Cause of Death Ensemble model and spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression. Cause-specific deaths were adjusted to match the total all-cause deaths calculated as part of the GBD population, fertility, and mortality estimates. Deaths were multiplied by standard life expectancy at each age to calculate YLLs. A Bayesian meta-regression modelling tool, DisMod-MR 2.1, was used to ensure consistency between incidence, prevalence, remission, excess mortality, and cause-specific mortality for most causes. Prevalence estimates were multiplied by disability weights for mutually exclusive sequelae of diseases and injuries to calculate YLDs. We considered results in the context of the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a composite indicator of income per capita, years of schooling, and fertility rate in females younger than 25 years. Uncertainty intervals (UIs) were generated for every metric using the 25th and 975th ordered 1000 draw values of the posterior distribution. Findings: Global health has steadily improved over the past 30 years as measured by age-standardised DALY rates. After taking into account population growth and ageing, the absolute number of DALYs has remained stable. Since 2010, the pace of decline in global age-standardised DALY rates has accelerated in age groups younger than 50 years compared with the 1990–2010 time period, with the greatest annualised rate of decline occurring in the 0–9-year age group. Six infectious diseases were among the top ten causes of DALYs in children younger than 10 years in 2019: lower respiratory infections (ranked second), diarrhoeal diseases (third), malaria (fifth), meningitis (sixth), whooping cough (ninth), and sexually transmitted infections (which, in this age group, is fully accounted for by congenital syphilis; ranked tenth). In adolescents aged 10–24 years, three injury causes were among the top causes of DALYs: road injuries (ranked first), self-harm (third), and interpersonal violence (fifth). Five of the causes that were in the top ten for ages 10–24 years were also in the top ten in the 25–49-year age group: road injuries (ranked first), HIV/AIDS (second), low back pain (fourth), headache disorders (fifth), and depressive disorders (sixth). In 2019, ischaemic heart disease and stroke were the top-ranked causes of DALYs in both the 50–74-year and 75-years-and-older age groups. Since 1990, there has been a marked shift towards a greater proportion of burden due to YLDs from non-communicable diseases and injuries. In 2019, there were 11 countries where non-communicable disease and injury YLDs constituted more than half of all disease burden. Decreases in age-standardised DALY rates have accelerated over the past decade in countries at the lower end of the SDI range, while improvements have started to stagnate or even reverse in countries with higher SDI. Interpretation: As disability becomes an increasingly large component of disease burden and a larger component of health expenditure, greater research and developm nt investment is needed to identify new, more effective intervention strategies. With a rapidly ageing global population, the demands on health services to deal with disabling outcomes, which increase with age, will require policy makers to anticipate these changes. The mix of universal and more geographically specific influences on health reinforces the need for regular reporting on population health in detail and by underlying cause to help decision makers to identify success stories of disease control to emulate, as well as opportunities to improve. Funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 licens

A Global Analysis on 'Gambling, Drinking, And Smoking'

Gambling, drinking, and smoking have often been examined for their relatedness. Researchers have conducted numerous empirical studies to determine whether there are significant relationships among the three activities. The commonly used research approach in prior studies was to collect primary data from individuals or problem gamblers in a particular locality and then used these data to analyze their relationships. The current study examines the same research question but uses a different research method. It analyzes the three activities based on secondary data from several countries. The results of this study reaffirm that gambling is positively related to drinking and smoking. Further analyses of the data also show that each of the three activities is positively related to income, and that gambling has an income elasticity of greater than one, while drinking and smoking have an income elasticity less than one.