Organizational Commitment of IT Professionals in Public Sector

This study focuses on the factors like salary/incentives, interpersonal conflicts, employeesorganization interface, job satisfaction and organizational culture, in order to clarify the behavior of organizational commitment among information technology employees in public sector organizations. The study provides an insight of the culture of public sector organization, which managers may use for the improvement of organizational commitment. The study tested and analyzed the proposed model, which gave valuable results. The result of the study also claims that organizational commitment may be increased

Blockchain-based secure authentication with improved performance for fog computing

Advancement in the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing has escalated the number of connected edge devices in a smart city environment. Having billions more devices has contributed to security concerns, and an attack-proof authentication mechanism is the need of the hour to sustain the IoT environment. Securing all devices could be a huge task and require lots of computational power, and can be a bottleneck for devices with fewer computational resources. To improve the authentication mechanism, many researchers have proposed decentralized applications such as blockchain technology for securing fog and IoT environments. Ethereum is considered a popular blockchain platform and is used by researchers to implement the authentication mechanism due to its programable smart contract. In this research, we proposed a secure authentication mechanism with improved performance. Neo blockchain is a platform that has properties that can provide improved security and faster execution. The research utilizes the intrinsic properties of Neo blockchain to develop a secure authentication mechanism. The proposed authentication mechanism is compared with the existing algorithms and shows that the proposed mechanism is 20 to 90 per cent faster in execution time and has over 30 to 70 per cent decrease in registration and authentication when compared to existing methods

Macroeconomic Shocks: Short-Run versus Long-Run Perspectives

Shocks that stem from goods and money markets are supposed to be influential as it takes some time for economic agents to realize their true impacts. Therefore, these shocks can induce uncertainty about key macroeconomic variables such as CPI inflation and real GDP growth. Impacts of nominal and real shocks are computed, evaluated and compared under short-run as well as under long-run restrictions for CPI inflation and real GDP. Furthermore, different countries with varying resource structures are incorporated to achieve a comprehensive and generalized analysis. Structural VAR models are employed in order to functionalize short-run and long-run restrictions. Impulse response analysis is done to analyze effects of nominal and real shocks on CPI inflation and real GDP in short-run as well as in long-run. Variance decompositions are done to locate main sources of uncertainties in CPI inflation and real GDP. Shocks from product market appeared to be more pervasive in comparison to shocks from money market

Enabling trust and security in digital twin management:a blockchain-based approach with ethereum and IPFS

The emergence of Industry 5.0 has highlighted the significance of information usage, processing, and data analysis when maintaining physical assets. This has enabled the creation of the Digital Twin (DT). Information about an asset is generated and consumed during its entire life cycle. The main goal of DT is to connect and represent physical assets as close to reality as possible virtually. Unfortunately, the lack of security and trust among DT participants remains a problem as a result of data sharing. This issue cannot be resolved with a central authority when dealing with large organisations. Blockchain technology has been proposed as a solution for DT information sharing and security challenges. This paper proposes a Blockchain-based solution for digital twin using Ethereum blockchain with performance and cost analysis. This solution employs a smart contract for information management and access control for stakeholders of the digital twin, which is secure and tamper-proof. This implementation is based on Ethereum and IPFS. We use IPFS storage servers to store stakeholders’ details and manage information. A real-world use-case of a production line of a smartphone, where a conveyor belt is used to carry different parts, is presented to demonstrate the proposed system. The performance evaluation of our proposed system shows that it is secure and achieves performance improvement when compared with other methods. The comparison of results with state-of-the-art methods showed that the proposed system consumed fewer resources in a transaction cost, with an 8% decrease. The execution cost increased by 10%, but the cost of ether was 93% less than the existing methods

ASSESSMENT OF QUALITY OF WATER FILTRATION UNITS IN RAWALPINDI AND COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS BETWEEN TAP WATER AND FILTRATION UNITS

The study was conducted to investigate the physicochemical characteristics of different water samples from filtration plants and Tap water for quality assessment from different areas of Rawalpindi during May and June of 2013. Analysis showed that the samples from tap water contains microbial contamination and water samples from filtration units were free of microbial contamination and other analyzed parameters were within permissible limits as compared with Pakistan Standards Quality Control Authority, 2008. Thus study depicts that the working of the filtration plants is effective

Macroeconomic Shocks: Short-Run versus Long-Run Perspectives

Shocks that stem from goods and money markets are supposed to be influential as it takes some time for economic agents to realize their true impacts. Therefore, these shocks can induce uncertainty about key macroeconomic variables such as CPI inflation and real GDP growth. Impacts of nominal and real shocks are computed, evaluated and compared under short-run as well as under long-run restrictions for CPI inflation and real GDP. Furthermore, different countries with varying resource structures are incorporated to achieve a comprehensive and generalized analysis. Structural VAR models are employed in order to functionalize short-run and long-run restrictions. Impulse response analysis is done to analyze effects of nominal and real shocks on CPI inflation and real GDP in short-run as well as in long-run. Variance decompositions are done to locate main sources of uncertainties in CPI inflation and real GDP. Shocks from product market appeared to be more pervasive in comparison to shocks from money market

Marker-Assisted Selection for Durable Rust Resistance in a Widely Adopted Wheat Cultivar "Inqilab-91"

The slow rusting wheat cultivars viz., Tukuru and Pavon-76 were hybridized with a widely adopted Pakistani wheat cultivar ?Inqilab-91? to incorporate durable rust resistance. Specific primers were used to validate the presence of durable rust resistance in a bulked segregating population. The F1 plants were backcrossed with either parent to obtain BC1F1 populations which were then self-pollinated to get four F2 populations. A total of 102 randomly selected back-crossed BC1F2 plants were used for bulk segregant?s analysis. Genomic DNA was extracted from randomly selected individual plants and aliquots of DNA of each sample were mixed to constitute bulk pools of each population. Durable resistance gene Lr34/Yr18 was heterozygous in populations 1, showing amplification of both the diagnostic csLV34a allele and the null csLV34b alleles. Population 2 amplified homozygous csLV34a alleles, while populations 3 and 4 amplified the null allele. The Lr46/Yr29 gene was identified in population 3 and 4. Compared to Inqilab-91 the Population 1 indicated 33-67% and Population 2 indicated 56-78% lower infection type while population 3 and 4 indicated 22-44% lower infection type to yellow rust. All the populations and parents showed the prevalence of Sr2 and absence of Lr37/Yr17/Sr38 gene complex. ? 2017 Friends Science PublisherspreprintPeer reviewe

Synthesis and Characterization of Graphene sheets from graphite powder by using ball milling

Due to the rising trend in 2-Dimensional material, graphene has gained a lot of interest in the recent past. Graphene is the 2D carbon allotrope with high strength and improved mechanical, chemical, and electrical properties. Despite being excellent properties among other types of carbon allotropes but still, graphene use is limited because of its costly synthesis technique. In this research, a cheap and effective method is adapted for the preparation of graphene from graphite powder. The graphite powder is thermally treated to prepare the exfoliated graphite then exfoliated graphite is milled to produce the 2D graphene sheets. The synthesized graphene is characterized by X-Ray Diffractometry (XRD) and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The XRD results show that graphene is successfully synthesized, and SEM results show that graphene is 2D which can be used in various applications. This research provides a direction for the synthesis of graphene from graphite powder on an industrial scale.Debido a la tendencia al alza en el material bidimensional, el grafeno ha ganado mucho interés en el pasado reciente. El grafeno es el alótropo de carbono 2D con propiedades mecánicas, químicas y eléctricas mejoradas de alta resistencia. A pesar de tener excelentes propiedades entre otros tipos de alótropos de carbono, el uso del grafeno es limitado debido a su costosa técnica de síntesis. En esta investigación se adapta un método económico y efectivo para la preparación de grafeno a partir de polvo de grafito. El polvo de grafito se trata térmicamente para preparar el grafito exfoliado y luego se muele para producir las láminas de grafeno 2D. El grafeno sintetizado se caracteriza por difractometría de rayos X (XRD) y microscopio electrónico de barrido (SEM). Los resultados de XRD muestran que el grafeno se sintetiza con éxito y los resultados de SEM muestran que el grafeno es 2D que se puede usar en varias aplicaciones. Esta investigación proporciona una dirección para la síntesis de grafeno a partir de polvo de grafito a escala industrial