Abstract: Although there are many theories and discussion of leadership, the necessity of having a new leadership paradigm was emphasized. The existing leadership characteristic of instruction and control revealed its limitations. Market competition becomes fierce and economic recession never ends worldwide. Of the leadership theories, servant leadership was introduced recently and is in line with the environmental changes of the organization. Servant leadership is a combination of two words, 'servant' and 'leader' and can be defined as the role of the leader who focuses on doing voluntary work for others with altruistic ethics, makes members, customers, and local communities a priority, and makes a commitment to satisfying their needs. This leadership received attention as one field of leadership in the late 1990s and secured its legitimacy. This study discusses the existing research trends of leadership, the concept, behavior characteristics, and lower dimensions of servant leadership, compares servant leadership with the existing leadership researches and diagnoses if servant leadership is a useful concept for further leadership researches. Finally, this study criticizes the limitations in the existing researches on servant leadership.
Abstract: This study aims to explore the differences and
similarities in perceptions of affective climate antecedents at the
workplace (intimacy, flexibility, employment stability, and team)
among Japanese and Thai Generations X and Y. The samples in this
study were Thai and Japanese workers who completed a work
environment questionnaire and provided demographic information.
Generational differences in perceptions (beliefs) of what factors
contribute to affective climate were investigated using t-test analysis.
Mean scores for each antecedent were ranked to determine how each
generation in each group prioritized the importance of all affective
climate antecedents. Japanese Generation Y perceived the importance
of employment stability for affective climate of their workplaces to be
significantly higher than did Japanese Generation X. Thai Generation
Y considered flexibility with a higher priority than did Thai
Generation X. Intimacy was perceived as highly important across
generations and countries in regard to affective climate. Results
suggest that managers should design workplaces for a mixture of
diverse generations, resulting in a better affective climate. Differences
in the importance of antecedents for affective climate among
Generations X and Y in two countries were clarified. In addition,
different preferences regarding work environment across Japanese
Generations X and Y and Thai Generations X and Y were discussed.
Abstract: The presented paper is related to the design methods and neutronic characterization of the reactivity control system in the large power unit of Generation IV Gas cooled Fast Reactor – GFR2400. The reactor core is based on carbide pin fuel type with the application of refractory metallic liners used to enhance the fission product retention of the SiCcladding. The heterogeneous design optimization of control rod is presented and the results of rods worth and their interferences in a core are evaluated. In addition, the idea of reflector removal as an additive reactivity management option is investigated and briefly described.
Abstract: One of the main concerns about parallel mechanisms
is the presence of singular points within their workspaces. In singular
positions the mechanism gains or loses one or several degrees of
freedom. It is impossible to control the mechanism in singular
positions. Therefore, these positions have to be avoided. This is a
vital need especially in computer controlled machine tools designed
and manufactured on the basis of parallel mechanisms. This need has
to be taken into consideration when selecting design parameters. A
prerequisite to this is a thorough knowledge about the effect of
design parameters and constraints on singularity. In this paper,
quality condition index was introduced as a criterion for evaluating
singularities of different configurations of a hexapod mechanism
obtainable by different design parameters. It was illustrated that this
method can effectively be employed to obtain the optimum
configuration of hexapod mechanism with the aim of avoiding
singularity within the workspace. This method was then employed to
design the hexapod table of a CNC milling machine.
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between hope and resilience with work engagement. A total of 422 staff nurses working in three public hospitals in Peninsular Malaysia participated in this study. Statistical results using regression analysis revealed that hope and resilience were positively related to work engagement. Possible reasons for these findings, as well as their implications and future research directions are discussed.
Abstract: Recently, distributed generation technologies have received much attention for the potential energy savings and reliability assurances that might be achieved as a result of their widespread adoption. Fueling the attention have been the possibilities of international agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, electricity sector restructuring, high power reliability requirements for certain activities, and concern about easing transmission and distribution capacity bottlenecks and congestion. So it is necessary that impact of these kinds of generators on distribution feeder reconfiguration would be investigated. This paper presents an approach for distribution reconfiguration considering Distributed Generators (DGs). The objective function is summation of electrical power losses A Tabu search optimization is used to solve the optimal operation problem. The approach is tested on a real distribution feeder.
Abstract: In many cases, there are some time lag between the consumption of inputs and the production of outputs. This time lag effect should be considered in evaluating the performance of organizations. Recently, a couple of DEA models were developed for considering time lag effect in efficiency evaluation of research activities. Multi-periods input(MpI) and Multi-periods output(MpO) models are integrate models to calculate simple efficiency considering time lag effect. However, these models can’t discriminate efficient DMUs because of the nature of basic DEA model in which efficiency scores are limited to ‘1’. That is, efficient DMUs can’t be discriminated because their efficiency scores are same. Thus, this paper suggests a super-efficiency model for efficiency evaluation under the consideration of time lag effect based on the MpO model. A case example using a long term research project is given to compare the suggested model with the MpO model.
Abstract: This research was aimed at determining the impact of conservation techniques including bench terrace, stone terrace, mulching, grass strip and intercropping on soil erosion at tobacco-based farming system at Progo Hulu subwatershed, Central Java, Indonesia. Research was conducted from September 2007 to September 2009, located at Progo Hulu subwatershed, Central Java, Indonesia. Research site divided into 27 land units, and experimental fields were grouped based on the soil type and slope, ie: 30%, 45% and 70%, with the following treatments: 1) ST0= stone terrace (control); 2) ST1= stone terrace + Setaria spacelata grass strip on a 5 cm height dike at terrace lips + tobacco stem mulch with dose of 50% (7 ton/ ha); 3) ST2= stone terrace + Setaria spacelata grass strip on a 5 cm height dike at terrace lips + tobacco stem mulch with dose of 100% (14 ton/ ha); 4) ST3= stone terrace + tobacco and red bean intercropping + tobacco stem mulch with dose of 50% (7 ton/ ha). 5) BT0= bench terrace (control); 6) BT1= bench terrace + Setaria spacelata grass strip at terrace lips + tobacco stem mulch with dose of 50% (7 ton/ ha); 7) BT2= bench terrace + Setaria spacelata grass strip at terrace lips + tobacco stem mulch with dose of 100% (14 ton/ ha); 8) BT3= bench terrace + tobacco and red bean intercropping + tobacco stem mulch with dose of 50% (7 ton/ ha). The results showed that the actual erosion rates of research site were higher than that of tolerance erosion with mean value 89.08 ton/ha/year and 33.40 ton/ha/year, respectively. These resulted in 69% of total research site (5,119.15 ha) highly degraded. Conservation technique of ST2 was the most effective in suppressing soil erosion, by 42.87%, following with BT2 as much 30.63%. Others suppressed erosion only less than 21%.
Abstract: Ranong province has the best kaolin, and it is the most
useful of all the clay types used in ceramic making. Until recently,
there has been only one community business making ceramics in
Ranong province. And this business could not build the mix of body
and glaze from their raw material without assistance. Considering
these problems, this research is aimed to test the composition of
ceramic body and glaze which suit. Kaolin from Ranong is the raw
material which these search focuses on. All other raw materials use in
the investigation will come from southern Thailand, kaolin and
limestone from Ranong province, ball clay from Surat Thani
province, white sand from Songkhla province, and feldspar from
Nakhon Si Thammarat province. Results can be used to develop the
efficiency of industrial production which in return will enhance the
business process.
Abstract: Cellular communication is being widely used by all
over the world. The users of handsets are increasing due to the
request from marketing sector. The important aspect that has to be
touch in this paper is about the security system of cellular
communication. It is important to provide users with a secure channel
for communication. A brief description of the new GSM cellular
network architecture will be provided. Limitations of cellular
networks, their security issues and the different types of attacks will
be discussed. The paper will go over some new security mechanisms
that have been proposed by researchers. Overall, this paper clarifies
the security system or services of cellular communication using
GSM. Three Malaysian Communication Companies were taken as
Case study in this paper.
Abstract: The algorithms of convex hull have been extensively studied in literature, principally because of their wide range of applications in different areas. This article presents an efficient algorithm to construct approximate convex hull from a set of n points in the plane in O(n + k) time, where k is the approximation error control parameter. The proposed algorithm is suitable for applications preferred to reduce the computation time in exchange of accuracy level such as animation and interaction in computer graphics where rapid and real-time graphics rendering is indispensable.
Abstract: Artificial atoms are growing fields of interest due to their physical and optoelectronicapplications. The absorption spectra of the proposed artificial atom inpresence of Tera-Hertz field is investigated theoretically. We use the non-perturbativeFloquet theory and finite difference method to study the electronic structure of ArtificialAtom. The effect of static electric field on the energy levels of artificial atom is studied.The effect of orientation of static electric field on energy levels and diploe matrix elementsis also highlighted.
Abstract: Aurein 1.2 is a 13-residue amphipathic peptide with antibacterial and anticancer activity. Aurein1.2 and its retro analog were synthesized to study the activity of the peptides in relation to their structure. The antibacterial test result showed the retro-analog is inactive. The secondary structural analysis by CD spectra indicated that both of the peptides at TFE/Water adopt alpha-helical conformation. MD simulation was performed on aurein 1.2 and retro-analog in water and TFE in order to analyse the factors that are involved in the activity difference between retro and the native peptide. The simulation results are discussed and validated in the light of experimental data from the CD experiment. Both of the peptides showed a relatively similar pattern for their hydrophobicity, hydrophilicity, solvent accessible surfaces, and solvent accessible hydrophobic surfaces. However, they showed different in directions of dipole moment of peptides. Also, Our results further indicate that the reversion of the amino acid sequence affects flexibility .The data also showed that factors causing structural rigidity may decrease the activity. Consequently, our finding suggests that in the case of sequence-reversed peptide strategy, one has to pay attention to the role of amino acid sequence order in making flexibility and role of dipole moment direction in peptide activity. KeywordsAntimicrobial peptides, retro, molecular dynamic, circular dichroism.
Abstract: A new deployment of the multiple criteria decision
making (MCDM) techniques: the Simple Additive Weighting
(SAW), and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to
Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) for portfolio allocation, is demonstrated in
this paper. Rather than exclusive reference to mean and variance as in
the traditional mean-variance method, the criteria used in this
demonstration are the first four moments of the portfolio distribution.
Each asset is evaluated based on its marginal impacts to portfolio
higher moments that are characterized by trapezoidal fuzzy numbers.
Then centroid-based defuzzification is applied to convert fuzzy
numbers to the crisp numbers by which SAW and TOPSIS can be
deployed. Experimental results suggest the similar efficiency of these
MCDM approaches to selecting dominant assets for an optimal
portfolio under higher moments. The proposed approaches allow
investors flexibly adjust their risk preferences regarding higher
moments via different schemes adapting to various (from
conservative to risky) kinds of investors. The other significant
advantage is that, compared to the mean-variance analysis, the
portfolio weights obtained by SAW and TOPSIS are consistently
well-diversified.
Abstract: A person-to-person information sharing is easily realized
by P2P networks in which servers are not essential. Leakage
of information, which are caused by malicious accesses for P2P
networks, has become a new social issues. To prevent information
leakage, it is necessary to detect and block traffics of P2P software.
Since some P2P softwares can spoof port numbers, it is difficult to
detect the traffics sent from P2P softwares by using port numbers.
It is more difficult to devise effective countermeasures for detecting
the software because their protocol are not public.
In this paper, a discriminating method of network applications
based on communication characteristics of application messages
without port numbers is proposed. The proposed method is based
on an assumption that there can be some rules about time intervals
to transmit messages in application layer and the number of necessary
packets to send one message. By extracting the rule from network
traffic, the proposed method can discriminate applications without
port numbers.
Abstract: The purpose of the research was to determine
effectiveness of habilitation of preschool children with cerebral palsy
in the process of pedagogical support of their families. The author
presents the study of psychology-pedagogical problems of families
with preschool children with cerebral palsy and the universal
program of pedagogical support of families. In the conclusion, the
author determines effectiveness of social adaptation of children with
cerebral palsy and their families.
Abstract: The self-organizing map (SOM) model is a well-known neural network model with wide spread of applications. The main characteristics of SOM are two-fold, namely dimension reduction and topology preservation. Using SOM, a high-dimensional data space will be mapped to some low-dimensional space. Meanwhile, the topological relations among data will be preserved. With such characteristics, the SOM was usually applied on data clustering and visualization tasks. However, the SOM has main disadvantage of the need to know the number and structure of neurons prior to training, which are difficult to be determined. Several schemes have been proposed to tackle such deficiency. Examples are growing/expandable SOM, hierarchical SOM, and growing hierarchical SOM. These schemes could dynamically expand the map, even generate hierarchical maps, during training. Encouraging results were reported. Basically, these schemes adapt the size and structure of the map according to the distribution of training data. That is, they are data-driven or dataoriented SOM schemes. In this work, a topic-oriented SOM scheme which is suitable for document clustering and organization will be developed. The proposed SOM will automatically adapt the number as well as the structure of the map according to identified topics. Unlike other data-oriented SOMs, our approach expands the map and generates the hierarchies both according to the topics and their characteristics of the neurons. The preliminary experiments give promising result and demonstrate the plausibility of the method.
Abstract: In this paper, we have focused on study of swelling kinetics and salt-sensitivity behavior of a superabsorbing hydrogel based on carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) and acrylic acid and 2- Buthyl methacrylate. The swelling kinetics of the hydrogels with various particle sizes was preliminary investigated as well. The swelling of the hydrogel showed a second order kinetics of swelling in water. In addition, swelling measurements of the synthesized hydrogels in various chloride salt solutions was measured. Results indicated that a swelling-loss with an increase in the ionic strength of the salt solutions.
Abstract: Groundwater is one of the most important water
resources in Fars province. Based on this study, 95 percent of the
total annual water consumption in Fars is used for agriculture,
whereas the percentages for domestic and industrial uses are 4 and 1
percent, respectively. Population growth, urban and industrial
growth, and agricultural development in Fars have created a
condition of water stress. In this province, farmers and other users are
pumping groundwater faster than its natural replenishment rate,
causing a continuous drop in groundwater tables and depletion of this
resource. In this research variation of groundwater level, their effects
and ways to help control groundwater levels in aquifer of the Kavar-
Maharloo plains in Fars plain were evaluated .Excessive
exploitation of groundwater in this aquifer caused the groundwater
levels fall too fast or to unacceptable levels. The average drawdown
of the groundwater level in this plain were 17 meters during
1995 to 2006. The purpose of this study is to evaluate water level
changes in the Kavar-Maharloo Aquifer in the Fars province in order
to determine the areas of greatest depletion, the cause of depletion,
and predict the remaining life of the aquifer.
Abstract: User-based Collaborative filtering (CF), one of the
most prevailing and efficient recommendation techniques, provides
personalized recommendations to users based on the opinions of other
users. Although the CF technique has been successfully applied in
various applications, it suffers from serious sparsity problems. The
cloud-model approach addresses the sparsity problems by
constructing the user-s global preference represented by a cloud
eigenvector. The user-based CF approach works well with dense
datasets while the cloud-model CF approach has a greater
performance when the dataset is sparse. In this paper, we present a
hybrid approach that integrates the predictions from both the
user-based CF and the cloud-model CF approaches. The experimental
results show that the proposed hybrid approach can ameliorate the
sparsity problem and provide an improved prediction quality.