Aims

Occupational stress is commonly acknowledged to be a critical issue for managers of private manufacturing companies. This study attempts to fill part of this void in literature by examining the relationship between job stress, job satisfaction and performance among 100 managers of private manufacturing firms. The study’s findings suggest that higher stress levels are related to lower performance whereas higher job satisfaction indicates higher performance. The main objective was to see if there was any relationship between job performance, job satisfaction and job stress & to preface model for the same. The research was assessed by using various instruments.

Urbanization has significant impact on socio-economical character, infrastructure requirement and transportation system in most of metropolitan cities in India. Geographical setting and land use patterns are also affected at the same time. Eventually these factors do influence on physical and social infrastructure in respect of purpose in spatial way as socio economic characteristics and settlement pattern differ from zone-zone. This paper focuses on these issues with reference to a fast growing metropolitan city of Surat in Gujarat. Spatial infrastructure characteristics and their assessment in various center zone of Surat city are discussed in length.

This paper provides guidance on the scope and construction of aims and intended learning outcomes, and on links with the wider programme. It concentrates on aspects of writing aims and learning outcomes that experience from reviewing documentation and from working with colleagues indicates are often most problematic. Thus while we introduce how to write aims and learning outcomes, we focus in more detail on broadening the scope of aims and on indicating level in an intended learning outcome. In addition, we consider in the first appendix the relationship between intended learning outcomes and standards of performance, allowing us to distinguish between outcomes that are set for typical or threshold standards. Further appendices provide guidance on both possible skills and other attributes, and on verbs to be included in intended learning outcomes.

Internet traffic is often summarized by collecting NetFlow/IPFIX flow records. Several tools exist to filter or to search for specific flows in a collection of flow records. However, there is a need for a framework (filter language) which allows certain types of traffic patterns to be defined and matched in a collection of flow records. The goal of this project

EU Member States have largely implemented, and started applying, three instruments on transferring prison sentences, probation measures and alternative sanctions, as well as pre-trial supervision measures, to other Member States. This report provides an overview of their first experiences with these measures, highlighting both best practices and shortcomings.

We present qualitative arguments concerning the probable infection pattern in a directed graph under the (weak or strong) influence of the outside world. This question is relevant for real computer viruses, which spread by following the (logical) directed links formed by address lists. Our arguments build on previous work in two (seemingly unrelated) areas: epidemic spreading on undirected graphs, and eigenvectors of directed graphs as applied to Web page ranking. More specifically, we borrow a recently proven result (used to design a ’sink remedy’ for Web link analysis) and use it to argue for a threshold effect: that the effects of the outside world will not appear in the pattern of infection until the strength of the influence of the outside world exceeds a finite threshold value. We briefly discuss possible tests of this prediction, and its implications.

This paper explores how the risk related to the pandemic of COVID-19 was managed, narrated and perceived in Italy during the lockdown phase, from February until June 2020. To reach this aim, the study provides a discourse analysis of three main level: the official institutional discourses declaimed by the government and the health authority; the risk narration spread through the diaphragm of the Italian press, and specifically through two of the most-read newspapers in Italy (Repubblica and Corriere della Sera) and their related weeklies (Venerdi di Repubblica and Sette); finally, the diverse reactions and perceptions to the risk coming from the most affected and most vulnerable subjects, communities and territories. In order to record this narrative frame, our study started by looking for the more recurrent keywords through which the public discourse about COVID-19 emergency was spread in Italy. The examined words, together with a literary review about risk, disaster, and sustainab...

This paper describes how to utilise Case Based Reasoning for identifying and user situations assessment in a contextaware mobile system. The Case Based Reasoning mechanism attempts to identify what situation the user is in, and utilises a Multi Agent System, consisting of information suppliers, to provide the user with personalised and contextsensitive information.

This paper explores how the risk related to the pandemic of COVID-19 was managed, narrated and perceived in Italy during the lockdown phase, from February until June 2020. To reach this aim, the study provides a discourse analysis of three main level: the official institutional discourses declaimed by the government and the health authority; the risk narration spread through the diaphragm of the Italian press, and specifically through two of the most-read newspapers in Italy (Repubblica and Corriere della Sera) and their related weeklies (Venerdi di Repubblica and Sette); finally, the diverse reactions and perceptions to the risk coming from the most affected and most vulnerable subjects, communities and territories. In order to record this narrative frame, our study started by looking for the more recurrent keywords through which the public discourse about COVID-19 emergency was spread in Italy. The examined words, together with a literary review about risk, disaster, and sustainab...

Big data, a recently popular term that refers to a massive collection of very large and complex data sets, is facing serious security and privacy challenges. Due to the typical characteristics of big data, namely velocity, volume and variety associated with large-scale cloud infrastructures and the Internet of Things (IoT), traditional security and privacy mechanisms are inadequate and unable to cope with the rapid data explosion in such a complex distributed computing environment. With big data analytics being widely used by businesses and government for decision making, security risk mitigation plays an important role in big data infrastructures worldwide. Traditional security mechanisms have failed to cope with the scalability, interoperability and adaptability of contemporary technologies that are required for big data. This paper takes an exploratory initial step using first principles to address this gap in literature. Firstly, we establish the current trends in big data comprehensively by identifying eleven Vs as important dimensions of big data, which form the contributing factors having an impact on the impending security problem. Next, we map the eleven Vs to the three phases of big data life cycle in order to unearth the major security and privacy challenges of big data. Finally, the paper provides four practical strategies adapted from contemporary technologies such as data provenance, encryption and access control, data mining and blockchain, identifying their associated real implementation examples. This work would pave way for future research investigations in this important big data security arena.

Research on materiality has grown rapidly over the past 10 years, highlighting the influence of physical artifacts and spaces in organizations, which had been overshadowed by discursive approaches. This body of research enriches our understanding of organizations in many areas including technology, decision-making, routines, learning, identity, culture, power, and institutions. However, researchers sometimes struggle to select methods suited to study materiality, as previous works have not been explicit in that respect. This article calls organizational researchers interested in physical environments – that is, artifacts and spaces – to integrate observation into their data collection. The first section presents a tripartite definition of the physical environment including activities, conceptions, and lived experiences. Ontological debates are introduced, and observation is proposed as a relevant method for studying materiality in organizational research. The second section presents...

This paper proposes a drama-based interaction metaphor for the presentation of information on mobile devices. The metaphor relies upon an artificial character, that presents information according to a scripted drama. The system architecture is typical of BDI agents, and operates as a script organizer over a repository of elementary audiovisual units (script units), that can be combined in order to effectively react to the user's inputs. In particular, this paper focuses on the preliminary results achieved in the implementation of the audiovisual fluency, i.e.

This paper presents a framework to control the life cycle of enforceable policies aligned to business directives. The framework relies on three main aspects: the formalization of measurable business indicators underpinning the management cycle of policies, a holistic approach to conceal Quality of Service delivery with business alignment, and the use of policy-based management as the vehicle to control system behavior accordingly. The core contribution of this research lies in the network management area whose most widespread solutions for QoS delivery have been systematically decoupled from business value, although the research community recognizes business profit as the main motivation for any management solution. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a management framework that allows exploiting business value in telecommunications infrastructures. As each application domain may have intrinsic peculiarities we propose to validate our approach in the context of DiffServ networks. Simulations will be conducted to evaluate and to optimize the performance of diverse business directives under different patterns of service invocations and patterns of inter-domain traffic exchange between autonomous systems. To the best of our knowledge no other approach has dealt with the above research area in such a holistic view.