Perceived Level of Personal Control Over the Work Environment and Employee Satisfaction and Work Performance

The purpose of this article is to provide a review of background information regarding perceived level of personal control over the physical features of the work environment and its impact on individual satisfaction and outcomes. In today's business with the fast growth of technology, e‐market development, and innovative methods of communication, the workplace will continue to change rapidly. To control and accommodate these fast changes while sustaining or enhancing outcomes, organizations have increasingly turned to a model of work teams; therefore, employees’ skills in working within team environments has been emphasized. To guarantee that the work environment itself supports these new approaches of working, flexible workplaces are often suggested. Open‐plan offices offer more flexibility when compared to completely closed and private ones and they are considered to have more capabilities and are, therefore, highly valued in today's industry. Apart from its advantages, open‐plan office design does create some problems due to lack of personal control over the work environment, which can negatively affect employees’ satisfaction and performance. It is, therefore, important to emphasize the significance of personal control over the physical work environment and the impact of that on employees’ satisfaction and outcome.     

Development and validation of a Disaster Management Metamodel (DMM)

Disaster Management (DM) is a diffused area of knowledge. It has many complex features interconnecting the physical and the social views of the world. Many international and national bodies create knowledge models to allow knowledge sharing and effective DM activities. But these are often narrow in focus and deal with specified disaster types. We analyze thirty such models to uncover that many DM activities are actually common even when the events vary. We then create a unified view of DM in the form of a metamodel. We apply a metamodelling process to ensure that this metamodel is complete and consistent. We validate it and present a representational layer to unify and share knowledge as well as combine and match different DM activities according to different disaster situations.     

Assessment of electrochemical concepts: a comparative study involving senior high-school students in Indonesia and Japan

This study investigated Indonesian and Japanese senior high-school students’ understanding of electrochemistry concepts.

Sample

The questionnaire was administered to 244 Indonesian and 189 Japanese public senior high-school students.

Design and methods

An 18-item multiple-choice questionnaire relating to five conceptual categories (reactions occurring during electrolysis, differences between electrolytic and voltaic cells, movement of ions in voltaic cells, poles in voltaic cells, voltaic cell reactions) was administered.

Results

The findings of this study show that difficulties and alternative conceptions previously reported in the literature are held equally by students from a developing and developed country, Indonesian and Japan respectively.

Conclusions

Collectively, the findings suggest that students’ understanding of electrochemistry concepts is relatively weak. Students from both samples shared common difficulties and displayed several alternative conceptions dealing with electrolysis, electricity flow, the voltaic cell and the electrode reactions. Not surprisingly, the students displayed limited consistency in understanding of the concepts in the five categories. This study has implications for teaching and learning, particularly in classroom discussions using models and computer animations in order to reinforce understanding at the sub-microscopic level.     

QMOS: Query-based multi-documents opinion-oriented summarization

Sentiment analysis concerns the study of opinions expressed in a text. This paper presents the QMOS method, which employs a combination of sentiment analysis and summarization approaches. It is a lexicon-based method to query-based multi-documents summarization of opinion expressed in reviews.QMOS combines multiple sentiment dictionaries to improve word coverage limit of the individual lexicon. A major problem for a dictionary-based approach is the semantic gap between the prior polarity of a word presented by a lexicon and the word polarity in a specific context. This is due to the fact that, the polarity of a word depends on the context in which it is being used. Furthermore, the type of a sentence can also affect the performance of a sentiment analysis approach. Therefore, to tackle the aforementioned challenges, QMOS integrates multiple strategies to adjust word prior sentiment orientation while also considers the type of sentence. QMOS also employs the Semantic Sentiment Approach to determine the sentiment score of a word if it is not included in a sentiment lexicon.On the other hand, the most of the existing methods fail to distinguish the meaning of a review sentence and user's query when both of them share the similar bag-of-words; hence there is often a conflict between the extracted opinionated sentences and users’ needs. However, the summarization phase of QMOS is able to avoid extracting a review sentence whose similarity with the user's query is high but whose meaning is different. The method also employs the greedy algorithm and query expansion approach to reduce redundancy and bridge the lexical gaps for similar contexts that are expressed using different wording, respectively. Our experiment shows that the QMOS method can significantly improve the performance and make QMOS comparable to other existing methods.     

Plasma TGF-β1, MMP-1 and MMP-3 Levels in Chronic Pancreatitis

Chronic pancreatitis (CP) presenting clinically with upper abdominal pain, as well as exocrine and endocrine insufficiencies, is characterized by irreversible morphological and functional alterations in the pancreas. The objective of the present study is to investigate the plasma levels of transforming growth factor-β 1 (TGF-β1), matrix metalloproteinases MMP-1 (collagenase) and MMP-3 (stromelysin) in CP. A total of 71 CP patients and 100 control subjects were considered for the study. Plasma levels of TGF-β1, MMP-1 and MMP-3 were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay in patients and control subjects. The plasma levels of TGF-β1 and MMP-1 were significantly elevated in patients compared to control group (*P = 0.0301, **P < 0.0001). However, there was no significant difference in the plasma levels of MMP-3 between patients and controls (P = 0.3756). The elevated levels of TGF-β1 and MMP-1 may influence the inflammatory reactions by enhancing the pancreatic stellate cell activation and deposition of extracellular matrix resulting in pancreatic fibrosis. Thus, the present study highlights the role of fibrogenic cytokine marker TGF-β1 and matrix metalloproteinases in the pathogenesis of CP.     

学生与辅导教师的在线交互研究(英文)

学习支持对于在线学习环境中的学习者的学习有着很重要的促进作用.印度尼西亚特布卡大学利用面对面教学、远程和在线的模式等各种方式为学习者提供学习支持服务.作为该校提供的一种学习支持服务方式,在线辅导旨在帮助学生更好地理解印刷材料.因为其"在线"的特征,在线辅导通过师生之间的异步交互和交流,以及学生之间互相的在线辅导,为学生提供了更灵活的学习途径.辅导教师在在线学习环境中的物理存在使得交互或对话变得更加客观、实用,使得交互聚焦于讨论话题."公共演讲"课程旨在培养学生向公众表达和传播观点的能力,该课程提供了印刷和非印刷学习材料,以帮助学生进行独立学习.学生通过印刷材料学习公共演讲方面的概念,并利用非印刷材料或者CD-ROM了解相关案例.在线辅导通过在线交互促进学生对概念的理解.本描述性研究试图探究在缺乏人际交流中的归属感、情感和控制等背景下,在线学习环境中辅导教师和学生之间的交互和交流,因而对2010年第一学期"公共演讲"课程的在线辅导活动进行了内容分析,研究发现,该课程的在线辅导活动中缺少礼貌,交流礼节也有所欠缺,另外,在线辅导教师需要加强学生在在线学习环境中的学习动机.     

Low-cost evaluation techniques for information retrieval systems: A review

For a system-based information retrieval evaluation, test collection model still remains as a costly task. Producing relevance judgments is an expensive, time consuming task which has to be performed by human assessors. It is not viable to assess the relevancy of every single document in a corpus against each topic for a large collection. In an experimental-based environment, partial judgment on the basis of a pooling method is created to substitute a complete assessment of documents for relevancy. Due to the increasing number of documents, topics, and retrieval systems, the need to perform low-cost evaluations while obtaining reliable results is essential. Researchers are seeking techniques to reduce the costs of experimental IR evaluation process by the means of reducing the number of relevance judgments to be performed or even eliminating them while still obtaining reliable results. In this paper, various state-of-the-art approaches in performing low-cost retrieval evaluation are discussed under each of the following categories; selecting the best sets of documents to be judged; calculating evaluation measures, both, robust to incomplete judgments; statistical inference of evaluation metrics; inference of judgments on relevance, query selection; techniques to test the reliability of the evaluation and reusability of the constructed collections; and other alternative methods to pooling. This paper is intended to link the reader to the corpus of ‘must read’ papers in the area of low-cost evaluation of IR systems.     

Nephroprotective effects of Zingiber zerumbet Smith ethyl acetate extract against paracetamol-induced nephrotoxicity and oxidative stress in rats

Paracetamol (PCM) overdose can cause nephrotoxicity with oxidative stress as one of the possible mechanisms mediating the event. In this study, the effects of ethyl acetate extract of Zingiber zerumbet rhizome [200 mg per kg of body weight (mg/kg) and 400 mg/kg] on PCM-induced nephrotoxicity were examined. Rats were divided into five groups containing 10 rats each. The control group received distilled water while other groups were treated with extract alone (400 mg/kg), PCM alone (750 mg/kg), 750 mg/kg PCM+200 mg/kg extract (PCM+ 200-extract), and 750 mg/kg PCM+400 mg/kg extract (PCM+400-extract), respectively, for seven consecutive days. The Z. zerumbet extract was given intraperitoneally concurrent with oral administration of PCM. Treatment with Z. zerumbet extract at doses of 200 and 400 mg/kg prevented the PCM-induced nephrotoxicity and oxidative impairments of the kidney, as evidenced by a significantly reduced (P<0.05) level of plasma creatinine, plasma and renal malondialdehyde (MDA), plasma protein carbonyl, and renal advanced oxidation protein product (AOPP). Furthermore, both doses were also able to induce a significant increment (P<0.05) of plasma and renal levels of glutathione (GSH) and plasma superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity. The nephroprotective effects of Z. zerumbet extract were confirmed by a reduced intensity of renal cellular damage, as evidenced by histological findings. Moreover, Z. zerumbet extract administered at 400 mg/kg was found to show greater protective effects than that at 200 mg/kg. In conclusion, ethyl acetate extract of Z. zerumbet rhizome has a protective role against PCM-induced nephrotoxicity and the process is probably mediated through its antioxidant properties.