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Exploring the various methodologies of auditing the variables in a food supply chain and suggesting integrated audit framework
In recent years, the food supply chain has faced huge uncertainties, which has led to increasing interest in effective supply chain management in the industry. By considering the five key system inputs (purchasing, receiving, storing, processing, distributing) that are indispensable in the supply chain, the company can first take action to stabilize the supply chain performance, and secondly to improve its effectiveness by reducing uncertainty in the supply chain and operational capabilities. This paper outlines the key drivers and uncertainties in the food supply chain and describes a structured supply chain audit that can be used to measure the effectiveness of the supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to study the existing audit framework and regulations for food safety in the food supply chain and examine the flaws in the existing framework and build a consolidated single framework that incorporates the best practices and fills the gap of the existing audit frameworks for food security. 2020, Institute of Advanced Scientific Research, Inc.. All rights reserved. -
To merge or not to merge: A case study of an EPC
Start ups face multiple challenges since inception and it is their response to these challenges that decides their success or failure. This case study examines the challenges of an EPC firm working in the field of alternative energy. It hopes to show that while initial growth may follow the path drawn by the entrepreneur, a point is reached when options for future growth inevitably face a dilemma. On the one hand getting investors to bring in funds is difficult in the absence of an order book for projects. On the other hand getting firms to give it project orders without the support of funds is also equally challenging. This is a turning point and the future of the firm depends on how it is able to surmount this challenge. However during the course of its journey the firm gets a foothold in the market and based on its unique competencies builds up a strategic position which can be exploited by a bigger player in the segment. This is in line with the Resource Based View of mergers and acquisitions that holds that gaining competitive advantage is the primary motive for an acquisition. The case follows the story of entrepreneur Deb who set up Streamline Energy, an EPC firm in 2015-16 in Navi Mumbai hoping to carve out a slice of the market in the growing field of alternative energy. 2020 Ecological Society of India. All rights reserved. -
Analysis of chromosomal aberrations and micronuclei in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients
Introduction: Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disorder characterized by insulin resistance and disrupted insulin secretion. It is often linked to injuries, malfunction and failure of several organs in the long term. The elevated chromosomal disruptions and genetic complications in diabetic patients are due to the increased production of reactive oxygen species. Materials and Methods: The current study used chromosomal aberration assay and micronucleus assay to analyze the extent of abnormalities in the subjects. Results: The results showed increase in frequency of chromosomal aberrations in diabetic patients when compared to the control group (2.761.65 and 0.470.75 respectively). They also showed higher levels of micronuclei formation than the control participants (13.288.63 and 4.128.89 respectively). The correlation analysis indicated positive relationship between total aberrations and duration of diabetes. Conclusion: These results indicate that diabetes is associated with genomic instability and studies at a genetic level can be employed for early detection. 2020, West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention. -
An empirical evaluation of stress and its impact on the engineering colleges faculty members in Tamil Nadu
The present study examined the specific causes, levels and effects of stress experienced by faculty members who worked in unaided private engineering and technology (UPET) colleges in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. Factor analysis and structural model were used to evaluate the relationship between the causes, subsequent effects at different level of stress and the appropriate personal and organisational stress coping strategies. Primary data were collected from 560 faculty members by employing convenience sampling method during the academic year 20172018. The study revealed that causes of stress influencing considerably the level of stress and the level of stress explained the high influence on the effect of stress variables. Both effects of stress and causes of stress were negatively influencing the stress coping strategies of personal as well as organisational level strategies. Copyright 2020 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. -
Heat transport and stagnation-point flow of magnetized nanoliquid with variable thermal conductivity, Brownian moment, and thermophoresis aspects
The improvement of heat transport is a very important phenomenon in nuclear reactors, solar collectors, heat exchangers, and coolers, which can be achieved by choosing the nanofluid as the functional fluid. Nanofluids improve thermophysical properties; as a result, they have made great progress in engineering, biomedical, and industrial applications. Therefore, a numerical study has been proposed to analyze the flow and heat transport of nanoliquids over an extendable surface near a stagnation point with variable thermal conductivity under the influence of the magnetic field, due to their importance in the engineering field. Nanoliquid attributes explain the Brownian motion and the diffusion of thermophoresis. The effects of the chemical reaction and the uniform internal heat source/heat sink are also considered. The Nachtsheim-Swigert shooting procedure based on the Runge-Kutta scheme is used for numerical calculation. The impact of effective parameters on velocity, temperature, and volume fraction of the nanoparticles is shown in the graphs and reported in detail. The surface criteria are also estimated with respect to the shear stress and the rate of heat and mass transfer. The aspects of the Brownian moment and Lorentz force are positively correlated to the thermal field of the nanoliquid. Also, the variable thermal conductivity aspect favors the growth of the thermal boundary layer. 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC -
Invariant Submanifolds of (?)-Sasakian Manifolds
In this paper, we consider invariant submanifolds of an (?)-Sasakian manifolds. We show that if the second fundamental form of an invariant submanifold of a (?)-Sasakian manifold is recurrent then the submanifold is totally geodesic. We also prove that, invariant submanifolds of an Einstein (?)-Sasakian manifolds satisfying the conditions (Formula presented) (X, Y) ? = 0 and (Formula presented)(X, Y) (Formula presented)? = 0 with ?r ? n(n 1) are also totally geodesic. 2020. All Rights Reserved. -
Chromatic completion number
The well known concept of proper vertex colouring of a graph is used to introduce the construction of a chromatic completion graph and determining its related parameter, the chromatic completion number of a graph. The chromatic completion numbers of certain classes of cycle derivative graphs and helm graphs are then presented. Finally, we discuss further problems for research related to this concept. 2020 the author(s). -
Ricci solitons and certain related metrics on almost co-kaehler manifolds
In the paper, we study a Ricci soliton and a generalized m-quasi-Einstein metric on almost co-Kaehler manifold M satisfying a nullity condition. First, we consider a non-co-Kaehler (?, )-almost co-Kaehler metric as a Ricci soliton and prove that the soliton is expanding with ? = ?2n? and the soliton vector field X leaves the structure tensors ?, ? and ? invariant. This result extends Theorem 5.1 of [32]. We construct an example to show the existence of a Ricci soliton on M. Finally, we prove that if M is a generalized (?, )-almost co-Kaehler manifold of dimension higher than 3 such that h ? 0, then the metric of M can not be a generalized m-quasi-Einstein metric, and this recovers the recent result of Wang [37, Theorem 4.1] as a special case. Devaraja Mallesha Naik, V. Venkatesha, and H. Aruna Kumara, 2020. -
Depression, anxiety, stress and marital adjustment among women
Marriage, especially for women in a patriarchal society involves a huge transition process. The struggle with new responsibilities and expectations is overwhelming in itself. But with the feelings of worthlessness and feeling trapped and bound in a loveless and thankless bond, come distress and adjustment issues. According to a recent Nielsen survey on 'Women of Tomorrow', out of 21 nations and 6500 women, India is a leading nation when it comes to stress in women. About 87% of women were stressed most of the time and 82% claimed that they did not find time to relax. Women in the age range from 22 years to 55 years are the most stressed and are struggling hard to strike a balance between their home lives, social activities and jobs. The present study aims to examine depression, stress, anxiety and adjustment issues among women. A total of 80 married women were selected for the study with 40 working and 40 non-working women. The Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale and Depression Anxiety Stress Scales were administered to collect data. Negative relationship was obtained between stress, anxiety depression and marital adjustment among married women. Anxiety and Marital adjustment are moderately correlated (-.346) while Stress (-.454) and Depression (-0.487) are highly correlated with marital adjustment. 2020 Journal of International Women's Studies. -
Strongly connected interval-valued fuzzy graphs
In interval-valued fuzzy graphs (IVFGs) strong paths need not exist between every two nodes in contrast with fuzzy graphs. Based on this, we define a particular class of interval-valued fuzzy graphs called strongly connected interval valued fuzzy graphs (SCIVFGs). A connected IVFG in which a strong path always exists between every two nodes is called a SCIVFG. We prove several sufficient conditions for an IVFG to be strongly connected. Finally we show that strong connectedness is preserved under isomorphism and co-weak isomorphism. 2020, Research Publication. All rights reserved. -
Pedagogical exploration for generation z students: Experiments using student-developed video case studies, gamification, student-developed case simulation and a movie reflection exercise in an organizational behaviour course
This paper will focus on three experiments performed while teaching undergraduate and graduate students using innovative pedagogy. In all three studies, the purpose was to understand how effective these pedagogical tools were in generating enthusiasm and engaging the students in the learning process. In study 1, teams developed and presented video case studies on the organizational behaviour themes studied in the course, applying them to practical scenarios. Later, the facilitators conducted a modified gamification quiz based on the video case studies, and the quiz results were considered to be the actual assessment of the students learning process. In study 2, student teams were asked to brain-storm and develop case simulations based on actual incidents encountered by those students who had work experience. In study 3, the undergraduate students were shown the classic movie 12 Angry Men as a means of learning about team decision-making processes. They reflected on and discussed the movie in relation to theory. Feedback collected at the end of each study conveyed that students experienced high levels of enthusiasm and engagement with positive learning outcomes. 2020 NeilsonJournals Publishing. -
Inpatient complaining behaviour: A study on the overt and covert behaviour of inpatients in Indian hospitals
Consumer dissatisfaction and complaining behaviour have always been a topic of discussion in educational institutes and industries alike. Whereas dissatisfaction with product purchases and subsequent returns or associated consumer responses is very common, the same in the service sector has been quite different. In India, it is not only the patient who decides, which healthcare service to opt for, because Indians are culturally embedded in a system of collective consumption where other family members or relatives or friends also influence their decision-making. This paper is an exploratory study done to comprehend the chosen behavioural responses of dissatisfied inpatients in India through a questionnaire survey. The survey followed a retrospective recall technique in which the recall window was fixed at six months. The sampling technique followed was probability sampling. The data collection tool was structured and self-administered questionnaire administered in the sampled nine districts of Kerala. A good number of respondents attributed their overt complaining behaviour to lack of cordiality of doctors, nurses or the attending staff and lack of proper care and concern from doctors or nurses. Post complaining, service recovery was found to be satisfactory for most of the complainers. 2020, Kamala-Raj Enterprises. All rights reserved. -
A prediction technique for heart disease based on long short term memory recurrent neural network
In recent years, heart disease is one of the leading cause of death for both women and men. So, heart disease prediction is considered as a significant part in the clinical data analysis. Standard data mining techniques like Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes and other machine learning techniques used in the earlier research for heart disease prediction. These methods are not sufficient for effective heart disease prediction due to insufficient test data. In this research, Bi-directional Long Short Term Memory with Conditional Random Field (BiLSTM-CRF) has been proposed to increase the efficiency of heart disease prediction. The input medical data were analyzed in a bidirectional manner for effective analysis, and CRF provided the linear relationship between the features. The BiLSTMCRF method has been tested on the Cleveland dataset to analyze the performance and compared with existing methods. The results showed that the proposed BiLSTM-CRF outperformed the existing methods in heart disease prediction. The average accuracy of the proposed BiLSTM-CRF is 90.04%, which is higher than the existing methods. 2020 by the authors. -
Comparing maritime piracy along the coasts of Africa: In search of a solution for the Gulf of Guinea
Merchant ships at sea have been under threat for centuries from criminal activities such as maritime piracy and armed robbery. Such acts have seen a rise in recent years, with new breeding grounds mushrooming across the globe. In Africa, such criminal activities are as old as maritime trade, with three severely affected regions, each with its own dynamics. While piracy on the eastern coast (Gulf of Aden) has been brought under control by international maritime forces and that on the south-eastern coast (Mozambique Channel) by local maritime forces, piracy on the western side (Gulf of Guinea) continues unabated and has become a matter of concern for the world's maritime fraternity. In an effort to find a solution for piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, this article aims to compare and analyse incidents of piracy along the coasts of Africa and understand whether the countermeasures adopted on the eastern coasts can be replicated on the western one. 2020 National Maritime Foundation. -
EMONET: A Cross Database Progressive Deep Network for Facial Expression Recognition
Recognizing facial features to detect emotions has always been an interesting topic for research in the field of Computer vision and cognitive emotional analysis. In this research a model to detect and classify emotions is explored, using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN). This model intends to classify the primary emotions (Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happy, Sad, Surprise and Neutral) using progressive learning model for a Facial Expression Recognition (FER) System. The proposed model (EmoNet) is developed based on a linear growing-shrinking filter method that shows prominent extraction of robust features for learning and interprets emotional classification for an improved accuracy. EmoNet incorporates Progressive- Resizing (PR) of images to accommodate improved learning traits from emotional datasets by adding more image data for training and Validation which helped in improving the model's accuracy by 5%. Cross validations were carried out on the model, this enabled the model to be ready for testing on new data. EmoNet results signifies improved performance with respect to accuracy, precision and recall due to the incorporation of progressive learning Framework, Tuning Hyper parameters of the network, Image Augmentation and moderating generalization and Bias on the images. These parameters are compared with the existing models of Emotional analysis with the various datasets that are prominently available for research. The Methods, Image Data and the Fine-tuned model combinedly contributed in achieving 83.6%, 78.4%, 98.1% and 99.5% on FER2013, IMFDB, CK+ and JAFFE respectively. EmoNet has worked on four different datasets and achieved an overall accuracy of 90%. 2020. All Rights Reserved. -
Generalisation of the rainbow neighbourhood number and k-jump colouring of a graph
In this paper, the notions of rainbow neighbourhood and rainbow neigh-bourhood number of a graph are generalised and further to these general-isations, the notion of a proper k-jump colouring of a graph is also intro-duced. The generalisations follow from the understanding that a closed k-neighbourhood of a vertex v ? V (G) denoted, Nk [v] is the set, Nk [v] = {u: d(v, u) ? k, k ? N and k ? diam(G)}. If the closed k-neighbourhood Nk [v] contains at least one of each colour of the chromatic colour set, we say that v yields a k-rainbow neighbourhood. 2020, Eszterhazy Karoly College. All rights reserved. -
Nonlinear Boussinesq buoyancy driven flow and radiative heat transport of magnetohybrid nanoliquid in an annulus: A statistical framework
The effect of nonlinear Boussinesq buoyancy force on the flow of Cu-Al2O3-H2O hybrid nanoliquid in a vertical annulus, which is adjacent to the radial magnetic field and thermal radiation, is analyzed through a statistical approach. The phenomena of movement of annuli are taken into account. The aspect of nonlinear density temperature is also accounted based on nonlinear Boussinesq approximation (NBA). The exact solution is obtained for the two-point boundary value problem comprised dimensionless governing equations. The skin friction coefficient and Nusselt number expressions are also estimated. The impacts of various physical parameters on the velocity, temperature, skin friction coefficient, and Nusselt number distributions are analyzed. The statistical techniques, such as correlation coefficient, probable error, and a multivariate regression model, are employed for the detailed analysis. It is found that the NBA is favorable for the skin friction coefficient and the rate of heat transfer. The maximum heat transfer is found on the wall of the internal annuli. 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC -
Sense of humour and work culture: A study based in the luxury hotels in Bangalore, India
Employee well-being has been a focus area for Human Resource managers as well as top management alike. The belief that healthy, happy employees would be more efficient, and consequently contribute more, has verily driven the research to understand the implications of different aspects of an employees health and happiness. Based on the work of key humour researcher Dr. Paul McGhee, it has been established that humour does play a key role in ensuring a happy and healthy workforce. The current study attempts to evaluate the benefits of the use of humour at the workplace, primarily in terms of influencing the work culture. The data for the study has been collected from the hotel sector and has been analysed to understand the use of humour and its influence on the work culture. The findings suggest that the presence and use of humour has a strong positive impact on work culture. The researchers also found that, contrary to previous literature, the use of humour did not depend on demographic variables like age, tenure in the current organization or total work experience. Furthermore, the study also attempts to understand how the use of humour would impact the work culture. In this regard, the researchers found that certain dimensions of humour at the workplace, had a stronger impact on the culture and it is expected that the findings would guide the behaviour of leaders and managers in the creation of a mutually beneficial workplace. 2020, Universidade de Aveiro. All rights reserved. -
Identification of misconceptions about corona outbreak using trigrams and weighted TF-IDF model
Misconceptions of a particular issue like health, diseases, politics, government policies, epidemics and pandemics have been a social issue for a number of years, particularly after the advent of social media, and often spread faster than true truth. The engagement with social media like Twitter being one of the most prominent news outlets continuing is a major source of information today, particularly the information distributed around the network. In this paper, the efficacy of Misconception Detection System was tested on Corona Pandemic Dataset extracted from Twitter posts. A Trigram and a weighted TF-IDF Model followed by a supervised classifier were used for categorizing the dataset into two classes: one with misconceptions about COVID-19 virus and the other comprising correct and authenticated information. Trigrams were more reliable as the functional words related to coronavirus appeared more frequently in the corpus created. The proposed system using a combination of trigrams and weighted TF-IDF gave relevant and a normalized score leading to an efficient creation of vector space model and this has yielded good performance results when compared with traditional approaches using Bag of Words and Count Vectorizer technique where the vector space model was created only through word count. 2020, Institute of Advanced Scientific Research, Inc. All rights reserved. -
Geopolymer concrete paving blocks made with Recycled Asphalt Pavement (RAP) aggregates towards sustainable urban mobility development
Policy makers in India have realized the importance of facility for pedestrians and non- motorized vehicles in an urban infrastructure setup. This has resulted in increased utilization of construction materials like Portland cement and crushed stone, which are not environmentally friendly and sustainable. The current study presents the development of paver blocks for pedestrian facility using different wastes. Geopolymer concrete was synthesized by fly ash and recycled asphalt pavement aggregates for making of paver blocks. Paver blocks were produced in laboratory with recycled asphalt pavement aggregate replacement levels of 0%, 20%, 40%, 60% and 80% by weight of virgin coarse and fine aggregates. The developed paver blocks were tested for dimensions and tolerances, water absorption, compressive strength and abrasion resistance as per IS15658:2006 standard. The results of the laboratory study show that recycled asphalt pavement aggregates can be introduced into geopolymer matrix to produce paver blocks of desirable quality. Furthermore, its use in pedestrian facilities provides a new avenue for managing the excessive waste, which otherwise goes in landfills, incurring loss to the paving industry. Therefore, the proposed method can help decision makers to effectively utilize recycled asphalt pavement in paving industry with environment-friendly approach. 2020 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.