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We propose a new work design model, SMART work design, that identifies five higher order categories of work characteristics, including stimulating work characteristics (task variety, skill variety, information processing requirements, and problem‐solving requirements), mastery work characteristics (job feedback, feedback from others, and role clarity), autonomous work characteristics (decision‐making autonomy, timing autonomy, and method autonomy), relational work characteristics (social support, task significance, and beneficiary contact), and tolerable work characteristics (low levels of: role overload, work–home conflict, and role conflict). Higher order confirmatory factor analysis of working participants provided initial evidence of this structure (Study 1, N = 1107), which was replicated in an additional dataset (Study 2, time 1, N = 709). To provide further evidence, we examined Study 2 data across three waves (N = 573) to show that each higher order factor at time 1 predicted time 3 job satisfaction either directly or via the theorized time 2 mediators (challenge appraisals, work meaningfulness, fulfillment of relatedness needs, and activated negative affect). In Study 3 (N = 108), employees' scores on specific higher order variables correlated with leader ratings of performance in the expected ways. The SMART work design model provides a unique integrating and multidimensional theory of work design that extends beyond existing models. The model can be used to facilitate the synthesis of research knowledge and guide scholars and practitioners to diagnose and address contemporary work design challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can artificial intelligence (AI) assist human employees in increasing employee creativity? Drawing on research on AI–human collaboration, job design, and employee creativity, we examine AI assistance in the form of a sequential division of labor within organizations: in a task, AI handles the initial portion, which is well-codified and repetitive, and employees focus on the subsequent portion, involving higher-level problem-solving. First, we provide causal evidence from a field experiment conducted at a telemarketing company. We find that AI assistance in generating sales leads, on average, increases employees' creativity in answering customers' questions during subsequent sales persuasion. Enhanced creativity leads to increased sales. However, this effect is much more pronounced for higher-skilled employees. Next, we conducted a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with the employees. We found that AI assistance changes job design by intensifying employees' interactions with more serious customers. This change enables higher-skilled employees to generate innovative scripts and develop positive emotions at work, which are conducive to creativity. By contrast, with AI assistance, lower-skilled employees make limited improvements to scripts and experience negative emotions at work. We conclude that employees can achieve AI-augmented creativity, but this desirable outcome is skill-biased by favoring experts with greater job skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern manufacturing systems, operators' role is evolving continuously in relation to the main production paradigms affecting how companies approach their manufacturing and logistics operations. If the introduction of Lean Manufacturing principles has affected workers' well-being directly, the adoption of digital technologies is modifying how factory work is organised and performed. As a result, digitalised and Lean Manufacturing contexts require operators to enhance their skills increasingly to perform several tasks and functions. This paper examines the evolution of operators' role in production by recalling two main work design paradigms that originated in the 1960s: Job Enlargement and Job Enrichment. Indeed, through a literature review and development of a causal loop diagram (CLD), this research points out how the main features of Industry 4.0 and Lean Manufacturing jointly affect the Job Enlargement and Job Enrichment concepts. The study significantly helps reshape work design in next-generation production systems, shedding light on the implications and relationships of the most widespread manufacturing paradigm, i.e. Lean Manufacturing and Industry 4.0, using Job Enrichment and Job Enlargement strategies. A CLD also can be a helpful tool for practitioners to understand what factors to leverage to increase efficiency and worker satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging digital and smart technologies, including wearable and collaborative ones, related to the Industry 4.0 paradigm are playing an assisting, collaborative, and augmenting role for the Operator 4.0, and just as in previous industrial revolutions, the nature of work and the workplace for operators on the shop floor is changing. This literature review aims to look into the impact of digital and smart technologies adoption on the workers’ psychosocial stage under the light of the Operator 4.0 typology. Based on the review conducted, a theoretical framework for assessing the psychosocial impacts (risks) of Industry 4.0 technologies adoption in Operator 4.0 is proposed. The framework can be utilized by company managers, researchers, production engineers, and human resources personnel for carrying out a psychosocial risk assessment of Operator 4.0 in assembly, maintenance, and training operations as these operations get digitally transformed and smartified based on self-report questionnaires. Findings reveal that the nature of work, the social and organizational environment of work, and related individual factors are key categories that might affect the Operator 4.0 psychosocial stage on the shop floor.

In today's time, the research mainly focuses on designing a Chat-bot which responds to a user's query in the most efficient manner. However, state-of-the-art works on chat-bot design are unable to emotionally connect with the user and follow-up to a conversation. In this paper, a socially and emotionally active intelligent assistant, AMIBO is proposed. It detects and recognizes the face, perceives emotion via speech and vision capabilities, provides empathetic and intelligent responses. In order to enhance the experience of AMIBO, navigation and information delivery system have been integrated in the bot. The analysis of the feature vector (on 450 subjects) is done for all the initially taken 75 distances and 15 angles reduced to 26 distances and 11 angles feature vector. An encouraging accuracy of 99% was achieved on CK+ dataset and 97% on KDEF dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stronger granular layers are often placed as working platforms over weaker sand subgrade. The design of a working platform involves the calculation of a two-layer bearing capacity under rectangular loading. Existing design methods are either overly simplified, based on infinitely long strip loads and validated by a small number of small-scale 1g model tests, or rely on numerous or empirically derived charts that are difficult to use or implement into design software. In this paper a new and highly practical design method is proposed in which the bearing capacity is determined simply from the shear strengths and unit weights of the two soil layers. The method was derived from extensive finite-element analysis and finite-element limit analysis (FELA) parametric studies in both plane strain and axisymmetric geometries. It was validated against published physical model tests, other FELA analyses and existing design methods. It can be applied to all rectangular shape ratios with dry and saturated layers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dissertation "Validity and written language proficiency" by Maria Håkansson Ramberg examines the assessment of written performance in the subject of German in Swedish schools. The author compares the evaluations of Swedish teachers with those of external assessors and investigates the underlying assessment criteria. There are significant deviations in the evaluation between the different groups of assessors. The Swedish minimum standards reach the claimed level B1.2 according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (GER). The study shows that the research design for such work is complex and that there are many influencing factors to consider when interpreting the results. [Extracted from the article]

The paper presents the construction and technological aspects of a device for pitting fruit, especially cherries, on an industrial scale. The presented work includes design solutions related to the transport of pits removed from pitted fruit, as well as a gravity chute, with an indication of potential operational problems related to the machine design. The authors proposed the use of a screw conveyor, especially in the case of longer drums, to optimize the process. Some analyses are also presented, including friction occurring during the transport of pits. Ultimately, a specific design concept is presented that integrates the screw conveyor with the pitting drum. The presented conclusions point to practical technological and engineering aspects related to fruit processing, suggesting the potential for innovative solutions in the design of pitters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article briefly introduces the concept of psychological safety as primarily conceptualised by Amy C. Edmondson. With Edmondson it is argued that psychological safety clearly has a positive and lasting impact on organisational culture. In a psychologically safe organisation employees are encouraged to actively participate in the design of work processes to overcome the so-called "epidemic of silence". In practice, this is primarily achieved by destigmatising mistakes and failure. Instead of promoting a culture of blaming, psychologically safe organisations perceive mistakes and failure as opportunities for organisational learning experiences. As a result, a positive culture of mistakes is created which in the end contributes to the continuous development of the organisation and its people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud detection is one of the important tasks in remote sensing image preprocessing, and this paper uses RGB preview images of remote sensing images to extract cloud regions efficiently. The preview images make the detection of cloud regions more challenging due to the lack of resolution and spectral information. The existing remote sensing image cloud detection methods, and feature fusion process, due to unreasonable feature fusion strategy, so that the encoded features cannot be fully utilized, which may introduce noise information, and ultimately lead to the problems of false detection and missing detection. To address these problems, this work designs a gated aggregation network (GANet) for remote sensing image cloud detection. GANet has a novel encoder–decoder architecture, a gated feature aggregation module (GFAM), and a pyramidal attention pooling module (PAPM). GFAM bridges the gap between high resolution with spatial details and low-resolution features with high-level semantics, fully selectively fusing semantic and spatial features to alleviate the semantic divide problem when fusing multi-level features. PAPM extracts multi-scale global contextual features without loss of resolution. The method is validated on three datasets: the publicly available 38-Cloud and SPARCS datasets and the self-built Landsat-8 cloud detection dataset with higher spatial resolution. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves competitive performance under different evaluation metrics. Codes and datasets can be found at https://github.com/HaiLei-Fly/GANet/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through job crafting, employees proactively change or modify their tasks, thus reducing adverse job demands or protecting resources. There is still a lack of understanding of the impact that job crafting may have on colleagues at work (crossover effect), and how this may affect their ability to disconnect from work (spillover effect). In the present daily diary study, we examine these two processes among 82 dyads of colleagues (N = 164 employees) over five consecutive working days (N = 820 observations). We found a number of crossover and differential spillover effects. For example, when the focal employee starts new challenging projects, their colleague reacts by reducing the number of stressful tasks. This, in turn, affects psychological detachment from work. Specifically, whereas increasing challenging demands hinders daily detachment, decreasing hindering demands facilitates it. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the impact of job crafting goes beyond the focal employee and beyond the work domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern key-value (KV) storage systems adopt append-only writes to update KV pairs with the out-of-place manner, because the performance of sequential accesses is much better than that of random accesses for HDDs. Compaction or GC operations will be deployed by traditional KVs or KV separation schemes due to updating KV pairs via append-only writes. Unfortunately, the system performance will be hurt because extra reads and writes are triggered during those operations, especially under update-intensive workloads.We find that the performance gap for SSDs between sequential and random accesses will get close when the request size becomes large in our experiments. Motivated by this, we propose InPlaceKV built atop SSDs, which adopts an in-place large-update scheme with a hotness-aware method to update KV pairs rather than use append-only writes with the LSM-tree. We further design the working flow of system operations with appropriate data structures. Finally, we compare InPlaceKV with state-of-the-art KV storage systems via extensive experiments under update-intensive workloads, and results validate the effectiveness of our design in improving the system throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supersonic ejectors are an economically feasible and environmentally friendly technology. Shock wave structures significantly affect the ejector performance. In the present work, the first shock wave structures in a supersonic ejector were analyzed with experimental and numerical methods. The experimental results by the Schlieren method were used to verify the accuracy of the numerical simulation results. Then the influence of the inlet pressure on the first shock wave structures inside the ejector was analyzed under critical operating conditions. The numerical simulation results showed that the dimensionless length and height of the first shock wave inside the ejector increase with the increase of the primary pressure and decrease with the increase of the secondary pressure. Meanwhile, the relationship between the performance of the ejector and the shock structures was established, the entrainment ratio is positively correlated with the first shock wave aspect ratio and has a good linear relationship. The results may be beneficial to reveal the ejector's working mechanism and design high performance ejectors in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic led many workers to integrate their work lives within their homes because of mandatory telework. Given that this new arrangement may affect their work-life balance, the present study seeks to understand the mechanisms that underlie the way boundary enactment can mitigate work-life conflict (WLC). Specifically, it examines two features of work design (autonomy and job feedback) that may exert pressure on the work-life boundary which, in turn, affects WLC. Drawing on Ashforth et al.'s (2000) boundary theory, we posit that work design characteristics conducive to the creation of an inflexible and impermeable boundary between roles allow individuals to adopt boundary enactment based on segmentation, and subsequently decrease WLC. The results show that although boundary enactment that tends toward segmentation does not invariably play a mediating role, it consistently minimizes inter-role conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Piezoelectric (PE) fan is a novel type of active cooling device which enhance heat transfer with less power consumption. In order to achieve the theoretical limit of heat transfer performance of multiple PE fans system in confined volume, the blade location effects on that were investigated in detail by conducting three-dimensional simulations. Here, the blade pitch ranges from 1.6 to 4.2 times the fan width, and the optimal values of blade pitch with respect to four typical vibration phase angles (0°, 60°, 120°, 180°) were obtained, respectively. For all vibration modes, the air volume variation curve follows a parabola trend with blade pitch. The largest air volume is obtained when fans operating in-phase mode (φ = 0°), a conclusion that differs from that in infinite space. We attribute this to the vortex action, and its formation is determined by two effects. The positive one is the attenuation of counteracting effect from normal forces with the increasing blade pitch, where the force was exerted by two blades onto their inner fluid. The negative one is weakening of the coupling effect of two jets formed by the blade tips when spacing of dual fans is gradually increased. In addition, the local hot spot phenomenon was observed in both in-phase and counter-phase mode. It was observed that the distance between local hot spots broadens with the increasing blade pitch for in-phase mode while remains substantially constant for counter-phase mode. Our work provides a design principle for heat transfer optimization of dual PE fans in confined volume and will benefit both theoretical understanding and application in thermal management of PE fan system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tandem bicycles are used for all para-cycling events for visually impaired athletes. Tandems are structurally more challenging to design than solo bicycles: they must resist higher loading over a longer wheelbase, yet must still fit between the legs of the riders. Despite this, there is limited published work on tandem design. This paper presents a method for determining maximal loading of a tandem bicycle frame in racing scenarios. The only inputs required are the dimensions of the frame and the torques exerted by the riders. Outputs are the forces acting on the frame. The method is used to provide loads for structural analyses of tandem frames of different topologies. Twisting of the frame under a starting effort is shown to be the worst load case. The "double diamond" is shown to be the most efficient tubular frame design, on a stiffness per weight basis, but is only 2% superior to an "open" topology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Directional sound beam emission from compact devices is highly desirable in many practical acoustic applications. Here, we present an approach for the efficient control of arbitrary multi-directional emission through a grafted metasurface that is designed by cutting and stitching two cylindrical phase-gradient metasurfaces carrying two opposite topological charges. The grafted metasurface provides a compact and robust platform for diverse multi-directional beam emission, whose beam number and azimuthal angles are precisely controlled by the topological charge. The underlying mechanism contributes to the wave interference of two opposite partial vortex waves. This scheme was verified by simulation and experimental results. Our work provides a design methodology for directional sound beam emission devices and may be useful for applications such as acoustic imaging, beam steering, and vortex detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To facilitate the integration of a fragrance encapsulation system into different products to achieve effective releases, a dual-responsive release system with pH and thermal trigger control is designed in this work. A series of ZIF-8 (M) and bilayer ZIF-8-on-ZIF-8 (MM) materials are synthesized by a solvent method at room temperature. The fragrance is encapsulated into the ZIFs by dynamic adsorption or in situ encapsulation combined dynamic adsorption. The fragrance loading contributed by dynamic adsorption was as high as 80%. The fragrance loaded in the double-layer MM host was almost twice that of the monolayer host M due to the stronger electrostatic interaction between MM and vanillin. In the pH and thermal trigger response release experiments, the second MOF layer in the MM host, as a controlled entity, greatly improved the load and kinetic equilibrium time of vanillin, and realized the controlled release of guest molecules. The developed dual-responsive release system in this work exhibits great potential in daily chemical products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One central goal of bioprocess engineering is to maximize the production of specific chemicals using microbial cell factories. Many bioprocesses are one-stage (batch) processes (OSPs), in which growth and product synthesis are coupled. However, OSPs often exhibit low volumetric productivities due to the competition for substrate for biomass and product synthesis implying trade-offs between biomass and product yields. Two-stage or, more generally, multi-stage processes (MSPs) offer the potential to tackle this trade-off for improved efficiency of bioprocesses, for example, by separating growth and production. MSPs have recently gained much attention, also because of a rapidly growing toolbox for the dynamic control of metabolic fluxes. Despite these promising advancements, computational tools specifically tailored for the optimal design of MSPs in the field of biotechnology are still lacking. Here, we present OptMSP, a new Python-based toolbox for identifying optimal MSPs maximizing a user-defined process metrics (such as volumetric productivity, yield, and titer or combinations thereof) under given constraints. In contrast to other methods, our framework starts with a set of well-defined modules representing relevant stages or sub-processes. Experimentally determined parameters (such as growth rates, substrate uptake and product formation rates) are used to build suitable ODE models describing the dynamic behavior of each module. OptMSP finds then the optimal combination of those modules, which, together with the optimal switching time points, maximize a given objective function. We demonstrate the applicability and relevance of the approach with three different case studies, including the example of lactate production by E. coli in a batch setup, where an aerobic growth phase can be combined with anaerobic production phases with or without growth and with or without enhanced ATP turnover. • The work addresses the design of multi-stage processes (MSPs) to improve the efficiency of bioprocesses. • OptMSP: a new Python-based toolbox for identifying MSPs maximizing a given process metrics. • Input: ODE (or analytical) models for each stage (modules). • Output: optimal combination of modules together with switching times. • Application example: lactate production by E. coli with up to six combinable modules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: India is going through the maintenance phase of VL elimination programme which may be threatened by the persistence of hidden parasite pools among asymptomatic leishmanial infection (ALI) and PKDL. The present work was designed to determine the burden of VL, PKDL, and ALI and to assess the role of treatment of ALI in maintaining post-elimination phase. Methods and finding: The study was undertaken in Malda district, West Bengal, India during October 2016 to September 2021. Study areas were divided into 'Study' and 'Control' arms. VL and PKDL cases of both the arms were diagnosed by three active mass surveys with an interval of one year and treated as per National guideline. ALI of study arm was treated like VL. ALI of control arm was followed up to determine their fate. Fed sand-fly pools were analysed for parasitic DNA. No significant difference was noted between the incidence of VL and PKDL in both the arms. Incidence of ALI declined sharply in study arm but an increasing trend was observed in control arm. Significantly higher rate of sero-conversion was noted in control arm and was found to be associated with untreated ALI burden. Parasitic DNA was detected in 22.8% ALI cases and 2.2% sand-fly pools. Conclusion: Persistence of a significant number of PKDL and ALI and ongoing transmission, as evidenced by new infection and detection of leishmanial DNA in vector sand-flies, may threaten the maintenance of post-elimination phase. Emphasis should be given for elimination of pathogen to prevent resurgence of VL epidemics. Author summary: The present study was conducted in a kala-azar endemic block of Malda district, West Bengal. The study areas were divided 'Study' and 'Control' arm and three active mass survey was conducted for detection of visceral leishmaniasis (VL), post kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis (PKDL) and asymptomatic leishmanial infection (ALI). In the study arm, diagnosed ALI cases were treated with Liposomal Amphotericin B. No significant difference was noted between the incidence of VL and PKDL cases in 'Study' and 'Control' arm. But the incidence of ALI cases declined sharply in 'Study' arm and increasing trend was observed in 'Control' arm. A significantly higher rate of ser-conversion was noted in 'Control' arm. In both 'Study' and 'Control' arm, the sero-conversion rate was significantly associated with untreated ALI burden. Persistence of significant number of PKDL and ALI and ongoing transmission as evidenced by new infection and detection of leishmanial DNA in sand-flies may jeopardise the maintenance of post-elimination phase. Therefore, constant vigilance is highly needed to prevent resurgence of VL epidemic. Detection and long-term follow-up of ALI may also help to sustain the elimination. However, feasibility and cost-effectiveness study for detection and treatment of ALI should also receive attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of work is a crucial consideration for production workers in terms of performance, satisfaction, and motivation. This aspect has garnered increasing attention in research, particularly with the rise of automation and the transition to Industry 4.0-enabled smart factories. Work design is influenced by both internal and external performance-shaping factors (PSFs). Internal factors include human, machine and task elements and traits, which HR specialists can structure to enhance efficiency and productivity in manufacturing. External PSFs, such as physical, psychological, social and organizational factors, also play a significant role in shaping production work. This study aims to understand the impact of personal characteristics of production workers in an automated factory. The research findings are extrapolated on an Industry 4.0 framework to establish a productive work design. Data collection is conducted through a quantitative survey, and non-parametric analysis of variance tests are employed to assess significant relationships. The results indicate a better perception of the pace of operations (µ = 4.19) and feedback (µ = 4.47) among elder workers. Additionally, educated workers express significant perceptions regarding external PSFs such as supervision (µ = 4.39), health and safety (µ = 4.25), job rotation (µ = 3.91) and pay and welfare (µ = 3.58). Aspiration, motivation and organizational commitment emerge as crucial work design attributes for experienced and married workers. These findings contribute to understanding the structure of modern work design in the context of Industry 4.0, aiming to enhance performance and worker productivity. The study proposes an advanced Industry 4.0 work design framework, empowering HR specialists to develop effective strategies and optimize work distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the relationships between human resource (HR) practices, employee psychological empowerment, employee innovative work behavior, and firm innovation capability in the context of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector in Jordan. Employing the Social Exchange Theory (SET) as a guiding framework, this study explored how employee psychological empowerment and innovative work behavior mediated the influence of HR practices on a firm's innovative capabilities. Drawing on extensive data collected from ICT organizations in Jordan, our analysis had several key findings. A significant positive correlation between HR practices and psychological empowerment was observed. Job design emerged as the most influential factor affecting psychological empowerment, whereas compensation had a weaker impact. Furthermore, we established that psychological empowerment significantly enhanced innovative work behavior, underscoring its role as a catalyst for innovative work behavior within the sector. Finally, our study supported the theory that psychological empowerment influenced a firms' innovation capabilities, emphasizing the pivotal role of employee empowerment in driving firm-level innovation in the Jordanian ICT sector. These findings provide insights for academic and practical audiences, clarifying how HR practices, employee psychological empowerment, and innovative work behavior collectively influenced firm innovation capability within the unique context of the Jordanian ICT sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two glass lined reactors in a launch platform facility operated by Syngenta have been damaged during the crystallization of an organic compound due to electrostatic discharges. The goal of this work was to design and commission a novel setup to measure charges and currents generated by this slurry in a laboratory‐scale reactor. An improved and more sophisticated setup was then proposed for possible implementation in Syngenta's own laboratories. With this novel setup, the electrostatic charging of stirred suspensions involving nonconductive solvents could be accurately measured in the context of a case study that involved the suspension that led to liner damages in the production facilities of Syngenta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work was to design a kirigami-based metamaterial with optical properties. This idea came from the necessity of a study that can improve common camouflage techniques to yield a product that is cheap, light, and easy to manufacture and assemble. The author investigated the possibility of exploiting a rotation to achieve transparency and color changing. One of the most important examples of a kirigami structure is a geometry based on rotating squares, which is a one-degree-of-freedom mechanism. In this study, light polarization and birefringence were exploited to obtain transparency and color-changing properties using two polarizers and common cellophane tape. These elements were assembled with a rotating-square structure that allowed the rotation of a polarizer placed on the structure with respect to a fixed polarizer equipped with cellophane layers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performance appraisals are widely used in organizations and most typically involve raters evaluating groups of subordinates along a set of items designed to represent job performance over a predetermined period (e.g., annually). A defining but often overlooked characteristic of performance appraisals is that they are cyclical. Since raters conduct appraisals over many cycles, it may be that measures of job performance are not equivalent across time. This is important because changes or differences in aggregated performance ratings can only be meaningfully interpreted if raters' definitions of job performance, interpretation of what the items mean, and their view of what constitutes the different levels of performance remain unchanged over time, unaffected by their experience with appraisals. Although critical to the interpretation of job performance scores, measurement invariance concerns are generally absent from the literature. The current research investigated the extent to which rater experience affected the conceptualization and measurement of performance using performance data from a major South American company which comprised information from raters and ratees through several appraisal cycles. In the between‐rater design, measurement invariance was analyzed using ratings of one performance appraisal cycle from 514 raters divided into groups according to their level of experience. The within‐rater design analyzed ratings from the same 80 raters in their first three appraisal cycles. In the between‐rater analysis, data supported measurement invariance across raters with different levels of experience. Results from the within‐rater analysis suggested that the job performance factor structure was not the same across cycles. Implications for research and practice are discussed. Practitioner points: (a)What is currently known about the topic of your study?Measurement invariance is critical to the validity of the interpretation of aggregated performance ratings, where items are believed to be manifest indicators of job performance constructs.Measurement invariance concerns in appraisal research have been limited to the analysis of ratings from different sources (e.g., peers and subordinates).Little is known about whether job performance ratings are noninvariant across time as a function of rater experience. (b)What your paper adds to this?In the current study, we examine if rater experience is a source of measurement nonequivalence in job performance ratings. Thus, we test the assumption that job performance ratings are invariant across time. (c)The implications of your study findings for practitioners.If raters at distinct stages of experience differ in either of these aspects of measurement, this should be considered whenever comparisons between employees' ratings are made (e.g., for administrative decisions).The finding that raters may still be calibrating the measure in the initial years of experience demonstrates the importance of examining whether performance appraisal training methods designed to provide a common frame of reference to raters are effective in ensuring measurement invariance.Organizations could benefit from the analysis of sources of measurement noninvariance as it potentially provides meaningful information about its culture and how it affects raters' performance views of job performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Job crafting refers to the self‐initiated work behaviours employees use to change their job characteristics. According to job design theory, these crafting‐induced changes in job characteristics should impact employee outcomes. Job characteristics can therefore be proposed as a key mechanism through which job crafting affects employee outcomes and we present cross‐sectional meta‐analytic structural equation modelling of this key mechanism (K = 58 independent samples, N = 20,347 employees). Results show significant indirect effects between task resource crafting and employee outcomes (well‐being and positive job attitudes) via task resources, and significant indirect effects between social job crafting and employee outcomes (well‐being and positive job attitudes) via social resources. Results also indicated that challenge and hindrance demand crafting increase job strain via increases in job demand. Overall, our findings indicate that job characteristics are an important job crafting mechanism, that employees may have difficulty in crafting job demands in ways that produce beneficial outcomes, and that future research needs to consider simultaneously the range of mechanisms through which job crafting affects outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To restore images with clear edge details and no staircase artifacts from degraded versions, this paper incorporates the ℓ 2 plus ℓ 0 data fidelity and non-convex high-order total variation regularizer to establish an optimization model for eliminating mixed Gaussian-impulse noise. Among them, the ℓ 2 fidelity is adopted to suppress Gaussian noise, while the ℓ 0 -norm is more suitable for detecting and removing impulse noise. In addition, the non-convex regularization displays excellent performance in overcoming the staircase effect and preserving edge details. Computationally, by using the iteratively reweighted ℓ 1 algorithm and variable splitting method, this work designs a modified alternating minimization method to solve the optimization problem we construct. In theory, the convergence proof of our resulting algorithm is also presented. Finally, in the experimental section, we conduct extensive numerical experiments on degraded images and compare with other existing techniques. From the intuitive effects and restoration accuracy, it follows that our newly proposed method is effective and competitive for image deblurring and mixed noise removal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the software development process, numerous bugs are reported daily in the software bug repositories. Bug triage assigned these bugs to the most relevant and expert developer for resolution. Moreover, assigning bugs to an incompetent or an over‐engaged developer causes repeated reassignment to other developers until it is resolved. This problem can be solved by devising a triage process that assigns bugs to not only expert developers but also to those who are either under‐engaged or reasonably engaged but are not over‐engaged in work. This paper has designed and implemented work engagement sensitive bug triage that resolves the issue of assigning bugs to developers considering their due work engagement, expertise as well as the current state of activity. For this purpose, a developer profile is built by using metrics to generate three types of scores: technical skill, work engagement and work experience. Metadata features like developer‐name, email, developer‐work‐experience in bug resolution, last and present‐work‐activity, timestamp, component and priority are used for it. A multi‐criteria‐based Henry–Garret technique is used to generate a single ranked list of developers from three ranked lists. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on four large OOS projects: Mozilla, Eclipse, Netbeans, and Open Office covering 895,439 bug reports accumulated for 33 years of development. The overall system accuracy of the proposed triage using all four datasets is 91.96 ± 0.05% which is 5.87% better than previously published work. The proposed method is achieved up to 90.30 ± 0.05 and 97.1 ± 0.05 MRR and accuracy of reassignment respectively that indicates how significantly it re‐assigns the bug to the relevant developers. The results demonstrate improvement in the accuracy of software‐bugs triaging as well as a reduction in the probability of bug‐tossing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research work presents the development of a flexible tool for performing the new joining process, called hole hemming, between dissimilar materials with very different mechanical properties. This work includes the design, fabrication, and assembly of the structural, active and passive components of the hole hemming tool and the evaluation of their performance. The tool is designed to have adjustable structural and passive tool components as well as easily interchangeable active tool components. The tool is evaluated for joining the AA6082-T4 aluminum sheet with 2 mm thickness to the AZ31 magnesium sheet with 0.9 mm thickness by experimental tests. The maximum force measured during the hole flanging and hemming stages is about 55 kN and 70 kN, respectively. The experimental data is also compared to the numerical results obtained from the finite element analysis of an ideal design. The results in both stages allow concluding the developed tool meets the considered requirements and can be efficiently used for creating hole-hemmed joints between dissimilar materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article serves as the first academic inquiry into the establishment and functioning of community review panels (CRPs) in England. CRPs are an innovation in public participation in planning. The first CRP was established in 2018 to operate within the boundaries of the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) in West London. It was set up to mirror the workings of a Design Review Panel, with people selected to serve on the CRP for their local knowledge and ability to participate in substantive discussions. CRPs are now active in six areas of London and Southeast England, predominantly in locations experiencing significant development or regeneration. The article is based on analysis of primary interview and observation data, grey literature on CRPs, and a review of academic and policy debates on public participation and lay knowledge. It explores the potential for CRPs to provide meaningful input into planning and place-making. It concludes that well-managed panels can make meaningful contributions to the development control process, but could be more effectively employed in broader place-making. Both outcomes are contingent on local planners' willingness and ability to serve as brokers of different types of knowledge, testing lay and expert perspectives alongside each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the core of every high-performing warehouse is an efficient order picking (OP) system. To attain such a system, policy choices should be carefully aligned with subjects responsible for the actual picking within the established system. Despite recent advancements in automating the picking process due to Industry 4.0, human operators will continue to play a crucial role in the future of ware-housing. However, unlike robots, human operators have specific skills, conduct, and perceptions, which are only partly accounted for in current planning models. This review adopts a multimethod approach to identify and analyse how these phenomena are currently integrated into OP planning problems. In addition, we assess the relevance and adequacy of human factors modelling in academic literature with practice-based insights gathered via semi-structured interviews. This leads to five major human factors integration constructs and dedicated recommendations on how to refine them. We then take the analysis one step further and make suggestions on how to integrate these constructs with leading research methodologies in the context of Industry 5.0. The results highlight the prevalent need to increasingly account for psychosocial phenomena and their impact on operational performance. Future research opportunities provide a substantiated foundation to assist in human-centric work design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jobs consist of bundles of tasks, with most jobs involving one or a few core tasks as well as supplementary tasks. In this article, the author argues that, keeping constant the number of supplementary tasks performed, the nature of these tasks can affect workers' productivity in their core task. The study uses quantitative and qualitative data to study tea pickers at a plantation in India. Using fine-grained personnel data on workers' task assignments and their daily productivity, the author finds that workers' productivity is affected by the extent to which their supplementary tasks are facilitative of their core task, when comparing workers performing the same number of supplementary tasks. Qualitative data suggest that one way in which performing a facilitative rather than a non-facilitative supplementary task could improve core task productivity is by temporarily boosting what the author calls "core task identification." This article contributes to scholarship on the design of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of digital media has changed the way people live and learn. In the context of the new era, digital media is gradually integrating into people's life and learning. Digital media contains massive images, and fine-grained image recognition for digital media has become an important topic. The challenge of fine-grained image recognition is that the difference between different categories is small, and the difference between the same categories is sometimes large. This work designs a fine-grained image recognition based on feature enhancement (FIRFE). This extracts as much information as possible from fine-grained images under weak supervision to improve the recognition accuracy. When the existing methods extract image features, the feature extraction other than the most significant local feature is not enough. This deals with local features alone and ignores the relationship between features. First, this paper designs a feature enhancement and suppression module to process image features. Secondly, this paper designs pyramid residual convolution. This uses different scale convolution kernels to capture different levels of features in the scene. Thirdly, this paper uses the softpool method to rationally allocate the information weight in the pooling process. Fourth, this paper uses feature focus module to mine more features. This focuses on obtaining similar information in multiple local features as discriminant features to further improve the recognition. Fifthly, this paper carried out systematic experiments on the designed method. The proposed method achieves 94.3%/95.7% accuracy, 92.9%/94.1% recall, and 91.4%/92.2% F1 score on different datasets. This verified the superiority of this method for fine-grained image recognition of digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work reports the design and synthesis of novel oxadiazole‐decorated azobenzenes, structural analysis of the resulting compounds and behavior under light irradiation. The synthetic strategy involved constructing amino functionalized heterocyclic key intermediates which were used either to yield electrophilic diazonium salts able to react with phenol moieties or as nucleophilic partners in Bayer‐Mills reaction with nitroso‐substituted derivatives. The amino‐derived oxadiazole intermediates were investigated by absorption and emission spectroscopy providing blue and green emitted light. The target oxadiazole‐decorated azobenzenes were structurally characterized, including solid‐state structures, and subsequently used in irradiation experiments in order to take advantage of the azo group known to provide photoswitching abilities. We noticed quenching of the emissive properties in presence of the azo group; however, all compounds were very stable to repeated cycles of light irradiation. In addition, according to structural diversification we could obtain half‐lives of the meta stable isomers within hours to hundreds of hours range. The experimental results were very well correlated with DFT calculations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This treatise studies a microoptoelectromechanical accelerometer (MOEMA) with an optical measuring transducer built according to the optical tunneling principle (evanescent coupling). The work discusses the design of the accelerometer's microelectromechanical sensing element (MSE) and states the requirements for the design to achieve a sensitivity threshold of 1 µg m/s2 at a calculated eigenvalue of the MSE. The studies cover the selection of the dimensions, mass, eigenfrequency and corresponding stiffness of the spring suspension, gravity-induced cross-displacements. The authors propose and experimentally test an optical transducer positioning system represented by a capacitive actuator. This approach allows avoiding the restrictions in the fabrication of the transducer conditioned by the extremely high aspect ratio of deep silicon etching (more than 100). The designed MOEMA is tested on three manufactured prototypes. The experiments show that the sensitivity threshold of the accelerometers is 2 µg. For the dynamic range from minus 0.01 g to plus 0.01 g, the average nonlinearity of the accelerometers' characteristics ranges from 0.7% to 1.62%. For the maximum dynamic range from minus 0.015 g to plus 0.05 g, the nonlinearity ranges from 2.34% to 2.9%, having the maximum deviation at the edges of the regions. The power gain of the three prototypes of accelerometers varies from 12.321 mW/g to 26.472 mW/g. The results provide broad prospects for the application of the proposed solutions in integrated inertial devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the large computational and GPUs memory cost of semantic segmentation, some works focus on designing a lite weight model to achieve a good trade‐off between computational cost and accuracy. A common method is to combined CNN and vision transformer. However, these methods ignore the contextual information of multi receptive fields. And existing methods often fail to inject detailed information losses in the downsampling of multi‐scale feature. To fix these issues, we propose AG Self‐Attention, which is Enhanced Atrous Self‐Attention (EASA), and Gate Attention. AG Self‐Attention adds the contextual information of multi receptive fields into the global semantic feature. Specifically, the Enhanced Atrous Self‐Attention uses weight shared atrous convolution with different atrous rates to get the contextual information under the specific different receptive fields. Gate Attention introduces gating mechanism to inject detailed information into the global semantic feature and filter detailed information by producing "fusion" gate and "update" gate. In order to prove our insight. We conduct numerous experiments in common semantic segmentation datasets, consisting of ADE20 K, COCO‐stuff, PASCAL Context, Cityscapes, to show that our method achieves state‐of‐the‐art performance and achieve a good trade‐off between computational cost and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the reduced switch multilevel inverters (MLIs), including switched capacitor MLIs (SC-MLIs), are designed with voltage sources/capacitors have obtained voltage levels with the addition of these sources only. This increases the number of voltage sources (capacitors) without full utilisation of these sources and has higher inverter total standing voltages, which leads the inverter inefficient (high conduction loss) and costly. The motivation of this work is to design a generalised reduced component MLI aiming for addition as well as subtraction of the voltage sources to obtain a voltage level, which results in the reduction of sources, enhance the voltage utilisation and lowering the inverter total standing voltage (TSV). The design parameters of the proposed MLI topology are compared with the recently developed MLIs in terms of the number of switches, capacitors and TSV to prove its superiority. The experimental prototype of the specimen 15-level and 27-level inverters is implemented using DS1103 and the corresponding results are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an efficient barrier model for enhancing smart building surveillance in harsh environment with thin walls and structures. After the main research problem of minimizing the total number of wall-recognition surveillance barriers, we propose two distinct algorithms, Centralized Node Deployment and Adaptation Node Deployment, which are designed to address the challenge by strategic placement of surveillance nodes within the smart building. The Centralized Node Deployment aligns nodes along the thin walls, ensuring consistent communication coverage and effectively countering potential disruptions. Conversely, the Adaptation Node Deployment begins with random node placement, which adapts over time to ensure efficient communication across the building. The novelty of this work is in designing a novel barrier system to achieve energy efficiency and reinforced surveillance in a thin-wall environment. Instead of a real environment, we use an ad hoc server for simulations with various scenarios and parameters. Then, two different algorithms are executed through those simulation environments and settings. Also, with detailed discussions, we provide the performance analysis, which shows that both algorithms deliver similar performance metrics over extended periods, indicating their suitability for long-term operation in smart infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significance: The photoacoustic (PA) technique, a noninvasive pump-probe technique, has found interesting applications in biomedical tissue diagnosis over the last decade. To take it a step further to clinical applications, the PA technique needs to be designed as an instrument focusing on a compact design, reducing the cost, and quickly providing a quantitative diagnosis. Aim: This work presents a design and characterization of a cost-effective, compact PA sensing instrument for biomedical tissue diagnosis. Approach: A compact laser diode case design is developed to house several laser diodes for PA excitation, and a pulsed current supply unit is also developed in-house to power the laser diodes to generate a 25 ns current pulse at a frequency of 20 kHz. After PA experimental data acquisition, the signal's frequency spectra were calculated to characterize the tissue quantitatively and correlated with their mechanobiological properties. Results: The corresponding dominant frequency peak in the PA spectral response (PASR) study was low in the fibrofatty normal breast tissue 0.26 x 0.03 MHz, compared to the dominant frequency peak of 1.60 x 0.016 MHz in the fibrocystic disease tissue, which had increased glandular and stromal elements, thereby increased tissue density. The histopathological findings correlated with the PASR results, and the fibrocystic breast disease tissue exhibited a higher dominant frequency peak and energy compared to the normal breast tissue. Conclusions: We experimented with an in vitro PASR study of fibrocystic human breast tissues and successfully differentiated different tissue types using quantitative spectral parameters peak frequency, mean frequency, and spectral energy. This gives the potential to take this technique further for cost-effective and quick clinical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The minimum spanning tree problem (MSTP) revolves around creating a spanning tree (ST) within a graph/network that incurs the least cost compared to all other potential STs. This represents a vital and fundamental issue in the realm of combinational optimization problems (COP). Supply chain management, communication, transportation, and routing are a few examples of real-world issues that have been represented using the MSTP. Uncertainties exist in almost every real life application of MSTP due to inconsistency, improperness, incompleteness, vagueness and indeterminacy of the information and It generates really challenging scenarios to determine the arc length precisely. The main motivation behind this research work is to design a method for MST which will be simple enough and effective in real world scenarios. Neutrosophic set (NS) is a well known renowned theory, which one can this type of uncertainty in the edge weights of the ST. In this article, we review trapezoid neutrosophic set/number to describe the arc weight of a neutrosophic network for MSTP. Here, we introduce an algorithm for solving MSTP in neutrosophic environment. In our proposed method, we describe the uncertainties in Prim's algorithm for MSTP using trapezoid neutrosophic set as edge cost. Here examples of numerical sets are used to explain the proposed algorithm. Keywords: Neutrosophic set; MSTP; neutrosophic network/graph; Prim's algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural surfaces have micro and nanostructures that affect the splashing behavior of water droplets falling on them. Synthetic surfaces mimicking this natural phenomenon have been previously reported. The objective of our current work is to design such surfaces and fine-tune the fluid splashing behavior using three-dimensional simulation tools. We have designed and simulated splashing behavior on geometrically patterned micro scale surfaces using the volume of fluid method within the commercial software Ansys Fluent. Surfaces with microscale pillars of different heights, geometrical shapes, layouts as well as tip designs were simulated with the goal of minimizing fluid splash. We found that certain pillar models produce less splashes than others. We have further optimized array structures for fluid splashing diameter and velocity. Behavior at different falling angles and fluid types are also investigated in multi-pillar models. The results indicate that a non-uniform structured surface decreases the speed and energy of the falling droplet. We have reported here three finalized designed models that are 35%, 63.5%, and 69% effective in reducing velocity compared to a flat surface model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study investigates how team cognition occurs in care transitions from operating room (OR) to intensive care unit (ICU). We then seek to understand how the sociotechnical system and team cognition are related. Background: Effective handoffs are critical to ensuring patient safety and have been the subject of many improvement efforts. However, the types of team-level cognitive processing during handoffs have not been explored, nor is it clear how the sociotechnical system shapes team cognition. Method: We conducted this study in an academic, Level 1 trauma center in the Midwestern United States. Twenty-eight physicians (surgery, anesthesia, pediatric critical care) and nurses (OR, ICU) participated in semi-structured interviews. We performed qualitative content analysis and epistemic network analysis to understand the relationships between system factors, team cognition in handoffs and outcomes. Results: Participants described three team cognition functions in handoffs—(1) information exchange, (2) assessment, and (3) planning and decision making; information exchange was mentioned most. Work system factors influenced team cognition. Inter-professional handoffs facilitated information exchange but included large teams with diverse backgrounds communicating, which can be inefficient. Intra-professional handoffs decreased team size and role diversity, which may simplify communication but increase information loss. Participants in inter-professional handoffs reflected on outcomes significantly more in relation to system factors and team cognition (p < 0.001), while participants in intra-professional handoffs discussed handoffs as a task. Conclusion: Handoffs include team cognition, which was influenced by work system design. Opportunities for handoff improvement include a flexibly standardized process and supportive tools/technologies. We recommend incorporating perspectives of the patient and family in future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]