Business Administration Department

This research takes as its topic business process reengineering (BPR) and public sector organisation performance in a developing economy context. It develops and empirically tests a research model to evaluate whether the implementation of BPR by public organisations contributes to the business process and overall organisational performance.

With climate change appearing on the horizon of economic theory and analytical research, it becomes imperative that the links are traced to the origin of the connection between the climate change and economics.  Climate change traditionally, is a subject for meteorologists, ecologist and marine biologists.  When economist and financial experts, start debating climate change, it means that the subject matter now includes costs and finance; income distribution; and factors of production.  Energy resource and fossil fuels are the focus for this discussion as these are linked to: CO2 emissions and other Green House Gases (GHG) emissions and the abatement costs of these emissions.

Production and consumption activities in any economy have a direct impact on the environment. Although increased economic activity and population growth in developing countries continue to exert enormous pressure on their natural environments, the role of the environment is neglected in the estimation of national income. Such neglect at the macroeconomic level is at least in part, an important cause of environmental degradation in developing countries. Since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 at Rio and even as early as middle of the 1980s, a substantial literature had developed on methods to integrate the environment into the economic development process. The main assertion in this literature is that natural resources represent a form of capital that is analogous to the stock of manufactured capital. Sustainable income can be determined by allocating a portion of income to allow for the deprecation of natural capital [Ahmed, El Serafy, and Lutz (19...

The environment is an asset that provides essential services. Like any other asset, its services will diminish as it depreciates. The environmentally sustainable income of a nation depends on a sustained¯ow of these services, and can be estimated by including the environment in a macroeconomic framework, with a goal to achieve both full employment and sustainability. The relationship of national income to employment is estimated at full employment, actual employment and the employment level that is necessary to maintain sustainable income, for the Australian economy. There proved to be a widening gap between actual income and environmentally sustainable income, and between actual income and income to guarentee full employment. Wage reduction and improvement of technology are analysed as possible ways to meet the goal of an environmentally sustainable income. Ã This work is part of Seeme Mallick's doctoral research and the facilities and support provided by the Graduate School of the Environment, Macquarie University are deeply appreciated, with the usual disclaimers.

Deterioration of natural resources during the past few decades has come to prominence as one of the most important current global issues [Desta (1999)]. Increase in population density in ecologically fragile areas and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources at high rates is seen as one of the leading causes of this deterioration [Grigg (1991)]. At present, in some of the developing countries, the pollution of air, water and soil has reached life-threatening levels [Gilbert (1991)]. In many of these countries population pressures, socio-political conditions and economic arrangements have resulted in massive natural resource depletion [Ahmed and Mallick (1999)]. In a developing country, poverty is the major factor that distorts the population transition in response to food supply [Aziz (2001)]. Pethe (1982) suggested that the best way to reduce poverty is to bring fundamental changes in society. The magnitude of this task can be seen readily, if we look at some of the basic dime...

Australia is highly dependent on its natural resources; therefore it needs to develop a national accounting system whereby the concept of natural resource asset depletion is incorporated into its national income accounts. The present study suggests that if the national income accounting system of the economy is deficient in highlighting the gap in estimated income and sustainable income, then such a system needs to be improved [Ahmed and Mallick (1997)]. In a previous analysis of the Australian economy [Mallick, Sinden, and Thampapillai (2000)], showed that reconciliation between the goals of sustainability and employment may be achieved by a real wage reduction of approximately 8-10 percent. The analysis was structured within the framework of a simple Keynesian model of income determination and a Cobb-Douglas production function.

A distributed heterogeneous computing (HC) system consists of diversely capable machines harnessed together to execute a set of tasks that vary in their computational requirements. Heuristics are needed to map (match and schedule) tasks onto machines in an HC system so as to optimize some figure of merit. This paper characterizes a simulated HC environment by using the expected execution times of the tasks that arrive in the system onto the different machines present in the system. This information is arranged in an "expected time to compute" (ETC) matrix as a model of the given HC system, where the entry(i, j) is the expected execution time of task i on machine j. This model is needed to simulate different HC environments to allow testing of relative performance of different mapping heuristics under different circumstances. In particular, the ETC model is used to express the heterogeneity among the runtimes of the tasks to be executed, and among the machines in the HC system. An existing range-based technique to generate ETC matrices is described. A coefficient-of-variation based technique to generate ETC matrices is proposed, and compared with the range-based technique. The coefficient-ofvariation-based ETC generation method provides a greater control over the spread of values (i.e., heterogeneity) in any given row or column of the ETC matrix than the rangebased method.

Cell phones are a pervasive new communication technology, especially among college students. This paper examines college studentsÕ cell phone usage from a behavioral and psychological perspective. Utilizing both qualitative (focus groups) and quantitative (survey) approaches, the study suggests these individuals use the devices for a variety of purposes: to help them feel safe, for financial benefits, to manage time efficiently, to keep in touch with friends and family members, et al. The degree to which the individuals are dependent on the cell phones and what they view as the negatives of their utilization are also examined. The findings suggest people have various feelings and attitudes toward cell phone usage. This study serves as a foundation on which future studies will be built.

Autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) are driverless material handling systems used for transportation of pallets and line side supply of materials to provide flexibility and agility in shop-floor logistics. Scheduling of shop-floor logistics in such systems is a challenging task due to their complex nature associated with the multiple part types and alternate material transfer routings. This paper presents a decision support system capable of supporting shop-floor decision-making activities during the event of manufacturing disruptions by automatically adjusting both AGV and machine schedules in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMSs). The proposed system uses discrete event simulation (DES) models enhanced by the Internet-of-Things (IoT) enabled digital integration and employs a nonlinear mixed integer programming Genetic Algorithm (GA) to find near-optimal production schedules prioritising the just-in-time (JIT) material delivery performance and energy efficiency of the material transp...

An automated flow assembly for a biosensor has been developed in this paper. In recent years there has been a growing interest in the field of in-vivo biosensors for continuous monitoring. For this continuous monitoring of biological interactions, a need for the development of auto-flow assembly arises. The automated flow assembly inherently coupled to a biosensor, forms a Flow Injection Analysis (FIA) system. The designed auto-flow assembly consists of three micro-fluidic solenoid valves actuated through a microcontroller AT89C51. A programmable turn-on time for each valve can be entered through a 4x3 keypad and its switching can be controlled by the microcontroller. In addition, a temperature-sensing unit for online monitoring of the buffer temperature at the biosensor has been interfaced to the microcontroller. The automated flow assembly offers the advantage of faster response. The work includes interfacing of the temperature sensor, keypad (for selecting the time), display unit (liquid crystal display) and solenoid valves to the microcontroller and development of the software for the same.

Clinical chemistry analyser is a high-performance microcontroller-based photometric biochemical analyser to measure various blood biochemical parameters such as blood glucose, urea, protein, bilirubin, and so forth, and also to measure and observe enzyme growth occurred ...

Anju Pathania1,#, PN Sharma1,∗ , OP Sharma1, RK Chahota2, Bilal Ahmad1 & P. Sharma1 1Molecular Plant Pathology Laboratory, Department of Plant Pathology, CSK HP Agricultural University, Palampur-176 062 (HP) India (# Research Associate, Plant Breeding); ...

Forty nine common bean lines comprising of exotic accessions and locally grown cultivars evaluated against Colletotrichum lindemuthianum exhibited differential resistance to its races in Himachal Pradesh, a north-western Himalayan state of India. Some exotic accessions like G 2333, Cornell 49242, PI 207262, Mexique 222, TO, Perry Marrow, Kaboon and Widusa were resistant to more than five Indian races, whereas two Indian accessions KRC-5 and Hans showed resistance to six and four races, respectively. However, nine accessions KRC-8, KR-40, KR-43, KR-81, KR-62-2, KR-90, KR-142, KR-148, and KR-216 were resistant to three races. Race specific resistance has been observed in different bean cultivars. Studies on inheritance of resistance in exotic accession G 2333 and Indian accession, KRC-5 showed that two independent dominant genes conferred resistance in G 2333 to race 3 and 515 and a single dominant gene controlled resistance in KRC-5 to race 775, indicating resistance from these sourc...

This document is the author's post-print version, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer-review process. Some differences between the published version and this version may remain and you are advised to consult the published version if you wish to cite from it.

In this research, the relationship between work-family conflicts of female doctors with turnover intentions is examined along with the moderating role of perceived organizational support and taking job stress as a mediator. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from 270 female doctors who were practicing in different tertiary care hospitals of Lahore. For analyzing the data, the researcher used IBM SPSS and PLS-SEM. Results of the study confirmed that a positive relationship exists between WFC and intention to quit jobs in female doctors. Results also revealed that POS acts as a moderator between WFC and quit intentions but rejected the hypothesis of stress as a mediator between work-family conflict and intentions to leave the profession in the case of female doctors of Lahore. The past studies on work-family conflict were mostly conducted on the scenario of western countries particularly in America but the present study gives an insight of the relationship between work-family conflict and turnover intention of female doctors in Pakistan.

In the current research, a mathematical model for the post-damage improvement of the carbonated blast furnace slag cement (BFSC) exposed to accelerated carbonation is constructed. The study is embedded within the framework of investigating the effect of using lightweight expanded clay aggregate, which is incorporated into the impregnation of the sodium mono-fluorophosphate (Na-MFP) solution. The model of the self-healing process is built under the assumption that the position of the carbonation front changes in time where the rate of diffusion of Na-MFP into the carbonated cement matrix and the reaction rates of the free phosphate and fluorophosphate with the components of the cement are comparable to the speed of the carbonation front under accelerated carbonation conditions. The model is based on an initial-boundary value problem for a system of partial differential equations which is solved using a Galerkin finite element method. The results obtained are discussed and generalized to a three-dimensional case.

Online shopping has progressed from having consumers passively browse through web pages of products to having them proactively engage in communication dialogs with product sellers via Live-Chat. Through Live-Chat, consumers can directly contact the sellers and inquire about their products of interest. This study extends the conceptual framework of motivation, opportunity, and ability (MOA) to understand the antecedents and consequences of Live-Chat usage in consumers' online shopping process. Our survey involving 222 online consumers validated the proposed conceptual model and confirmed most of our assumptions. For antecedents, we found that MOA factors generally influence the Live-Chat usage of consumers in their shopping process. Specifically, perceived information asymmetry, fears of seller opportunism and perceived personal expertise have strong positive effects on Live-Chat usage. For consequences, Live-Chat usage positively affects consumers' perceived interactivity, thereby reducing their uncertainty in transaction. Our findings contribute to the understanding of real-time communication technology in specific and digital service for e-commerce in general.

This document is the author's post-print version, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer-review process. Some differences between the published version and this version may remain and you are advised to consult the published version if you wish to cite from it.