Personality and Attitudes of Indian Young Female Workforce: Entrepreneurial Orientation by Education and Regions

This investigation analyzes the impact of region and educational background on entrepreneurial orientation of Indian young female trainees by using four personality descriptors i.e. need for achievement, innovation, personal control, and self-esteem around three attitude components i.e. affect, behavior, and cognition. The findings reflect the highest score of the respondents on the achievement motivation as compared to the other three personality descriptors (innovation, personal control, and self-esteem) and lowest score on the self-esteem dimension. Among attitude components, cognition has emerged as highest. Entrepreneurial orientation score of the sample as a whole is moderately high and female trainees from South India are having an edge over their counterparts from North India. Significant differences are not found between females of different educational backgrounds.entrepreneurial orientation, achievement, attitude, female, self-esteem

HRM Practices in Insurance Companies: A Study of Indian and Multinational Companies

Competitive advantage of a company can be generated from human resources (HR) and company performance is influenced by a set of effective HRM practices. In this study, we intended to assess the HR practices in insurance companies. Primary data based on 218 respondents from four insurance companies (two multinational-7 branches and two Indian-7 branches) were analyzed to assess HR practices being practiced by insurance companies in India. Six factors from factor analysis were further analyzed. ‘Training and benefits’ was found highly in practice in the insurance companies. Further, ‘performance appraisal,’ ‘selection and socialization of employees,’ and ‘HR planning and recruitment’ were moderately practised in insurance companies. ‘Workforce diversity and contemporary HR practices’ and ‘competitive compensation’ were also practised to some extent. ANOVA results showed that Indian companies did not practise workforce diversity. Compensation practices were found more competitive or performance based in Multinational insurance companies than in Indian ones. The gender effect showed that only competitive compensation was perceived significantly differently by male and female employees/executives. Interactive effects were significant on workforce diversity and contemporary issues, training and benefits, and selection and socialization of employees.competitive compensation, multinational companies, performance appraisal, selection and socialization, training and benefits, workforce diversity

The Power of Interfacing Departments in Shaping B2B Customer Satisfaction

Extant research identifies service quality and service encounter perceptions as the key determinants of satisfaction. However, no study in a business-to-business environment has examined the simultaneous effect of these two determinants on overall satisfaction. Hence, we do not know which of these two determinants has a stronger impact on service satisfaction. We investigated this issue by collecting data from shipping managers of several firms in Singapore that used the services of ocean freight shipping companies. Results of path analysis indicate that perceptions of service encounters have a relatively stronger impact compared to service quality. Implications of these results are discussed

Adapting the Interrelated Two-way Clustering method for Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) Modeling of a Diverse Set of Chemical Compounds

Interrelated Two-way Clustering (ITC) is an unsupervised clustering method developed to divide samples into two groups in gene expression data obtained through microarrays, selecting important genes simultaneously in the process. This has been found to be a better approach than conventional clustering methods like K-means or self-organizing map for the scenarios when number of samples much smaller than number of variables (n<<p). In this paper we used the ITC approach for classification of a diverse set of 508 chemicals regarding mutagenicity. A large number of topological indices (TIs), 3-dimensional, and quantum chemical descriptors, as well as atom pairs (APs) have been used as explanatory variables. In this paper, ITC has been used only for predictor selection, after which ridge regression is employed to build the final predictive model. The proper leave-one-out (LOO) method of cross-validation in this scenario is to take as holdout each of the 508 compounds before predictor thinning and compare the predicted values with the experimental data. ITC based results obtained here are comparable to those developed earlier

The Development of Polyamines throughout Brassica rapa over its Lifecycle

Polyamines are naturally produced chemicals in plants involved in growth, development and stress response. The primary objective of my study is to create a profile of changes in the entire life of the plant, in every organ at all stages of development from seed germination to seed formation. We have analyzed polyamines putrescine, spermidine and spermine in all parts of Brassica rapa, a small, rapid growing plant. Parallel to the polyamines, we will also study changes in the activities of the polyamine biosynthetic enzymes and the expression of their genes in different organs at different times. In the next stage of the study, the expression of selected genes will be inhibited by RNAi constructs, allowing further analysis of their role in growth and stress response. Because polyamines play are important in development and lifecycle of plants, altering their presence may be useful in altering plant growth patterns, such as in seasonal crops

Statistical theory of spectra: Statistical moments as descriptors in the theory of molecular similarity

Statistical moments of the intensity distributions are used as molecular descriptors. They are used as a basis for defining similarity distances between two model spectra. Parameters which carry the information derived from the comparison of shapes of the spectra and are related to the number of properties taken into account, are defined.Comment: Poster presented at the 3rd NEXT-Sigma-Phi Conference, Crete, Aug.2005, revtex, 13 pages including 6 figure

On stochastic comparisons of largest order statistics in the scale model

Let $X_{\lambda _{1}},X_{\lambda _{2}},\ldots ,X_{\lambda _{n}}$ be independent nonnegative random variables with $X_{\lambda _{i}}\sim F(\lambda _{i}t)$, $i=1,\ldots ,n$, where $\lambda _{i}>0$, $i=1,\ldots ,n$ and $F$ is an absolutely continuous distribution. It is shown that, under some conditions, one largest order statistic $X_{n:n}^{\lambda }$ is smaller than another one $X_{n:n}^{\theta }$ according to likelihood ratio ordering. Furthermore, we apply these results when $F$ is a generalized gamma distribution which includes Weibull, gamma and exponential random variables as special cases

Stochastic order relations among parallel systems from Weibull distributions

In this article, we focus on stochastic orders to compare the magnitudes of two parallel systems from Weibull distributions when one set of scale parameters majorizes the other. The new results obtained here extend some of those proved by Dykstra et al. (1997) and Joo and Mi (2010) from exponential to Weibull distributions. Also, we present some results for parallel systems from multiple-outlier Weibull models.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures. Journal of Applied Probability (2015

Moving Observers in an Isotropic Universe

We show how the anisotropy resulting from the motion of an observer in an isotropic universe may be determined by measurements. This provides a means to identify inertial frames, yielding a simple resolution to the twins paradox of relativity theory. We propose that isotropy is a requirement for a frame to be inertial; this makes it possible to relate motion to the large scale structure of the universe.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, with minor typographical correctio