Diversity and Inclusion Experience of Trans Workers: The Missing Link of Trans-Friendly Environment in Organizations

The transgender community, one of the most marginalized communities, faces a range of discriminatory issues in workplaces and educational institutions. The study seeks to investigate the extent of organizational support ensured by the workplaces to create a transgender-friendly environment in Bangladesh. The paper opted for a mixed study and surveyed 47 trans workers using a questionnaire. The responses yielded quantitative data that was analyzed using SPSS. The qualitative data was collected through focus group discussions with seven respondents. The study findings showed that the discrimination and exclusion experience is negative for trans workers of Bangladeshi organizations and educational institutions. While most of the respondents felt primarily excluded in the formal setting, they feel that they have been intentionally left out when they meet their coworkers in informal or social gatherings. The outcomes of the discrimination involved forced termination and absenteeism on the ground of their non-binary gender identity. It was also found that many Bangladeshi organizations still do not want trans workers to represent them. To the best of researchers’ understanding, the past research on the transgender community’s diversity and inclusion experience in organizations is rarely covered from the developing country’s perspective. This paper attempts to fulfill the study gap. Recommendations for good practices to ensure diversity is proposed to companies. Creating a more inclusive workplace is expected to create a robust economic and social impact for developing countries like Bangladesh. Keywords: Bangladesh, Discrimination, Diversity, Inclusion, Trans workers, Trans-friendly environment, Organizations

Study of the Operation Process of the E-Commerce Oriented Ecosystem of 5Ge Base Station, Which Supports the Functioning of Independent Virtual Network Segments

According to specifications, flexible services for traffic management should be implemented within the 5G platform in order to improve its efficiency, which is and will remain an actual task. For the first time, the article presented here proposes a mathematical model for the operation process of an e-commerce-oriented ecosystem of a 5Ge base station, the information environment of which supports the operation of independent virtual network segments that provide terminal–segment information interaction services. In contrast to existing models, the presented model describes the studied process as a multi-pipeline queuing system, the inputs of which are coordinated with the flows of requests for communication with the relevant virtual network segments. The distribution of the total resources between the weighted virtual network segments in the simulated system is dynamically conducted by the appropriate software control mechanism. It considers the address intensities of new incoming requests and the maintenance of received incoming requests, but throughout the scale of the information environment of the 5Ge base station ecosystem. Based on the created mathematical model, a functional algorithm for the forced termination of an active terminal–segment information interaction session in the overloaded virtual network segment and the control mechanism of the distribution of the released system resources between other virtual network segments that takes into account the degree of their overload are formulated. The simulation and computational experiments showed that the implemented forced termination algorithm and system resource management mechanism allow the 5Ge base station to continue receiving incoming requests despite the overload of individual virtual network segments. It is empirically shown that the proposed services are effectively scaled concerning the value that is generally available for the distribution of the number of system resources and the allocation method within the guaranteed amounts of system resources for individual virtual network segments.

The Effect of Mandatory Play Breaks on Subsequent Gambling Behavior Among Norwegian Online Sports Betting, Slots and Bingo Players: A Large-scale Real World Study

In order to protect gamblers, gambling operators have introduced a wide range of responsible gambling (RG) tools. Mandatory play breaks (i.e., forced termination of a gambling session) and personalized feedback about the gambling expenditure are two RG tools that are frequently used. While the motivation behind mandatory play breaks is simple (i.e., gambling operators expect gamblers to reduce their gambling significantly as a result of an enforced break in play), empirical evidence supporting the efficacy of the mandatory breaks is still limited. The present study comprised a real-world experiment with the clientele of Norwegian gambling operator Norsk Tipping. On the Norsk Tipping gambling website, which offers slots, bingo and sports-betting, forced termination occurs if gamblers have played continuously for a one-hour period. The study tested the effect of different lengths of mandatory play breaks (90 s, 5 min, 15 min) on subsequent gambling behavior, as well as the effect of combined personalized feedback concerning money wagered, won, and net win/loss. In total 21,129 online players (61% male; mean age = 47.4 years) experienced at least one play break between April 17 and May 21 (2020) with 156,989 mandatory play breaks in total. Results indicated that a 15-min mandatory play break led to a disproportionately longer voluntary play pause compared to 5-min and 90-s mandatory play breaks. Personalized feedback appeared to have no additional effect on subsequent gambling and none of the mandatory play breaks appeared to affect the increase or decrease in money wagered once players started to gamble again.

Forced Termination of the Right to a Land not Used for Purpose or Used in Violation of the Law: Enforcement Issues

The article provides an analysis of the legal rules governing the application of sanctions for violation of land laws. Particular attention is paid to the type of sanctions, such as the seizure of land used in violation of the law and unused in accordance with their purpose. The author examines the existing theoretical positions on the legal nature of these sanctions, examines law enforcement practice. The article provides a critical analysis of the positions of the judiciary in terms of the qualification of land offences as the basis for the application of these sanctions. As a result of the theoretical study of the issue, the author concludes that the sanctions are recognized as liability measures, the industry of which needs to be legislated.

Dynamic Flow-Adaptive Spectrum Leasing with Channel Aggregation in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs), which allow secondary users (SUs) to dynamically access a network without affecting the primary users (PUs), have been widely regarded as an effective approach to mitigate the shortage of spectrum resources and the inefficiency of spectrum utilization. However, the SUs suffer from frequent spectrum handoffs and transmission limitations. In this paper, considering the quality of service (QoS) requirements of PUs and SUs, we propose a novel dynamic flow-adaptive spectrum leasing with channel aggregation. Specifically, we design an adaptive leasing algorithm, which adaptively adjusts the portion of leased channels based on the number of ongoing and buffered PU flows. Furthermore, in the leased spectrum band, the SU flows with access priority employ dynamic spectrum access of channel aggregation, which enables one flow to occupy multiple channels for transmission in a dynamically changing environment. For performance evaluation, the continuous time Markov chain (CTMC) is developed to model our proposed strategy and conduct theoretical analyses. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed strategy effectively improves the spectrum utilization and network capacity, while significantly reducing the forced termination probability and blocking probability of SU flows.

Performance Sensitivity to the High-Order Statistics of Time Interval Variables in Cellular Networks

Cell dwell time (DT) and unencumbered interruption time (IT) are fundamental time interval variables in the teletraffic analysis for the performance evaluation of mobile cellular networks. Although a diverse set of general distributions has been proposed to model these time interval variables, the effect of their moments higher than the expected value on system performance has not been reported in the literature. In this paper, sensitivity of teletraffic performance metrics of mobile cellular networks to the first three standardized moments of both DT and IT is investigated in a comprehensive manner. Mathematical analysis is developed considering that both DT and IT are phase-type distributed random variables. This work includes substantial numerical results for quantifying the dependence of system level performance metrics to the values of the first three standardized moments of both DT and IT. For instance, for a high mobility scenario where DT is modeled by a hyper-Erlang distribution, we found that call forced termination probability decreases around 60% as the coefficient of variation (CoV) and skewness of DT simultaneously change from 1 to 20 and from 60 to 2, respectively. Also, numerical results confirm that as link unreliability increases the forced termination probability increases while both new call blocking and handoff failure probabilities decrease. Numerical results also indicate that for low values of skewness, performance metrics are highly sensitive to changes in the CoV of either the IT or DT. In general, it is observed that system performance is more sensitive to the statistics of the IT than to those of the DT. Such understanding of teletraffic engineering issues is vital for planning, designing, dimensioning, and optimizing mobile cellular networks.