Unhealthy leadership behavior and employee retention that rocks academic excellence in higher education from a critical realist approach

Unhealthy leadership behavior also known as Toxic leader’s theory. It affects employee base and create environments to be less effective due to stress, devaluation, and potential job loss. And today, this challenge has also rocked academic excellence in higher education. This paper took a giant step to investigate unhealthy leadership behavior and employee retention that affects academic excellence and suggested a coping strategy by adopting a critical realist approach. This approach is used and adopted to understand the significant relationship between unhealthy leadership behavior, employee retention, and academic excellence. The study is centered on 48 head of units of universities both public and privately owned. The findings reveal that lack of job satisfaction and organizational commitment are rampant among higher educators due to unhealthy leadership behavior of which leads to implications on job satisfaction, job retention, and organizational commitment which are key components of organizational productivities.

Hemocompatible Electrochemical Sensors for Continuous Monitoring of Blood Parameters

The real-time monitoring of physiological parameters is essential for point-of-care testing. While nowadays routine tests are done through ex vivo analysis on frequently extracted blood, placing implantable sensors monitoring key blood parameters such as lactate, glucose, ions, and oxygen would mean a giant step forward in the care of critically ill patients, improving the response time in emergencies and diminishing the invasiveness of the measurements. The recent advances in microelectronics and nanotechnology are a promising technology enabling moving in that direction. The goal of our work is to develop arrays of electrochemical sensors with selective and hemocompatible coatings, allowing for the future implementation of such measurements in patients. We perform the analysis of blood parameters in a label-free and electrochemical manner which is compatible with the inevitable miniaturization in a real application. The tuneable composition of the layer will allow to pursue further applications in the future by modification of the receptor molecules and their concentrations.

A walk through the history of the Spanish thought influenced by Uexküll

Jakob Johannes von Uexküll’s biological thought influenced a new path to approach the view of a living being throughout of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the past century, in Spain a “new vertebrate way of thinking” was generated, as Ortega would say. And the work of Uexküll initiated an interest in the circles of thinkers of the likes of Julio Caro Baroja, José Ortega y Gasset, and Xavier Zubiri among others. My aim is describing how Uexküll plays a part in the development in the foundations of thoughts of these thinkers; in particular, Ortega and Zubiri’s thought and their interactions between the circumstantiality and formality, respectively, and Uexküll’s Umwelt. In fact, Ortega’s biological thought was the foundation of his vitalism realism and made a giant step in philosophical anthropology existentialism in his Meditations of Quixote in 1911. We will also see the anthropologist Caro Baroja’s epistemic Uexküll influences. A retrospective view of Spanish thought will be developed, where the seeds of Uexküll made fruitful the development of several authors, as well as some transitive or indirect influences; even the generation of discrepancies in others. Finally, we will describe the development, in Spanish, that had the work of Thure von Uexküll, which includes the work of his father. With Thure, the Uexküll influences in Spain concluded until the start of interest in zoosemiotics and biosemiotics.