Social Movements and HR: The Impact of #MeToo

[Excerpt] Considering the increased societal attention given to sexual harassment and assault, and the wide range of reactions to #MeToo, we wanted to know how companies are reacting, whether they are changing their policies and practices, and whether the societal movement is impacting company culture. The highlights of our study show opportunities in culture, leadership, policy and reporting formulation, and training practices. During our study, we also found innovative practices that could be replicated across companies. Lastly, we have included a self-assessment tool to measure progress in addressing sexual harassment and assault within an organizatio

How are Companies Modifying Benefits in Total Rewards Programs to Address the Varying Needs of their Employee Population?

[Excerpt] A strategic total rewards program can be used to attract, motivate, and retain employees and generate superior business results. However, while organizations spend an estimated 31.7% of total compensation on benefits, some 60% of firms report having low engagement. Therefore, there is pressure to invest strategically to drive the employee experience. With the increasing diversity of employee populations, as well as the demand for tailored, cafeteria-style benefits, many companies have discovered that a one-size-fits-all approach to rewards is inadequate. This summary will outline how innovative rewards address the needs of these populations

Socially Constrained Structural Learning for Groups Detection in Crowd

Modern crowd theories agree that collective behavior is the result of the underlying interactions among small groups of individuals. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm for detecting social groups in crowds by means of a Correlation Clustering procedure on people trajectories. The affinity between crowd members is learned through an online formulation of the Structural SVM framework and a set of specifically designed features characterizing both their physical and social identity, inspired by Proxemic theory, Granger causality, DTW and Heat-maps. To adhere to sociological observations, we introduce a loss function (G-MITRE) able to deal with the complexity of evaluating group detection performances. We show our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art results when relying on both ground truth trajectories and tracklets previously extracted by available detector/tracker systems

Learning to Divide and Conquer for Online Multi-Target Tracking

Online Multiple Target Tracking (MTT) is often addressed within the tracking-by-detection paradigm. Detections are previously extracted independently in each frame and then objects trajectories are built by maximizing specifically designed coherence functions. Nevertheless, ambiguities arise in presence of occlusions or detection errors. In this paper we claim that the ambiguities in tracking could be solved by a selective use of the features, by working with more reliable features if possible and exploiting a deeper representation of the target only if necessary. To this end, we propose an online divide and conquer tracker for static camera scenes, which partitions the assignment problem in local subproblems and solves them by selectively choosing and combining the best features. The complete framework is cast as a structural learning task that unifies these phases and learns tracker parameters from examples. Experiments on two different datasets highlights a significant improvement of tracking performances (MOTA +10%) over the state of the art

How is Human Capital Management Defined and Managed in Large Companies?

[Excerpt] The employer — employee relationship is in disarray: 59% of workers feel their company favors profits over people, 58% believe there are limited growth opportunities in their organization, and 69% would be more satisfied if their employer better utilized their skills and abilities. Thus, a company must consider how to reinvent people strategy to improve engagement. This summary will illustrate the value of strategic human capital management, outline how organizations have adopted a human capital mindset, and provide recommendations for the future workplace

What are the Predictors of a Successful People Manager?

[Excerpt] Managers, who account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement and are the reason for 75% of voluntary turnover, have significant fiscal impact. Therefore, an organization’s ability to identify, develop, and retain leaders is a critical competitive advantage. It is estimated that companies with capable leaders achieve, on average, 147% higher earnings per share than competitors, and, that negative employee-supervisor relationships cost some $360 billion per year in lost productivity. This summary will outline the characteristics of successful people managers, and will provide recommendations for identification processes that better predict performance

Video Registration in Egocentric Vision under Day and Night Illumination Changes

With the spread of wearable devices and head mounted cameras, a wide range of application requiring precise user localization is now possible. In this paper we propose to treat the problem of obtaining the user position with respect to a known environment as a video registration problem. Video registration, i.e. the task of aligning an input video sequence to a pre-built 3D model, relies on a matching process of local keypoints extracted on the query sequence to a 3D point cloud. The overall registration performance is strictly tied to the actual quality of this 2D-3D matching, and can degrade if environmental conditions such as steep changes in lighting like the ones between day and night occur. To effectively register an egocentric video sequence under these conditions, we propose to tackle the source of the problem: the matching process. To overcome the shortcomings of standard matching techniques, we introduce a novel embedding space that allows us to obtain robust matches by jointly taking into account local descriptors, their spatial arrangement and their temporal robustness. The proposal is evaluated using unconstrained egocentric video sequences both in terms of matching quality and resulting registration performance using different 3D models of historical landmarks. The results show that the proposed method can outperform state of the art registration algorithms, in particular when dealing with the challenges of night and day sequences

Measurement of pupil preference for titles and stories as determined by a survey of basal readers for intermediate grades

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

NOD2 and inflammation: current insights

The nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain (NOD) protein, NOD2, belonging to the intracellular NOD-like receptor family, detects conserved motifs in bacterial peptidoglycan and promotes their clearance through activation of a proinflammatory transcriptional program and other innate immune pathways, including autophagy and endoplasmic reticulum stress. An inactive form due to mutations or a constitutive high expression of NOD2 is associated with several inflammatory diseases, suggesting that balanced NOD2 signaling is critical for the maintenance of immune homeostasis. In this review, we discuss recent developments about the pathway and mechanisms of regulation of NOD2 and illustrate the principal functions of the gene, with particular emphasis on its central role in maintaining the equilibrium between intestinal microbiota and host immune responses to control inflammation. Furthermore, we survey recent studies illustrating the role of NOD2 in several inflammatory diseases, in particular, inflammatory bowel disease, of which it is the main susceptibility gene

Energetic Fermi/LAT GRB100414A: Energetic and Correlations

This study presents multi-wavelength observational results for energetic GRB100414A with GeV photons. The prompt spectral fitting using Suzaku/WAM data yielded spectral peak energies of E^src_peak of 1458.7 (+132.6, -106.6) keV and Eiso of 34.5(+2.0, -1.8) x 10^52 erg with z=1.368. The optical afterglow light curves between 3 and 7 days were effectively fitted according to a simple power law with a temporal index of alpha=-2.6 +/- 0.1. The joint light curve with earlier Swift/UVOT observations yields a temporal break at 2.3 +/- 0.2 days. This was the first \fermi/LAT detected event that demonstrated the clear temporal break in the optical afterglow. The jet opening angle derived from this temporal break was 5.8 degree, consistent with those of other well-observed long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The multi-wavelength analyses in this study showed that GRB100414A follows E^src_peak-Eiso and E^src_peak-E_gamma correlations. The late afterglow revealed a flatter evolution with significant excesses at 27.2 days. The most straightforward explanation for the excess is that GRB100414A was accompanied by a contemporaneous supernova. The model light curve based on other GRB-SN events is marginally consistent with that of the observed lightcurve.Comment: ApJL in press; 12 pages, 3 figures, 2 table