What are Best Practices to Measure Employee Performance to Support Hiring Promotion With No Ratings?

[Excerpt] In the last decade, many large Fortune 200 companies began eliminating their annual performance reviews, citing multiple reasons such as being unfair, subjective, demotivating, and that reviews did little to improve the performance of employees. Additionally, managers often did not give honest or constructive feedback, viewing annual reviews as too time consuming and untimely in reporting feedback. As a result, many companies feel data is missing to make important personnel decisions. In order to make successful personnel decisions a company must continue to provide some sort of feedback in the absence of an annual review

Generalized Continuous and Discrete Stick Fragmentation and Benford's Law

Inspired by the basic stick fragmentation model proposed by Becker et al. in arXiv:1309.5603v4, we consider three new versions of such fragmentation models, namely, continuous with random number of parts, continuous with probabilistic stopping, and discrete with congruence stopping conditions. In all of these situations, we state and prove precise conditions for the ending stick lengths to obey Benford's law when taking the appropriate limits. We introduce the aggregated limit, necessary to guarantee convergence to Benford's law in the latter two models. We also show that resulting stick lengths are non-Benford when our conditions are not met. Moreover, we give a sufficient condition for a distribution to satisfy the Mellin transform condition introduced in arXiv:0805.4226v2, yielding a large family of examples.Comment: 43 pages, 2 figure

First Profunda Artery Perforator Flap for Breast Reconstruction Performed at a VA Hospital

The profunda artery perforator (PAP) flap for breast reconstruction originated by Dr. Robert J. Allen in 2010 after multiple failed attempts at using muscle-sparing transverse rectus abdominal muscle (MS-TRAM) flap and implants. This flap method was initially approached due to the patient’s request for an autologous tissue graft that did not sacrifice muscle. The PAP flap has grown significantly in popularity and usage in breast reconstruction and makes up to about 16% of autologous breast reconstruction, coming second to DIEP flaps (76%). This well-tolerated, muscle-sparing approach is ideal for patients without sufficient abdominal fat (low BMI or previous abdominal liposuction) or those who prefer a non-abdominal donor site. In addition to its gained popularity for breast reconstruction, the PAP flap has also been utilized in defects reconstruction over the entire body such as the head and neck, lower extremities, vulva, and tongue. This is a sophisticated procedure and has never been performed at a VA hospital before this case

Assessing the Role of Selenium in Endometrial Cancer Risk: A Mendelian Randomization Study.

Endometrial cancer is the most commonly diagnosed gynecological cancer in developed countries. Based on evidence from observational studies which suggest selenium inhibits the development of several cancers (including lung and prostate cancer), selenium supplementation has been touted as a potential cancer preventative agent. However, randomized controlled trials have not reported benefit for selenium supplementation in reducing cancer risk. For endometrial cancer, limited observational studies have been conducted assessing whether selenium intake, or blood selenium levels, associated with reduced risk, and no randomized controlled trials have been conducted. We performed a two-sample Mendelian randomization analysis to examine the relationship between selenium levels (using a composite measure of blood and toenail selenium) and endometrial cancer risk, using summary statistics for four genetic variants associated with selenium levels at genome-wide significance levels (P < 5 × 10-8), from a study of 12,906 endometrial cancer cases and 108,979 controls, all of European ancestry. Inverse variance weighted (IVW) analysis indicated no evidence of a causal role for selenium levels in endometrial cancer development (OR per unit increase in selenium levels Z-score = 0.99, 95% CI = 0.87-1.14). Similar results were observed for sensitivity analyses robust to the presence of unknown pleiotropy (OR per unit increase in selenium levels Z-score = 0.98, 95% CI 0.89-1.08 for weighted median; OR per unit increase in selenium levels Z-score = 0.90, 95% CI = 0.53-1.50 for MR-Egger). In conclusion, these results do not support the use of selenium supplementation to prevent endometrial cancer.This work was supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Project Grant (APP1109286). PFK is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program PhD Scholarship and QIMR Berghofer Postgraduate Top-Up Scholarship, TAO’M is supported by an NHMRC Early Career Fellowship (APP1111246), ABS is supported by an NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship (APP1061779)

Genome-Wide Association Studies of Endometrial Cancer: Latest Developments and Future Directions.

Endometrial cancer, the most commonly diagnosed cancer of the female reproductive tract in developed countries, has a heritable component. To date, 16 genetic risk regions have been robustly discovered by genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of endometrial cancer. Post-GWAS analyses including expression quantitative trait loci analysis and laboratory-based functional studies have been successful in identifying genes and pathways involved in endometrial carcinogenesis. Mendelian randomization analysis studies have confirmed factors causal for endometrial cancer risk, including increased body mass index and early onset of menarche. In this review, we summarize findings from GWAS and post-GWAS analyses of endometrial cancer. We discuss clinical implications of these findings, current knowledge gaps, and future directions for the study of endometrial cancer genetics.TAO’M is supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Early Career Fellowship (APP1111246), PFK is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program PhD Scholarship and QIMR Berghofer Postgraduate Top-Up Scholarship, ABS is supported by an NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship (APP1061779)

The functional interactome landscape of the human histone deacetylase family

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102187/1/msb201326-sup-0001.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102187/2/msb201326.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102187/3/msb201326.reviewer_comments.pd

Childhood injury after a parental cancer diagnosis

A parental cancer diagnosis is psychologically straining for the whole family. We investigated whether a parental cancer diagnosis is associated with a higher-than-expected risk of injury among children by using a Swedish nationwide register-based cohort study. Compared to children without parental cancer, children with parental cancer had a higher rate of hospital contact for injury during the first year after parental cancer diagnosis (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.27, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.22-1.33), especially when the parent had a comorbid psychiatric disorder after cancer diagnosis (HR = 1.41, 95% CI = 1.08-1.85). The rate increment declined during the second and third year after parental cancer diagnosis (HR = 1.10, 95% CI = 1.07-1.14) and became null afterwards (HR = 1.01, 95% CI = 0.99-1.03). Children with parental cancer also had a higher rate of repeated injuries than the other children (HR = 1.13, 95% CI = 1.12-1.15). Given the high rate of injury among children in the general population, our findings may have important public health implications

The association between diabetes-related distress and fear of hypoglycaemia in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus: A cross-sectional descriptive study

Aim: The study aimed to explore the association between diabetes-related distress as a dependent variable and fear of hypoglycaemia as a independent variable in Chinese individuals with type 2 diabetes, which can provide a basis for the development of effective nursing interventions. Design: A cross-sectional descriptive study. Methods: Pre-piloted scales were used to determine whether they experienced fear of hypoglycaemia and whether this impacted upon their management of the disease. From June–October 2019, participants were asked to complete the “hypoglycaemia fear survey” and “diabetes distress scales” to assess levels of fear and distress. Stepwise multivariate regression analysis was applied to reveal relationship between distress as a dependent variable and fear as a independent variable. Covariates included demographic, clinical or lifestyle factors. Results: A total of 258 participants were recruited for the survey, and they were characterized by little or no distress (39.53%), moderate distress (45.35%) and high distress (15.12%). The prevalence of moderate to severe distress in patients was 60.47%. Increased diabetes-related distress was strongly correlated with increased fear of hypoglycaemia and closely associated with the scores of the worry and behaviour subscales. These results indicated that 62.3% of diabetes-related distress may be explained by fear of hypoglycaemia. Conclusion: Increased diabetes-related distress is associated with increased fear of hypoglycaemia in individuals with type 2 diabetes

Phenformin has anti-tumorigenic effects in human ovarian cancer cells and in an orthotopic mouse model of serous ovarian cancer

Obesity and diabetes have been associated with increased risk and worse outcomes in ovarian cancer (OC). The biguanide metformin is used in the treatment of type 2 diabetes and is also believed to have anti-tumorigenic benefits. Metformin is highly hydrophilic and requires organic cation transporters (OCTs) for entry into human cells. Phenformin, another biguanide, was taken off the market due to an increased risk of lactic acidosis over metformin. However, phenformin is not reliant on transporters for cell entry; and thus, may have increased potency as both an anti-diabetic and anti-tumorigenic agent than metformin. Thus, our goal was to evaluate the effect of phenformin on established OC cell lines, primary cultures of human OC cells and in an orthotopic mouse model of high grade serous OC. In three OC cell lines, phenformin significantly inhibited cellular proliferation, induced cell cycle G1 arrest and apoptosis, caused cellular stress, inhibited adhesion and invasion, and activation of AMPK and inhibition of the mTOR pathway. Phenformin also exerted anti-proliferative effects in seven primary cell cultures of human OC. Lastly, phenformin inhibited tumor growth in an orthotopic mouse model of serous OC, coincident with decreased Ki-67 staining and phosphorylated-S6 expression and increased expression of caspase 3 and phosphorylated-AMPK. Our findings demonstrate that phenformin has anti-tumorigenic effects in OC as previously demonstrated by metformin but it is yet to be determined if it is superior to metformin for the potential treatment of this disease