How ECA vs Human Leaders Affect the Perception of Transactive Memory System (TMS) in a Team

Transactive Memory System (TMS) is a mental representation of the distribution of knowledge between the members of a team. Can an Embodied Conversational Agent perform as well as a Human when intervening as a leader to support the development of the team's TMS? And, if yes, are there differences in the way the team perceives their respective interventions? In this paper, a perceptive online study is conducted on how Human leader interventions affect the perception of a team's TMS. The results are compared to the ones from a previous study evaluating an Embodied Conversational agent leader rather than a human one. Both the agent and the human adopt nonverbal behaviors characterizing 2 leadership styles: Transformational (TFL) and Transactional (TAL). TFL is expected to stimulate team members curiosity and creativity in problem-solving; instead, TAL emphasizes the role of the leader in supervising the team, providing it with feedback when needed. The results show that the intervention from both the agent and the human are perceived to potentially improve the perceived TMS of a team. Another interesting insight is that the TFL style works better when performed by the Human, where both the TAL and TFL style perform well when realized by the agent

Allochthonous bioaugmentation in ex situ treatment of crude oil-polluted sediments in the presence of an effective degrading indigenous microbiome

Oil-polluted sediment bioremediation depends on both physicochemical and biological parameters, but the effect of the latter cannot be evaluated without the optimization of the former. We aimed in optimizing the physicochemical parameters related to biodegradation by applying an ex-situ landfarming set-up combined with biostimulation to oil-polluted sediment, in order to determine the added effect of bioaugmentation by four allochthonous oil-degrading bacterial consortia in relation to the degradation efficiency of the indigenous community. We monitored hydrocarbon degradation, sediment ecotoxicity and hydrolytic activity, bacterial population sizes and bacterial community dynamics, characterizing the dominant taxa through time and at each treatment. We observed no significant differences in total degradation, but increased ecotoxicity between the different treatments receiving both biostimulation and bioaugmentation and the biostimulated-only control. Moreover, the added allochthonous bacteria quickly perished and were rarely detected, their addition inducing minimal shifts in community structure although it altered the distribution of the residual hydrocarbons in two treatments. Therefore, we concluded that biodegradation was mostly performed by the autochthonous populations while bioaugmentation, in contrast to biostimulation, did not enhance the remediation process. Our results indicate that when environmental conditions are optimized, the indigenous microbiome at a polluted site will likely outperform any allochthonous consortium

Surgeons’ practice and preferences for the anal fissure treatment: results from an international survey

The best nonoperative or operative anal fissure (AF) treatment is not yet established, and several options have been proposed. Aim is to report the surgeons’ practice for the AF treatment. Thirty-four multiple-choice questions were developed. Seven questions were about to participants’ demographics and, 27 questions about their clinical practice. Based on the specialty (general surgeon and colorectal surgeon), obtained data were divided and compared between two groups. Five-hundred surgeons were included (321 general and 179 colorectal surgeons). For both groups, duration of symptoms for at least 6 weeks is the most important factor for AF diagnosis (30.6%). Type of AF (acute vs chronic) is the most important factor which guide the therapeutic plan (44.4%). The first treatment of choice for acute AF is ointment application for both groups (59.6%). For the treatment of chronic AF, this data is confirmed by colorectal surgeons (57%), but not by the general surgeons who prefer the lateral internal sphincterotomy (LIS) (31.8%) (p = 0.0001). Botulin toxin injection is most performed by colorectal surgeons (58.7%) in comparison to general surgeons (20.9%) (p = 0.0001). Anal flap is mostly performed by colorectal surgeons (37.4%) in comparison to general surgeons (28.3%) (p = 0.0001). Fissurectomy alone is statistically significantly most performed by general surgeons in comparison to colorectal surgeons (57.9% and 43.6%, respectively) (p = 0.0020). This analysis provides useful information about the clinical practice for the management of a debated topic such as AF treatment. Shared guidelines and consensus especially focused on operative management are required to standardize the treatment and to improve postoperative results