Dialogue-based evaluation as a creative climate indicator

This paper examines how different forms of performance evaluation relate to aspects of the creative climate in a major pharmaceutical company. The study was based on a large employee-attitude survey that was distributed to all company employees. The study analyses survey results from 5,333 employees at five R&D sites. The results indicate that management’s evaluation of employees (either dialogue-based or control-based) relates to the type of motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic) that drives employees, to their style of thinking (value-focused thinking) and on their attitudes to organizational creativity. The paper then discusses implications of these findings for HRM

Does corporate social responsibility pay?

This literature review summarises the main strands of the debate around whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) has any impact on corporate financial performance (CFP). This subject area has been the source of academic and business debate for more than 40 years, especially since the level of CSR engagement of an organisation (whether profit-making or not) has been linked to benefits to its reputation and relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, government and its wider community

The European Institute for Innovation through Health Data

The European Institute for Innovation through Health Data (i~HD, www.i-hd.eu) has been formed as one of the key sustainable entities arising from the Electronic Health Records for Clinical Research (IMI-JU-115189) and SemanticHealthNet (FP7-288408) projects, in collaboration with several other European projects and initiatives supported by the European Commission. i~HD is a European not-for-profit body, registered in Belgium through Royal Assent. i~HD has been established to tackle areas of challenge in the successful scaling up of innovations that critically rely on high-quality and interoperable health data. It will specifically address obstacles and opportunities to using health data by collating, developing, and promoting best practices in information governance and in semantic interoperability. It will help to sustain and propagate the results of health information and communication technology (ICT) research that enables better use of health data, assessing and optimizing their novel value wherever possible. i~HD has been formed after wide consultation and engagement of many stakeholders to develop methods, solutions, and services that can help to maximize the value obtained by all stakeholders from health data. It will support innovations in health maintenance, health care delivery, and knowledge discovery while ensuring compliance with all legal prerequisites, especially regarding the insurance of patient's privacy protection. It is bringing multiple stakeholder groups together so as to ensure that future solutions serve their collective needs and can be readily adopted affordably and at scale

Ring-Enhancing Lesions in the Brain: A Diagnostic Dilemma

How to Cite This Article: Shetty G, Avabratha K.S, Rai B.S. Ring-Enhancing Lesions in the Brain: A Diagnostic Dilemma. Iran J Child Neurol. 2014 Summer;8(3): 61-64.AbstractThe most common radiological abnormality seen in young Indian patients with epilepsy is single small enhancing (ring/disc) computed tomographic (CT) lesions. The two most common differential diagnosis of this lesion in clinical practice include neurocysticercosis (NCC) and tuberculomas. They have similar clinical and neuroimaging features. Few researchers believe that in poor and developing countries (where both tuberculosis and NCC are common) that it is difficult to differentiate between tuberculomas and a single cysticercal granulomas.We report a case of a 6-year-old female patient who presented with complex partial seizures. The patient’s neuroimaging showed a single ring-enhancing lesion in the brain that was not differentiated between NCC and Tuberculoma.Finally, Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) was suggestive of tuberculoma that was successfully treated with antituberculosis therapy.This report highlights diagnostic difficulties with conventional investigations in single ring enhancing lesions in the brain and role of MRS in a diagnosis. MRS is helpful in differentiating these two conditions. ReferencesSeth R, Kalra V, Sharma U, Jagannathan N. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy in ring enhancing lesions. Indian pediatrics. 2010;47(9):803-4. Epub 2010/11/05.Rudresh K MKM, Karthik, Sebastin J. Clinical and Aetiological Profile of Ring-enhancing Lesions on CT Brain. Journal of Indian Academy of Clinical Medicine. 2008;9(2):100-2.RK G. Single enhancing computerized tomography– detected lesion in immunocompetent patients. Neurosurg Focus 2002;12(6):1-9.Singhi P RM. Focal seizure with single small ring enhancing lesion Seminars in Pediatric Neurology. 1999;6(3):196-201.Sethi PP, Wadia RS, Kiyawat DP, Ichaporia NR, Kothari SS, Sangle SA, et al. Ring or disc enhancing lesions in epilepsy in India. The Journal of tropical medicine and hygiene. 1994;97(6):347-53. Epub 1994/12/01.Jain AP JR, Lathia T. Single Small Enhancing Computed Tomography Lesion: A Review. Journal of Indian Academy of Clinical Medicine. 2005;6(2):114-21.Gujar SK, Maheshwari S, Bjorkman-Burtscher I, Sundgren PC. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy. J Neuroophthalmol. 2005;25(3):217-26. Epub 2005/09/09.Pretell EJ MCJ, Garcia HH, Alvarado M, Bustos JA, Martinot C. Differential diagnosis between cerebral tuberculosis and neurocysticercosis by magnetic resonance spectroscopy. J Comput Assist Tomogr. 2005;29:112-4.Santy K, Nan P, Chantana Y, Laurent D, Nadal D, Richner B. The diagnosis of brain tuberculoma by (1)H-magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Eur J Pediatr. 2011;170(3):379-87. Epub 2011/02/09.Gutch M, Jain N, Agrawal A, Modi A. MR spectroscopy in tuberculoma of brain. BMJ Case Rep. 2012;2012. Epub 2012/05/19

Developing modular product family using GeMoCURE within an SME

Companies adopt the strategy of producing variety of products to be competitive and responsive to market. Product variation is becoming an important factor in companies' ability to accurately meet customer requirements. Ever increasing consumer options mean that customers have more choices than ever before which put commercial pressures on companies to continue to diversify. This can be a particular problem within Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) who do not always have the level of resources to meet these requirements. As such, methods are required that provide means for companies to be able to produce a wide range of products at the lowest cost and shortest time. This paper details a new modular product design methodology that provides a focus on developing modular product families. The methodology's function is described and a case study detailed of how it was used within an SME to define the company's product portfolio and create a new Generic Product Function Structure from which a new family of product variants can be developed. The methodology lends itself to modular re-use which has the potential to support rapid development and configuration of product variants

Sympathy Begins with a Smile, Intelligence Begins with a Word: Use of Multimodal Features in Spoken Human-Robot Interaction

Recognition of social signals, from human facial expressions or prosody of speech, is a popular research topic in human-robot interaction studies. There is also a long line of research in the spoken dialogue community that investigates user satisfaction in relation to dialogue characteristics. However, very little research relates a combination of multimodal social signals and language features detected during spoken face-to-face human-robot interaction to the resulting user perception of a robot. In this paper we show how different emotional facial expressions of human users, in combination with prosodic characteristics of human speech and features of human-robot dialogue, correlate with users' impressions of the robot after a conversation. We find that happiness in the user's recognised facial expression strongly correlates with likeability of a robot, while dialogue-related features (such as number of human turns or number of sentences per robot utterance) correlate with perceiving a robot as intelligent. In addition, we show that facial expression, emotional features, and prosody are better predictors of human ratings related to perceived robot likeability and anthropomorphism, while linguistic and non-linguistic features more often predict perceived robot intelligence and interpretability. As such, these characteristics may in future be used as an online reward signal for in-situ Reinforcement Learning based adaptive human-robot dialogue systems.Comment: Robo-NLP workshop at ACL 2017. 9 pages, 5 figures, 6 table

Are Board Size And Ownership Structure Beneficial In Emerging Markets’ Firms? Evidence From Jordan

The present study aims to investigate the effect of board size and managerial ownership on firm performance in Jordan, based on agency. The current study examined cross sectional data to test all hypotheses through using statistical software, SPSS 20, to analyze data on a sample of 60 firms (service firms) in Jordan as one of emerging markets in Asia. Multiple regression analysis instruments were used to test the hypothesis regarding the effect of board size and managerial ownership on firm performance with the effect of firm size as a control variable. The data used in the current study is obtained from the annual reports issued by Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) for the year 2014. Accounting data is used in the current study for the purpose of measuring the performances represented by ROA and ROE. I find that measures of board size statistically affect ROA and ROE. Board size affects ROA and ROE positively while firm size has no effect on firm performance. Unfortunately, managerial ownership does not affect both ROA and ROE. The current study presents practical evidence to the policy makers, academic and all beneficiary parties in emerging markets, specifically Jordan