What are the Most Critical HR Capabilities and Competencies that are Emerging for the Future?

[Excerpt] What are most critical competencies that are emerging for HR professionals today? What capabilities are needed for HR leaders to advance forward in their careers? While there has been much research and emphasis on technical competencies. (i.e. training & development, diversity & inclusion, etc.), our summary focuses on the important leadership and behavioral traits that enable HR professionals to successfully impact their organizations

What are the Best Processes for Using Metrics to Ensure Organizational Optimization Needs of our HR Clients are Being Met?

A major insurance company currently utilizes HR partners to serve needs within the organization. A challenge of this is determining how to drive organizational optimization and measuring how effective HR initiatives are in accomplishing this goal

How Do You Shift From a Siloed System to Portfolio Solutions?

As a result of the costs associated with the Affordable Care Act, hospitals have changed the way they operate. This in turn has caused companies across the healthcare and devices sector to adapt their business models to cope with this change, resulting in changes to the organizational structure with an emphasis on improved collaboration across verticals, advancing innovative solutions faster and finding new markets for products. We believe technology and improving the diversity within R&D teams can help transform organizations, and help them achieve their business goals

A Study on Agreement in PICO Span Annotations

In evidence-based medicine, relevance of medical literature is determined by predefined relevance conditions. The conditions are defined based on PICO elements, namely, Patient, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcome. Hence, PICO annotations in medical literature are essential for automatic relevant document filtering. However, defining boundaries of text spans for PICO elements is not straightforward. In this paper, we study the agreement of PICO annotations made by multiple human annotators, including both experts and non-experts. Agreements are estimated by a standard span agreement (i.e., matching both labels and boundaries of text spans), and two types of relaxed span agreement (i.e., matching labels without guaranteeing matching boundaries of spans). Based on the analysis, we report two observations: (i) Boundaries of PICO span annotations by individual human annotators are very diverse. (ii) Despite the disagreement in span boundaries, general areas of the span annotations are broadly agreed by annotators. Our results suggest that applying a standard agreement alone may undermine the agreement of PICO spans, and adopting both a standard and a relaxed agreements is more suitable for PICO span evaluation.Comment: Accepted in SIGIR 2019 (Short paper

Early exposure to environmental toxin contributes to neuronal vulnerability and axonal pathology in a model of familial ALS

Adult onset amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) arises due to progressive and irreversible functional deficits to the central nervous system, specifically the loss of motor neurons. Sporadic ALS causality is not well understood, but is almost certainly of multifactorial origin involving a combination of genetic and environmental factors. The discovery of endemic ALS in the native Chamorro population of Guam during the 1950s and the co-occurrence of parkinsonism and dementia in some patients led to searches for an environmental toxins that could be responsible. In the present paper, we report that an environmental neurotoxin enhances mutant superoxide dismutase (SOD)-induced spinal motor neuron death and pathology and induces motor axon abnormalities. These results cumulatively confirm earlier findings that exposure to an environmental toxin is sufficient to produce the disease phenotype and indicate a role for gene-environment interaction in some forms of the disease

Optimum Currency Areas in East Asia: A Structural VAR Approach

Optimum Currency Area; Monetary Union; Vector autoregression; Exchange rate; East Asia Abstract: This paper assesses the empirical desirability of the East Asian economies to an alternative exchange rate arrangement (a monetary union) that can potentially enhance the exchange rate stability and credibility in the region. Specifically, the symmetry in macroeconomic disturbances of the East Asian economies is examined as satisfying one of the preconditions for forming an Optimum Currency Area (OCA). The Structural Vector Autoregression (VAR) method is employed to assess the nature of macroeconomic disturbances among the East Asian countries, as a preliminary guide in identifying potential candidates for forming an OCA. The preliminary findings of this study suggest that there exists scope among some small sub-regions for potential monetary integration.

A Bayesian Approach to Optimum Currency Areas in East Asia

This paper assesses the empirical desirability of the East Asian economies to an alternative exchange rate arrangement (a monetary union) that can potentially enhance the exchange rate stability and credibility in the region. Specifically, the symmetry in macroeconomic disturbances of the East Asian economies is examined as satisfying one of the preconditions for forming an Optimum Currency Area (OCA). We extend the existing literature by improving the methodology of assessing the symmetry shocks in evaluating the suitability of a common currency area in the East Asian economies employing the Bayesian State-Space Based approach. We consider a model of an economy in which the output is influenced by global, regional and country-specific shocks. The importance of a common regional shock would provide a case for a regional common currency. This model allows us to examine regional and country-specific cycles simultaneously with the world business cycle. The importance of the shocks decomposition is that studying a subset of countries can lead one to believe that observed co-movement is particular to that subset of countries when it in fact is common to a much larger group of countries. In addition, the understanding of the sources of international economic fluctuations is important for making policy decisions. Our findings also indicate that regional factors play a minor role in explaining output variation in both East Asian and the European economies. This implies that while East Asia does not satisfy the OCA criteria (based on the insignificant share of regional common factor), neither does Europe.Optimum Currency Area; Business Cycle Synchronisation, Monetary Integration; East Asia

THE ENDOGENEITY OF THE OPTIMUM CURRENCY AREA CRITERIA IN EAST ASIa

The Asian financial crisis in mid-1997 has increased interest in policies to achieve greater regional exchange rate stability in East Asia. It has renewed calls for greater monetary and exchange rate cooperation. A country’s suitability to join a monetary union depends, inter alia, on the trade intensity and the business cycle synchronization with other potential members of the monetary union. However, these two Optimum Currency Area criteria are endogenous. Theoretically, the effect of increased trade integration (after the elimination of exchange fluctuations among the countries in the region) on the business cycle synchronization is ambiguous. Reduction in trade barriers can potentially increase industrial specialization by country and therefore resulting in more asymmetry business cycles from industry-specific shocks. On the other hand, increased trade integration may result in more highly correlated business cycles due to common demand shocks or intra-industry trade. If the second hypothesis is empirically verified, policy makers have little to worry about the region being unsynchronized in their business cycles as the business cycles will become more synchronized after the monetary union is formed. This paper assesses the dynamic relationships between trade, finance, specialization and business cycle synchronization for East Asian economies using a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach. The dynamic panel approach improves on previous efforts to examine the business cycle correlation –trade link using panel procedures, which control for the potential endogeneity of all explanatory variables. Based on the findings on how trade, finance and sectoral specialization have effects on the size of common shocks among countries, potential policies that can help East Asian countries move close toward a regional currency arrangement can be suggested. The empirical results of this study suggest that there exists scope for East Asia to form a monetary union.Optimum Currency Area; Monetary Union; Trade Integration; Business Cycle Synchronisation

The anatomic distribution and expression of matricellular proteins in the cerebral vasculature of Alzheimer's Disease subjects

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is characterized by the deterioration of cognitive functioning. AD is the most common form of dementia amongst older adults and currently has no cure. Through extensive research that continues to be elucidated, there are two linked factors that may contribute to AD severity. The first is the presence of the epsilon 4 allele in the apolipoprotein E gene (ApoE4 allele), and the second is severity of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA). In this project, gene expression of target genes TSP1, CD36, CD47, sirpα and hif-2α were investigated in relation to ApoE allele status and the degree of cerebral amyloid angiopathy in AD patients. Immunofluorescence and immunostaining procedures were carried out on post-mortem human brain tissue samples to detect target gene expression. The experimental cohort was made up of 20 subjects with Alzheimer’s disease pathology, while the non-diseased control cohort consisted of 6 subjects with minimal-to-no Alzheimer’s disease pathology. Immunostaining was followed by microscopy imaging and subsequent fluorescent quantification using Image J software (NIH). Standard statistical analyses were carried out on the results using the patient demographics of each cohort. ApoE allele status and CAA grade for each cohort were obtained after immunostaining and fluorescence quantification occurred, resulting in a blinded study to prevent bias. The results of this project concluded that TSP1, sirpα, and CD36 correlate with increasing CAA grade, while sirpα, CD36 and CD47 show a correlation with ApoE allele status. When looking at ApoE4 allele and CAA grade, TSP1, sirpα, and CD36 show a correlation to both factors, suggesting ApoE4 may cause increased CAA, which may result in more severe AD. Various signaling pathways through interactions between these target genes may contribute to severity of Alzheimer’s Disease. Further research will need to be done in order to examine these mechanisms