Impact of Employee Engagement on Performance

Employee engagement is a vast concept and has a wide area of interpretation and thus each organisation interprets the meaning of employee engagement on its own terms, knowledge, and culture. Employee engagement is a relationship between the employee and the enterprise, an engaged employee is the one who is entirely engrossed in and ardent about their work and so takes positive steps to further the organisation's prestige and interests. The construct employee engagement is built on the foundation of concepts like organisation citizenship behaviour, employee commitment, and job satisfaction. Though it relates to and besets these concepts but employee engagement is broader in scope. In today's scenario organisations have started looking out for ways more stronger than only monetary incentives to keep employees involved and work towards goals, hence comes the role of employee engagement which helps the employees realise they are a part of the organisation and thus employees are emotionally connected to their organization and highly involved in their job with a great enthusiasm for the success of their employer, going an extra mile beyond the employment contractual agreement assuming all their efforts leads to the growth of what already belongs to them. Since Employee engagement is a fairly novel concept thus a lot of measurement metrics are not present to find out direct relationship between employee engagement and its impact on the performance of employees thus the purpose of this paper is to find out an Impact of employee engagement on the performance of the employees

Pulmonary Echinococcal Cyst with a Filamentous Fungus Co-Infection

Fungal infections are known to colonize the preexisting lung cavities formed as a result of diseases like tuberculosis, sarcoidosis, bronchiectasis and cavitatary neoplasia, mostly encountered in immunocompromised patients. Pulmonary echinococcal cysts have been reported coexistent with cryptococcosis and other saprophytic mycosis, but the coexistence of aspergillosis and echinococcal cyst is extremely rare and occasionally been reported in English literature. Active invasion and proliferation of the fungi in the laminated ectocyst of the echinococcal cyst is very unusual. We report a case of 60 years old immunocompetent female, presented with cough, chest pain and shortness of breath. The chest X- ray showed a large thick walled cavity in the lower and mid zone of right lung with positive water lily sign. Surgical enucleation of the echinococcal cyst revealed aspergilloma involving the cavity with massive invasion of laminated ectocyst by filamentous fungus, morphologically resembling an Aspergillus species and was further treated with Itraconazole for 3 months. This unique coexistence of active pulmonary echinococcosis and aspergillosis is being reported because of its rarity and clinical importance for its management.Keywords: Aspergillosis, echinococcosis, echinococcal cyst, pulmonary, mycosis

Successful Endoscopic Management of Bouveret's Syndrome in a Patient with Cholecystoduodenocolic Fistulae

Bouveret's syndrome, first described in 1896 by Léon Bouveret, is rare, limited to approximately 200 published case reports to date [Ariche et al.: Scand J Gastroenterol 2000;35:781–783]. It is a subgroup of gallstone ileus in which a cholecystoduodenal fistula allows the passage of a gallstone that obstructs the duodenum, causing gastric outlet obstruction. This case is unique as it describes Bouveret's syndrome in a patient with combined cholecystoduodenocolic fistulae. Gastric outlet obstruction was successfully managed endoscopically with lithotripsy. Both fistulae were subsequently managed conservatively without any complications

Investigation of vacuum evaporated SnTe thin films for their structural, electrical and thermoelectric properties

Remarkable enhancement in figure-of-merit (ZT) value of p-type Tin Telluride (SnTe) thin films is reported in the present investigations. Under high vacuum conditions, all thin films deposited on the glass substrate by using thermal evaporation technique. Thickness of the thin films were kept 55 and 33 nm. Morphological features and the elemental composition of the thin film were investigated using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) technique respectively. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) with selected area electron diffraction (SAED) pattern was used to investigate the microstructure of these thin films. For the identification of crystalline features, phase, and nano-crystallites size in all the thin films, the X-ray diffraction (XRD) technique had played a dominant role. The analysis of the XRD data results in a single-phase cubic structure. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) analysis revealed the 2D and 3D view of variable size grains formed on the glass substrate. Four probes method was used to determine the electrical conductivity of these thin films. Electrical measurements revealed the semi-metallic nature of the SnTe thin films. The thermoelectric measurement analysis revealed that the ZT of the thin films was found to be increased as the thickness of the film enhanced. The maximum value of ZT similar to 1.0 was obtained at room temperature for the film of thickness 55 nm

Inflammation and fibrosis in chronic liver diseases including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and hepatitis C

At present chronic liver disease (CLD), the third commonest cause of premature death in the United Kingdom is detected late, when interventions are ineffective, resulting in considerable morbidity and mortality. Injury to the liver, the largest solid organ in the body, leads to a cascade of inflammatory events. Chronic inflammation leads to the activation of hepatic stellate cells that undergo trans-differentiation to become myofibroblasts, the main extra-cellular matrix producing cells in the liver; over time increased extra-cellular matrix production results in the formation of liver fibrosis. Although fibrogenesis may be viewed as having evolved as a “wound healing” process that preserves tissue integrity, sustained chronic fibrosis can become pathogenic culminating in CLD, cirrhosis and its associated complications. As the reference standard for detecting liver fibrosis, liver biopsy, is invasive and has an associated morbidity, the diagnostic assessment of CLD by non-invasive testing is attractive. Accordingly, in this review the mechanisms by which liver inflammation and fibrosis develop in chronic liver diseases are explored to identify appropriate and meaningful diagnostic targets for clinical practice. Due to differing disease prevalence and treatment efficacy, disease specific diagnostic targets are required to optimally manage individual CLDs such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and chronic hepatitis C infection. To facilitate this, a review of the pathogenesis of both conditions is also conducted. Finally, the evidence for hepatic fibrosis regression and the mechanisms by which this occurs are discussed, including the current use of antifibrotic therapy

Case law on standard essential patents in Europe

In Europe disputes over SEPs are frequently litigated. In Huawei v ZTE, the CJEU gave a landmark judgement where it established guidelines to balance the interests of SEP owners and those of implementers. In this paper we will cover that case as well as other important SEP-related decisions from courts in the UK, Germany, France, Netherland and Italy

SECURITY AND OTHER VULNERABILITY PREDICTION USING NOVEL DEEP REPRESENTATION OF SOURCE CODE WITH ACTIVE FEEDBACK LOOP

Since the cost of fixing vulnerabilities can be thirty times greater after an application has been deployed, it is recognized that properly-written code can yield potentially large savings. Accordingly, approaches presented herein apply machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to improve developer experience by enabling developers to avoid introducing potential bugs and/or vulnerabilities while coding. Billions of lines of source code, which have already been written, are utilized as examples of how to write functional and secure code that is easy to read and to debug. By leveraging this wealth of available data, which is complemented with state-of-art machine learning models, enterprise-level software solutions can be developed that have a high standard of coding and are potentially bug-free

Cell Lineage Tracing Identifies Hormone-Regulated and Wnt-Responsive Vaginal Epithelial Stem Cells.

The intact vaginal epithelium is essential for women's reproductive health and provides protection against HIV and sexually transmitted infections. How this epithelium maintains itself remains poorly understood. Here, we used single-cell RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to define the diverse cell populations in the vaginal epithelium. We show that vaginal epithelial cell proliferation is limited to the basal compartment without any obvious label-retaining cells. Furthermore, we developed vaginal organoids and show that the basal cells have increased organoid forming efficiency. Importantly, Axin2 marks a self-renewing subpopulation of basal cells that gives rise to differentiated cells over time. These cells are ovariectomy-resistant stem cells as they proliferate even in the absence of hormones. Upon hormone supplementation, these cells expand and reconstitute the entire vaginal epithelium. Wnt/β-catenin is essential for the proliferation and differentiation of vaginal stem cells. Together, these data define heterogeneity in vaginal epithelium and identify vaginal epithelial stem cells

Systematic review: Investigating the prognostic performance of four non‐invasive tests in alcohol‐related liver disease

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Mortality of Alcohol-related-Liver-Disease (ArLD) is increasing, and liver fibrosis stage is the best mortality predictor. Non-invasive-tests (NIT) are increasingly used to detect fibrosis, but their value as prognostic tests in chronic liver disease (CLD), and in particular in ArLD is less well recognized. We aimed to describe the prognostic performance of four widely used NITs (FIB4, ELF test, FibroScan and FibroTest) in ArLD. METHODS: Applying systematic-review methodology, four databases were searched from inception to May 2020. Inclusion/exclusion criteria were applied to search using MeSH terms and keywords. First and second reviewers independently screened results, extracted data and performed risk-of-bias assessment using Quality-In-Prognostic-Studies (QUIPS) tool. RESULTS: Searches produced 25,088 articles. After initial screening, 1,020 articles were reviewed independently by both reviewers. Eleven articles remained after screening for eligibility: one on ELF, four on FibroScan, four on FIB4, one on FIB4+FibroScan and one on FibroTest+FIB4. Area-Under-Receiving-Operator-Characteristics-curves (AUROCS) for outcome-prediction ranged from: 0.65-0.76 for FibroScan, 0.64-0.83 for FIB4, 0.69-0.79 for FibroTest and 0.72-0.85 for ELF. Studies scored low-moderate risk of bias for most domains, but high-risk in confounding/statistical reporting domains. The results were heterogeneous for outcomes and reporting, making pooling of data unfeasible. CONCLUSIONS: This systematic-review returned eleven papers, six of which were conference-abstracts and one unpublished manuscript. Whilst the heterogeneity of studies precluded direct comparisons of NITs, each NIT performed well in individual studies in predicting prognosis in ArLD (AUROCs >0.7 in each NIT category), and may add value to prognostication in clinical practice