Is Past Performance a Good Predictor of Future Potential?

Both assessment centres and 360 degree feedback have become very popular new era HR tools. With human resources gaining strategic importance combined with raising costs of talented managers and their scarce availability, organizations are left with no alternatives than identifying and grooming talent from within. This has led to the increased use of assessment centres and 360 degree tools for developing leadership competencies. Some times 360 degree feedback is used as tool for career development and succession planning. Sometimes assessment centres are used as predictors of fast track managers. However research on the predictive ability of ACs or 360 degree feedback is scant. This study is based on data gathered from three organizations that have conducted assessment centres as well as 360 degree feedback. In all three organizations ACs and 360 degree feedback were used as development tools. In all these organizations competency mapping was done and common competencies were identified using behaviour indicators. Competencies were assessed by external assessors and by their seniors, juniors, and colleagues on the same competency model. Results showed no definite patterns and lead to the conclusion that past performance as assessed by 360 degree feedback predictor of future potential as assessed by the assessment centres. The findings seem to be valid irrespective of the nature of competencies assessed and across various categories of employees. Given the lack of correlation, caution is necessary while using the data for promotion and succession planning exercises.

A case of subretinal hemorrhage due to choroidal tear in right eye following blunt trauma in a 35 years old female

A 35-year-old Asian Indian female presented to our institute with a history of fall on road and accidental hit by stone over her right eyebrow, grossly no anterior segment abnormality was noted. On dilated fundus examination, a superotemporal choroidal tear was noted which led to choroidal hemorrhage. Patient was managed conservatively by giving oral steroids and tablet vitamin C. After 2 months of treatment there was complete resolution of the lesion with a final best corrected visual acuity of 6/6

Traumatic avulsion of the eyeball: a case report

Ocular trauma is very common, but globe avulsion along with optic nerve avulsion is a rare clinical event. Blunt trauma during a road traffic accident can cause rupture or avulsion of the globe and the outcome can range from complete recovery on repositioning to visual loss because of globe perforation or optic nerve injury. Here, authors report a case of a 20-year-old male who presented with history of a road traffic accident causing severe facial injuries. The physical examination revealed oedema and ecchymoses over the right side of the face with avulsion of the right eyeball anteriorly outside the orbit along with avulsion of the optic nerve. The visual acuity in the injured eye was no perception of light and the direct pupillary response was absent. Computed tomography revealed fracture of the roof and lateral wall of the right orbit. As the eye was not salvageable, enucleation surgery was done. Insertion of an ocular prosthesis for rehabilitation was planned. The presentation, investigations, surgery and follow-ups are described

Synthetic & Structural Studies on the Polymeric Complexes of Terephthaloyl-bis-(N-phenylhydroxamic Acid) (TPHA) & Sebacyl-bis(N-phenylhydroxamic Acid) (SPHA) with Co(II), Ni(II), Cu(II) & Zn(II)

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Adaptive importance sampling technique for markov chains using stochastic approximation

For a discrete-time finite-state Markov chain, we develop an adaptive importance sampling scheme to estimate the expected total cost before hitting a set of terminal states. This scheme updates the change of measure at every transition using constant or decreasing step-size stochastic approximation. The updates are shown to concentrate asymptotically in a neighborhood of the desired zero-variance estimator. Through simulation experiments on simple Markovian queues, we observe that the proposed technique performs very well in estimating performance measures related to rare events associated with queue lengths exceeding prescribed thresholds. We include performance comparisons of the proposed algorithm with existing adaptive importance sampling algorithms on some examples. We also discuss the extension of the technique to estimate the infinite horizon expected discounted cost and the expected average cost

A prospective comparative study of intestinal anastomosis, single layer extramucosal versus double layer

Background: Intestinal anastomosis is an operative procedure that is of central importance in the practice of surgery. Intestinal anastomosis after resection of bowel may be of various types and techniques. This prospective comparative study is performed to evaluate the safety in term of anastomotic leak of single layer interrupted extramucosal technique as compared to conventional double layer technique.Methods: The patients selected for this study are those who were admitted with various clinical conditions requiring resection and anastomosis of small or large bowel presented to P.D.U. Medical College & Hospital, Rajkot between a period of August 2012 to December 2014. A total of 50 patients were included in the study. All the patients above the age of 18 years and less than 60 years, requiring intestinal anastomosis on emergency or electively, were included in the study and those requiring anastomosis to esophageal, gastric and duodenal anastomosis were excluded and randomly allotted single layer and double layer groups and results such as anastomotic leak rate, duration for anastomosis, number of suture material required noted.Results: Mean duration required for single layer anastomosis was 19.6 minutes and for double layer anastomosis was 29.5 minutes and double number of suture material used in double layer anastomosis with equal anastomotic leak rate (6%) in each group.Conclusions: Single layer interrupted extramucosal technique required significantly less duration for anastomosis, is cost effective with no significant difference in anastomotic leak rate and  as safe as conventional double layer technique.

Exome and transcriptome sequencing of Aedes aegypti identifies a locus that confers resistance to Brugia malayi and alters the immune response.

Many mosquito species are naturally polymorphic for their abilities to transmit parasites, a feature which is of great interest for controlling vector-borne disease. Aedes aegypti, the primary vector of dengue and yellow fever and a laboratory model for studying lymphatic filariasis, is genetically variable for its capacity to harbor the filarial nematode Brugia malayi. The genome of Ae. aegypti is large and repetitive, making genome resequencing difficult and expensive. We designed exome captures to target protein-coding regions of the genome, and used association mapping in a wild Kenyan population to identify a single, dominant, sex-linked locus underlying resistance. This falls in a region of the genome where a resistance locus was previously mapped in a line established in 1936, suggesting that this polymorphism has been maintained in the wild for the at least 80 years. We then crossed resistant and susceptible mosquitoes to place both alleles of the gene into a common genetic background, and used RNA-seq to measure the effect of this locus on gene expression. We found evidence for Toll, IMD, and JAK-STAT pathway activity in response to early stages of B. malayi infection when the parasites are beginning to die in the resistant genotype. We also found that resistant mosquitoes express anti-microbial peptides at the time of parasite-killing, and that this expression is suppressed in susceptible mosquitoes. Together, we have found that a single resistance locus leads to a higher immune response in resistant mosquitoes, and we identify genes in this region that may be responsible for this trait.This work was funded by a Cambridge- KAUST Academic Excellence Alliance (AEA2) project grant to AP and CVA was supported by a Cambridge Overseas Trust Studentship. JA was supported by a Darwin Trust of Edinburgh. WJP was supported by a Medical Research Council. FMJ was supported by Royal Society Research. EASIH is supported by Cambridge NIHR-BRC. The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics is funded by Wellcome Trust grant reference 090532/Z/09/Z and MRC hub grant G0900747 91070. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.his is the final version of the article. It first appeared from PLOS via http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.100476

AXES at TRECVid 2011

The AXES project participated in the interactive known-item search task (KIS) and the interactive instance search task (INS) for TRECVid 2011. We used the same system architecture and a nearly identical user interface for both the KIS and INS tasks. Both systems made use of text search on ASR, visual concept detectors, and visual similarity search. The user experiments were carried out with media professionals and media students at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, with media professionals performing the KIS task and media students participating in the INS task. This paper describes the results and findings of our experiments