Book Review: The Courage to Lead Through Values: How Management by Values Supports Transformational Leadership, Culture, and Success

The Courage to Lead through Values: How Management by Values Supports Transformational Leadership, Culture, and Success is about being fearless and implementing the values in changing or sustaining the organization and its people. Transformational leadership is shown as an influential factor in the individual’s ability to deal with different circumstances and where leaders courageously provide support to maintain the employee confidence level. This book is also about the type of leader an individual can become, who may not have answers or solutions to every problem, but genuinely keep working on and acknowledge their inner sense of courage and values by putting their principles and values into practice. By using the methodology Management by Values (MBV), the book is wired into the leadership values and its effectiveness which brings the positive results impacted by the effective leadership and ethics in the organizations

Book Review: How to Lead

Many consider leadership a path to improve their personal, social, and professional lives. People believe that leaders add unique skills to their lives and improve the world in the long run. Accordingly, authors have provided leadership books to help individuals understand leadership and leaders. The author of this book, David M. Rubenstein, is one of them. This book offers perspectives on different leadership experiences. These are categorized into visionaries, builders, transformers, commanders, decision-makers, and masters. The vision of this book is to inspire readers to develop and enhance their leadership skills. Altogether, this book proves that there is no perfect way to lead; any person from any background can become a leader who can make positive changes

Effect of thermal annealing on optical properties of CR-39 polymeric track detector

The samples of CR-39 polymer (TASTRAK, Bristol, England) were annealled thermally at various temperatures ranging from 100oC to 180oC for 1 hour, in air. FTIR spectroscopy reveals the structural degradation of CR-39 polymer due to thermal annealing above its glass transition temperature. Optical band gap of pristine and thermally annealed samples has been determined using UV-Visible absorption spectra. It has been observed that the optical band gap decreases continuously as a result of annealing.Department of Physics, Kurukshetra University,Kurukshetra-136 119, Haryana, Indi

Effects of physiotherapy in 28-year-old male with Bell’s palsy following vestibular schwannoma

Schwannomas are benign, well-encapsulated, slow growing nerve sheath tumors. Vestibular schwannomas (VS) are one of the commonest intracranial tumors that arise from the Schwann cells at cerebropontine angle. Post-surgical complications are highly prevalent where Bell’s palsy is one of the most reported problems. Bell’s palsy is a lower motor neuron condition characterized by rapid and unilateral paresis of 7th cranial nerve. A 28-year-old male was diagnosed with vestibular schwannoma followed by Bell’s palsy. Patient presented with facial muscle paresis along with the Bell’s phenomenon. Neurological examination revealed 7th cranial nerve involvement (house Brackmann scale score-VI). Various physiotherapy interventions including facial PNF, facial exercise, electrical stimulation, biofeedback through mirror exercises, facial soft tissue manipulation and ultrasound therapy were used that reduced the house Brackmann scale score to I/VI

Periodontal Considerations in the placement of Dental Implants

The creation of an esthetic implant restoration with gingival architecture that harmonizes with the adjacent dentition is a formidable challenge. The predictability of the peri-implant esthetic outcome may ultimately be determined by the patient’s own presenting anatomy rather than the clinician’s ability to manage state-of-the-art procedures. To more accurately predict the peri-implant esthetic outcome before removing a failing tooth, five diagnostic keys are discussed. These keys include relative tooth position, form of the periodontium, biotype of the periodontium, tooth shape and position of the osseous crest.   KEYWORDS:  Dental Implants, Periodontal, Peri-implan

Revisiting Global Health Security Measures in COVID 19 Pandemic

As the world has become a global village with increasing socio-economic interdependence, health, security and stability issues are imposing interrelated global impacts. Thus, activities supporting epidemic and pandemic preparedness are needed to minimize vulnerability to acute public health events. Coordination mechanisms must be pre-established for diagnostics, therapeutics and research as emergencies often lead to competition and shortage of resources. This paper attempts to discuss the available global health security measures at the time of COVID 19 pandemic

Analyzing the Efficacy of an LLM-Only Approach for Image-based Document Question Answering

Recent document question answering models consist of two key components: the vision encoder, which captures layout and visual elements in images, and a Large Language Model (LLM) that helps contextualize questions to the image and supplements them with external world knowledge to generate accurate answers. However, the relative contributions of the vision encoder and the language model in these tasks remain unclear. This is especially interesting given the effectiveness of instruction-tuned LLMs, which exhibit remarkable adaptability to new tasks. To this end, we explore the following aspects in this work: (1) The efficacy of an LLM-only approach on document question answering tasks (2) strategies for serializing textual information within document images and feeding it directly to an instruction-tuned LLM, thus bypassing the need for an explicit vision encoder (3) thorough quantitative analysis on the feasibility of such an approach. Our comprehensive analysis encompasses six diverse benchmark datasets, utilizing LLMs of varying scales. Our findings reveal that a strategy exclusively reliant on the LLM yields results that are on par with or closely approach state-of-the-art performance across a range of datasets. We posit that this evaluation framework will serve as a guiding resource for selecting appropriate datasets for future research endeavors that emphasize the fundamental importance of layout and image content information

Open Government Data (OGD) and energy resources in India : project brief

In India the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) 2012, provides for sharing of government data. The open data portal of India is evolving in terms of content and design, with only limited data available regarding energy; disaggregated data is collected, but not accessible in the public domain. Physical and monetary data are easier to access in the energy resource sector compared to environmental and social data. Some specific suggestions on improving the quality of government data are presented. This paper is part of the larger project “From Data to Development: Exploring the Emerging Impact of Open Government Data in Developing Countries.

Subtractive genomics approach for in silico identification and characterization of novel drug targets in Neisseria meningitides serogroup B

Meningococcal disease is a life-threatening illness with annual incidence rates varying from 1 to 1000 per 100 000 persons in different parts of the world. Effective polysaccharide and polysaccharide-protein conjugate vaccines that offer protection against infection with meningococcal serogroups A, C, Y and W-135 have been licensed and are available worldwide. Serogroup B remains the most prevalent cause of meningococcal disease responsible for 32% of all meningococcal disease in the United States, 45 to 80% of the cases in Europe, and for the majority of cases in the rest of the world. The development of a vaccine against serogroup B poses the biggest problem due to the similarity between the B capsular polysaccharide structure and a polysialic acid containing glycopeptides that are a part of human brain tissue. Prevention of meningococcal disease will require the development of an effective vaccine to combat serogroup B, which is the cause of most meningococcal cases in developed countries. The availability of the complete sequence information of Neisseria meningitides serogroup B proteome has made it possible to carry out the in silico analysis of its genome for identification of potential vaccine and drug targets. Our study revealed 1413 proteins which are non-homologous to human genome. Screening these proteins using the Database of Essential Genes (DEG) resulted in the identification of 362 proteins as essential proteins of the bacterium. Analysis of the identified essential proteins, using the KEGG Automated Annotation Server (KAAS) housed at Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways database, revealed 35 enzymes of N. Meningitides that may be used as potential drug targets, as they belongs to pathways present only in the bacterium and not present in humans. Subcelluler localization prediction of these essential proteins revealed that 9 proteins lie on the outer membrane of the pathogen which could be potential vaccine targets. Screening of the functional inhibitors against these novel targets may result in discovery of novel therapeutic compounds that can be effective against Neisseria meningitides Serogroup B