Experience sampling of the psychosocial work environment: from hedonometrics to hedonopragmatics

Current research that uses the experience sampling method (ESM) in an organisational context has focused on individuals in order to advance the theories and metrics regarding employees’ work experiences. What is notable is the lack of focus on the pragmatic potential of the method to mobilise change in organisations. Participatory interventions based on survey feedback are shown to be effective, but rely on questionnaire data with well-known limitations for capturing the dynamic nature of employee experiences. The ESM addresses and overcomes some of these limitations but has yet to be applied to feedback interventions. This research investigates how an ESM approach to survey feedback in an organisational context mobilises change efforts with a focus on the psychosocial work environment. The study serves two purposes. First, it investigates the semantic equivalence between the questionnaire metrics and new ESM measures of the psychosocial work environment, where questions are sampled from a pool of items at each time sampling occasion (hedonometrics). Second, it assesses whether the ESM exceeds traditional survey feedback when mobilising collective change efforts (hedonopragmatics). A longitudinal experimental study design is applied within a Danish higher education institution. Ten naturally established work groups are assigned to either an ESM or a questionnaire survey condition. Each unit participates in an intervention with extensive data feedback and a follow-up procedure 8–16 months later. Data include survey responses, action plans and observations of feedback conferences. The results provide partial support for the semantic equivalence of the ESM sampling and the questionnaire approach. All three data sources indicate greater change mobilisation for the ESM compared to the questionnaire condition. It is concluded that the added value of the ESM extends beyond its use as a better metric at the individual level. It also has pragmatic and emancipatory potential for sensemaking at the group level in organisations

Melhorando o diagnóstico diferencial entre síndromes mielodisplásicas e citopenias periféricas reativas por citometria de fluxo multiparamétrica: o papel dos precursores de células B

Immunophenotyping is a valuable ancillary technique for the differential diagnosis between myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) with low bone marrow (BM) blast counts and a normal karyotype, and reactive peripheral (PB) cytopenias. Our aim was to search for the most important variables for this purpose. We also analyzed the age variation of BM B-cell precursors (BCP) and its differences in reactive and clonal cytopenias. Immunophenotypic analyzes were performed in BM of 54 patients with MDS (76% with BM blasts 55 years. % BM BCP could be calculated by the formula: (-7.97 × log age) + (4.24 × log % CD34 (+) cells) - (0.22 x nr. alterations CD34 (+) cells) + 0.577. Corrected R(2) = 0.467. Analysis of myelomonocytic precursors and CD34(+) cells was satisfactory for the differential diagnosis between reactive PB cytopenias and MDS. The most specific alterations were found in CD34(+) cells. Comparison of the values obtained with those of normal age-matched controls is recommended. The virtual slide(s) for this article can be found here: http://www.diagnosticpathology.diagnomx.eu/vs/1975931809154663.Immunophenotyping is a valuable ancillary technique for the differential diagnosis between myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) with low bone marrow (BM) blast counts and a normal karyotype, and reactive peripheral (PB) cytopenias. Our aim was to search for th104419FAPESP - FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULOCNPQ - CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO25924846sem informaçãoFAEPEX (proc 1208/11 Fundo de Pesquisa da Universidade de Campinas) e Fundação MDS (concessão de Jovem Investigador Tito Bastianello 2009). Konradin Metze e Irene Lorand-Metze têm uma bolsa de pesquisa do CNPq (proc. 307270 / 2010-6 e 302277 / 2009-9, re

Fractal Characteristics of May-Grünwald-Giemsa Stained Chromatin Are Independent Prognostic Factors for Survival in Multiple Myeloma

The use of computerized image analysis for the study of nuclear texture features has provided important prognostic information for several neoplasias. Recently fractal characteristics of the chromatin structure in routinely stained smears have shown to be independent prognostic factors in acute leukemia. In the present study we investigated the influence of the fractal dimension (FD) of chromatin on survival of patients with multiple myeloma.We analyzed 67 newly diagnosed patients from our Institution treated in the Brazilian Multiple Myeloma Study Group. Diagnostic work-up consisted of peripheral blood counts, bone marrow cytology, bone radiograms, serum biochemistry and cytogenetics. The International Staging System (ISS) was used. In every patient, at least 40 digital nuclear images from diagnostic May-Grünwald-Giemsa stained bone marrow smears were acquired and transformed into pseudo-3D images. FD was determined by the Minkowski-Bouligand method extended to three dimensions. Goodness-of-fit of FD was estimated by the R(2) values in the log-log plots. The influence of diagnostic features on overall survival was analyzed in Cox regressions. Patients that underwent autologous bone marrow transplantation were censored at the day of transplantation.Median age was 56 years. According to ISS, 14% of the patients were stage I, 39% were stage II and 47% were stage III. Additional features of a bad prognosis were observed in 46% of the cases. When stratifying for ISS, both FD and its goodness-of-fit were significant prognostic factors in univariate analyses. Patients with higher FD values or lower goodness-of-fit showed a worse outcome. In the multivariate Cox-regression, FD, R(2), and ISS stage entered the final model, which showed to be stable in a bootstrap resampling study.Fractal characteristics of the chromatin texture in routine cytological preparations revealed relevant prognostic information in patients with multiple myeloma

Keratoacanthoma and keratoacanthoma-like squamous cell carcinoma similar morphology but different pathogenesis

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Differential diagnosis between keratoacanthoma (KA) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is difficult due to their similarities. The mechanisms that drive their distinct biological behavior are poorly understood.To investigate whether the assessment of microvessel density (MVD) could be helpful in KA and SCC differential diagnosis and to gain insight into the pathogenesis of KA-like neoplasms, we compared the density of CD105- and CD34-stained vessels in KAs and SCCs and their relation to the expression of the p53 oncoprotein and proliferation marker Ki67.This is an observational retrospective cohort study. Forty lesions with clinical appearance of KAs (29 KAs and 11 SCCs) entered the study. A biopsy was taken from each lesion at presentation and the natural clinical course was monitored for at least 1 month. Growing or minimally regressing lesions were submitted to complete surgical excision. The diagnoses were established on combined clinical, histological, and follow-up evaluations. The MVD and p53 or Ki67 expression in neoplastic cells were assessed through morphometry.The MVD did not show discriminating power between KAs and SCCs. The Ki67 proliferation rate was significantly higher in SCCs. Although neoangiogenesis (CD105-MVD) in KAs was associated with cell proliferation, in SCCs it was not. There was significant correlation between p53 expression and neoplasia size in SCCs but not in KAs.From our results, we may conclude that KA and SCC have similarities, as CD105- and CD34-MVD. However, the low Ki67 proliferation index and the positive correlation between Ki-67 index and neovascularization in KA suggest a dependence in neovascularization to grow in KA, pointing to involvement of distinct pathogenesis.Differential diagnosis between keratoacanthoma (KA) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is difficult due to their similarities. The mechanisms that drive their distinct biological behavior are poorly understood.To investigate whether the assessment of micro9423FAPESP - FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULOFundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)FAPESP [2007/52603-0]2007/52603-0Funding from National Institutes of Health (NIH); Wellcome Trust; Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) or other(s): non

Screening for hotspot mutations in PI3K, JAK2, FLT3 and NPM1 in patients with myelodysplastic syndromes

INTRODUCTION: Myelodysplastic syndromes encompass a heterogeneous group of clonal hematopoietic stem cell disorders characterized by ineffective hematopoiesis, refractory cytopenia and a tendency to progress toward acute myeloid leukemia. The accumulation of genetic alterations is closely associated with the progression of myelodysplastic syndromes toward acute myeloid leukemia. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the presence of mutations in the points most frequent for mutations (hotspot mutations) in phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K), Janus kinase 2 (JAK2), FMS-like tyrosine kinase 3 (FLT3) and nucleophosmin (NPM1), which are involved in leukemia and other cancers, in a population of Brazilian MDS patients. METHODS: Fifty-one myelodysplastic syndromes patients were included in the study. According to French-American-British classification, the patients were distributed as follows: 31 with refractory anemia, 8 with refractory anemia with ringed sideroblasts, 7 with refractory anemia with excess blasts, 3 with refractory anemia with excess blasts in transformation and 2 with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia. Bone marrow samples were obtained and screened for the presence of hotspot mutations using analysis based on amplification with the polymerase chain reaction, sequencing, fragment size polymorphisms or restriction enzyme digestion. All patients were screened for mutations at the time of diagnosis, and 5 patients were also screened at the time of disease progression. RESULTS: In the genes studied, no mutations were detected in the patients at the time of diagnosis. One patient with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia was heterozygous for a Janus kinase 2 mutation after disease progression. CONCLUSIONS: These results show that hotspot mutations in the PI3K, JAK2, FLT3 and NPM1 genes are not common in MDS patients; nevertheless, JAK2 mutations may be present in myelodysplasia during disease progression

Robust Audio-Codebooks for Large-Scale Event Detection in Consumer Videos

Abstract In this paper we present our audio based system for detecting "events" within consumer videos (e.g. You Tube) and report our experiments on the TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection (MED) task and development data. Codebook or bag-of-words models have been widely used in text, visual and audio domains and form the state-of-the-art in MED tasks. The overall effectiveness of these models on such datasets depends critically on the choice of low-level features, clustering approach, sampling method, codebook size, weighting schemes and choice of classifier. In this work we empirically evaluate several approaches to model expressive and robust audio codebooks for the task of MED while ensuring compactness. First, we introduce the Large Scale Pooling Features (LSPF) and Stacked Cepstral Features for encoding local temporal information in audio codebooks. Second, we discuss several design decisions for generating and representing expressive audio codebooks and show how they scale to large datasets. Third, we apply text based techniques like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to learn acoustictopics as a means of providing compact representation while maintaining performance. By aggregating these decisions into our model, we obtained 11% relative improvement over our baseline audio systems

IRS2 silencing increases apoptosis and potentiates the effects of ruxolitinib in jak2v617f-positive myeloproliferative neoplasms

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)The recurrent V617F mutation in JAK2 (JAK2(V617F)) has emerged as the primary contributor to the pathogenesis of myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN). However, the lack of complete response in most patients treated with the JAK1/2 inhibitor, ruxolitinib, indicates the need for identifying pathways that cooperate with JAK2. Activated JAK2 was found to be associated with the insulin receptor substrate 2 (IRS2) in non-hematological cells. We identified JAK2/IRS2 binding in JAK2(V617F) HEL cells, but not in the JAK2(WT) U937 cell line. In HEL cells, IRS2 silencing decreased STAT5 phosphorylation, reduced cell viability and increased apoptosis; these effects were enhanced when IRS2 silencing was combined with ruxolitinib. In U937 cells, IRS2 silencing neither reduced cell viability nor induced apoptosis. IRS1/2 pharmacological inhibition in primary MPN samples reduced cell viability in JAK2(V617F)-positive but not JAK2(WT) specimens; combination with ruxolitinib had additive effects. IRS2 expression was significantly higher in CD34(+) cells from essential thrombocythemia patients compared to healthy donors, and in JAK2(V617F) MPN patients when compared to JAK2(WT). Our data indicate that IRS2 is a binding partner of JAK2(V617F) in MPN. IRS2 contributes to increased cell viability and reduced apoptosis in JAK2-mutated cells. Combined pharmacological inhibition of IRS2 and JAK2 may have a potential clinical application in MPN.The recurrent V617F mutation in JAK2 (JAK2V617F) has emerged as the primary contributor to the pathogenesis of myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN). However, the lack of complete response in most patients treated with the JAK1/2 inhibitor, ruxolitinib, indi7669486959sem informaçãoConselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)sem informaçã