Sieving Through the Data to Find the Person: HR’s Imperative for Balancing Big Data with People Centricity

[Excerpt] With “big data” and “analytics” atop human resources (HR) professionals’ dictionaries, it is no wonder that some are calling it time to think of employees as data points and to scientifically make people decisions. These beget horrific images of what many employees already believe HR promotes: incessant change and downsizing solely for profit maximization. Yet, for HR to genuinely transition into the world of data-driven people solutions, it must leverage its roots in employee advocacy, understanding, and development. To best do this, HR must undertake three actions. First, HR can ease into people analytics, using the necessary time and effort to gain employee buy-in. Second, HR should stress the objectivity of data-driven decision making. Third, HR practitioners must exhibit empathy for those affected by such decisions

Woostah Security: Neighborhood Violence

https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/gps-posters/1595/thumbnail.jp

The Influence of Transient Thermal Gradients and Substrate Constraint on Delamination of Thermal Barrier Coatings

A systematic study of factors affecting the delamination energy release rate and mode mix of a thermal barrier coating attached to a substrate is presented accounting for the influence of thermal gradients combined with rapid hot surface cooling. Transient thermal gradients induce stress gradients through the coating and substrate, which produce overall bending if the substrate is not very thick and if it is not constrained. Due to their influences on the coating stresses, substrate thickness and constraint are important aspects of the mechanics of delamination of coating-substrate systems, which must be considered when laboratory tests are designed and for lifetime assessment under in-service conditions. Temperature gradients in the hot state combined with rapid cooling give rise to a maximum energy release rate for delamination that occurs in the early stage of cooling and that can be considerably larger than the driving force for delamination in the cold state. The rates of cooling that give rise to a large early stage energy release rate are identified.Engineering and Applied Science

Prospectives

Tiré de: Prospectives, vol. 11, no 4, oct. 1975Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 24 janv. 2013

Prospectives

Tiré de: Prospectives, vol. 9, no 1, février 1973Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 24 janv. 2013

Phase Transitions at Finite Temperature and Dimensional Reduction for Fermions and Bosons

In a recent Letter we discussed the fact that large-$N$ expansions and computer simulations indicate that the universality class of the finite temperature chiral symmetry restoration transition in the 3D Gross-Neveu model is mean field theory. This was seen to be a counterexample to the standard 'sigma model' scenario which predicts the 2D Ising model universality class. In this article we present more evidence, both theoretical and numerical, that this result is correct. We develop a physical picture for our results and discuss the width of the scaling region (Ginzburg criterion), $1/N$ corrections, and differences between the dynamics of BCS superconductors and Gross-Neveu models. Lattices as large as $12 \times 72^2$ are simulated for both the $N=12$ and $N=4$ cases and the numerical evidence for mean field scaling is quite compelling. We point out that the amplitude ratio for the model's susceptibility is a particulartly good observable for distinguishing between the dimensional reduction and the mean field scenerios, because this universal quantity differs by almost a factor of $20$ in the two cases. The simulations are done close to the critical point in both the symmetric and broken phases, and correlation lengths of order $10$ are measured. The critical indices $\beta_{mag}$ and $\delta$ also pick out mean field behavior. We trace the breakdown of the standard scenario (dimensional reduction and universality) to the composite character of the mesons in the model. We point out that our results should be generic for theories with dynamical symmetry breaking, such as Quantum Chromodynamics. We also simulated the $O(2)$ model on $8 \times 16^3$ lattices to establish that our methods give the results of dimensional reduction in purely bosonicComment: 47 pages, latex, 23 figures in one uuencoded fil

Etiology of severe childhood pneumonia in the Gambia, West Africa, determined by conventional and molecular microbiological analyses of lung and pleural aspirate samples.

Molecular analyses of lung aspirates from Gambian children with severe pneumonia detected pathogens more frequently than did culture and showed a predominance of bacteria, principally Streptococcus pneumoniae, >75% being of serotypes covered by current pneumococcal conjugate vaccines. Multiple pathogens were detected frequently, notably Haemophilus influenzae (mostly nontypeable) together with S. pneumoniae