Celebrating Diversity through Spirituality in the Workplace: Transforming Organizations Holistically

Managing diversity effectively is the key to attract and retain a productive workforce. Research demonstrates that celebrating diversity leads to greater productivity, increased creativity, and heightened morale and motivation. Organizations often benefit from the differing perspectives and rich experiences a diverse workforce provides. Similarly, organizations can enhance their creativity by encouraging diverse perspectives and opinions. Thus, issues of managing diversity, valuing diversity, and celebrating diversity have assumed added importance. This paper suggests that diversity is not a problem, but rather a solution to most of the challenges organizations face such as employee engagement and participation. Managing workforce diversity effectively transcends meeting a company’s legal requirements and complying with equal opportunity and non-discrimination regulation. Leaders need to understand and deal constructively with their own biases and prejudices that hinder diversity. Celebrating diversity is the extension of healthy spirituality that leads us to celebrate our differences and view diversity as different manifestations of the underlying Unity that permeates every phenomenon. This paper discusses key advantages of celebrating diversity, pinpoints barriers to organizational diversity, and offers some perspectives to overcome barriers to inclusiveness

Celebrating Diversity through Spirituality in the Workplace: Transforming Organizations Holistically

Managing diversity effectively is the key to attract and retain a productive workforce. Research demonstrates that celebrating diversity leads to greater productivity, increased creativity, and heightened morale and motivation. Organizations often benefit from the differing perspectives and rich experiences a diverse workforce provides. Similarly, organizations can enhance their creativity by encouraging diverse perspectives and opinions. Thus, issues of managing diversity, valuing diversity, and celebrating diversity have assumed added importance. This paper suggests that diversity is not a problem, but rather a solution to most of the challenges organizations face such as employee engagement and participation. Managing workforce diversity effectively transcends meeting a company’s legal requirements and complying with equal opportunity and non-discrimination regulation. Leaders need to understand and deal constructively with their own biases and prejudices that hinder diversity. Celebrating diversity is the extension of healthy spirituality that leads us to celebrate our differences and view diversity as different manifestations of the underlying Unity that permeates every phenomenon. This paper discusses key advantages of celebrating diversity, pinpoints barriers to organizational diversity, and offers some perspectives to overcome barriers to inclusiveness

Occupational Stress among Health Care Workers

Occupational stress is a harmful response particularly physical and emotional, due to a mismatch between job requirements and the qualifications, resources, and worker’s needs; its chronic form is termed “Burnout.” Stress among health care workers is multifactorial. Its prevalence among healthcare professionals ranges from 27−87.4%. Occupational stress is a significant reason for physical and mental health, substance use, work-related delay, absenteeism, and emigration rate. Additionally, it can lead to patient safety concerns and poor quality of care. The mismatch between job requirements and the available resources, work overload, working environment, work experience, workplace conflict, gender discrimination, marital status, educational status, job satisfaction, and not being rewarded were some of the factors significantly associated with occupational stress among health care professionals. Moreover, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic introduced additional stressors, such as staff redeployment and the fear of infection. WHO identified good primary health care as fundamental for achieving universal health coverage without financial hardship. Healthcare professionals’ physical and mental well-being is crucial for attaining this. Developing culturally and organizationally appropriate early interventions is the need of the hour to prevent a health care worker from entering a stress level that is non-adaptable beyond their coping abilities

Temperature-Sensitive RB Mutations Linked to Incomplete Penetrance of Familial Retinoblastoma in 12 Families

SummaryThe tumor-suppressor activity of the retinoblastoma protein (RB) is encoded within a protein-binding (“pocket”) domain that is targeted for mutations in all cases of familial retinoblastoma and in many common adult cancers. Although familial retinoblastoma is a paradigm for a highly penetrant, recessive model of tumorigenesis, the molecular basis for the phenotype of incomplete penetrance of familial retinoblastoma is undefined. We studied the RB pocket-binding properties of three independent, mutant RB alleles that are present in the germline of 12 kindreds with the phenotype of incomplete penetrance of familial retinoblastoma. Each arises from alterations of single codons within the RB pocket domain (designated “Δ480,” “661W,” or “712R”). Under the same conditions, we studied the properties of wild-type (WT) RB, an RB point mutant isolated from a lung carcinoma sample (706F) and an adjacent, in vitro–generated point mutant (707W). The Δ480, 661W, and 712R mutants lack pocket protein-binding activity in vitro but retain the WT ability to undergo cyclin-mediated phosphorylation in vivo. Each of the low-penetrant RB mutants exhibits marked enhancement of pocket protein binding when the cells are grown at reduced temperature. In contrast, in this temperature range, no change in binding activity is seen with WT RB, the 706F mutant, or the 707W mutant. We have demonstrated that many families with incomplete penetrance of familial retinoblastoma carry unstable, mutant RB alleles with temperature-sensitive pocket protein-binding activity. The variable frequency for tumor development in these families may result from reversible fluctuations in a threshold level of RB pocket-binding activity

Semantic Segmentation of Legal Documents via Rhetorical Roles

Legal documents are unstructured, use legal jargon, and have considerable length, making them difficult to process automatically via conventional text processing techniques. A legal document processing system would benefit substantially if the documents could be segmented into coherent information units. This paper proposes a new corpus of legal documents annotated (with the help of legal experts) with a set of 13 semantically coherent units labels (referred to as Rhetorical Roles), e.g., facts, arguments, statute, issue, precedent, ruling, and ratio. We perform a thorough analysis of the corpus and the annotations. For automatically segmenting the legal documents, we experiment with the task of rhetorical role prediction: given a document, predict the text segments corresponding to various roles. Using the created corpus, we experiment extensively with various deep learning-based baseline models for the task. Further, we develop a multitask learning (MTL) based deep model with document rhetorical role label shift as an auxiliary task for segmenting a legal document. The proposed model shows superior performance over the existing models. We also experiment with model performance in the case of domain transfer and model distillation techniques to see the model performance in limited data conditions.Comment: 19 pages, Accepted at Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop, EMNLP 202

Role of diagnostic hysterolaparoscopy in the evaluation of infertility

Background: Infertility has become nowadays not only a medical, but a social problem as well. None of the laboratory findings alone is conclusive in diagnosing infertility. Diagnostic hysterolaparoscopy is an accurate method of assessing and treating infertility. Direct visualization of abdominal and pelvic organs in hysteroscopy and laparoscopy allows a definite diagnosis where clinical examination and less invasive techniques such as ultrasound, SSG and HSG fail to identify the problem. The main objective of study was to determine the role of diagnostic hysterolaparoscopy in the evaluation of infertility in tertiary care centers.Methods: A prospective hospital based study was carried out in two tertiary care centers (Sheth V.S. General Hospital and Smt. S.C.L. Municipal Hospital) over a period of 2 years from July 2013 to June 2015. Hysterolaparoscopy was done in 300 patients. Women aged 20-40 years with normal hormone profile without male factor infertility were included.Results: Out of 300 cases, 206 (69%) patients had primary infertility. While laparoscopy detected abnormalities in 35% of the cases, significant hysteroscopy findings were noted in 17% of cases. Together, diagnostic hysterolaparoscopy detected abnormalities in 26% of the infertile patients in both groups. While the most common laparoscopic abnormality was endometriosis (14%) and adnexal adhesions (12%) in primary and secondary infertile patients respectively, on hysteroscopy, intrauterine septum was found as the commonest abnormality in both the groups.Conclusions: Hysterolaparoscopy is an effective diagnostic tool for evaluation of certain significant and correctable tubo-peritoneal and intrauterine pathologies like peritoneal endometriosis, adnexal adhesions and subseptate uterus, which are usually missed by other imaging modalities

Comparison of Baska Mask Versus I-Gel in Short Gynaecological Laparoscopic Surgeries Under General Anaesthesia in Adult Female: A Randomized Interventional Study

Background: Various newer generations of Supraglottic Airway Devices (SAD) with improved designs and performance are available for use by anaesthesiologist. We conducted the present study to compare 3rd generation SAD Baska Mask with 2nd generation SAD I-gel with the aim of comparing their clinical performance in terms of insertion parameters and oropharyngeal leak pressure in short laparoscopic gynaecological surgeries in adult females. Methods: 80 adult female patients were randomly allocated to either Baska Mask (n=40) or I-gel (n=40) groups. Insertion characteristics that included number of attempts, mean insertion time and manipulation frequency were recorded and compared. Oropharyngeal leak pressure was measured just after insertion of device and after 5 min of creating pneumoperitoneum in both devices and were compared. Results: Baska Mask insertion was successfully achieved in first attempt in 38/40 patients in Baska group vs 35/40 patients in I-gel group. Mean oropharyngeal leak pressure (OLP) in Baska Mask versus I-gel just after insertion was (29.24±4.20cm H20 vs 26.33±2.51cm H2O, P=0.003) whereas it was (29.42±2.70 vs 26.18±2.54 cm H2O) after 5 min of creating pneumoperitoneum. Both groups were comparable in terms of removal characteristics and postoperative laryngopharyngeal airway morbidities. Conclusion: Baska Mask provided more effective ventilation in terms of greater oropharyngeal leak pressure as compared to I-gel. However Baska Mask was more difficult to insert and the incidence of postoperative laryngopharyngeal morbidity was higher in case of Baska Mask

Time to shift from contemporary to high-sensitivity cardiac troponin in diagnosis of acute coronary syndromes

AbstractEarly rule-in and rule-out of non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) is a challenge. In patients with inconclusive findings on ECG, cardiac biomarkers play a crucial role in the diagnosis. The introduction of the new high-sensitive cardiac troponin test (hs-TnI assay) has changed the landscape of NSTEMI diagnosis.The new hs-TnI assay can detect troponin values at a lower level compared with a contemporary cardiac troponin (cTn) assay. The hs-cTnI assay has a coefficient of variation of ≤10%, well below the 99th percentile value. It reduces the time to diagnose acute myocardial infarction from 6h to 3h. A recent study has demonstrated that hs-cTnI can further reduce the time to 1h in 70% of all patients with chest pain.The European Society of Cardiology 2015 guidelines recommend including a second sample of hs-cTnI within 3h of presentation This increases the sensitivity of the hs-TnI assay from 82.3% (at admission) to 98.2% and negative predictive value from 94.7% (at admission) to 99.4%. Combining the 99th percentile at admission with serial changes in troponin increases the positive predictive value to rule in acute coronary syndrome from 75.1% at admission to 95.8% after 3h.The 2015 ESC Guidelines recommend the use of a rapid rule out protocol (0h and 1h) when hs-cTnI with a validated 0 to1h algorithm is available.Training and displaying the clinical algorithm depicting the role of hs-TnI assay in acute cardiac care units and in EDs are an efficient way to deliver the new standard of care to patients. Compared with contemporary troponin assays, the hs-cTn assay accelerates the diagnostic pathway to 0–1h, thus reducing the time for diagnosis of NSTEMI and hence, its management

Morphological characterization of sali rice accessions of North East India

838-845Rice is a major cereal crop of Assam, North East India. The local rice accessions grown in this region possess unique traits of breeder’s choice i.e., tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses. In the present investigation, 712 sali rice accessions of Assam were characterized using 20 qualitative and 13 quantitative traits. Among these, 19 qualitative traits showed distinct polymorphism except for the ligule colour. The maximum polymorphism was observed for apiculus colour followed by the colour of lemma palea and sterile lemma. The significant variation for the quantitative traits was recorded among the accessions. Lakhi Bilash and Borkamal were identified as the high yielding genotypes, which may be used further in breeding programmes. The cluster analysis using morphological traits based on the Euclidean distance matrix classified the accessions into the two distinct sub-groups. The high yielding accessions were grouped together in one cluster. A significant positive correlation was observed among the grain yield with the various panicle associated traits therefore, these may be used as selection criteria for development of high yielding rice varietiies