How do instrumental and expressive network positions relate to turnover? A meta-analytic investigation

Although social network methods have proven valuable for predicting employee turnover, an informed use of network methods for turnover management requires an integration and extension of extant networks-turnover research. To that end, this article addresses two relatively neglected issues in the networks-turnover literature: the lack of integration of turnover process models into networks-turnover research and the differential influence of “network content” (i.e., instrumental vs. expressive network resources) on turnover processes. To address these issues, we draw from social capital and turnover theories as a basis for investigating how turnover antecedents (i.e., work attitudes, job alternatives, and job performance) mediate the associations between instrumental and expressive degree centrality and turnover. We test a theoretical model using meta-analytic path analysis based on the results of random-effects meta-analyses (64 independent samples of working adults) of instrumental and expressive degree centrality in relation to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job alternatives, job performance, and employee turnover. We found that both instrumental and expressive degree centrality relate to employee turnover, but through different mediating processes; instrumental degree centrality decreased the likelihood of turnover via job performance and organizational commitment, whereas expressive degree centrality decreased the likelihood of turnover via job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Furthermore, expressive degree centrality (as compared to instrumental degree centrality) had a negative association with turnover after accounting for these prominent turnover antecedents. These findings illustrate the importance of distinguishing between instrumental and expressive network positions in the turnover process as well as the value of leveraging employee networks for employee retention

Natural and experimental evolution of sexual conflict within Caenorhabditis nematodes

BACKGROUND: Although males and females need one another in order to reproduce, they often have different reproductive interests, which can lead to conflict between the sexes. The intensity and frequency of male-male competition for fertilization opportunities is thought to be an important contributor to this conflict. The nematode genus Caenorhabditis provides an opportunity to test this hypothesis because the frequency of males varies widely among species with different mating systems. RESULTS: We find evidence that there is strong inter- and intra-sexual conflict within C. remanei, a dioecious species composed of equal frequencies of males and females. In particular, some C. remanei males greatly reduce female lifespan following mating, and their sperm have a strong competitive advantage over the sperm of other males. In contrast, our results suggest that both types of conflict have been greatly reduced within C. elegans, which is an androdioecious species that is composed of self-fertilizing hermaphrodites and rare males. Using experimental evolution in mutant C. elegans populations in which sperm production is blocked in hermaphrodites (effectively converting them to females), we find that the consequences of sexual conflict observed within C. remanei evolve rapidly within C. elegans populations experiencing high levels of male-male competition. CONCLUSIONS: Together, these complementary data sets support the hypothesis that the intensity of intersexual conflict varies with the intensity of competition among males, and that male-induced collateral damage to mates can evolve very rapidly within populations

Neurotoxins subvert the allosteric activation mechanism of SARM1 to induce neuronal loss

SARM1 is an inducible TIR-domain NA

The COMBREX Project: Design, Methodology, and Initial Results

© 2013 Brian P. et al.Prior to the “genomic era,” when the acquisition of DNA sequence involved significant labor and expense, the sequencing of genes was strongly linked to the experimental characterization of their products. Sequencing at that time directly resulted from the need to understand an experimentally determined phenotype or biochemical activity. Now that DNA sequencing has become orders of magnitude faster and less expensive, focus has shifted to sequencing entire genomes. Since biochemistry and genetics have not, by and large, enjoyed the same improvement of scale, public sequence repositories now predominantly contain putative protein sequences for which there is no direct experimental evidence of function. Computational approaches attempt to leverage evidence associated with the ever-smaller fraction of experimentally analyzed proteins to predict function for these putative proteins. Maximizing our understanding of function over the universe of proteins in toto requires not only robust computational methods of inference but also a judicious allocation of experimental resources, focusing on proteins whose experimental characterization will maximize the number and accuracy of follow-on predictions.COMBREX is funded by a GO grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) (1RC2GM092602-01).Peer Reviewe

Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Untangling the Networking Phenomenon: A Dynamic Psychological Perspective on How and Why People Network

Compared to the extensive research that has investigated the structures of social relationships (i.e., social networks), relatively little research attention has been geared towards understanding how and why individuals initiate, build, and maintain social networks (i.e., networking) from a psychological perspective. The objective of this review is to shed light on the dynamic, psychological processes at the center of individuals’ discretionary, professional relationship development. The diffuse networking literature in the field of management is reviewed and organized into four primary research streams. On the basis of insights from this review, we propose a dynamic, psychological model of how and why individuals strategically network, which marries social exchange and expectancy theories with the concept of relational schema to explain the networking phenomenon across dyadic and intraindividual levels. This conceptual model posits that a networking interaction, construed as an exchange of resources within a given network relationship at a certain stage of relationship maturity, affects the relational schemas of those involved in the interaction and that each networking partner’s relational schema influences each partner’s perceptions of his or her network relationship and guides individual decisions to network with a specific network contact. The aim of this review is to lay a theoretical foundation for investigating strategic networking from a dynamic, psychological perspective

Developing and Validating Short Form Protean and Boundaryless Career Attitudes Scales

The Protean and Boundaryless Career Attitudes scales developed by Briscoe and colleagues have facilitated research on career attitudes and mindsets, but they are unnecessarily lengthy and somewhat redundant in their content. To address these concerns, this article presents three studies that develop and validate short forms of the Protean and Boundaryless Career Attitudes scales (i.e., PCA-SF and BCA-SF). Study findings suggest that the PCA-SF and BCA-SF provide a more efficient assessment of the protean and boundaryless career attitudes constructs than the full-length measures and exhibit partial measurement equivalence across U.S. and Korean populations