bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Caprini Scores, Risk Stratification, and Rivaroxaban in Plastic Surgery: Time to Reconsider Our Strategy
Authors: Swanson Eric 
Published: June 2016

Summary:
Limited data are available regarding the pathophysiology of venous thromboembolism in plastic surgery patients. In an effort to identify patients at greater risk, some investigators promote individual risk assessment using Caprini scores. However, these scores do not correlate with relative risk values. Affected patients cannot be reliably predicted (97% false positive rate). Caprini scores make many body contouring patients candidates for chemoprophylaxis, an intervention that introduces risks related to anticoagulation. Caprini has financial conflicts with several companies that manufacture products such as enoxaparin, commonly used for chemoprophylaxis. Rivaroxaban, taken orally, has been used by some plastic surgeons as an alternative to enoxaparin injections. However, this medication is not United States Food and Drug Administration approved for venous thromboembolism prophylaxis in plastic surgery patients, and a reversal agent is unavailable. This article challenges the prevailing wisdom regarding individual risk stratification and chemoprophylaxis. Alternative methods to reduce risk for all patients include safer anesthesia methods and Doppler ultrasound surveillance. Clinical findings alone are unreliable in diagnosing deep venous thromboses. Only by using a reliable diagnostic tool such as Doppler ultrasound are we able to learn more about the natural history of this problem in our patients. Such knowledge is likely to better inform our treatment recommendations.
Increased Global DNA Methylation and Decreased TGFβ1 Promoter Methylation in Glaucomatous Lamina Cribrosa Cells
Authors: McDonnell Fiona S. , McNally Sara A. , Clark Abbot F. , O’Brien Colm J. , Wallace Deborah M. 
Published: June 2016

Background:
Glaucoma is an optic neuropathy that affects 60 million people worldwide. There is an underlying fibrosis associated with the lamina cribrosa (LC) in glaucoma. DNA methylation is well established in regulating fibrosis and may be a therapeutic target for glaucoma. The purpose of this study was to compare global DNA methylation levels in primary human normal (NLC) and glaucomatous (GLC) cells, and to investigate DNA methylation in driving fibrosis through regulation of transforming growth factor β1 (TGFβ1).

Materials and Methods:
LC cells were cultured from normal and glaucomatous human donors. Global methylation was assessed by ELISA. qPCR was conducted for DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs), methyl-CpG-binding protein 2 (MeCP2), TGFβ 1 and 2, collagen 1α1 (COL1A1), and α-smooth muscle actin (αSMA). TGFβ1 and DNMT1 were examined by immunofluorescence. Methylation of the TGFβ1 promoter was determined by methylation-specific PCR (MSP).

Results:
Global DNA methylation demonstrated an increase in GLC compared with NLC cells (P<0.05). The previously mentioned methylation and matrix genes were increased in GLC compared with NLC cells (P<0.05). Immunofluorescence showed increased TGFβ1 and DNMT1 in GLC compared with NLC cells. MSP showed increased unmethylated DNA in the TGFβ1 promoter of GLC compared with NLC cells.

Conclusions:
We found increased expression of fibrotic genes in GLC cells and demonstrated an increase in global DNA methylation and in associated enzymes in GLC cells. Furthermore, we showed decreased promoter methylation of TGFβ1 in GLC cells. Determining a role for methylation in glaucoma and in regulating TGFβ1 may provide a novel therapeutic approach.
Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer Damage in Young Myopic Eyes With Optic Disc Torsion and Glaucomatous Hemifield Defect
Authors: Lee Jong Eun , Lee Jin Young , Kook Michael S. 
Published: June 2016

Purpose:
To investigate retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) status at the opposite hemiretinas of optic disc torsion (ODT) in young myopic subjects with glaucomatous visual field (VF) defects and correlation between its thickness and VF defects using spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT).

Patients and Methods:
We assessed the frequency and characteristics of glaucomatous RNFL defects at the opposite hemiretinas of ODT location (ODT-unaffected hemiretinas) in 59 young myopic subjects presenting with glaucomatous VF defects confined to 1 hemifield, and compared the peripapillary RNFL thickness (pRNFLT) in ODT-unaffected hemiretinas of study eyes with that of 60 myopic controls without ODT using Cirrus HD SD-OCT. Linear regression analyses were performed between the pRNFLT measurements at ODT-unaffected hemiretinas and Humphrey field analyzer VF indices.

Results:
Approximately 42% of study eyes with ODT showed glaucomatous RNFL defects at ODT-unaffected hemiretinas. The mean width of RNFL defects was significantly greater in ODT-affected hemiretinas than in ODT-unaffected hemiretinas (P<0.001). The mean pRNFLT in ODT-unaffected hemiretinas of study group (99.9±12.1 μm) was significantly lower than that in the matched hemiretinas of control group (109.8±14.9 μm; P<0.001). Significant correlations were observed between pRNFLT parameters and Humphrey field analyzer indices for each hemiretina with or without ODT in the study group.

Conclusions:
Young myopic eyes with ODT and hemifield VF loss often show glaucomatous RNFL defects at both hemiretinas and significantly lower pRNFLT in the ODT-unaffected hemiretinas compared with matched hemiretinas of control eyes. Greater VF loss is associated with more advanced pRNFT loss in ODT-unaffected hemiretinas.
The Impact of Reported Hospice Preferred Practices on Hospital Utilization at the End of Life
Authors: Aldridge Melissa D. , Epstein Andrew J. , Brody Abraham A. , Lee Eric J. , Cherlin Emily , Bradley Elizabeth H. 
Published: June 2016

Background:
The Affordable Care Act requires hospices to report quality measures across a range of processes and practices. Yet uncertainties exist regarding the impact of hospice preferred practices on patient outcomes.

Objective:
Assess the impact of 6 hospice preferred practices and hospice organizational characteristics on hospital utilization and death using the first national data on hospice preferred practices.

Design:
Longitudinal cohort study (2008–2011) of Medicare beneficiaries (N=149,814) newly enrolled in a national random sample of hospices (N=577) from the National Hospice Survey (84% response rate) and followed until death.

Outcome Measures:
The proportion of patients at each hospice admitted to the hospital, emergency department (ED), and intensive care unit (ICU), and who died in the hospital after hospice enrollment.

Results:
Hospices that reported assessing patient preferences for site of death at admission had lower odds of being in the highest quartile for hospital death (AOR=0.36; 95% CI, 0.14–0.93) and ED visits (AOR=0.27; 95% CI, 0.10–0.76). Hospices that reported more frequently monitoring symptoms had lower odds of being in the highest quartile for ICU stays (AOR=0.48; 95% CI, 0.24–0.94). In adjusted analyses, a higher proportion of patients at for-profit compared with nonprofit hospices experienced a hospital admission (15.3% vs. 10.9%, P<0.001), ED visit (21.8% vs. 15.6%, P<0.001), and ICU stay (5.1% vs. 3.0%, P<0.001).

Conclusions:
Hospitalization of patients following hospice enrollment varies substantially across hospices. Two of the 6 preferred practices examined were associated with hospitalization rates and for-profit hospices had persistently high hospitalization rates regardless of preferred practice implementation.
Arrested coalescence of viscoelastic droplets: polydisperse doublets
Authors: Dahiya Prerna , Caggioni Marco , Spicer Patrick T. 
Published: June 2016

Arrested droplet coalescence produces stable anisotropic shapes and is a key mechanism for microstructure development in foods, petroleum and pharmaceutical formulations. Past work has examined the dynamic elastic arrest of coalescing monodisperse droplet doublets and developed a simple model of doublet strain as a function of physical variables. Although the work describes experimental data well, it is limited to describing same-size droplets. A new model incorporating a generalized description of doublet shape is developed to describe polydisperse doublet formation in more realistic emulsion systems. Polydisperse doublets are shown to arrest at lower strains than monodisperse doublets as a result of the smaller contribution of surface area in a given pair. Larger droplet size ratios have lower relative degrees of strain because coalescence is arrested at an earlier stage than in more monodisperse cases. Experimental observations of polydisperse doublet formation indicate that the model under-predicts arrest strains at low solid levels and small droplet sizes. The discrepancy is hypothesized to be the result of nonlinear elastic deformation at high strains.
This article is part of the themed issue ‘Soft interfacial materials: from fundamentals to formulation’.
Morphological variation inHomo erectusand the origins of developmental plasticity
Authors: Antón Susan C. , Taboada Hannah G. , Middleton Emily R. , Rainwater Christopher W. , Taylor Andrea B. , Turner Trudy R. , Turnquist Jean E. , Weinstein Karen J. , Williams Scott A. 
Published: June 2016

Homo erectuswas the first hominin to exhibit extensive range expansion. This extraordinary departure from Africa,especially into more temperate climates of Eurasia, has been variously related to technological, energetic and foraging shifts. The temporal and regional anatomical variation inH. erectussuggests that a high level of developmental plasticity, a key factor in the ability ofH. sapiensto occupy a variety of habitats, may also have been present inH. erectus.Developmental plasticity, the ability to modify development in response to environmental conditions, results in differences in size, shape and dimorphism across populations that relate in part to levels of resource sufficiency and extrinsic mortality. These differences predict not only regional variations but also overall smaller adult sizes and lower levels of dimorphism in instances of resource scarcity and high predator load. We consider the metric variation in 35 human and non-human primate ‘populations’ from known environmental contexts and 14 time- and space-restricted paleodemes ofH. erectusand other fossilHomo. Human and non-human primates exhibit more similar patterns of variation than expected, with plasticity evident, but in differing patterns by sex across populations. The fossil samples show less evidence of variation than expected, althoughH. erectusvaries more than Neandertals.This article is part of the themed issue ‘Major transitions in human evolution’.
The shaping of human diversity: filters, boundaries and transitions
Authors: Mirazón Lahr Marta 
Published: June 2016

The evolution of modern humans was a complex process, involving major changes in levels of diversity through time. The fossils and stone tools that record the spatial distribution of our species in the past form the backbone of our evolutionary history, and one that allows us to explore the different processes—cultural and biological—that acted to shape the evolution of different populations in the face of major climate change. Those processes created a complex palimpsest of similarities and differences, with outcomes that were at times accelerated by sharp demographic and geographical fluctuations. The result is that the population ancestral to all modern humans did not look or behave like people alive today. This has generated questions regarding the evolution of human universal characters, as well as the nature and timing of major evolutionary events in the history ofHomo sapiens. The paucity of African fossils remains a serious stumbling block for exploring some of these issues. However, fossil and archaeological discoveries increasingly clarify important aspects of our past, while breakthroughs from genomics and palaeogenomics have revealed aspects of the demography of Late Quaternary Eurasian hominin groups and their interactions, as well as those between foragers and farmers. This paper explores the nature and timing of key moments in the evolution of human diversity, moments in which population collapse followed by differential expansion of groups set the conditions for transitional periods. Five transitions are identified (i) at theoriginsof the species, 240–200 ka; (ii) at the time of the first majorexpansions, 130–100 ka; (iii) during a period ofdispersals, 70–50 ka; (iv) across a phase of local/regionalstructuringof diversity, 45–25 ka; and (v) during a phase of significant extinction of hunter–gatherer diversity and expansion of particular groups, such as farmers and later societies (theHolocene Filter), 15–0 ka.This article is part of the themed issue ‘Major transitions in human evolution’.
The origins of the Acheulean: past and present perspectives on a major transition in human evolution
Authors: de la Torre Ignacio 
Published: June 2016

The emergence of the Acheulean from the earlier Oldowan constitutes a major transition in human evolution, the theme of this special issue. This paper discusses the evidence for the origins of the Acheulean, a cornerstone in the history of human technology, from two perspectives; firstly, a review of the history of investigations on Acheulean research is presented. This approach introduces the evolution of theories throughout the development of the discipline, and reviews the way in which cumulative knowledge led to the prevalent explanatory framework for the emergence of the Acheulean. The second part presents the current state of the art in Acheulean origins research, and reviews the hard evidence for the appearance of this technology in Africa around 1.7 Ma, and its significance for the evolutionary history ofHomo erectus.This article is part of the themed issue ‘Major transitions in human evolution’.
Comment on Smaerset al.(2016): A nonviable phylogenetic comparative method hampered by circularity, inaccuracy, and bias
Authors: Griffin Randi H. , Yapuncich Gabriel S. 
Published: June 2016

AbstractSmaers, Mongle & Kandler (2016) (Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 118: 78-94) introduced a new phylogenetic comparative method, multiple variance Brownian motion (mvBM), for reconstructing ancestral states given a phylogenetic tree and continuous trait data. The authors conducted a simulation study and argued that mvBM outperforms constant variance Brownian motion (BM) when rates of evolution vary across the phylogeny. In this comment, we argue that mvBM is not a viable statistical method because it is fundamentally a circular analysis that overfits phylogenetic branch lengths to the data. We further argue that the comparison of mvBM to BM under conditions where the assumptions of BM are clearly violated is not an informative performance analysis, and that the simulation study of Smaerset al. (2016) exaggerates the performance of mvBM by focusing on a narrow range of simulation conditions and reporting aggregated accuracy metrics that obscure severe inaccuracy and bias in its ancestral state estimates. Our arguments are supported by simulation results. We conclude that mvBM is not a viable phylogenetic comparative method.
Cardiorespiratory physiological perturbations after acute smoke-induced lung injury and during extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support in sheep
Authors: Chemonges Saul 
Published: June 2016

AbstractBackgroundNumerous successful therapies developed for human medicine involve animal experimentation. Animal studies that are focused solely on translational potential, may not sufficiently document unexpected outcomes. Considerable amounts of data from such studies could be used to advance veterinary science. For example, sheep are increasingly being used as models of intensive care and therefore, data arising from such models must be published. In this study, the hypothesis is that there is little information describing cardiorespiratory physiological data from sheep models of intensive care and the author aimed to analyse such data to provide biological information that is currently not available for sheep that received extracorporeal life support (ECLS) following acute smoke-induced lung injury.MethodsNineteen mechanically ventilated adult ewes undergoing intensive care during evaluation of a form of ECLS (treatment) for acute lung injury were used to collate clinical observations. Eight sheep were injured by acute smoke inhalation prior to treatment (injured/treated), while another eight were not injured but treated (uninjured/treated). Two sheep were injured but not treated (injured/untreated), while one received room air instead of smoke as the injury and was not treated (placebo/untreated). The data were then analysed for 11 physiological categories and compared between the two treated groups.ResultsCompared with the baseline, treatment contributed to and exacerbated the deterioration of pulmonary pathology by reducing lung compliance and the arterial oxygen partial pressure to fractional inspired oxygen (PaO2/FiO2) ratio. The oxygen extraction index changes mirrored those of the PaO2/FiO2ratio. Decreasing coronary perfusion pressure predicted the severity of cardiopulmonary injury.ConclusionsThese novel observations could help in understanding similar pathology such as that which occurs in animal victims of smoke inhalation from house or bush fires, aspiration pneumonia secondary to tick paralysis and in the management of the severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in humans.
Familiarity Facilitates Feature-based Face Processing
Authors: di Oleggio Castello Matteo Visconti , Wheeler Kelsey G. , Cipolli Carlo , Gobbini M. Ida 
Published: June 2016

AbstractRecognition of personally familiar faces is remarkably efficient, effortless and robust. We asked if feature-based face processing facilitates detection of familiar faces by testing the effect of face inversion on a visual search task for familiar and unfamiliar faces. Because face inversion disrupts configural and holistic face processing, we hypothesized that inversion would diminish the familiarity advantage to the extent that it is mediated by such processing. Subjects detected personally familiar and stranger target faces in arrays of two, four, or six face images. Subjects showed significant facilitation of personally familiar face detection for both upright and inverted faces. The effect of familiarity on target absent trials, which involved only rejection of unfamiliar face distractors, suggests that familiarity facilitates rejection of unfamiliar distractors as well as detection of familiar targets. The preserved familiarity effect for inverted faces suggests that facilitation of face detection afforded by familiarity reflects mostly feature-based processes.
Case B (Sequel) – GMR: deciding future alliance strategy for airports
Authors: Dubey Rita 
Published: June 2016

Subject area
General management/strategy.

Case overview
Case B: On April 4, 2013, the meeting of GMR’s Group Executive Council (GEC) was scheduled to take place. Srinivas Bommidala, G.M. Rao’s son-in-law and Chairman of GMR’s airports business, was gearing up for the meeting. The meeting was called to discuss a proposal for bidding for an upcoming airport project in the Philippines. It had been more than a decade since GMR entered the airport infrastructure sector. The organization had built substantial airport operating expertise during that period. It adopted a joint venture (JV) model for expanding into the airport infrastructure business. Until now the organization had always formed JVs for all its airport projects. JVs, with existing airport operators, were necessitated by the bid conditions that required a certain minimum airport operating experience for qualifying as a bidder for various projects. In some cases, JV with a local player helped GMR with market knowledge for functioning in a foreign market. GMR also used JVs to access the capabilities it lacked for operating in this sector and gradually learnt from its partners for building capabilities in-house. The group now had the required operating expertise in the sector to qualify as a bidder. One of the key issues the GEC was contemplating was: Whether GMR should continue to form JV for bidding for the upcoming project or should it go solo? Further, if it had to form a JV then, in which areas should it seek a partner?

Expected learning outcomes
Case B: To help students understand how companies use alliances as growth strategies; to understand the rationale for formation of various alliances; to explore various factors managers consider when deciding on alliance strategy of an organization; to understand the challenges associated with using alliances as a strategic option; and to understand the pros and cons of internal development (i.e. going solo) vis-à-vis strategic alliances.

Supplementary materials
Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

Subject code
CSS 11: Strategy.
HRD interventions, employee competencies and organizational effectiveness: an empirical study
Authors: Potnuru Rama Krishna Gupta , Sahoo Chandan Kumar 
Published: June 2016

PurposeThe purpose of the study is to examine the impact of human resource development (HRD) interventions on organizational effectiveness by means of employee competencies which are built by some of the selected HRD interventions.Design/methodology/approachAn integrated research model has been developed by combining the principal factors from the existing literature. The HRD interventions chosen are training, performance management and career management (development). The validity of the model is tested by applying structural equation modeling (SEM) approach to the information collected from 290 executive and non-executive employees working in two medium size cement manufacturing companies. The reliability and validity of the dimensions are established through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the related hypotheses are tested by using SEM.FindingsThe result indicates that the selected HRD interventions have an impact on building of employee competencies, which in turn is instrumental in improving organizational effectiveness.Research limitations/implicationsThe research is undertaken in Indian cement manufacturing companies which cannot be generalized across a broader range of sectors and international environment.Practical implicationsThe findings of the study have potential to help decision makers of manufacturing companies to develop strategies which will enable them to improve employee competency, to formulate effective HRD interventions and to enhance the capability of the employees to achieve desired goals and objectives of the organization.Originality/valueThe research is unique in its attempt to measure employee competencies for organizational effectiveness by combining the existing scales of individual competences. The article contributes to the HRD literature, integrating HRD interventions and employee competencies into a comprehensive research model that influence organizational effectiveness.