BACKGROUND Extensive invasion of the maternal decidua by extravillous trophoblast is considered of critical importance for implantation and placentation in humans, the decidua being viewed as a ...passively invaded tissue. In this study, we examined whether decidual cells might contribute to the highly dynamic processes at the fetal–maternal interface by active movement. METHODS Primary endometrial stromal cells (ESCs) or the telomerase-immortalized ESC line, St-T1b, was induced to decidualize or was left undifferentiated. The AC-1M88 cell line served as a model for extravillous trophoblast cells. Motility of ESCs and trophoblast cells was monitored in transwell invasion and migration assays under co-culture conditions. Secretion of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) was assessed by gelatin zymography. RESULTS AC-1M88 cell invasiveness was unaffected by the presence of ESCs, irrespective of their decidualization status. Surprisingly, decidualized ESCs were significantly more invasive than undifferentiated cells, and this invasive activity was strongly enhanced when cells were cultured in direct contact with AC-1M88 cells. Conditioned medium from AC-1M88 cells also stimulated migration and invasion of ESCs. Secretion of MMP-2 and -9 by ESCs was increased upon decidualization. CONCLUSIONS Enhanced motility and invasive capacity of decidualized ESCs in the presence of trophoblastic cells lead us to hypothesize a major contribution of the decidua in encapsulating the early conceptus and supporting subsequent trophoblast invasion. Our findings thus suggest a far more active role of the decidua in the implantation process than hitherto recognized.
In this commentary, the authors argue that as scholars, they should remind themselves that some of the most significant contributions to management theory emerged from what might best be labeled ..."unconventional" organizational research: research where either or both the sample and the context are unusual by today's norms. Specifically, they are referring to studies intended to enhance understanding of critical organizational phenomena and relations by focusing on lower-echelon employees and/or exploring phenomena or relations that are observable or open to discovery in extreme or "unusual" contexts. Because those people in management work at the margin between basic and applied social science, the role of the unconventional in their research will likely remain a hotly contested subject for many years to come. As applied scholars, they need to remain vigilant about their efforts to be relevant to the managerial community that they seek to inform.
Iatrogenesis often results from performance deficiencies among medical team members. Team-targeted rudeness may underlie such performance deficiencies, with individuals exposed to rude behavior being ...less helpful and cooperative. Our objective was to explore the impact of rudeness on the performance of medical teams.
Twenty-four NICU teams participated in a training simulation involving a preterm infant whose condition acutely deteriorated due to necrotizing enterocolitis. Participants were informed that a foreign expert on team reflexivity in medicine would observe them. Teams were randomly assigned to either exposure to rudeness (in which the expert's comments included mildly rude statements completely unrelated to the teams' performance) or control (neutral comments). The videotaped simulation sessions were evaluated by 3 independent judges (blinded to team exposure) who used structured questionnaires to assess team performance, information-sharing, and help-seeking.
The composite diagnostic and procedural performance scores were lower for members of teams exposed to rudeness than to members of the control teams (2.6 vs 3.2 P = .005 and 2.8 vs 3.3 P = .008, respectively). Rudeness alone explained nearly 12% of the variance in diagnostic and procedural performance. A model specifying information-sharing and help-seeking as mediators linking rudeness to team performance explained an even greater portion of the variance in diagnostic and procedural performance (R(2) = 52.3 and 42.7, respectively).
Rudeness had adverse consequences on the diagnostic and procedural performance of the NICU team members. Information-sharing mediated the adverse effect of rudeness on diagnostic performance, and help-seeking mediated the effect of rudeness on procedural performance.
Saving Governance-By-Design Mulligan, Deirdre K.; Bamberger, Kenneth A.
California law review,
06/2018, Letnik:
106, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Governing through technology has proven irresistibly seductive. Everything from the Internet backbone to consumer devices employs technological design to regulate behavior purposefully by promoting ...values such as privacy, security, intellectual property protection, innovation, and freedom of expression. Legal and policy scholarship has discussed individual skirmishes over the political impact of technical choices—from whether intelligence and police agencies can gain access to privately encrypted data to debates over digital rights management. But it has failed to come to terms with the reality that “governance-by-design”—the purposeful effort to use technology to embed values—is becoming a central mode of policymaking, and that our existing regulatory system is fundamentally ill-equipped to prevent that phenomenon from subverting public governance.
Far from being a panacea, governance-by-design has undermined important governance norms and chipped away at our voting, speech, privacy, and equality rights. In administrative agencies, courts, Congress, and international policy bodies, public discussions about embedding values in design arise in a one-off, haphazard way, if at all. Constrained by their structural limitations, these traditional venues rarely explore the full range of other values that design might affect, and often advance, a single value or occasionally pit one value against another. They seldom permit a meta-discussion about when and whether it is appropriate to enlist technology in the service of values at all. And their policy discussions almost never include designers, engineers, and those that study the impact of socio-technical systems on values.
When technology is designed to regulate without such discussions—as it often is—the effects can be even more insidious. The resulting technology often hides government and corporate aims and the fundamental political decisions that have been made. In this way, governance-by-design obscures policy choices altogether. Such choices recede from the political as they become what “is” rather than what politics has determined ought to be.
This Article proposes a detailed framework for saving governance-by-design.
Through four case studies, the Article examines a range of recent battles over the values embedded in technology design and makes the case that we are entering an era of policymaking by “design war.” These four battles, in turn, highlight four recurring dysfunctions of governance-by-design:
First, governance-by-design overreaches by using overbroad technological fixes that lack the flexibility to balance equities and adapt to changing circumstances. Errors and unintended consequences result.
Second, governance-by-design often privileges one or a few values while excluding other important ones, particularly broad human rights.
Third, regulators lack the proper tools for governance-by-design. Administrative agencies, legislatures, and courts often lack technical expertise and have traditional structures and accountability mechanisms that poorly fit the job of regulating technology.
Fourth, governance-by-design decisions that broadly affect the public are often made in private venues or in processes that make technological choices appear inevitable and apolitical.
If we fail to develop new rules of engagement for governance-by-design, substantial and consequential policy choices will be made without effective public participation, purposeful debate, and relevant expertise. Important values will be sacrificed—sometimes inadvertently, because of bad decisions, and sometimes willfully, because decisions will be captured by powerful stakeholders.
To address these critical issues, this Article proposes four rules of engagement. It constructs a framework to help decision makers protect values and democratic processes as they consider regulating by technology. Informed by the examination of skirmishes across the battlefields, as well as relevant Science and Technology Studies (STS), legal, design, and engineering literatures, this framework embraces four overarching imperatives:
1. Design with Modesty and Restraint to Preserve Flexibility
2. Privilege Human and Public Rights
3. Ensure Regulators Possess the Right Tools: Broad Authority and Competence, and Technical Expertise
4. Maintain the Publicness of Policymaking
These rules of engagement offer a way toward surfacing and resolving value disputes in technological design, while proeserving rather than subverting public governance and public values.
Rudeness is routinely experienced by medical teams. We sought to explore the impact of rudeness on medical teams' performance and test interventions that might mitigate its negative consequences.
...Thirty-nine NICU teams participated in a training workshop including simulations of acute care of term and preterm newborns. In each workshop, 2 teams were randomly assigned to either an exposure to rudeness (in which the comments of the patient's mother included rude statements completely unrelated to the teams' performance) or control (neutral comments) condition, and 2 additional teams were assigned to rudeness with either a preventative (cognitive bias modification CBM) or therapeutic (narrative) intervention. Simulation sessions were evaluated by 2 independent judges, blind to team exposure, who used structured questionnaires to assess team performance.
Rudeness had adverse consequences not only on diagnostic and intervention parameters (mean therapeutic score 3.81 ± 0.36 vs 4.31 ± 0.35 in controls, P < .01), but also on team processes (such as information and workload sharing, helping and communication) central to patient care (mean teamwork score 4.04 ± 0.34 vs 4.43 ± 0.37, P < .05). CBM mitigated most of these adverse effects of rudeness, but the postexposure narrative intervention had no significant effect.
Rudeness has robust, deleterious effects on the performance of medical teams. Moreover, exposure to rudeness debilitated the very collaborative mechanisms recognized as essential for patient care and safety. Interventions focusing on teaching medical professionals to implicitly avoid cognitive distraction such as CBM may offer a means to mitigate the adverse consequences of behaviors that, unfortunately, cannot be prevented.
CEACAM1, also known as biliary glycoprotein (BGP), CD66a, pp120 and C-CAM1, is a member of the CEA immunoglobulin superfamily. CEACAM1 is a putative tumor suppressor based on diminished expression in ...some solid neoplasms such as colorectal carcinoma. However, CEACAM1 is overexpressed in some tumors such as non-small cell lung cancer. To clarify the mechanism of action of this cell adhesion molecule, we studied thyroid carcinoma that has a spectrum of morphologies and variable behavior allowing separation of proliferation from invasion and metastasis. CEACAM1 is expressed in thyroid carcinoma cell lines derived from tumors that exhibit aggressive behavior. Introduction of CEACAM1 into endogenously deficient WRO cells resulted in reduced cell cycle progression associated with p21 upregulation and diminished Rb phosphorylation. Forced CEACAM1 expression enhanced cell-matrix adhesion and migration and promoted tumor invasiveness. Conversely, small interfering RNA (siRNA)-mediated downregulation of CEACAM1 expression in MRO cells accelerated cell cycle progression and significantly enhanced tumor size in xenografted mice. CEACAM1 is not appreciably expressed in normal thyroid tissue or benign thyroid tumors. In a human thyroid tissue array, CEACAM1 reactivity was associated with metastatic spread but not with increased tumor size. These findings identify CEACAM1 as a unique mediator that restricts tumor growth whereas increasing metastatic potential. Our data highlight a complex repertoire of actions providing a putative mechanism underlying the spectrum of biologic behaviors associated with thyroid cancer.
Abstract
Here we determine whether entropy drives planar turbulent jets into round turbulent jets. Determining when a jet flow transitions from one symmetry to the next is an important but ...incompletely resolved problem. The constructal view argues that the transition between symmetries of jet flows is governed by the minimization or maximization of entropy. Here we explore whether entropy increases with the transition of a planar turbulent jet into a round turbulent jet and whether entropy maximization (or minimization) predicts the same location of symmetry transition as velocity matching. We find that entropy considerations presented do not predict this transition.
The authors investigated the moderating role of unit-level performance resources on the distress-mediated relationship between the intensity of involvement in workplace critical incidents and ...problematic drinking behavior (i.e., drinking to cope). Building on recent developments in hierarchical linear modeling, the authors tested a cross-level, moderated-mediation model using data from 1,481 firefighters in 144 companies. The findings indicate that (a) there is a significant, distress-mediated association between intensity of involvement in such incidents and drinking to cope, which varies by company (i.e., unit), and (b) the adequacy of unit-level performance resources explains much of this cross-unit variance and attenuates both individual-level mediation stages (i.e., intensity of involvement in critical incidents → distress, and distress → drinking to cope). Implications regarding the role of unit resources adequacy as a vulnerability factor in stressor-strain relations are discussed.
PDF
