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Software that easily helps higher education instructors to remove poor quality items and set appropriate grade boundaries is generally lacking. To address these challenges, the SmartStandardSet system provides a graphical-user interface for removing defective items, weighting student scores using a two-parameter model IRT score analysis, and a mechanism for standard-setting. We evaluated the system through a series of six interviews with teachers and six focus groups involving 19 students to understand how key stakeholders would view the use of the tool in practice. Generally, both groups of participants reported high levels of feasibility, accuracy, and utility in SmartStandardSet’s statistical scoring of items and score calculation for test-takers. Teachers indicated the data displays would help them improve future test items; students indicated the system would be fairer and would motivate greater effort on more difficult test items. However, both groups had concerns about implementing the system without institutional policy endorsement. Students specifically were concerned that academics may set grade boundaries on arbitrary and invalid grounds. Our results provide useful insights into the perceived benefits of using the tool for standard setting, and suggest concrete next steps for gaining wider acceptance that will be the focus of future work.

Tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) plays a key role to understand how tumors respond to prostate cancer (PC) therapies and potential mechanisms of resistance. Previous research has suggested that specific genomic aberrations, such as microsatellite instability (MSI) or CDK12 bi-allelic loss can allow PC patients more likely to respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) or other immune therapies. However, responses to these treatments remain highly variable even in selected patients. Thus, it is essential to obtain more information about tumor immune cells that infiltrate these tumors, and on their plasticity and interactions, in order to better understand the underlying biology to allow development of new therapeutic strategies. This review analyzes: 1) How interactions among immune cell populations and other cells infiltrating the tumor stroma can modulate the progression of PC, 2) How the standard therapies to treat PC (such as androgen deprivation therapy, new androgen-directed hormone therapy or chemotherapy) may influence the dynamic changes of the immunome and 3) What are the limitations in characterizing the immune landscape of the host´s response to tumors., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 San-Jose Manso, Alfranca, Moreno-Pérez, Ruiz-Vico, Velasco, Toquero, Pacheco, Zapatero, Aldave, Celada, Albers, Fenor de la Maza, García, Castro, Olmos, Colomer and Romero-Laorden.)

Social accounting focuses on value transactions between organizations and their stakeholders; both market ones, where the value perceived by the different stakeholders is identified, and non-markets ones, where transactions are monetized at their fair value. There was long awareness of an emotional value translation, linked to the transfer of different products, services, remunerations, and incentives, regardless of whether they were market or non-market. Yet that emotional value seemed to be anchored in the field of psychology and managed to elude economic science. This study seeks to identify emotional value with consumer surplus and, by extension, of the other stakeholders in a value transfer process. This proposal allows the emotional value to be anchored in the micro-economy and allows it to be objectively calculated using a regression involving three elements: the market price, the fair value interval, and a perceived satisfaction score by the different stakeholders in the form of significant sampling. The result obtained not only allows Social Accounting to be complemented with emotional value, but it also facilitates its incorporation in the strategy to optimize the emotional value. Furthermore, it enables a quantification of the perceived subjective utility, which opens up a research path where some possible lines are clearly identified., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Retolaza and San-Jose.)

Objective: The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that it is possible to monetize the social value generated by a hospital and use it to establish a different perspective to analyze the efficiency of public spending., Method: A public hospital in Spain was selected using the case method. It is suitable for two reasons; first, the hospital activity is small and therefore dialogue with stakeholders is easy; and second, as it is a hospital of a residential nature, it allows an easy, modifiable and testable approximation of social accounting in hospitals., Results: It establishes the monetary translation of the activity of a hospital, including the social part of the economic transactions (market), the variables that have not been created based on economic transaction, but have been perceived and valued by the stakeholders (not market), and the satisfaction of the stakeholders (emotional). This socio-emotional value amounts to approximately 60 million Euros per year from 2013 to 2017., Conclusions: The social value generated for the stakeholders, and its monetization, allows more efficient management of decisions towards the social purpose of public hospitals. In particular, the social value added index can be a tool for the social-efficiency of hospitals, as it establishes how much social value it generates from the public funding allocated to it. Thus, the decline in this value in recent years denotes a problem that, without this analysis with a social perspective and from the stakeholders, could not have been detected., (Copyright © 2019 SESPAS. Publicado por Elsevier España, S.L.U. All rights reserved.)

Religious oriented organizations (ROOs) have frequently higher levels of motivation among their employees, because the aims of ROOs and those of collaborators and stakeholders are usually aligned. However, sometimes, when the management of ROOs becomes professionalized, tensions between aims and efficiency are more frequent, and productivity levels start to decline. The most widespread current management theories are focused on profit maximization and are not especially helpful to religious organizations which try to enhance their productivity levels and, at the same time, achive their mission and aims. In order to fill this gap, in this research, we will develop two main concepts: social accounting and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). We will propose the use of social accounting to calculate the social value generated by ROOs and, from that point, build new indicators able to measure the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of collaborators working in ROOs. We will exemplify this theoretical development with the actual case of the diocese of Bilbao. In short, the main objectives of this work are two. The first objective is the development of a theoretical framework able to enhance the levels of social value creation inside religious (and socially oriented) organizations using social accounting. The second objective is the use of data from the 16 educative centers of the diocese of Bilbao to ilustrate that social accounting is a valid tool to measure social value. Additionally, we will show that social accounting can be a tool to assess management decisions in order to enhance organizational and individual OCB in ROOs and, in this way, generate moral satisfaction for employees and collaborators in their organizations., (Copyright © 2020 Retolaza, Aguado and San-Jose.)

Background and Aims: Distribution shifts and natural selection during past climatic changes are important factors in determining the genetic structure of forest species. In particular, climatic fluctuations during the Quaternary appear to have caused changes in the distribution ranges of plants, and thus strongly affected their genetic structure. This study was undertaken to identify the responses of the conifer Cryptomeria japonica, endemic to the Japanese Archipelago, to past climatic changes using a combination of phylogeography and species distribution modelling (SDM) methods. Specifically, this study focused on the locations of refugia during the last glacial maximum (LGM)., Methods: Genetic diversity and structure were examined using 20 microsatellite markers in 37 populations of C. japonica. The locations of glacial refugia were assessed using STRUCTURE analysis, and potential habitats under current and past climate conditions were predicted using SDM. The process of genetic divergence was also examined using the approximate Bayesian computation procedure (ABC) in DIY ABC to test the divergence time between the gene pools detected by the STRUCTURE analysis., Key Results: STRUCTURE analysis identified four gene pools: northern Tohoku district; from Chubu to Chugoku district; from Tohoku to Shikoku district on the Pacific Ocean side of the Archipelago; and Yakushima Island. DIY ABC analysis indicated that the four gene pools diverged at the same time before the LGM. SDM also indicated potential northern cryptic refugia., Conclusions: The combined evidence from microsatellites and SDM clearly indicates that climatic changes have shaped the genetic structure of C. japonica. The gene pool detected in northern Tohoku district is likely to have been established by cryptic northern refugia on the coast of the Japan Sea to the west of the Archipelago. The gene pool in Yakushima Island can probably be explained simply by long-term isolation from the other gene pools since the LGM. These results are supported by those of SDM and the predicted divergence time determined using ABC analysis., (© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Annals of Botany Company. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Accumulating evidence has suggested the existence of a human action recognition system involving inferior frontal, parietal, and superior temporal regions that may participate in both the perception and execution of actions. However, little is known about the specificity of this system in response to different forms of human action. Here we present data from PET neuroimaging studies from passive viewing of three distinct action types, intransitive self-oriented actions (e.g., stretching, rubbing one's eyes, etc.), transitive object-oriented actions (e.g., opening a door, lifting a cup to the lips to drink), and the abstract, symbolic actions-signs used in American Sign Language. Our results show that these different classes of human actions engage a frontal/parietal/STS human action recognition system in a highly similar fashion. However, the results indicate that this neural consistency across motion classes is true primarily for hearing subjects. Data from deaf signers shows a non-uniform response to different classes of human actions. As expected, deaf signers engaged left-hemisphere perisylvian language areas during the perception of signed language signs. Surprisingly, these subjects did not engage the expected frontal/parietal/STS circuitry during passive viewing of non-linguistic actions, but rather reliably activated middle-occipital temporal-ventral regions which are known to participate in the detection of human bodies, faces, and movements. Comparisons with data from hearing subjects establish statistically significant contributions of middle-occipital temporal-ventral during the processing of non-linguistic actions in deaf signers. These results suggest that during human motion processing, deaf individuals may engage specialized neural systems that allow for rapid, online differentiation of meaningful linguistic actions from non-linguistic human movements.

Unlike spoken languages, sign languages of the deaf make use of two primary articulators, the right and left hands, to produce signs. This situation has no obvious parallel in spoken languages, in which speech articulation is carried out by symmetrical unitary midline vocal structures. This arrangement affords a unique opportunity to examine the robustness of linguistic systems that underlie language production in the face of contrasting articulatory demands and to chart the differential effects of handedness for highly skilled movements. Positron emission tomography (PET) technique was used to examine brain activation in 16 deaf users of American Sign Language (ASL) while subjects generated verb signs independently with their right dominant and left nondominant hands (compared to the repetition of noun signs). Nearly identical patterns of left inferior frontal and right cerebellum activity were observed. This pattern of activation during signing is consistent with patterns that have been reported for spoken languages including evidence for specializations of inferior frontal regions related to lexical-semantic processing, search and retrieval, and phonological encoding. These results indicate that lexical-semantic processing in production relies upon left-hemisphere regions regardless of the modality in which a language is realized, and that this left-hemisphere activation is stable, even in the face of conflicting articulatory demands. In addition, these data provide evidence for the role of the right posterolateral cerebellum in linguistic-cognitive processing and evidence of a left ventral fusiform contribution to sign language processing.