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Author(s): Olga Caramelo[sup.1], Cristina Silva[sup.2], Francisco Caramelo[sup.3], Cristina Frutuoso[sup.1], Leonor Pinto[sup.4] and Teresa Almeida-Santos[sup.5,6] Introduction Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) accounts for approximately 15% of all breast cancers and represents a [...], Purpose Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive breast cancer strongly associated with BRCA mutation. Standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy remains the standard of care for early stage TNBC, the optimal chemotherapy regimen is still a matter of discussion. Other agents, such as poly-ADP-ribosyl polymerase inhibitors (PARPi) and anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) antibodies were evaluated in the neoadjuvant setting. This systematic review and meta-analysis intend to evaluate the impact of neoadjuvant treatments in pCR rates in TNBC gBRCA mutation, beyond traditional standard chemotherapy. Methods PubMed, Clinicaltrials.gov, Cochrane CENTRAL, Embase and key oncological meetings for trials were searched for studies reporting neoadjuvant chemo-immunotherapy in BRCA positive TNBC. Results Out of 1238 records reviewed, thirty-one trials were included, resulting in a total 619 BRCA-mutated TNBC patients. In BRCA mutated TNBC patients who received cisplatin in monotherapy the proportion of patients who achieved pCR was 0.53 (95%CI [0.30, 0.76]), and when treatment combined standard chemotherapy and platin derivatives the proportion of pCR increased to 0.62 (95% CI [0.48, 0.76]). The group of patients treated with platin derivatives, anthracyclines [+ or -] taxanes achieved the highest proportion of pCR, 0.66. Patients treated with PARPi alone show a pCR proportion of 0.55 (95% CI [0.30, 0.81]); and when standard chemotherapy and platin derivatives were combined with PARPi the proportion of pCR did not vary. Conclusions Patients with BRCA mutated TNBC treated with cisplatin in monotherapy demonstrate inferior proportion in the pCR achievement when compared with standard chemotherapy plus platin derivates. The best pCR was achieved with platin derivates in association with anthracyclines [+ or -] taxanes. No difference in pCR was found between PARPi alone vs PARPi with standard chemotherapy. Keywords: Triple negative breast cancer, BRCA, Neoadjuvant chemotherapy, Cisplatin, Carboplatin, PARPi

West Region LeMoyne-Owen College Memphis, Tennessee 31 March 2012 Oral Presentations Session I First Place--Nick Watkins. Altered Ultrasonic Vocalizations in a Mouse Model of Fragile X Syndrome. Christian Brothers University, [...]

This article uses a form of linguistic ethnography (LE) to analyze videotaped recordings of gossip that took place during formal school meetings. By comparing these gossip data against existing models of gossip based on data collected in informal settings, the authors identify eleven new response classes, including four forms of indirectness that operate to cloak gossip under ambiguity and seven forms of avoidance that change the trajectory of gossip. In doing so, this article makes three larger contributions. First, it opens a new front in research on organizational politics by providing an empirically grounded, conceptually rich vocabulary for analyzing gossip in formal contexts. Second, it contributes to knowledge about social interactions in organizations. By examining gossip talk embedded within a work context, this project highlights the nexus among structure, agency, and interaction. Third, it contributes to understandings of gossip in general. By examining gossip in a context previously unexamined, this project provides analytical leverage for theorizing conditions under which gossip is likely and when it will take various forms. Keywords gossip, work, organizations, micro-politics, power

Computer understanding of human actions and interactions is one of the key research issues in human computing. In this regard, context plays an essential role in semantic understanding of human behavioral and social signals from sensor data. This paper put forward an event-based dynamic context model to address the problems of context awareness in the analysis of group interaction scenarios. Event-driven multilevel dynamic Bayesian network is correspondingly proposed to detect multilevel events, which underlies the context awareness mechanism. Online analysis can be achieved, which is superior over previous works. Experiments in our smart meeting room demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Index Terms--Dynamic Bayesian network (DBN), dynamic context model, group interaction analysis, meeting analysis.

We address the problem of recognizing the visual focus of attention (VFOA) of meeting participants based on their head pose. To this end, the head pose observations are modeled using a Ganssian mixture model (GMM) or a hidden Markov model (HMM) whose hidden states correspond to the VFOA. The novelties of this paper are threefold. First, contrary to previous studies on the topic, in our setup, the potential VFOA of a person is not restricted to other participants only. It includes environmental targets as well (a table and a projection screen), which increases the complexity of the task, with more VFOA targets spread in the pan as well as tilt gaze space. Second, we propose a geometric model to set the GMM or HMM parameters by exploiting results from cognitive science on saccadic eye motion, which allows the prediction of the head pose given a gaze target. Third, an unsupervised parameter adaptation step not using any labeled data is proposed, which accounts for the specific gazing behavior of each participant. Using a publicly available corpus of eight meetings featuring four persons, we analyze the above methods by evaluating, through objective performance measures, the recognition of the VFOA from head pose information obtained either using a magnetic sensor device or a vision-based tracking system. The results clearly show that in such complex but realistic situations, the VFOA recognition performance is highly dependent on how well the visual targets are separated for a given meeting participant. In addition, the results show that the use of a geometric model with unsupervised adaptation achieves better results than the use of training data to set the HMM parameters. Index Terms--Head pose tracking, hidden markov model, maximum a posteriori adaptation, meeting analysis, particle filter, visual focus of attention.

School districts are both big businesses and a form of local governance that is part of American democracy. When a crisis makes a district's democratic face relevant, the organization will experience a dilemma that does not occur in business-only organizations. This study examines the public meetings of a school board in the western United States as it confronted a multimillion dollar error. After reviewing the organizational crisis literature, background is provided on the district, the crisis, and the method--action-implicative discourse analysis. The district's crisis, the paper shows, was constructed through six discursive practices. Each is identified and illustrated. Because school boards are democratic bodies, they depend on having citizens willing to attend and speak out in public meetings, and they depend on a smaller set of citizens willing to run for and serve in these elected, unpaid school board positions. In crises, these two groups of citizens will have partially competing needs. As a result, local governance organizations will experience a dilemma regarding how to design their public participation. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research on organizational crisis and public meetings, and practical implications for citizens and elected officials. Keywords: Local Governance; Public Meetings; School Board; Organizational Crisis; Democracy; Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis

Byline: Gert-Jan de Vreede (1), Fred Niederman (2), Ilse Paarlberg (3) Keywords: facilitation; group support systems; meeting technology; participant perceptions; questionnaire; survey Abstract: Facilitation is often considered to be one of the key factors in the successful application of GSS. Research on GSS facilitation has revealed insight into the types of tasks performed by facilitators and the potential positive effects of facilitation on group consensus and satisfaction. However, earlier research has rarely approached GSS facilitation from the participants' point of view. In this study a questionnaire was developed and distributed to 369 participants of facilitated GSS meetings in order to measure their perceptions of various facilitation tasks. The results suggested three categories of facilitation tasks that are perceived as important by participants. Each of these categories strongly correlated with participants' meeting satisfaction. Further research is needed to refine these categories so that the instrument may be used to evaluate a facilitator's performance. Author Affiliation: (1) Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands (2) Decision Sciences and MIS, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA (3) Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Article History: Registration Date: 12/10/2004

Superior performance results from flexible structures such as familiarity and formal interventions by members in decision-making groups. However, formal interventions in familiar groups are unlikely to produce the same results.

The effect of voice in homogenous and heterogeneous groups is analyzed. It is observed that the policy decisions emanating from homogenous group duly take into account the information provided by the individuals seated farthest from the group leader and thus such an individual has a reason to make his point. But in heterogeneous group, the possibility of information exchange is highly restricted and in fact the policies may be pushed to the other extreme on individual's attempt to share information.

We study how newspaper editors, in conference meetings, jointly determine which stories will appear on the front page. Previous research on editorial gatekeeping has identified various standards of newsworthiness that serve as selection criteria. We focus on the actual practices through which gatekeeping decisions are rendered. We provide an overview of the primary phases of activity in conference meetings, identify various practices for promoting stories as page-one material, and analyze in detail one particular practice - verbal assessments of newsworthiness. We find that editors display a systematic preference for mildly favorable assessments over both stronger and weaker ones, apparently because restrained support enables them to maintain solidary relations with reporters and editorial colleagues. Moreover, assessment favorability is significantly associated with gatekeeping outcomes.

East Region Walters State Community College Morristown, Tennessee 12 April 2013 Oral Presentations Behavioral Sciences First Place--Eugenie de Silva. Analysis of Denial and Deception (D&D) Practices in the Intelligence Field. [...]

Companies should promote the development of meeting skills to enhance the efficiency of such horizontal organizations as continuous improvement task forces, natural work groups and crossfunctional teams. The operating review meeting (ORM) is ideal for such organizational structures since it encourages open inter-departmental communications and high-performance standards. ORMs will also help managers in the goal-setting process as well as teach organizations how to plan, control and delegate.