Angel grants employees their wish – for time off in return for high performance:new breed of incentives based on what staff really want from their employer

Purpose – Describes a new breed of HR strategies that encourage employee involvement and commitment as part of high-performance working (HPW). Design/methodology/approach – Focuses on managing employee attitudes and skills through careful attention to leadership, reward and job-design policies. Highlights the differences between people's formal employment contracts and their less formal “psychological contracts”, and emphasizes the importance of the latter. Provides a case study of UK recruitment consultancy Angel Services Group Ltd, which allows staff who meet their daily targets to go home an hour early. Findings – Urges companies to have processes in place to understand the needs of individual employees. This can be done through leadership policies that require all supervisors and managers not only to manage their staff but also to know them as people. Practical implications – Emphasizes that organizations need to see HPW initiatives as part of the normal way of managing people, and not as “flavour of the month”. Originality/value – Outlines a wide range of initiatives that could help organizations to gain their employees' commitment.

Children's views on unlicensed/off-label paediatric prescribing and paediatric clinical trials

Objectives - To explore the views and perspectives of children on the unlicensed/off-label use of medicines in children and on the participation of children in clinical trials. Methods - Focus-group discussions, involving school children, were carried out in a range of primary and secondary schools in Northern Ireland. A purposeful sample was chosen to facilitate representation of various socioeconomic groupings. Results - A total of 123 pupils, aged from 10 to 16 years, from six schools, participated in 16 focus groups. In general, pupils viewed the unlicensed/off-label use of medicines in children as unsafe and unethical and felt it is necessary to test medicines in children to improve the availability of licensed products. The majority felt that older children should be told, and that parents should be told, about the unlicensed/off-label use of medicines in children, yet they recognised some implications of this, such as potential medication non-adherence. Conclusions - This is the first study to explore the views of healthy children on unlicensed medicine use in children. Children were able to recognise potential risks associated with the unlicensed use of medicines and felt it is necessary to test and license more medicines in children. Practice implications - Health care professionals should consider the views of children in decisions that affect their health.

Healthcare professional experiences and attitudes on unlicensed/off-label paediatric prescribing and paediatric clinical trials

To investigate the knowledge and views of a range of healthcare professionals (consultant paediatricians, general practitioners (GPs), community pharmacists and paediatric nurses) regarding the use of unlicensed/off-label medicines in children and the participation of children in clinical trials.

Cortical mechanisms of attention in time:neural correlates of the Lag-1-sparing phenomenon

If humans monitor streams of rapidly presented (approximately 100-ms intervals) visual stimuli, which are typically specific single letters of the alphabet, for two targets (T1 and T2), they often miss T2 if it follows T1 within an interval of 200-500 ms. If T2 follows T1 directly (within 100 ms; described as occurring at 'Lag 1'), however, performance is often excellent: the so-called 'Lag-1 sparing' phenomenon. Lag-1 sparing might result from the integration of the two targets into the same 'event representation', which fits with the observation that sparing is often accompanied by a loss of T1-T2 order information. Alternatively, this might point to competition between the two targets (implying a trade-off between performance on T1 and T2) and Lag-1 sparing might solely emerge from conditional data analysis (i.e. T2 performance given T1 correct). We investigated the neural correlates of Lag-1 sparing by carrying out magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings during an attentional blink (AB) task, by presenting two targets with a temporal lag of either 1 or 2 and, in the case of Lag 2, with a nontarget or a blank intervening between T1 and T2. In contrast to Lag 2, where two distinct neural responses were observed, at Lag 1 the two targets produced one common neural response in the left temporo-parieto-frontal (TPF) area but not in the right TPF or prefrontal areas. We discuss the implications of this result with respect to competition and integration hypotheses, and with respect to the different functional roles of the cortical areas considered. We suggest that more than one target can be identified in parallel in left TPF, at least in the absence of intervening nontarget information (i.e. masks), yet identified targets are processed and consolidated as two separate events by other cortical areas (right TPF and PFC, respectively).

Soliton's eigenvalue based analysis on the generation mechanism of rogue wave phenomenon in optical fibers exhibiting weak third order dispersion

One of the extraordinary aspects of nonlinear wave evolution which has been observed as the spontaneous occurrence of astonishing and statistically extraordinary amplitude wave is called rogue wave. We show that the eigenvalues of the associated equation of nonlinear Schrödinger equation are almost constant in the vicinity of rogue wave and we validate that optical rogue waves are formed by the collision between quasi-solitons in anomalous dispersion fiber exhibiting weak third order dispersion.

Analysis of rogue wave phenomenon in optical fiber based on soliton's eigenvalue

The impact of third-order dispersion (TOD) on optical rogue wave phenomenon is investigated numerically. We validate the TOD coefficient by utilizing the eigenvalue of the associated equation of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE). © 2014 OSA.

On the dual-cone nature of the conical refraction phenomenon

In conical refraction (CR), a focused Gaussian input beam passing through a biaxial crystal and parallel to one of the optic axes is transformed into a pair of concentric bright rings split by a dark (Poggendorff) ring at the focal plane. Here, we show the generation of a CR transverse pattern that does not present the Poggendorff fine splitting at the focal plane, i.e., it forms a single light ring. This light ring is generated from a nonhomogeneously polarized input light beam obtained by using a spatially inhomogeneous polarizer that mimics the characteristic CR polarization distribution. This polarizer allows modulating the relative intensity between the two CR light cones in accordance with the recently proposed dual-cone model of the CR phenomenon. We show that the absence of interfering rings at the focal plane is caused by the selection of one of the two CR cones. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America