This paper examines the use of incentive pay schemes within the financial services sector in London. Various theories of wage determination are reviewed with particular attention placed on the principal-agent literature as a framework for analysing the use of incentive pay. This is combined with case study interviews and a number of hypotheses regarding the use of bonuses. Quantitative analysis...

Patterned self-assembly tile set synthesis (PATS) aims at finding a minimum tile set to uniquely self-assemble a given rectangular color pattern. For k ≥ 1, k-PATS is a variant of PATS that restricts input patterns to those with at most k colors. We prove the NP-hardness of 29-PATS, where the best known is that of 60-PATS.

Patterned self-assembly tile set synthesis (Pats) is the problem of finding a minimal tile set which uniquely self-assembles into a given pattern. Czeizler and Popa proved the NP-completeness of Pats and Seki showed that the Pats problem is already NP-complete for patterns with 60 colors. In search for the minimal number of colors such that Pats remains NP-complete, we introduce multiple bound ...

BACKGROUND Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) is a core unit delivered across many medical schools. Few studies have investigated the most effective method of teaching a course in EBM to medical students. The objective of this study was to identify whether a blended-learning approach to teaching EBM is more effective a didactic-based approach at increasing medical student competency in EBM. METHOD...

We study a direct-sum question for read-once branching programs. If M(f) denotes the minimum average memory required to compute a function f(x1, x2, . . . , xn) how much memory is required to compute f on k independent inputs that arrive in parallel? We show that when the inputs are sampled independently from some domain X and M(f) = Ω(n), then computing the value of f on k streams requires ave...

BACKGROUND Curriculum evaluation is key to continuous assurance of quality of education. OBJECTIVES To assess the teachers' perceptions on how well student teaching and learning activities were conducted at an institution that had practiced PBL for five years. METHODS A cross sectional descriptive study. 150 teachers from 23 departments at the College of Health Sciences participated in the ...

Biological systems are capable of acting in a shared environment to produce emergent, self-organized behavior that is the result of the constraints imposed by local interactions– such as bird flocking or ant swarming behavior. These examples present minimal demands for a shared-intention between co-actors, whereas other instances necessitate the formation of a shared goal. In these goal-directe...

abstract background: gifted individuals have exclusive personality traits and need various experiences to achieve more information about themselves and their ability into developmental process from giftedness to talent. also, they can increase mental experiences and obtain greater self- actualization with recognition of the level of challenges, values and their personality traits. the aim of th...

methods the current cross sectional study included all female high school students in tehran in the 2014 - 2015 academic year. of these, 477 females were selected by multistage cluster sampling. results the results of the correlation matrix was indicative of a significant negative relationship between self-esteem and self-concept clarity with social comparison (p < 0.000). there was a significa...

background : work-family conflict has many negative outcomes for organization and career and family life of each person. the aim of present study was to determine the relationship between work-family conflict and the level of self-efficacy in female nurses. methods : in this cross-sectional descriptive research, the relationship between work-family conflict and the level of self-efficacy in fem...