Caring and humanism in hospitals exist on both the organizational and the individual levels. This paper identifies key organizations and foundations that have succeeded in promoting or fostering caring environments in hospitals. These include the Picker Institute, the Baptist Healing Trust, Sage Consulting, and the Caritas Consortium. Exemplary, caring clinicians in hospitals are also described...

Antitrust authorities have set up leniency programs for cartel members that denounce their collusive agreements. These programs help prosecute participants and can thereby deter collusion. We compare the impact of reduced fines and positive rewards and argue that rewarding individuals, including firm employees, can deter collusion in a more effective way. We discuss possible adverse effects of ...

Conflict has been proposed to act as a cost in action selection, implying a general function of medio-frontal cortex in the adaptation to aversive events. Here we investigate if response conflict acts as a cost during reinforcement learning by modulating experienced reward values in cortical and striatal systems. Electroencephalography recordings show that conflict diminishes the relationship b...

Power management is at the forefront of challenges facing next-generation computing systems. Multiple mechanisms for dynamic regulation of processor power can be used aggressively to address power and thermal issues in real time; however, to do so effectively requires knowledge of the power and performance impact of the power-regulation choices. The problem is complex since the impact of each m...

This research identifies factors affecting the operation of a supply chain in a large, asset rich transport utility, and how a recent Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP) implementation was perceived with respect to its usability for the task. A lack of trust in the ERP, ineffective training methods and complexity in extracting the data from the ERP were identified as a problem which lead ...

A growing body of evidence demonstrates a rhythmic characteristic spatial attention, with the corresponding behavioral performance fluctuating periodically. Here, we investigate whether and how attention is affected by reward—an important factor in attentional selection. We adopted classic cueing paradigm time-resolved stimulus-onset-asynchrony (SOA) between cue target such that responses to di...

This comment argues that instead of worrying about the pros and cons of whistleblowing one should focus on the more general problem of the failure of upward communication around safety and quality problems and consider what leaders and managers must do to stimulate subordinates to communicate and reward such communication. The article analyzes why safety failures occur and introduces the concep...

We address the problem of coordinating the plans and schedules for a team of agents in an uncertain and dynamic environment. Bounded rationality, bounded communication, subjectivity and distribution make it extremely challenging to find effective strategies. The Criticality-Sensitive Coordination (CSC) system uses multiple policy modification managers making predictable policy changes based on ...

Dialogue management is the component of a dialogue system that determines the optimal action for the system to take at each turn. An important consideration for dialogue managers is the ability to adapt to new user behaviors unseen during training. In this paper, we investigate policy gradient based methods for interactive reinforcement learning where the agent receives action-specific feedback...

In the 1960s, discovery of pleasure system (defined as reward system) in the brain that may underlie drug reward and addiction encouraged many scientists to investigate the mechanisms by which drug abuse affects central nervous system function. In this regard, investigators developed several drugs targeting the brain reward system for drug dependence therapy. However, no positive results obtain...