Your search

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the relationship between environmental performance and management and company valuation. With a specific focus on company valuation, this study shows how a firm’s environmental activities, including its environmental management practices, are perceived and valued by its stockholders. Design/methodology/approach: Newsweek’s green ranking data between 2014 and 2016 were used to support this analysis. Environmental performances and environmental management practices of 345 Fortune 500 companies from various industries were included in the data set. Findings: The analysis finds higher valuations for US companies that are more efficient in managing greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, it empirically shows that investors place a higher value on companies with the following environment-related management policies: initiatives that reward top management for achieving environmental goals and third-party auditing of environmental performance. Originality/value: By incorporating corporate environmental management practices as an additional environmental performance criterion, this research fills a gap in the literature on the potential relationship between corporate environmental performance and company valuation. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.

This paper examines the role of property rights and other factors to the growth of real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. We show using a two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) dynamic model and a panel data set of around 150 countries from 2006 to 2018 that property rights have a positive and significant effect on the growth of real GDP per capita. The paper also found that human capital, physical capital and inflation have significant effects on real GDP per capita growth. © 2021. All Rights Reserved.

In this paper, we develop a new point-of-entry security measure for smartphone users. We devise a concept, the “Quad Swipe Pattern”, which includes four swipes from a user in four directions and utilizes the user’s swipe behavior for authentication. The Quad Swipe Pattern overcomes several shortcomings present in current point-of-entry security measures. We performed several experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Quad Swipe Pattern in smartphone user authentication. We evaluated the Quad Swipe Pattern using five machine learning classifiers, three datasets of different sizes, and five different fingers. In addition, we studied how fusion of information from multiple fingers and multiple classifiers can improve the performance of Quad Swipe Pattern. All of our experimental results show significant promise of the Quad Swipe Pattern as a new point-of-entry security measure for smartphones. With a Neural Network model, the Quad Swipe Pattern achieves the Accuracy of 99.7%, False Acceptance Rate of 0.4%, and False Rejection Rate of 0%. With Support Vector Machine, the Quad Swipe Pattern achieves the Accuracy of 99.5%, False Acceptance Rate of 0.4%, and False Rejection Rate of 1.7%. With fusion of two best fingers, the Quad Swipe Pattern demonstrates an excellent performance of a zero Equal Error Rate.

A Skolem sequence can be thought of as a labelled path where two vertices with the samelabelarethatdistanceapart.Thisconcepthasnaturallybeengeneralizedto labellingsofothergraphs,butalwaysusingatmosttwoofanyintegerlabel.Giventhat more than two vertices can be mutually distance d apart, wedefine a new generalization of aSkolemsequenceongraphsthatwecallaproperSkolemlabelling.Thisbrings rise tothequestion;use to proper Skolemlabel a graph?"This will be known as the Skolem number of the graph. In this paper we give the Skolem number for cycles and grid graphs,while also providing other related results along the way. Published by Digital Commons@Georgia Southern, 2021. © 2021 Georgia Southern University. All rights reserved.

A rokudoku-pair square is an order-6 sudoku Latin square for both 2 x 3 and 3 x 2 tiling regions simultaneously. We count the distinct rokudoku-pair squares as well as orbits under the action of a suitable group. Our arguments employ group actions and list colorings of graphs. As an application we determine which rokudoku-pair squares are based on groups. © 2021. All Rights Reserved.

Image reconstruction for industrial applications based on Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) has been broadly applied. The goal of image reconstruction based ECT is to locate the distribution of permittivity for the dielectric substances along the cross-section based on the collected capacitance data. In the ECT-based image reconstruction process: (1) the relationship between capacitance measurements and permittivity distribution is nonlinear, (2) the capacitance measurements collected during image reconstruction are inadequate due to the limited number of electrodes, and (3) the reconstruction process is subject to noise leading to an ill-posed problem. Thence, constructing an accurate algorithm for real images is critical to overcoming such restrictions. This paper presents novel image reconstruction methods using Deep Learning for solving the forward and inverse problems of the ECT system for generating high-quality images of conductive materials in the Lost Foam Casting (LFC) process. Here, Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) models were implemented to predict the distribution of metal filling for the LFC process-based ECT. The recurrent connection and the gating mechanism of the LSTM is capable of extracting the contextual information that is repeatedly passing through the neural network while filtering out the noise caused by adverse factors. Experimental results showed that the presented ECT-LSTM-RNN model is highly reliable for industrial applications and can be utilized for other manufacturing processes. © 2013 IEEE.

Thirty-seven deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students in grades four through six participated in a year of Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction, an approach to writing instruction designed to be responsive to DHH students’ unique language experiences and profiles. The current study investigated the transfer of writing skills between genres by analyzing participants’ recount, information report, and persuasive writing samples at four time points: at the beginning of the academic year, immediately before genre-focused instruction, at the end of 9 weeks of instruction in a genre, and 9 weeks after the conclusion of instruction in a genre. Results from the study demonstrate that DHH students transfer genre-specific writing skills between genres. © 2021 The Authors

Grid resilience and reliability are pivotal in the transition to low and zero carbon energy systems. Tree-trimming operations (TTOs) have become a pivotal tool for increasing the resilience power grids, especially in highly forested regions. Building on recent literature, we aim at assessing the temporal and spatial extents of the benefits that TTOs produce on the grid from three perspectives: the frequency, extent, and duration of outages. We use a unique dataset provided by Eversource Energy, New England's largest utility company, with outage events from 2009 to 2015. We employ spatial econometrics to investigate both the legacy and spatial extent of TTOs. Our results show TTOs benefits occur for all three metrics for at least 4 years, and benefits spillover to up to 2 km throughout the treated areas, with significant spatial spillovers across the state greater than direct effects. Implications lead to supporting TTOs as part of the hardening policies for utility companies, especially as home-based activities increase in importance in a post-COVID19 world. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd

"This book provides awareness and discussion on the topic of inequities in healthcare that impact health disparities"--

Chapter 6 provides nurses, nurse leaders, and organizations interventions to understand, confront, and eliminate bullying and incivility from the workplace. Emotional intelligence (EI) and cognitive rehearsal are techniques when taught to nurses via in-services provided by organizations, can build awareness of verbal and nonverbal cues used in their communication as well as those of others. By understanding how we communicate and respond to others and vice versa, insight to what are appropriate and inappropriate responses can hold nurses accountable to how they treat one another. The neuroscience of oxytocin release at a biochemical level supports the benefits of organizations investing in the mental and physical health of their employees by empowering them to grow individually and as a collaborative team. © 2021, IGI Global.

Freshwater crustaceans are distributed throughout the montane and lowland areas of Colombia, and are therefore a useful indicator group for how aquatic species will respond to climate change. As such, metabolic determination of physiological performance was evaluated for the Colombian pseudothelphusid crab, Neostrengeria macropa (H. Milne Edwards, 1853), over a temperature range inclusive of current temperatures and those predicted by future scenarios in the plateau around the city of Bogotá, namely from 8 °C to 30 °C. The performance results mostly aligned with previous exploratory behavioral determination of the ideal temperature range in the same species, although the metabolism increased at the highest temperature treatments, a point when exploratory behavior declined. These results indicate that this species of montane crab behaviorally compensates for increased thermal stress by decreasing its physical activity, which could have negative predator-prey consequences with changes to community structure as different species undergo climate-mediated geographic range shifts in the region. As this species is endemic to the plateau surrounding Bogotá, it also experiences a number of other stressors to its survival, including infrastructure development and invasive species. © 2021 The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Crustacean Society. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.