405 research outputs found

    Re-evaluation of the risks to public health related to the presence of bisphenol A (BPA) in foodstuffs

    Get PDF
    Publisher Copyright: © 2023 European Food Safety Authority. EFSA Journal published by Wiley-VCH GmbH on behalf of European Food Safety Authority.In 2015, EFSA established a temporary tolerable daily intake (t-TDI) for BPA of 4 μg/kg body weight (bw) per day. In 2016, the European Commission mandated EFSA to re-evaluate the risks to public health from the presence of BPA in foodstuffs and to establish a tolerable daily intake (TDI). For this re-evaluation, a pre-established protocol was used that had undergone public consultation. The CEP Panel concluded that it is Unlikely to Very Unlikely that BPA presents a genotoxic hazard through a direct mechanism. Taking into consideration the evidence from animal data and support from human observational studies, the immune system was identified as most sensitive to BPA exposure. An effect on Th17 cells in mice was identified as the critical effect; these cells are pivotal in cellular immune mechanisms and involved in the development of inflammatory conditions, including autoimmunity and lung inflammation. A reference point (RP) of 8.2 ng/kg bw per day, expressed as human equivalent dose, was identified for the critical effect. Uncertainty analysis assessed a probability of 57–73% that the lowest estimated Benchmark Dose (BMD) for other health effects was below the RP based on Th17 cells. In view of this, the CEP Panel judged that an additional uncertainty factor (UF) of 2 was needed for establishing the TDI. Applying an overall UF of 50 to the RP, a TDI of 0.2 ng BPA/kg bw per day was established. Comparison of this TDI with the dietary exposure estimates from the 2015 EFSA opinion showed that both the mean and the 95th percentile dietary exposures in all age groups exceeded the TDI by two to three orders of magnitude. Even considering the uncertainty in the exposure assessment, the exceedance being so large, the CEP Panel concluded that there is a health concern from dietary BPA exposure.Peer reviewe

    Travels along the hype cycle: a set of blockchain applications and the economic processes they impact

    Get PDF
    Some commentators refer to blockchain as a potential General Purpose Technology. Yet despite a plethora of cryptoassets and projects, it has struggled to gain traction beyond payments and price discovery. This thesis explores how the technology is being applied to better understand the potential and risks of deploying blockchain. It examines four different use cases with econometric and case study methods: (1) Bitcoin mining as the token incentivized processing of records, (2) Initial Coin Offering tokens as a form of venture financing, (3) Uniswap the decentralized exchange and (4) Kompany improving the data integrity of compliance records via notarization to a public blockchain. It finds that blockchain enables capabilities that did not exist before, but that these capabilities are bounded by trade offs and developer priorities. Ultimately this research expands the literature on blockchain applications and argues that blockchain does not build better systems, but different systems that can achieve different objectives. It provides evidence that firms and society are gradually traversing the hype cycle, deploying blockchain, solving real world economic problems and creating value

    Computational acquisition of knowledge in small-data environments: a case study in the field of energetics

    Get PDF
    The UK’s defence industry is accelerating its implementation of artificial intelligence, including expert systems and natural language processing (NLP) tools designed to supplement human analysis. This thesis examines the limitations of NLP tools in small-data environments (common in defence) in the defence-related energetic-materials domain. A literature review identifies the domain-specific challenges of developing an expert system (specifically an ontology). The absence of domain resources such as labelled datasets and, most significantly, the preprocessing of text resources are identified as challenges. To address the latter, a novel general-purpose preprocessing pipeline specifically tailored for the energetic-materials domain is developed. The effectiveness of the pipeline is evaluated. Examination of the interface between using NLP tools in data-limited environments to either supplement or replace human analysis completely is conducted in a study examining the subjective concept of importance. A methodology for directly comparing the ability of NLP tools and experts to identify important points in the text is presented. Results show the participants of the study exhibit little agreement, even on which points in the text are important. The NLP, expert (author of the text being examined) and participants only agree on general statements. However, as a group, the participants agreed with the expert. In data-limited environments, the extractive-summarisation tools examined cannot effectively identify the important points in a technical document akin to an expert. A methodology for the classification of journal articles by the technology readiness level (TRL) of the described technologies in a data-limited environment is proposed. Techniques to overcome challenges with using real-world data such as class imbalances are investigated. A methodology to evaluate the reliability of human annotations is presented. Analysis identifies a lack of agreement and consistency in the expert evaluation of document TRL.Open Acces

    Financial reporting in Europe: Accounting for regulatory and technical challenges

    Get PDF
    This thesis explores the challenges facing financial reporting in Europe both regulatory and technical in nature. This has involved research into the background of European legislation and conducting face to face semi-structured interviews with senior elite actors from institutions governing the regulatory and technical arrangements of general-purpose financial reporting practice in Europe. European companies are required to disclose information about their financial affairs. The European legislation governing company financial reporting was delegated to the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) by the EU institutions via Regulation 1606/2002. This thesis argues that European agencies (represented by EFRAG) are caught in a devolved regulatory relationship where the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has been able to assume a relatively strong self-regulatory position. This weakens the agency that European legislative institutions have over their own legislation with regards to financial reporting practice. This thesis argues this loss of agency by European institutions over their legislation governing accounting practice is not a fait accompli but is challenged and contested as European institutions seek and need a more co-regulated arrangement. A key argument developed in this thesis is that regulatory arrangements governing accounting practice are evolving in terms of the distribution of responsibilities and control over European financial reporting practice. To understand how the regulatory landscape governing European accounting practice is changing we employ an investigative lens that is grounded in accounting. This investigative lens employs three elements that are regarded in the literature review as significant technical challenges facing accounting practice in Europe. The first of these is retaining or not prudent accounting practice, the second is concerned with the development of non-financial reporting and the third, concerns with installing the public interest not just investor interests in financial disclosures. It is through this investigative lens that this thesis assesses the extent to which regulatory arrangements and agency governing accounting practice in Europe are shifting sands

    Business sustainability: understanding the influence of managers and stakeholders on adopting sustainability practices in Nigerian SMEs

    Get PDF
    A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.The importance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in any economy must be balanced, yet hardly the sector attracts the needed attention for sustainability. This has led to unacceptable high mortality rates for the sector, especially in emerging contexts. Nevertheless, SMEs and sustainability agenda share significant melting pots of disrupting large-scale extreme poverty, among other benefits. Numerous literature supports this and acknowledges SMEs' potential for national employment, investment stimulation and gross domestic growth (GDP). This study aimed to unveil the impacts of managerial characteristics and stakeholders on Nigerian SME sustainability practices to understand SME business sustainability practices in developing countries. To fully investigate these impacts, three research questions enabled the navigation of this project. Firstly, to ascertain the current antecedents influencing SME sustainability practices. Secondly, we quizzed the relationship between the manager's characteristics and Nigerian SME sustainability practices. Furthermore, finally, we sort out how stakeholders influence SMEs' sustainability practices in Nigeria. A qualitative research approach was adopted within an interpretivist philosophical paradigm to construct participants narrated perspectives of sustainability practices. Data were collected from twenty-two (22) Nigerian SME owners/managers and nine (9) stakeholders in semi-structured interviews, virtually. Participants' information was inductively condensed, analysed and thematically framed using the Upper Echelon and Stakeholder concepts. The findings were dimensionally extracted using Gioia's step/order analysis to develop a data structure for each research question. The findings for the current antecedence include the political and governance dimension, the cultural and societal dimension, the economic dimension, and the business orientation dimension. In contrast, the findings for the relationship between managerial characteristics and sustainability practices include observable dimensions and cognitive values. The finding for stakeholder influence on sustainability practices includes the managerial alignment dimension and the dimension of stakeholders’ intervention. Asides from the contribution to knowledge, the result presented national, organisational and managerial practical implications. Diverse organisational and regulatory policy implications were also presented with future research directions

    Geographic information extraction from texts

    Get PDF
    A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction

    Socio-Political Context as a Driver of Corporate Governance Practices in a Society: A Case Study of the Nigerian Banks

    Get PDF
    The global increase in failures and scandals in the financial services sector, especially banking institutions, has renewed the call for a more robust corporate governance in the industry. This has necessitated the need to investigate the impact of corporate governance on bank performance, and this study focuses on the case of Nigeria. Previous research has investigated the impact of corporate governance practices mostly in the developed world, to the neglect of vulnerable and poor economies such as Nigeria. This study therefore investigates the impact of corporate governance on the performance of Nigerian banks in the pre- and post-colonial period, using quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches. While various different theoretical perspectives have been adopted to study the impact of corporate governance in specific social contexts, the appropriateness of these theories to the socio-political context of poor countries has become contested. Considering the integration of the Nigerian economy into the global neoliberal capitalist economic system, this thesis adopts neoliberal global capitalism to understand the activities of the Nigerian banking institutions. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection, adopting qualitative semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, within the framework of neoliberal capitalism, the quantitative results suggest that board size, frequency of board meetings, frequency of audit committee meetings and managerial share ownership have a negative relationship with bank performance. Most of the respondents did not believe that neoliberal corporate governance practices were practical in Nigerian banking institutions. In sum, the study identifies a number of factors leading to failure of banks in Nigeria: the impact of the Nigerian socio-political context of overbearing family domination, ineffective boards, dual and pseudo-dual CEOs, flagrant disobedience and poor application of corporate governance codes. These factors have resulted in poor risk management, excessive risk taking and other unethical behaviours. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by providing an understanding of the connection between corporate governance principles and the performance of banks, looking at the peculiarities of each society in the application of corporate governance principles and introducing a balanced score card to the application of corporate governance. Keywords: Corporate governance, profitability, board size, neoliberalism, Central Bank of Nigeria, political economy, audit committe

    Differential evolution of non-coding DNA across eukaryotes and its close relationship with complex multicellularity on Earth

    Get PDF
    Here, I elaborate on the hypothesis that complex multicellularity (CM, sensu Knoll) is a major evolutionary transition (sensu Szathmary), which has convergently evolved a few times in Eukarya only: within red and brown algae, plants, animals, and fungi. Paradoxically, CM seems to correlate with the expansion of non-coding DNA (ncDNA) in the genome rather than with genome size or the total number of genes. Thus, I investigated the correlation between genome and organismal complexities across 461 eukaryotes under a phylogenetically controlled framework. To that end, I introduce the first formal definitions and criteria to distinguish ‘unicellularity’, ‘simple’ (SM) and ‘complex’ multicellularity. Rather than using the limited available estimations of unique cell types, the 461 species were classified according to our criteria by reviewing their life cycle and body plan development from literature. Then, I investigated the evolutionary association between genome size and 35 genome-wide features (introns and exons from protein-coding genes, repeats and intergenic regions) describing the coding and ncDNA complexities of the 461 genomes. To that end, I developed ‘GenomeContent’, a program that systematically retrieves massive multidimensional datasets from gene annotations and calculates over 100 genome-wide statistics. R-scripts coupled to parallel computing were created to calculate >260,000 phylogenetic controlled pairwise correlations. As previously reported, both repetitive and non-repetitive DNA are found to be scaling strongly and positively with genome size across most eukaryotic lineages. Contrasting previous studies, I demonstrate that changes in the length and repeat composition of introns are only weakly or moderately associated with changes in genome size at the global phylogenetic scale, while changes in intron abundance (within and across genes) are either not or only very weakly associated with changes in genome size. Our evolutionary correlations are robust to: different phylogenetic regression methods, uncertainties in the tree of eukaryotes, variations in genome size estimates, and randomly reduced datasets. Then, I investigated the correlation between the 35 genome-wide features and the cellular complexity of the 461 eukaryotes with phylogenetic Principal Component Analyses. Our results endorse a genetic distinction between SM and CM in Archaeplastida and Metazoa, but not so clearly in Fungi. Remarkably, complex multicellular organisms and their closest ancestral relatives are characterized by high intron-richness, regardless of genome size. Finally, I argue why and how a vast expansion of non-coding RNA (ncRNA) regulators rather than of novel protein regulators can promote the emergence of CM in Eukarya. As a proof of concept, I co-developed a novel ‘ceRNA-motif pipeline’ for the prediction of “competing endogenous” ncRNAs (ceRNAs) that regulate microRNAs in plants. We identified three candidate ceRNAs motifs: MIM166, MIM171 and MIM159/319, which were found to be conserved across land plants and be potentially involved in diverse developmental processes and stress responses. Collectively, the findings of this dissertation support our hypothesis that CM on Earth is a major evolutionary transition promoted by the expansion of two major ncDNA classes, introns and regulatory ncRNAs, which might have boosted the irreversible commitment of cell types in certain lineages by canalizing the timing and kinetics of the eukaryotic transcriptome.:Cover page Abstract Acknowledgements Index 1. The structure of this thesis 1.1. Structure of this PhD dissertation 1.2. Publications of this PhD dissertation 1.3. Computational infrastructure and resources 1.4. Disclosure of financial support and information use 1.5. Acknowledgements 1.6. Author contributions and use of impersonal and personal pronouns 2. Biological background 2.1. The complexity of the eukaryotic genome 2.2. The problem of counting and defining “genes” in eukaryotes 2.3. The “function” concept for genes and “dark matter” 2.4. Increases of organismal complexity on Earth through multicellularity 2.5. Multicellularity is a “fitness transition” in individuality 2.6. The complexity of cell differentiation in multicellularity 3. Technical background 3.1. The Phylogenetic Comparative Method (PCM) 3.2. RNA secondary structure prediction 3.3. Some standards for genome and gene annotation 4. What is in a eukaryotic genome? GenomeContent provides a good answer 4.1. Background 4.2. Motivation: an interoperable tool for data retrieval of gene annotations 4.3. Methods 4.4. Results 4.5. Discussion 5. The evolutionary correlation between genome size and ncDNA 5.1. Background 5.2. Motivation: estimating the relationship between genome size and ncDNA 5.3. Methods 5.4. Results 5.5. Discussion 6. The relationship between non-coding DNA and Complex Multicellularity 6.1. Background 6.2. Motivation: How to define and measure complex multicellularity across eukaryotes? 6.3. Methods 6.4. Results 6.5. Discussion 7. The ceRNA motif pipeline: regulation of microRNAs by target mimics 7.1. Background 7.2. A revisited protocol for the computational analysis of Target Mimics 7.3. Motivation: a novel pipeline for ceRNA motif discovery 7.4. Methods 7.5. Results 7.6. Discussion 8. Conclusions and outlook 8.1. Contributions and lessons for the bioinformatics of large-scale comparative analyses 8.2. Intron features are evolutionarily decoupled among themselves and from genome size throughout Eukarya 8.3. “Complex multicellularity” is a major evolutionary transition 8.4. Role of RNA throughout the evolution of life and complex multicellularity on Earth 9. Supplementary Data Bibliography Curriculum Scientiae Selbständigkeitserklärung (declaration of authorship
    corecore