FROM BUSINESS CORRUPTION TO BUSINESS ETHICS – NEW CHALLENGES FOR THE COMPETITIVE STRATEGY OF THE FIRM

The word corruption became a hyper used one in the last few years into the public discourse – related with politics, business or public administration. In Romania’s case it was (and still is) especially related with the requirements of the adhesion to the European Union. All the infrastructures and superstructures of the society are suspected of being (more or less) contaminated by the corruption scourge – according to different studies and reports (made by national and international organisms) measuring the corruption level and its perception. The main idea of this study is to review and analyze the existing literature (which is mainly foreign) in the field of business related corruption – private-to-public corruption and particularly private-to-private corruption, form that is generally neglected and less examined in Romania – in order to identify why and how is possible and necessary for firms to make a shift from business corruption to business ethics. The competitive strategy of the firm can emphasize ethics among the core values of it, source of long lasting competitive advantage, a key resource of surviving into the global economic world and competition.business related corruption, private-to-public corruption, private-to-private corruption, business ethics

Make Antibiotics Great Again: Combating Drug Resistance By Targeting Lexa, A Regulator Of Bacterial Evolution

The ability of bacterial pathogens to evolve and adapt to our antimicrobial agents has precipitated a global health crisis where treatment options for bacterial infections are running low. Recently, studies have shown that the ability to acquire resistance is linked to the SOS response, which is a widely conserved network of genes involved in both high fidelity and error-prone DNA damage repair. The SOS response is regulated by the DNA-binding protein, RecA, and a repressor-protease, LexA. When the cell experiences stress, which can be caused by antibiotics, RecA polymerizes along single-stranded DNA and thereby stimulates LexA to undergo a conformational change and self-cleavage reaction (autoproteolysis). LexA self-cleavage de-represses downstream SOS genes, which are involved in both stress tolerance and mutagenesis. Various studies have shown that inactivating LexA autoproteolysis can both reduce the viability of bacteria under antibiotic stress and impede their ability to acquire resistance. These results therefore suggest that targeting LexA therapeutically could offer a novel way to combat the rise of resistance in pathogens, although to date no LexA inhibitors have been found. To facilitate the development of such therapeutics, we focused our efforts on examining LexA from 1) biochemical, 2) microbiological, and 3) drug discovery perspectives. On the biochemical front, we elucidated the substrate preference of LexA’s serine protease active site to form a better understanding of the target enzyme’s active site architecture. Performing saturation mutagenesis on the LexA’s internal cleavage loop, we showed that LexA possesses a unique active site, revealing residues involved in specific molecular recognition and conformational change. On the microbiological front, we examined how different LexA activities can impact bacterial drug susceptibility and stress-induced mutagenesis. Employing engineered E. coli strains with a spectrum of SOS activities, we showed that modulating LexA activity can increase bacterial susceptibility to antibiotics, while also tuning stress-induced mutagenesis. Finally, on the drug discovery front, we designed a high-throughput screen that enabled us to discover small molecule inhibitors of the LexA/RecA axis in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline. Together, this work provides a multi-pronged foray into developing therapeutics that target the SOS pathway and combat the rise of antibiotic resistance

Sources of Noise in Dialogue and How to Deal with Them

Training dialogue systems often entails dealing with noisy training examples and unexpected user inputs. Despite their prevalence, there currently lacks an accurate survey of dialogue noise, nor is there a clear sense of the impact of each noise type on task performance. This paper addresses this gap by first constructing a taxonomy of noise encountered by dialogue systems. In addition, we run a series of experiments to show how different models behave when subjected to varying levels of noise and types of noise. Our results reveal that models are quite robust to label errors commonly tackled by existing denoising algorithms, but that performance suffers from dialogue-specific noise. Driven by these observations, we design a data cleaning algorithm specialized for conversational settings and apply it as a proof-of-concept for targeted dialogue denoising.Comment: 23 pages, 6 Figures, 5 tables. Accepted at SIGDIAL 202

Discerning users of information: A qualitative analysis of student inquiry

A shift is needed in information and digital literacy instruction and assessment led by elementary and secondary school librarians with an emphasis on the evaluation of information sources. The need is in response to widespread societal sharing of mis- and disinformation related to political news including the politicizing of scientific understandings of a disease and the ensuing distrust of the messages of public health officials during the COVID-19 global pandemic. In this article, I create an instructional framework for information evaluation that is grounded in data derived from a qualitative content analysis of published research, standards, and theoretical perspectives and that is confirmed using data derived from examples of middle school students\u27 inquiry research. Three overarching themes resulted from the analysis: blend media and research skills throughout the curriculum, ground information evaluation skills within a guided inquiry information process approach, and embed information evaluation skills in every grade and subject so they are taught beyond the context of news

‘Like What Do You Do – Hand Out an Announcement?’ – Combating Heteronormativity in Physical Education

For many years, women in physical education have been stereotyped as lesbians and seen as intruders to the masculine arena of sport. Social norms within the school system make it very clear what is acceptable as a female teacher, and anything differing from the created norm is considered deviant. With this being the case, it was my desire to break through the walls of heteronormativity (pattern of thought which places heterosexuality as the normal, natural, and accepted sexual orientation, failing to recognize any other form of sexuality) within education and expose the injustice towards a stigmatized and marginalized population of physical educators. Through semi-structured interviews five teachers had a chance to share their experiences and bring voice to an often, silenced topic. A qualitative inductive analysis of the data revealed the silence around the topic of sexuality in education, heterosexual privilege, the influence of the administration, and the consequences of a heterosexist and homophobic environment

Perception of Gifted Students on Compulsory Subjects in Their Academic Performance a Case of Secondary Schools in Uasin Gishu County in Kenya

Academic performance is a function of many interrelated variables including inherent study efforts, modes of teaching, school environment and students ability. Many gifted students may face myriads of academic problems, which may however, be masked by their academic prowess, yet research into this realm is limited in Kenya. The objectives of the study were: To investigate the perception of gifted students on the effects of compulsory subjects on academic performance. To establish the perception of gifted students of teacher - centred teaching methods on academic performance. To examine the perception of the gifted students of the effects of mentorship and counselling services on academic performance. To establish the perception of teachers on gifted students identification criteria on academic performance. An exploratory survey design was used. The research population consisted of 100 heads of academic departments and 153 gifted students.  The sample then was 30 teachers and 120 gifted students from the sampled schools in Uasin Gishu District. Two sets of structured questionnaires were used to collect data. The sample was selected using random sampling technique and purposive sampling technique. Descriptive statistics was used in data analysis that is of frequencies and percentages. The findings were presented using tables, pie charts and figures. From the findings it was established that the gifted students perceived that the compulsory subjects were highly influential in affecting academic performance. That most of these students 48 %( 50) rated the teacher-centred teaching methods as poor and these teaching methods were found to affect the academic performances negatively. Absence of mentorship and guidance and counselling services affected a majority 55% (58) of the gifted students negatively academically. Identifying the gifted learners in secondary schools of Uasin Gishu was non standard. No intelligence tests were used to identify gifted learners instead evaluation test results was majorly used by 60% of the teachers to identify these learners. The study recommended that the MoE should make IQ tests available in schools. Teachers should be equipped with skills and knowledge of how to handle gifted learners in schools. Further studies should be carried out to establish how primary schools cater for this gifted learner

Combating User Misbehavior on Social Media

Social media encourages user participation and facilitates user’s self-expression like never before. While enriching user behavior in a spectrum of means, many social media platforms have become breeding grounds for user misbehavior. In this dissertation we focus on understanding and combating three specific threads of user misbehaviors that widely exist on social media — spamming, manipulation, and distortion. First, we address the challenge of detecting spam links. Rather than rely on traditional blacklist-based or content-based methods, we examine the behavioral factors of both who is posting the link and who is clicking on the link. The core intuition is that these behavioral signals may be more difficult to manipulate than traditional signals. We find that this purely behavioral approach can achieve good performance for robust behavior-based spam link detection. Next, we deal with uncovering manipulated behavior of link sharing. We propose a four-phase approach to model, identify, characterize, and classify organic and organized groups who engage in link sharing. The key motivating insight is that group-level behavioral signals can distinguish manipulated user groups. We find that levels of organized behavior vary by link type and that the proposed approach achieves good performance measured by commonly-used metrics. Finally, we investigate a particular distortion behavior: making bullshit (BS) statements on social media. We explore the factors impacting the perception of BS and what leads users to ultimately perceive and call a post BS. We begin by preparing a crowdsourced collection of real social media posts that have been called BS. We then build a classification model that can determine what posts are more likely to be called BS. Our experiments suggest our classifier has the potential of leveraging linguistic cues for detecting social media posts that are likely to be called BS. We complement these three studies with a cross-cutting investigation of learning user topical profiles, which can shed light into what subjects each user is associated with, which can benefit the understanding of the connection between user and misbehavior. Concretely, we propose a unified model for learning user topical profiles that simultaneously considers multiple footprints and we show how these footprints can be embedded in a generalized optimization framework. Through extensive experiments on millions of real social media posts, we find our proposed models can effectively combat user misbehavior on social media

Being Good Lawyers: A Relational Approach to Law Practice

In response to past generations of debates regarding whether law is a business or profession, we advance an alternative approach that rejects the dichotomies of business and profession, or hired gun and wise counselor. Instead, we propose a relational account of law practice. Unlike frameworks grounded in assumptions of atomistic individualism or communitarianism, a relational perspective recognizes that all actors, whether individuals or organizations, have separate identities yet are intrinsically inter-connected and cannot maximize their own good in isolation. Through the lens of relational self-interest, maximizing the good of the individual or business requires consideration of the good of the neighbor, the employee or customer, and of the public. Accordingly, relational lawyers advise and assist clients, colleagues, and themselves to take into account the well-being of others when contemplating and pursuing their own interests. A relational approach to law practice does not require a choice between labeling law a business or a profession, and indeed is consistent with both perspectives. Lawyers can access relational perspectives from a wide range of understandings of the lawyer’s role, with the exception of the particular hired gun ideology that views lawyers as amoral mouthpieces for clients who act as Holmesian bad men and women aggressively pursuing their self-interest with no regard to others. The relational framework offers all lawyers, whether they see themselves as professionals or business persons, a framework for understanding that they can continue to serve as society’s civic teachers in their capacity as intermediaries between the people and the law, integrating relational self-interest into their representation of clients and their community service. By doing so, lawyers as professionals, individuals, and community members will more effectively represent clients, as well as enhance their contribution to the public good and to the quality of their own professional and private lives. They will also surmount the generation-long malaise resulting from the crisis of professionalism

Dna Aptamers Selected Against Wild-Type Helix 69 Ribosomal Rna And Their Implications In Combating Antibiotic Resistance

Outbreaks of advanced antibiotic-resistant strains of microbes have hastened the need to identify new viable molecular targets for the development of novel anti-infectives. For this purpose, helix 69 (H69, or m3a 19-nucleotide (nt) hairpin motif that is highly conserved throughout phylogeny and rich in modified nucleotides, including pseudouridine () and 3-methylpseudouridine (m3) was chosen as a potential target. Helix 69, which is located in domain IV of Escherichia coli 23S ribosomal RNA (rRNA), undergoes conformational changes when in close proximity to the decoding region of 16S rRNA and transfer RNAs (tRNAs) in the peptidyl-transferase center (PTC). Functionally, the exact biological role(s) of H69 remains unclear; however, its proposed importance within protein synthesis may support it as an ideal target to develop ligands with high binding specificity. In this thesis work, DNA aptamer candidates with binding specificity for the wild-type bacterial H69 were selected. The 84-nt-long DNA aptamer (H69DNAapt18) that was identified from a DNA library with a 40-nt randomized region has the sequence 5\u27-CTCCCCGGGCACTATTTCCTGGGACTAGTTCTGCAGGTTT-3\u27. The initial library contained 5 × 1014 DNA sequences and was used in SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment) (Molecular diversity of the library was reduced to approximately 1 102 after 11 rounds of in vitro selection) experiments. A synthetic construct of H69 was biotinylated and used with optimized SELEX. After immobilization of the biotinylated target H69 to streptavidin-coated surfaces, DNA library candidates were challenged against H69 in multiple rounds of selection, recovered, and enriched by direct-bead PCR (polymerase chain reaction). Levels of bound DNA and diversity of the amplified library pools were monitored by UV-visible spectroscopy and sequencing between rounds of SELEX (11 total). Select rounds were cloned and sequenced. Consensus sequences from select rounds of SELEX were identified by using Clustal W alignments, and optimal secondary structures were predicted by Mfold analysis. Analysis of 120 clones led to the identification of 20 sequences with consensus motifs. Notably, one of the selected DNA ligands (H69DNAapt18) contained a conserved 20-nt hairpin-loop motif with complementarity to the loop region of the targeted E. coli wild-type H69. Interestingly, this 20-nt hairpin motif of H69DNAapt18 retained its conserved 20-nt motif within the truncated 40-nt Mfold structural prediction representing only the randomized region of the 84-nt DNA library. Attempts to determine binding affinities of select isolated DNA aptamer candidates to 32P-radiolabeled H69 by electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSAs) were moderately successful, with observation of RNA-DNA complexes with apparent dissociation constants (Kds) in the high nM range. To better evaluate the affinity and selectivity of DNA aptamer #18, a fluorescently tagged H69-DNA aptamer #18 (FAM-H69DNAapt18) was used for a comparison binding study with wild-type H69 and unmodified rRNA constructs. Relative dissociation constants of FAM-H69DNAapt18 for H69 and RNAs other than H69, as determined by fluorescence titrations with small RNA constructs, are as follows: wild-type H69 \u3e partially modified H69 \u3e unmodified H69 \u3e A-site RNA of 16S rRNA. Overall, this study provides a reference point for the development of DNA aptamers that identify modified nucleotides and/or methylation sites in RNA, or could potentially function as novel therapeutics to help combat antibiotic resistance. Keywords: 23S ribosomal RNA (rRNA); helix 69 (H69); modified nucleotides; pseudouridine (); 3-methylpseudouridine (m3); peptidyl-transferase center (PTC); systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX); aptamers; fluorescence spectroscopy; DNA:RNA complexes; dissociation constant (Kd); anti-infectives; antibiotic resistance; antibacterial therapeutics; and bioprobes