12,519 research outputs found

    Corporate Social Responsibility: the institutionalization of ESG

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    Understanding the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on firm performance as it relates to industries reliant on technological innovation is a complex and perpetually evolving challenge. To thoroughly investigate this topic, this dissertation will adopt an economics-based structure to address three primary hypotheses. This structure allows for each hypothesis to essentially be a standalone empirical paper, unified by an overall analysis of the nature of impact that ESG has on firm performance. The first hypothesis explores the evolution of CSR to the modern quantified iteration of ESG has led to the institutionalization and standardization of the CSR concept. The second hypothesis fills gaps in existing literature testing the relationship between firm performance and ESG by finding that the relationship is significantly positive in long-term, strategic metrics (ROA and ROIC) and that there is no correlation in short-term metrics (ROE and ROS). Finally, the third hypothesis states that if a firm has a long-term strategic ESG plan, as proxied by the publication of CSR reports, then it is more resilience to damage from controversies. This is supported by the finding that pro-ESG firms consistently fared better than their counterparts in both financial and ESG performance, even in the event of a controversy. However, firms with consistent reporting are also held to a higher standard than their nonreporting peers, suggesting a higher risk and higher reward dynamic. These findings support the theory of good management, in that long-term strategic planning is both immediately economically beneficial and serves as a means of risk management and social impact mitigation. Overall, this contributes to the literature by fillings gaps in the nature of impact that ESG has on firm performance, particularly from a management perspective

    Consent and the Construction of the Volunteer: Institutional Settings of Experimental Research on Human Beings in Britain during the Cold War

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    This study challenges the primacy of consent in the history of human experimentation and argues that privileging the cultural frameworks adds nuance to our understanding of the construction of the volunteer in the period 1945 to 1970. Historians and bio-ethicists have argued that medical ethics codes have marked out the parameters of using people as subjects in medical scientific research and that the consent of the subjects was fundamental to their status as volunteers. However, the temporality of the creation of medical ethics codes means that they need to be understood within their historical context. That medical ethics codes arose from a specific historical context rather than a concerted and conscious determination to safeguard the well-being of subjects needs to be acknowledged. The British context of human experimentation is under-researched and there has been even less focus on the cultural frameworks within which experiments took place. This study demonstrates, through a close analysis of the Medical Research Council's Common Cold Research Unit (CCRU) and the government's military research facility, the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, Porton Down (Porton), that the `volunteer' in human experiments was a subjective entity whose identity was specific to the institution which recruited and made use of the subject. By examining representations of volunteers in the British press, the rhetoric of the government's collectivist agenda becomes evident and this fed into the institutional construction of the volunteer at the CCRU. In contrast, discussions between Porton scientists, staff members, and government officials demonstrate that the use of military personnel in secret chemical warfare experiments was far more complex. Conflicting interests of the military, the government and the scientific imperative affected how the military volunteer was perceived

    Strategies for Early Learners

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    Welcome to learning about how to effectively plan curriculum for young children. This textbook will address: • Developing curriculum through the planning cycle • Theories that inform what we know about how children learn and the best ways for teachers to support learning • The three components of developmentally appropriate practice • Importance and value of play and intentional teaching • Different models of curriculum • Process of lesson planning (documenting planned experiences for children) • Physical, temporal, and social environments that set the stage for children’s learning • Appropriate guidance techniques to support children’s behaviors as the self-regulation abilities mature. • Planning for preschool-aged children in specific domains including o Physical development o Language and literacy o Math o Science o Creative (the visual and performing arts) o Diversity (social science and history) o Health and safety • Making children’s learning visible through documentation and assessmenthttps://scholar.utc.edu/open-textbooks/1001/thumbnail.jp

    Learning disentangled speech representations

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    A variety of informational factors are contained within the speech signal and a single short recording of speech reveals much more than the spoken words. The best method to extract and represent informational factors from the speech signal ultimately depends on which informational factors are desired and how they will be used. In addition, sometimes methods will capture more than one informational factor at the same time such as speaker identity, spoken content, and speaker prosody. The goal of this dissertation is to explore different ways to deconstruct the speech signal into abstract representations that can be learned and later reused in various speech technology tasks. This task of deconstructing, also known as disentanglement, is a form of distributed representation learning. As a general approach to disentanglement, there are some guiding principles that elaborate what a learned representation should contain as well as how it should function. In particular, learned representations should contain all of the requisite information in a more compact manner, be interpretable, remove nuisance factors of irrelevant information, be useful in downstream tasks, and independent of the task at hand. The learned representations should also be able to answer counter-factual questions. In some cases, learned speech representations can be re-assembled in different ways according to the requirements of downstream applications. For example, in a voice conversion task, the speech content is retained while the speaker identity is changed. And in a content-privacy task, some targeted content may be concealed without affecting how surrounding words sound. While there is no single-best method to disentangle all types of factors, some end-to-end approaches demonstrate a promising degree of generalization to diverse speech tasks. This thesis explores a variety of use-cases for disentangled representations including phone recognition, speaker diarization, linguistic code-switching, voice conversion, and content-based privacy masking. Speech representations can also be utilised for automatically assessing the quality and authenticity of speech, such as automatic MOS ratings or detecting deep fakes. The meaning of the term "disentanglement" is not well defined in previous work, and it has acquired several meanings depending on the domain (e.g. image vs. speech). Sometimes the term "disentanglement" is used interchangeably with the term "factorization". This thesis proposes that disentanglement of speech is distinct, and offers a viewpoint of disentanglement that can be considered both theoretically and practically

    Statistical-dynamical analyses and modelling of multi-scale ocean variability

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    This thesis aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of multi-scale oceanic variabilities using various statistical and dynamical tools and explore the data-driven methods for correct statistical emulation of the oceans. We considered the classical, wind-driven, double-gyre ocean circulation model in quasi-geostrophic approximation and obtained its eddy-resolving solutions in terms of potential vorticity anomaly and geostrophic streamfunctions. The reference solutions possess two asymmetric gyres of opposite circulations and a strong meandering eastward jet separating them with rich eddy activities around it, such as the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic and Kuroshio in the North Pacific. This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part discusses a novel scale-separation method based on the local spatial correlations, called correlation-based decomposition (CBD), and provides a comprehensive analysis of mesoscale eddy forcing. In particular, we analyse the instantaneous and time-lagged interactions between the diagnosed eddy forcing and the evolving large-scale PVA using the novel `product integral' characteristics. The product integral time series uncover robust causality between two drastically different yet interacting flow quantities, termed `eddy backscatter'. We also show data-driven augmentation of non-eddy-resolving ocean models by feeding them the eddy fields to restore the missing eddy-driven features, such as the merging western boundary currents, their eastward extension and low-frequency variabilities of gyres. In the second part, we present a systematic inter-comparison of Linear Regression (LR), stochastic and deep-learning methods to build low-cost reduced-order statistical emulators of the oceans. We obtain the forecasts on seasonal and centennial timescales and assess them for their skill, cost and complexity. We found that the multi-level linear stochastic model performs the best, followed by the ``hybrid stochastically-augmented deep learning models''. The superiority of these methods underscores the importance of incorporating core dynamics, memory effects and model errors for robust emulation of multi-scale dynamical systems, such as the oceans.Open Acces

    The Disputation: The Enduring Representations in William Holman Hunt's “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple,” 1860

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    This interdisciplinary thesis problematizes the Jewish presence in the painting The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860) by William Holman Hunt. This “Jewish presence” refers to characters within the painting, Jews who posed for the picture and the painting’s portrayal of Judaism. The thesis takes a phenomenological and hermeneutical approach to The Finding providing careful description and interpretation of what appears in the painting. It situates the painting within a newly configured genre of disputation paintings depicting the Temple scene from the Gospel of Luke (2:47 – 52). It asks two questions. Why does The Finding look the way it does? And how did Holman Hunt know how to create the picture? Under the rubric of the first question, it explores and challenges customary accounts of the painting, explicitly challenging the over reliance upon F.G. Stephens’s pamphlet. Additionally, it examines Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian religious contexts and bringing hitherto unacknowledged artistic contexts to the fore. The second question examines less apparent influences through an analysis of the originary Lukan narrative in conjunction with the under-examined genre of Temple “disputation” paintings, and a legacy of scholarly and religious disputation. This demonstrates a discourse of disputation informing The Finding over and above the biblical narrative. In showing that this discourse strongly correlates with the painting’s objectifying and spectacular properties, this thesis provides a new way to understand The Finding’s orientalism which is further revealed in its typological critical reworking of two Christian medieval and renaissance paintings. As a demonstration of the discourse, the thesis includes an examination of Jewish artists who addressed the theme of disputation overtly or obliquely thereby engaging with and challenging the assumptions upon which the disputation rests

    Exploring the Structure of Scattering Amplitudes in Quantum Field Theory: Scattering Equations, On-Shell Diagrams and Ambitwistor String Models in Gauge Theory and Gravity

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    In this thesis I analyse the structure of scattering amplitudes in super-symmetric gauge and gravitational theories in four dimensional spacetime, starting with a detailed review of background material accessible to a non-expert. I then analyse the 4D scattering equations, developing the theory of how they can be used to express scattering amplitudes at tree level. I go on to explain how the equations can be solved numerically using a Monte Carlo algorithm, and introduce my Mathematica package treeamps4dJAF which performs these calculations. Next I analyse the relation between the 4D scattering equations and on-shell diagrams in N = 4 super Yang-Mills, which provides a new perspective on the tree level amplitudes of the theory. I apply a similar analysis to N = 8 supergravity, developing the theory of on-shell diagrams to derive new Grassmannian integral formulae for the amplitudes of the theory. In both theories I derive a new worldsheet expression for the 4 point one loop amplitude supported on 4D scattering equations. Finally I use 4D ambitwistor string theory to analyse scattering amplitudes in N = 4 conformal supergravity, deriving new worldsheet formulae for both plane wave and non-plane wave amplitudes supported on 4D scattering equations. I introduce a new prescription to calculate the derivatives of on-shell variables with respect to momenta, and I use this to show that certain non-plane wave amplitudes can be calculated as momentum derivatives of amplitudes with plane wave states

    A Comparative Study on Students’ Learning Expectations of Entrepreneurship Education in the UK and China

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    Entrepreneurship education has become a critical subject in academic research and educational policy design, occupying a central role in contemporary education globally. However, a review of the literature indicates that research on entrepreneurship education is still in a relatively early stage. Little is known about how entrepreneurship education learning is affected by the environmental context to date. Therefore, combining the institutional context and focusing on students’ learning expectations as a novel perspective, the main aim of the thesis is to address the knowledge gap by developing an original conceptual framework to advance understanding of the dynamic learning process of entrepreneurship education through the lens of self-determination theory, thereby providing a basis for advancing understanding of entrepreneurship education. The author adopted an epistemological positivism philosophy and a deductive approach. This study gathered 247 valid questionnaires from the UK (84) and China (163). It requested students to recall their learning expectations before attending their entrepreneurship courses and to assess their perceptions of learning outcomes after taking the entrepreneurship courses. It was found that entrepreneurship education policy is an antecedent that influences students' learning expectations, which is represented in the difference in student autonomy. British students in active learning under a voluntary education policy have higher autonomy than Chinese students in passive learning under a compulsory education policy, thus having higher learning expectations, leading to higher satisfaction. The positive relationship between autonomy and learning expectations is established, which adds a new dimension to self-determination theory. Furthermore, it is also revealed that the change in students’ entrepreneurial intentions before and after their entrepreneurship courses is explained by understanding the process of a business start-up (positive), hands-on business start-up opportunities (positive), students’ actual input (positive) and tutors’ academic qualification (negative). The thesis makes contributions to both theory and practice. The findings have far reaching implications for different parties, including policymakers, educators, practitioners and researchers. Understanding and shaping students' learning expectations is a critical first step in optimising entrepreneurship education teaching and learning. On the one hand, understanding students' learning expectations of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education can help the government with educational interventions and policy reform, as well as improving the quality and delivery of university-based entrepreneurship education. On the other hand, entrepreneurship education can assist students in establishing correct and realistic learning expectations and entrepreneurial conceptions, which will benefit their future entrepreneurial activities and/or employment. An important implication is that this study connects multiple stakeholders by bridging the national-level institutional context, organisational-level university entrepreneurship education, and individual level entrepreneurial learning to promote student autonomy based on an understanding of students' learning expectations. This can help develop graduates with their ability for autonomous learning and autonomous entrepreneurial behaviour. The results of this study help to remind students that it is them, the learners, their expectations and input that can make the difference between the success or failure of their study. This would not only apply to entrepreneurship education but also to other fields of study. One key message from this study is that education can be encouraged and supported but cannot be “forced”. Mandatory entrepreneurship education is not a quick fix for the lack of university students’ innovation and entrepreneurship. More resources must be invested in enhancing the enterprise culture, thus making entrepreneurship education desirable for students
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