Sustainability disclosure and reputation: a comparative study

This paper aims to explore the relationship between a company’s sustainability disclosure and its reputation. The sample consists of 57 companies in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) and a control group belonging to the Dow Jones Global Index (World1), matched on country, industry and size. The extent of sustainability disclosure is determined using the content analysis method performed via multimedia. The empirical research provides evidence that reputation does affect the extent of sustainability disclosure. Furthermore, results indicate that European companies disclose more than US companies. This paper is exploratory in nature as it investigates the effects of reputation on corporate sustainability disclosure (CSD). It also examines sustainability disclosure by type of information – strategic, financial, environmental and social – and it extends previous studies on CSD by concentrating on information released not only on annual reports, but also in multimedia, such as social reports, environmental reports and sustainability reports.sustainability disclosure; reputation; legitimacy theory; USA, Europe, UK; content analysis

Exploring teachers’ attitudes to implementing blended learning: a case study

One of the many characteristics of the 21st century learner is that they are highly technologically skilled. This characteristic poses today’s teachers with many challenges in order to teach these learners and create optimal learning experiences. It is evident that teachers have their own preferred teaching methods which they believe work best and some teachers teach the way that they were taught at school in ways that have become part of their habitus. Blended learning is a teaching method that can promote effective learning experiences in the 21st century learning environment. This study focussed on teachers’ experiences with blended learning and their current ideas on how learners learn optimally and whether the practice of blended learning changed their ideas of learning. Furthermore, the study determined the teachers’ present technology acceptance and established teachers’ personal views regarding the challenges that teachers face to teach 21st century skills, what they think 21st century teaching is about and new insights on dealing with these challenges. Through experiencing blended learning teachers who made use of a textbook based teaching method made shifts not only to a blended approach, but also shifted their thinking away from what they prefer to what learners get out of the learning experience. Although challenges occur when using a blended teaching approach, their experiences with blended learning were mostly positive and they found learners to be more involved in the learning process. These outcomes created feelings of worthiness in the teachers since they create such positive learning opportunities for their learners. Although the teachers made shifts, some teachers continue to have a fear of technology since they had not received adequate training to incorporate technology into their teaching approaches. It is crucial for the DBE and schools to provide teachers with opportunities to improve their technological skills in order for teachers to create opportunities for blended learning experiences for the 21st century learne

F-formation Detection: Individuating Free-standing Conversational Groups in Images

Detection of groups of interacting people is a very interesting and useful task in many modern technologies, with application fields spanning from video-surveillance to social robotics. In this paper we first furnish a rigorous definition of group considering the background of the social sciences: this allows us to specify many kinds of group, so far neglected in the Computer Vision literature. On top of this taxonomy, we present a detailed state of the art on the group detection algorithms. Then, as a main contribution, we present a brand new method for the automatic detection of groups in still images, which is based on a graph-cuts framework for clustering individuals; in particular we are able to codify in a computational sense the sociological definition of F-formation, that is very useful to encode a group having only proxemic information: position and orientation of people. We call the proposed method Graph-Cuts for F-formation (GCFF). We show how GCFF definitely outperforms all the state of the art methods in terms of different accuracy measures (some of them are brand new), demonstrating also a strong robustness to noise and versatility in recognizing groups of various cardinality.Comment: 32 pages, submitted to PLOS On

The Free Press Vol 44 Issue 15, 02-11-2013

USM couple ties the knot after fourteen years--Free Press to host media training day for students--University of Maine schools plug in to Project Login--Campus goes international--USM battles Nemohttps://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/free_press/1085/thumbnail.jp

The Free Press Vol 44 Issue 13, 01-28-2013

USM safest in Maine, site says--Faculty discuss how to implement union vote--Protestors act against tar sands pipeline--The numbers are in: Report shows improved enrollment figures--Students start up divest movement at USMhttps://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/free_press/1083/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily September 8, 2010

Volume 135, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1168/thumbnail.jp