78,262 research outputs found

    Private Sector Investment and Sustainable Development: The Current and Potential Role of Institutional Investors, Companies, Banks and Foundations in Sustainable Development

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    This paper seeks to provide the Financing for Development process with a perspective on the role institutional investors, companies, and foundations can play in the design and implementation of a financing strategy for global sustainability. This will help bridge the terminology and investment approaches of institutional investors, companies, foundations, and governments. The paper highlights ongoing efforts among private investors to increase the impact of their investments. It concludes with a set of key actions facing investors, companies and foundations in their transition towards investment practices that contribute to sustainable development

    Stewardship of the evolving scholarly record: from the invisible hand to conscious coordination

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    The scholarly record is increasingly digital and networked, while at the same time expanding in both the volume and diversity of the material it contains. The long-term future of the scholarly record cannot be effectively secured with traditional stewardship models developed for print materials. This report describes the key features of future stewardship models adapted to the characteristics of a digital, networked scholarly record, and discusses some practical implications of implementing these models. Key highlights include: As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models. Past stewardship models were built on an "invisible hand" approach that relied on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections. Future stewardship of the evolving scholarly record requires conscious coordination of context, commitments, specialization, and reciprocity. With conscious coordination, local stewardship efforts leverage scale by collecting more of less. Keys to conscious coordination include right-scaling consolidation, cooperation, and community mix. Reducing transaction costs and building trust facilitate conscious coordination. Incentives to participate in cooperative stewardship activities should be linked to broader institutional priorities. The long-term future of the scholarly record in its fullest expression cannot be effectively secured with stewardship strategies designed for print materials. The features of the evolving scholarly record suggest that traditional stewardship strategies, built on an “invisible hand” approach that relies on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections, is no longer suitable for collecting, organizing, making available, and preserving the outputs of scholarly inquiry. As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models. Conscious coordination calls for stewardship strategies that incorporate a broader awareness of the system-wide stewardship context; declarations of explicit commitments around portions of the local collection; formal divisions of labor within cooperative arrangements; and robust networks for reciprocal access. Stewardship strategies based on conscious coordination involve an acceleration of an already perceptible transition away from relatively autonomous local collections to ones built on networks of cooperation across many organizations, within and outside the traditional cultural heritage community

    How Registries Can Help Performance Measurement Improve Care

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    Suggests ways to better utilize databases of clinical information to evaluate care processes and outcomes and improve measurements of healthcare quality and costs, comparative clinical effectiveness research, and medical product safety surveillance

    State of The Art and Hot Aspects in Cloud Data Storage Security

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    Along with the evolution of cloud computing and cloud storage towards matu- rity, researchers have analyzed an increasing range of cloud computing security aspects, data security being an important topic in this area. In this paper, we examine the state of the art in cloud storage security through an overview of selected peer reviewed publications. We address the question of defining cloud storage security and its different aspects, as well as enumerate the main vec- tors of attack on cloud storage. The reviewed papers present techniques for key management and controlled disclosure of encrypted data in cloud storage, while novel ideas regarding secure operations on encrypted data and methods for pro- tection of data in fully virtualized environments provide a glimpse of the toolbox available for securing cloud storage. Finally, new challenges such as emergent government regulation call for solutions to problems that did not receive enough attention in earlier stages of cloud computing, such as for example geographical location of data. The methods presented in the papers selected for this review represent only a small fraction of the wide research effort within cloud storage security. Nevertheless, they serve as an indication of the diversity of problems that are being addressed

    The future of corporate reporting: a review article

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    Significant changes in the corporate external reporting environment have led to proposals for fundamental changes in corporate reporting practices. Recent influential reports by major organisations have suggested that a variety of new information types be reported, in particular forward-looking, non-financial and soft information. This paper presents a review and synthesis of these reports and provides a framework for classifying and describing suggested information types. The existence of academic antecedents for certain current proposals are identified and the ambiguous relationship between research and practice is explored. The implications for future academic research are discussed and a research agenda is introduced

    Regulating Non Audit Services:Towards a Principles Based Approach to Regulation

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    Based on the argument that the benefits conferred through the provision of non audit services by audit firms outweigh the attributed costs of safeguarding the auditor's independence, this paper will not only seek to justify this argument, advance proposals which do not favour an outright prohibition of the provision of non audit services, but also consider means through which non audit services could be regulated in order to facilitate competition in the audit market. At the same time it will consider various legislation which have been introduced in recent years and which are aimed at facilitating greater disclosure of information – hence improving transparency within the audit and financial markets. “Specific measures,” it is contended, “would involve not only the introduction of new standards (for example – the disclosure of client concentration) but also the elimination of current restrictions“. Different types of safeguards which exist in order “to mitigate or eliminate threats” to the auditor’s independence, as a result of the provision of non audit services, will be considered against the regulator’s aim to facilitate competition, enhance disclosure and promote other practices which would advance the regulator’s endeavour to be more “market friendly”. The consultation on control structures in audit firms and their consequences on the audit market, a consultation which was launched by the European Commission as part of its efforts to create more market players, could be regarded as a response to such proposals to facilitate a more “market friendly” environment and also to concerns that the financial market is already over regulated. Some of the possible ways advanced by the Commission as channels for facilitating greater entry into the international market include the deregulation of the capitalisation of audit firms as a catalyst for facilitating greater entry into the audit market. Deregulation of the capital structure in this sense is considered to be a “modification of Article 3 (4) of the 2006 Directive on Statutory Audit which should however not be to the detriment of robust independence rules.

    Regulating non audit services: Towards a principles based approach to regulation

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    Based on the argument that the benefits conferred through the provision of non audit services by audit firms outweigh the attributed costs of safeguarding the auditor's independence, this paper will not only seek to justify this argument, advance proposals which do not favour an outright prohibition of the provision of non audit services, but also consider means through which non audit services could be regulated in order to facilitate competition in the audit market. At the same time it will consider various legislation which have been introduced in recent years and which are aimed at facilitating greater disclosure of information – hence improving transparency within the audit and financial markets. “Specific measures,” it is contended, “would involve not only the introduction of new standards (for example – the disclosure of client concentration) but also the elimination of current restrictions“. Different types of safeguards which exist in order “to mitigate or eliminate threats” to the auditor’s independence, as a result of the provision of non audit services, will be considered against the regulator’s aim to facilitate competition, enhance disclosure and promote other practices which would advance the regulator’s endeavour to be more “market friendly”. The consultation on control structures in audit firms and their consequences on the audit market, a consultation which was launched by the European Commission as part of its efforts to create more market players, could be regarded as a response to such proposals to facilitate a more “market friendly” environment and also to concerns that the financial market is already over regulated. Some of the possible ways advanced by the Commission as channels for facilitating greater entry into the international market include the deregulation of the capitalisation of audit firms as a catalyst for facilitating greater entry into the audit market. Deregulation of the capital structure in this sense is considered to be a “modification of Article 3 (4) of the 2006 Directive on Statutory Audit which should however not be to the detriment of robust independence rules.”Principles based regulation; audit; directives; regulation; market; NAS (non audit services)

    New Media & Youth Identity. Issues and Research Pathways

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    Media have held a considerable and growing place in the social environment of industrial society in recent decades, transforming the perception that a people have of their place in the world and of their memberships and belonging, creating new paths for social relations, affecting lifestyles, socialization, and communication processes, and the construction of identity itself. The relationship between young people (especially teenagers and adolescents) and new media shows some peculiarities which are worth further reflection to understand the extent and outcomes of these social changes. This article aims to investigate the discourse on youth identity and new media in the social science literature, determining which are the key trends and exploring the more relevant research questions about this theme and the way these topics relate to one another. Titles and abstracts of articles published during the period 2004 \u2013 2013 were selected from the Scopus social sciences database and they were analysed using different content analysis techniques supported by the T-Lab software. The international literature on these topics presents a certain liveliness and heterogeneity in themes and its perspectives on theoretical and empirical research. Nevertheless, it has been possible to identify some key trends, focusing mainly on the idea of active identity construction by new media

    Download the full PDF of the Issue- Health Policy Newsletter, Vol. 22, Issue 1, March 2009

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