Board of Director and Audit Committee Effectiveness, Ownership Structure and Intellectual Capital Disclosure of Listed Banks in GCC Countries

Intellectual capital (IC) disclosure provides signals not only for organizations to gain competitive advantage but it also enables shareholders and other stakeholders to better judge the financial performance and financial position of the organizations. The disclosure of IC is very important in IC-intensive sectors like banking sector. However, generally there is a lack of studies that investigate this issue in the banking sectors indeveloping countries, particularly in Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC). Thus, the main purpose of this study is to examine the voluntary disclosure of IC among listed banks in the GCC. This study examines annual reports of 137 GCC listed banks for the period of 2008-2010 using content analysis. Further it investigates whether the monitoring mechanisms namely, characteristics of effective board and audit committee, institutional ownership, level of market concentration and bank type, influence the IC disclosure. Furthermore, by using hierarchical regression, this study examines the moderating effect of chairman ownership, family and government control, and also information asymmetry on the relationship between the effectiveness score of the board and IC disclosure. The findings of multiple regression show that the level of score for the board effectiveness and audit committee effectiveness, foreign institutional and level of market concentration have significant relationship with IC disclosure. However, when the characteristics of board and audit committee were individually examined with IC disclosure, the results show that only board independence, board meetings, board committees, audit committee size and audit committee meetings have positive and significant relationship with IC disclosure. In addition, based on hierarchical regression analysis, the results show family control, government control and information asymmetry moderate the relationship between the effectiveness score of the board and IC disclosure.The results of this study might be of interest to regulators, investment analysts and market participants as well researchers

Assessment of Arabian Gulf Seaweeds from Kuwait as Sources of Nutritionally Important Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids (PUFAs)

Funding: We are grateful to the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) for PhD funding for H.A.-A. We are thankful to the National Unit for Environmental Research and Services (NUERS) at Kuwait University, Project # SRUIL01/13 and the Department of Marine Sciences for providing their facilities and labs. We equally thank the UK Natural Environment Research Council for their support to F.C.K. (program Oceans 2025–WP 4.5 and grants NE/D521522/1 and NE/J023094/1). This work also received support from the Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland pooling initiative. MASTS is funded by the Scottish Funding Council (grant reference HR09011) and contributing institutions. PK would like to acknowledge European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 839151 for fundingPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Monitoring mechanisms and intellectual capital disclosure among banks in the GCC

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between monitoring mechanisms namely, board and audit committee effectiveness, foreign and domestic institutional ownership and competition with voluntary disclosure of intellectual capital (IC) among listed banks in the Gulf Co-Operation Council (GCC) region. The content analysis was used to analyse IC disclosures of 137 listed GCC banks. A regression model is utilized to analyze the data. The results suggest that the monitoring mechanisms have significant relationship with the quantity of IC information disclosed. The findings contribute to support agency theory by indicating that corporate governance mechanisms and corporate voluntary disclosure can be used strategically by considering the mechanisms as a bundle since they work complimentary to reduce agency conflicts. In addition, the finding also suggests that foreign institutional ownership have more monitoring capacities than domestic institutional investors in relation to IC disclosure

GenX uptake by wheat and rice in flooded and non-flooded soils : A greenhouse experiment

Funding Amnah Al Zbedy: financial support of her scholarship from the Cultural Bureau of Saudi Arabia, London. Viktoria Müller: financial support of her scholarship from the Macaulay Development Trust, UK.Peer reviewe

BikeSimWS: Workshop on Simulators, Scenarios, and Test Standard for Bicycle Research

Research on cyclists‘ safety and comfort is a growing topic. Existing works address support systems with novel interaction concepts such as augmented reality but also the design and evaluation of high-fidelity bicycle simulators. Since the field is still in its exploratory phase, there have been few attempts to systematically provide guidance for conducting experiments. For example, there is no consensus on the choice of representative driving scenarios, the proper choice of different bicycle simulators, and measurement standards to systematically compare the results of different studies. With this workshop, we want the community to gather and discuss a roadmap for the future of HCI bicycle research so that these issues can be overcome

Learning and innovative elements of strategy adoption rules expand cooperative network topologies

Cooperation plays a key role in the evolution of complex systems. However, the level of cooperation extensively varies with the topology of agent networks in the widely used models of repeated games. Here we show that cooperation remains rather stable by applying the reinforcement learning strategy adoption rule, Q-learning on a variety of random, regular, small-word, scale-free and modular network models in repeated, multi-agent Prisoners Dilemma and Hawk-Dove games. Furthermore, we found that using the above model systems other long-term learning strategy adoption rules also promote cooperation, while introducing a low level of noise (as a model of innovation) to the strategy adoption rules makes the level of cooperation less dependent on the actual network topology. Our results demonstrate that long-term learning and random elements in the strategy adoption rules, when acting together, extend the range of network topologies enabling the development of cooperation at a wider range of costs and temptations. These results suggest that a balanced duo of learning and innovation may help to preserve cooperation during the re-organization of real-world networks, and may play a prominent role in the evolution of self-organizing, complex systems.Comment: 14 pages, 3 Figures + a Supplementary Material with 25 pages, 3 Tables, 12 Figures and 116 reference

Phase transitions in biological membranes

Native membranes of biological cells display melting transitions of their lipids at a temperature of 10-20 degrees below body temperature. Such transitions can be observed in various bacterial cells, in nerves, in cancer cells, but also in lung surfactant. It seems as if the presence of transitions slightly below physiological temperature is a generic property of most cells. They are important because they influence many physical properties of the membranes. At the transition temperature, membranes display a larger permeability that is accompanied by ion-channel-like phenomena even in the complete absence of proteins. Membranes are softer, which implies that phenomena such as endocytosis and exocytosis are facilitated. Mechanical signal propagation phenomena related to nerve pulses are strongly enhanced. The position of transitions can be affected by changes in temperature, pressure, pH and salt concentration or by the presence of anesthetics. Thus, even at physiological temperature, these transitions are of relevance. There position and thereby the physical properties of the membrane can be controlled by changes in the intensive thermodynamic variables. Here, we review some of the experimental findings and the thermodynamics that describes the control of the membrane function.Comment: 23 pages, 15 figure

Network 'small-world-ness': a quantitative method for determining canonical network equivalence

Background: Many technological, biological, social, and information networks fall into the broad class of 'small-world' networks: they have tightly interconnected clusters of nodes, and a shortest mean path length that is similar to a matched random graph (same number of nodes and edges). This semi-quantitative definition leads to a categorical distinction ('small/not-small') rather than a quantitative, continuous grading of networks, and can lead to uncertainty about a network's small-world status. Moreover, systems described by small-world networks are often studied using an equivalent canonical network model-the Watts-Strogatz (WS) model. However, the process of establishing an equivalent WS model is imprecise and there is a pressing need to discover ways in which this equivalence may be quantified. Methodology/Principal Findings: We defined a precise measure of 'small-world-ness' S based on the trade off between high local clustering and short path length. A network is now deemed a 'small-world' if S. 1-an assertion which may be tested statistically. We then examined the behavior of S on a large data-set of real-world systems. We found that all these systems were linked by a linear relationship between their S values and the network size n. Moreover, we show a method for assigning a unique Watts-Strogatz (WS) model to any real-world network, and show analytically that the WS models associated with our sample of networks also show linearity between S and n. Linearity between S and n is not, however, inevitable, and neither is S maximal for an arbitrary network of given size. Linearity may, however, be explained by a common limiting growth process. Conclusions/Significance: We have shown how the notion of a small-world network may be quantified. Several key properties of the metric are described and the use of WS canonical models is placed on a more secure footing

Network Archaeology: Uncovering Ancient Networks from Present-day Interactions

Often questions arise about old or extinct networks. What proteins interacted in a long-extinct ancestor species of yeast? Who were the central players in the Last.fm social network 3 years ago? Our ability to answer such questions has been limited by the unavailability of past versions of networks. To overcome these limitations, we propose several algorithms for reconstructing a network's history of growth given only the network as it exists today and a generative model by which the network is believed to have evolved. Our likelihood-based method finds a probable previous state of the network by reversing the forward growth model. This approach retains node identities so that the history of individual nodes can be tracked. We apply these algorithms to uncover older, non-extant biological and social networks believed to have grown via several models, including duplication-mutation with complementarity, forest fire, and preferential attachment. Through experiments on both synthetic and real-world data, we find that our algorithms can estimate node arrival times, identify anchor nodes from which new nodes copy links, and can reveal significant features of networks that have long since disappeared.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure

Phase Locking Induces Scale-Free Topologies in Networks of Coupled Oscillators

An initial unsynchronized ensemble of networking phase oscillators is further subjected to a growing process where a set of forcing oscillators, each one of them following the dynamics of a frequency pacemaker, are added to the pristine graph. Linking rules based on dynamical criteria are followed in the attachment process to force phase locking of the network with the external pacemaker. We show that the eventual locking occurs in correspondence to the arousal of a scale-free degree distribution in the original graph