Environmental sustainability conducts and corporate performance in extractive sector

The subject of environmental sustainability transcends geographical zones, it attracts attention at the top-most business, governmental and civil society levels because of its current visible impacts. Despite the growing concern for a sustainable ecosystem, few applied studies have been conducted to establish the relationship between environmental sustainability and corporate performance in the extractive sector (one of the most profitable of all business sectors, yet arguably the worst culprit in environmental degradation). Therefore, this research seeks to explore the relationship between environmental sustainability and corporate performance in the extractive sector. This relationship was investigated using data from 68 companies within the extractive sector in both Europe and the Americas by the technique of multiple linear regression and event studies by one-way ANOVA. Our results show a negative relationship between environmental sustainability and profit while mixed results were obtained for relationship between environmental sustainability and firm value. In the short horizon, there is a positive relationship between environmental sustainability and firm value while a negative result was obtained in a long-horizon. The pattern of the results is most likely due to the unique nature of the sector where the demand for product exceeds supply. There is monopoly power in the form of cartels, and substitutes for the sector’s products (e.g. oil, gas, and cement) are either unavailable or inadequate. Therefore, poor attention to environmental responsibilities may not necessarily affect the profit but impact negatively on corporate value of the companies within the sector in a short-term. However, in the long-term, poor sensitivity to the environment may not be sustainable

Mutual Information and Boson Radius in c=1 Critical Systems in One Dimension

We study the generic scaling properties of the mutual information between two disjoint intervals, in a class of one-dimensional quantum critical systems described by the c=1 bosonic field theory. A numerical analysis of a spin-chain model reveals that the mutual information is scale-invariant and depends directly on the boson radius. We interpret the results in terms of correlation functions of branch-point twist fields. The present study provides a new way to determine the boson radius, and furthermore demonstrates the power of the mutual information to extract more refined information of conformal field theory than the central charge.Comment: 4.1 pages, 5 figure

When The Moon Is Shinin\u27 Down In Alabam

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/4878/thumbnail.jp

Deedle Deedle Dum

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/1294/thumbnail.jp

Energy compensation and adiposity in humans

Understanding the impacts of activity on energy balance is crucial. Increasing levels of activity may bring diminishing returns in energy expenditure because of compensatory responses in non-activity energy expenditures

An Efficient Method for Quantifying the Aggregate Flexibility of Plug-in Electric Vehicle Populations

Plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) are widely recognized as being highly flexible electric loads that can be pooled and controlled via aggregators to provide low-cost energy and ancillary services to wholesale electricity markets. To participate in these markets, an EV aggregator must encode the aggregate flexibility of the population of EVs under their command as a single polytope that is compliant with existing market rules. To this end, we investigate the problem of characterizing the aggregate flexibility set of a heterogeneous population of EVs whose individual flexibility sets are given as convex polytopes in half-space representation. As the exact computation of the aggregate flexibility set -- the Minkowski sum of the individual flexibility sets -- is known to be intractable, we study the problems of computing maximum-volume inner approximations and minimum-volume outer approximations to the aggregate flexibility set by optimizing over affine transformations of a given convex polytope in half-space representation. We show how to conservatively approximate the pair of maximum-volume and minimum-volume set containment problems as linear programs that scale polynomially with the number and dimension of the individual flexibility sets. The class of approximations methods provided in this paper generalizes existing methods from the literature. We illustrate the improvement in approximation accuracy achievable by our methods with numerical experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

High Transverse Momentum Physics at the Large Hadron Collider

This note summarizes many detailed physics studies done by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations for the LHC, concentrating on processes involving the production of high mass states. These studies show that the LHC should be able to elucidate the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and to study a variety of other topics related to physics at the TeV scale. In particular, a Higgs boson with couplings given by the Standard Model is observable in several channels over the full range of allowed masses. Its mass and some of its couplings will be determined. If supersymmetry is relevant to electroweak interactions, it will be discovered and the properties of many supersymmetric particles elucidated. Other new physics, such as the existence of massive gauge bosons and extra dimensions can be searched for extending existing limits by an order of magnitude or more.Comment: Authors listed are the editor