Features affecting the quality of Sustainability Reporting: Theoretically informed insights and empirical evidence from the Global Fortune 100 (2011-2015)

Sound Corporate Governance (CG) requires business entities to take responsible regard for the equitable interests of all stakeholders and appropriately align their individual concerns. Given that society generally is one significant stakeholder, it then becomes relevant to determine how such entities take regard for and report upon the social and environmental issues that currently threaten the sustainability of our globe. Accordingly, this research focuses on such sustainability issues and how they are reported, through Sustainability Reporting (SR). Verifying corporate social and environmental activities to stakeholders through Sustainability Reporting (SR) tends to gain and maintain corporate social Legitimacy and continuity in the market. This is because, SR is an effective and efficient tool for measuring and communicating the corporate social and environmental performance, in conjunction with its economic performance to stakeholders. Despite the critical importance of Sustainability Reporting, academics and professionals claim that the Quality of Sustainability Reporting is poor. Given this poor quality, it is recognized that several Sustainability Reports do not fulfill the needs of stakeholders. Consequently, based on the theoretical foundation of Legitimacy Theory and relevant literature, this research aims at hypothesizing and testing the effect of four features on the Quality of Sustainability Reporting (QSR). These features are Adherence to Regulation (ATR), External Assurance of Report (ASR), Independence of Board (IOB) and Type of Information (TOI). QSR is determined via the Index of the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI). The GRI is regarded as the international proxy for Sustainability Reporting. Its Index identifies the performance indicators that should be included within the Sustainability Report, in order to fulfill the needs of stakeholders. The relationship between these features and QSR are tested/evaluated within 500 reports. These 500 are the Sustainability Reports of the Global Fortune 100 (G100) companies over the five-year period 2011-2015. Employing an ordinal dependent variable (QSR), the research applies an Ordinal, Logistic Regression (OLS) to statistically test hypothesized relationships. The SPSS statistical software package is used to implement that regression and to statistically analyze the collected data. The research concludes that Adherence To Regulations, External Assurance of Report, Independence of Board and Type of Information significantly affect, (representing 37.1% - 41% of the change in) the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. It also concludes that, Adherence to Regulations and External Assurance of Report have an Extremely Significant and Positive, relationship with the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Moreover; there is a Significant and Positive, relationship between the Type of Information and Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Regarding the Independence of Board, two main phenomena are identified from the empirical results. The results identify that, there is a Non-significant relationship between Independence of Board Members and the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. However; there is a Significant, Positive, relationship between the Independence of Board Chair and the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Therefore, Adherence to Regulations, External Assurance of Report, Independence of Board Chair and Type of Information are significant influencing factors that should be seriously considered by reporting firms in order to improve the Quality of Sustainability Reporting

Features Affecting the Quality of Sustainability Reporting: Theoretically-Informed Insights and Empirical Evidence from the Global Fortune 100 (2011-2015)

Sound Corporate Governance (CG) requires business entities to take responsible regard for the equitable interests of all stakeholders and appropriately align their individual concerns. Given that society generally is one significant stakeholder, it then becomes relevant to determine how such entities take regard for and report upon the social and environmental issues that currently threaten the sustainability of our globe. Accordingly, this research focuses on such sustainability issues and how they are reported, through Sustainability Reporting (SR). Verifying corporate social and environmental activities to stakeholders through Sustainability Reporting (SR) tends to gain and maintain corporate social Legitimacy and continuity in the market. This is because, SR is an effective and efficient tool for measuring and communicating the corporate social and environmental performance, in conjunction with its economic performance to stakeholders. Despite the critical importance of Sustainability Reporting, academics and professionals claim that the Quality of Sustainability Reporting is poor. Given this poor quality, it is recognized that several Sustainability Reports do not fulfill the needs of stakeholders. Consequently, based on the theoretical foundation of Legitimacy Theory and relevant literature, this research aims at hypothesizing and testing the effect of four features on the Quality of Sustainability Reporting (QSR). These features are Adherence to Regulation (ATR), External Assurance of Report (ASR), Independence of Board (IOB) and Type of Information (TOI). QSR is determined via the Index of the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI). The GRI is regarded as the international proxy for Sustainability Reporting. Its Index identifies the performance indicators that should be included within the Sustainability Report, in order to fulfill the needs of stakeholders. The relationship between these features and QSR are tested/evaluated within 500 reports. These 500 are the Sustainability Reports of the Global Fortune 100 (G100) companies over the five-year period 2011-2015. Employing an ordinal dependent variable (QSR), the research applies an Ordinal, Logistic Regression (OLS) to statistically test hypothesized relationships. The SPSS statistical software package is used to implement that regression and to statistically analyze the collected data. The research concludes that Adherence To Regulations, External Assurance of Report, Independence of Board and Type of Information significantly affect, (representing 37.1% - 41% of the change in) the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. It also concludes that, Adherence to Regulations and External Assurance of Report have an Extremely Significant and Positive, relationship with the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Moreover; there is a Significant and Positive, relationship between the Type of Information and Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Regarding the Independence of Board, two main phenomena are identified from the empirical results. The results identify that, there is a Non-significant relationship between Independence of Board Members and the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. However; there is a Significant, Positive, relationship between the Independence of Board Chair and the Quality of Sustainability Reporting. Therefore, Adherence to Regulations, External Assurance of Report, Independence of Board Chair and Type of Information are significant influencing factors that should be seriously considered by reporting firms in order to improve the Quality of Sustainability Reporting

Automatic Classification of Bright Retinal Lesions via Deep Network Features

The diabetic retinopathy is timely diagonalized through color eye fundus images by experienced ophthalmologists, in order to recognize potential retinal features and identify early-blindness cases. In this paper, it is proposed to extract deep features from the last fully-connected layer of, four different, pre-trained convolutional neural networks. These features are then feeded into a non-linear classifier to discriminate three-class diabetic cases, i.e., normal, exudates, and drusen. Averaged across 1113 color retinal images collected from six publicly available annotated datasets, the deep features approach perform better than the classical bag-of-words approach. The proposed approaches have an average accuracy between 91.23% and 92.00% with more than 13% improvement over the traditional state of art methods.Comment: Preprint submitted to Journal of Medical Imaging | SPIE (Tue, Jul 28, 2017

The increasing role of UNIDO as cooperation promoter

After ten years during which technical assistance to developing countries by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) rose from $5 mn in 1967 to$ 40 mn in 1976, factors influencing the organization’s evolution, future tasks, operations and plans have taken place. In the long term much will depend on the extent to which international cooperation keeps pace with declared intentions, and favourable indications have been provided by the response to early experiments in global consultation. Realization that industrialization encourages all other forms of development, particularly education and health services, should also encourage greater material support to UNIDO from Governments

The Political Mobilization of the Arab Minority in Israel: Shifts in Political Demands and Activities

Previous scholarly work on the demands and political activities of the Arab minority in Israel have focused on studying Arab political parties and parliamentary participation, asserting that Arab demands fall into one of two categories: radical or adaptive. That is, in studying Arab participation, or lack thereof, in parliamentary processes, one can claim that Arabs want either complete separation from the state of Israel (radical demands) or complete integration into the state of Israel (adaptive demands). However, recent trends have witnessed a decrease in Arab Israelis’ interest in political parties and parliamentary participation, such as voting in Knesset elections and attempts to pass legislation. This disinterest is a direct result of the inability and inefficiency of parliamentary processes to make practical changes in the daily lives of the Arab minority, who are underprivileged, socio-economically, politically, and legally. However, disinterest in parliamentary processes does not translate into disinterest in political mobility, and consequently, Arab Israelis have turned to other means, particularly extra-parliamentary organization, to achieve their demands. This paper then takes a different approach in that I study extra-parliamentary organizations to explore the nature of Arab demands towards the Israeli government. In studying extra-parliamentary organization, I have found that the nature of Arab demands no longer fall within the radical-adaptive dichotomy proposed by previous scholars. Rather, the Arab minority’s demands can be described as being ethnoregional in nature. That is, the Arab minority in Israel demand collective national rights based on the fragmented geographical regions they occupy

DETECTING THE EXTERNAL DEFECTS OF POTATO TUBERS USING A VISIBLE LASER

ABSTRACTPotato (Solanum tuberosum, L.) is considered as a source of the national income in Egypt, since the potato crop is exported abroad because it's high quality specifications. The aim of this study is to: Find out the potential of using the optical properties as a nondestructive quality assessment for detecting surface defects of Spunta potato tubers using a low-power Helium-Neon laser. The obtained results were as following: The percentage of reflection intensity of sound tubers (7.48%) was the highest. While, the reflection percentage of superficial shatter bruise (0.83%) was the lowest. The reflection intensity percentages of He-Ne laser light from sound and defective tubers were arranged as follow: Sound (7.48%) >, Internal black spot (4.33%) >, Greening (2.53%) >, Cuts (1.83%) >, Growth cracks (1.64%) >, Shrinkage (1.54%) >, Deep shatter bruise (1.33%) >, Rots (1.32%) >, Pressure bruise (1.09%) >, Skinning (1.07%) >, Insect damage (0.87%) >, Superficial shatter bruise (0.83%). For quality evaluation processes it was concluded that: when the percentage of reflection intensity is less than 1%, (Ref.%< 1%) then the defects may be considered superficial shatter bruise or insect damage, otherwise, when the percentage of reflection intensity greater than or equal 1% and less than 2%, (1% ≤ Ref.%< 2 %) then the defects may be considered skinning, pressure bruise, rots, deep shatter bruise, shrinkage, growth cracks or cuts, if the percentage is ranged between (2.5:4.5%) then the defects may be belonging to greening defect or internal black spot. The percentage of reflection greater than 7% the surface may be considered as sound tubers. It was concluded that the reflected laser light could be used as an indicator for the defective surface defects of potato tubers, so sorting and separating processes can be conducted according to the optical properties

Le concile de Clermont de 1095 et l'appel à la croisade. Actes du Colloque Universitaire International de Clermont-Ferrand (23-25 juin 1995) organisé et publié avec le concours du Conseil Regional d'Auvergne Rome : Ecole Française de Rome, 1997.

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Ecotypes or Genotypes? The Status of the Currently Recognized Infraspecific Taxa of Acacia tortilis (Forssk.) : Hayne Growing in the Red Sea Hills, Sudan and Egypt

This study focuses on the Acacia tortilis species complex and the taxonomic relationship among its currently recognized infraspecific (A. tortilis ssp. tortilis, ssp raddiana and ssp. spirocarpa) in the Red Sea Hills of North-East Sudan and South-East Egypt. The morphological features used in floras to differentiate among these taxa were examined on a total of 520 specimens, collected from 33 localities. It was found that there is an association between the morphological characters and their immediate environment. Of 158 specimens subjected to molecular analysis 106 showed no agreement between classes formed using morphological and / or molecular data. In spite of the great genetic polymorphism among all the 158 specimens, there was no significant difference among the three putative A. tortilis sub-taxa. Genetic diversity among the samples studied seems linked to restricted gene flow among populations, but a positive correlation was found between the genetic variation and the physical distance between A. tortilis localities studied. Discriminating morphological characters of A. tortilis such as crown shape and growth form seem to be a result of traditional human management activities such as animal browsing and pollarding at different life stages. The currently recognized infraspecific taxa of Acacia tortilis in the Red Sea Hills, Sudan and Egypt appear to be ecotypes rather than genotypes, and accordingly the A. tortilis complex in the Red Sea Hills of Sudan and Egypt comprises only one species i.e. A. tortilis

Effect of Gamma Radiation and Laser Exposure on Color Properties of Sesame Oil during Storage

The aim of the present study was measured of the color properties as Hue degree, Saturation value, and Brightness value (HSB). Three samples of Sesame oil was exposure by laser) diod laser with wavelength 450 nm) with three times (0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 hour) and three samples of sesame oil were irradiated by Gamma Rays with three dosses 2, 4, 8 kGy) and one sample without any treatment (control). The processing of an image starts with the transfer of the image to the PC, where the image analysis process is applied. After that, it is performed the segmentation to watermark determine if each pixel belongs to bottom, skin or color.  The parameters obtained from each Sesame oil sample (in each image are the pixel number of lighter oil (Stage 1), of darker or sesame oil profile (Stage 2). Taking image of each Sesame oil samples, a total number of 6 parameters can be obtained. Color properties {Hue, Saturation and brightness (HSB)}, color component {Red, Green and Blue (RGB)} of sesame oil. The obtained results were showed that by increasing Gamma radiation doses and exposure time of Laser, Hue Degree was increased, that mean the color of sesame oil may be improved to be less quality. While, Hue Degree was decreased by increasing storage period. Also, by increasing Gamma radiation doses and exposure time of Laser, the value of saturation was decreasing, that means that the color of sesame oil may be improved to be high quality. Meanwhile, the value of saturation was decreased by increasing storage period. As well as, by increasing Gamma radiation doses, exposure time of Laser and by increasing storage period the value of brightness was decreasing. &nbsp