Do industrial incidents in the chemical sector create equity market contagion?

Purpose: This paper examines a number of US chemical industry incidents and their effect on equity prices of the incident company. Furthermore, this paper then examines the contagion effect of this incident on direct competitors. Findings: This paper finds that the incident company experiences deeper negative abnormal returns as the number of injuries and fatalities as a result of the incident increases. The equity value of the competitor companies suffer substantial losses stemming from contagion effects when disasters occur causing ten or more injuries and fatalities, but benefit from the incident through increasing equity value when the level of injury and fatality is minor. Practical implications: This research can be used as a resource to promote and justify the cost of safety mechanisms within the chemical industry, as incidents have been shown to negatively affect the equity value of the not just the incident company, but also their direct competitor

Garbage collection auto-tuning for Java MapReduce on Multi-Cores

MapReduce has been widely accepted as a simple programming pattern that can form the basis for efficient, large-scale, distributed data processing. The success of the MapReduce pattern has led to a variety of implementations for different computational scenarios. In this paper we present MRJ, a MapReduce Java framework for multi-core architectures. We evaluate its scalability on a four-core, hyperthreaded Intel Core i7 processor, using a set of standard MapReduce benchmarks. We investigate the significant impact that Java runtime garbage collection has on the performance and scalability of MRJ. We propose the use of memory management auto-tuning techniques based on machine learning. With our auto-tuning approach, we are able to achieve MRJ performance within 10% of optimal on 75% of our benchmark tests

Power Wheelchair Canopy

Some power wheelchair users can not drive and independently hold an umbrella at the time because they do not have much upper body strength. Therefore, users are unprotected from the rain and are getting soaking wet. One of the members of this group is in a wheelchair and faces this problem. He has previously searched for something to protect him from rain, but could not found something he could independently use. What users need is a powered umbrella that attaches to their power wheelchair. There is no such umbrella available in the market. In this project, the solution to this problem will be designed and built in the form of an umbrella for his wheelchair. Exploration of various methods of rain protect will be explored. Calculations will be performed to verify that everything will work when assembled. The prototype will then be built. Assuming there will be some issues, as there always seem to be, several iterations of the prototype will be built. This is assuming that there will still be money left in the budget to complete these other iterations. It is also desired to make it inexpensive. This will allow power wheelchair users all over the world to purchase it for themselves. In order to achieve this, the project will lean heavily on the 3-D printing capabilities that the University of Akron has to offer

The impact of gender on risk perception: Implications for EU member states’ national risk assessment processes

This study examined the influence of gender on individual risk perception. The analysis covered 17 involuntary risks and examined the effects of gender on three dimensions - likelihood, impact and overall risk rating. The results showed that while the magnitude and significance of the gender coefficients varied by risk, a general pattern was apparent: females judged involuntary risks as being more likely, having a greater impact, or having a higher overall risk rating than their male counterparts. The impact rating for Fire was the one significant exception to this pattern. These findings highlight how the composition of National Risk Assessment (NRA) focus groups may impact the outputs from Ireland’s NRA process and the importance of EU Member States ensuring gender representation within NRA focus groups

The influence of expertise on perceived and actual household disaster preparedness

Household preparedness is critical if frontline responders are to avoid role conflict and report for duty during a disaster. Although differences between expert and non-expert risk assessment are well documented, the extent to which expertise impacts on household preparedness is less studied. To address this gap, 2087 Irish households, 678 of which are the homes of experts, are surveyed to ascertain their level of preparedness. The findings show that expertise has a positive and significant effect on both perceived and actual preparedness. However, experts are no more accurate than non-experts in judging the level of actual preparedness in their homes

Targeting of anionic membrane species by lanthanide(III) complexes: towards improved MRI contrast agents for apoptosis

No abstract available