The Effect of Management’s Focus on SASB Measures on Financial Performance: A Study of the Health Care Supply Chain Sector

Publicly traded companies are coming under increasing pressure from investors and the media to demonstrate their commitment to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) sustainability, and there are many ESG models competing for the attention of the board and senior management team (Burke, 2020, Fatemi, 2017, and Jebe, 2019). In response to this pressure the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) has prepared a “Directors’ Guide to the SASB Standards” for eleven industries (Value Reporting Foundation, 2021). The objective of this study was to provide evidence to support the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board’s claim that organizational adoption and strategic focus on its ESG measures will materially improve financial performance. This was accomplished by evaluating key financial performance metrics for companies in the healthcare supply chain sector. As one of eleven industries with SASB standards, the healthcare supply chain was selected to limit the scope of the analysis of this study. This study addressed the five years before adopting SASB measures through the years following the firm’s strategic commitment. The findings in my study do not support the SASB claim that reporting companies experience improved financial performance (H1) and outperform their peers (H2). Further study is warranted

Th Ages for Metal-Poor Stars

With a sample of 22 metal-poor stars, we demonstrate that the heavy element abundance pattern (Z > 55) is the same as the r-process contributions to the solar nebula. This bolsters the results of previous studies that there is a universal r-process production pattern. We use the abundance of thorium in five metal-poor stars, along with an estimate of the initial Th abundance based on the abundances of stable r-process elements, to measure their ages. We have four field red giants with errors of 4.2 Gyr in their ages and one M92 giant with an error of 5.6 Gyr, based on considering the sources of observational error only. We obtain an average age of 11.4 Gyr, which depends critically on the assumption of an initial production ratio of Th/Eu of 0.496. If the Universe is 15 Gyr old, then the initial Th/Eu value should be 0.590, in agreement with some theoretical models of the r-process.Comment: 26 pages, to be published in Ap

Ongoing oroclinal bending in the Cascadia forearc and its relation to concave-outboard plate margin geometry

The concave-inboard (concave toward the overriding plate) geometry of most convergent margins is considered a natural consequence of the depression of the edge of a thin spherical cap, whereas concave-outboard margin segments commonly form around indenters on the subducting plate. At the Cascadia subduction zone, the apex of a > 500-km-long concave-outboard bend in the trench presently shows no obvious subduction of an indenter, but does coincide with the axis of an outboard-facing concavity in upper-plate rocks arched around the Olympic Peninsula in northwestern Washington State, USA. Here we synthesize paleomagnetic and structural data together with new analyses of Global Navigation Satellite System data to show that the upper plate at Cascadia has been folded from the Miocene to the present into an orocline with an axial trace that bisects the Olympic Peninsula. The processes that accommodate bending, which we suggest include (1) folding by flexural slip on the orocline limbs and (2) shortening, uplift, and escape within the core of the fold at the Olympic Mountains, have the combined result of relative motion of the forearc towards the arc at the core of the orocline, and sustained opposing rotations of the upper plate on the orocline limbs. We propose that oroclinal bending is promoted and maintained by along-strike variations in plate-boundary tractions resulting from the geometry of the plate interface at depth and suggest that these processes can contribute to the development of concave-outboard margins without the need for a subducting indenter

Disease Knowledge Transfer across Neurodegenerative Diseases

We introduce Disease Knowledge Transfer (DKT), a novel technique for transferring biomarker information between related neurodegenerative diseases. DKT infers robust multimodal biomarker trajectories in rare neurodegenerative diseases even when only limited, unimodal data is available, by transferring information from larger multimodal datasets from common neurodegenerative diseases. DKT is a joint-disease generative model of biomarker progressions, which exploits biomarker relationships that are shared across diseases. Our proposed method allows, for the first time, the estimation of plausible, multimodal biomarker trajectories in Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA), a rare neurodegenerative disease where only unimodal MRI data is available. For this we train DKT on a combined dataset containing subjects with two distinct diseases and sizes of data available: 1) a larger, multimodal typical AD (tAD) dataset from the TADPOLE Challenge, and 2) a smaller unimodal Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA) dataset from the Dementia Research Centre (DRC), for which only a limited number of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans are available. Although validation is challenging due to lack of data in PCA, we validate DKT on synthetic data and two patient datasets (TADPOLE and PCA cohorts), showing it can estimate the ground truth parameters in the simulation and predict unseen biomarkers on the two patient datasets. While we demonstrated DKT on Alzheimer's variants, we note DKT is generalisable to other forms of related neurodegenerative diseases. Source code for DKT is available online: https://github.com/mrazvan22/dkt.Comment: accepted at MICCAI 2019, 13 pages, 5 figures, 2 table