Yahoo! And The Chinese Dissidents: A Case Study Of Trust, Values, And Clashing Cultures

This case involves the global business ethics of two distinctly different cultures whose definition of human rights is embedded within their differing historical traditions. The Constitution of the United States guarantees individual rights for each of its citizens, including free speech and the right to petition the government. The People’s Republic of China traces its roots to the ancient tradition of Confucius and the Mandate of Heaven that advocated the Emperor’s responsibility to provide economic justice to instill social harmony. This perspective is echoed by the Communist’s party of the PRC with its insistence on the prohibition of public dissent.  How then should an American firm address these issues while remaining competitive in the global arena and should they be held responsible for abiding to foreign law? This case presents the ethical dilemma faced by democratic multinationals conducting business globally

Persistence of poor sleep predicts the severity of the clinical condition after 6months of standard treatment in patients with eating disorders

Clinical evidence suggests that eating disorder (ED) patients experience poor sleep even if they rarely complain of it. However, direct empirical evidence supporting this relationship is still sparse. In order to provide direct evidence, poor sleep, severity of the ED symptoms and depression were obtained in 562 ED patients at treatment admission (T0). For 271 patients out of them, data were also available after 6 months of standard treatment (T1). Results evidence that at T0 poor sleep predicts severity of ED symptoms through the mediation of depression. Persistence of poor sleep at T1 directly predicts the severity of the ED symptoms both directly and through the mediation of depression. These findings suggest that the treatment of ED may benefit from addressing poor sleep since its presence and persistence increase comorbidity and attrition to the standard treatment

Civilization, National Culture And Ethical Work Climates: A Comparative Study Of CPA Firms In China And Taiwan

The emergence of China as an economic power has prompted the question, what impact if any has globalization and market liberalization had on the ethical climate of organizations within China and its neighbor Taiwan? Cross-strait tensions have eased over the past few years due to closer economic integration. Although both countries differ in political, as well as organizational design, they share core cultural values embedded within civilization; Confucianism. This study attempts to understand how the correlation established between ethical climates and National culture by Parboteeah, Cullen, Victor, and Sakano are played out against the backdrop of a shared civilization. Will the ethical climates retain or deviate from the core civilization cultural values theorized by Samuel P. Huntington? To answer that question, we collected data from C.P.A. firms in China and Taiwan using the 36-item revised version of the Ethical Climate Questionnaire developed by John B. Cullen, Bart Victor (1988), and James W. Bronson (1993). The results indicated a significant difference in four areas: 1) principal-individual, 2) principle-cosmopolitan, 3) benevolence-individual, and 4) egoism-individual. When correlated with national culture and their core civilizational cultural value of Confucianism, deviations showed that Taiwan moved away from Confucian values by scoring higher in Egoism while retaining Confucianism with a more particularistic culture. China demonstrated a shift away from Confucian values by scoring higher in principle while retaining Confucian values through its score in benevolence

Is Ethics Education Necessary? A Comparative Study Of Moral Cognizance In Taiwan And The United States

Ethical development, cognizance, and maturity, as well as ethical behavior, are a primary concern of all managers, government officials, and educators. These moral values are even more important in Asian economies where some aspects of the economy seem to go underground without any due taxation afforded to the government or proper credit accorded to the property owners or copyright or other intellectual property holders. This article examines morality and ethics from a cross-cultural perspective. The article examines works using Kohlbergs Cognitive Moral Development theory and the Defining Issues Test (DIT), in order to ascertain the moral cognizance of workers and students, with particular attention to the variables of age, education, ethics education, and gender. United States samples are compared with studies of Taiwanese managers and Taiwanese students. The purpose was to see if there is relationship between any of these variables and moral maturity and cognizance, as well as whether any of these relationships were culturally influenced

The Effect Of Market Structure On Mutual Fund Performance In Taiwan

This paper illustrates the relationship between industry concentration and performance in Taiwan’s mutual fund industry. Our research mainly focuses on the relation between a fund’s average performance and market structure. Typically, a fund’s manager who faces price uncertainty will dedicate his efforts to determine the scale and compositions of portfolio to achieve a better performance in the near future. Since mutual funds are price takers, the empirical results for this industry may go beyond the scope of the SCP paradigm.   This study focuses on the open-end equity mutual fund in the Taiwan market, which can be viewed as one representative of emerging markets. Employing three measures of market structure, we find that the higher degree of market concentration always associates with poor performance, which contradicts the structure-conduct-performance (SCP) hypothesis. More interestingly, when market shares of mutual funds have been considered, our empirical results show a U-shape structure-performance relation for mutual funds. When a fund’s market share becomes larger, the negative influence on fund performance of market concentration will get stronger. Similarly, the smaller a fund’s market share the stronger negative impact on fund performance of market concentration, suggesting that mutual funds endowed with too weak or too strong market power can erode their performance. More importantly, these results offer a new thinking toward the mutual fund industry’s organization policy for authorities; that is, maintaining a high competitive environment and encouraging mutual funds to keep moderate and efficient scale is a better way to achieve superior fund performance

The performance of the EU-Rotate_N model in predicting the growth and nitrogen uptake of rotations of field vegetable crops in a Mediterranean environment

The EU-Rotate_N model was developed as a tool to estimate the growth and nitrogen (N) uptake of vegetable crop rotations across a wide range of European climatic conditions and to assess the economic and environmental consequences of alternative management strategies. The model has been evaluated under field conditions in Germany and Norway and under greenhouse conditions in China. The present work evaluated the model using Italian data to evaluate its performance in a warm and dry environment. Data were collected from four 2-year field rotations, which included lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.), fennel (Foeniculum vulgare Mill.), spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.), broccoli (Brassica oleracea L. var. italica Plenck) and white cabbage (B. oleracea convar. capitata var. alba L.); each rotation used three different rates of N fertilizer (average recommended N1, assumed farmer's practice N2=N1+0·3×N1 and a zero control N0). Although the model was not calibrated prior to running the simulations, results for above-ground dry matter biomass, crop residue biomass, crop N concentration and crop N uptake were promising. However, soil mineral N predictions to 0·6 m depth were poor. The main problem with the prediction of the test variables was the poor ability to capture N mineralization in some autumn periods and an inappropriate parameterization of fennel. In conclusion, the model performed well, giving results comparable with other bio-physical process simulation models, but for more complex crop rotations. The model has the potential for application in Mediterranean environments for field vegetable production

Taylor‐vortex membrane reactor for continuous gas–liquid reactions

A unique Taylor-vortex membrane reactor (TVMR) design for continuous gas–liquid reactions is presented in this work. The reactor consists of a cylindrical rotor inside a stationary concentric cylindrical vessel, and a flexible system of equispaced baffle rings surrounding the rotor. This restricts the annular cross section to a small gap between the baffles and the rotor, and divides the annulus into 18 mixing zones. The baffles support a 6 m long PFA tubular membrane that is woven around the rotor. At 4 mL/min inlet flow rate, the TVMR showed a plug-flow behavior and outperformed the unbaffled reactor, having 5–12 times lower axial dispersion. The continuous aerobic oxidation of benzyl alcohol was performed for 7 h using the Pd(OAc)2/pyridine catalyst in toluene at 100 °C and 1.1 MPa oxygen pressure. A stable conversion of 30% was achieved with 85% benzaldehyde selectivity, and no pervaporation of organics into the gas phase

Anticipatory Smiling: Linking Early Affective Communication and Social Outcome

In anticipatory smiles, infants appear to communicate pre-existing positive affect by smiling at an object and then turning the smile toward an adult. We report two studies in which the precursors, development, and consequences of anticipatory smiling were investigated. Study 1 revealed a positive correlation between infant smiling at 6 months and the level of anticipatory smiling at 8 and 10 months during joint attention episodes, as well as a positive correlation between anticipatory smiling and parent-rated social expressivity scores at 30 months. Study 2 confirmed a developmental increase in the number of infants using anticipatory smiles between 9 and 12 months that had been initially documented in the Study 1 sample [Venezia, M., Messinger, D. S., Thorp, D., & Mundy, P. (2004). The development of anticipatory smiling. Infancy, 6(3), 397–406]. Additionally, anticipatory smiling at 9 months positively predicted parent-rated social competence scores at 30 months. Findings are discussed with regard to the importance of anticipatory smiling in early socioemotional development

Evolution of Vacancy Supersaturations in MeV Si Implanted Silicon

High-energy Si implantation into silicon creates a net defect distribution that is characterized by an excess of interstitials near the projected range and a simultaneous excess of vacancies closer to the surface. This defect distribution is due to the spatial separation between the distributions of interstitials and vacancies created by the forward momentum transferred from the implanted ion to the lattice atom. This dissertation investigates the evolution of the near-surface vacancy excess in MeV Si-implanted silicon both during implantation and post-implant annealing. Although previous investigations have identified a vacancy excess in MeV-implanted silicon, the investigations presented in this dissertation are unique in that they are designed to correlate the free-vacancy supersaturation with the vacancies in clusters. Free-vacancy (and interstitial) supersaturations were measured with Sb (B) dopant diffusion markers. Vacancies in clusters were profiled by Au labeling; a new technique based on the observation that Au atoms trap in the presence of open-volume defects. The experiments described in this dissertation are also unique in that they were designed to isolate the deep interstitial excess from interacting with the much shallower vacancy excess during post-implant thermal processing