Private politics daily: What makes firms the target of internet/media criticism? An empirical investigation of firm, industry, and institutional factors

Private politics refers to situations in which activists or NGOs try to push firms to conform to social standards (regarding, for instance, human rights and environmental protection) without public policy intervention. The existing literature on private politics has focused on large campaigns such as consumer boycotts, and looked at the impact of those boycotts on firms' financial performance and on the likelihood that firms comply with activist demands. Even though these large campaigns are important, focusing on them leads to neglecting the fact that a large portion of the time and resources that activists consecrate to private politics is used to monitor firms and criticize them through Internet posting and media statements, rather than to launch high profile campaigns. Little is known, however, about what drives these activists when they criticize companies, why they target certain companies and not others, and whether this criticism should be considered as a primary step in the production of full-fledged campaigns. In this paper, we fill this gap by exploring a unique international database of CSR-based criticisms against Fortune 500 companies for the 2006-2009 period. This database allows us to look at the impact of a broad range of factors including industry differences, country/institutional differences and firm-specific dimensions, on the likelihood that a certain firm will be targeted by activist critique. Results indicate that criticism is driven by strategic intents. Similar to previous literature, large and visible firms in certain industries are more targeted than others. In addition, these firms also tend to come from countries with strong institutions and high standards of living

Skeletons for Distributed Topological Computation

Parallel implementation of topological algorithms is highly desirable, but the challenges, from reconstructing algorithms around independent threads through to runtime load balancing, have proven to be formidable. This problem, made all the more acute by the diversity of hardware platforms, has led to new kinds of implementation platform for computational science, with sophisticated runtime systems managing and coordinating large threadcounts to keep processing elements heavily utilized. While simpler and more portable than direct management of threads, these approaches still entangle program logic with resource management. Similar kinds of highly parallel runtime system have also been developed for functional languages. Here, however, language support for higher-order functions allows a cleaner separation between the algorithm and `skeletons' that express generic patterns of parallel computation. We report results on using this technique to develop a distributed version of the Joint Contour Net, a generalization of the Contour Tree to multifields. We present performance comparisons against a recent Haskell implementation using shared-memory parallelism, and initial work on a skeleton for distributed memory implementation that utilizes an innovative strategy to reduce inter-process communication overheads

β Subunit M2–M3 Loop Conformational Changes Are Uncoupled from α1 β Glycine Receptor Channel Gating: Implications for Human Hereditary Hyperekplexia

Hereditary hyperekplexia, or startle disease, is a neuromotor disorder caused mainly by mutations that either prevent the surface expression of, or modify the function of, the human heteromeric α1 β glycine receptor (GlyR) chloride channel. There is as yet no explanation as to why hyperekplexia mutations that modify channel function are almost exclusively located in the α1 to the exclusion of β subunit. The majority of these mutations are identified in the M2–M3 loop of the α1 subunit. Here we demonstrate that α1 β GlyR channel function is less sensitive to hyperekplexia-mimicking mutations introduced into the M2–M3 loop of the β than into the α1 subunit. This suggests that the M2–M3 loop of the α subunit dominates the β subunit in gating the α1 β GlyR channel. A further attempt to determine the possible mechanism underlying this phenomenon by using the voltage-clamp fluorometry technique revealed that agonist-induced conformational changes in the β subunit M2–M3 loop were uncoupled from α1 β GlyR channel gating. This is in contrast to the α subunit, where the M2–M3 loop conformational changes were shown to be directly coupled to α1 β GlyR channel gating. Finally, based on analysis of α1 β chimeric receptors, we demonstrate that the structural components responsible for this are distributed throughout the β subunit, implying that the β subunit has evolved without the functional constraint of a normal gating pathway within it. Our study provides a possible explanation of why hereditary hyperekplexia-causing mutations that modify α1 β GlyR channel function are almost exclusively located in the α1 to the exclusion of the β subunit

The phenomenon of reputational damage: What is it? What does it cause?

Reputation constitutes one distinctive element in the capitalistic competition among for-profit firms: Numerous concepts and empirical studies have been suggested, dealing with the construction and benefits of reputation as well as the financial consequences of negative reputation. Studies that examine the causes of reputational damage are, however, few and miss providing clear theoretical reasons why a reputation might be destructed. Studying the causes of reputation damage is the purpose of this paper, with a twofold agenda: First, building on institutional theory, we conceptualize how preceding illegitimate corporate behaviors can drive the destruction of corporate reputation. To capture the reputational impact of such a so-called norm-deviating behavior empirically, we deduce hypotheses which we test in a highly normative context, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Building on a new global dataset of over 8,600 CSR-related social movements, or norm breaches, reported from more than 1,000 sources directed against 451 firms belonging to the Fortune reputation ranking over the 2006–2009 period, we find strong support for framed and new critique from influential sources as the main causes of reputational damages. If reputational destruction is mainly caused by social construction, we conclude that it is particularly environments skeptical of capitalism tipping the scales

Firms, Breach of Norms, and Reputation Damage

A large body of literature looks at how firms develop and maintain their reputation. Little is known, however, about factors leading to a damaged corporate reputation. In this article, the authors compare two sets of predictors of reputational damage following a reported breach of norms: the characteristics of the breach and the characteristics of the actor reporting the breach. Theoretically, the authors argue that the latter is likely to prevail over the former. The authors test this proposition in the highly normative context of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Building on a global data set of over 8,600 CSR-related norm breaches, directed against 451 firms on the Fortune ranking reputation over the 2006-2009 period, the authors find empirical support for the idea that reputation damage is not really driven by the severity and novelty of the allegation, but by the type of source reporting the issue as well as the credibility of this source. Hence, these results lend some support to a socially constructed view of reputational damage, in which being portrayed by prominent actors as deviating from the norm is more important than the actual deviation from the goal of the norm itself

Using approximate matching to reduce the volume of digital data

Digital forensic investigators frequently have to search for relevant files in massive digital corpora – a task often compared to finding a needle in a haystack. To address this challenge, investigators typically apply cryptographic hash functions to identify known files. However, cryptographic hashing only allows the detection of files that exactly match the known file hash values or fingerprints. This paper demonstrates the benefits of using approximate matching to locate relevant files. The experiments described in this paper used three test images of Windows XP, Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 systems to evaluate fingerprint-based comparisons. The results reveal that approximate matching can improve file identification – in one case, increasing the identification rate from 1.82% to 23.76%

Expediting MRSH-v2 Approximate Matching with Hierarchical Bloom Filter Trees

Bytewise approximate matching algorithms have in recent years shown significant promise in de- tecting files that are similar at the byte level. This is very useful for digital forensic investigators, who are regularly faced with the problem of searching through a seized device for pertinent data. A common scenario is where an investigator is in possession of a collection of known-illegal files (e.g. a collection of child abuse material) and wishes to find whether copies of these are stored on the seized device. Approximate matching addresses shortcomings in traditional hashing, which can only find identical files, by also being able to deal with cases of merged files, embedded files, partial files, or if a file has been changed in any way. Most approximate matching algorithms work by comparing pairs of files, which is not a scalable approach when faced with large corpora. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of using a Hierarchical Bloom Filter Tree (HBFT) data structure to reduce the running time of collection-against-collection matching, with a specific focus on the MRSH-v2 algorithm. Three experiments are discussed, which explore the effects of different configurations of HBFTs. The proposed approach dramatically reduces the number of pairwise comparisons required, and demonstrates substantial speed gains, while maintaining effectiveness