How to measure Corporate Social Responsibility

Compliance with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) standards may require capacity that varies from one aspect to the other and companies in different industries may encounter different difficulties. Since CSR is a multidimensional concept, latent variable models may be usefully employed to provide a unidimensional measure of the ability of a firm to fulfil CSR standards. A methodology based on Item Response Theory has been implemented on the KLD sustainability dataset. Results show that companies in the industries Oil & Gas, Industrials, Basic Materials and Telecommunications have a higher difficulty to meet the CSR standards. Criteria based on Environment, Community relations and Product quality have a large capacity to select the firms with the best CSR performance, while Governance does not exhibit similar behavior. A stock selection based on the ranking of the firms according to our CSR measure outperforms, in terms of risk-adjusted returns, stock selection based on other criteria.Socially Responsible Investment, CSR ability, latent variable model, item response theory

A SMARC Effect for Loudness

Various reports suggest that the pitch height of musical tones may be represented along a mental space, with lower pitch heights represented on the left or lower sectors and higher pitch heights represented on the right or upper sectors of the mental space. Given that in Western languages the loudness of tones is often addressed spatially, with loud sounds referred to as \u201chigh\u201d and quiet sounds referred to as \u201clow,\u201d here we investigated whether loudness might also have a spatial representation. Participants judged whether a tone was louder or quieter than a reference tone, by pressing two keys: one at the top and the other at the bottom of a response box. Participants were faster in a situation where they pressed the key at the top to report louder sounds, and the key at the bottom to report quieter sounds, than vice versa. This result supports the view that loudness, like other types of magnitudes, might be represented spatially

Mode space approach for tight-binding transport simulations in graphene nanoribbon field-effect transistors including phonon scattering

In this paper, we present a mode space method for atomistic non-equilibrium Green's function simulations of armchair graphene nanoribbon FETs that includes electron-phonon scattering. With reference to both conventional and tunnel FET structures, we show that, in the ideal case of a smooth electrostatic potential, the modes can be decoupled in different groups without any loss of accuracy. Thus, inter-subband scattering due to electron-phonon interactions is properly accounted for, while the overall simulation time considerably improves with respect to real-space, with a speed-up factor of 40 for a 1.5-nm-wide device. Such factor increases with the square of the device width. We also discuss the accuracy of two commonly used approximations of the scattering self-energies: the neglect of the off-diagonal entries in the mode-space expressions and the neglect of the Hermitian part of the retarded self-energy. While the latter is an acceptable approximation in most bias conditions, the former is somewhat inaccurate when the device is in the off-state and optical phonon scattering is essential in determining the current via band-to-band tunneling. Finally, we show that, in the presence of a disordered potential, a coupled mode space approach is necessary, but the results are still accurate compared to the real-space solution.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures. Copyright (2013) American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physic

Boosting the voltage gain of graphene FETs through a differential amplifier scheme with positive feedback

We study a possible circuit solution to overcome the problem of low voltage gain of short-channel graphene FETs. The circuit consists of a fully differential amplifier with a load made of a cross-coupled transistor pair. Starting from the device characteristics obtained from self-consistent ballistic quantum transport simulations, we explore the circuit parameter space and evaluate the amplifier performance in terms of dc voltage gain and voltage gain bandwidth. We show that the dc gain can be effectively improved by the negative differential resistance provided by the cross-coupled pair. Contact resistance is the main obstacle to achieving gain bandwidth products in the terahertz range. Limitations of the proposed amplifier are identified with its poor linearity and relatively large Miller capacitance.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

Stochastic Calculus of Wrapped Compartments

The Calculus of Wrapped Compartments (CWC) is a variant of the Calculus of Looping Sequences (CLS). While keeping the same expressiveness, CWC strongly simplifies the development of automatic tools for the analysis of biological systems. The main simplification consists in the removal of the sequencing operator, thus lightening the formal treatment of the patterns to be matched in a term (whose complexity in CLS is strongly affected by the variables matching in the sequences). We define a stochastic semantics for this new calculus. As an application we model the interaction between macrophages and apoptotic neutrophils and a mechanism of gene regulation in E.Coli

Promuovere la salute attraverso l'educazione mediale: una ricerca quasi-sperimentale con bambini di 10 anni e i loro genitori

This research pertains to the broad study field of “Health Promoting Media Literacy Education” (Bergsma & Carney, 2008; Bergsma & Ferris, 2011) and regards in particular children's healthy nutrition (Evans et al., 2006; Tanner et al. 2008). The purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a school-based media education intervention on the promotion of fruit and vegetables consumption to prevent childhood obesity. The target population for the study was 10-year-old Italian children and their parents. The study utilized a mixed-method approach, with a quasi experimental design (one intervention group – 27 children and one of their parents – and one control group – 33 children and one of their parents), integrated by a focus group, which is used as a key for the interpretation of the quantitative data. Pre-test, post-test (upon completion of the intervention) and delayed post-test (after 3 months upon completion of the intervention) measured: the children's fruit and vegetables consumption, motivation, self-efficacy and parental social support related to fruit and vegetables consumption; parent motivation and social support related to their children fruit and vegetables intake; availability and accessibility of fruit and vegetables at home. Upon completion of the intervention, a focus group was conducted with children in the intervention group, divided in three different groups. During the focus group, children were asked to express their health and media beliefs and knowledge, their ability of critical analyses and expression skills, and nutritional behavior intentions, as well as their opinions/satisfaction with the intervention. The 10 weeks long intervention included 12 sessions on: health education, media literacy, and a health communication media-based campaign workshop during which the children created posters, newsletters and video commercials on fruit and vegetables targeted to their parents. To test the intervention effect on the changes in outcomes of all variables, independent sample T-test analyses were calculated. The intervention was effective in increasing children’s fruit and vegetable intake (p<.05) and all psychosocial determinants (p values ranging from 0.00 to 0.04) both at immediate post-test and at delayed post-test. Parents reported increased emotional social support (p<.05) at delayed post-test. To investigate the families raised from the focus group text, the content analysis was done. The relationship among the families was investigated with the co-occurrences analysis, from which the ability of expression - that is one of the main skills stimulated by the media education (production approach) - results in the central core of the relationship among almost all of the theoretical constructs investigated, so we could consider it the main successful factor of the intervention. These results indicate that a nutrition and media literacy intervention may be an innovative and promising methodological approach to promote children’s healthy nutritio

Turin's Foodscapes: Exploring Places of Food Consumption Through the Prism of Social Practice Theory

This contribution wishes to propose an addition to the existing toolbox of techniques employed to approach and render explicit the place semantics embedded in geosocial data. Inspired by the notion of relational place introduced by human geographers, we focused on people's experience of the city derived from the aggregation of the points of view of different social groups. We analysed socio-spatial behaviour under the frame of social practice theories, defining social practices as collective social actions performed by groups of people that display a similar behaviour. Applying spatial pattern analysis and clustering on data extracted from TripAdvisor platform, we classified social groups of users depending on our prior knowledge and their spatial behaviours