Environmental awareness and shareholder proposals: the case of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster

Purpose The authors study the effect of increasing environmental awareness on shareholders' activism. Specificallly, this study aims to examine whether growing environmental awareness is reflected in more aggressive environmental shareholder proposals. Design/methodology/approach This study uses the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster as an exogenous event that increased shareholders' environmental awareness. This study analyzes the spill’s effect on the tone of proposals about environmental issues and nonenvironmental topics. Findings After the disaster, the tone of environmental proposals (i.e. the treatment group) is significantly more negative. In contrast, the tone of nonenvironmental proposals (i.e. the control group) is unaffected. This study interprets this finding as direct evidence that the oil spill led to increased shareholder environmental activism through proposals that targeted the environmental risks surrounding the business more aggressively. By contrast, this study finds no effect of the oil spill on the tone of managers' responses to the proposals, consistent with managers refraining from emphasizing environmental threats. Originality/value Anecdotal evidence and recent studies suggest a link between environmental disasters and shareholder pressure for corporate change. However, no prior research has investigated the channel through which shareholders could have exerted such pressure or has looked for direct evidence of it in the negotiations between shareholders and managers. By finding such evidence in shareholder proposals, this study fills in this gap

Robotic treatment of a rare paramedian cystic lesion of the lower male urogenital tract

Abstract Objectives To report the diagnosis and the mini-invasive treatment of a rare paramedian cystic lesion of the lower male urogenital tract (CLMGU). Material and methods This is a case of a 46 old male with low urinary tract symptoms, azoospermia and mild erectile dysfunction. MRI Imaging showed a midline high signal intensity cystic lesion of a tear drop shape, extending above the base of the prostate to the level of the seminal vesicles. The lesion was located between the seminal vesicles and the urinary bladder. A direct communication of the intra-abdominal portion of both vas deferens with the cyst was found. MRI also showed small solid nodule within the upper portion of the cyst. The patient underwent a robotic surgery of the CLMGU. A Retzius-sparing approach was used to gain access to the seminal vesicles in order to carefully dissect and excise the lesion without any dissection of the anterior compartment. The CLMGU was excised with a nerve sparing technique. Results Operative time was 115 min. Blood loss was minimal. Length of stay was three days. No post-operative complications occurred. One month after surgery patient's IPSS improved considerably. Final pathology showed a cystic lesion containing papillary projections with squamous metaplasia. At 2 months follow up, urinary symptoms improved with no postoperative complications. Conclusion Robotic surgery allows a direct access to the Douglas space with an easy removal of the neoplasia. Our video represents a case of possible application of robotic surgery to improve dissection, overall surgical precision and functional outcomes

Corrigendum: Current drive at plasma densities required for thermonuclear reactors

Nature Communications 1: Article number: 55 (2010); Published: 10 August 2010; Updated:19 September 2013. In Fig. 3 of this Article, the colours of the blue and green curves were accidentally interchanged while the manuscript was being revised. In addition, the x axis labels on Fig. 4 should have read 'Frequency (MHz)'

Current drive at plasma densities required for thermonuclear reactors

Progress in thermonuclear fusion energy research based on deuterium plasmas magnetically confined in toroidal tokamak devices requires the development of efficient current drive methods. Previous experiments have shown that plasma current can be driven effectively by externally launched radio frequency power coupled to lower hybrid plasma waves. However, at the high plasma densities required for fusion power plants, the coupled radio frequency power does not penetrate into the plasma core, possibly because of strong wave interactions with the plasma edge. Here we show experiments performed on FTU (Frascati Tokamak Upgrade) based on theoretical predictions that nonlinear interactions diminish when the peripheral plasma electron temperature is high, allowing significant wave penetration at high density. The results show that the coupled radio frequency power can penetrate into high-density plasmas due to weaker plasma edge effects, thus extending the effective range of lower hybrid current drive towards the domain relevant for fusion reactors

contefranz/OpTop: 0.9.2

Detect the optimal topic specification from pool of Latent Dirichlet Allocation model

How did Covid-19 affect investors’ interpretation of earnings news? The role of accounting conservatism

We examine how investors interpreted earnings news when the Covid-19 pandemic began. We argue the pandemic made investors unsure about the earnings news’ reliability and valuation implications. We compare earnings announcements in early 2020 to those between 2015 and 2019. During Covid, earnings news significantly increased (decreased) post-announcement abnormal volatility (returns), consistent with investors’ struggling to price the news. However, we find that Covid did not have such an effect on firms that had priorly established a reputation for conservative accounting. This suggests that conservatism, whose information effects have been debated by prior literature, alleviated investors’ concerns during the pandemic

Python for non-Pythonians : how to win over programming languages

Whether or not you are familiar with the world of programming languages, you would probably know that there are currently hundreds of them. They can serve very different goals and their characteristics might change quite dramatically. We can be sure about one thing, though: developing the correct mindset to start using one of these languages is fundamental in order to solve complex real-world problems. Whether we have to deal with remote databases or with Social Media data, being able to access and manipulate the information contained in this data is a key competitive advantage in today's world. The goal of this book is to give you an easy access point to start exploring the vast world of programming languages. In particular, in this manuscript we focus our attention on one of the most common and versatile languages, called Python. The book uses a very simple and accessible language. All the descriptions of Python functionalities come with intuitive examples to make you learn by doing. This is not a theoretical book and does not cover some of the most internal features of Python. The intention of the authors is to allow business oriented people to start using Python. The main reason for such a choice of style is due to the increasing number of requests by non-technical professionals to solve daily problems and tasks. Whether we want to append multiple spreadsheets or profile the customer base, being able to use a solid infrastructure which enables to collect, check, process, analyze data, and report results has become a basic requirement in most industries. This work starts with a brief introduction to the Python language by presenting some of its most important features. We will learn how to install Python and how to start talking with it through different front-ends. We will then begin to define objects and to recognize their different characteristics and functionalities. Each section ends with a few exercises to make the reader comfortable with the concepts just introduced. This book comes with an online version available at http://mybook.egeaonline.it. The online version cannot be downloaded but it is a colour version to facilitate code reading

Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies: where is the accounting?

In a recent survey of academic research, Fintech related topics, broadly classified as crypto-currency studies, were by far the most researched topics in the social sciences. However, we have observed that, perhaps surprisingly, even though crypto-currencies rely on a distributed accounting ledger technology, relatively few of those studies were conducted by accounting academics. While some of the features of a system like Bitcoin do not necessarily rely on a traditional accounting knowledge, this knowledge is key in designing effective real-world distributed systems. Building on a foundational framework developed by Risius and Spohrer (2017), we provide support for their hypothesis that to date, research in this area has been predominantly of a somewhat narrow focus (i.e., based upon exploiting existing programming solutions without adequately considering the fundamental needs of users). This is particularly reflected by the abundance of Bitcoin-like crypto-currency code-bases with little or no place for business applications. We suggest that this may severely limit an appreciation of the relevance and applicability of decentralized systems, and how they may support value creation and improved governance. We provide supporting arguments for this statement by considering four applied classes of problems where a blockchain/distributed ledger can add value without requiring a crypto-currency to be an integral part of the functioning system. We note that each class of problem has been viewed previously as part of accounting issues within the legacy centralized ledger systems paradigm. We show how accounting knowledge is still relevant in the shift from centralized to decentralized ledger systems. We advance the debate on the development of (crypto-currency free) value-creating distributed ledger systems by showing that applying accounting knowledge in this area has potentially a much wider impact than that currently being applied in areas limited to auditing and operations management. We develop a typology for general distributed ledger design which assists potential users to understand the wide range of choices when developing such systems

A statistical approach for optimal topic model identification

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a popular machine-learning technique that identifies latent structures in a corpus of documents. This paper addresses the ongoing concern that formal procedures for determining the optimal LDA configuration do not exist by introducing a set of parametric tests that rely on the assumed multinomial distribution specification underlying the original LDA model. Our methodology defines a set of rigorous statistical procedures that identify and evaluate the optimal topic model. The U.S. Presidential Inaugural Address Corpus is used as a case study to show the numerical results. We find that 92 topics best describe the corpus. We further validate the method through a simulation study confirming the superiority of our approach compared to other standard heuristic metrics like the perplexity index