Corporate Governance and Foreign Portfolio Investment in Saudi Arabia

A corporate governance system has been designed to ensure efficient operations of companies on behalf of share-holders. Good practices of corporate governance principles and high protection of investors would attract foreign portfolio investment. This study aims to investigate the effect of corporate governance mechanisms (i.e. board size, board independence, audit committee size, audit committee independence and firm age) on foreign portfolio investment in Saudi listed firms for the year 2010. This study is significant due to the lack of empirical evidence regarding the field of corporate governance and foreign portfolio investment in Saudi firms since the Saudi code of corporate governance has been enacted in the late 2006. The results of the study show that board independence and audit committee independence are associated with foreign portfolio investment in Saudi listed firms. However, the corporate governance mechanisms, i.e. board size, audit committee size and firm age had no impact on foreign portfolio investmen

New pests for old as GMOs bring on substitute pests

In agroecological systems, one thing leads to another, often in unexpected ways. In the 1950s a single pesticide application per season was sufficient to control the jassid bug Empoasca lybica, the only major cotton pest in the Gezira of Sudan at the time (1). However, the spraying killed the natural enemies that had previously held populations of the cotton bollworm Helicoverpa armigera in check. Intensive spraying against the bollworm’s larvae during the 1970s and 1980s led to the emergence from obscurity of whiteflies, Bemisia tabaci. They became primary pests in need of further control, and then there were also outbreaks of aphids, Aphis gossypii. Faced with crippling control costs and the development by the pests of resistance to the pesticides used against them (2, 3), the Sudanese eventually resorted to the integrated pest management approach. A similar but more complicated series of events is described for the cotton fields of China in PNAS by Zhang et al. (4), but in China it is not only trophic cascades leading to new pest upsurges but also effects of land-use alterations and climate change

Determinants of foreign share ownership of the listed companies in selected gulf cooperation council (GCC) countries

In recent years, foreign share ownership has been proven to be an important financial source for companies to develop and grow. The objective of this study is to examine the determinants of foreign share ownership in selected Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Specifically, this study attempts to examine the relationship between the corporate governance mechanisms, ownership structure, firm performance, adoption of English language for annual reports and foreign share ownership. Moreover, this study used firm size, leverage, political risks, exchange rate risk, inflation risk and economic growth (GDP) as control variables. This study is being established based on fixed effect model and conducted over the period of 2012-2015 for 192 non-financial companies (768 company-year observations) listed on the GCC stock markets. The results demonstrate that foreign share ownership is positively related to the board size, board independence, board expertise, board effectiveness, audit committee independence, audit committee expertise, audit committee effectiveness, firm performance (Tobin`s Q), local institutional investors and the adoption of the English language. With respect to family ownership, the result shows a negative relationship with foreign share ownership. However, the results find no influence of frequency meetings of board, audit committee size, frequency meetings of audit committee and audit quality on foreign share ownership. This comprehensive study contributes novel insights to the existing body of foreign share ownership literature, in that foreign investors prefer companies that have effective governance structures, good performance and provide annual reports in English. The results have implications for policy-makers in developing countries in general, and GCC in particular in their endeavours to improve liquidity on stock markets through the participation of foreign investors. Overall, these results are useful to managers in developing countries who are keen to attract foreign ownership

Titanocene–gold complexes containing N-heterocyclic carbene ligands inhibit growth of prostate, renal, and colon cancers in vitro

We report on the synthesis, characterization, and stability studies of new titanocene complexes containing a methyl group and a carboxylate ligand (mba = −OC(O)-p-C6H4-S−) bound to gold(I)−N-heterocyclic carbene fragments through the thiolate group: [(η5 -C5H5)2TiMe(μ-mba)Au(NHC)]. The cytotoxicities of the heterometallic compounds along with those of novel monometallic gold−N-heterocyclic carbene precursors [(NHC)Au(mbaH)] have been evaluated against renal, prostate, colon, and breast cancer cell lines. The highest activity and selectivity and a synergistic effect of the resulting heterometallic species was found for the prostate and colon cancer cell lines. The colocalization of both titanium and gold metals (1:1 ratio) in PC3 prostate cancer cells was demonstrated for the selected compound 5a, indicating the robustness of the heterometallic compound in vitro. We describe here preliminary mechanistic data involving studies on the interaction of selected mono- and bimetallic compounds with plasmid (pBR322) used as a model nucleic acid and the inhibition of thioredoxin reductase in PC3 prostate cancer cells. The heterometallic compounds, which are highly apoptotic, exhibit strong antimigratory effects on the prostate cancer cell line PC3

Models and techniques for designing mobile system-on-chip devices

Mobile SoCs have become ubiquitous computing platforms, and, in recent years, they have become increasingly heterogeneous and complex. A typical SoC today includes CPUs, GPUs, image processors, video encoders/decoders, and AI engines. This dissertation addresses some of the challenges associated with SoCs in three pieces of work. The first piece of work develops a cycle-accurate model, Emerald, which provides a platform for studying system-level SoC interactions while including the impact of graphics. Our cycle-accurate infrastructure builds upon well-established tools, GPGPU-Sim and gem5, with support for graphics and GPGPU workloads, and full system simulation with Android. We present two case studies using Emerald. First, we use Emerald's full-system mode to highlight the importance of system-wide interactions by studying and analyzing memory organization and scheduling in SoCs. Second, we use Emerald's standalone mode to evaluate a dynamic mechanism for balancing the shading work assigned to GPU cores. Our dynamic mechanism speeds up frame rendering by 7.3-19% compared to static load-balancing. The second work highlights the time-variant traffic asymmetry in heterogeneous SoCs. We analyze the impact of this asymmetry on network performance and propose interleaved source injection (ISI), an interconnect topology and associated flow control mechanism to manage time-varying asymmetric network traffic. We evaluate ISI using stochastic traffic patterns and a set of traces that emulate mobile use cases with traffic from various IP blocks. We show that ISI increases saturation throughput by 80-184% for 12% increase in NoC area. In the last piece of work, we study the compression properties of framebuffer surfaces and highlight the characteristics of surfaces generated by different applications. We use our analysis to propose Dynamic Color Palettes (DCP), a hardware scheme that dynamically constructs color palettes and employs them to efficiently compress framebuffer surfaces. We evaluated DCP against a set of 124 workloads and found that DCP improves compression rates by 91% for UI and 20% for 2D applications compared to previous proposals. We also propose a hybrid scheme (HDCP) that combines DCP with a generic compression scheme. HDCP outperforms previous proposals by 161%, 124% and 83% for UI, 2D, and 3D applications, respectively.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofGraduat