Towards Corporate Sustainability? An inquiry into the motivating factors and possibilities for creating increased focus on corporate sustainability in Norway

Generating sustainable development is still today a great global challenge, even though the climate change issues are pressing. Business corporations are significant contributors to creating sustainability progress, considering their scope of operation and the extent of their impacts. This thesis aims to bring insights into the motives for corporations in Norway to adopt sustainable practices and discuss how their focus on sustainability could be stimulated. The consultancy company Entro is for this used as a case study, which wishes to move customer companies towards a stronger emphasis on sustainability in practice. For Entro, the challenge seems to boil down to demand. The project’s data basis consists of interviews with employees of Entro and two of its customer companies. The research identifies a few main areas of motivators for corporate sustainability, classified as internal and external drivers with help from the project’s theoretical framework. The areas of demand and request, regulatory requirements, and financial and commercial considerations appear as the most important for companies. The results also indicate a current large emphasis on external drivers. However, relying on external drivers for further developing corporate sustainability could be problematic and result in too slow changes. The research further identifies a few elements or approaches that could contribute to promoting the focus or attractiveness of corporate sustainability. Several of these center around Entro’s practices and how the employees could better convince customer companies. However, the areas of finance, commercial considerations, and legislation are again found to be largely emphasized. Further perspectives for stimulating corporate sustainability development are discussed by applying the theoretical framework. The project does not bring any straightforward answers to the question of which approaches should be utilized for bringing sustainable practices to the corporate sector. The results show however that internally-driven motivation should be emphasized and that commercial business aspects should also be involved. Employing new organizational perspectives is additionally found to be advantageous for enabling creativity and thus maybe creating progress. In conclusion, the task of generating corporate sustainability is complex and appears to involve an interplay and arrangement of various aspects. However, to create development, this thesis highlights that we should likely think in new ways – although the barrier between academia and practice may be hard to overcome

Effects of Weight Initialization methods on FFN\u27s

Weight initialization is the method of determining starting values of weights in a neural network. The way this method is done can have massive effects on the network[2, 3, 6, 9] and can halt training if not handled properly. On the other hand, if initialization is chosen tactfully it can improve training and accuracy greatly. The initialization method usually called Normalized Xavier will be referred to as Nox in this paper to avoid confusion with the Xavier initialization method. This study analyzes five methods of weight initialization(Nox, He, Xavier, Plutonian, and Self-Root), two of them being new to this study combined with three activation functions(Relu, Swish, and Tanh) and uses two datasets(MNIST[5], US Census 1990[4]). The study compares weight initialization methods using average MSE’s of FFN’s and shows significance by using MannWhitney U p-tests. This study does not provide very many definitive results outside of what is already proven in other studies but does provide a lot of new questions and speculation that can hopefully be answered. The definitive data this study does provide is as follows. While Swish is the activation function for all layers, the Plutonian produces lower error than the He, Nox, and Xavier, and the Xavier produces higher error than any other initialization method with statistical significance. The Self-Root produces higher error than any other initialization method while Tanh is the activation function for all layers. When Relu was the activation function in all layers Nox and He had a very significant statistical similarity. As for speculation, the Plutonian proved to be quite flexible in its use, possibly indicating a low error if used in networks with different activation functions in different layers. The Nox networks with Tanh as an activation performed better on MNIST, which could mean that when Tanh is an activation function more neurons per layer could lead to less error with the Nox

Faktor-Faktor yang Berpengaruh terhadap Pengumpulan Data Pendidikan Nonformal Tidak Tepat Waktu dan Tidak Berkualitas

Tujuan penelitian ini yaitu untuk mengetahui faktor-faktor penyebab pengumpulan data pendidikan nonformal (PNF) tidak tepat waktu dan tidak berkualitas. Metode yang digunakan yakni survei dengan populasi dinas pendidikan kabupaten/kota di seluruh Indonesia, sedangkan metode pengambilan sampel yang digunakan adalah purposive samplingdengan teknik analisis deskriptif. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa dari tujuh faktor, yaitu pemahaman pendataan, sumber daya manusia, dukungan dinas pendidikan kabupaten/kota, dana, infrastruktur pendataan, monitoring dan evaluasi, dan kondisi geografis yang mempengaruhi pengumpulan data PNF tidak tepat waktu dan tidak berkualitas, terdapat empat faktor yang sangat mempengaruhi. Keempat faktor tersebut ialah dukungan dari dinas pendidikan kabupaten/kota(26,00%), monitoring dan evaluasi (31,57%), dana (32,25%), dan infrastruktur (39,40%). Bila ketujuh variabel tersebut digabungkan, maka rata-rata sebesar 36,75% berarti juga sangat mempengaruhi pengumpulan data PNF tidak tepat waktu dan tidak berkualitas. Dengan demikian, disarankan agar ada dukungan dari dinas pendidikan kabupaten/kota terhadap pendataan PNF, monitoring dan evaluasi pendataan PNF di tingkat satuan pendidikan sampai kabupaten/kota dapat dilaksanakan, dukungan dana bagi pengelola pendataan PNF dan peningkatan infrastruktur, baik dalam kuantitas maupun kualitas

Comparison of toroidal viscosity with neoclassical theory

Toroidal rotation profiles are measured with charge exchange spectroscopy for a plasma heated with tangential neutral beam injection (NBI) in the Compact Helical System (CHS) heliotron/torsatron device [Ida et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 58 (1991)] to estimate the toroidal viscosity. The toroidal viscosity derived from the toroidal rotation velocity shows good agreement with the neoclassical toroidal viscosity plus the perpendicular viscosity ( [perpendicular]=2 m^2/s)