Evaluation of Corporate Sustainability

As a consequence of an increasing demand in sustainable development for business organizations, the evaluation of corporate sustainability has become a topic intensively focused by academic researchers and business practitioners. Several techniques in the context of multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) have been suggested to facilitate the evaluation and the analysis of sustainability performance. However, due to the complexity of evaluation, such as a compilation of quantitative and qualitative measures, interrelationships among various sustainability criteria, the assessor’s hesitation in scoring, or incomplete information, simple techniques may not be able to generate reliable results which can reflect the overall sustainability performance of a company. This paper proposes a series of mathematical formulations based upon the evidential reasoning (ER) approach which can be used to aggregate results from qualitative judgments with quantitative measurements under various types of complex and uncertain situations. The evaluation of corporate sustainability through the ER model is demonstrated using actual data generated from three sugar manufacturing companies in Thailand. The proposed model facilitates managers in analysing the performance and identifying improvement plans and goals. It also simplifies decision making related to sustainable development initiatives. The model can be generalized to a wider area of performance assessment, as well as to any cases of multiple criteria analysis

Understanding the proton spin "puzzle" with a new "minimal" quark model

We investigate the spin structure of the nucleon in an extended Jaffe-Lipkin quark model. In addition to the conventional $3q$ structure, different $(3q)(Q\bar{Q})$ admixtures in the nucleon wavefunction are also taken into account. The contributions to the nucleon spin from various components of the nucleon wavefunction are discussed. The effect due to the Melosh-Wigner rotation is also studied. It is shown that the Jaffe-Lipkin term is only important when antiquarks are negatively polarized. We arrive at a new "minimal" quark model, which is close to the naive quark model, in order to understand the proton spin "puzzle".Comment: 19 latex pages, Published in Eur.Phys.J.

Lattice calculation of hadronic tensor of the nucleon

We report an attempt to calculate the deep inelastic scattering structure functions from the hadronic tensor calculated on the lattice. We used the Backus-Gilbert reconstruction method to address the inverse Laplace transformation for the analytic continuation from the Euclidean to the Minkowski space.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures; Proceedings of the 35th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 18-24 June 2017, Granada, Spai

Variance Reduction and Cluster Decomposition

It is a common problem in lattice QCD calculation of the mass of the hadron with an annihilation channel that the signal falls off in time while the noise remains constant. In addition, the disconnected insertion calculation of the three-point function and the calculation of the neutron electric dipole moment with the $\theta$ term suffer from a noise problem due to the $\sqrt{V}$ fluctuation. We identify these problems to have the same origin and the $\sqrt{V}$ problem can be overcome by utilizing the cluster decomposition principle. We demonstrate this by considering the calculations of the glueball mass, the strangeness content in the nucleon, and the CP violation angle in the nucleon due to the $\theta$ term. It is found that for lattices with physical sizes of 4.5 - 5.5 fm, the statistical errors of these quantities can be reduced by a factor of 3 to 4. The systematic errors can be estimated from the Akaike information criterion. For the strangeness content, we find that the systematic error is of the same size as that of the statistical one when the cluster decomposition principle is utilized. This results in a 2 to 3 times reduction in the overall error.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, appendix added to address the systematic erro

Nucleon Transversity Distribution from Azimuthal Spin Asymmetry in Pion Electroproduction

The azimuthal asymmetry observed by the HERMES collaboration in semi-inclusive pion production in deep inelastic scattering of unpolarized positron on the longitudinally polarized proton target, can provide information of the quark transversity distributions of the nucleon. We show that the quark transversity distributions predicted both by the light-cone quark-spectator-diquark model and by a pQCD inspired model can give consistent descriptions of the available HERMES data for the analyzing powers $A_{UL}^{\sin \phi}$ and $A_{UL}^{\sin 2 \phi}$ for $\pi^+$ and $\pi^-$ productions. We also show that the two models give similar predictions of $A_{UL}^{\sin \phi}$ for $\pi^+$ production, whereas they give very different predictions of $A_{UL}^{\sin \phi}$ for $\pi^-$ production at large $x$. Further precision measurement of $A_{UL}^{\sin \phi}$ for $\pi^-$ production can provide a decisive test of different models.Comment: 11 latex pages, 1 figure, version to appear in PR

A new potential radiosensitizer: ammonium persulfate modified WCNTs

Radiotherapy plays a very important role in cancer treatment. Radiosensitizers have been widely used to enhance the radiosensitivity of cancer cells at given radiations. Here we fabricate multi-walled carbon nanotubes with ammonium persulfate, and get very short samples with 30-50 nanometer length. Cell viability assay show that f-WCNTs induce cell death significantly. We hypothesize that free radicals originated from hydroxyl and carbonyl groups on the surface of f-WCNTs lead cell damage