Can board climate-responsible orientation improve corporate carbon performance? The moderating role of board carbon awareness and firm reputation

Overwhelming evidence from prior research suggests the functions of the board of directors have a vital influence on carbon performance. However, very little is known about the moderating effect of board functions. This study attempts to fill this gap by developing and empirically testing a conceptual model that highlights the role of board carbon awareness and firm reputation in the relationship between board climate-responsible orientation (BCO) and carbon performance. Using a fixed effect model to analyze data from 665 US listed firms covering a period of 2010–2019, we find that BCO and carbon performance show a U-shaped non-linear relationship. Increased experience of BCO improves corporate carbon performance. The results also provide evidence of the moderating effect of carbon awareness and firm reputation on the relationship between BCO and carbon performance. Carbon awareness reduces symbolic emission reduction actions in carbon management, while, firm reputation will cause symbolic emission reduction actions. Besides, splitting the sample according to firm size and carbon dependency shows BCO has a better effect on the carbon performance of small or medium-sized and high carbon-dependency firms. The findings have important implications for managers to use firm governance mechanisms to improve carbon performance

Combinations of antioxidants and/or of epigenetic enzyme inhibitors allow for enhanced collection of mouse bone marrow hematopoietic stem cells in ambient air

Hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) is a treatment for malignant and non-malignant disorders. However, sometimes the numbers of donor hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) are limiting, which can compromise the success of HCT. We recently published that collection and processing of mouse bone marrow (BM) and human cord blood cells in a hypoxic atmosphere of 3% O2 or in ambient air (~21% O2) in the presence of cyclosporine A yields increased numbers of HSC. We now show that collection and processing of mouse BM cells in ambient air in the presence of specific combinations of anti-oxidants and/or inhibitors of epigenetic enzymes can also enhance the collection of HSC, information of potential relevance for enhanced efficacy of HCT

Generalized seniority for the shell model with realistic interactions

The generalized seniority scheme has long been proposed as a means of dramatically reducing the dimensionality of nuclear shell model calculations, when strong pairing correlations are present. However, systematic benchmark calculations, comparing results obtained in a model space truncated according to generalized seniority with those obtained in the full shell model space, are required to assess the viability of this scheme. Here, a detailed comparison is carried out, for semimagic nuclei taken in a full major shell and with realistic interactions. The even-mass and odd-mass Ca isotopes are treated in the generalized seniority scheme, for generalized seniority v<=3. Results for level energies, orbital occupations, and electromagnetic observables are compared with those obtained in the full shell model space.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures; published in Phys. Rev.

Quantum secret sharing between multiparty and multiparty with four states

An protocol of quantum secret sharing between multiparty and multiparty with four states is presented. We show that this protocol can make the Trojan horse attack with a multi-photon signal, the fake-signal attack with EPR pairs, the attack with single photons, and the attack with invisible photons to be nullification. In addition, we also give the upper bounds of the average success probabilities for dishonest agent eavesdropping encryption using the fake-signal attack with any two-particle entangled states.Comment: 7 page

Constrained structure of ancient Chinese poetry facilitates speech content grouping

Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage [1, 2]; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements [3]. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic [4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and statistical cues [5, 9] are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language

Non-existence of New Quantum Ergosphere Effect of a Vaidya-type Black Hole

Hawking evaporation of Dirac particles and scalar fields in a Vaidya-type black hole is investigated by the method of generalized tortoise coordinate transformation. It is shown that Hawking radiation of Dirac particles does not exist for $P_1, Q_2$ components but for $P_2, Q_1$ components in any Vaidya-type black holes. Both the location and the temperature of the event horizon change with time. The thermal radiation spectrum of Dirac particles is the same as that of Klein-Gordon particles. We demonstrates that there is no new quantum ergosphere effect in the thermal radiation of Dirac particles in any spherically symmetry black holes.Comment: Latex, 9 pages, no figure, submitted to Mod. Phys. Lett.