Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Law

Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR) and organizational ethics have been described with a variety of definitions in the past literature, without any explanations of the underlying motives and assumptions. For instance, Kim, Youn, and Lee (2019) define CSR as “activities or processes concerned with how an organization exceeds the minimum obligations to stakeholders’ specified through regulation and corporate governance” (p. 682). Although these descriptions have demonstrated different details and expectations of what social, business, and legal procedures a company can engage in, CSR defines the relationship between an enterprise and the community the industry serves. Additionally, CSR concentrates on the voluntary business’ actions designed to enhance environmental and socio-economic conditions (Kim et al., 2019). Globally-Renowned businesses including the Apple Corporation and Volkswagen have legally binding responsibilities to their financiers and administrative teams. These enterprises are regularly required to make profits and increase or maintain their business value while improving growth potential. The companies must obey regulations associated with internal and external organizational relationships which address issues including social inclusion, timely payments for deliveries made, working environments, and employees’ benefits including pensions. The government has placed an “invisible hand” on established corporations through the execution of employment rules and regulations that promote corporate social responsibility activities, thus ensuring that companies legally bound to the fulfillment of additional duties (Saleem, Kumar, & Shahid, 2016). However, the main issues with the stipulated responsibilities involve the perceived duty of a business to willingly operate within the confines of pre-determined ethical and corporate rules, which are often designed based on the needs and expectations of the immediate community. Some scholars including Marens (2008) have argued that corporations exist to fulfill important needs of the population and must be responsible for maintaining the highest standards of behavior. However, others have questioned the practicality of forcing firms to allocate their financial and human resources to improving public welfare (Saleem et al., 2016). This paper will present opinions for and against the value of corporate social responsibility investments in businesses such as Apple Inc. and Volkswagen by examining the advantages and disadvantages of CSR in an international context

Effects Of Body Position And Sex Group On Tongue Pressure Generation

Fine control of orofacial musculature is necessary to precisely accelerate and decelerate the articulators across exact distances for functional speech and coordinated swallows (Amerman & Parnell, 1990; Benjamin, 1997; Kent, Duffy, Slama, Kent, & Clift, 2001). Enhanced understanding of neural control for such movements could clarify the nature of and potential remediation for some dysarthrias and other orofacial myofunctional impairments. Numerous studies have measured orolingual force and accuracy during speech and nonspeech tasks, but have focused on young adults, maximum linguapalatal pressures, and upright positioning (O’Day, Frank, Montgomery, Nichols, & McDade, 2005; Solomon & Munson, 2004; Somodi, Robin, & Luschei, 1995; Youmans, Youmans, & Stierwalt, 2009). Patients’ medical conditions or testing procedures such as concurrent neuroimaging may preclude fully upright positioning during oral motor assessments in some cases. Since judgments about lingual strength and coordination can influence clinical decisions regarding the functionality of swallowing and speech, it is imperative to understand any effects of body positioning differences. In addition, sex differences in the control of such tasks are not well defined. Therefore, this study evaluated whether pressures exerted during tongue movements differ in upright vs. supine body position in healthy middle-aged men and women. Twenty healthy middle-aged adults compressed small air-filled plastic bulbs in the oral cavity at predetermined fractions of task-specific peak pressure in a randomized block design. Tasks including phoneme repetitions and nonspeech isometric contractions were executed in upright and supine positions. Participants received continuous visual feedback regarding targets and actual exerted pressures. Analyses compared average pressure values for each subject, task, position, and effort level. Speech-like and nonspeech tongue pressures did not differ significantly across body position or sex groups. Pressure matching was significantly less accurate at higher percentages of maximum pressure for both tasks. These results provide preliminary comparative data for the clinical assessment of individuals with orofacial myofunctional and neurological disorders

Mobile-based Skin Lesions Classification Using Convolution Neural Network

This research work is aimed at investing skin lesions classification problem using Convolution Neural Network (CNN) using cloud-server architecture. Using the cloud services and CNN, a real-time mobile-enabled skin lesions classification expert system “i-Rash” is proposed and developed. i-Rash aimed at early diagnosis of acne, eczema and psoriasis at remote locations. The classification model used in the “i-Rash” is developed using the CNN model “SqueezeNet”. The transfer learning approach is used for training the classification model and model is trained and tested on 1856 images. The benefit of using SqueezeNet results in a limited size of the trained model i.e. only 3 MB. For classifying new image, cloud-based architecture is used, and the trained model is deployed on a server. A new image is classified in fractions of seconds with overall accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 97.21%, 94.42% and 98.14% respectively. i-Rash can serve in initial classification of skin lesions, hence, can play a very important role early classification of skin lesions for people living in remote areas

Primary somatosensory cortex in chronic low back pain – a 1H-MRS study

The goal of this study was to investigate whether certain metabolites, specific to neurons, glial cells, and the neuronal-glial neurotransmission system, in the primary somatosensory cortex (SSC), are altered and correlated with clinical characteristics of pain in patients with chronic low back pain (LBP). Eleven LBP patients and eleven age-matched healthy controls were included. N-acetylaspartate (NAA), choline (Cho), myo-inositol (mI), and glutamine/glutamate (Glx) were measured with proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) in left and right SSC. Differences in metabolite concentrations relative to those of controls were evaluated as well as analyses of metabolite correlations within and between SSCs. Relationships between metabolite concentrations and pain characteristics were also evaluated. We found decreased NAA in the left SSC (P = 0.001) and decreased Cho (P = 0.04) along with lower correlations between all metabolites in right SSC (P = 0.007) in LBP compared to controls. In addition, we found higher and significant correlations between left and right mI (P < 0.001 in LBP vs P = 0.1 in controls) and between left mI and right Cho (P = 0.048 vs P = 0.6). Left and right NAA levels were negatively correlated with pain duration (P = 0.04 and P = 0.02 respectively) while right Glx was positively correlated with pain severity (P = 0.04). Our preliminary results demonstrated significant altered neuronal-glial interactions in SSC, with left neural alterations related to pain duration and right neuronal-glial alterations to pain severity. Thus, the 1H-MRS approach proposed here can be used to quantify relevant cerebral metabolite changes in chronic pain, and consequently increase our knowledge of the factors leading from these changes to clinical outcomes

Strategies in PRholog

PRholog is an experimental extension of logic programming with strategic conditional transformation rules, combining Prolog with Rholog calculus. The rules perform nondeterministic transformations on hedges. Queries may have several results that can be explored on backtracking. Strategies provide a control on rule applications in a declarative way. With strategy combinators, the user can construct more complex strategies from simpler ones. Matching with four different kinds of variables provides a flexible mechanism of selecting (sub)terms during execution. We give an overview on programming with strategies in PRholog and demonstrate how rewriting strategies can be expressed

Cervical arthroplasty versus anterior cervical decompression and fusion

Background: Anterior cervical decompression and fusion (ACDF) is a common procedure in neurosurgical practice to manage the cervical cord/nerve roots compression by intervertebral disk herniation / osteophytic formation. However, cervical total disk replacement (TDR) progressively became a feasible alternative to ACDF in surgical practice. This procedure is thought to have many advantages compared to classical ACDF. The aim of the present study is to investigate if TDR is superior as outcome measures than ACDF, by reviewing the published data available to date.Methods: We searched several electronic databases up to December 2010. Outcomes sought includes pain relief, functional capacity, quality of life, adjacent disk disease, secondary surgeries, kinematics/range of motion, return to work, adverse events, potential candidacy rate for surgery. We selected mainly randomized controlled trials.Results: Compared to ACDF, TDR has superior or equal clinical outcomes, a lower incidence of adjacent disc disease (radiological +/- clinical), lower rate of secondary revision surgeries, supplemental fixation or adjacent segment reoperation, superior spine kinematics, which is maintained over time, earlier return to work. On the other hand, the presented studies have shown that TDR exposes the patients to more frequent postoperative events and have an inferior candidacy rate compared to ACDF. We did not have access to straight –forward economic data, but TDR seems to be more costly than ACDF.Conclusions: TDR already represents a well-established technique in the armamentarium to manage the cervical disc herniation, a method required to be handled by any surgeon involved in spinal care

Intramedullary tumors: Clinical, radiological and histological correlations

Intramedullary spinal cord (SC) tumors are relatively rare tumors, accounting for only 2% to 4% ofcentral nervous systemtumors.These tumorsaregenerallyslow-growing tumorsthatcouldbenefitfromsurgical removal. A pre-surgery identification of the tumor histology might improve the surgical management of the tumor and also properly predict the functional outcome after surgery. The neuroimaging techniques, provide crucial information about tumors anatomy. By adding the medical history of the present illness and detailed clinical examination, the imaging data might however be extremely helpful in the prediction of tumor histology. This will allow anappropriate surgical managementofthese lesions and provide pertinent predictors of the functional outcome post-surgery. Therefore, the surgeon can set the patient’s expectations at a realistic level.The present studyis a prospective study,aiming to use combined clinical and imaging data to predictthe intramedullary SC tumor histology. The primary objectiveis to identify the pathognomonic clinical and imaging pattern for eachtumor type.The study was conducted in the Neurosurgery Clinic Emergency Clinic Hospital Bagdasar-Arseni between 2006 and 2009. A total of 36 patients (19 females/17 males) participated. All patients were evaluated for motor, sensory, sphincter, walking and balance functions. MRI assessment was used to determine the presence of an intramedullary SC tumor as well as its characteristics.All histological types have a long history of symptoms, which depends of locations in longitudinal plane. All intramedullary tumors presented spinal cord dilatation on MRI. We confined the clinico-radiological characteristics of each histological type, strongly correlated with histopathological analysis, extensively presented in the paper.&nbsp;By combining a careful medical history, clinical examination and MRI data, we could predict with a reasonable accuracy in preoperative stage the histological type of an intramedullary tumor.&nbsp