Impact of Working Capital on the Profitability of UK Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology FTSE All Share Index Firms

The study is conducted to investigate the impact of a working capital on profitability for the Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology firms listed on FTSE all share index. Panel data is collected (data is collected from 2009 to 2015 for 10 Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology firms), Pearson’s correlation and fixed effect regression is used for the data analysis. Profitability is the dependent variable, which is measured through return on capital employed (ROCE). Five models have been generated based on different components of working capital (stock conversion period, debtor collection period, and creditor payment period and cash conversion cycle) in a stand-alone and collective manner to explore the impact of working capital components on the firm profitability. Four control variables (liquidity, leverage, firm size and growth) have also included in the models. The results have shown that stock conversion period has a positive while debtor collection period has a negative relationship with profitability. Insignificant results have observed for creditor payment period and cash conversion cycle therefore no relationship can be determined between these two variables with profitability. Similar results have been observed when all the working capital components were collected together to explore their impact on firm’s profitability. Leverage and firm size have shown a positive relationship with profitability while insignificant results have observed for the liquidity and growth.      &nbsp

Alt-Index: A proposed Index for measuring the social activity of scientific research

Altmetrics is a broad term used to refer to article level metrics, which focus on a more timely measurement of interest in scholarly documents made visible through social media (Priem et al., 2010). As with any new metric, concerns have been raised regarding its use (Prime, 2013; Kwok, 2013), due to the fact that an Altmetric score might potentially be manipulated or gamed, just as it is possible to game citations (Bartneck & Kokkelmans, 2011; Wilhite et al., 2012). However, given that there are so many diverse measures now compiled within Altmetrics, the tampering process is actually not that easy (Piwowar, 2013). Altmetric scores have therefore attracted the attention of the scientific community, who, parallel to traditional forms of scholarly communication, are now relying on social media to disseminate research as part of their daily practices (Piwowar, 2013). Thus far, a few studies have shown weak to medium correlations between bibliometric measures and Altmetric scores (Costas et al., 2015). More recently, a comprehensive study using data from Altmetic.com and Scopus has shown that when compared to journal citation scores, Altmetric scores demonstrate a higher-level of accuracy for identifying highly cited publications (Hassan et al., 2017). With this paper, we would like to propose a new measure, termed the alt-index. It is analogous to the h-index (Hirsch 2005), and it is defined as follows: "a scholar has an alt-index of a, if a of her/his Np papers have at least a social mentions, and the other (Np-a) papers have no more than a mentions each"

VPT: Privacy Preserving Energy Trading and Block Mining Mechanism for Blockchain based Virtual Power Plants

The desire to overcome reliability issues of distributed energy resources (DERs) lead researchers to development of a novel concept named as virtual power plant (VPP). VPPs are supposed to carry out intelligent, secure, and smart energy trading among prosumers, buyers, and generating stations along with providing efficient energy management. Therefore, integrating blockchain in decentralized VPP network emerged out as a new paradigm, and recent experiments over this integration have shown fruitful results. However, this decentralization also suffers with energy management, trust, reliability, and efficiency issues due to the dynamic nature of DERs. In order to overcome this, in this paper, we first work over providing efficient energy management strategy for VPP to enhance demand response, then we propose an energy oriented trading and block mining protocol and named it as proof of energy market (PoEM). To enhance it further, we integrate differential privacy in PoEM and propose a Private PoEM (PPoEM) model. Collectively, we propose a private decentralized VPP trading model and named it as Virtual Private Trading (VPT) model. We further carry out extensive theoretical analysis and derive step-by-step valuations for market race probability, market stability probability, energy trading expectation, winning state probability, and prospective leading time profit values. Afterwards, we carry out simulation-based experiment of our proposed model. The performance evaluation and theoretical analysis of our VPT model make it one of the most viable model for blockchain based VPP network as compared to other state-of-the-art works.Comment: Article Submitted for Revie

Measuring Social Media Activity of Scientific Literature: An Exhaustive Comparison of Scopus and Novel Altmetrics Big Data

This paper measures social media activity of 15 broad scientific disciplines indexed in Scopus database using Altmetric.com data. First, the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database is investigated, overall and across disciplines. Second, the correlation between the bibliometric and altmetric indices is examined using Spearman correlation. Third, a zero-truncated negative binomial model is used to determine the association of various factors with increasing or decreasing citations. Lastly, the effectiveness of altmetric indices to identify publications with high citation impact is comprehensively evaluated by deploying Area Under the Curve (AUC) - an application of receiver operating characteristic. Results indicate a rapid increase in the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database from 10.19% in 2011 to 20.46% in 2015. A zero-truncated negative binomial model is implemented to measure the extent to which different bibliometric and altmetric factors contribute to citation counts. Blog count appears to be the most important factor increasing the number of citations by 38.6% in the field of Health Professions and Nursing, followed by Twitter count increasing the number of citations by 8% in the field of Physics and Astronomy. Interestingly, both Blog count and Twitter count always show positive increase in the number of citations across all fields. While there was a positive weak correlation between bibliometric and altmetric indices, the results show that altmetric indices can be a good indicator to discriminate highly cited publications, with an encouragingly AUC= 0.725 between highly cited publications and total altmetric count. Overall, findings suggest that altmetrics could better distinguish highly cited publications.Comment: 34 Pages, 3 Figures, 15 Table

Geotechnical characteristics of effluent contaminated cohesive soils

In developing countries like Pakistan, raw industrial effluents are usually disposed-off directly into open lands or in water bodies resulting in soil contamination. Leachate formation due to rainfalls in openly dumped solid waste also adds to soil contamination. In this study, engineering behavior of soils contaminated by two industrial effluents, one from paper industry (acidic) and another from textile industry (basic), has been investigated. Laboratory testing revealed significant effects of effluent contamination on engineering behavior of tested soils. Liquid limit, plasticity index, optimum moisture content and compression index of tested soils were found to increase with effluent contaminant, indicating a deterioration in the engineering behavior of soils. Whereas maximum dry density, undrained shear strength and coefficient of consolidation of the contaminated soils showed a decreasing trend. The dilapidation in engineering characteristics of soils due to the addition of industrial effluents could pose serious threats to existing and future foundations in terms of loss of bearing capacity and increase in settlement. Keywords: soil contamination, industrial waste, engineering behavior, effluent waste, leachate. First published online: 28 Nov 201