Is corporate social responsibility always a function of good management?

The debate on the relationship between business and society is an issue of practical importance and theoretical interest. This paper discusses the perspectives on the social responsibilities of organisations to indicate the diversity of approaches to the legitimacy and the boundaries of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. Classical Theories of Social Responsibility, The Stakeholder Theory, The Social Demandingness Theory, and The Social Activist Theory are critiqued. Finally, major arguments behind the social responsibility theories are discussed and an ethical relativism framework is proposed to assess the morality and the legitimacy of CSR practices. Keywords: Corporate social responsibility; philantrophy; relativism; management; stakeholde

Drought and oxidative stress

Drought, a natural stress factor has the highest percentage with 26%, when the usable areas on the earth are classified in view of stress factors. Biotic and abiotic stress factors may cause yield loss in plants and affect human and animal nutrition. Amount of lacking yield due to biotic and abiotic stress factors ranged between 65 and 87%. The best option for crop production, yield improvement and yield stability under soil moisture deficient conditions is to develop drought tolerant crop varieties (Siddique et al., 2000). A physiological approach would be the most attractive way to develop new varieties rapidly. Only few studies highlighted the importance of antioxidant enzymes during drought stress. The antioxidant defenses appear to provide crucial protection against oxidative damage in cellular membranes and organelles in plants grown under unfavorable conditions. Thus, plants are equipped with complex and a highly efficient antioxidative defense system which can respond and adapt to drought stress. This system is composed of protective nonenzymatic and enzymatic protection mechanisms. They interrupt the uncontrolled oxidation and serve to maintain the antioxidants in their reduced functional state, that efficiently scavenge ROS (reactive oxygen species) and prevent damaging effects of free radicals. Balance at aerobic metabolism is defined as free radical generation and rapid removal by antioxidant systems. The structure of cells and functional changes of systems, may be damaged by the formation of irreversible oxidative stress. Redox signalling and antioxidative defense systems are very important for protection towards uncontrolled and cascade damage of biotic and abiotic stress factors. In this review, drought, drought types and antioxidative defense system components will be discussed.Key words: Antioxidative defense system, ascorbate peroxidase, catalase, drought types, glutathione reductase, oxidative stress, superoxide dismutase

Asymmetric intergroup bullying: the enactment and maintenance of societal inequality at work

What does inequality mean for dysfunctional organizational behaviours, such as workplace bullying? This article argues that workplace bullying can be understood as a manifestation of intergroup dynamics originating beyond the organization. We introduce the construct of asymmetric intergroup bullying: the disproportionate mistreatment of members of low status groups, with the intended effect of enhancing the subordination of that group in society at large. Analysis of data from 38 interviews with public and private sector workers in Turkey depicts a pattern of asymmetric intergroup bullying, undertaken to achieve organizational and broader sociopolitical goals. Respondents reported bullying acts used to get rid of unwanted personnel, with the goal of avoiding severance pay, or of removing supporters of the former government from positions of political and economic influence. Bullying was also described as working towards the dominance of the sociocultural worldview of one political group over another. We discuss asymmetric intergroup bullying as one mechanism through which acute intergroup hierarchy in the broader society corrupts management practice and employee interactions, in turn exacerbating economic inequality along group lines

The Energy Eigenvalues of the Two Dimensional Hydrogen Atom in a Magnetic Field

In this paper, the energy eigenvalues of the two dimensional hydrogen atom are presented for the arbitrary Larmor frequencies by using the asymptotic iteration method. We first show the energy eigenvalues for the no magnetic field case analytically, and then we obtain the energy eigenvalues for the strong and weak magnetic field cases within an iterative approach for $n=2-10$ and $m=0-1$ states for several different arbitrary Larmor frequencies. The effect of the magnetic field on the energy eigenvalues is determined precisely. The results are in excellent agreement with the findings of the other methods and our method works for the cases where the others fail.Comment: 13 pages and 5 table

Identification of New Resistance Sources From Diploid Wild Strawberry Against Powdery Mildew Pathogen

Powdery mildew pathogen causes diseases in berries and resistance breeding is hampered by the lack of sufficient sources. While control of fungal pathogens relies on chemical fungicides. In either case, a reliable source of resistance for breeding purposes is imperative for efficient protection of the crop plants. A powdery mildew isolate designated GOU1 has been identified as Podosphaera aphanis var. aphanis using light microscopy and sequencing the ITS region. Pathogenicity tests on 3 diploid wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca L.) ecotypes with GOU1 revealed 3 distinctive interaction phenotypes; enhanced susceptible (ecotype 1), intermediate susceptible (ecotype 2) and resistant (ecotype 3). In vitro staining methods with diaminobenzidine and trypan blue showed massive mycelial web and conidiophore production on the susceptible ecotype, but there was no mycelia and conidiophore production on the resistant ecotype 3. In the ecotype 3 conidiospore penetration was associated with accumulation of hydrogen peroxide production on the host cells. These findings suggest that these ecotypes could be explored as resistant gene sources to powdery mildew fungus

Query Extension Suggestions for Visual Query Systems Through Ontology Projection and Indexing

Ontology-based visual query formulation is a viable alternative to textual query editors in the Semantic Web domain for extracting data from structured data sources in terms of the skills and knowledge required. A visual query system is at any moment responsible for providing the user with query extension suggestions; however, suggestions leading to empty results are often not useful. To this end, in this article, we first present an approach for projecting OWL 2 ontologies into navigation graphs to be used for query formulation and then a solution where an efficient finite index is used to calculate non-ranked approximated extension suggestions for ontology-based visual query systems using navigation graphs. The results of our experiments suggest that one can efficiently project an ontology into a navigation graph, query it for running an interactive user interface, and suggest query extensions that do not lead to dead-ends

Computer Vision Techniques for Background Modeling in Urban Traffic Monitoring

Jose Manuel Milla, Sergio Luis Toral, Manuel Vargas and Federico Barrero (2010). Computer Vision Techniques for Background Modeling in Urban Traffic Monitoring, Urban Transport and Hybrid Vehicles, Seref Soylu (Ed.), ISBN: 978-953-307-100-8, InTech, DOI: 10.5772/10179. Available from: http://www.intechopen.com/books/urban-transport-and-hybrid-vehicles/computer-vision-techniques-for-background-modeling-in-urban-traffic-monitoringIn this chapter, several background modelling techniques have been described, analyzed and tested. In particular, different algorithms based on sigma-delta filter have been considered due to their suitability for embedded systems, where computational limitations affect a real-time implementation. A qualitative and a quantitative comparison have been performed among the different algorithms. Obtained results show that the sigma-delta algorithm with confidence measurement exhibits the best performance in terms of adaptation to particular specificities of urban traffic scenes and in terms of computational requirements. A prototype based on an ARM processor has been implemented to test the different versions of the sigma-delta algorithm and to illustrate several applications related to vehicle traffic monitoring and implementation details

Querying industrial stream-temporal data: An ontology-based visual approach

An increasing number of sensors are being deployed in business-critical environments, systems, and equipment; and stream a vast amount of data. The operational efficiency and effectiveness of business processes rely on domain experts’ agility in interpreting data into actionable business information. A domain expert has extensive domain knowledge but not necessarily skills and knowledge on databases and formal query languages. Therefore, centralised approaches are often preferred. These require IT experts to translate the information needs of domain experts into extract-transform-load (ETL) processes in order to extract and integrate data and then let domain experts apply predefined analytics. Since such a workflow is too time intensive, heavy-weight and inflexible given the high volume and velocity of data, domain experts need to extract and analyse the data of interest directly. Ontologies, i.e., semantically rich conceptual domain models, present an intelligible solution by describing the domain of interest on a higher level of abstraction closer to the reality. Moreover, recent ontology-based data access (OBDA) technologies enable end users to formulate their information needs into queries using a set of terms defined in an ontology. Ontological queries could then be translated into SQL or some other database query languages, and executed over the data in its original place and format automatically. To this end, this article reports an ontology-based visual query system (VQS), namely OptiqueVQS, how it is extended for a stream-temporal query language called STARQL, a user experiment with the domain experts at Siemens AG, and STARQL’s query answering performance over a proof of concept implementation for PostgreSQL