The Impact of Equity Engagement Evaluating the Impact of Shareholder Engagement in Public Equity Investing

Over the last decade, growing numbers of investors have become increasingly concerned with the environmental and social impact of their investments across asset classes. This trend has recently been driven by new waves of "impact investors" proactively seeking measurable social and environmental impact in addition to financial returns, and by "responsible investors" making commitments to engage on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues through initiatives such as the United Nations-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). At the same time, engaged shareholders have had long-standing experience using "the power of the proxy" and their voices as investors to hold companies accountable for the impacts they have on employees, stakeholders, communities, and ecosystems.While investor interest in shareholder engagement has grown, our understanding of the impacts associated with engagement activities remains largely anecdotal.In 2012, an important study on Total Portfolio Activation provided a new conceptual and analytical framework for investors to pursue environmental and social impact across all asset classes commonly found in a diversified investment portfolio. Building upon the insights of Total Portfolio Activation, the Impact of Equity Engagement (IE2) initiative seeks to deepen our understanding of the nature of impact in one specific asset class—public equities— where investors' engagement activities have generated meaningful social and environmental impacts.Given the large social and environmental footprints of publicly traded corporations and the persistently high allocation to public equities in most investor portfolios, public equity investing presents a major opportunity for impact investing. Yet impact investing, as currently practiced, has concentrated primarily on smallscale direct investments in private equity and debt, where many investors perceive that social and environmental impact can be more readily observed than in publicly traded companies where ownership is intermediated, diluted, and diffused through secondary capital markets.Indeed, the nature of impact within public equity investing remains poorly understood and insufficiently documented. Because of this, many investors may be overlooking readily available opportunities for generating impact within their existing investment portfolios.To address these misperceptions and missed opportunities, the IE2 initiative is developing a more rigorous framework for documenting the impact of engagement within the public equity asset class.

The impact of a dedicated training program for oral examiners at a medical school in Germany: a survey among participants from operative and non-operative disciplines

BACKGROUND: Oral examinations have been a crucial format in ancient and modern assessment to evaluate and guarantee quality of medical education and thereby to secure patient safety. To achieve a high level of quality in the oral part of the final examination of medical students, a training program for oral examiners at the Medical Faculty of Ulm (Germany) has been established since 2007. However, little is known about the attitude of the examiners in regard to the impact of this training program and of oral examinations as instruments to ensure patient safety. METHODS: All 367 academic clinicians from operative and non-operative disciplines, attending the one-day examiner training program at the University of Ulm between 2007 and 2012 have been asked to answer an online survey (EvaSys 5.0). Focus of the survey was to find out in which respect the examiners profited from the trainings, if the training effects were discipline-dependent, and to which degree the oral examinations could contribute to patient safety. Statistical analysis was performed using the t-test for independent samples. Results were considered statistically significant when p < 0.05. RESULTS: A total of 63 participants answered the survey, but in 4 cases the questionnaire was not fully completed (with single items missing). More than half of the study participants (n = 34/59; 58%) have experienced (at least sometimes or rarely) candidates that they deemed incompetent and perhaps even dangerous to the patients’ health who nevertheless passed the oral exam successfully. The majority of participants were convinced that oral examinations using concrete clinical cases could significantly contribute to patient safety, if grading is based on clear criteria and if examinations as well as grading are performed more critically. The impact of the training program was rated significantly stronger by surgeons than by non-surgeons in several categories. These categories included “strengths and weaknesses of oral examinations”, “reliability”, “validity”, “competence in grading”, “critical grading”, and “departmental improvements” concerning oral examinations. CONCLUSIONS: In respect to patient safety, it seems crucial to prevent incompetent candidates from passing the oral examination. The present study indicates the importance to continue and to develop our examiner trainings, with main emphasis on concrete clinical problems and a criteria-based critical grading system for oral examinations. Since the impact of the training was particularly high for colleagues from the operative disciplines, the training program should be offered especially in surgical departments

A model of partial differential equations for HIV propagation in lymph nodes

Texto completo versión postprint de autor.-- PACS numbers: 02.30.Ks,02.30.Hq,87.18.Hf,87.19.XxA system of partial differential equations is used to model the dissemination of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in CD4+T cells within lymph nodes. Besides diffusion terms, the model also includes a time-delay dependence to describe the time lag required by the immunologic system to provide defenses to new virus strains. The resulting dynamics strongly depends on the properties of the invariant sets of the model, consisting of three fixed points related to the time independent and spatial homogeneous tissue configurations in healthy and infected states. A region in the parameter space is considered, for which the time dependence of the space averaged model variables follows the clinical pattern reported for infected patients: a short scale primary infection, followed by a long latency period of almost complete recovery and third phase characterized by damped oscillations around a value with large HIV counting. Depending on the value of the diffusion coefficient, the latency time increases with respect to that one obtained for the space homogeneous version of the model. It is found that same initial conditions lead to quite different spatial patterns, which depend strongly on the latency interval.This work was partially supported by the following Brazilian funding agencies: CAPES, FAPESB/PRONEX, CNPq and National Institute for Science and Technology/Complex Systems.Peer reviewe

Approximation projektiver Tensornormen mit konvexer algebraischer Geometrie

In dieser Arbeit untersuchen wir eine Methode zur Approximation der projektiven Norm auf reellen multipartiten Tensorprodukten durch sogenannte Thetakörper. Mit Thetakörpern kann die konvexe Hülle bestimmter reeller algebraischer Varietäten durch eine Kette von konvexen semialgebraischen Obermengen approximiert werden. Wir zeigen zunächst, dass die Einheitsproduktvektoren eines multipartiten Tensorprodukts, deren konvexe Hülle gleich der Einheitskugel der projektiven Norm ist, eine reelle algebraische Varietät bilden. Anschließend zeigen wir, dass die zu dieser Varietät gehörenden Thetakörper gegen die Einheitskugel der projektiven Norm konvergieren. Wir kommen zu dem Schluss, dass die Einheitskugel im Falle von reellen bipartiten Tensorprodukten bereits durch den ersten Thetakörper vollständig beschrieben werden kann. Zur Herleitung dieses Ergebnisses führen wir die zu Grunde liegenden mathematischen Konzepte ein, insbesondere Gröbnerbasen, reelle algebraische Geometrie, konvexe Geometrie und multipartite Tensorprodukte. Abschließend widmen wir uns dem Verständnis der Menge der Produktvektoren als algebraische Varietät und erhalten verschiedene Darstellungsweisen von Thetakörpern, beispielsweise als projizierte Spektraeder oder als Indikatoren für Positivität. Um den allgemeinen Fall multipartiter Tensorprodukte zu behandeln, entwickeln wir eine Software zur Annäherung der projektiven Norm durch Thetanormen. Für eine Fortführung dieser Arbeit siehe: Lang, Sandra: A Geometric Approach to the Projective Tensor Norm URN: urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-203316 https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/20331

A Geometric Approach to the Projective Tensor Norm

The main focus of this thesis is on the projective norm on finite-dimensional real or complex tensor products. There are various mathematical subjects with relations to the projective norm. For instance, it appears in the context of operator algebras or in quantum physics. The projective norm on multipartite tensor products is considered to be less accessible. So we use a method from convex algebraic geometry to approximate the projective unit ball by convex supersets, so-called theta bodies. For real multipartite tensor products we obtain theta bodies which are close to the projective unit ball, leading to a generalisation of the Schmidt decomposition. In a second step the method is applied to complex tensor products, in a third step to separable states. In a more general context, the projective norm can be related to binomial ideals, especially to so-called Hibi relations. In this respect, we also focus on a generalisation of the projective unit ball, here called Hibi body, and its theta bodies. It turns out that many statements also hold in this general context

Chirale Welten

Die Chemie büßt zugunsten physikalischer und lebenswissenschaftlicher Konzeptionen zunehmend an Deutungsmacht über die molekulare Welt ein. Sandra Lang untersucht, inwiefern die Ausdifferenzierung der chemischen Wissenschaften mit sich ebenfalls ausdifferenzierenden Zugriffen auf das Molekulare zusammenhängt. Anhand der vier exemplarischen Grenzfelder Materialwissenschaften, Biomedizin, Pharmazie und Quantenchemie und deren Narrative zur molekularen Eigenschaft der Chiralität veranschaulicht sie die transformative Phase der Chemie angesichts sich wandelnder Innovationsdispositive

Data Augmentation of Wearable Sensor Data for Parkinson's Disease Monitoring using Convolutional Neural Networks

While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied to many challenging classification applications, they typically require large datasets for training. When the availability of labeled data is limited, data augmentation is a critical preprocessing step for CNNs. However, data augmentation for wearable sensor data has not been deeply investigated yet. In this paper, various data augmentation methods for wearable sensor data are proposed. The proposed methods and CNNs are applied to the classification of the motor state of Parkinson's Disease patients, which is challenging due to small dataset size, noisy labels, and large intra-class variability. Appropriate augmentation improves the classification performance from 77.54\% to 86.88\%.Comment: ICMI2017 (oral session

Taking the lead into sustainability: decision makers’ competencies for a greener future

Many research articles describe competencies that people need in order to think, develop, and enact a sustainable future. Based on findings from the political economy, this paper argues that it is the macroscopic decisions in the public sphere that have an impact on society and the environment. Therefore, decision makers in the economy, politics, and civil society are important actors to enable a societal transformation towards sustainability by making macroscopic decisions. Based on these assumptions, this empirical research article analyzes the competencies decision makers such as ministers, CEOs, or union leaders need to contribute to a sustainable future in their professional life. We conducted interviews with 14 high-level decision makers and analyzed their competencies based on Wiek et al.’s framework on sustainability competencies. The findings show how they enact and organize the competencies needed for steering the sustainable transition. Linking all competencies is particularly important, especially at the intersection of different systems, to develop a macroscale, system-oriented decision. The authors suggest to consider systems and interpersonal thinking as extremely interdisciplinary competencies and to put a focus on public-sphere actions when educating future leaders. Moreover, the results indicate that dealing with uncertainty, following one’s own values, and building up resilience play a major role for decision makers