Comparison of corporate social responsibility programmes of large international and small national hotel operators in Southeast Asia

Although the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been introduced in 1979, the service industry has just recently begun to adopt CSR programmes. This study seeks to identify, compare and investigate the differences of CSR programmes in Phuket, Thailand as conducted by the Holiday Inn Phuket, which is managed by a large international hotel operator, the InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), and the Centara Grand Beach Resort Phuket, which is managed by, a small national hotel operator, the Centara Hotels and Resorts Group (CHRG). Economic, social and environmental indicators have been selected from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) 3.1 guidelines and are used for the comparison of the CSR programmes in this study. IHG has guidelines, frameworks and systems at the corporate level for the individual properties to use and follow. Holiday Inn Phuket contributed to the community through donations to establish Happy Home, a children’s shelter, which is now converted to a learning centre due to changes in the Thai legislation. Holiday Inn Phuket has efforts to reduce energy consumption and promote recycling but is more focused on social initiatives, such as donations to schools and to Happy Home. CHRG engages external vendors for frameworks and guidelines to develop its CSR programmes. Centara Grand has environmental initiatives that reduce energy and water consumption. Centara Grand donates to the community and is involved in community projects together with other hotels under the Centara brand. The majority of the employees in both hotels are Thais but there are more expatriates in Centara Grand’s senior management than Holiday Inn Phuket’s. Both IHG and CHRG provide a high level of flexibility for individual properties to conduct their own initiatives, especially for social initiatives.BUSINES

A selection of Slovenian literary heroes for the preschool period

V vrtcih slovenske literarne junake vse bolj spodrivajo tuji fantazijski junaki, za katere se otroci navdušijo prek risank, revij in video igric. Slovenski junaki so pomemben del naše kulture in so lahko nekakšni spremljevalci v domovinski vzgoji pri najmlajših. To delo naj služi kot promocija slovenskih literarnih junakov pri otrocih vseh starosti, z začetkom v predšolskem obdobju. V delu je opredeljeno merilo izbire likovpredstavljene so njihove zgodbe, posebne lastnosti in upodobitevjunaki so po izvoru opredeljeni kot ljudski ali umetninavedeni so avtorji in zgodovinske okoliščine nastankaraziskane so njihova prepoznavnost in zastopanost v različnih medijih (slikanice, avdio- in video mediji, oglasi) ter dostopnost teh medijev.In preschools, Slovenian literary heroes are being displaced by foreign fantastic heroes that impress children via cartoons, magazines and video games. Slovenian heroes are an important part of our culture and can act as companions of sorts within citizenship education of youngsters. This thesis should serve as a promotion of Slovenian literary heroes for children of all ages, beginning with the preschool period. The thesis defines the selection criterion of charactersit introduces their stories, special characteristics and depictionsit defines heroes by origin as folk or artificialit lists the authors and historical circumstances of productionit investigates their recognisability and representation in various media (picture books, audio- and video media, advertisements) and the accessibility of these media

Imputation and subset-based association analysis across different cancer types identifies multiple independent risk loci in the TERT-CLPTM1L region on chromosome 5p15.33

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have mapped risk alleles for at least 10 distinct cancers to a small region of 63 000 bp on chromosome 5p15.33. This region harbors the TERT and CLPTM1L genes; the former encodes the catalytic subunit of telomerase reverse transcriptase and the latter may play a role in apoptosis. To investigate further the genetic architecture of common susceptibility alleles in this region, we conducted an agnostic subset-based meta-analysis (association analysis based on subsets) across six distinct cancers in 34 248 cases and 45 036 controls. Based on sequential conditional analysis, we identified as many as six independent risk loci marked by common single-nucleotide polymorphisms: five in the TERT gene (Region 1: rs7726159, P = 2.10 x 10(-39); Region 3: rs2853677, P = 3.30 x 10(-36) and P-Conditional = 2.36 x 10(-8); Region 4: rs2736098, P = 3.87 x 10(-12) and P-Conditional = 5.19 x 10(-6), Region 5: rs13172201, P = 0.041 and P-Conditional = 2.04 x 10(-6); and Region 6: rs10069690, P = 7.49 x 10 215 and P-Conditional = 5.35 x 10(-7)) and one in the neighboring CLPTM1L gene(Region 2: rs451360; P = 1.90 x 10(-18) and P-Conditional = 7.06 x 10(-16)). Between three and five cancers mapped to each independent locus with both risk-enhancing and protective effects. Allele-specific effects on DNA methylation were seen for a subset of risk loci, indicating that methylation and subsequent effects on gene expression may contribute to the biology of risk variants on 5p15.33. Our results provide strong support for extensive pleiotropy across this region of 5p15.33, to an extent not previously observed in other cancer susceptibility loci