The Strategic Application of Alternative Grading to Improve Retention and Enhance Equity (Spring 2023)

Universities across the United States have been using the Pass/Fail grading system for a variety of reasons and in many different ways. There are so many uses of the system as there are universities. In general, universities have used the Pass/Fail grading system to: help reduce stress and pressure on students; provide more flexibility in course selection and encourage students to explore and pursue interest without fear of damaging their GPA; reduce perceived discrimination and bias in grading, providing more equitable opportunities for all students regardless of race, socioeconomic status or prior academic background; and to improve retention rates by reducing the risk of failing a course and being unable to complete a degree or program. The case is made for a Pass/Fail grading system and suggested options are identified.https://thekeep.eiu.edu/think_tank_reports/1000/thumbnail.jp

Towards a circular economy: Implications for emission reduction and environmental sustainability

Governments and policymakers worldwide have been setting targets to achieve an ambitious net-zero emission target by 2050 to tackle the pressing issue of climate change. However, achieving the net-zero emission target by 2050 depends on the factors determining the transition from traditional fossil fuel energy sources to renewables. In connection with this, policymakers have emphasised the need to transition from a linear to a circular economy. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of the progress towards a circular economy in reducing CO2 emissions and promoting environmental sustainability. To do so, we use annual historical data for a panel of 29 European countries from 2000 to 2020. Using an identification strategy that adopts heteroscedastic-based instrumental variables and addresses endogeneity issues, we find that progress towards a circular economy significantly improves environmental quality via reducing CO2 emissions. Our findings suggest that business strategies promoting recycling and circular economy practices play an important role in environmental sustainability by reducing emissions

Adaptive Data Storage and Placement in Distributed Database Systems

Distributed database systems are widely used to provide scalable storage, update and query facilities for application data. Distributed databases primarily use data replication and data partitioning to spread load across nodes or sites. The presence of hotspots in workloads, however, can result in imbalanced load on the distributed system resulting in performance degradation. Moreover, updates to partitioned and replicated data can require expensive distributed coordination to ensure that they are applied atomically and consistently. Additionally, data storage formats, such as row and columnar layouts, can significantly impact latencies of mixed transactional and analytical workloads. Consequently, how and where data is stored among the sites in a distributed database can significantly affect system performance, particularly if the workload is not known ahead of time. To address these concerns, this thesis proposes adaptive data placement and storage techniques for distributed database systems. This thesis demonstrates that the performance of distributed database systems can be improved by automatically adapting how and where data is stored by leveraging online workload information. A two-tiered architecture for adaptive distributed database systems is proposed that includes an adaptation advisor that decides at which site(s) and how transactions execute. The adaptation advisor makes these decisions based on submitted transactions. This design is used in three adaptive distributed database systems presented in this thesis: (i) DynaMast that efficiently transfers data mastership to guarantee single-site transactions while maintaining well-understood and established transactional semantics, (ii) MorphoSys that selectively and adaptively replicates, partitions and remasters data based on a learned cost model to improve transaction processing, and (iii) Proteus that uses learned workload models to predictively and adaptively change storage layouts to support both high transactional throughput and low latency analytical queries. Collectively, this thesis is a concrete step towards autonomous database systems that allow users to specify only the data to store and the queries to execute, leaving the system to judiciously choose the storage and execution mechanisms to deliver high performance

The influence of CEO political outspokenness on stock market reaction and firm performance

CEOs\u27 public communications are considered essential parts of their stakeholder management efforts. Specifically, CEOs\u27 oral and written communications pertaining to their firms\u27 actions receive scrutiny from external stakeholders (e.g. investors, stock analysts, regulators) and members of the media (Conaway & Wardrope, 2010; Kassel, 2017). There is a burgeoning body of research on CEO communication. Research evidence, for instance, points to the extent to which CEOs\u27 communications influence firm performance and investor behavior (Whittington, Yakis-Douglas, Ahn, 2016; Elliott, Grant & Hodge, 2018). Furthermore, CEOs\u27 communications have been shown to shape firm reputation and stakeholder perceptions in times of crises (Seeger, Sellnow & Ulmer, 2003). In recent years, there have been reports of a growing number of CEOs publicly weighing in on controversial public policy debates (Chatterji & Toffel, 2016; Soergel, 2016). These CEOs are addressing a wide range of societal hot button issues in the political arena. This trend is considered unusual because it goes against the implicit societal expectation that CEOs refrain from being involved in controversial political debates and instead focus on managing their businesses. We refer to this growing trend as CEO political outspokenness and define it as CEO\u27s public and opinionated expression of personal beliefs and values on controversial political issues. Because this trend is very nascent, scholarly research has not examined the consequences of controversial political comments made by CEOs on firm performance. In exploring this issue, we consider two important contingency factors that moderate the impact of CEO political outspokenness on firm performance: firm \u27s past reputation ( Celebrity Status) and history of consumer activism. In the next section, we first provide an overview of CEO political outspokenness. We will then present our study\u27s predictions and conclude by highlighting the scholarly and managerial implications of our empirical findings

Hitting the ‘reset button’: The role of digital reorientation in successful turnarounds

Seismic shifts in industries brought about by radical technological innovations usually lead to a misalignment between the capabilities of many incumbent firms and the requisites of their new environment, and eventually, organizational decline. The current turnaround literature, while emphasizing operating and strategic responses to organizational decline that focus on efficiency and fine tuning product/market strategy respectively, ignores such organizational decline that requires fundamental reengineering of the whole firm and its value chain. This paper introduces the concept of digital reorientation as a long term turnaround strategy to respond to situations in which a firm’s environment has been fundamentally restructured. Digital reorientation is a technology-enabled, simultaneous and multilevel change that transforms the organization’s core architecture and the way it serves its customers. We develop a framework to understand this turnaround strategy relative to traditional operational and strategic options and formulate propositions on internal and external contingencies that will likely influence the effectiveness of its implementation. Finally, using the newspaper publishing industry as an example of an environment that has undergone such disruptive change driven by digital technological innovations, we examine how the use of digital reorientation could help declining firms in that industry successfully turnaround their performance

Busy Directors and The Occurrence of Corporate Environmental Misconduct

The occurrence of corporate misconduct is a significant organizational event that adversely affects not only the firm’s performance but also its relationships with key stakeholders. Corporate directors are pivotal in the prevention and management of organizational misconduct. In this study, we focus on the phenomenon of “overboarded directors” (those serving on three or more corporate boards). Specifically, we propose that busy directors are less likely to be effective in monitoring environmental misconduct given the substantial cognitive overload and a limited sense of alertness associated with multiple directorships. We propose that firms with busy directors are more likely to have environmental misconduct if they are led by a powerful CEO, do not have a superior ethical reputation, or are experiencing financial distress. We examine these predictions using a panel data on environmental violations among S&P 500 firms (2007-2016). The findings suggest the presence of busy directors is associated with a high likelihood and frequency of environmental violation. This relationship is stronger among firms experiencing financial distress, and weaker among those with superior ethical reputation. Overall, this study sheds light on the organizational consequences of overboarded directors as it relates to environmental misconduct

Strategic Agility, Business Model Innovation and Firm Performance: An Empirical Investigation

Despite the robust literature on the nature of business models and their implications for firm performance, research on the organizational antecedents of business model innovations (BMIs) is still evolving. In this paper, we empirically examine the extent to which firm-level strategic agility predicts the adoption of three (value creation, value capture, and value proposition) types of BMIs. Furthermore, we propose that the relationship between firm-level strategic agility and BMI adoption is contingent on the degree of environmental turbulence. Finally, we explore the mediating role that BMI plays in the relationship between firm-level strategic agility and firm performance. Our analysis of data from 432 German firms in the electronics industry indicates that strategic agility is positively related to BMI and that this relationship is indeed strengthened by the degree of environmental turbulence. Additionally, our findings show that, while value proposition and value creation BMIs have positive relationships with firm performance, value capture innovation is negatively related to firm performance; these findings are contrary to our prediction. Finally, the results of our mediation tests indicate that BMI serves as an important intermediary mechanism through which firms’ strategic agility contributes to superior firm performance

Hydrological Foundation as a Basis for a Holistic Environmental Flow Assessment of Tropical Highland Rivers in Ethiopia

The sustainable development of water resources includes retaining some amount of the natural flow regime in water bodies to protect and maintain aquatic ecosystem health and the human livelihoods and wellbeing dependent upon them. Although assessment of environmental flows is now occurring globally, limited studies have been carried out in the Ethiopian highlands, especially studies to understand flow-ecological response relationships. This paper establishes a hydrological foundation of Gumara River from an ecological perspective. The data analysis followed three steps: first, determination of the current flow regime flow indices and ecologically relevant flow regime; second, naturalization of the current flow regime looking at how flow regime is changing; and, finally, an initial exploration of flow linkages with ecological processes. Flow data of Gumara River from 1973 to 2018 are used for the analysis. Monthly low flow occurred from December to June; the lowest being in March, with a median flow of 4.0 m(3) s(-1). Monthly high flow occurred from July to November; the highest being in August, with a median flow of 236 m(3) s(-1). 1-Day low flows decreased from 1.55 m(3) s(-1) in 1973 to 0.16 m(3) s(-1) in 2018, and 90-Day (seasonal) low flow decreased from 4.9 m(3) s(-1) in 1973 to 2.04 m(3) s(-1) in 2018. The Mann-Kendall trend test indicated that the decrease in low flow was significant for both durations at alpha = 0.05. A similar trend is indicated for both durations of high flow. The decrease in both low flows and high flows is attributed to the expansion of pump irrigation by 29 km(2) and expansion of plantations, which resulted in an increase of NDVI from 0.25 in 2000 to 0.29 in 2019. In addition, an analysis of environmental flow components revealed that only four "large floods" appeared in the last 46 years; no "large flood" occurred after 1988. Lacking "large floods" which inundate floodplain wetlands has resulted in early disconnection of floodplain wetlands from the river and the lake; which has impacts on breeding and nursery habitat shrinkage for migratory fish species in Lake Tana. On the other hand, the extreme decrease in "low flow" components has impacts on pin smaller pools. These results serve as the hydrological foundation for continued studies in the Gumara catchment, with the eventual goal of quantifying environmental flow requirements.redators, reducing their mobility and ability to access prey concentrate

Organizational and competitive influences of exploration and exploitation activities in small firms

a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o This study explores organizational and competitive factors affecting exploration/exploitation activities in SMEs by examining the role of entrepreneurial orientation (EO), market orientation (MO) and perceived competitive intensity. We test the relationships among these variables using data collected from 55 manufacturing SMEs operating in the southern part of U. S. The findings provide a strong support for a positive association between EO, MO and exploration/exploitation activities. Perceived competitive intensity was only a significant moderator for the relationship between MO and the degree of exploratory activities. Our findings, hence, suggest the significant role organizational predictors play in enhancing exploration/exploitation activities in SMEs. Implications for research and practice are discussed

Editorial

NCD Risk Factors on the Rise in Ethiopia: A call for Action