Measuring social, economic and environmental sustainability at the enterprise level: a case study of an Australian Utility Corporation’s Sustainability Report

The debate on a sustainable future for Australia has focused enterprises on developing triple bottom line or sustainability reports. Enterprises now commonly provide reports to their stakeholders on sustainability. However it is argued in this paper that shortcomings in current reporting practices are limiting the measurement of sustainability. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the most commonly applied consistent framework for enterprises, recommends the application of indicators that consider the inter-relations between the economy, society and the environment. However, these recommendations are not generally being translated into practice by firms. The environmental aspects of enterprise sustainability reports tend to be privileged over the social and economic components. Indicators of the social and economic impact of an enterprise generally draw upon productivity and human relation measurements rather than measures directly relevant to the impact of enterprise actions on the community. To illustrate these arguments we offer a case study of the Australian Gas Light Company, (AGL), 2004 Sustainability Report, and a critique of the GRI. AGL is a large Australian energy company. We argue that inter-related indicators tend not to be considered within enterprise sustainability reports. It is argued that social and economic externalities of enterprises have an impact on surrounding communities and hence should be measured and reported in conjunction with environmental factors. Moreover, these reports should to be developed in a manner that enables the context of sustainability to be adequately explored

Evaluation of Select Publicly Available in Silico Methods for Predicting Functional Effects of Missense Mutations in the GALNS Gene

The ability to sequence patient DNA has led to an explosion in the reports of mutations for a number of diseases. Frequently, published reports include in silico predictions of the probability that the mutations are disease-associated. The question asked here is how well these in silico methods predict the effects of new mutations, i.e., mutations not included in the dataset(s) used for training and testing the in silico method. To address this question, we examined mutations associated, or potentially associated, with Morquio A (MPS IVA), a rare, autosomal recessive lysosomal storage disorder (LSD) caused by a deficiency of lysosomal enzyme N-acetylgalactosamine-6-sulfatase (GALNS). In the severe form of the disease, life expectancy is less than 30 years. More than 200 unique missense mutations have been identified in the GALNS gene, with effects ranging from no change in function (wild-type) to significant reduction in functional effect (severe forms of the disease). Using GALNS as the model gene, we evaluated the ability of select publicly available in silico methods to predict the functional effects of these mutations. Specifically, the predictions of GALNS mutations on enzyme activity were evaluated and compared to both published and unpublished Morquio A mutations. Functional effects for unpublished Morquio A mutations were determined by measuring the enzyme activity of cells transiently transfected with mutant gene cassettes. Although some of the in silico packages perform better than others, they may not be used either individually or in combination to predict with any level of certainty whether or not any particular mutation is deleterious. Our results strongly suggest that testing enzyme activity is still required to determine the functional impact of a specific mutation

De re interpretation in belief reports: An experimental investigation

Determiner phrases (DPs) under intensional operators give rise to multiple interpretations, known as the de re/de dicto ambiguity. Formal theoretical approaches to modeling this ambiguity must rely on nuanced semantic judgments, but inconsistent judgments in the literature suggest that informal judgment collection may be insufficient. In addition, little is known about how these ambiguities are resolved in context and how preferences between these readings vary by context and across individuals, etc. We reported three controlled experiments to systemize the truth-value judgment collection of de re/de dicto readings. While the de dicto readings were robustly accepted by nearly all English speakers, de re readings exhibited strongly bimodal judgments, suggesting an inherent disagreement among speakers. In addition, the acceptability of de re judgments was affected by the DP's internal structure as well as idiosyncratic scenarios. More broadly, our experimental results lend support to the practice of including quantitative data collection within semantics

NPI Intervention: Crosslinguistic Data

It has been claimed that negative polarity items (NPIs) such as “any” and “ever” are blocked in factive environments in Romance languages, despite being licensed in English. We test this claim in a judgment study in English, Italian, and French, comparing NPIs in factive and non-factive environments. We find that, consistent with previous claims, this effect seems to exist in Italian and not English, but that, against expectation, French does not pattern with either language

Focus on demonstratives: Experiments in English and Turkish

This paper deals with an unexpected contrast between demonstrative descriptions and definite descriptions on their anaphoric uses. If two (or more) discourse referents are introduced in the preceding sentence, it is perfectly natural to refer to one of them in the following sentence using a definite description. Use of demonstrative descriptions in the same context, however, is degraded, with existing accounts of anaphoric demonstratives and definites providing no explanation for this contrast. We present experimental evidence from two languages, one with definite determiners (English) and one without (Turkish), and show that the acceptability of demonstratives depends independently both on (i) whether one or two NPs are introduced in the initial sentence, and (ii) whether the follow-up sentence introduces a new situation or not. We propose a focus-driven information structural approach to demonstratives to account for this pattern. Following Dayal & Jiang (2021) (building on Schwarz 2009) in assuming that definite and demonstrative expressions in anaphoric contexts are similar in including an anaphoric index argument, we argue that demonstratives essentially differ in evoking focus alternatives on the index argument

Default biases in the interpretation of English negation, conjunction, and disjunction

Previous research has hypothesized default interpretive biases for three types of ambiguities with English logical words and, or, and not. First, disjunction (A or B) is hypothesized to be biased towards an exclusive interpretation in upward-entailing environments and an inclusive interpretation in downward-entailing environments (Levinson 2000, Chierchia 2004, Breheny et al. 2005). A negated disjunction (not A or B) is claimed to be biased towards a “neither-nor” interpretation (i.e. wide scope negation: ¬[A ∨ B]) and a negated conjunction is said to be biased towards an “either-not” interpretation (i.e. wide-scope negation: ¬[A ∧ B]) (Szabolcsi 2002, Szabolcsi & Haddican 2004). We tested these hypotheses within the same experimental paradigm with 149 English-speaking participants and found disjunction to be biased towards an inclusive interpretation across three different entailment environments: episodic declaratives, questions, and conditional antecedents. Our results also confirmed that English negated disjunction is biased towards a “neither-nor” (wide scope negation) interpretation but the results did not show an “either-not” bias (wide scope negation) for negated conjunction

Raman spectroscopic investigation of the murine oocyte

Over recent years, the application of assisted reproductive techniques in the treatment of infertility has increased exponentially, yet these methodologies still remain inherently inefficient. It has long been established that the single greatest obstacle to improving the success of these treatments is determining the quality of the oocytes used. However, currently the methods available for oocyte assessment are mainly qualitative, and suffer due to a lack of standardisation. As such, the efficiency of fertility treatments could benefit from the introduction of a rigorous quantitative measure of oocyte quality and maturation. The principal aim of this thesis was to determine the potential of Raman spectroscopy when applied to the field of oocyte biology. Consequently, this thesis addressed three main areas of investigation: I. the intra-oocyte biochemical variation; II. the biochemistry of oocyte maturation; and finally, III. the effect of environment on the mature oocyte in vivo and in vitro. I. To investigate the presence of intra-oocyte biochemical variation, oocytes from various stages of development were analysed using high resolution Raman mapping, in combination with univariate and multivariate analysis. Images revealed variation between the germinal vesicle and ooplasm in immature oocytes, as well as intra-ooplasmic variation in all oocytes. II. The spectral analysis of oocytes derived from pre-antral and in vitro cultured follicles revealed significant variation: It was found that Raman spectroscopy could successfully discriminate between immature and mature oocytes. III. Finally, the spectral analysis of oocytes derived from unstimulated and stimulated ovulation cycles, as well as those derived from in vitro follicle cultures, revealed that although biochemically similar, in vitro matured oocytes demonstrated reduced protein content. Furthermore, greater spectral variation was observed in superovulated oocytes, which was found to describe the corresponding morphological quality. In conclusion, this thesis has demonstrated the effective application of Raman spectroscopy to the study of fixed murine oocytes. Raman mapping experiments have demonstrated this technique for the visualisation of biochemical variation which exists within the oocyte. Furthermore, using Raman spectroscopy, the identification of the biochemical variation resulting from different maturation mechanisms has been achieved, as has the discrimination of immature and mature oocytes. These results indicate that Raman spectroscopy holds promise as a quantitative analysis method in the field of fertility treatment