Corporate governance of the environment.

The global pursuit of a more sustainable future cannot be achieved without the active engagement of the business community. The challenge for business has been to strategically engage with and embed environmental responsibility within their wider corporate governance to create effective corporate governance of the environment. The assumption would appear to be, that we have already witnessed the construction of such governance, delivered through the attainment of a paradigmatic shift in corporate engagement with environmental issues. This thesis questions the validity of such an assumption, exploring what the reality of current corporate governance of the environment is, and the drivers which have shaped it. Through a dual strategy of web-based and questionnaire research, analysis is made of the FTSE 100 and 250 Index companies, the nature of their individual and aggregate strategising and attenuating corporate governance of the environment. The findings illustrate that far from having achieved a new paradigm of corporate environmental engagement, embodied through effective corporate governance of the environment, there exists significant levels of non- engagement within UK business. Quantitatively and qualitatively, the nature of current corporate governance of the environment, indicates that stakeholder expectations of a new era of informed corporate environmental responsibility have not yet been met there exists significant scope for developing current corporate governance in this context. Crucially, the findings also suggest for such companies, that in the absence of mandatory drivers for change, such a shift will not be forthcoming. This has important implications for the current, largely self-regulatory, policy approach prevailing in the UK

Alien Registration- Purvis, Alice B. (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/21555/thumbnail.jp

Design guidelines for assessing and controlling spacecraft charging effects

The need for uniform criteria, or guidelines, to be used in all phases of spacecraft design is discussed. Guidelines were developed for the control of absolute and differential charging of spacecraft surfaces by the lower energy space charged particle environment. Interior charging due to higher energy particles is not considered. A guide to good design practices for assessing and controlling charging effects is presented. Uniform design practices for all space vehicles are outlined

Estimation and Optimal Configurations for Localization Using Cooperative UAVs

The time-difference of arrival techniques are adapted to locate networked enemy radars using a cooperative team of unmanned aerial vehicles. The team is engaged in deceiving the radars, which limits where they can fly and requires accurate radar positions to be known. Two time-differences of radar pulse arrivals at two vehicle pairs are used to localize one of the radars. An explicit solution for the radar position in polar coordinates is developed. The solution is first used for position estimation given "noisy" measurements, which shows that the vehicle trajectories significantly affect estimation accuracy. Analyzing the explicit solution leads to The Angle Rule, which gives the optimal vehicle configuration for the angle estimate. Analyzing the Fisher Information Matrix leads to The Coordinate Rule, which gives a different optitmal configuration for the position estimate. A linearized time-varying model is also formulated and an Extended Kalman Filter applied. This estimation scheme is compared with the earlier one, with the second showing overall improvement in reducing the variance of the estimate

A Professional Development Program for Science Adjunct Faculty: The Mentoring-Learning Community (MLC)

Institutions of higher education have become increasingly dependent on adjunct faculty. These faculty members are often unfamiliar with current teaching strategies emphasizing an active learning approach. To support science adjunct faculty in learning about active learning, a professional development program was designed and implemented by the authors of this study, the Mentoring-Learning Community. The Mentoring-Learning Community program design was informed by literature regarding the use of professional development programs that focused on adjunct faculty. To determine the impact of this program, participants in the Mentoring-Learning Community were observed and interviewed over one semester. Mentoring-Learning Community participants transformed through all three Transformative Learning Theory dimensions, felt more empowered to utilize active learning approaches in their classrooms, and modified some aspects of their instruction

Knowledge Acquisition by Networks of Interacting Agents in the Presence of Observation Errors

In this work we investigate knowledge acquisition as performed by multiple agents interacting as they infer, under the presence of observation errors, respective models of a complex system. We focus the specific case in which, at each time step, each agent takes into account its current observation as well as the average of the models of its neighbors. The agents are connected by a network of interaction of Erd\H{o}s-Renyi or Barabasi-Albert type. First we investigate situations in which one of the agents has a different probability of observation error (higher or lower). It is shown that the influence of this special agent over the quality of the models inferred by the rest of the network can be substantial, varying linearly with the respective degree of the agent with different estimation error. In case the degree of this agent is taken as a respective fitness parameter, the effect of the different estimation error is even more pronounced, becoming superlinear. To complement our analysis, we provide the analytical solution of the overall behavior of the system. We also investigate the knowledge acquisition dynamic when the agents are grouped into communities. We verify that the inclusion of edges between agents (within a community) having higher probability of observation error promotes the loss of quality in the estimation of the agents in the other communities.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures. A working manuscrip

The Impact of Emergent Control Systems on the Video Game Industry

Video Games as an entertainment genre have been around for about thirty five years. The first thirty were dominated by relatively simple control devices - joysticks and D-Pads, as well as sporadic use of light guns and foot pad technology. We are entering an era where control will move beyond these simple implementations. Rather than being bound to the fingers and feet, full body movement is becoming ever more prevalent. While the aforementioned use of the fingers and feet isn't likely to fade out completely, the ways in which they manipulate the controllers will. Instead of dance pads alone, we will have pedals; instead of games being designed to fit the controllers, the controllers will be designed to fit the games, as we see in titles such as Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution. New technologies and styles of gaming are drawing more and more people to the hobby. The question remains, then: what impact will this new degree of interaction have on the finer aspects of gaming, such as system usability, market trends, and user well being, in both the short and long term? This paper seeks to examine the impact of motion-based control systems on the video game industry. We discuss the issues of usability, marketability, health and well-being. In addition, a pilot study was undertaken to evaluate the correlation between motion-based control systems and user fatigue. Motion capture data from a small number of participants was gathered while they play a title for the Nintendo Wii. Pre- and Post-Test questionnaires were administered, and the data was compiled and examined