BUILDING THE NEW DIMENSION OF STRATEGIC CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: ENVIRONMENTAL LEADERSHIP

The paper aims to emphasize the role of environmental leadership as main option for combining the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy with the business goals and targets in order to satisfy both shareholders’ interests and social interests, in terms of profit, productivity and social awareness. Under these circumstances, the paper describes the way environmental leadership is being built and introduced in the organizational culture of a company, regardless of its size, becoming a very efficient and effective philosophy of managing people and achieving performance targets. Nowadays.environmental leadership, corporate social responsibility, strategy, business performance

Romanian Management Status and Performance in the European Environment

At all times whatsoever the evaluation of the quality and efficacy of a given field or process may be performed in an absolute manner – by using certain indicators actually measuring the elements – or in a relative manner, by comparison with the quality and efficacy of said field or process as run within other systems. Anytime a crises occurs – and this is stated by the quasi – totality of management specialists – the quality of the management implemented in the previous period has been “in pain”. A good management counters the occurrence of such crises or – when the crisis causes are somewhere outside the area where the management can directly intervene – it diminish any such crises.European management, Romanian management, economic crisis, management efficacy, performance.

Romania Between Istanbul and Ankara: The Beginning of The Alliance in The First Decade of The Kemalist Republic

The premise that designed the Kemalist regional policy, has considered the reconciliation and cooperation between the South-Eastern Europe. The reasons, highly pragmatical, have contributed significantly to shaping an important regional power in the late interwar period, that promoted the concept formulated by Ataturk – “Turkey is an element of force and international peace.” After a mandatory review of the past and prospects of bilateral relations, a concept has been theorized in Ankara and Bucharest on a long term. The Romanians’ decisions have outlined some of the coordinates from the Romanian –Turkish relations from 1927-1928 that would promote bilateral and regional interests ensuring flexibility. Pictures are clearly marked in the two capitals, even before the Balkan Entente (in 1934) built a strategic axis that should have been very active, functional and pragmatic. The concepts of peace and neutrality, promoted by Bucharest and Ankara would remain foreign policy dogmas until the general European War, in 1941, even with the risk of cancelling the alliances concluded during the two interwar periods

A remark on the Discrete Fourier Transform statistical test

The study of randomness has always been a topic of significant relevance, and the importance of this topic in cryptography is undeniable. In this paper, we are going to provide a short introduction regarding pseudo-random number generators, their applications in cryptography and an analysis of the Discrete Fourier Transform statistical test. Our contribution is that of compiling the results of multiple runs on several popular pseudo-random number generators, and a Python implementation for computing the probability of a type II error. We intend to underline the weak points of the Discrete Fourier Transform test by showcasing results on large amounts of data, and showcase how testing bigger sequences of bits can help reduce the probability of type II errors

The challenges of proving solvency while preserving privacy.

The increasing popularity of blockchain technology has affected the way we view many fields related to computer science, with E-commerce being no exception. The distributed nature and transparency of blockchain-based systems is one of its main perks, but it also raises some issues when it comes to privacy. Zero-knowledge proofs are very powerful building blocks when it comes to building privacy-preserving protocols, so, naturally, they have attracted a lot of attention in the last years. Following the recent collapse of the very popular crypto exchange FTX, we believe it is important to analyse how such events can be prevented in the future. This paper aims to highlight solutions that use zero-knowledge to prove solvency

Expert System for Nutrition Care Process of Older Adults

This paper presents an expert system for a nutrition care process tailored for the specific needs of elders. Dietary knowledge is defined by nutritionists and encoded as Nutrition Care Process Ontology, and then used as underlining base and standardized model for the nutrition care planning. An inference engine is developed on top of the ontology, providing semantic reasoning infrastructure and mechanisms for evaluating the rules defined for assessing short and long term elders’ self-feeding behaviours, to identify unhealthy dietary patterns and detect the early instauration of malnutrition. Our expert system provides personalized intervention plans covering nutrition education, diet prescription and food ordering adapted to the older adult’s specific nutritional needs, health conditions and food preferences. In-lab evaluation results are presented proving the usefulness and quality of the expert system as well as the computational efficiency, coupling and cohesion of the defined ontology

Dried figs as sources of essential microelements

The paper aims to determine the concentration of some microelements essential in cardiovascular sistem health from dried figs and evaluate their mineral intake. The concentrations of Fe, Mn, Zn and Cu were determined from samples of dried figs from the local trade, imported from different countries in the Mediterranean areas. The results obtained, by flame atomic absorption spectrometry (FAAS) method, show that these fruits contain important quantities of essential microelements, depending on fig providers: 22.1 - 32.5 mg/kg Fe, 4.14 - 12.73 mg/kg Mn, 4.53 - 10.20 mg/kg Zn and 3.95 - 9.16 mg/kg Cu. The analytical results obtained allowed the evaluation of the mineral intake of these fruits for men and women aged between 19 - 50 years. Thus, a consumption of 40 g of dried figs covers a large part of the need for microelements, as follows: 13.99% Fe, 13.39% Mn, 2.83% Zn and 28.07% Cu - for men and 6.22% Fe, 17.11% Mn, 3.89% Zn and 28.07% Cu - for men. These results show that the dried figs analyzed could be considered as sources with some essential microelements, especially in terms of Cu, Mn and Fe

Association study between idiopathic male infertility and the MTHFD1 G1958A SNP

Couple infertility is a global health problem and according to the World Health Organization approximately one couple in seven is affected by fertility or subfertility problems. Male infertility in humans has been acknowledged as the cause of couple’s inability to have children in 20-50% of total cases and although there have been much progress in understanding its etiology many of the case are still considered to be idiopathic, arising from an unknown cause. The MTHFD1 G1958A SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) by altering the structure of the encoded enzyme, a trifunctional enzyme which catalyzes the interconversion of 1-carbon derivatives of tetrahydrofolate could lead to an abnormal folate status, hyperhomocysteinemia and altered DNA synthesis. The folate metabolic pathway is essential for DNA methylation, DNA synthesis, as well as methylation of various other substrates, thus a disruption to this cellular pathway may lead to major pathologic consequences. By means of molecular genetic techniques, respectively PCR-RFLP (Polymerase Chain Reaction - Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism) we investigated the possible role of MTHFD1 G1958A SNP in the etiology of male infertility by comparing the distribution of this SNP in two groups: a group of 66 men with idiopathic azoospermia or severe oligozoospermia and a control group of 67 healthy men which have at least one child. Statistical analysis was performed by means of chi-square and Fisher’s exact tests. The genotype distribution in the two groups was in agreement with the Hardy-Weinberg Law. We obtained the following genotype stratification: 18 (27.3%) G/G, 27 (40.9%) G/A, 21(31.8%) A/A in the cases group compared to 19(28.4%) G/G, 36(53.7%) G/A, 12(17.9%) A/A in the control group; with a p value of 0.23 (odds ratio: 1.85, Cl 95%: 0.71-4.82) when comparing the mutant homozygous status (A/A) to the normal homozygous status (G/G). Because of the profound social, familial, medical and emotional outcomes that male infertility generates a greater emphasis should be made in understanding its etiology. After performing the first study on a Romanian population, due to the similar distribution of the studied polymorphism in the two groups we can state the MTHFD1 G1958A SNP is not a risk factor for idiopathic male infertility in our study group