Analyzing a sample of 13,917 US firm–years from 1991 to 2006, we find that more innovative firms demonstrate high corporate social responsibility performance subsequent to a successful innovation. These high-CSR innovative firms enjoy significantly higher valuation post-innovation. These findings imply that firms with demonstrated potential growth opportunities, as evident from the number of registered patents and their citations, benefit by strategically investing more in CSR activities; that is, CSR investment entails ‘doing well by [strategically] doing good.’.

Rice is the most important crop species on earth, providing staple food for 70% of the world's human population. Over the past four decades, successes in classical breeding, fertilization, pest control, irrigation and expansion of arable land have massively increased global rice production, enabling crop scientists and farmers to stave off anticipated famines. If current projections for human population growth are correct, however, present rice yields will be insufficient within a few years. Rice yields will have to increase by an (...) estimated 60% in the next 30 years, or global food security will be in danger. The classical methods of previous green revolutions alone will probably not be able to meet this challenge, without being coupled to recombinant DNA technology. Here, we focus on the promise of these modern technologies in the area of nitrogen acquisition in rice, recognizing that nitrogen deficiency compromises the realization of rice yield potential in the field more than any other single factor. We summarize rice‐specific advances in four key areas of research: (1) nitrogen fixation, (2) primary nitrogen acquisition, (3) manipulations of internal nitrogen metabolism, and (4) interactions between nitrogen and photosynthesis. We develop a model for future plant breeding possibilities, pointing out the importance of coming to terms with the complex interactions among the physiological components under manipulation, in the context of ensuring proper targeting of intellectual and financial resources in this crucial area of research. BioEssays 26:683–692, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This article constitutes excerpts of a videotaped discussion hosted by the New England Journal of Medicine on January 14, 2008, concerning a range of topics on lethal injection prompted by the United States Supreme Court's January 7 oral arguments in Baze v. Rees. Dr. Atul Gawande moderated the roundtable that included two anesthesiologists - Dr. Robert Truog and Dr. David Waisel - as well as law professor Deborah Denno. The discussion focused on the drugs used in lethal injection executions, (...) whether physicians should participate, potential alternatives, and some of the legal parameters of Baze. (shrink)

“It is this distancing of personal relationships, combined with their replacement by written contractual terms and conditions, which make the discussion of ethics within a corporate institutionalised context highly limited and problematic.’ The challenge is to find means of personalising modern corporations so as to encourage ethical behaviour. Atul K. Shah PhD ACA gained his doctorate from the London School of Economics and is Lecturer in the Department of Accounting and Financial Management, at the University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, (...) Colchester CO4 3SQ; e‐mail [email protected]. This article was conceived while he was Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Business, University of Maryland, USA. The author wishes to thank Dan Ostas, Lee Preston and Stephen Loeb for helpful comments on earlier drafts. (shrink)

This article takes the linguistic space of North India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tries to see how a nationalistic linguistic ideology that was shaping up at that time, creating Hindi and Urdu linguistic communities, used gender as a tool to portray and assert a masculinist vision of language and nation. It involved not just censoring certain representations of women and their cultural spaces, but also using the issue of ‘vulgar’ representations as a premise to marginalize certain languages (...) and their literature. The article looks at the colonial ideology that worked as an enforcer for the nationalists to work towards achieving what they felt as a sanitized and moral form of literature and culture. The linguistic ideology that accompanied these revisions was of projecting Hindi (Khari Boli) as a national language while limiting spaces of other languages, such as Braj, Urdu and Bhojpuri, in the region, by criticizing either their use of sexual imagery or by stereotyping them in a gendered way. This article investigates the arguments of nationalist writers and highlights their masculinist and patriarchal ideas in their bid for the new national language. (shrink)

We examine whether social capital mitigates managerial opportunism around share repurchase announcements. We find that firms headquartered in high social capital states are associated with: (i) higher repurchase completion rates, and more so in environments where governance is weak and the potential for misleading investors is high, (ii) a smaller likelihood of information manipulation such as revealing bad news before repurchases, and (iii) lower completion rates when shares are less undervalued. By documenting that firms’ external social environments help curb managerial (...) opportunism, our study suggests that the location of headquarters facilitates trustworthiness and affects ethical considerations in corporate announcements. (shrink)

The folklore studies scholar, such as Dorson, was emphatic about the distinction between folklore and ‘fake lore’, one being authentic and the other as invented by the popular industry; however, he paradoxically maintained interest in the contemporariness of folklore. This was a paradox since the contemporariness of folklore is largely, and usually, due to intersections of folk with popular and political. Nevertheless, the emphasis on contemporariness was a harbinger of discussion on the potential dynamics of folklore, and everything buried therein, (...) including value orientation. This essay is guided by the observations emerging from folklore studies, socio-cultural anthropology and performance studies in order to get into a specific case of Bihu, a folk performance inclusive of songs, dance, attires and instruments inter alia in Assam, in the northeast of India. The curious case of Bihu in flux divulges dynamics of value orientation and intersections of identity politics, in the wake of the contemporariness of folklore. (shrink)

What is remarkably unique of the popular cinema in the region of South Asia? How does it lead beyond the vexed notions of the contemporary milieu, namely, hybrid local? How does it transcend the idea of nationally restricted local too? Looking through eclectic motley of popular cinema in the region, this article seeks to unravel such questions with reflexive propositions. It paves the way to comprehend cinematic identity of the region with the adjective of ‘melodrama’, as perceived through the local (...) sociocultural component. It is with the sweep of melodrama, arguably, that cinema of South Asia transcends the notions attached with the category of ‘local’. In this backdrop, this article moots a probing question: What is local in the regional cinemas? Does local mean merely a vexed category in contemporary context of transnational flow? Or there is more to the category of local, beyond the existing formulations? With these questions, this article seeks to participate in the available discourse showing the regional cinema underpinned by the essentially dynamic nature and scope of the local. (shrink)

The highly contagious 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has not only impacted health systems, economies, and governments, it has also rapidly grown into a global health crisis, which is now threatening the lives of millions of people globally. While, on one hand, medical institutions are critically attempting to find a cure, on the other hand, governments have introduced striking measures and policies to curtail the rapid spread of the disease. Although COVID-19 has achieved pandemic status and is predominantly viewed (...) as a biomedical issue, it is argued that it should also be treated as a psychological crisis. This paper also reviews the literature to examine and comment on the detrimental effects of isolation, which has been enforced as one of the primary preventative measures to manage the spread of COVID-19. This paper further outlines key recommendations that should be addressed across different levels to buffer against the known adverse effects of isolation, which is especially relevant for the current COVID-19 situation, where a large proportion of the global population is isolated, confined, and/or quarantined. (shrink)

“It is this distancing of personal relationships, combined with their replacement by written contractual terms and conditions, which make the discussion of ethics within a corporate institutionalised context highly limited and problematic.’ The challenge is to find means of personalising modern corporations so as to encourage ethical behaviour. Atul K. Shah PhD ACA gained his doctorate from the London School of Economics and is Lecturer in the Department of Accounting and Financial Management, at the University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, (...) Colchester CO4 3SQ; e‐mail [email protected]. This article was conceived while he was Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Business, University of Maryland, USA. The author wishes to thank Dan Ostas, Lee Preston and Stephen Loeb for helpful comments on earlier drafts. (shrink)

From the financial year 2014-15, the Indian corporate sector was made to comply with a newly introduced Sect. 135 (5) by the Companies Act of 2013. The rule required select companies to spend 2% of their average net profits on CSR initiatives. This paper tries to find if the companies have complied with the provision based on data for six financial years starting 2014-15. CSR performance of the top thirty companies forming part of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) Sensex was (...) evaluated and a CSR Spend-to-Obligation (CSR SO) Index was calculated comparing the actual spend vis-à-vis the obligatory requirement. A quantitative and a qualitative methodology were used for the analysis. The quantitative method involved computation of the CSR SO index at various levels. The “quality” of the CSR expenditure was also assessed by speaking to twelve experts from the Corporate to find out if the expenditure was in the right direction. The results show that the aggregate average six-year CSR SO index for the 30 Sensex companies is 0.98, suggesting that companies comply with the requirements of mandatory CSR. Moreover, the experts confirm that CSR spending is in the right spirit and direction. It certainly has a long-term orientation and qualifies as quality spending. A novel CSR-SO index is presented that compares CSR performance by comparing actual CSR spending with obligatory requirements. This index can act as a barometer for CSR performance and facilitate objective evaluation. Additionally, the qualitative assessment of CSR spending shows a holistic approach to evaluating CSR. (shrink)

Contributed articles chiefly on the life and work of Govinda Chandra Dev, philosopher from Bangladesh; festscrift volume of lectures; includes articles on Bengali culture.

The shortest definition of a number by a first order formula with one free variable, where the notion of a formula defining a number extends a notion used by Boolos in a proof of the Incompleteness Theorem, is shown to be non computable. This is followed by an examination of the complexity of sets associated with this function.

The complexity of aII 4 set of natural numbers is encoded into a linear order to show that the finite condensation of a recursive linear order can beII 2–II 1. A priority argument establishes the same result, and is extended to a complete classification of finite condensations iterated finitely many times.

The properties of antisymmetry and linearity are easily seen to be sufficient for a recursively enumerable binary relation to be recursively isomorphic to a recursive relation. Removing either condition allows for the existence of a structure where no recursive isomorph exists, and natural examples of such structures are surveyed.

As development of the speech recognition system entirely depends upon the spoken language used for its development, and the very fact that speech technology is highly language dependent and reverse engineering is not possible, there is an utmost need to develop such systems for Indian languages. In this paper we present the implementation of a time delay neural network system (TDNN) in a modular fashion by exploiting the hidden structure of previously phonetic subcategory network for recognition of Hindi consonants. For (...) the present study we have selected all the Hindi phonemes for srecognition. A vocabulary of 207 Hindi words was designed for the task-specific environment and used as a database. For the recognition of phoneme, a three-layered network was constructed and the network was trained using the back propagation learning algorithm. Experiments were conducted to categorize the Hindi voiced, unvoiced stops, semi vowels, vowels, nasals and fricatives. A close observation of confusion matrix of Hindi stops revealed maximum confusion of retroflex stops with their non-retroflex counterparts. (shrink)

A perusal of the criminal laws and personal laws reveal that laws adopt a protectionist and paternalistic approach for empowering and providing autonomy to women. This paper initiates a discussion on issues at the core of gender justice. It questions the man-woman dichotomy and asserts that if men and women are fundamentally different as categories, then a single yardstick for measuring justice is wrong. And, if they are not class wise different, and evince only personal traits, then the whole idea (...) of gender justice based on the dichotomy is flawed. This paper further argues that social conditioning restricts the possibility of autonomous decisions. In conclusion, it is argued that laws need to create just social conditions and institutions that guarantee freedom from socially imposed disabilities, and subsequently, strengthen autonomy in decision making. (shrink)

The term “Anthropocene” is frequently used to refer to the present planetary epoch, characterized by a geological signature of human activities, which have led to global ecological crises. This paper probes at what it means to be human on earth now, using healing as a concept to orient humanity in relation to other species, and particularly medicinal plants. Donna Haraway’s concept of the “Chthulucene” is used as an alternate lens to the Anthropocene, which highlights the inextricable linkages between humans and (...) other-than-human species. Healing can be viewed as a type of embodied orientation or engagement with the world, which has the potential to reach across boundaries of the skin, blur distinctions between self and other, and allow for both transpersonal and trans-species reconciliation. I focus my attention on Indigenous Shipibo healing rituals, and Shipibo concepts of healing that integrate humans within the ecosystem, and traverse species boundaries through communication with and embodiment of plant spirits. These healing rituals offer ways of coming into being within an ecology of selves—both internal and external, human and non-human—through listening and lending voice. I explore the potential for healing and ritual to work as a form of porous resistance through the internal blurring of binaries and hierarchical structures. (shrink)

The prime objective of this paper is to conduct phoneme categorization experiments for Indian languages. In this direction a major effort has been made to categorize Hindi phonemes using a time delay neural network (TDNN), and compare the recognition scores with other languages. A total of six neural nets aimed at the major coarse of phonetic classes in Hindi were trained. Evaluation of each net on 350 training tokens and 40 test tokens revealed a 99% recognition rate for vowel classes, (...) 87% for unvoiced stops, 82% for voiced stops, 94.7% for semi vowels, 98.1% for nasals and 96.4% for fricatives. A new feature vector normalisation technique has been proposed to improve the recognition scores. (shrink)

Phenomenology, as I understand it, by G. C. Deb.--Phenomenology: education and evaluation, by Kazi A. Kadir.--Phenomenology, by B. H. Siddiqi.--Phenomenology in perspective, by James L. Kinder.

Although compassion in healthcare differs in important ways from compassion in everyday life, it provides a key, applied microcosm in which the science of compassion can be applied. Compassion is among the most important virtues in medicine, expected from medical professionals and anticipated by patients. Yet, despite evidence of its centrality to effective clinical care, research has focused on compassion fatigue or barriers to compassion and neglected to study the fact that most healthcare professionals maintain compassion for their patients. In (...) contributing to this understudied area, the present report provides an exploratory investigation into how healthcare professionals report trying to maintain compassion. In the study, 151 professionals were asked questions about how they maintained compassion for their patients. Text responses were coded, with a complex mixture of internal vs. external, self vs. patient, and immediate vs. general strategies being reported. Exploratory analyses revealed reliable individual differences in the tendency to report strategies of particular types but no consistent age-related differences between older and younger practitioners emerged. Overall, these data suggest that while a range of compassion-maintaining strategies were reported, strategies were typically concentrated in particular areas and most professionals seek to maintain care using internal strategies. A preliminary typology of compassion maintaining strategies is proposed, study limitations and future directions are discussed, and implications for the study of how compassion is maintained are considered. (shrink)

Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, Experience, Caste and Everyday Social. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019, 257 pp., ₹1,100. ISBN: 9780199496051.