Emotional stimuli (e.g. words, images) are often remembered better than neutral stimuli. However, little is known about how memory is affected by an environmentally induced emotional state (without any overtly emotional occurrences) – the focus of this study. Participants were randomly assigned to discovery (n = 305) and replication (n = 306) subsamples and viewed a desktop virtual environment before rating their emotions and completing objective (i.e. item, temporal-order, duration) and subjective (e.g. vividness, sensory detail, coherence) memory measures. In both (...) samples, a Partial Least Squares Correlation analysis showed that an emotional state characterised by high negative emotion (i.e. threat, fear, anxiety) and arousal was reliably associated with better memory in both objective (i.e. item) and subjective (i.e. vividness and sensory detail) domains. No reliable associations were observed for any temporal memory measures (objective or subjective). Thus, an environmentally induced state of negative emotion corresponds with enhanced memory for indices of episodic memory pertaining to “what” happened, but not necessarily “when” it happened. (shrink)

This study examines the roles of environmental strategy and accounting in corporate carbon performance, as measured by the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol. A novel interaction model is developed based on legitimacy theory and natural-resource dependence theory to capture the interaction between environmental strategy and accounting. An international sample of 3322 firms from 73 countries is used in the analysis, based on a panel data design for 17 years (2005–2022). The empirical findings reveal an overall reactive role of these environmental initiatives (...) in relation to carbon performance. The marginal effect analysis shows that environmental accounting favourably moderates the effect of environmental strategic functions on carbon performance, indicating that the former facilitates the translation of the latter into practice. Similarly, environmental strategic initiatives improve the impact of environmental accounting information on carbon performance. The main contribution of this study stems from methodologically demonstrating how the synergy between environmental strategic initiatives and environmental information mechanisms can translate into improved carbon performance. This finding has multiple societal, practical and research implications. The interaction effect evidence can be viewed as consistent with recent trends of integrated approaches to thinking and reporting, where interrelated phenomena are integrated into operational and reporting contexts to improve efficiency. This can be of interest to policymakers, investors, corporate managers and providers of assurance services related to carbon performance. (shrink)

This study provides novel evidence of the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on investment sensitivity to cash flows. We posit that CSR affects investment–cash flow sensitivity (ICFS) through information asymmetry and agency costs, commonly viewed as the two channels through which investment responds to the availability of internal cash flows. We find that CSR performance leads to a decrease in ICFS. We further find that ICFS decreases (increases) when CSR strengths (concerns) increase. Finally, we find that the effect of (...) CSR on ICFS is driven by the areas Community, Diversity, and Human Rights. In sum, the findings of this study stress the relevance of CSR—in particular, of CSR activities that extend beyond compliance behavior and reflect what is desired by society—in reducing market frictions and improving firms’ access to financial capital. (shrink)

The novel coronavirus disease is regarded as one of the most imminent disease outbreaks which threaten public health on various levels worldwide. Because of the unpredictable outbreak nature and the virus’s pandemic intensity, people are experiencing depression, anxiety, and other strain reactions. The response to prevent and control the new coronavirus pneumonia has reached a crucial point. Therefore, it is essential—for safety and prevention purposes—to promptly predict and forecast the virus outbreak in the course of this troublesome time to have (...) control over its mortality. Recently, deep learning models are playing essential roles in handling time-series data in different applications. This paper presents a comparative study of two deep learning methods to forecast the confirmed cases and death cases of COVID-19. Long short-term memory and gated recurrent unit have been applied on time-series data in three countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, from 1/5/2020 to 6/12/2020. The results show that LSTM has achieved the best performance in confirmed cases in the three countries, and GRU has achieved the best performance in death cases in Egypt and Kuwait. (shrink)

Twitter integrates with streaming data technologies and machine learning to add new value to healthcare. This paper presented a real-time system to predict breast cancer based on streaming patient’s health data from Twitter. The proposed system consists of two major components: developing an offline building model and an online prediction pipeline. For the first component, we made a correlation between the features to determine the correlation between features and reduce the number of features from the Breast Cancer Wisconsin Diagnostic dataset. (...) Two feature selection algorithms are recursive feature elimination and univariate feature selection algorithms which are applied to features after correlation to select the essential features. Four decision trees, logistic regression, support vector machine, and random forest classifier have been used on features after correlation and feature selection. Also, hyperparameter tuning and cross-validation have been applied with machine learning to optimize models and enhance accuracy. Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, and Twitter Streaming API are used to develop the second component. The best model with the highest accuracy obtained from the first component predicts breast cancer in real time from tweets’ streaming. The results showed that the best model is the random forest classifier which achieved the best accuracy. (shrink)

This paper seeks to discover whether companies that adopt a stakeholder approach, and thereby demonstrate a wider remit of corporate responsibility, provide inferior returns to those that embrace the shareholder value approach. To classify approaches, mission statements were analysed, the final sample comprising 32 shareholder oriented companies and 48 stakeholder oriented companies. To assess performance both accounting–based and market–based measures were used. A number of moderating variables were taken into account: systematic (beta) risk, gearing (long–term debt to total long–term finance), (...) tax ratios, and firm size. ANOVA and Kruskall–Wallis tests revealed that mission orientation did not affect performance, whether in terms of stock returns or excess returns. Neither were accounting returns on equity different overall, although shareholder oriented companies experienced wider variations in this measure. A number of multiple regressions were also performed. However, the mission dummy was not found to be a significant variable. (shrink)

This paper seeks to discover whether companies that adopt a stakeholder approach, and thereby demonstrate a wider remit of corporate responsibility, provide inferior returns to those that embrace the shareholder value approach. To classify approaches, mission statements were analysed, the final sample comprising 32 shareholder oriented companies and 48 stakeholder oriented companies. To assess performance both accounting–based and market–based measures were used. A number of moderating variables were taken into account: systematic (beta) risk, gearing (long–term debt to total long–term finance), (...) tax ratios, and firm size. ANOVA and Kruskall–Wallis tests revealed that mission orientation did not affect performance, whether in terms of stock returns or excess returns. Neither were accounting returns on equity different overall, although shareholder oriented companies experienced wider variations in this measure. A number of multiple regressions were also performed. However, the mission dummy was not found to be a significant variable. (shrink)

Spam electronic mails (emails) refer to harmful and unwanted commercial emails sent to corporate bodies or individuals to cause harm. Even though such mails are often used for advertising services and products, they sometimes contain links to malware or phishing hosting websites through which private information can be stolen. This study shows how the adaptive intelligent learning approach, based on the visual anti-spam model for multi-natural language, can be used to detect abnormal situations effectively. The application of this approach is (...) for spam filtering. With adaptive intelligent learning, high performance is achieved alongside a low false detection rate. There are three main phases through which the approach functions intelligently to ascertain if an email is legitimate based on the knowledge that has been gathered previously during the course of training. The proposed approach includes two models to identify the phishing emails. The first model has proposed to identify the type of the language. New trainable model based on Naive Bayes classifier has also been proposed. The proposed model is trained on three types of languages (Arabic, English and Chinese) and the trained model has used to identify the language type and use the label for the next model. The second model has been built by using two classes (phishing and normal email for each language) as a training data. The second trained model (Naive Bayes classifier) has been applied to identify the phishing emails as a final decision for the proposed approach. The proposed strategy is implemented using the Java environments and JADE agent platform. The testing of the performance of the AIA learning model involved the use of a dataset that is made up of 2,000 emails, and the results proved the efficiency of the model in accurately detecting and filtering a wide range of spam emails. The results of our study suggest that the Naive Bayes classifier performed ideally when tested on a database that has the biggest estimate (having a general accuracy of 98.4%, false positive rate of 0.08%, and false negative rate of 2.90%). This indicates that our Naive Bayes classifier algorithm will work viably on the off chance, connected to a real-world database, which is more common but not the largest. (shrink)

For a sample comprising 36,105 U.S. firm-year observations from 1985 to 2008, we find that firms located in more religious counties enjoy cheaper equity financing costs. This result is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests, including alternative assumptions and model specifications, additional controls for noise in analyst forecasts, and various approaches to addressing endogeneity. In another set of tests, we find that the equity pricing role that religion plays comes predominantly from Mainline Protestants. We also document that the effect (...) of religiosity on firms’ cost of equity capital is larger for firms (periods) lacking alternative monitoring (regulation) mechanisms as measured by lower institutional ownership (the pre-SOX era), implying that religion plays a corporate governance role. Finally, we find that the importance of religion to equity pricing is concentrated in firms that suffer lower visibility, which tend to be more sensitive to local social and economic factors. By examining the links between religiosity and valuation at the firm level, we provide strong, robust evidence supporting the perspective that religion facilitates economic development. (shrink)

An improved variant of the Jaya optimization algorithm, called Jaya2, is proposed to enhance the performance of the original Jaya sacrificing its algorithmic design. The proposed approach arranges the solutions in a ring topology to reduce the likelihood of premature convergence. In addition, the population size reduction is used to automatically adjust the population size during the optimization process. Moreover, the translation dependency problem of the original Jaya is discussed, and an alternative solution update operation is proposed. To test Jaya2, (...) we compare it with nine different optimization methods on the CEC 2020 benchmark functions and the CEC 2011 real-world optimization problems. The results show that Jaya2 is highly competitive on the tested problems where it generally outperforms most approaches. Having an easy-to-implement approach with little parameter tuning is highly desirable since researchers from different disciplines with basic programming skills can use it to solve their optimization problems. (shrink)

We examine how corporate environmental responsibility affects the cost of equity capital for manufacturing firms in 30 countries. Using several approaches to estimate firms’ ex ante equity financing costs, we find in regressions that control for firm-level characteristics as well as industry, year, and country effects that the cost of equity capital is lower when firms have higher CER. This finding is robust to addressing endogeneity through instrumental variables, to using alternative specifications and proxies for the cost of equity capital, (...) and to accounting for noise in analyst forecasts. We conclude that investment in CER reduces firms’ equity financing costs worldwide. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that collectivism breeds corruption in bank lending. This finding, together with the stickiness of culture, poses a direct challenge to economic growth in collectivist societies. In this paper, we address this grim outlook by examining the types of firms that are susceptible to the detrimental effect of collectivism on lending integrity and the formal institutions that can help alleviate such effect. We find that the adverse effect of collectivism on bank corruption is more severe in small and (...) medium-sized firms, privately owned firms, and non-exporting firms, while it is considerably weaker in countries with more effective private monitoring, a higher fraction of foreign-owned banks, a more competitive banking sector, better information sharing, and stronger legal and political institutions. Our findings are robust to using alternative measures of collectivism and alternative dependent variables. These results highlight how firm-level characteristics and formal institutions interact with collectivism in affecting firms’ access to bank credit. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

This study provides evidence on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and firms’ credit ratings. We find that credit rating agencies tend to award relatively high ratings to firms with good social performance. This pattern is robust to controlling for key firm characteristics as well as endogeneity between CSR and credit ratings. We also find that CSR strengths and concerns influence credit ratings and that the individual components of CSR that relate to primary stakeholder management matter most in explaining firms’ (...) creditworthiness. Overall, our results suggest that CSR performance conveys important non-financial information that rating agencies are likely to use in their evaluation of firms’ creditworthiness, and that CSR investments—particularly those that extend beyond compliance behavior to reflect what is desired by society—can lead to lower financing costs resulting from higher credit ratings. (shrink)

Using a large sample of 3,040 U.S. firms and 16,606 firm-year observations over the 1991–2010 period, we find strong evidence that firm internationalization is positively related to the firm’s corporate social responsibility rating. This finding persists when we use alternative estimation methods, samples, and proxies for internationalization and when we address endogeneity concerns. We also provide evidence that the positive relation between internationalization and CSR rating holds for a large sample of firms from 44 countries. Finally, we offer novel evidence (...) that firms with extensive foreign subsidiaries in countries with well-functioning political and legal institutions have better CSR ratings. Our findings shed light on the role of internationalization in influencing multinational firms’ CSR activities in the U.S. and around the world. (shrink)

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors-in-chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialog around the theme Bringing Excitement to Empirical Business Ethics Research (inspired by the title of the commentary by Babalola and van Gils). These editors, considering the diversity of empirical approaches in business ethics, envisage a future in which quantitative (...) business ethics research is more bold and innovative, as well as reflexive about its techniques, and dialog between quantitative and qualitative research nourishes the enrichment of both. In their commentary, Babalola and van Gils argue that leadership research has stagnated with the use of too narrow a range of perspectives and methods and too many overlapping concepts. They propose that novel insights could be achieved by investigating the lived experience of leadership (through interviews, document analysis, archival data); by focusing on topics of concern to society; by employing different personal, philosophical, or cultural perspectives; and by turning the lens on the heroic leader (through “dark-side” and follower studies). Taking a provocative stance, Bal and Garcia-Lorenzo argue that we need radical voices in current times to enable a better understanding of the psychology underlying ethical transformations. Psychology can support business ethics by not shying away from grander ideas, going beyond the margins of “unethical behaviors harming the organization” and expanding the range of lenses used to studying behavior in context. In the arena of finance and business ethics, Guedhami, Liang, and Shailer emphasize novel data sets and innovative methods. Significantly, they stress that an understanding the intersection of finance and ethics is central to business ethics; financial equality and inclusion are persistent socio-economic and political concerns that are not always framed as ethics issues, yet relevant business policies and practices manifest ethical values. Finally, Charles Cho offers his opinion on the blurry line between the “ethical” versus “social” or “critical” aspects of accounting papers. The Journal of Business Ethics provides fertile ground for innovative, even radical, approaches to quantitative methods (see Zyphur and Pierides in J Bus Ethics 143(1):1–16, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3549-8, 2017), as part of a broad goal of ethically reflecting on empirical research. (shrink)

Practical deliberation often involves conditional judgements about what will (likely) happen if certain alternatives are pursued. It is widely assumed that the conditionals useful in deliberation are counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals. Against this, I argue that the conditionals of deliberation are indicatives. Key to the argument is an account of the relation between 'straightforward' future-directed conditionals like ' If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby' and * "w e r e ' ' e d F (...) D C s like ' If the house were not to be painted, it would soon look quite shabby': an account on which both of these types of FDCs are grouped with the indicatives for semantic treatment and on which, while conditionals of both types are properly used in means/ends deliberations, those of the ' were'ed-up variety are especially well suited for that purpose. (shrink)

'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is a survey that attempts to describe a hypothetic philosophy--the avant-garde pseudo-science imagined by Alfred Jarry. 'Pataphysics is a supplement to metaphysics, accenting it, then replacing it, in order to create a philosophic alternative, whose discipline can study cases, not of conception, but of exception: variance , alliance , and deviance . 'Pataphysics synthesizes the romantic schism between a literal, scientized discourse and a figural, poeticized discourse, and my thesis suggests that this revision (...) of the signifier "science" by 'pataphysics is symptomatic of a postmodern transition in science from a paradigm of absolutism to a paralogy of relativism. Structured as a descriptive explication, which emphasizes a theoretical perspective, this survey is divided into five chapters: the first chapter recounts the history of the conflict between science and poetry ; the second chapter examines the avant-garde pseudo-science of 'pataphysics itself ; and finally, the last three chapters discuss the influence of 'pataphysics upon the poetics of its subsequent successors . While my thesis focuses upon theories of textual poetics rather than poetry itself , my thesis does nevertheless strive to be as conceptually encyclopedic as 'pataphysics itself: instead of normalizing 'pataphysics within one theoretical perspective, this survey alludes intermittently to 'pataphysical enterprises that constitute exceptions to such a genealogy of Jarryites. What is at stake is the status of poetry in a world of science. How might poetry reclaim its own viable truth? How might science benefit from its own poetic irony? For the postmodern condition, such questions have already opened up a novel space for speculative imagination; hence, this survey presents itself as a kind of primer for a future of possible research. (shrink)

In this short but meaty book, Peter Unger questions the objective answers that have been given to central problems in philosophy. As Unger hypothesizes, many of these problems are unanswerable, including the problems of knowledge and scepticism, the problems of free will, and problems of causation and explanation. In each case, he argues, we arrive at one answer only relative to an assumption about the meaning of key terms, terms like "know" and like "cause," even while we arrive at an (...) opposite answer relative to quite different assumptions, but equally arbitrary assumptions, about what the key terms mean. (shrink)

This study provides novel evidence of the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on investment sensitivity to cash flows. We posit that CSR affects investment–cash flow sensitivity (ICFS) through information asymmetry and agency costs, commonly viewed as the two channels through which investment responds to the availability of internal cash flows. We find that CSR performance leads to a decrease in ICFS. We further find that ICFS decreases (increases) when CSR strengths (concerns) increase. Finally, we find that the effect of (...) CSR on ICFS is driven by the areas Community, Diversity, and Human Rights. In sum, the findings of this study stress the relevance of CSR—in particular, of CSR activities that extend beyond compliance behavior and reflect what is desired by society—in reducing market frictions and improving firms’ access to financial capital. (shrink)

This article explores the enduring mysteries of consciousness and the afterlife, two enigmatic topics that have fascinated humanity for ages. Despite extensive scientific efforts, the existence of an afterlife remains unproven, and understanding consciousness remains a significant challenge. The research introduces innovative hypotheses through simple thought experiments with empirical evidence and robust theoretical foundations. It delves into the complexities of consciousness, its relationship with the brain, and the need for interdisciplinary approaches encompassing physics, psychology, and philosophy. Boldly contemplating the probability (...) of a continuous consciousness after death, the study argues that existing evidence strongly supports this idea. Beyond theoretical implications, it envisions practical outcomes, suggesting that insights into these mysteries could enhance human well-being and contribute to a more harmonious world. In summary, this article embarks on a quest to shed light on age-old questions about consciousness and the afterlife. Through fresh methodologies, it aims to provide new perspectives that could reshape our understanding of existence and inspire intellectuals to positive individual and societal advancements. -/- . (shrink)

Neoplatonic allegorical interpretation expounds how literary texts present philosophical ideas in an enigmatic and coded form, offering an alternative path to the divine truths. The Neoplatonist Porphyry’s _On the Cave of the Nymphs_ is one of the most significant allegorical interpretation handed down to us from Antiquity. This monograph, exclusively dedicated to the analysis of _On the Cave of Nymphs_, demonstrates that Porphyry interprets Homer’s verse from Odyssey 13.102-112 to convey his philosophical thoughts, particularly on the material world, relationship between (...) soul and body and the salvation of the soul through the doctrines of Plato and Plotinus. The Homeric cave of the nymphs with two gates is a station where the souls descend into genesis and ascend to the intelligible realm. Porphyry associates Odysseus’ long wanderings with the journey of the soul and its salvation from the irrational to rational through escape from all toils of the material world. (shrink)

are ambiguous. In the mouth of someone who cannot remember whether it was Michael, or rather someone else, who was top scorer, can express the epistemic possibility that Michael led the league in scoring. But from someone who knows that Michael did not even play last season, but is wondering what would have happened if he had, means something quite different. Now where it has this quite different meaning, may still turn out to be the expression of some epistemic possibility. (...) Perhaps where does not express the epistemic possibility of ‘Michael led the league in scoring’, it expresses the epistemic possibility of ‘Michael would have led the league in scoring’. Analysis of this ‘would have’ statement, together with an exploration of the suspicion that the ‘might have’ statement is ambiguous between these two epistemic possibilities, will have to await another occasion. The important point for present purposes is that is ambiguous between an expression of the epistemic possibility of ‘Michael led the league in scoring’ and some quite different reading. (shrink)

What are the criteria for reasonable clinical judgements? The reasonableness of macro-level decision-making has been much discussed, but little attention has been paid to the reasonableness of applying guidelines generated at a macro-level to individual cases. This paper considers a framework for reasonable clinical decision-making that will capture cases where relevant guidelines cannot reasonably be followed. There are three main sections. (1) Individual claims on healthcare from the point of view of concerns about equity are analysed. (2) The demands of (...) responsibility and equity on professional clinical performance are discussed, and how the combination of these demands emerges into seven requirements that constitute the framework is explored. Since this framework is developed to assist in reasonable clinical decision-making, practical implications of all these requirements are also suggested. (3) Challenges concerning the framework are discussed. First, a crucial presumption that the framework relies upon is considered—namely, clinicians’ willingness to justify their decisions as requested. Then how public deliberation may influence clinical decision-making is discussed. Next is a consideration of how clinicians’ need to have confidence in their own judgements in order to perform in a manner worthy of trust would be compatible with adherence to the framework supported by public deliberation. It is concluded that fair distribution in the interplay between macro- and micro-level considerations can be secured by legitimising procedures on each level, by ensuring well-organised and continuing public debate and by basing individual clinical judgements upon well-justified and principled normative bases. (shrink)

It is only when mixing two or more pure substances along a reversible path that the entropy of the mixing can be made physically manifest. It is not, in this case, a mere mathematical artifact. This mixing requires a process of successive stages. In any finite number of stages, the external manifestation of the entropy change, as a definite and measurable quantity of heat, isa fully continuous function of the relevant variables. It is only at an infinite and unattainable limit (...) thata non-uniform convergence occurs. And this occurs when considered in terms of the number of stages together with a distinguishability parameter appropriate to the particular device which is used to achieve reversibility. These considerations, which are of technological interest to chemical engineers, resolve a paradox derived in chemical theory called Gibbs'' Paradox. (shrink)