The stock market’s reaction to information disclosure of environmental violation events (EVEs) is investigated multi-dimensionally for Chinese listed companies, including variables such as pollution types, information disclosure sources, information disclosure levels, modernization levels of the region where the company locates, ultimate ownership of the company, and ownership held by the largest shareholder. Using the method of event study, daily abnormal return (AR) and accumulative abnormal return (CAR) are calculated under different event window for examining the extent to which the stock (...) market responds to the EVEs. Furthermore, statistical significance of the difference in stock market reaction is compared between event firms with different characteristics. The relationship between CAR and its impact factors is examined by multivariate analysis. The findings reveal that the average reduction in market value is estimated to be much lower than the estimated changes in market value for similar events in other countries, demonstrating that the negative environmental events of Chinese listed companies currently have weak impact on the stock market. (shrink)

Based on the institutional theory, this article attempts to examine two consecutive questions regarding the impact of various factors on corporate decision in environmental information disclosure (EID): (1) whether or not to disclose; and (2) the level of disclosure. The relevance of these factors is empirically tested using data collected from publicly listed manufacturing companies from 2006 to 2008 in China. Some interesting findings appear. We find that firms that are state-owned, those that operate in environmentally sensitive industries, those having (...) more industrial peers engaged in EID, and those with better reputation are more likely to disclose environmental information. When it comes to the content of EID, variables that attempt to capture external institutional pressures exhibit either no or weak explanatory power. Only the variable of organizational image and reputation is demonstrated to have a significant impact on both the act and the content of EID. This study provides a snapshot of the dialogues between constituencies in the organizational field and EID development. (shrink)

We have empirically examined the relationship between top executives’ turnover and the corporate environmental responsibility by identifying the influence of ten specific turnover reasons resulting in the chairman’s departure and two important types of chairman’s succession. Using a sample of 782 manufacturing listed companies across 3 years in China, we find that the corporate environmental responsibility is negatively associated with the involuntary and negative turnover (i.e., dismissal, health and death, and forced resignation) and positively associated with improving corporate governance, and (...) not associated with the normal turnover (i.e., retirement and contract expiration) and the types of chairman’s succession (i.e., independence, and internal or external promotion). Our study significantly contributes to research in environmental disclosure by revealing the relationship between chairman’s turnover and the corporate environmental responsibility. A feasible way is suggested to regulators and other stakeholders in monitoring or assessing the possible abnormality of environmental responsibility when firms experience involuntary and negative chairman’s turnover in the emerging economies. (shrink)

Class line is a fundamental line of the Party. To be the Communist Party is to make revolution, eradicate the bourgeoisie and promote the proletariat, stress class status, and implement the proletarian class line!

The DAMA project is an observatory for rare processes and it is operative deep underground at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory of the I.N.F.N. In particular, the DAMA/LIBRA (Large sodium Iodide Bulk for RAre processes) set-up consists of highly radiopure NaI(Tl) detectors for a total sensitive exposed mass of ≃250 kg. Recent results, obtained by this set-up by exploiting the model independent annual modulation signature of Dark Matter (DM) particles, have confirmed and improved those obtained by the former DAMA/NaI experiment. (...) A model independent evidence for the presence of Dark Matter particles in the galactic halo is cumulatively obtained at 8.2 σ C.L. No systematics or side reactions able to account for the measured modulation amplitude and to contemporaneously satisfy all the many specific requirements of the signature have been found or suggested by anyone over more than a decade. An example of one of the many possible model dependent corollary quests for the candidate particles and for the related astrophysical, nuclear and particle physics scenarios is presented considering the whole cumulative exposure. Future perspectives are shortly addressed. (shrink)

Our model integrates the nativist assumption of prespecified neural structures underpinning basic emotions with the constructionist view that emotions are assembled from psychological constituents. From a dynamic systems perspective, the nervous system self-organizes in different ways at different time scales, in relation to functions served by emotions. At the evolutionary scale, brain parts and their connections are specified by selective pressures. At the scale of development, connectivity is revised through synaptic shaping. At the scale of real time, temporary networks of (...) synchronized activity mediate responses to situations. To the degree that humans share common emotional functions, neural structuration is similar across scales, giving rise to “basic” emotions. However, unique developmental and situational factors select for neural configurations mediating emotional variants. (shrink)

Searches for non-paulian nuclear processes, i.e. processes normally forbidden by the Pauli–Exclusion–Principle (PEP) with highly radiopure NaI(Tl) scintillators allow the test of this fundamental principle with high sensitivity. Status and perspectives are addressed.

A diagonal version of the strong reflection principle is introduced, along with fragments of this principle associated with arbitrary forcing classes. The relationships between the resulting principles and related principles, such as the corresponding forcing axioms and the corresponding fragments of the strong reflection principle, are analyzed, and consequences are presented. Some of these consequences are “exact” versions of diagonal stationary reflection principles of sets of ordinals. We also separate some of these diagonal strong reflection principles from related axioms.

A total of 1918 loci, detected by the hybridization of 938 expressed sequence tag unigenes from 26 Triticeae cDNA libraries, were mapped to wheat homoeologous group 4 chromosomes using a set of deletion, ditelosomic, and nulli-tetrasomic lines. The 1918 EST loci were not distributed uniformly among the three group 4 chromosomes; 41, 28, and 31% mapped to chromosomes 4A, 4B, and 4D, respectively. This pattern is in contrast to the cumulative results of EST mapping in all homoeologous groups, as reported (...) elsewhere, that found the highest proportion of loci mapped to the B genome. Sixty-five percent of these 1918 loci mapped to the long arms of homoeologous group 4 chromosomes, while 35% mapped to the short arms. The distal regions of chromosome arms showed higher numbers of loci than the proximal regions, with the exception of 4DL. This study confirmed the complex structure of chromosome 4A that contains two reciprocal translocations and two inversions, previously identified. An additional inversion in the centromeric region of 4A was revealed. A consensus map for homoeologous group 4 was developed from 119 ESTs unique to group 4. Forty-nine percent of these ESTs were found to be homoologous to sequences on rice chromosome 3, 12% had matches with sequences on other rice chromosomes, and 39% had no matches with rice sequences at all. Limited homology was found between wheat ESTs on homoeologous group 4 and the Arabidopsis genome. Forty-two percent of the homoeologous group 4 ESTs could be classified into functional categories on the basis of blastX searches against all protein databases. (shrink)

Automated classification of legal documents has been the subject of extensive research in recent years. However, this is still a challenging task for long documents, since it is difficult for a model to identify the most relevant information for classification. In this paper, we propose a two-stage supervised learning approach for the classification of petitions, a type of legal document that requests a court order. The proposed approach is based on a word-level encoder–decoder Seq2Seq deep neural network, such as a (...) Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) or a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, and a document-level Support Vector Machine classifier. To address the challenges posed by the lengthy legal documents, the approach introduces a human-in-the-loop approach, whose task is to localize and tag relevant segments of text in the word-level training part, which dramatically reduces the dimension of the document classifier input vector. We performed experiments to validate our approach using a real-world dataset comprised of 270 intermediate petitions, which were carefully annotated by specialists from the 15th civil unit of the State of Alagoas, Brazil. Our results revealed that both BiLSTM and BERT-Convolutional Neural Networks variants achieved an accuracy of up to 95.49%, and also outperformed baseline classifiers based on the Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency test vectorizer. The proposed approach is currently being utilized to automate the aforementioned justice unit, thereby increasing its efficiency in handling repetitive tasks. (shrink)

A hybrid preference framework is proposed for strategic conflict analysis to integrate preference strength and preference uncertainty into the paradigm of the graph model for conflict resolution (GMCR) under multiple decision makers. This structure offers decision makers a more flexible mechanism for preference expression, which can include strong or mild preference of one state or scenario over another, as well as equal preference. In addition, preference between two states can be uncertain. The result is a preference framework that is more (...) general than existing models which consider preference strength and preference uncertainty separately. Within the hybrid preference structure, four kinds of stability are defined as solution concepts and a post-stability analysis, called status quo analysis, which can be used to track the evolution of a given conflict. Algorithms are provided for implementing the key inputs of stability analysis and status quo analysis within the extended preference structure. The new stability concepts under the hybrid preference structure can be used to model complex strategic conflicts arising in practical applications, and can provide new insights for the conflicts. The method is illustrated using the conflict over proposed bulk water exports from Lake Gisborne in Newfoundland, Canada. (shrink)