648 research outputs found
Mandatory CSR expenditure and stock market liquidity
Full text linkWe investigate the nexus between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firms' stock market liquidity. Using actual firm-level CSR expenditure data and a quasi-natural experiment setup of a mandated CSR regulation in India, we find that firms complying with the mandate experience significantly higher stock market liquidity, relative to non-CSR firms in the post-CSR mandate period. This effect seems to be more pronounced among CSR firms not affiliated to business groups, with concentrated promoter ownership, with low institutional ownership, with foreign sales and having operations in multiple locations. Further, we find that firms spending more on education and healthcare projects as part of their mandatory CSR engagement have higher stock market liquidity. Our results are in line with the conjecture that mandatory CSR regulation could lead to reduced information asymmetry and improved social and reputational capital, and thus improve the stock market liquidity of CSR firms. Finally, we show that mandated CSR firms, having superior stock market liquidity, obtain higher market valuations in the long run
Mandatory corporate social responsibility and foreign institutional investor preferences
Full text linkThis study examines whether the heterogeneity among foreign institutional investors (FIIs) matters when investing in socially responsible investee firms. Exploiting a mandated corporate social responsibility (CSR) regulation in India and using manually collected CSR expenditure data, the results of a quasi-natural experiment confirm that firms that comply with the CSR mandate attract greater investment from FIIs. This positive nexus holds for both existing and new FIIs. However, the heterogeneity of FIIs plays a significant moderating role because FIIs from civil law origin countries and those considered to be independent and long-term investors invest more in mandated CSR firms
QSAR Prediction of Aquatic Toxicity of Triazoles and Benzo-Triazoles
No full textTriazoles and benzo-triazoles (TAZ/BTAZ) are potentially hazardous chemicals that adversely affect humans and other non-target species, and are on the list of substances of very high concern (SVHC) in the European regulation of chemicals REACH.
TAZ/BTAZ are synthetic molecules used in various industrial processes (to obtain pharmaceuticals and agricultural products), and have a wide application as anti-corrosives, cleansing agents for textiles, flame retardants, photographic emulsions, etc. Furthermore they are abundantly used as components of liquid deicing agents for aircraft and airport runways. Because of their wide use they have been found distributed throughout the environment, mainly in water compartments. The amount of experimental data available for these molecules is insufficient for a comprehensive characterization of their environmental and toxicological profile and they have been included among the four classes of chemicals studied in the European FP7 Project CADASTER (CAse studies on the Development and Application of in Silico Techniques for Environmental hazard and Risk assessment).
In this study we investigated and modeled by QSAR different endpoints of interest to define the potential aquatic toxicological profile of hundreds of TAZ/BTAZ, and the possible correlations among different end-points toxicity. The studied end-points were: LC50 in fish (Onchorhynchus Mykiss), EC50 in Daphnia Magna, and EC50 in algae (Pseudokirchneriella subcapitata). Different theoretical molecular descriptors were calculated by different proprietary and freely available online software (DRAGON, Hyperchem, and the CADASTER online platform for the calculation of molecular descriptors – www.cadaster.eu). The endpoints of interest were modeled by multiple linear regression (MLR) and the Genetic Algorithm was used to select the relevant molecular descriptors by the MLR-Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method. The best models were validated for their robustness using leave-one-out, bootstrap and the scrambling of the responses. External validation was also performed demonstrating the high predictive ability of the models. The reliability of the predictions was always checked in order to verify the chemical applicability domain of the models to new chemicals
Electronic Supplementary Information for the manuscript entitled "<b>Ahead by a Century:</b><b> </b><b>Discovery of Laves Phases Assisted by Machine Learning</b><b>".</b>
No full textThe files contain the inputs, outputs, and the the Jupyter notebooks used for the manuscript details given below.Ahead by a Century: Discovery of Laves Phases Assisted by Machine LearningRitobroto Sikdar a, Nilanjan Roy b, Balaranjan Selvaratnam a, Vidyanshu Mishra a, Dundappa Mumbaraddi a, Amit Mondal b, Krishnendu Buxi b, Partha Pratim Jana b,*, Arthur Mar a,*a Department of Chemistry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G2G2, Canadab Department of Chemistry, IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, 721302, IndiaCorresponding authors.* E-mail: [email protected] (P. P. Jana).* E-mail: [email protected] (A. Mar).</p
Globalisation: Good, Bad, and the Ugly; casualties of Indian Liberalisation - a Postcolonial Perspective
No full textThe paper discusses the views of three economists, Amartya Sen, Pranab Barhdan and Partha Dasgupta on the liberalization of the Indian economy, which has brought severe changes since the 1990s. The paper argues that despite this liberalist move there are multiple problems and injustices across the society remain unanswered, particularly in the areas of education, literacy, health and medical care, gender inequities, unemployment, farmers' suicide, and other societal challenges (including the entrenched caste hierarchy). What counts as the index of growth is a matter of some debate among the economists being discussed, but the real .concern is the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. Case studies are entertained to explicate the ramifications of globalisation and its impact on Indian economy
Comparative Evaluation of Awareness among Armed Forces Personnel in Respect of Special Provisions and Benefits Applicable to Children with Disabilities
No full textABSTRACT
Introduction
Mental retardation ranges from the borderline to mild to very severe. Fortunately, the majority (80%) are in the mild range that endows the individual the capacity to lead a simple, yet fruitful life once provided with a means that are conducive to their learning styles. Children with a more severe disorder can achieve remarkably if their unique talents are recognized and nurtured to the fullest.
Aim
We conducted a study among armed forces personnel in a large city in Maharashtra. This community has many peculiar and special features. They are from different ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds and live together as a cohesive unit. The general socioeconomic and educational awareness toward facilities and concessions available for the differently abled children is assumed to be high.
Materials and methods
Detailed interaction with 27 parents having special children was conducted and further data were collected. Each parent was individually interviewed. This group was named parents having differently abled children (PHDAC). Group discussions consisting of 15 families in one group that had no special children in the family were conducted. A total of such eight groups (120 families) were, thus, interviewed. This group was named parents having normal children (PHNC). Each family was verbally questioned regarding the facilities available to special children thoroughly and responses were recorded.
Results and discussion
Overall, it was found that among the PHDAC, the awareness was much better, but some were circumspect of the facilities provided for their wards by the land of the law. Most of them felt that the benefits coming to them were due to their service with the Army. The PHNC were not aware of most of the provisions. However, during the interactions with the researcher, they evinced interest in the matter and were happy to know that special provisions are existent in various Government sectors for special children.
How to cite this article
Roy C, Roy P. Comparative Evaluation of Awareness among Armed Forces Personnel in Respect of Special Provisions and Benefits Applicable to Children with Disabilities. Indian J Phy Med Rehab 2017;28(2):64-68.
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Darwin-E: an environment for imposing regularity on object-oriented software
No full textRegularity in this dissertation means conformity to unifying principles -- principles that affect every part of a software system, or, some significant and well-defined subset of its parts. Complexity of a large system can be reduced by incorporating some meaningful regularity into it. Regularity can be used to explicate structural aspects that were invisible otherwise. Furthermore, various thumb-rules of software construction, certain architectural patterns, and constraints underlying various design models can also be expressed as regularity.
An explicit and formal statement of the desired regularities therefore, can serve as a guideline to construct a well-designed software that is easier to understand and maintain. Strict imposition of these regularities on the other hand leads to a controlled evolution of the software, with a guaranteed conformance to its desired model and underlying guidelines.
Object-orientation is the technology of choice today for building large systems. We considered software development in Eiffel, one of the advanced object-oriented languages and showed that there are many cases where regularities would increase the comprehensibility, mangeability and reliability of Eiffel systems pal92 . However, neither the language nor its host environments has the infrastructure for formulating and imposing such regularities.
The paradigm of Law-Governed Architecture (LGA) provides the perspective needed for realizing regularities: regularities can be formulated and enforced as the "law" under LGA. We developed a prototype environment named Darwin-E that supports LGA for Eiffel. The novelty of the Darwin-E environment is its ability to perform compile-time enforcement of a wide range of useful laws, thus imposing desired regularities upon object-oriented (Eiffel) systems being developed in it. Several other aspects of a software project that benefit from LGA, such as controlling developer activities, configuration management and monitoring, are also handled in Darwin-E.
The main contribution of this dissertation is that it demonstrates the feasibility of using regularities as an integral part of object-oriented software construction. Besides, being an environment whose principal focus is the software product, Darwin-E complements the approaches taken by process-centered environments.Technical report LCSR-TR-27
Assessment of tropical cyclone amphan affected inundation areas using sentinel-1 satellite data
No full textTropical cyclones as natural disturbances, influence ecosystem structure, function and dynamics at the global scale. This study assesses the inundation due to the super cyclone Amphan in coastal districts of eastern India by leveraging the computational power of Google Earth Engine (GEE) and the availability of high resolution Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. A cloud-based image processing framework was developed and implemented in GEE for classification using Random Forest algorithm. The inundation areas due to storm surge owing to cyclone Amphan, were mapped and further categorised to different land use and land cover classes based on an existing land cover map. Sentinel-1 images were useful in post-cyclone studies for the change detection analysis due to its higher temporal resolution and cloud penetration ability. The study found that the majority of agricultural and agricultural fallow lands were inundated in the coastal districts. The availability of open-source cloud-based data processing platforms provides cost effective way to rapidly gather accurate geospatial information. Such information could be useful for emergency response planning and post-event disaster management including relief, rescue and rehabilitation measures; and crop yield loss assessment. Cyclone and Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) change can have significant impacts on the human population and if both coexist, the consequences for people and the surrounding environment may be severe
Establishing Regularities in Object-Oriented (Eiffel) Systems
No full textRegularities, or the conformity to unifying principles, are essential to the comprehensibility, manageability and reliability of large software systems, and should, therefore, be considered an important element of their architecture. But the inherent globality of regularities makes them very hard to implement in traditional methods. We have argued elsewhere that this difficulty can be alleviated by means of law-governed architecture (LGA), under which system designers can establish the desired regularity (of a certain kind) simply by declaring it formally and explicitly as the law of the system. Once such a law-governed regularity is declared, it is enforced by the environment in which the system is developed. This paper, which is based on a recently developed environment called Darwin-E, describes the application of LGA to object-oriented systems written in the Eiffel language. We introduce here the formalism for specifying laws under Darwin-E and give a sample of regularities that can be efficiently established by such laws. In particular, we demonstrate how one can establish a kernelized architecture suitable for the construction of critical embedded software, such as the software embedded in an intensive care unit.Technical report lcsr-TR-22
Silymarin nanoparticle prevents paracetamol-induced hepatotoxicity
Full text linkSuvadra Das, Partha Roy, Runa Ghosh Auddy, Arup MukherjeeDepartment of Chemical Technology, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, West Bengal, IndiaAbstract: Silymarin (Sm) is a polyphenolic component extracted from Silybum marianum. It is an antioxidant, traditionally used as an immunostimulant, hepatoprotectant, and dietary supplement. Relatively recently, Sm has proved to be a valuable chemopreventive and a useful antineoplastic agent. Medical success for Sm is, however, constrained by very low aqueous solubility and associated biopharmaceutical limitations. Sm flavonolignans are also susceptible to ion-catalyzed degradation in the gut. Proven antihepatotoxic activity of Sm cannot therefore be fully exploited in acute chemical poisoning conditions like that in paracetamol overdose. Moreover, a synchronous delivery that is required for hepatic regeneration is difficult to achieve by itself. This work is meant to circumvent the inherent limitations of Sm through the use of nanotechnology. Sm nanoparticles (Smnps) were prepared by nanoprecipitation in polyvinyl alcohol stabilized Eudragit RS100&reg; polymer (Rohm Pharma GmbH, Darmstadt, Germany). Process parameter optimization provided 67.39% entrapment efficiency and a Gaussian particle distribution of average size 120.37 nm. Sm release from the nanoparticles was considerably sustained for all formulations. Smnps were strongly protective against hepatic damage when tested in a paracetamol overdose hepatotoxicity model. Nanoparticles recorded no animal death even when administered after an established paracetamol-induced hepatic necrosis. Preventing progress of paracetamol hepatic damage was traced for an efficient glutathione regeneration to a level of 11.3 &micro;mol/g in hepatic tissue due to Smnps.Keywords: silymarin, paracetamol, nanoparticle, glutathione, mouse hepatotoxicit
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