Search results for "Accounting"

Fuel for commercial politics: the nucleus of early commercial proliferation of atomic energy in three acts

2020

Historical research into the nuclear industry has focussed upon military and commercial aspects of the technology whilst ignoring fuel. This article discusses nuclear fuel, the resource at the centre of the industry and the role superpower politics played in its supply. Starting with the context of superpower competition, we examine the spread of nuclear technology from its beginnings in post-war Britain via West Germany in the 1950s to Finland in the 1960s and 1970s. We demonstrate that each country had varied interests affecting the choice of nuclear fuel for early energy projects; British fuel choices were constrained by its weapons programme and Germany needed legitimacy in the face of …

Corporate Social Responsibility: A Survey of the Italian SA8000 Certified Companies

2005

Today’s society requires companies to act more and more effectively for the general good, by respecting human rights and the environment. Innovative and enlightened companies try to meet this need through the adoption of several initiatives. Accordingly, the International Standard Organisation is now working on attempts to unify these initiatives and to formulate an internationally recognised standard, providing guidance to companies on social responsibility. Currently the SA8000 international standard is the most often used tool – based on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) philosophy – which guarantees the respect of fundamental workers’ rights. Since 2003, Italy holds the world record…

Disclosure Alignment and Transparency Signaling in CSR Reports

2014

This chapter investigates companies' disclosure alignment and transparency signaling within the 2011 CSR annual reports of 36 U.S. firms in the Global Forbes 2000. DICTION 6.0 was used for the text analysis. The study found that CSR reports are fairly similar to corporate financial annual reports but can be classified more accurately as a hybrid discourse with normative elements matching genres emanating from science, business, government, religion, and social movements. Despite the relatively short time that CSR reports have been in existence, this chapter provides evidence that CSR reporting has become institutionalized quickly. The measures of transparency signaling and disclosure alignm…

Towards Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Industry-Near Environments

2019

Deep reinforcement learning has over the past few years shown great potential in learning near-optimal control in complex simulated environments with little visible information. Rainbow (Q-Learning) and PPO (Policy Optimisation) have shown outstanding performance in a variety of tasks, including Atari 2600, MuJoCo, and Roboschool test suite. Although these algorithms are fundamentally different, both suffer from high variance, low sample efficiency, and hyperparameter sensitivity that, in practice, make these algorithms a no-go for critical operations in the industry.

Biophysical parameter estimation with adaptive Gaussian Processes

2009

We evaluate Gaussian Processes (GPs) for the estimation of biophysical parameters from acquired multispectral data. The standard GP formulation is used, and all hyperparameters (kernel parameters and noise variance) are optimized by maximizing the marginal likelihood. This gives rise to a fully-adaptive GP to data characteristics, both in terms of signal and noise properties. The good numerical results in the estimation of oceanic chlorophyll concentration and leaf membrane state confirm GPs as adequate, alternative non-parametric methods for biophysical parameter estimation. GPs are also analyzed by scrutinizing the predictive variance, the estimated noise variance, and the relevance of ea…

The Impact of Macroeconomic Variables on Corporate Performance - What Shareholders Ought to Know?

2002

Increased integration and growing macroeconomic fluctuations require more attention to be paid to the link between the "noise" that these fluctuations represent and the company's own development. For many reasons management must weed out the effects of the "noise" so as to obtain a clear picture of the long-term sustainable profits, and thus a picture of how the company's intrinsic competitiveness is fostered. An understanding of the effects of the fluctuations also provides the basis for risk assessment. How far, then, should this "new" view of corporate performance be extended to outsider shareholders? Current reporting practice does not provide these shareholders with an adequate idea of…

The effect of IFRS's and Russian GAAP's revenue recognition differences on accumulation and timely allocation of profit tax in Russia : case Andritz …

2011

Motivational Impact of Environmental Management on the Environmental Awareness in a Workplace

2021

PURPOSE: The aim of this article is to determine the level of motivational impact of environmental management (EM) on the environmental awareness of employees.

Pattern Identification by Factor Analysis for Regions with Similar Economic Activity Based on Mobile Communication Data

2018

The study analyses the regions’ economic activity in Latvia using Latvia Mobile Telephone (LMT) mobile communication data from July 2015 to January 2017. The call activity and a number of unique phone users by 119 Latvia counties and biggest cities were analysed in two steps: at first method of principal components was used to explain the variance in the data and then exploratory factor analysis was applied. Three factors were identified that describe 87.5% of the total variance of the aggregated daily data. The first factor is related more to the regions with higher economic activity, the second and third factors capture, respectively, lowers call activity during weekdays and are related t…

Company in a Global Environment and Intangible Assets

2017

The article discusses the nature and material scope of intangible assets. The author presented that these are key factors in the process of doing business in the global market. The paper also presents possibilities of their identification in the accounting system. To solve the presented problem, the author used methods of analysis of literature, content of legal regulations, and a method of comparison and inference.