Environmental incidents in a developing country and corporate environmental disclosures : a study of a multinational gas company

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the environmental disclosure initiatives of Niko Resources Ltd – a Canada-based multinational oil and gas company – following the two major environmental blowouts at a gas field in Bangladesh in 2005. As part of the examination, the authors particularly focus on whether Niko’s disclosure strategy was associated with public concern pertaining to the blowouts.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors reviewed news articles about Niko’s environmental incidents in Bangladesh and Niko’s communication media, including annual reports, press releases and stand-alone social responsibility report over the period 2004-2007, to understand whether news media attention as proxy for public concern has an impact on Niko’s disclosure practices in relation to the affected local community in Bangladesh.
Findings – The findings show that Niko did not provide any non-financial environmental information within its annual reports and press releases as a part of its responsibility to the local community which was affected by the blowouts, but it did produce a stand-alone report to address the issue. However, financial environmental disclosures, such as the environmental contingent liability disclosure, were adequately provided through annual reports to meet the regulatory requirements concerning environmental persecutions. The findings also suggest that Niko’s non-financial disclosure within a stand-alone report was associated with the public pressures as measured by negative media coverage towards the Niko blowouts.
Research limitations/implications – This paper concludes that the motive for Niko’s non-financial environmental disclosure, via a stand-alone report, reflected survival considerations:
the company’s reaction did not suggest any real attempt to hold broader accountability for its activities in a developing country.
Originality/value – This is the first known paper that investigates a multinational company’s disclosure behavior in relation to environmental incidents which occurred in a local community.

Electrochemical properties and applications of ionic liquids

This book presents the latest research in electrochemical properties and applications of ionic liquids. While there is no universally agreed upon definition, an ionic liquid may be conveniently described as a compound composed entirely of ions that is a liquid at temperatures less than 100 °C. However, this is an arbitrary definition employed to distinguish ionic liquids from classically well-known molten salts. This book addresses a comprehensive overview of the area, because it is obvious that ionic liquids have the ability to offer many advantages, but also some disadvantages, over traditional molecular solvent (electrolyte) media in the field of electrochemistry.

Detecting unknown anomalous program behavior using API system calls

This paper presents the detection techniques of anomalous programs based on the analysis of their system call traces. We collect the API calls for the tested executable programs from Microsoft detour system and extract the features for our classification task using the previously established n-gram technique. We propose three different feature extraction approaches in this paper. These are frequency-based, time-based and a hybrid approach which actually combines the first two approaches. We use the well-known classifier algorithms in our experiments using WEKA interface to classify the malicious programs from the benign programs. Our empirical evidence demonstrates that the proposed feature extraction approaches can detect malicious programs over 88% which is quite promising for the contemporary similar research.

Service quality assessment in provision of library services

Libraries are dynamic organization providing dynamic services to their patrons. However, advances in IT and networking have created a serious competition to libraries from many information service provisioning agents. The purpose of this study is to understand the issue relevant to service quality assessment in libraries and subsequently develop a conceptual model of aligning library quality of service assessment for effective reporting of library value and performance to stakeholders. In this paper, we will focus on the provision of library services and the nature of the relationship and interactions between various components of library services.

Human rights performance reporting : a study of corporations within Australian financial sector

This paper investigates the human rights performance reporting practices of the top 50 Australian financial service companies listed in the Australian Stock Exchange. All corporate reporting media, including annual reports, Social Responsibility Reports (CSR) and company websites, were reviewed to document their disclosure practices for the current period (2009/2010). In considering a number of international voluntary guidelines on human rights, a content analysis instrument containing 80 specific human rights themes, under 10 general categories, was developed to examine corporate reporting media. The results remain intensely unimpressive. The number of companies that disclosed human rights items is extremely low; the majority of the items were not disclosed by any of the companies under investigation. However, compared to CSR reports and company websites, annual reports were the preferable media used to disclose human rights issues. The result indicates how ineffective the voluntary global guidelines are in ensuring that Australian financial corporations report on their human rights performances.

Polymorphic malware detection using Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model

Binary signatures have been widely used to detect malicious software on the current Internet. However, this approach is unable to achieve the accurate identification of polymorphic malware variants, which can be easily generated by the malware authors using code generation engines. Code generation engines randomly produce varying code sequences but perform the same desired malicious functions. Previous research used flow graph and signature tree to identify polymorphic malware families. The key difficulty of previous research is the generation of precisely defined state machine models from polymorphic variants. This paper proposes a novel approach, using Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model (HHMM), to provide accurate inductive inference of the malware family. This model can capture the features of self-similar and hierarchical structure of polymorphic malware family signature sequences. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach, we evaluate it with real malware samples. Using more than 15,000 real malware, we find our approach can achieve high true positives, low false positives, and low computational cost.

Production and applications of multi-layer 3D fabrics

In this paper, 3D textile structures, their types and applications have been discussed. Woven structures especially multi-layer woven structures are discussed in detail. A simple and quick method to produce 3D textile woven preforms on conventional looms is also given at the end of this paper. 3D textile fabrics give composite structures weight reduction with improved mechanical properties in comparison to traditionally used materials.

Channel estimation of dual-hop MIMO relay system via parallel factor analysis

The optimal source precoding matrix and relay amplifying matrix have been developed in recent works on multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay communication systems assuming that the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) is available. However, in practical relay communication systems, the instantaneous CSI is unknown, and therefore, has to be estimated at the destination node. In this paper, we develop a novel channel estimation algorithm for two-hop MIMO relay systems using the parallel factor (PARAFAC) analysis. The proposed algorithm provides the destination node with full knowledge of all channel matrices involved in the communication. Compared with existing approaches, the proposed algorithm requires less number of training data blocks, yields smaller channel estimation error, and is applicable for both one-way and two-way MIMO relay systems with single or multiple relay nodes. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the PARAFAC-based channel estimation algorithm.

Guest editorial : In Journal of networks, v.7 n.3

Networking of computing devices has been going through rapid evolution and thus continuing to be an ever expanding area of importance in recent years. New technologies, protocols, services and usage patterns have contributed to the major research interests in this area of computer science. The current special issue is an effort to bring forward some of these interesting developments that are being pursued by researchers at present in different parts of the globe. Our objective is to provide the readership with some insight into the latest innovations in computer networking through this. This Special Issue presents selected papers from the thirteenth conference of the series (ICCIT 2010) held during December 23-25, 2010 at the Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology. The first ICCIT was held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1998. Since then the conference has grown to be one of the largest computer and IT related research conferences in the South Asian region, with participation of academics and researchers from many countries around the world. Starting in 2008 the proceedings of ICCIT are included in IEEExplore. In 2010, a total of 410 full papers were submitted to the conference of which 136 were accepted after reviews conducted by an international program committee comprising 81 members from 16 countries. This was tantamount to an acceptance rate of 33%. From these 136 papers, 14 highly ranked manuscripts were invited for this Special Issue. The authors were advised to enhance their papers significantly and submit them to undergo review for suitability of inclusion into this publication. Of those, eight papers survived the review process and have been selected for inclusion in this Special Issue. The authors of these papers represent academic and/or research institutions from Australia, Bangladesh, Japan, Korea and USA. These papers address issues concerning different domains of networks namely, optical fiber communication, wireless and interconnection networks, issues related to networking hardware and software and network mobility. The paper titled “Virtualization in Wireless Sensor Network: Challenges and Opportunities” argues in favor of bringing in different heterogeneous sensors under a common virtual framework so that the issues like flexibility, diversity, management and security can be handled practically. The authors Md. Motaharul Islam and Eui-Num Huh propose an architecture for sensor virtualization. They also present the current status and the challenges and opportunities for further research on the topic. The manuscript “Effect of Polarization Mode Dispersion on the BER Performance of Optical CDMA” deals with impact of polarization mode dispersion on the bit error rate performance of direct sequence optical code division multiple access. The authors, Md. Jahedul Islam and Md. Rafiqul Islam present an analytical approach toward determining the impact of different performance parameters. The authors show that the bit error rate performance improves significantly by the third order polarization mode dispersion than its first or second order counterparts. The authors Md. Shohrab Hossain, Mohammed Atiquzzaman and William Ivancic of the paper “Cost and Efficiency Analysis of NEMO Protocol Entities” present an analytical model for estimating the cost incurred by major mobility entities of a NEMO. The authors define a new metric for cost calculation in the process. Both the newly developed metric and the analytical model are likely to be useful to network engineers in estimating the resource requirement at the key entities while designing such a network. The article titled “A Highly Flexible LDPC Decoder using Hierarchical Quasi-Cyclic Matrix with Layered Permutation” deals with Low Density Parity Check decoders. The authors, Vikram Arkalgud Chandrasetty and Syed Mahfuzul Aziz propose a novel multi-level structured hierarchical matrix approach for generating codes of different lengths flexibly depending upon the requirement of the application. The manuscript “Analysis of Performance Limitations in Fiber Bragg Grating Based Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer due to Crosstalk” has been contributed by M. Mahiuddin and M. S. Islam. The paper proposes a new method of handling crosstalk with a fiber Bragg grating based optical add drop multiplexer (OADM). The authors show with an analytical model that different parameters improve using their proposed OADM. The paper “High Performance Hierarchical Torus Network Under Adverse Traffic Patterns” addresses issues related to hierarchical torus network (HTN) under adverse traffic patterns. The authors, M.M. Hafizur Rahman, Yukinori Sato, and Yasushi Inoguchi observe that dynamic communication performance of an HTN under adverse traffic conditions has not yet been addressed. The authors evaluate the performance of HTN for comparison with some other relevant networks. It is interesting to see that HTN outperforms these counterparts in terms of throughput and data transfer under adverse traffic. The manuscript titled “Dynamic Communication Performance Enhancement in Hierarchical Torus Network by Selection Algorithm” has been contributed by M.M. Hafizur Rahman, Yukinori Sato, and Yasushi Inoguchi. The authors introduce three simple adapting routing algorithms for efficient use of physical links and virtual channels in hierarchical torus network. The authors show that their approaches yield better performance for such networks. The final title “An Optimization Technique for Improved VoIP Performance over Wireless LAN” has been contributed by five authors, namely, Tamal Chakraborty, Atri Mukhopadhyay, Suman Bhunia, Iti Saha Misra and Salil K. Sanyal. The authors propose an optimization technique for configuring the parameters of the access points. In addition, they come up with an optimization mechanism in order to tune the threshold of active queue management system appropriately. Put together, the mechanisms improve the VoIP performance significantly under congestion. Finally, the Guest Editors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the 15 reviewers besides the guest editors themselves (Khalid M. Awan, Mukaddim Pathan, Ben Townsend, Morshed Chowdhury, Iftekhar Ahmad, Gour Karmakar, Shivali Goel, Hairulnizam Mahdin, Abdullah A Yusuf, Kashif Sattar, A.K.M. Azad, F. Rahman, Bahman Javadi, Abdelrahman Desoky, Lenin Mehedy) from several countries (Australia, Bangladesh, Japan, Pakistan, UK and USA) who have given immensely to this process. They have responded to the Guest Editors in the shortest possible time and dedicated their valuable time to ensure that the Special Issue contains high-quality papers with significant novelty and contributions.

Concomitant reactivity of the m-Terphenylindium dihydroxide [2,6-Mes2C6H3In(OH)2]4 toward carbon dioxide and ethylene glycol

The stepwise reaction of [2,6-Mes₂C₆H₃In(OH)₂]₄ with carbon dioxide and ethylene glycol proceeded with the formation of (2,6-Mes₂C₆H₃In)₄(CO₃)₂(OH)₄(H₂O)₂ (1) and (2,6-Mes₂C₆H₃In)₄(OCH₂CH₂O)₂(OH)₄ (2), respectively, and eventually produced (2,6-Mes₂C₆H₃In)₄(CO₃)₂(OCH₂CH₂OH)₂(OH)₂ (3). Attempts to liberate ethylene carbonate upon heating of 3 were unsuccessful.

The role of contexts and teacher's questioning to enhance students' thinking

This paper discusses results from a design research in line with Realistic Mathematics Education (RME). Daily cycles of design, classroom experiments, and retrospective analysis are enacted in five days of working about division by fractions. Data consists of episodes of video classroom discussions, and samples of students’ work. The focus of discussion and analysis centres on the role of contexts and the role of teachers’ probing questions to elicit students’ thinking. Our findings suggest that contexts that are meaningful for and understandable by students bring out rich mathematical thinking and discussion amongst students. Meaningful contexts combined with teacher’s probing questions - highlighting big mathematical ideas - allow students to attain various approaches at different levels of formal mathematics.