Demand Explanation Research Articles

Stakeholder demands and corporate social responsibility: Evidence from the Olympic Games

We propose that stakeholder demand can explain firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and empirically test our proposition using 2002–2016 panel data from multiple countries. We select the Olympic Games as our experimental context and use a difference-in-differences design. We find that firms domiciled in countries that host the Olympic Games subsequently experience a significantly smaller increase in CSR commitment than firms in countries that unsuccessfully bid to host the Olympics. We also find that firms domiciled in cities that host the Olympic Games exhibit a significantly smaller increase in CSR than those domiciled in other cities in the same country. Additional tests indicate that firms in host countries with greater increases in the levels of happiness tend to experience an even smaller increase in CSR. Our findings are consistent with the stakeholder demand explanation, as stakeholders are less likely to require local firms to invest in CSR if utilities, such as those from environmental improvement, increase.Running head: Olympic Games and CSR.

Why and how do Y chromosome stop recombining?

Why and how do Y chromosome stop recombining?

The European banks’ role in the financial crisis of 2007-8: a critical assessment

ABSTRACT Since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2007, opinion has been divided over whether its root cause was weak regulation and bank funding problems or the pressure of investor demand for US safe assets. New research on the European banks’ role in the crisis may finally help to resolve the issue. Far from being peripheral players in the crisis, European banks were deeply implicated in its causal origins as evidenced by their activities in the two US debt markets that were at the heart of the crisis: those for collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and for asset backed commercial paper (ABCP). These activities would seem to lend weight to the conclusion that regulation and bank funding issues were the key causal variables in the financial crisis. However, it is a conclusion only made possible by ignoring the pre-crisis connection between the federal funds rate and the rate of ABCP demand from the institutional money market mutual funds (MMMFs). This paper argues that when this connection is closely examined, it turns out that the evidence surrounding the European banks’ role in the financial crisis gives greater weight to the safe asset demand explanation of the crisis.

McTague, John. Things That Didn’t Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743.

McTague, John. <i>Things That Didn’t Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743</i>.

The Significance of Polarons and Dynamic Disorder in Halide Perovskites

The development of halide perovskite semiconductors led to various technological breakthroughs in optoelectronics, in particular in the areas of photovoltaics and light-emitting diodes. Additionally, the study of their fundamental properties has uncovered intriguing puzzles that demand explanation. Polaronic effects associated with the coupling of electrons and holes to polar lattice vibrations are often invoked as a microscopic mechanism to explain various unusual experimental observations. While some form of polaronic behavior undoubtedly exists in these systems, several assumptions underlying standard models used to describe a polaron mechanism appear to be strongly violated in these materials. In this Perspective, we investigate the role of polaronic effects in halide perovskites and summarize signatures and failures of the polaron picture to explain physical characteristics of the materials. We highlight the importance of the complementary dynamic disorder concept that can rationalize various key properties of halide perovskites for which standard polaron and band-theory pictures of carrier transport fail.

Ontological status of time in chemistry

While temporal considerations are of prime importance for chemical reactions, as well as for molecular stability, most chemical concepts (outside of the field of chemical kinetics) are not explicitly formulated on a diachronic basis (Earley in Found Chem 14:235, 2012). It will be argued here that a formulation explicitly incorporating temporal and epistemological considerations enables us to treat chemical reactions and chemical substances on ontologically equivalent terms, instead of assigning a more fundamental status to the latter. After all, in collision theory, a chemical substance is just a collision complex (a “resonance”) that takes too long. How long qualifies as “too long”, and “too long” in relation to what, are crucial questions that distinguish chemical substances from chemical reactions, and reversible reactions from irreversible ones, thereby introducing anthropocentric considerations into these distinctions. Too long for a lab chemist is very different from too long for an astrochemist studying chemical reactions between chemical substances in inter-stellar space on cosmological timescales. Examining several physical and chemical properties on the basis of which chemical substances are distinguished from one another, the role of temporal and anthropocentric considerations in defining molecular properties is emphasized. I conclude with some observations on the much-debated reduction of chemistry to other disciplines, arguing that such reduction depends on our aesthetic choices as to what kinds of observations demand explanation, and what kinds of explanation are acceptable.

Weak sections of society and teachings of almighty Allah

In Islamic tradition the idea if Social welfare has been presented as one its principal value and the practice of social service as its various forms has been instructed and encouraged. A Muslim’s life remain incomplete if not attended by the service to humanity. Duties to parents neighbors, sick people, relatives, orphans, poor people have been defined in Islam. According to hadith, on the Day of judgment. Allah will be displeased with those who do not give food to them who ask. Allah will interrogates them and demand explanation from them. This act of Allah proves that in Islamic Society all weak groups have fundamental rights. In this articles presented Islamic teachings about such groups of Islamic Society.

Predicting taxi demand hotspots using automated Internet Search Queries

Disruptions due to special events are a well-known challenge in transport operations, since the transport system is typically designed for habitual demand. Part of the problem relates to the difficulty in collecting comprehensive and reliable information early enough to prepare mitigation measures.A tool that automatically scans the internet for events and predicts their impact would strongly support transport management in many cities in the world. This study addresses the challenges related to retrieving and analyzing web documents about real world events, and using them for demand explanation (if related to a past event) and prediction (if a future one).Transport demand is predicted with a supervised topic modeling algorithm by utilizing information about social events retrieved using various strategies, which made use of search aggregation, natural language processing, and query expansion. It was found that a two-step process produced the highest accuracy for transport demand prediction, where different (but related) queries are used to retrieve an initial set of documents, and then, based on these documents, a final query is constructed that obtains the set of predictive documents. These are then used to model the most discriminating topics related to the transport demand. A framework was proposed that sequentially handles all stages of data gathering, enrichment, and prediction with the intention of generating automated search queries.

Neighbors through Imperial Eyes: Depicting Babylonia in the Assyrian Campaign Reliefs

Abstract The Neo-Assyrian campaign reliefs are rich sources for understanding Assyrian ideas of empire, geography, and Assyria’s relationship to the wider world. They are also exceptions: the format of the later Assyrian campaign reliefs is in several respects so unusual in ancient Near Eastern art as to demand explanation. Not the least of the campaign reliefs’ unusual qualities is the extensive and often detailed depiction of foreign landscapes and people. This paper examines one instance of this phenomenon: the particular case of depictions of Babylonia and the far south in Assyrian campaign reliefs. Studies of the textual sources have done much to draw out the complex cultural and political relationship between Assyria and Babylonia in the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries B.C., revealing tensions between an identification with the cities of the south and their venerable temples on the one hand, and the undeniable political and strategic problems posed by Babylonian rebellions against Assyrian rule on the other. It is argued that the campaign reliefs attempt to resolve this tension by presenting conquest and pacification as accomplished facts, and Babylonia’s abundance as an Assyrian imperial possession. It is also suggested that one function of the reliefs was to process historical victories into a larger, ahistorical image of Assyrian imperial success.

Why Do Analysts Issue Sales Forecasts? Evidence from Mandatory IFRS Adoption

SYNOPSISThis study uses mandatory adoption of IFRS as a setting to investigate why financial analysts issue supplementary sales forecasts. The demand explanation proposes that analysts issue supplementary forecasts if earnings are not informative and thus investors demand additional accounting information. The reputation explanation posits that analysts are more likely to issue sales forecasts if these forecasts are more accurate and will not cause reputation damage. Using mandatory IFRS adoption as an exogenous shock to analysts' information environment, we find that after firms mandatorily adopt IFRS, analysts are more likely to issue sales forecasts and analysts' sales forecasts become more accurate and less dispersed. The effect of mandatory IFRS adoption is stronger in countries with strong law enforcement and a large difference between local GAAP and IFRS. Further analysis shows that the IFRS effect concentrates on analysts with prior experience with IAS. Overall, the results provide support to the reputation explanation.JEL Classifications: G15; G18; M41.

Field manipulations of resources mediate the transition from intraspecific competition to facilitation.

Population density affects individual performance, though its effects are often mixed. For sessile species, increases in population density typically reduce performance. Still, cases of positive density-dependence do occur in sessile systems and demand explanation. The stress gradient hypothesis (SGH) predicts that under stressful conditions, positive effects of facilitation may outweigh the negative effects of competition. While some elements of the SGH are well studied, its potential to explain intraspecific facilitation has received little attention. Further, there have been questions regarding whether the SGH holds if the stressor is a resource. Most studies of interactions between the environment and intraspecific facilitation have relied on natural environmental gradients; manipulative studies are much rarer. To test the effects of intraspecific density and resources, we manipulated resource availability over natural population densities for the marine bryozoan Watersipora subtorquata. We found negative effects of density on colony performance in low resource environments, but mainly positive density-dependence in high resource environments. By adding resources, competition effects were reduced and the positive effects of facilitation were revealed. Our results suggest that resource availability mediates the relative strength of competition and facilitation in our system. We also suggest that intraspecific facilitation is more common than may be appreciated and that environmental variation may mediate the balance between negative and positive density-dependence.

Accountability of AI Under the Law: The Role of Explanation

The ubiquity of systems using artificial intelligence or has brought increasing attention to how those systems should be regulated. The choice of how to regulate AI systems will require care. AI systems have the potential to synthesize large amounts of data, allowing for greater levels of personalization and precision than ever before|applications range from clinical decision support to autonomous driving and predictive policing. That said, common sense reasoning [McCarthy, 1960] remains one of the holy grails of AI, and there exist legitimate concerns about the intentional and unintentional negative consequences of AI systems [Bostrom, 2003, Amodei et al., 2016, Sculley et al., 2014]. There are many ways to hold AI systems accountable. In this work, we focus on one: explanation. Questions about a legal right to explanation from AI systems was recently debated in the EU General Data Protection Regulation [Goodman and Flaxman, 2016, Wachter et al., 2017], and thus thinking carefully about when and how explanation from AI systems might improve accountability is timely. Good choices about when to demand explanation can help prevent negative consequences from AI systems, while poor choices may not only fail to hold AI systems accountable but also hamper the development of much-needed beneficial AI systems. Below, we briefly review current societal, moral, and legal norms around explanation, and then focus on the different contexts under which explanation is currently required under the law. We find that there exists great variation around when explanation is demanded, but there also exists important consistencies: when demanding explanation from humans, what we typically want to know is how and whether certain input factors affected the final decision or outcome. These consistencies allow us to list the technical considerations that must be considered if we desired AI systems that could provide kinds of explanations that are currently required of humans under the law. Contrary to popular wisdom of AI systems as indecipherable black boxes, we find that this level of explanation should often be technically feasible but may sometimes be practically onerous|there are certain aspects of explanation that may be simple for humans to provide but challenging for AI systems, and vice versa. As an interdisciplinary team of legal scholars, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists, we recommend that for the present, AI systems can and should be held to a similar standard of explanation as humans currently are; in the future we may wish to hold an AI to a different standard.

Hypothesizing Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs Mass Shooters Suffer from Reward Deficiency Syndrome: "Born Bad".

The slaughters in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs demand explanation, in the face of the ineffable. An understanding of the shooters’ motives could restore our trust in our mutually cooperative existence. In this short communication we provide post-hoc rationale of both Stephen Paddock (Las Vegas mass shooting) and Devin Kelley (Southerland Springs mass shooting) and hypothesize that these shooters had genetically induced “Reward Deficiency Syndrome” (RDS) and a hypodopaminergia trait/state. In this particular case we are in pursuit of trying to obtain postmortem samples of mass shooters for subsequent epigenetic and neurogenetic analyses. It is our contention that early genetic identification of RDS and its pathological behaviors including hyper – sexuality, violence, a love for guns, even in children, could be a giant step forward in potentially saving lives.

Ecogeographical gradients in plumage coloration among Australasian songbird clades

AbstractAimAnimal coloration often shows high degrees of evolutionary lability, producing variation among species that is easily apparent. This variation may produce consistent geographical patterns as species converge on adaptive phenotypes in similar environments. Some such geographical patterns in colour variation have been recently predicted as a response to the light environment in different habitats. Others like Gloger's rule – the negative relationship between brightness and humidity – have long been observed but still demand explanation. Finally, the conventional wisdom that tropical birds are more colourful remains largely untested.LocationAustralia, New Guinea.MethodsHere, we compared plumage coloration across two families of Australian birds (Meliphagidae, n = 97 species; Acanthizidae, n = 40 species) in a combined spatial and phylogenetic framework. We assessed the extent to which environmental variables extracted from species ranges explain variation in colour traits, while correcting for the autocorrelation inherent in spatially structured data using extensive simulations.ResultsWe found several strong effects of environment on plumage coloration. Inland species with ranges marked by high aridity and temperature seasonality showed greater colour span among acanthizids, and greater saturation among meliphagids. Gloger's rule was supported in both clades, but more strongly for dorsal plumage. The most consistent correlate in this relationship was vegetation: birds in regions with more vegetation had markedly darker plumage. Ornament hue showed no significant associations with vegetation or climate.Main conclusionsBirds living close to the equator were not more colourful, but species inhabiting arid regions were. Species may respond to the shorter and less predictable breeding seasons of arid environments by evolving increased ornamentation. The consistent relationship we observed between vegetation and dorsal brightness supports a primary role for countershading and background matching in Gloger's rule.

Living to Fight Another Day: Judicial Deferral in Defense of Democracy

Even many years after Marbury v. Madison, and even in the face of the spread of aggressive constitutional court review in democracies around the world, the ability of courts to assert their authority against the political branches continues to demand explanation. Especially in newly minted democracies, and most so in countries emerging from authoritarian rule, how courts can engage the misuse of state power remains a bit of a mystery. This Article examines the hitherto under-studied phenomenon of judicial deferral as providing some insight into how courts acquire the institutional capacity to engage in robust judicial review and, in particular, how the deferral of implementation avoids direct political confrontations for the judiciary. Unlike in the US, constitutional court decisions around the world frequently delay the practical effect of their decisions. The Article explores various modes of judicial deferral, including suspended declarations of invalidity, doctrines of prospective overruling and progressive implementation, and more implicit or forms of delay involving narrow rulings paired with broad dicta. It also considers different functions served by judicial deferral, including practical concerns about smooth transition from one legal regime to another, democratic legitimacy and dialogue, and more political concerns about ensuring the legal and political preconditions necessary for effective judicial review; and the connections between these various 'first' and 'second' order modes and functions of deferral.Once examined in this light, it turns out that various deferral-based strategies have been by courts in some of the most successful systems of constitutional review in recent years, including in Germany, India, Colombia and Indonesia. Finally, the Article turns to both the preconditions necessary for successful deferral and the corresponding risks when delay simply postpones an inevitable conflict.

Doctrine and Deep Structure in the Contraception Mandate Debate

This short essay is part of an exchange on religious liberty challenges to the so-called “contraception mandate,” which requires many employer-provided health insurance plans to cover contraception as part of preventative care.The general idea of religion-based exemptions to general laws has been controversial for a long time. But rarely has a specific claim for exemption provoked as much vehemence as in the current fight over the contraception mandate. Doctrinally, the legal problem here is hard but conceptually straightforward, and comes down to whether the government has a compelling interest in applying the rule to employers with sincere religious objections. Both sides, though, see larger stakes at play. Opponents of the mandate describe it as an attack on bedrock principles of religious freedom. And some supporters want to avoid even reaching the compelling interest analysis and argue that the mandate often infringes no legitimate religious interests to begin with.Both these extreme views are wrong. But they are also important. And they demand explanation. They suggest some imperfectly articulated undercurrents in the current American conversation about religion and the law. My goal here is therefore twofold – to analyze the legal problem, and to say something about the deep structure of the conflict, which goes beyond a simple legal dispute.

Fringe public relations: How activism moves critical pr toward the mainstream

The dominance of Excellence Theory in public relations theory and research may be eroding as contemporary issues in corporations, including the concern with activist challenges to reputation management and corporate social responsibility, increase in visibility and demand explanation. We argue that Excellence Theory‘s seemingly reluctant evolution has provided unsatisfactory treatments of concepts like power and activism, even though it has attempted to address some limitations of the symmetrical model's efficacy in responding to activist challenges. Excellence Theory‘s acknowledgment of once-vilified concepts like persuasion and power sets the stage for critical public relations theory and research to emerge as significantly more capable of addressing activist advocacy and concomitant issues. The paper argues that critical theory, buoyed by acceptance of its key concepts, its increasing access to presentation venues and journals sympathetic to once-marginalized, alternative perspectives, is poised to infiltrate the public relations orthodoxy. This possibility offers hope that once marginalized pluralistic approaches, especially critical public relations, may disrupt the colonization of the orthodoxy and infiltrate mainstream public relations.

POLYDACTYLY AND THE MAYA: A REVIEW AND A CASE FROM THE SITE OF PELIGROSO, UPPER MACAL RIVER VALLEY, BELIZE

AbstractA single right fifth metatarsal found in Tomb 1 at Peligroso, Belize exhibited a small deformity in the form of a small (7 mm) accessory digit emanating from the plantar surface at mid-shaft. This Type A postaxial polydactyly is the first archaeological example of polydactyly reported for Mesoamerica. Polydactyly is one of the more commonly reported morphological anomalies and thus its appearance in Maya populations would have been prevalent enough to demand explanation. A review of related terminology in pertinent Amerindian languages is presented as a means of exploring the manners in which digits and the human body are conceptualized. Maya iconographic representations of polydactyly at Palenque have parallels to other Mesoamerican renderings of supernumerary digits used to identify divinities and deified ancestors. However, the Peligroso mortuary context comprised disarticulated and commingled bones, suggesting that the individual did not have a distinctive social role related to the presence of an extra digit.

Biology's first law: the tendency for diversity and complexity to increase in evolutionary systems

Life on earth is characterized by three striking phenomena that demand explanation: adaptation - the marvelous fit between organism and environment; diversity - the great variety of organisms; and complexity - the enormous intricacy of their internal structure. Natural selection explains adaptation. But what explains diversity and complexity? Daniel W. McShea and Robert N. Brandon argue that there exists in evolution a spontaneous tendency toward increased diversity and complexity, one that acts whether natural selection is present or not. They call this tendency a biological law - the Zero-Force Evolutionary Law, or ZFEL. This law unifies the principles and data of biology under a single framework and invites a reconceptualization of the field of the same sort that Newton's First brought to physics. Biology's First Law shows how the ZFEL can be applied to the study of diversity and complexity and examines its wider implications for biology. Intended for evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and other scientists studying complex systems, and written in a concise and engaging format that speaks to students and interdisciplinary practitioners alike, this book will also find an appreciative audience in the philosophy of science.

The Movius Line controversy: the state of the debate

Patterns of Palaeolithic variability between eastern Asia and western portions of the Old World continue to engender controversial discussion. Most famously, debate has focused on variability in the absence/presence of ‘handaxes’ east and west of the so-called ‘Movius Line’. However, it is becoming equally apparent that cross-regional contrasts can be made using categories of data other than handaxe presence/absence alone. This, in turn, is leading to a reconfiguration of the archaeological patterns that demand explanation. Here, we outline the current state of the Movius Line controversy in these terms, and undertake a series of metric analyses of eastern and western biface samples. This leads us to highlight specific lines of enquiry that may be important for future attempts to address these enduring questions.