Small Board Research Articles

Effect of growth ring angle on lateral enlargement of compressed Cryptomeria japonica wood impregnated with polyethylene glycol

The lateral enlargement perpendicular to the compressive direction for small thin boards of Cryptomeria japonica was investigated to evaluate the effects of density and compressive directions to the radial (plane-sawn board) and 45 degrees of tilt to the radial (45º sawn board). Samples were impregnated with 200 and 20,000 molecular weight polyethylene glycol (PEG). The enlargement perpendicular to the fiber direction with deformation was obtained for heartwood and sapwood specimens treated only with PEG20,000. The compression ratio of specimens treated with PEG 20,000 exceeded the void volumes regardless of the wood density. Enlarged specimens of both sapwood and heartwood showed the inflection points in the force-compression ratio curve and no correlation between the compressive directions and lateral enlargement of specimens. In the local area showing the largest deformation, however, a weak positive correlation from plane-sawn boards and weak negative correlation from 45º sawn boards between the angles of compressive direction to growth ring and lateral enlargement were derived. Microfocus X-ray computer tomography in these areas showed the different morphological compressive deformations. The cells in the 45º sawn board were forced out due to each cell moving, whereas the radially arranged ones in the plane sawn board buckled under compression.

Corporate governance and the financial performance of commercial banks in Ghana

This study aims to provide further evidence on the effect of corporate governance on the performance of Ghanaian banks. Two performance measures were used in this study, namely: Return on Asset (ROA) and Cost-Income Ratio (CIR). Data for the analysis were sourced from 21 commercial banks from 2005 to 2015. Regression estimation techniques were employed for analysis purposes. The result revealed that large board size reduces banks’ performance. Furthermore, CEO duality and foreign ownership negatively affect the performance of banks. However, while the effect of CEO duality was significant on CIR, it was not significant in the case of ROA. On the contrary, the effect of foreign ownership was only significant on ROA. Moreover, board independence has a significant positive effect on both CIR and ROA, while audit committee independence has no significant effect on CIR and ROA. The paper argues that for a good corporate governance practice, banks should institute a small board with more than half of the members being independent directors. Furthermore, the role of the board chair should be separated from that of the managing director/CEO. The study provides insight and further evidence to stakeholders and regulators to deal with the crisis in the Ghanaian banking sector.

Corporate governance and earnings management nexus: Evidence from the UK and Egypt using neural networks

AbstractUsing conventional regressions and generalized regression neural networks (GRNNs), we examine the relationship between corporate governance (CG) and earnings management (EM). We also examine whether governance quality moderates the association between EM and CG for a sample of British and Egyptian companies. Our findings show that: (a) UK firms are likely to have lower levels of EM if they: have smaller boards, are dominated by independent outside directors, and have a low percentage of female directors; (b) Egyptian firms are likely to have lower levels of EM if they: have larger boards, are dominated by independent outside directors, and have a low percentage of female directors; (c) The governance quality (control of corruption) has a significant hidden effect on EM. Since our results provide empirical evidence that the board of directors plays a vital role in mitigating EM, these findings might lead to an improvement in the credibility of financial statements for investors in both the UK and Egypt. As policy implications, our findings inform regulators and policy‐makers that corruption has a very strong hidden effect on EM and that they can deter EM by controlling the corruption level in their countries.

Performance comparison of container orchestration platforms with low cost devices in the fog, assisting Internet of Things applications

In the last decade there has been an increasing interest and demand on the Internet of Things (IoT) and its applications. But, when a high level of computing and/or real time processing is required for these applications, different problems arise due to their requirements. In this context, low cost autonomous and distributed Small Board Computers (SBC) devices, with processing, storage capabilities and wireless communications can assist these IoT networks. Usually, these SBC devices run an operating system based on Linux. In this scenario, container-based technologies and fog computing are an interesting approach and both have led to a new paradigm in how devices cooperate, improving overall capacity in a cluster of these SBC devices. The use of containers is considered a lightweight virtualization, allowing an application to be broken into small tasks as services, enabling load balancing, flexibility and scalability. Nevertheless when the number of devices and containers increases in the cluster, it is required an orchestration layer. There are not many solutions and available alternatives using these technologies applied on these networks, and less an assessment of their performances. This paper focuses on these technologies when we use fog computing with low cost SBC devices in a context of IoT. We use Linux containers and different available orchestration platforms (in particular Docker Swarm and Kubernetes), to run on the top of the cluster of commercial SBC devices. Thus, we carry out a thorough functional and performance comparison with different real topologies (wired and wireless) and using both homogeneous and heterogeneous clusters of SBC devices, showing their results. We conclude that with the collected experimental results, Docker Swarm orchestration platform outperforms its counterparts in the scenarios shown.

Stakeholder Protection, Public Trust, and Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence from Listed SMEs in China

In this paper, we investigate the effects of stakeholder protection and public trust on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities of listed enterprises on the Chinese Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Board. We find that the degree of stakeholder protection has a significantly positive impact on SME CSR activities. The public trust is not associated with SME CSR disclosure significantly; it has a significantly negative impact on the SME implementation levels of CSR activities. Furthermore, the moderating effect of public trust on the relationship between the degree of stakeholder protection and SME CSR activities is not supported by our empirical study.

Are outside directors on the small and medium-sized enterprise board always beneficial? Disclosure of firm-specific information in board-management relations as the missing mechanism:

In board governance literature and practice, the presence of outside directors is presumed to have a beneficial effect on board effectiveness and firm performance. This study challenges this prevai...

Are outside directors on the small and medium-sized enterprise board always beneficial? Disclosure of firm-specific information in board-management relations as the missing mechanism

In board governance literature and practice, the presence of outside directors is presumed to have a beneficial effect on board effectiveness and firm performance. This study challenges this prevailing view by exploring the boundary conditions and intermediate mechanism preventing the potential benefits of outside directors. Our results reveal that reality is more complex than previously assumed. Using unique data from a sample of 561 Belgian small and medium-sized enterprises, we find that the presence of outside directors has a neutral or even negative effect under certain boundary conditions on board service engagement in the small and medium-sized enterprises context. Family ownership control and infrequent board meetings are two important contingencies that reduce management’s propensity to disclose firm-specific information to the board in the presence of outside directors. The disclosure of such information, in turn, serves as a critical mechanism to offset firm-specific information asymmetry, associated with better board service engagement and (indirectly) enhanced firm performance. Based on our study, we articulate new theoretical insights for understanding board governance in small and medium-sized enterprises, which integrate existing board governance theories with the dominant coalition context, serving as a springboard for future board governance research.

Board Structure and Agency Cost

This research paper focuses to examine the role of board structure and corporate governance in eliminating agency cost in a sample of 30 firms selected from the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange during the time period of 2007-19. This study uses return on assets to measure agency cost. This study applies multiple fixed effects of regression to analyze the data. The result findings also conclude that there is a positive impact of small board size, firm size, growth, independent directors and frequent board meetings on return on assets and helps in reducing agency cost but the non-independent director does not make any impact and women director makes a negative impact on agency cost.

Corporate Governance and Supplemental Environmental Projects: A Restorative Justice Approach

Firms have traditionally responded to environmental violations by increasing information disclosure and/or communication to manage stakeholder perceptions. As such, these approaches may be symbolic in nature, with no genuine intention to improve the environment. We draw from restorative justice grounded in stakeholder theory and explore a relatively new approach in the form of supplemental environmental projects (SEPs) aimed at restoring the environment, and empirically examine the role of corporate governance (board structure) in firms’ decisions to undertake reparative actions. Using environmental violations and SEPs data from the US Environmental Protection Agency between 2002 and 2015, we find that firms with smaller boards are more likely to undertake SEPs. We also find that firms with higher board independence and CEO duality undertake SEPs more frequently; however, board gender diversity and the existence of a sustainability committee appear to have no impacts. These results are robust to propensity score matching and an alternative data source. We extend the scope of stakeholder theory by emphasizing a new approach—restorative justice—by which corporations can repair damaged relationships and also improve the environment. We also contribute to corporate governance and environmentalism literature by identifying governance structures that promote environmental restorative justice. Thus, our study will inform different stakeholders, including regulators, shareholders, and boards of directors, and will open new avenues for business ethics scholarship.

Structuring Corporate Boards: Some Facts and Determinants from the Macedonian Setting

Purpose: Knowing the factors that might affect board structure is an important step in understanding boards and their role in corporate governance. This research aims to examine the effect of firm characteristics closely related to corporate governance mechanisms, such as the model of corporate governance, shareholder capital concentration, and stock exchange listing on board structure variables (size, independence, and gender diversity). Methodology: The sample of this study stems from large Macedonian joint-stock companies. We run a hierarchical linear regression of board characteristics on common demographic firm characteristics as control variables and contextual firm characteristics related to corporate governance mechanisms as independent variables. Findings: Joint-stock companies in the Republic of North Macedonia have relatively small boards, which provide no positive effects that would originate from the larger number of board members. Moreover, the number of outside independent members is small, insufficient to influence the boards with greater objectivity, independence, and quality. Larger companies with a one-tier model have statistically significant larger corporate boards and a larger number of independent directors. Implications: The best corporate governance practices worldwide must be used as a basis for future improvements of corporate governance in joint-stock companies in developing economies.

Learning the Game of Go by Scalable Network Without Prior Knowledge of Komi

AlphaGo trains a value network to predict the win rate of the current state with 7.5 komi on a 19 × 19 board. The komi of most rectangular boards is unknown, so we do not know who the winner is at the end of the game. We need to use the human experience to guess a komi and then train the value network with this komi. Therefore, the accuracy of the value network is related to the accuracy of the guess. This article uses the board value network to calculate the score of the current state and tries to maximize the score. Then, we do not need to guess the komi. We also modify the network structure to support the board with arbitrary board size as input. Furthermore, we can transfer knowledge of the small board to the large board. We propose an algorithm that can adapt to the bonus rule. We have experimentally proved that our method is effective on a small board and has the ability to transfer knowledge to the large board. In order to better understand the learning process, we visualize the policy and score of some major branches. Finally, we show the solution that our program obtained on 6 × 6, 6 × 7, and 7 × 8 boards.

‘The Land is in Good Heart’: Flood Mitigation and the Drainage Boards in Cumbria, 1844–1985

Abstract While much research has been done to utilise historic flood data, much more work is required to understand richly nuanced historic human relationships with water qualitatively. This article combines an in-depth oral history interview with a retired Cumbrian Land Drainage and Flood Risk Management engineer, whose career spanned from 1978 to 2011, with the documentary archives of the largely overlooked local Drainage Boards (DBs) and their successors after the Land Drainage Act (1930), Internal Drainage Boards (IDBs). These boards were established across Cumbria and the rest of England from the early nineteenth century to organise the collection of communal drainage rates charged by hectare of land to fund the installation and maintenance of flood prevention infrastructure. The records of these locally-specific, flexible and relatively small drainage boards demonstrate loudly and clearly the benefits of decentralised flood management, able to respond directly to the particularities of their own catchment’s environment, residents, economy, infrastructure, topography and climatic challenges. It is vitally important to listen to the voices contained in the minute books of IDBs because they counterbalance historiographically-dominant narratives of top-down, large-scale infrastructural installations, inflexible centralisation of water governance and the powerlessness and gradual demise of many similarly small-scale, locally rooted and bottom-up organisations. The article argues that these local collectives, while far from being environmentalist, were nevertheless deeply in touch with the landscapes and waterscapes they managed and with intergenerational understanding of and respect for the watery environments within their boundaries. DBs and IDBs developed strong, deep and dynamic relationships with water as it coursed through the Cumbrian landscape. These boards also forged long-term relationships with central government and the Ministry of Agriculture. Those who served on Drainage Boards were regulators and stewards of the English landscape and their archival voices can tell us a great deal about how and why human relationships with water changed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Impact of Political Connection on Earnings Management in China’s Private Enterprises

Earnings management behaviour lowers the quality of accounting information of private enterprises to a certain extent. Hence, it is necessary to study the relationship between political connection and earnings management of private enterprises. Through the investigation and statistics of the private companies in China’s Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Board Market from 2013 to 2017, this paper performs empirical analysis to verify the relationship between political connection and earnings management. It shows that political connection can weaken accrual-based earnings management level, which helps private firms obtain more preferential policies and financing help. Based on the above conclusions, this paper puts forward the corresponding policy recommendations, which provide reference for the governance of private enterprises and the capital market.

Design, analysis, and realisation of chipless RFID tag for orientation independent configurations

The architectures of two innovative compact orientation independent chipless radio frequency identification device (RFID) tags for emerging applications such as the internet of things are presented. These tags, when illuminated, generate resonant frequencies in the radar cross-section backscattered spectrum, which are used to encode the data. These are based around L-type resonators, which can be read from front and back using linear polarisation waves as they do not have the ground plane. The first tag design consists of L-resonators in the lower triangular of the substrate, and thereby mutual coupling is increased as a reduction in the size. The second tag design incorporates alternate L-resonators in both halves of the substrate and exhibits reduced mutual coupling and enhanced printing strength but with a reduction in bit density. The proposed concept is demonstrated through prototypes of 8-bit chipless tags on Rogers substrate. These tags require very low bandwidth to encode 8-bit and occupy a small board size of 20 mm × 20 mm, and these are considerable improvements in the development of chipless RFID.

A vision-based robust grape berry counting algorithm for fast calibration-free bunch weight estimation in the field

Counting the number of berries per bunch is a key component of many yield estimation processes but is exceptionally tedious for farmers to complete. Recent work into image processing in viticulture has produced methods for berry counting, however these require some degree of manual intervention or need calibration to manual counts for different bunch architectures.Therefore, this paper introduces a fast and robust calibration-free algorithm for berry counting for winegrapes to aid yield estimation. The algorithm was tested on 529 images collected in the field at multiple vineyards at different maturity stages and achieved an accuracy of approximately 89% per bunch. As it would mostly likely be used to obtain an average value across a block, the low bias of this method resulted in an average accuracy of 99% and was shown to be robust from pea-sized to harvest and between both red and green bunches.Taking only 0.1 to 1 s per image to process and requiring only a smartphone and small backing board to capture, the algorithm can readily be applied to images which are captured in the field by farmers. This allowed bunch weights to be estimated to within 92% accuracy and assisted larger scale yield estimation processes to achieve accuracies of between 3% and 16%. The robustness of the method lays the foundation for fast fruit-set ratio determination and more detailed bunch architecture studies in vivo on a large scale.

A resonant cavity method for measuring electrical permittivity in the GHz region

Resonant cavity perturbation as a means to measuring permittivity has been used since the early 1940s. It is attractive because it is non-contact, non-destructive and experimentally simple. Only recently, however, has the cost of a small analyser board become acceptably low that experiments can be carried out in schools and colleges. Using the TE 1,0,1 cavity mode in a rectangular cavity, measurements of permittivity for distilled water, methanol and PTFE in the microwave region of 1 GHz are presented and these agree well with published data. A granular sugar sample is also investigated to confirm measurements carried out with a compact Lecher Line apparatus

How do the size and independence of the board of trustees affect the financial and sustainable performance of socially responsible mutual funds?

AbstractIn this article, I study for first time how the board of trustees’ size and independence influence the financial performance and sustainability scores of socially responsible (SR) mutual funds. The sample analyzed consists of 99 SR US domestic equity mutual funds existing in the period 2012–2018. The results obtained indicate that funds monitored by boards with a lower number of trustees and an independent chair show lower net expense ratios and better sustainability scores. In addition, smaller boards and a greater percentage of independent trustees are positively associated with the achievement of a better risk‐adjusted financial performance. Regarding SR strategies, negative screens are more likely among funds with larger and less independent boards whereas positive screens are more frequent when boards show the opposite characteristics. Another finding indicates that SR funds that implement positive screens present more industry concentrated portfolios that lead to the achievement of a more sustainable performance.

Comparing School Board Governing Dynamics in Small Rural and Suburban Districts

In this paper we use the case of U.S. school boards to compare small group governing dynamics across suburban and rural school boards serving fewer than 1,000 students. Using a national dataset, we find that rural school board members are less diverse, perceive higher levels of interpersonal conflict, and higher levels of interest group influence compared to their suburban colleagues. The results reveal the need to consider contextual factors such as urbanity when researching small group governing dynamics on public boards, and the importance of place-based policy making. The results are relevant to scholars of small group dynamics, municipal governance, and school boards.

IoT based facial recognition door access control home security system using raspberry pi

The home security system has become vital for every house. Previously, most doors can be open by using traditional ways, such as keys, security cards, password or pattern. However, incidents such as a key loss has led to much worrying cases such as robbery and identity fraud. This has become a significant issue. To overcome this problem, face recognition using deep learning technique was introduced and Internet of Thing (IoT) also been used to perform efficient door access control system. Raspberry Pi is a programmable small computer board and used as the main controller for face recognition, youth system and locking system. The camera is used to capture images of the person in front of the door. IoT system enables the user to control the door access.

When Do Governance Mechanisms Matter Most?

We examine the interaction of internal and external firm-level governance mechanisms with industry-specific economic conditions to assess when they best serve current shareholders. We find that external governance (shareholder rights) is most valuable during industry upturns, with no differential benefit during downturns. For internal governance, we find that small boards are incrementally more valuable during upturns but that this result weakens/reverses during downturns, and there is inconclusive evidence regarding the state dependent value of institutional ownership. Contributions include showing: governance mechanisms have industry economic state dependent values; small boards may not always be optimal; and managers do not capture these inefficiencies through aggressive policy decisions, nor excessive compensation.