TM Interests Research Articles

Does CSR Expenditure and Sustainability Reporting Improve Firm Performance? Mandatory CSR Regimes in India

This paper aims to investigate whether firms that comply with corporate social responsibility (CSR) expenditure and undertake voluntary sustainability reporting will have lower systematic risk and higher stock returns—the proxies for measuring firm performance—in mandatory CSR regimes in India. The instrumental approach of stakeholder theory asserts that firms considering stakeholders’ interests, including societal interest, are likely to show better firm performance compared to others. Therefore, on the basis of such a theory, this study attempts to link sustainability reporting and CSR compliance with firm performance. One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and post-hoc tests were used to examine the proposed hypotheses and analyze the results for firms meeting the criteria of CSR provisions and are listed in the National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India. The period of study covers four financial years from 2015–16 to 2018–19, after India mandated CSR expenditure on April 1, 2014. Results reveal that markets value those firms that meet the mandatory CSR expenditure requirement but do not undertake voluntary sustainability reporting. The findings offer important implications for firms, investors, and policymakers of countries, including those that are planning for CSR legislation.

Exploring Impact of Quality Accreditation on Students’ Interests in Islamic Higher Education

This study aims to map and analyze students’ interests before and after study program accreditation, the effect of accreditation grade, and attempt to increase the value of accreditation. This study employed a mixed-methods approach with a sample of 218 participants for quantitative data and ten informants for qualitative data. The data were collected by using interviews, focus group discussion, observation, and questionnaires. To analyze the data, triangulation is performed to display the frequency distribution, and simple regression analysis is also carried out to find the data related to the effect of the accreditation. Study results expose that firstly, there was a significant improvement in the students’ interest after study program accreditation with an average of 87.5%. Secondly, the accreditation grade gave a positive and significant effect on students’ interest in choosing study programs at a public Islamic university in West Papua, Indonesia. Lastly, there were several endeavors taken into account to increase accreditation score, i.e. synergizing an integrated internal quality assurance system, having an acceleration program for students’ length of study, digitizing students’ admission system, enhancing digital-based learning models, and increasing lecturers’ competence in academic writing, community service, and publication. The present study suggests that the quality of study program accreditation should be a pivotal concern in organizing Islamic higher education.

Analysis of Sharia Investment Gallery’s Innovative Strategy in Increasing Millennial Investors’ Interests Through AS-SALAM Programs

Sharia capital market is a capital market that is related to its activities, regarding issuers, types of securities traded and their trading mechanism conducted based on sharia principles. UINSA Sharia Investment Gallery and UINSA Sharia Trash Bank collaborating to spark AS-SALAM investment products. The AS-SALAM product is a form of investment product for saving capital junk stocks. This research aims to study the innovative strategies adopted by GIS in increasing millennial investors’ interests through the AS-SALAM program. The method used in this research is descriptive method through qualitative research. The results of this study indicate how saving capital stock can increase the interests of millennial investors to start learning to invest. This is because the price of shares is low compared to shares on the outside and only with garbage.

The Influence of Interest in Choosing the Mechanical Engineering Vocational Program in Vocational High Schools

This research aimed to find out the influence of students’ interests in choosing the mechanical engineering vocational program. The research method used was descriptive quantitative. The population in this study were all Grade X students in Yogyakarta which total number were 180 respondents. The data collecting technique was using questionnaires which then was analyzed using descriptive analysis and regression. The results of this study were (1) Students’ interests in choosing mechanical engineering vocational program was high. (2) There was a positive and significant influence from students’ own understanding, family, school, and society towards students’ interests in choosing the mechanical engineering vocational program, (3) The four variables, together, have positive and significant influences towards vocational high school students’ interests in choosing the mechanical engineering vocational program in Yogyakarta..

The effect of remuneration committees, directors’ shareholding and institutional ownership on the remuneration of directors in the top 100 companies in South Africa

Executive directors’ remuneration of leading South African companies often attracts the attention of the press, shareholders and unions. The research on which this article is based investigated whether executive directors’ remuneration of the Top 100 companies listed on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange (JSE) is influenced by the implementation of certain corrective corporate governance measures. The remuneration of executive directors was regressed on a number of firm and corporate governance characteristics to determine whether these characteristics have an influence on executive directors ’remuneration. It was found that corporate governance reforms relating to institutional ownership, the number of non-executive directors on the remuneration committee, shareholder voting on the remuneration policy and the number of remuneration committee meetings act as an effective governance tool to protect shareholders’ interests with regard to some of the elements of executive directors’ remuneration.

Legal Defense of Foreign Citizens and Non-Citizens’ Economic Rights and Interests from Criminal Offense and Other Incidents

The paper analyzes issues of defense of foreign citizens’ and apatrides’ economic rights and interests from criminal offense and wrongful acts within the Russian Federation. Due to situation of political strain, fueled by refugee crisis, obviously national legal system faces new challenges in maintaining human values within its borders.The key idea of the paper is a legal capacity to renege from providing the non-citizens of national equality, addressing the lex personalis i.e., the law of the alien’s home country for meaningful rights and interests’ defense.The certainty is based on the fact that the legislation of alien’s home country could not always correspond with the Russian one and it could not be read as a decline in alien’s legal status.Even a superficial view reveals lots of theoretical and enforcement issues ranging from providing equal defense from criminal or administrative offence to defense from maladministration. Despite the distinctions in national legal systems, common European trend is aimed at highest possible defense of non-citizens’ and apatrides’ economic interests.Thus, Russian legal system admits feasible aliens’ adjective law limitations as a retaliatory measure for Russian citizens’ rights limitation abroad. Authors push for balancing both personal and public interests when determining the legal defense of economic interests of non-citizens in accordance with European practice.

Brics’ Foreign Debt Burden and its Impact on Core Institutional Basis

Creation of a multipolar international economy and economic relations is accompanied by shifting gravity centers of international finances, redistribution of positions on the global market for financial services in favor of large emerging countries and countries with transitional economies. This post crisis period triggered serious problems related to international capital inflows and outflows at the BRICS states. This is all due to a slow recovery of developed countries; a high probability of a full-scale debt crisis in some E.U. states; mounting uncertainties following financial reforms in some states, etc. But raising debt as an important way to finance speedy economic growth and import of technologies to the BRICS countries make their financial systems more vulnerable to exogenous stresses and shocks, which result in an unreasonable firming of national currencies. In our research, we have identified the risks and misbalances of global development, which affect BRICS, evaluated the influence of foreign debt and singled out the key growth trends. We have revealed the importance of the New Development Bank development, which will help solve urgent problems of its participants connected with their growing role in international economic relations: the creation of a regional financing mechanism as well as a core institutional basis to represent BRICS’ interests in the global financial structure and to become the missing link in interaction with global financial institutions.

Mixed Classroom Teaching in Computer Mathematics for Undergraduate Students

The difficulties of computer mathematics in classroom teaching present in various aspects. The most important one in our experience is to ignite our students’ interests and active attitude. In this paper, we use mixed teaching modes to overcome the hardness of contents, and initiate our undergraduate students to follow useful instructions. Mixed classroom teaching modes use “new techniques and new resources, encouraging, heuristic, leading, from the shallower to the deeper”, to overcome the difficulties. By stimulating students learning desire, use step by step questions to lead and encourage them to overcome the psychological barriers. The mixed mode teaching focuses on students’ learning initiative, serves the happiness of successfully solving the problems to form active atmosphere of interactive classroom.

A Study on Analysing Speaking-pen Learning Log Data Considering Interests for Improvement of Primary School Children’s English Ability

As globalization advances, early English education for children in non-English speaking countries has been regarded as important. Many studies have proposed effective learning methods; however, few of these have analysed the relationship between learning processes and their effects with respect to detailed, classified interes ts. This study investigated and proposed detailed learners’ interests in primary school children’s English learning as variables from log data obtained through learning with a speaking-pen, and analysed the relation ship between features of learners’ interests and their improvements. Children were classified into four types based on their initial abilities, and an effective learning method was hypothesized for each type. The relationship between the features of children’s interests and variables related to self-regulated learning and English education , and their improvement of English skills, were then analysed . As a result, the validity of using variables of interests for understanding factors in English skill improvement was shown . https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.17.1.7

A Microblog User Interest Model Based on Participated and Not Participated Data

Oriented to the social network and media such as micro-blog, this paper presents a constructing way of user interest model. Based on the date whether user participated or not, user interest was divided into participated part and not-participated part. Instead of gaining friends’ interests and then considering the immediate effect towards user’s interest, the influence of friends’ interests take effects through the long-term friends-generated user-participated data explicitly and the short-term friends-generated user-not participated data implicitly. Forgetting mechanism helped modelling the user interest drift. Simulated experiments verify the proposed user interest modelling method is effective and the not participated data plays a more important role than the participated data.

Simple Calculations but Amusing Lessons about Teaching Nanotechnology in Higher Education

The higher education should follow closely the fast development of modern science and technology. Particularly in those disciplines about engineering and applied sciences, the lessons about state-of-the-art techniques are very important to cultivate the students’ innovation ability and capability of solving the complex engineering problems. However, how to effectively teach these contents needs careful considerations. Here, it is demonstrated that the simple calculations can achieve amusing results about the lessons on nanotechnologies such as electrospinning and electrospraying. The surface enlargement effects of nanomaterials including 2-dimensional graphene, 1-dimensional electrospun nanofiber, and 0-dimensional nanoparticle are calculated. All the calculation demonstrate that the magnitude of surface area increase is equal to the magnitude the size decrease. These simple calculations can be good start points for giving lessons about nanotechnologies to college students, can make the courses more vivid, and can provoke the students’ interests about new kinds of advanced techniques.

A Study on Strategies of English Vocabulary Teaching

The problem of how to teach vocabulary effectively and efficiently puzzles many teachers for a long time. After a brief review of the history of the development of English teaching methods, this paper offers some efficient strategies of English vocabulary teaching for English teachers, which include stimulating students’ curiosity and interests, using conversion of part of speech, using syntactic analysis, using formative evaluation, and using game method. The result of application of these strategies is very effective to students’ vocabulary accumulation, which is the crucial part and basis of English teaching. So teaching vocabulary effectively and efficiently will be a great help to English teaching on the whole in the end.

A Research on the Present Situation of College Examination Discipline and Countermeasures

The sharp increase in the number of national college students leads to a high proportion of low-quality college students. Cheating in exams becomes a common phenomenon. The author tries to find out the subjective and objective motivations of cheating in exams and seek the countermeasures based on questionnaires. The countermeasures include: guiding students to set learning goals to stimulate their learning motivations; enriching teaching models to arouse students’ interests; strengthening college students’ integrity education and helping them set up positive views of life and value, etc.

Students' interest for sport and recreation at Goce Delcev University - Stip, depending the selected Faculty

Implementation of sport in university curricula is an important issue considering its importance in creating a fully developed personality and its impact on participation in sport and physical activity during the entire life. Therefore, At Goce Delcev”University - Stip, Macedonia, sport is implemented as obligatory university course, realized in the first academic year at all faculties within the University. Considering the fact that course Sport and recreation is realized as unified curricula at all Faculties, we were interested in possible differences in students preferences toward sport activities and realization of sport and recreation course based on a selected faculty of study – humanities, technical sciences, natural sciences and arts. The research was realized on a sample of 670 respondents, full time students in the first academic year at thirteen faculties at“Goce Delcev” University. Students’ opinions for Sport and recreation were determined using a closed form of questionnaire.Obtained results were processed using basic descriptive statistics parameters and comparative statistics (Chi-square test).The obtained results suggest on differences related to selection of current and preferred activities, number of weekly classes for sport, theoretic lectures. Obtained results suggest the directions and possibilities for future interventions in current course and its design according to the students’ interests and needs..Keywords: Sport activities, differences, university students.

Empirical Study on a New English Writing Revision Mode Based on Screen-recording Software

Despite its great importance, English writing has been seen as a tough issue for both teachers and learners. By applying screen recording software, this empirical study explores the feasibility and advantages of face-to-face English writing revision mode, and analyzes the effects of this mode on English writing teaching. The results show that the English writing feedback mode constructed by face-to-face revision videos (made by screen-recording software) can motivate learners’ interests and self-confidence in writing largely, and enhance their writing abilities effectively as well.

Research of the Behavior of Low-Carbon Economy Subjects Based on Incentive Compatibility Theory

The development of low carbon economy is closely related to the interests of all sectors of society, especially the main three to participate: the government, enterprises and the public. In this process, how to coordinate the interests of all parties and formulate a reasonable incentive mechanism has become an important task for the government. Studied on the analysis of the behavior status and goals of the government, enterprises and public on the background of low carbon economic development, then used the game method to quantify each object’ interests of the target and relations. At last, designed incentive mechanism on the basis of incentive compatibility principle to meet the individual subject welfare maximization and, the greatest degree of protection for the development of low carbon economy.

A Study on the Application of CBI in College English Writing Teaching

This paper offers a brief introduction of content-based instruction (CBI) and its related studies, and discusses the application of CBI in college English writing teaching. Based on CBI and its theme-based instruction, it constructs a new mode of college English teaching. In other words, according to students’ interests and needs, teachers should concentrate on the contents and provide numerous authentic linguistic materials to improve students’ English writing proficiency and develop their writing ability.

PROTECTING INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE USING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS LAW: THE MASAKHANE PELARGONIUM CASE

The use of indigenous knowledge (IK) and indigenous bio-resources by pharmaceutical and herbal industries has led to concerns about the need to protect indigenous communities' interests in regards to the use of IK and indigenous bio-resources. Some commentators believe that intellectual property rights (IPR) law can effectively be used to protect IK and indigenous bio-resources, while others are more sceptical. An analysis of the Masakhane Pelargonium case reveals that while the Masakhane community's successful use of IPR law in a case against Schwabe Pharmaceuticals has been lauded as a successful example of a marginalised community using IPR law to protect IK, the facts and results of the case are more ambivalent. Importantly, the Masakhane case shows that existing community resources and the level of mobilisation of the community affect the community's ability to use IPR law effectively. A consideration of the broader context in which IPR law is used is required in order to determine how useful IPR law may be for a particular indigenous community seeking to protect its knowledge and bio-resources. In addition, it also indicates that we need to start recognising communities' existing resources and their determination to be more pivotal to the success of IK-IPR cases.

Effect of Industrial Work Practice and Family Environment on Interest in Entrepreneurship to Students of Vocational High School

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of industrial work practices and family environment on interest in entrepreneurship at state vocational high school 1 of Parepare. Population showed in this study was all students of class XII at state vocational high school 1 of Parepare in the academic year 2015 2016 as many as 232 students. The total sample of 30 % or as many as 70 students. Data collection techniques in this study are a questionnaire, observation, interviews, and documents. The data analysis techniques used in this study is multiple regression analysis using the Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS). The results showed that (1) the industrial work practices has a positive and significant impact on interest in entrepreneurship at students of vocational high school of state 1 of Parepare by 58.40 %, (2) family environment has a positive and significant impact on interest in entrepreneurship on students of vocational high school of state 1 of Parepare by 55.70%, and (3) influences of industrial work practices and family environment simultaneously positive and significant impact on students of vocational high school of state 1 of Parepare by 65.30%. The study recommended that the head school should more pay attention to the implementation of the industrial work practices, so that students’ interests in entrepreneurship can be improved estuary on improving the quality of education

Food Additives Course Teaching Reform and Construction

Food additives course is a professional course in undergraduate specialty of food science and engineering. In order to improve the food additives course teaching and students’ experimental ability, the food additives teaching is confronted with new tasks, i.e., establish the corresponding experimental course, in which the modern means and methods were used to develop a new experimental teaching and stimulate the students’ interests and the spirit of innovation.