Pressures from stakeholders hit Japanese companies

In recent years few US and European executives have been faced with the task of managing in a highly complex, dynamic business environment. There is a growing awareness of the need to consider the interests of a variety of stakeholder groups when making business decisions. This awareness has quickly become a requirement for executives across the globe, even among those in Japanese firms who have historically been less encumbered due to different societal, cultural, and business expectations. This article addresses these differences and discusses the global evolution of stakeholder group influence with an emphasis on US, European, and Japanese executives.     

Gender-based violence and the Arms Trade Treaty: reflections from a campaigning and legal perspective

The Arms Trade Treaty, the first treaty to regulate the international transfer of conventional arms and ammunition, was adopted in 2013 at the United Nations. It aims to regulate the flow of weapons around the world by requiring governments to assess all arms transfers against a set of criteria, before the transfer is authorised or denied. The agreed criteria include language on the risks of gender-based violence. This is a landmark provision, and shows that the issues of women, peace and security have successfully moved into the realm of mainstream security. This article explores how this happened, and the lessons campaigners can learn from this campaign success. The article also explores what the implications are for progress on reducing gender-based violence in conflict, and the areas of uncertainty as attention turns to the treaty's implementation.     

Discussion of Hughes’ “There’s No Such Thing as a Whole Story”

The discussion of Elizabeth Hughes’ essay “There’s No Such Thing as the Whole Story” seeks to argue that a biopsychosocial perspective can flesh out understanding of what occurs at the level of discourse by adoptees. Underpinning such discourses, it is argued, is an experience-dependent view of the embodied mind. From this perspective understanding of the unconscious is situated biopsychosocially and includes aspects of how an autobiographical sense of self (Damasio, 2011) is embedded in memory.     

Subjective sexual arousal and involvement: Development of multiple indicators

Three measures of subjective sexual arousal were observed across four erotic conditions in a sample of 241 college men and women (a) to refine two multi‐item scales of subjective sexual arousal, (b) to determine the convergent and discriminant validity of three measures of sexual arousal, and (c) to relate these operational definitions of subjective sexual arousal to the construct of subjective sexual arousal within Mosher's (1980) involvement theory. From the perspective of involvement theory, subjective sexual arousal is conceived to be an affect‐cognition blend, consisting of awareness of physiological sexual arousal, sexual affects, and affect‐cognition blends, which is transmuted into consciousness and deepens involvement by amplifying the perception of sexual stimulation, sexual cognitions, sexual behavior, physiological sexual response, and itself. Evidence of convergent validity was strong with a median validity coefficient of .51 for the three measures across the four conditions.     

The New Jersey Ethnic Life Series

The circular flow of income diagram is a traditional starting point for economics taught at the high school and college level. Although it is an incredibly useful tool for illustrating how money flows through the economy, the model can be abstract and relies on a sophisticated vocabulary that makes it impractical for use with younger students. This paper offers techniques for making the model accessible to middle school students and offers activities for reinforcing the concepts taught.     

Quantitative sources for studying urban industrial slavery in the antebellum US South

The composition of antebellum Southern urban industrial labour forces is an area requiring careful quantitative analysis. Southern elites worried about slaves in urban industry (especially hired slaves) because they experienced wage‐labour freedoms and so had greater opportunites to resist slavery. The distribution of late antebellum Richmond tobacco factory workers between hired slaves and owned slaves is studied by examining property tax records and census of manufacturing records. Tax records are shown to understate by 11–12 per cent the number of slaves used in factories. This error is due to tax evasion, assessment inefficiency, and seasonal variations between census and tax record collection dates. Furthermore, tax records cannot be used to distinguish between owned and hired slaves in factories, as previous researchers allege. Only the 1860 census of manufacturers explicitly divides the slave force between hired and owned slaves. This record shows that 58 per cent of Richmond tobacco workers were hired slaves, lending credence to the fears of southern elites that urban industry would erode the master‐slave relation they preferred.     

Selection of regress or va riables when E(Y) is an unknown honlinear function

We consider the problem of deciding which of a set of p independent variables x₁ X₂J x_s we are to regard as being functionally involved in the mean of a dependent normal random variable Y and estimating E( Y) in terms of the chosen x's. This mean is an unknown function (assumed to be doubly differentiable) of some or all of the x's, so that the problem is of wide relevance. We approximate to the hypersurface in two different ways, and select within each approximation:

(a)For the situation where the mean of Y is assumed to be a linear function of the x's, we use ono of the optimum methods of selection.

(b)More generally, in the space of the X's the function will be approximately linear in a relatively small region. Accordingly this p-dimensional space is subdivided into smaller regions by a clustering procedure, and a hyperplane if fitted with in each region to aproximate to the unknown responce surface.An adaption of an optimum-regressor-selection procedure is then used to assist in the selection of the regressors

Approximate F tests are given to choose between models, including deciding how many x's to retain. Alternatively: the application of Akaike's Extended Maximum Likelihood Principle provides another way of choosing between the models and of selecting regressor variables. The methods are applied to data on glass manufacture.     

On order statistics from thelog-logistic distribution and their properties

The aim of this paper is to derive the exact forms of the p.d.f. and the moments of the rth order statistics in a sample of size n from the Log-logistic (L_l ) distribution. Measures of skewness and kurtosis are tabulated. The recurrence relations between the moments of all order statistics and an expression of the covariance between any two order statistics, x_i and x_jand the distribution of the ratio of X_i to x_j are derived.     

连云港市海洋经济可持续发展战略研究

根据江苏省委、省政府的"海上苏东"发展战略,对连云港市的海洋经济可持续发展问题进行了系统的研究。结合连云港市特定的地理位置和区位优势,明确指出实施可持续发展战略是连云港市发展海洋经济的必然选择,在此基础上详细地对连云港现有海洋经济发展的状况和拥有的海洋资源、海洋产业基础、海洋环境及海洋科技条件,以及制约其海洋经济可持续发展的因素进行了分析,结合分析提出了强化政府宏观调控、保护海洋环境、合理开发海洋资源、大力实施"科技兴海"等一系列实施可持续发展战略的措施。