Green and sustainable finance, corporate social responsibility and financial and non-financial performance are attracting widespread interest due to the challenging times that the business ...environment is currently facing. Moreover, green and sustainable finance, corporate social responsibility, and intellectual and human capital have become central issues in measuring organizations' success, competitive advantage and influence on the marketplace. This scientific paper seeks to address the relationship between corporate social responsibility, intellectual capital and performance, providing valuable insights and relevant evidence from a Romanian business environment. The questionnaire method was used for the targeted research objectives, which referred to: (a) Romanian organizations and local community understanding of green and sustainable finance, corporate social responsibility and intellectual capital; (b) corporate social responsibility actions taken by Romanian organizations and the local community; (c) main drivers of corporate social responsibility and intellectual capital in Romanian organizations; and (d) ways to enhance financial and non-financial performance of Romanian organizations with the aid of corporate social responsibility and intellectual capital. The findings support the idea of a strong relationship between corporate social responsibility, intellectual capital and performance in the Romanian business environment. Our work shows that, broadly speaking, Romanian entities operate on a socially responsible level, being aware of the importance and the advantages brought by both corporate social responsibility and intellectual capital when it comes to enhancing profit, productivity and performance. Our results are highly encouraging and may be validated by a larger sample size.
In order to identify the factors that have influenced the Romanian companies’ level of compliance required by the Directive 2013/34/EU with respect to publishing, alongside the annual financial ...statements for 2017, a report containing non-financial information regarding environmental, social, and personal aspects, and business ethics, the following steps were taken in our groundbreaking study: firstly, we analyzed whether there are statistical associations between the level of compliance and the legal forms of organization, the forms of ownership of capital, the branch of activity, the number of employees, the turnover, and the company location; secondly, we evaluated the meaning and intensity of these associations with the help of non-parametric correlation coefficients; thirdly, we identified and presented the economic and social causes of the results obtained; and fourthly, we proposed measures that can contribute to increasing the degree of compliance. What is more, this rigorous scientific work highlights the need to enhance corporate governance and corporate social responsibility in order to create an appropriate balance between sustainability, competitiveness, productivity, and businesses’ financial and non-financial performance, while taking into consideration the benefits brought by the tangible value of businesses (such as, cash flow and earnings) as well as the intangible value of businesses (such as, brand, customer experience, intellectual capital, organizational culture and reputation).
An investigation of the constitutional adaptive gelation process of chitosan/cinnamaldehyde (C/Cy) dynagels is reported. These gels generate timely variant macroscopic organization across extended ...scales. In the first stage, imine‐bond formation takes place “in‐water” and generates low‐ordered hydrogels. The progressive formation of imine bonds further induces “out‐of‐water” increased reactivity within interdigitated hydrophobic self‐assembled layers of Cy, with a protecting environmental effect against hydrolysis and that leads to the stabilization of the imine bonds. The hydrophobic swelling due to Cy layers at the interfaces reaches a critical step when lamellar self‐organized hybrids are generated (24 hours). This induces an important restructuration of the hydrogels on the micrometric scale, thus resulting in the formation of highly ordered microporous xerogel morphologies of high potential interest for chemical separations, drug delivery, and sensors.
Dynamic constitutional gelation of chitosan/cinnamaldehyde (C/Cy) generates variant‐adaptive macroscopic organization across extended scales (see figure). The resulting highly ordered microporous xerogel morphologies are of high potential interest for chemical separation, drug delivery, and sensors.
ABSTRACT
The disc structure of the Milky Way is marked by a chemical dichotomy, with high-α and low-α abundance sequences, traditionally identified with the geometric thick and thin discs. This ...identification is aided by the old ages of the high-α stars, and lower average ages of the low-α ones. Recent large-scale surveys such as APOGEE have provided a wealth of data on this chemical structure, including showing that an identification of chemical and geometric thick discs is not exact, but the origin of the chemical dichotomy has remained unclear. Here we demonstrate that a dichotomy arises naturally if the early gas-rich disc fragments, leading to some fraction of the star formation occuring in clumps of the type observed in high-redshift galaxies. These clumps have high star formation rate density. They therefore enrich rapidly, moving from the low-α to the high-α sequence, while more distributed star formation produces the low-α sequence. We demonstrate that this model produces a chemically defined thick disc that has many of the properties of the Milky Way’s thick disc. Because clump formation is common in high-redshift galaxies, we predict that chemical bimodalities are common in massive galaxies.
In this study the weathering behavior of lime wood (Tillia cordata Mill.) has been examined using FT-IR and 2D IR correlation spectroscopy, which evidenced chemical changes induced by exposure to ...weathering conditions. It was showed that lignin is most sensitive component to the photodegradation processes as indicated by considerable decreases in the intensities of the characteristic aromatic lignin band at 1505cm−1 and other associated bands.
By 2D correlation spectroscopy has been demonstrated that the moment of CO from carboxyl and acetyl groups in hemicelluloses is changing first, followed by the CC of aromatic skeletal, CO in non-conjugated ketones, carboxyl groups and lactones, absorbed O–H and conjugated C–O groups in quinones.
The carbonyl formation corresponded well with lignin degradation, indicating a close relationship between them. Comparing the rate of carbonyl formation and lignin decay clearly showed that the former is remarkably higher than the latter, indicating the formation of carbonyl bands at 1738cm−1 probably resulted from not only lignin oxidation but also from reactions occurring in other components of the wood. Quinine formation is combined with the decay of aromatic structures and the formation of conjugated carbonyl groups.
We present single-Sérsic two-dimensional (2D) model fits to 167 600 galaxies modelled independently in the ugrizYJHK bandpasses using reprocessed Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release Seven (SDSS ...DR7) and UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey Large Area Survey imaging data available from the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) data base. In order to facilitate this study we developed Structural Investigation of Galaxies via Model Analysis (sigma), an r wrapper around several contemporary astronomy software packages including source extractor, psf extractor and galfit 3. sigma produces realistic 2D model fits to galaxies, employing automatic adaptive background subtraction and empirical point spread function measurements on the fly for each galaxy in GAMA. Using these results, we define a common coverage area across the three GAMA regions containing 138 269 galaxies. We provide Sérsic magnitudes truncated at 10r
e which show good agreement with SDSS Petrosian and GAMA photometry for low Sérsic index systems (n < 4), and much improved photometry for high Sérsic index systems (n > 4), recovering as much as Δm= 0.5 mag in the r band. We employ a K-band Sérsic index/u−r colour relation to delineate the massive (n > ∼2) early-type galaxies (ETGs) from the late-type galaxies (LTGs). The mean Sérsic index of these ETGs shows a smooth variation with wavelength, increasing by 30 per cent from g through K. LTGs exhibit a more extreme change in Sérsic index, increasing by 52 per cent across the same range. In addition, ETGs and LTGs exhibit a 38 and 25 per cent decrease, respectively, in half-light radius from g through K. These trends are shown to arise due to the effects of dust attenuation and stellar population/metallicity gradients within galaxy populations.
Biobased materials present a great interest due to their properties and biodegradability. Cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) nanofiller, in various amounts, was incorporated into a carboxymethyl cellulose ...(CMC)–glycerol (G) matrix in order to obtain nanocomposite systems with improved properties. The effect of the nanofiller on the structural features was investigated by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, principal component analysis (PCA), two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy (2D-COS), and X-ray diffraction, while the sorption properties were evaluated by water vapor isotherms using the gravimetric method coupled with infrared spectroscopy. We observed the presence of the interactions taking place between the CMC-G and CNC involving the hydroxyl and carboxylate groups, which decreased the number of water sorption sites. Following this, the moisture content in the nanocomposite films decreased with the increase in the amount of CNC. Moreover, the bands associated to water molecules presented different wavenumber values separated for CMC-G and CNC components.
ABSTRACT
A quantitative derivation of the intrinsic properties of galaxies related to their fundamental building blocks, gas, dust, and stars is essential for our understanding of galaxy evolution. A ...fully self-consistent derivation of these properties can be achieved with radiative transfer (RT) methods that are constrained by panchromatic imaging observations. Here, we present an axi-symmetric RT model of the UV-optical-FIR/submm spectral and spatial energy distribution of the face-on spiral galaxy M51. The model reproduces reasonably well the azimuthally averaged radial profiles derived from the imaging data available for this galaxy, from GALEX, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, 2MASS, Spitzer, and Herschel. We model the galaxy with three distinct morphological components: a bulge, an inner disc, and a main disc. We derive the length parameters of the stellar emissivity and of the dust distribution. We also derive the intrinsic global and spatially resolved parameters of M51. We find a faint ‘outer disc’ bridging M51 with its companion galaxy M51b. Finally, we present and discuss an alternative model, with dust properties that change within the galaxy.
ABSTRACT
We obtained an axisymmetric model for the large-scale distribution of stars and dust in the Milky Way (MW) using a radiative transfer code that can account for the existing near-infrared ...(NIR)/mid-infrared/submm all-sky emission maps of our Galaxy. We find that the MW has a star-formation rate of ${\rm SFR}=1.25\pm 0.2\, {\rm M}_{\odot }$ yr−1, a stellar mass $M_{*}=(4.9\pm 0.3)\times 10^{10}\, {\rm M}_{\odot }$, and a specific SFR that is relatively constant with radius (except for the inner 1 kpc). We identified an inner radius Rin = 4.5 kpc beyond which the stellar emissivity and dust distribution fall exponentially. For R < Rin the emissivities fall linearly towards the centre. The old stellar populations in the disc have an exponential scale length that increases monotonically from $h_{\rm s}^{\rm disc}(K)=2.2\pm 0.6$ kpc in the NIR, to $h_{\rm s}^{\rm disc}(B)=3.2\pm 0.9$ kpc at the shorter optical bands, and a scale height that varies with radial distance, from $z_{\rm s}^{\rm disc}(0) =140\pm 20$ pc in the centre to $z_{\rm s}^{\rm disc}(R_{\odot }) =300\pm 20$ pc at the solar radius. The young stellar populations have a scale length of $h_{\rm s}^{\rm tdisc}=3.2\pm 0.9$ kpc and a scale height that varies from $z_{\rm s}^{\rm tdisc}(0)=50\pm 10$ pc in the centre to $z_{\rm s}^{\rm tdisc}(R_{\odot })=90\pm 10$ pc at the solar radius. We discovered an inner stellar disc within the central 4.5 kpc, which we associate with the extended long bar of the MW. Most of the obscured star formation happens within this inner thin disc. The diffuse dust is mainly distributed in a disc with scale length $h_{\rm d}^{\rm disc}=5.2\pm 0.8$ kpc and scale height $z_{\rm d}^{\rm disc}=0.14\pm 0.02$ kpc. We give the first derivation of the MW attenuation curve and present it as a functional fit to the model data. We find the MW to lie in the Green Valley of the main sequence relation for spiral galaxies.
In this paper, we demonstrate a new method for fitting galaxy profiles which makes use of the full multiwavelength data provided by modern large optical-near-infrared imaging surveys. We present a ...new version of galapagos, which utilizes a recently developed multiwavelength version of galfit, and enables the automated measurement of wavelength-dependent Sérsic profile parameters for very large samples of galaxies. Our new technique is extensively tested to assess the reliability of both pieces of software, galfit and galapagos on both real ugrizY JHK imaging data from the Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey and simulated data made to the same specifications. We find that fitting galaxy light profiles with multiwavelength data increases the stability and accuracy of the measured parameters, and hence produces more complete and meaningful multiwavelength photometry than has been available previously. The improvement is particularly significant for magnitudes in low-S/N bands and for structural parameters like half-light radius r
e and Sérsic index n for which a prior is used by constraining these parameters to a polynomial as a function of wavelength. This allows the fitting routines to push the magnitude of galaxies for which sensible values can be derived to fainter limits. The technique utilizes a smooth transition of galaxy parameters with wavelength, creating more physically meaningful transitions than single-band fitting and allows accurate interpolation between passbands, perfect for derivation of rest-frame values.
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