Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to assess to what extent the loss of the ISO 9001 certification affects the decertified firms’ financial performance.
Design/methodology/approach
– Using ...standard event study methods, this paper matches a sample of 143 Portuguese companies that lost their ISO 9001 certification with similar non-event counterpart firms (according to return-on-assets (ROA) and size) and compares the performance of these two groups of firms using financial data collected from the AMADEUS database.
Findings
– Results show no statistical significant differences in the financial performance (as measured by ROA, return-on-sales (ROS) and sales growth) between companies that lost their ISO 9001 certification and their matched firms. Although the literature suggests that certification improves firms’ performance and that the benefits of certification may last over long periods of time, this paper’s results suggest that, after decertification, companies do not exhibit over or underperformance in their operations vis-à-vis comparable firms that do not undergo the same event.
Originality/value
– As far as the authors are aware, this is the first study assessing the impact of ISO 9001 certificate withdrawal on the decertified firms’ financial performance.
The Japanese fisheries, aquaculture, and seafood sectors have been undergoing continuous transformation affected by economic downturns due to the new coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Analyses of the ...COVID-19 impacts on fishery, aquaculture and seafood sectors in six sites in different parts of Japan exhibit that the impacts of the economic recession due to the pandemic differ between sectors, species, and local communities. The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic were multiplied by other national and international policy changes as well as other factors such as fish stock depletion and the possible relocation of fish stocks due to sea water temperature change. Stagnating demand for fisheries may give incentives to reinforce conservation and introduce new schemes aimed at seafood sustainability. There can be, however, a possible driver for a vicious cycle that induces overfishing and fish price deterioration. Stakeholder ingenuity and policy innovation are required to achieve sustainable fisheries.
Digital certificates are frequently used to secure communications between users and web servers. Critical to the Web's PKI is the secure validation of digital certificates. Nonetheless, certificate ...validation itself is complex and error-prone. Moreover, it is also undermined by particular constraints of mobile browsers. However, these issues have long been overlooked. In this article, we undertook the first systematic and large-scale study of the certificate validation mechanism within popular mobile browsers to highlight the necessity of reassessing it among all released browsers. To this end, we first compile a comprehensive test suite to identify security flaws in certificate validation from various aspects. By designing and implementing a generic, automated testing pipeline, we effectively evaluate 30 popular browsers on two mobile OS versions and compare them with five representative desktop browsers. We found the latest mobile browsers Accept as many as 33.2% invalid certificates and Reject merely 5.4% invalid ones on average, leaving the majority of them to be decided by users who usually have little expertise. Our findings shed light on the severity and inconsistency of certificate validation flaws across mobile browsers, which are likely to expose users to MITM attacks, spoofing attacks, and so forth.
Professionals voice confusion between the distinctions of board certification and educational certificate courses, and note barriers and motivators in obtaining national anticoagulation board ...certification. To identify barriers vs. motivators in obtaining board certification and detail the differences in board certification and educational certificate courses, an IRB-approved electronic survey was sent to professionals completing the University of Southern Indiana (USI) Anticoagulation Therapy educational certificate course (n = 491) and existing Certified Anticoagulation Care Providers (CACP, n = 622). A total of 1049 surveys were delivered successfully, with a 26% response rate (USI = 62, CACP = 211.) Respondents identified as a nurse (n = 52, 19%), advanced practice nurse (n = 14, 5.1%), pharmacist (n = 206, 75.5%) or physician (n = 5, 1.8%). Overall, respondents indicated board certification via CACP has significant impact on patient/organizational outcomes (n = 118, 43.2%). Top motivators for board certification include personal accomplishment (n = 147, 53%) and professional growth (n = 139, 50.9%). Top barriers include lack of time to prepare (n = 102, 37.3%,) board certification exam cost (n = 95, 34.8%), and for CACP recertification, and requirement to recertify by examination (n = 74, 35.1%). Of board-certified respondents, 45.4% indicated they were not employed at an Anticoagulation Center of Excellence (ACE), 34.8% employed at an ACE and 16.8% were unsure of ACE status. Narrative comments were obtained and evaluated. Significant personal and professional barriers exist in completing, and subsequently maintaining, board certification in anticoagulation. This offers great insight for NCBAP to invoke changes to support clinicians and healthcare organizations in seeking and maintaining CACP credentialing, a component of ACE attainment.
Certificate Transparency With Enhanced Privacy Kwon, Hyunsoo; Lee, Sangtae; Kim, Minjae ...
IEEE transactions on dependable and secure computing,
09/2023, Volume:
20, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Digital certificates play an important role in the authentication of communicating parties for transport layer security. Recently, however, frequent incidents such as the illegal issuance of fake ...certificates by a compromised certificate authority have raised concerns about the legacy certificate system. Certificate Transparency (CT) mitigates such issues by employing a log server to audit issued certificates publicly, making the certificate issuance and verification processes transparent. Unfortunately, the legacy CT ecosystem suffers from log server compromises and user browsing information leakage. Furthermore, the data structure for the certificate management in the legacy CT system incurs computation overhead linear to the number of registered certificates in the log. In this paper, we propose a secure CT scheme by leveraging a shared value tree (SVT), a novel log structure specifically designed to address the log server compromise and browsing information leakage problems. The verification time of SVT remains constant regardless of the number of registered certificates in the log. We analyze our scheme on the legacy CT system to demonstrate its incremental deployability, guaranteeing a smooth transition toward a more secure web ecosystem.
Currently, digital certificate systems based on blockchain have been extensively developed and adopted. However, most of them do not take into account the certificate quality. To evaluate the ...credibility of certificates issued by educational institutions, we propose a novel blockchain-based system with credit self-adjustment (BC-CS). In BC-CS, employers can provide feedback according to the performances of their employees (i.e., students) holding different certificates. Based on the feedback, BC-CS automatically adjusts the certificate credits by using our proposed credit self-adjustment algorithm. To verify the feasibility of our proposed system, a decentralized application prototype has been developed on an Ethereum network. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can fully support multi-step accreditation and automatic adjustment for certificate credit.
Non-domestic buildings contribute 20% of the UK’s annual carbon emissions. A contribution exacerbated by its ageing stock of which only 7% is considered new-build. Consequently, the government has ...set regulations to decrease the amount of energy take-up by buildings which currently favour deep energy retrofitting analysis for decision-making and demonstrating compliance. Due to the size and complexity of non-domestic buildings, identifying optimal retrofit packages can be very challenging. The need for effective decision-making has led to the wide adoption of artificial intelligence in the retrofit strategy design process. However, the vast retrofit solution space and high time-complexity of energy simulations inhibit artificial intelligence’s application. This paper presents an energy performance prediction model for non-domestic buildings supported by machine learning. The aim of the model is to provide a rapid energy performance estimation engine for assisting multi-objective optimisation of non-domestic buildings energy retrofit planning. The study lays out the process of model development from the investigation of requirements and feature extraction to the application on a case study. It employs sensitivity analysis methods to evaluate the effectiveness of the feature set in covering retrofit technologies. The machine learning model which is optimised using advanced evolutionary algorithms provide a robust and reliable tool for building analysts enabling them to meaningfully explore the expanding solution space. The model is evaluated by assessing three thousand retrofit variations of a case study building, achieving a root mean square error of 1.02 kgCO2∕m2×year equal to 1.7% of error.
•Addressed impracticality of optimisation methods in supporting deep energy retrofit.•A machine learning model to calculate non-domestic buildings’ energy performance.•Identified essential features of non-domestic buildings affecting energy performance.•TOptimised the model by tuning hyperparameters using an evolutionary algorithm.•Evaluated model performance by scoring thousands of variations in a sample building.
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