Purpose

The paper aims to re-interpret the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in limiting the extreme practices in earnings management (EM) by using evidence from large UK companies.

Design/methodology/approach

The study has used content analysis and disclosure index to measure the level of CSR. The authors measured EM based on discretionary accruals by using cross-sectional version of the modified Jones model.

Findings

The findings of this study reveal that companies with a higher commitment to CSR activities are less likely to manage earnings through accruals.

Originality/value

This study shed more light on the potential impact of CSR on earnings management in the context of the UK. Prior research on the impact of CSR on earnings management has used exclusively CSR scores, provided by CSR score indices. The manual measurement used in this study for CSR (disclosure index/content analysis) is considered to provide a more detailed and precise measure.

Abstract

This study examines the impact of the teachability of vocabulary learning strategies (VLSs) on Libyan EFL teachers and students at university level. It investigates the extent to which instructing language teachers in how to integrate strategic intervention into regular classes impacts upon teachers’ and students’ use, promotion of the use, and perceptions of usefulness of vocabulary learning strategies. The empirical research in this area has been very limited, and the vast majority of studies have centred around examining the influence of strategy instruction on language learners’ achievements. Bearing this in mind, the present study provides an exciting opportunity to advance knowledge of the impact of direct teaching of VLSs on EFL teachers and students alike. The findings make an important contribution to literature in the field of vocabulary learning and teaching. The study recruited 109 participants, including 13 EFL teachers from two different university levels (Year 1 and 2) and two English language faculties at the Al-jabal Al-gharbi University in the cities of Tiji and Badr. The aims were 1) to identify the current situation in terms of VLSs known, promoted or used, 2) to design a strategy training programme for teachers and students, and 3) to trial and evaluate the effectiveness of the training programme on students’ and teachers’ use, promotion, and adoption of learning strategies. To achieve the research aims, three studies were carried out and two phases of training arranged. Teachers were targeted in the first phase, which was administered by the researcher and ran for a 2-week period, with students targeted in the second phase, which was carried out by trainee teachers, with the researcher’s guidance, for 10 weeks. Data for this research were collected using a multi-method approach in the form of VLS questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, observations, and an evaluation form. The quantitative and qualitative data obtained from the instruments were triangulated to allow for a more comprehensive understanding, as well as to render reliable conclusions. Microsoft Office Excel programmes, SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science), and a qualitative content analysis were used to analyse the data gathered. The results of the study reveal that the training had a positive impact on both the teachers’ and students’ attitudes, perceptions and adoption of VLSs. What is more, teachers and students showed an increased awareness of using/promoting the use of learning strategies even when the training had finished, which in turn indicates that the impact of VLS training has been durable.

The present study was conducted to investigate the efficacy of Chenopodium album aqueous methanolic extract supplementation on the immunological and haematological indices, digestive enzyme activity and growth performance of the common carp (Cyprinus carpio). C. album was added to a basal diet at the rate of 0 (CA0), 0.01 (CA0.01), 0.05 (CA0.05) and 0.1 g kg−1 (CA0.1), and C. carpio was fed this diet for 45 days. Respiratory burst activity was significantly increased in all experimental groups on days 15 and 30 compared to the control (P < 0.05). Lysozyme activity was significantly increased over all sampling times compared to the control except in CA0.1 (P < 0.05). Myeloperoxidase activities were significantly increased in all experimental groups compared to

ABSTRACT

The essential oil of Thymus algeriensis was analyzed as a potential preservative in soft cheese. We developed a novel method to test the preserving properties of essential oil in soft cheese. Contamination incidence of Penicillium aurantiogriseum was absent after 30 d of storage at 4°C with 25 µL of essential oil added. The antimicrobial activity was tested against 8 bacteria and 8 fungi. Thymus algeriensis oil showed inhibitory activity against tested bacteria at 0.03 to 0.09 mg/mL, and bactericidal activity was achieved at 0.05 to 0.15 mg/mL. For antifungal activity, minimum inhibitory concentrations ranged between 0.01 and 0.04 mg/mL and minimum fungicidal concentrations between 0.01 and 0.04 mg/mL. Furthermore, the oil was also screened for antiradical activity using the 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl assay. The results showed that the oil was active and achieved half-maximal inhibitory activity at 0.132 mg/mL. We used gas chromatography, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry to investigate the volatile compounds from the oil. Carvacrol was identified as the main compound in the oil, represented by 80.9% of the total constituents, followed by p-cymene (7.7%).

Infertility is a worldwide health issue with high impact on the individuals involved and the society as a whole. Estimates of infertility are very important to inform social and economic policies. The aim of this systematic literature review is to estimate the prevalence of primary and secondary infertility in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and produce the overall estimate of the different indicators of infertility in MENA region. A systematic search was conducted to identify publications providing data from MENA countries. All titles and abstracts retrieved using this search strategy were managed by Endnote software, duplicates were removed and studies on animals, systematic reviews, and from non-MENA region was removed from the EndNote library. Seven electronic databases and websites were searched for relevant articles and surveys with no language or date restriction on July 2017. Data of prevalence 

Natural abundance and host plant preference of the endoparasitoids O. pallipes was studied in Ojelat region. Four host plants were studied [tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) pepper (Capsicum annuum) eggplant (Solanum melongena) and kidney bean (Phaseolus vulgaris)] The parasitoids showed high populations in April and May that kept the populations of the serpentine leafminer L. trifolii at low densities till the end of the season on all studied host plants. O. pallipes recorded two peaks of abundance on the four studied host plants recording (19, and 24 individuals/ 50 infested leaflets) on tomatoes, (18, and 16 individuals/ 50 infested leaflets) on pepper, (26 and 20 individuals/ 50 infested leaflets) on eggplant and (32, 26 individuals/ 50 infested leaflets) on kidney bean during the season of the study. O. pallipes showed a relatively low preference towards kidney bean and eggplant compared with pepper and tomatoes.

Hadoop has been developed as a platform solution for processing a large scale of data in parallel for different applications in Cloud com-puting. A Hadoop system can be characterized based on three main factors: cluster, workload, and user. Each of these factors can be described in heterogeneous environment, which reflects the heterogeneity degree of the Hadoop system. This paper investigates the effect of heterogeneity in each of these factors on the performance of Hadoop for different schedulers. Three schedulers which consider differ-ent levels of Hadoop heterogeneity are used for the analysis: FIFO, Fair sharing, and COSHH (Classification and Optimization based Scheduler for Heterogeneous Hadoop). Performance issues are introduced for Hadoop schedulers and comparative performance analysis between different cases of jobs submission. These jobs are processed in heterogeneous data environments and, under fixed or reconfigu-rable slot between map and reduce tasks for Hadoop MapReduce java programming clustering model. The results showed that when assigning tunable knob between map and reduce tasks under certain scheduler like FIFO algorithm, the performance enhanced about 81.42% especially in cases of heterogeneity environment where the workload is decreased significantly and the utilization of computa-tional resources in increased obviously.