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Interests of companies in the sustainability-related communication have risen considerably in recent years. This paper focuses on the current state of sustainability-related reporting in chemical industry companies registered in the Association of Chemical Industry in the Czech Republic. It deals with the form and the content of reporting, the importance of different stakeholders in this process as well as benefits of the sustainability-related communication and its impacts on competitiveness of the company. This paper summarizes the results of a research executed in the year 2014. The results of the research showed that chemical industry companies were aware of the significance of sustainability-related communication and they utilized various types of sustainability-related reports for this communication. Companies prefer to report on the environmental and social aspects of their activities primarily in their annual reports, or they issue separate environmental reports. The research verified the relationship between the sustainability-related communication and competitiveness. A suitable established high quality system of communication that provides sufficient information and meets the information requirements of the key stakeholders may significantly contribute to reputation improvement, to increased attractiveness of the company as an employer and thereby to maintain, to improve respectively, the level of a company's competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, in the Cardiff model (Fawcett, 2000, 2008, 2011, forthcoming a, forthcoming b), we explore the transitivity system of communication processes in the economic media discourse in Spanish. In the Cardiff Grammar, verbal processes are conceived as a subset of mental processes of cognition and they have a configuration of three participant roles: Agent + Affected- Cognizant + Phenomenon. The participant role Agent gives information or knowledge to an Affected who, thereafter, becomes Cognizant, and so comes to know of some Phenomenon. It is assumed that these three roles are inherent in this process type, i.e., they are required at the level of meaning, even if they are covert and sometimes unrealized at the level of form (Fawcett, in preparation a, in preparation b). In this paper, we analyze a subset (50 texts) of a corpus called DIDIECO (Economic Media Discourse), built according to the principles of Corpus Linguistics (Biber, 1993; McEnery & Wilson, 2001; Parodi, 2010). In order to annotate the corpus, syntactic and semantic analysis were made, applying verification tests (Fawcett, 2011) for participants roles. Our main purposes are: (i) distinguish criteria to identify members of the class "communication process"; (ii) determine the frequency of instantiation of each verb in this kind of discourse; (iii) extend in delicacy the system network proposed by Fawcett, based on the concept of "lexis as most delicate grammar" (Halliday, 1961), and (iv) consider the diversity of verbs that realize communi- cation processes in the light of the discourse in which they are inserted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust is fragile. It is hard to build but easy to destroy. In this paper, we explore the fragility of trust in a stylized laboratory environment. We ask whether transgression outside a direct send-and-return relationship destroys trust and, if so, whether a competition against outsiders or an apology for misdeeds helps restore it. We find that transgression significantly reduces trust and that the broken trust can be greatly restored by group competition. Communication via an apology, impersonal or not, has an insignificant impact. By contrast, offering explanations for misbehavior is as effective as group competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few years, a large variety of IoT applications has been witnessed by fast proliferation of IoT devices (e.g., environment surveillance devices, wearable devices, city-wide NB-IoT devices). However, launching data collection from these mass IoT devices raises a challenge due to limited computation, storage, bandwidth, and energy support. Existing solutions either rely on traditional data gathering methods by relaying data from each node to the sink, which keep data unaltered but suffering from costly communication, or tackle the spacial data in a proper basis to compress effectively in order to reduce the magnitude of data to be collected, which implicitly assumes the sparsity of the data and inevitably may result in a poor data recovery on account of the risk of sparsity violation.Note that these data collection approaches focus on either the fidelity or the magnitude of data, which can solve either problem well but never both simultaneously. This paper presents a new attempt to tackle both problems at the same time from theoretical design to practical experiments and validate in real environmental datasets. Specifically, we exploit data correlation at both temporal and spatial domains, then provide a cross-domain basis to collect data and a low-rank matrix recovery design to recover the data. To evaluate our method, we conduct extensive experimental study with real datasets. The results indicate that the recovered data generally achieve SNR 10 times (10 db) better than compressive sensing method, while the communication cost is kept the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) comprises a number of sensor nodes and the portable mobile device such as smartphone. It is used to monitor the physical condition and provide a reliable healthcare system. Utilizing the wireless communication network, sensor nodes collect the physiological data of one patient to the portable mobile device and the latter analyzes and transmits them to the application providers. Therefore, the personal data confidentiality and user privacy are cores of WBANs. Recently, Shen et al. presented a multi-layer authentication protocol for WBANs, which is lightweight and much easier to implement. However, we observe that their authentication between sensor nodes and the portable mobile device could ensure the forward security property only when the sensor nodes are changed (add or delete). When the sensor nodes are constant, the security property is not satisfied. Meanwhile, the authentication between the portable mobile device and application provider is prone to mutual impersonation attack, so the critical goal of mutual authentication can not be achieved. In this paper, an improved two-layer authentication scheme is proposed to remove the flaws. The analysis shows that our method is more secure and could withstand various attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]