Management accounting education: is there a gap between academia and practitioner perceptions?

A mail survey was conducted of all Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand accredited Tertiary Education Institutions and 300 randomly selected New Zealand companies to ascertain the views of management accounting academics and practitioners on the contents of management accounting courses and the skills and competencies of recent graduates. The results show that practitioners placed an emphasis on traditional management accounting techniques, while academics placed an emphasis on contemporary techniques. Both groups were in agreement on the skills and characteristics required of recent graduates. An interesting finding was the emergence of negative comments on the arrogance of new graduates and an increased need for graduates to be work ready. These two aspects were not a feature of previous studies. The implications of the results are that academics cannot ignore the teaching of traditional management accounting techniques and may need to increase the coverage of the issues involved in implementing contemporary management accounting techniques

Wake in faint television meteors

The two component dustball model was used in numerical lag computation. Detached grain lag is typically less than 2 km, with expected wakes of a few hundred meters. True wake in television meteors is masked by apparent wake due to the combined effects of image persistence and blooming. To partially circumvent this problem, we modified a dual MCP intensified CID video system by addition of a rotating shutter to reduce the effective exposure time to about 2.0 ms. Preliminary observations showed that only 2 of 27 analyzed meteors displayed statistically significant wake

Combined Reconstruction and Registration of Digital Breast Tomosynthesis

Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) has the potential to en- hance breast cancer detection by reducing the confounding e ect of su- perimposed tissue associated with conventional mammography. In addi- tion the increased volumetric information should enable temporal datasets to be more accurately compared, a task that radiologists routinely apply to conventional mammograms to detect the changes associated with ma- lignancy. In this paper we address the problem of comparing DBT data by combining reconstruction of a pair of temporal volumes with their reg- istration. Using a simple test object, and DBT simulations from in vivo breast compressions imaged using MRI, we demonstrate that this com- bined reconstruction and registration approach produces improvements in both the reconstructed volumes and the estimated transformation pa- rameters when compared to performing the tasks sequentially

Searches for New Quarks and Leptons Produced in Z-Boson Decay

We have searched for events with new-particle topologies in 390 hadronic Z decays with the Mark II detector at the SLAC Linear Collider. We place 95%-confidence-level lower limits of 40.7 GeV/c^2 for the top-quark mass, 42.0 GeV/c^2 for the mass of a fourth-generation charge - 1/3 quark, and 41.3 GeV/c^2 for the mass of an unstable Dirac neutral lepton

Measurement of Z Decays into Lepton Pairs

We present measurements by the Mark II experiment of the ratios of the leptonic partial widths of the Z boson to the hadronic partial width. The results are Γ_(ee)/Γ_(had)=0.037_(-0.012^()+0.016),Γ_(µµ)/Γ_(had)=0.053-_(0.015)^(+0.020), and Γ_(ττ)/Γ_(had)=0.066_(-0.017)^(+0.021), in good agreement with the standard-model prediction of 0.048. From the average leptonic width result, Γ_(ll)/Γ_(had)=0.053_(-0.009)^(+0.010), we derive Γ_(had)=1.56_(-0.24)^(+0.28) GeV. We find for the vector coupling constants of the tau and muon v_τ^2=0.31±0.31_(-0.30)^(+0.43) and v_μ^2=0.05±0.30_(-0.23)^(+0.34)

Distribution and abundance of fish and crayfish in a Waikato stream in relation to basin area

The aim of this study was to relate the longitudinal distribution of fish and crayfish to increasing basin area and physical site characteristics in the Mangaotama Stream, Waikato region, North Island, New Zealand. Fish and crayfish were captured with two-pass removal electroshocking at 11 sites located in hill-country with pasture, native forest, and mixed land uses within the 21.6 km2 basin. Number of fish species and lineal biomass of fish increased with increasing basin area, but barriers to upstream fish migration also influenced fish distribution; only climbing and non-migratory species were present above a series of small waterfalls. Fish biomass increased in direct proportion to stream width, suggesting that fish used much of the available channel, and stream width was closely related to basin area. Conversely, the abundance of crayfish was related to the amount of edge habitat, and therefore crayfish did not increase in abundance as basin area increased. Densities of all fish species combined ranged from 17 to 459 fish 100 m-2, and biomass ranged from 14 to 206 g m-2. Eels dominated the fish assemblages, comprising 85-100% of the total biomass; longfinned eels the majority of the biomass at most sites. Despite the open access of the lower sites to introduced brown trout, native species dominated all the fish communities sampled

Uncertainty in multitask learning: joint representations for probabilistic MR-only radiotherapy planning

Multi-task neural network architectures provide a mechanism that jointly integrates information from distinct sources. It is ideal in the context of MR-only radiotherapy planning as it can jointly regress a synthetic CT (synCT) scan and segment organs-at-risk (OAR) from MRI. We propose a probabilistic multi-task network that estimates: 1) intrinsic uncertainty through a heteroscedastic noise model for spatially-adaptive task loss weighting and 2) parameter uncertainty through approximate Bayesian inference. This allows sampling of multiple segmentations and synCTs that share their network representation. We test our model on prostate cancer scans and show that it produces more accurate and consistent synCTs with a better estimation in the variance of the errors, state of the art results in OAR segmentation and a methodology for quality assurance in radiotherapy treatment planning.Comment: Early-accept at MICCAI 2018, 8 pages, 4 figure

Plant–soil feedback under drought:does history shape the future?

Plant–soil feedback (PSF) is widely recognised as a driver of plant community composition, but understanding of its response to drought remains in its infancy. Here, we provide a conceptual framework for the role of drought in PSF, considering plant traits, drought severity, and historical precipitation over ecological and evolutionary timescales. Comparing experimental studies where plants and microbes do or do not share a drought history (through co-sourcing or conditioning), we hypothesise that plants and microbes with a shared drought history experience more positive PSF under subsequent drought. To reflect real-world responses to drought, future studies need to explicitly include plant–microbial co-occurrence and potential co-adaptation and consider the precipitation history experienced by both plants and microbes.</p