2015 Best Paper Award for Excellence

Papeers are: R. J. Chambers and the AICPA’s Postulates and Principles Controversy: A Case of Vicarious Action; Earliest Known Treatise on Double Entry Bookkeeping by Marino de Raphaeli;Symbolic Versus Substantive Regulatory Disclosure Requirements: The Case of Ford Motor Company in the Early 1900

Coz: Finding Code that Counts with Causal Profiling

Improving performance is a central concern for software developers. To locate optimization opportunities, developers rely on software profilers. However, these profilers only report where programs spent their time: optimizing that code may have no impact on performance. Past profilers thus both waste developer time and make it difficult for them to uncover significant optimization opportunities. This paper introduces causal profiling. Unlike past profiling approaches, causal profiling indicates exactly where programmers should focus their optimization efforts, and quantifies their potential impact. Causal profiling works by running performance experiments during program execution. Each experiment calculates the impact of any potential optimization by virtually speeding up code: inserting pauses that slow down all other code running concurrently. The key insight is that this slowdown has the same relative effect as running that line faster, thus "virtually" speeding it up. We present Coz, a causal profiler, which we evaluate on a range of highly-tuned applications: Memcached, SQLite, and the PARSEC benchmark suite. Coz identifies previously unknown optimization opportunities that are both significant and targeted. Guided by Coz, we improve the performance of Memcached by 9%, SQLite by 25%, and accelerate six PARSEC applications by as much as 68%; in most cases, these optimizations involve modifying under 10 lines of code.Comment: Published at SOSP 2015 (Best Paper Award

Yet Another Puzzle of Ground

We show that any predicational theory of partial ground that extends a standard theory of syntax and that proves some commonly accepted principles for partial ground is inconsistent. We suggest a way to obtain a consistent predicational theory of ground

Massimo Sargiacomo Receives 2016 Hourglass Award

Massimo Sargiacomo is a tenured Professor of Accounting and Public Management in the Department of Management and Business Administration at the University G.d\u27Annunzio of Chieti-Pescara where he has also been sole Vice-Rector to Administration and Management, President of the Bachelor Degree Undergraduate Course on Economics and Management, President of the Research Committee of the Faculty of the Managerial Sciences, as well as of the Department of Management and Business Administration, and is still Director of the Phd Programme in Accounting, Management and Business Economics . In addition to his current roles, he has active research collaborations with several colleagues at diverse universities, for example: Edinburgh Business School and Toronto Schulich School of Business

Variable-Angle Phase-Shifted PWM for Multilevel Three-Cell Cascaded H-bridge Converters

Multilevel cascaded H-bridge converters have become a mature technology for applications where high-power medium ac voltages are required. Normal operation of multilevel cascaded H-bridge converters assumes that all power cells have the same dc voltage, and each power cell generates the same voltage averaged over a sampling period using a conventional phase-shifted pulse width modulation (PWM) technique. However, this modulation method does not achieve good results under unbalanced operation per H-bridge in the power converter, which may happen in grid-connected applications such as photovoltaic or battery energy storage systems. In the paper, a simplified mathematical analysis of the phase-shifted PWM technique is presented. In addition, a modification of this conventional modulation method using variable shift angles between the power cells is introduced. This modification leads to the elimination of harmonic distortion of low-order harmonics due to the switching (triangular carrier frequency and its multiples) even under unbalanced operational conditions. The analysis is particularized for a three-cell cascaded H-bridge converter, and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the good performance of the proposed modulation method

Accounting Historians Notebook, 2016, Vol. 39, no. 2 (October) [whole issue]

October issu

Energy-Efficient Dynamic Motion Control for Wheeled Mobile Robots Using Low Cost Resources

Mobile robotic systems have gained significant attention in human interest, where they represent such a complex interaction with challenging environments. Some applications require continuous operations, so the robots motions have to be optimized to reduce their energy consumption. In addition, total energy consumption in mobile robotic applications is one of the most important issues that has not been adequately considered. Mobile robots are limited by the amount of energy supplied by the batteries they carry where a new supply of energy while working is too expensive to be realistic. Thus, this work aiming to minimize the energy consumption of a wheeled mobile robot in dynamic environments