University accounting and business curricula on sustainability: Perceptions of undergraduate students

The challenge to embed sustainability in the formal curriculum has been troublesome for accounting academics. This study investigates sustainability in the accounting curriculum at a regional university in New Zealand. Sustainability practices are becoming an important issue given that many business activity problems have arisen over the years, unsustainable practices have resulted in societal and environmental damages. There has been an increasing recognition of the need for sustainability teaching in tertiary education. Education plays an important role in equipping graduates with the relevant sustainability skills to make informed decisions towards a more sustainable world. There is a need to examine how students respond to the teaching of sustainability in their courses. This will allow education providers to find out how student perceive sustainability education, and make changes to improve the teaching of sustainability. Literatures have claimed that students have positive attitudes towards sustainability; however, this does not mean that students are familiar with the concept of sustainability. There are business students who seem to perceive the study of sustainability to be less important when compared to other subjects. There still seems to be a shortage of research done on how students perceive sustainability. This paper contributes to the discussion needed to understand what sustainability skills are required by managers and how tertiary education programs in accounting may need to incorporate sustainability. The role of accounting schools in leading and managing change towards sustainability must be further informed

Object-oriented cohesion as a surrogate of software comprehension: An empirical study

The concept of software cohesion in both the procedural and object-oriented paradigm is well known and documented. What is not so well known or documented is the perception of what empirically constitutes a cohesive 'unit' by software engineers. In this paper, we describe an empirical investigation using object-oriented (OO) classes as a basis. Twenty-four subjects (drawn from IT experienced and IT inexperienced groups) were asked to rate ten classes sampled from two industrial systems in terms of their overall cohesiveness; a class environment was used to carry out the study. Four key results were observed. Firstly, class size (when expressed in terms of number of methods) did not tend to influence the perception of cohesion by any subjects. Secondly, well-commented classes were rated most highly amongst both IT experienced and inexperienced subjects. Thirdly, the empirical study suggests that cohesion comprises a combination of various class factors including low coupling, small numbers of attributes and well-commented methods, rather than any single, individual class feature per se. Finally, the research supports the view that cohesion is a subjective concept reflecting a cognitive combination of class features; as such it is a surrogate for class comprehension

The use of Web Ontology Language (OWL) to Combine Extant Controlled Vocabularies in Biodiversity Informatics Appears Redundant

Implementation of PESI requires data to be combined from multiple source databases. Some of the shared fields in the source databases used different controlled vocabularies of terms. OWL DL was investigated as a mechanism to build an extensible, shared ontology of species occurrence terms that permitted the source database to continue using and extending their own vocabularies whilst formally mapping to a more generic shared vocabulary. The merits of this approach were explored and it was concluded that the building of such a complex mapping ontology probably wasn't worthwhile. The level of semantic complexity involved outweighed the costs of simply imposing a flat list of well defined terms onto data suppliers. The main problem with exiting vocabularies appear to be the overloading of terms. A candidate list of terms was proposed

Studienlandschaft Schwingbachtal: an out-door full-scale learning tool newly equipped with augmented reality

This paper addresses education and communication in hydrology and geosciences. Many approaches can be used, such as the well-known seminars, modelling exercises and practical field work but out-door learning in our discipline is a must, and this paper focuses on the recent development of a new out-door learning tool at the landscape scale. To facilitate improved teaching and hands-on experience, we designed the Studienlandschaft Schwingbachtal. Equipped with field instrumentation, education trails, and geocache, we now implemented an augmented reality App, adding virtual teaching objects on the real landscape. The App development is detailed, to serve as methodology for people wishing to implement such a tool. The resulting application, namely the Schwingbachtal App, is described as an example. We conclude that such an App is useful for communication and education purposes, making learning pleasant, and offering personalized options

Designing and Deploying Online Field Experiments

Online experiments are widely used to compare specific design alternatives, but they can also be used to produce generalizable knowledge and inform strategic decision making. Doing so often requires sophisticated experimental designs, iterative refinement, and careful logging and analysis. Few tools exist that support these needs. We thus introduce a language for online field experiments called PlanOut. PlanOut separates experimental design from application code, allowing the experimenter to concisely describe experimental designs, whether common "A/B tests" and factorial designs, or more complex designs involving conditional logic or multiple experimental units. These latter designs are often useful for understanding causal mechanisms involved in user behaviors. We demonstrate how experiments from the literature can be implemented in PlanOut, and describe two large field experiments conducted on Facebook with PlanOut. For common scenarios in which experiments are run iteratively and in parallel, we introduce a namespaced management system that encourages sound experimental practice.Comment: Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web, 283-29

Who's Feeding the Kids Online? Digital food marketing to children in Ireland: Advertisers’ tactics, children’s exposure and parents’ awareness

Obesity in children and young people is a global health challenge. The widespread marketing of unhealthy foods (food and non-alcoholic drinks high in fat, sugar and salt, or HFSS) plays a causal role in unhealthy eating and obesity. Food and eating is typically presented as an issue of ‘choice’. However, this disregards the fact that current obesogenic environments use many tactics to promote unhealthy foods, interfering with people’s ability to make good choices. This study examined: 1. Content appealing to children and young people on websites of top food and drink retail brands in Ireland 2. Marketing techniques on Facebook: Pages of food brands that have the highest reach among young teens, the first such study of which we are aware 3. Parents’ awareness of digital food marketing to their children in an online, two-stage survey with digital marketing examples and open-ended response options