692 research outputs found

    Promoting interactivity and engagement in tertiary STEM education using technology

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    Change In The Indian Accounting Profession: Three Studies Related To The Entry Of The Big Four Accounting Firms In India

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    This dissertation focuses on the globalization of audit markets. In particular, this dissertation is studying the entry of the Big Four accounting firms into India post-economic and political reforms of the early 1990s. The dissertation is comprised of three separate, but related studies. Each study appeals to prior research in accounting and related disciplines to examine the entry of the Big Four accounting firms in India. The first study appeals to audit market and economic research on incumbent pricing to examine ways in which local accounting firms in India adapted to the competition introduced by the Big Four accounting firms. The second study is an account of the change in the organizational field of the Indian accounting profession caused by the entry of the multinational accounting firms from 1990 to 2005 from a social constructionist perspective using the model of nonisomorphic change. The third study examines the change in the Indian accounting profession from 1990 to 2005 caused by the entry of the Big Four accounting firms in India from a critical perspective. It appeals to the theories of globalization to examine the change. Taken together, these studies attempt to provide the Big Four accounting firms useful information about the pricing strategies likely to be faced by them from local accounting firms in a new market, provide insights into the multiple roles played by professional associations in the process of radical change in the organizational field, and emphasize that globalization of accounting markets has not been accompanied by a level playing field for the local accounting profession in the globalized markets

    Methods for Efficient and Accurate Discovery of Services

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    With an increasing number of services developed and offered in an enterprise setting or the Web, users can hardly verify their requirements manually in order to find appropriate services. In this thesis, we develop a method to discover semantically described services. We exploit comprehensive service and request descriptions such that a wide variety of use cases can be supported. In our discovery method, we compute the matchmaking decision by employing an efficient model checking technique

    Challenges in impact evaluation of development interventions: opportunities and limitations for randomized experiments

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    In recent years debates on as well as funding of impact evaluations of development interventions have flourished. Unfortunately, controversy regarding the promotion and application of randomized experiments (RE) has led to a sense of polarization in the development policy and evaluation community. As some proponents claim epistemological supremacy of REs (with respect to attribution) the counter reaction among others has been rejection. Needless to say, such extreme positions are counterproductive to reaching a goal that is commonly endorsed: to learn more about what works and why in development. This paper discusses the prospects and limitations of REs from the perspective of three categories of challenges in impact evaluation: delimitation and scope, attribution versus explanation, and implementation challenges. The implicit lesson is twofold. First of all, the question ‘to randomize or not to randomize’ is overrated in the current debate. Limitations in scope, applicability as well as implementation will necessarily restrict the use of REs in development impact evaluation. There is a risk that the current popularity of REs in certain research and policy circles might lead to a backlash as too high expectations of REs may quicken its demise. More importantly, given the nature and scope of the challenges discussed in the paper, more energy should be devoted to developing and testing ‘rigorous’ mixed method approaches within a framework of theory-driven evaluation.

    Perpetual requirements engineering

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    This dissertation attempts to make a contribution within the fields of distributed systems, security, and formal verification. We provide a way to formally assess the impact of a given change in three different contexts. We have developed a logic based on Lewis’s Counterfactual Logic. First we show how our approach is applied to a standard sequential programming setting. Then, we show how a modified version of the logic can be used in the context of reactive systems and sensor networks. Last but not least we show how this logic can be used in the context of security systems. Traditionally, change impact analysis has been viewed as an area in traditional software engineering. Software artifacts (source code, usually) are modified in response to a change in user requirements. Aside from making sure that the changes are inherently correct (testing and verification), programmers (software engineers) need to make sure that the introduced changes are coherent with those parts of the systems that were not affected by the artifact modification. The latter is generally achieved by establishing a dependency relation between software artifacts. In rough lines, the process of change management consists of projecting the transitive closure of the this dependency relation based on the set of artifacts that have actually changed and assessing how the related artifacts changed. The latter description of the traditional change management process generally occurs after the affected artifacts are changed. Undesired secondary effects are usually found during the testing phase after the changes have been incorporated. In cases when there is certain level of criticality, there is always a division between production and development environments. Change management (either automatic, tool driven, or completely manually done) can introduce extraneous defects into any of the changed software life-cycle artifacts. The testing phase tries to eradicate a relatively large portion of the undesired defects introduced by change. However, traditional testing techniques are limited by their coverage strength. Therefore, even when maximum coverage is guaranteed there is always the non-zero probability of having secondary effects prior to a change

    SAGA: A project to automate the management of software production systems

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    The Software Automation, Generation and Administration (SAGA) project is investigating the design and construction of practical software engineering environments for developing and maintaining aerospace systems and applications software. The research includes the practical organization of the software lifecycle, configuration management, software requirements specifications, executable specifications, design methodologies, programming, verification, validation and testing, version control, maintenance, the reuse of software, software libraries, documentation, and automated management

    The proceedings of the first international symposium on Visual Formal Methods VFM'99, Eindhoven, August 23rd, 1989

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    Insights from Complexity: A Study of the Implementation of a District-Wide Literacy Initiative through the Lens of Complex Systems Theory

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    Complexity Theory provides unique insights into the implementation and operations of a district literacy initiative. The successful and unsuccessful structures of the literacy initiative are examined through a complexity lens in order to gain insight into the relationships between elements of a complex system and its processes operating within a “top-down” educational directive and the resulting “bottom-up” resistance. This qualitative study uses a phenomenological approach to advance complex systems theory. This allows a multi-dimensional exploration of the fundamental attributes of the district initiative, its processes and the relationships within those processes. The literacy initiative in a large urban school district is considered from the experiences of members at every level of the system. Intricate interactions of the participants within the system are explored through the lens of complexity in order to gain an understanding for future implementation of literacy initiatives. For the purpose of the research, the district, the classroom, the faculty, the students, and their learning are considered by the study to be components of a complex adaptive system, as well as Complex Adaptive Systems in and of themselves. The study of the interconnectedness among these agents illuminates the activities and structures within the system design that facilitate or hinder meaningful change for the system
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