Should auditors be reviewed by peers or should the state do it?

Rather than 'who', the most important question is 'how' auditors are audited, argues Lukas Löhlei

Biodiversity of Angola

This open access multi-authored book presents a 'state of the science' synthesis of knowledge on the biodiversity of Angola, based on sources in peer-reviewed journals, in books and where appropriate, unpublished official reports. The book identifies Angola as one of the most biologically diverse countries in Africa, but notes that its fauna, flora, habitats and the processes that drive the dynamics of its ecosystems are still very poorly researched and documented. This 'state of the science' synthesis is for the use of all students of Angola's biodiversity, and for those responsible for the planning, development and sustainable management of the country's living resources. The volume brings together the results of expeditions and research undertaken in Angola since the late eighteenth century, with emphasis on work conducted in the four decades since Angola's independence in 1975. The individual chapters have been written by leaders in their fields, and reviewed by peers familiar with the region

How to make best use of the intellectual output of a country? a simple approach to the design of a digital library of theses and dissertations in Indian universities

In India there are hundreds of universities and other academic institutions catering for the needs of millions of users. INFLIBNET is in an excellent position to spearhead in building such digital libraries, and in this paper I would like to propose some simple guidelines for this

Cardano as an Alternative to Cryptocurrency Investment

Cardano becomes the first cryptocurrency designed and built on scientific philosophy and academic research reviewed by peers. Market participants can assess the potential of Cardano to use it for cryptocurrency investment alternative which can be done through comparing Cardano with traditional financial asset particularly stock and gold. Purpose of the research is to know the difference between Cardano performance to stock and gold. This research used quantitative methods with a comparative and descriptive approach. Performance of each asset measured by Sharpe, Treynor and Jensen indexes from October 2017 to April 2019. Result of the research is Cardano shows good performance in comparison to other assets. It concluded that Cardano shows a significant difference in performance with LQ45 index using Sharpe, Treynor and Jensen indices. While Cardano in comparison to ANTAM gold shows that there is a significant difference in performance using the Sharpe index but no significant difference using Treynor and Jensen indeces. Keywords: cryptocurrency; Cardano; portfolio performance; Sharpe index; Treynor index; Jensen Index DOI: 10.7176/RJFA/11-16-10 Publication date:August 31st 202

Biodiversity of Angola

This open access multi-authored book presents a 'state of the science' synthesis of knowledge on the biodiversity of Angola, based on sources in peer-reviewed journals, in books and where appropriate, unpublished official reports. The book identifies Angola as one of the most biologically diverse countries in Africa, but notes that its fauna, flora, habitats and the processes that drive the dynamics of its ecosystems are still very poorly researched and documented. This 'state of the science' synthesis is for the use of all students of Angola's biodiversity, and for those responsible for the planning, development and sustainable management of the country's living resources. The volume brings together the results of expeditions and research undertaken in Angola since the late eighteenth century, with emphasis on work conducted in the four decades since Angola's independence in 1975. The individual chapters have been written by leaders in their fields, and reviewed by peers familiar with the region

Can Students Review Their Peers?: Comparison of Peer and Instructor Reviews

Having students peer review each other's exercises is a common task in modern computing classrooms. In large classes, peer review might even partly replace traditional instructor-led review -- and prior work has found some indications that the quality of peer reviews can be close to that of instructor reviews. In this work, we explore the difference between instructor and peer reviews of student-created programming exercises. One task in an introductory programming course was to have students design their own programming exercises -- including an exercise description, model solution, and test cases -- which were then reviewed by peers. After the course, we had two instructors review the same student-created exercises. We compare the scores given by the instructors and the students to analyze potential differences. Our results suggest that agreement between instructors and students as measured by inter-rater reliability is low, although differences between instructor and student review score distributions are not statistically significant. Additionally, instructors have more fluctuation in their reviews compared to students. Due to the rising popularity of peer reviews, more research is needed to examine to what extent they could complement traditional instructor-led review of exercises.Peer reviewe

Building Ethically Bounded AI

The more AI agents are deployed in scenarios with possibly unexpected situations, the more they need to be flexible, adaptive, and creative in achieving the goal we have given them. Thus, a certain level of freedom to choose the best path to the goal is inherent in making AI robust and flexible enough. At the same time, however, the pervasive deployment of AI in our life, whether AI is autonomous or collaborating with humans, raises several ethical challenges. AI agents should be aware and follow appropriate ethical principles and should thus exhibit properties such as fairness or other virtues. These ethical principles should define the boundaries of AI's freedom and creativity. However, it is still a challenge to understand how to specify and reason with ethical boundaries in AI agents and how to combine them appropriately with subjective preferences and goal specifications. Some initial attempts employ either a data-driven example-based approach for both, or a symbolic rule-based approach for both. We envision a modular approach where any AI technique can be used for any of these essential ingredients in decision making or decision support systems, paired with a contextual approach to define their combination and relative weight. In a world where neither humans nor AI systems work in isolation, but are tightly interconnected, e.g., the Internet of Things, we also envision a compositional approach to building ethically bounded AI, where the ethical properties of each component can be fruitfully exploited to derive those of the overall system. In this paper we define and motivate the notion of ethically-bounded AI, we describe two concrete examples, and we outline some outstanding challenges.Comment: Published at AAAI Blue Sky Track, winner of Blue Sky Awar

AGRICULTURAL POLICY ANALYSIS: DISCUSSION

Agricultural economists are appropriately concerned about their profession's contributions to policy decisions. An examination of alternative approaches to transforming policy analyses is in order. There are opportunities to (a) focus on income and wealth distribution, (b) give attention to the public as a primary client, (c) avoid advocacy, and (d) adjust institutions in ways that encourage participation in policy analyses including the development of data systems.Equity, Income and wealth distribution, Policy analysis, Public as a primary client, Agricultural and Food Policy,