The Once and Future Book

Purpose: Reflection on the value of considering information history as a guide to the future Methodology: Reviews Ashgate's History of the Book in the West series Findings:'Information revolutions', such as printing and digital books, are often based on technologies and features already present. Value: Insights into the future of information and documentation may be gained from studying the historical development of our information environment

The Once and Future Budapest – Book Review

Robert Nemes has written a concise and useful overview of the expansion, mod ernization, and ethnic transformation of Budapest in the classic era of nineteenth century nationalism and liberalism, from the French Revolutionary era to the eve of World War I. The author tells the story of the rise of a metropolis imagined as a national (i. e., Magyar) capital city, in place of the older, prenationalist and socially corporatist seventeenth- and eighteenth-century towns of Ofen (Buda), ?buda, and Pest, which were largely German Sprachinseln straddling the Danube on the Hungarian plain

Yukichi Fukuzawa and the Making of the Modern World

My book The Making of the Modern World; Visions from the West and East was published by Palgrave in 2002. It discussed the work of two major writers who had dedicated their lives to trying to answer the riddle of how our modern world originated and what its future might be. These were F.W.Maitland and Yukichi Fukuzawa. The book was only modestly successful and never went into paperback. By combining these thinkers, the distinctive contribution of each one may have been somewhat muffled. This long and expensive book did not reach a wider audience who might be potentially interested in one or other of the authors treated, but not both of them at once. So I have decided to re-issue each part as a downloadable electronic book. This book on Fukuzawa was originally published in a section of five chapters, which have now been broken down into smaller chapters

AN APPROACH TO THE PROSPECTS OF BUSINESS ENGLISH LEARNING

The future of English as a global language has widely been discussed for over 10 years, starting with David Graddol (1997), a language researcher and lecturer at the Open University in Britain, in his famous work ‘The Future of English’, to so many other language researchers, so much inspired by Graddol’s book. Whether English will keep its supremacy as THE tool of communication in the future world is still debatable, fact is that English is still the language of business and information technology and it shall stay so for quite a while, in spite of the challenges coming from Spanish, French, German, Russian and… Mandarin. Once we acknowledge that, the question is: how can the teaching/learning process be improved in the future for a better and faster acquisition of English as the language of choice in the business world?Business English; global English; globalization; information technology; sustainable development; universal language; neutral universal language; international language

An Antidote to War? An Examination of the Success of The Once and Future King by T.H. White

This paper seeks to evaluate the level of success of The Once and Future King by T.H. White. It examines the financial success of the book and its popularity among readers, both immediately upon publication and in later years. It also considers the book within its historical context, during and after World War II, and hypothesizes that the war negatively impacted the success of the book since it has a pacifist agenda. Finally, the paper examines White’s own goals and intentions while writing the book, and whether the book achieved those purposes. In order to study these matters, the text itself is closely analyzed, as well as private letters and diary entries of White and his friends. Book reviews and newspaper articles of the times of publication are also used to analyze the success of the book. The paper concludes that while White’s book was hugely successful financially and very popular among readers, both immediately and in later years, it failed to achieve its purposes, which were to find a solution to the problem of war, and to help future generations avoid war

Regulatory implications of the global financial crisis

It has become popular for journalists who are trying to sell newspapers, and politicians who are trying to solicit votes, to refer to this financial crisis as the worst since the Great Depression or WWII. I don’t know whether it is the worst or not so will leave that question to the historians and economists of the future once the storm has past. But it is indeed a “storm” as described by Vince Cable, Member of Parliament in his UK bestselling book entitled “The Storm – The World Economic Crisis and What it Means”. He describes this “storm” as a very destructive one displacing jobs, businesses, banks and whole economies from Iceland to the United Kingdom to the United States. I propose to offer a short chronology and summary of the causes of the current economic crisis. Then I will review several of the regulatory responses to the crisis focusing on the Turner Report, the de Larosière Group and certain US Treasury statements. I will offer my critiques of these proposals and then make some predictions of what the financial services industry may look like in the future

Review of Patrick Tierney, \u3cem\u3eDarkness in El Dorado\u3c/em\u3e

More than once as the controversy over this book unfolded reporters and others told me the number of footnotes in Tierney\u27s chapter on the measles outbreak: 147. I have now tallied the total number of footnores in the entire book including the appendix (1,599). Such numbers seem to interst people. It is considerable more difficult to quantify the evidentiary force and legitimacy of these footnores. My own assessment is perhaps suggested by the fact that I have rewritten this review several times in an effort to make it difficult for anyone to extract a decontextualized endorsement on some future web page or book jacket. This accounts for the somewhat stilted style, for which I apologize

Is there an accruals or a cash flow anomaly in UK stock returns?

In this paper, we apply a modified version of the Mishkin (1983) test to companies in the UK stock market in order to investigate the presence of accruals and cash flow effects on UK firms’ annual returns. First, we find that accruals decile rankings have U-shaped, or inverted U-shaped, or no relationships with most of the risk variables. Accruals decile rankings have, however, a negative relationship with the ratio of research and development to market value which is known to have a positive relationship with returns. Second, regarding the relationship between risk controls and returns, we find evidence associated with an RD effect and some evidence in favour of earnings-price and past return effects. We find little evidence of firm size, book to-market, and firm leverage effects, once the other variables are controlled for. Third, for the period 1990-2007, we report little evidence of general accruals mispricing in the UK in which accruals have a negative relationship with future returns, once risk has been accounted for. Additionally, after treatment of extreme observations, evidence of cash flow mispricing is found for the UK stock market. An alternative interpretation of our results is that there is no separate accruals effect, at least in the way predicted by the conventional mispricing stories, once other effects are taken into account, but there is a separate cash flow effect.Accruals anomaly, accrual based accounting, cash flows, financial statement analysis

Timely Industry Information as an Assurance Service: Evidence on the Information Content of the Book-to-Bill Ratio

Assurance services include independent professional services that improve the quality of information. Once such service is the collection of confidential information from participating firms on behalf of an industry association and the release of summarized information to investors. An example of this type of service is the collection of industry-wide information for the Semiconductor Industry Association. The primary output from this process is the monthly release of a ratio of new orders received to chips shipped, known as the book-to-bill ratio. We evaluate the association between book-to-bill disclosures and common stock prices. Statements in the financial press suggest that the book-to-bill index is an important indicator of future demand in the semiconductor industry. Because changes in the book-to-bill ratio signal impending changes in sales, the index may be relevant information for firm valuation. Our results suggest that investors in semiconductor firms utilize the book-to-bill ratio in revising their expectations of future cash flows. Specifically, we find (1) that eight of the 36 monthly book-to-bill announcements occurring during 1994 through 1996 produced share price reactions significant at the 10 percent level, and (2) that the price response across the subset of good news disclosures is positively related to the change in the book-to-bill ratio