One way forward: non-traditional accounting disclosures in the 21st century

Recent empirical studies (Deegan and Rankin, 1999; Deegan et al., 2000) have indicated that although many corporations have begun to respond to perceived demand for environmental disclosures in published accounts, their perspective of organisational legitimacy is a narrow view, in which information is targeted towards specific stakeholders and not to the general public. This paper considers a range of models (variously called guidelines, standards and charters) which have been put forward by different organisations to aid the development of social and environmental disclosures. In all cases verification and attestation are part of the proposed regimen. The question which the papers attempts to answer is whether any one of the models would be capable of rapid adoption as part of an expanded GAAP, should the professional accounting bodies think that this is desirable. The outcome of our deliberations is cautious support for the use of EMAS and ISO 14000 as the basis for a modified GAAP plus the further development of the GRI 2000 guidelines into a set of standards covering both social and environmental reporting

Externalities revisited: the use of an environmental equity account

This exploratory paper attempts to restart a debate about the incorporation of environmental externalities into the cost structure of the organisation. A number approaches are considered; regulation together with all that would follow such as audit and policing; pollution permits, which probably can only be used with a sinking lid application; and other charging mechanisms such as making the private sector pay for public sector capital funding. The fourth alternative, the use of an environmental equity account, has not been widely considered in the literature. The paper proposes the use of an environmental equity account (after Boone and Rubenstein, 1997) with the express intent of generating a charge for environmental impact based on the cost of control. That is, the cost of implementing state of the art technology compared to that currently in use within the organisation, is used as a balance which may be either paid as a capital sum or carried as a balance sheet entry upon which dividend payments would have to be made. It is envisaged that both capital sums and dividend payments would go to an agency responsible for environmental remediation activity

Potentially dysfunctional impacts of harmonising accounting standards: the case of intangible assets

Intangible Assets as a category within accounting and reporting disclosures have become far more noticeable in recent years, including large amounts associated with brands, mastheads, franchises, and patents. Many of these items are not purchased but internally generated within the organisation, and may account for much of the difference in magnitude between book value and market capitalisation. The International Accounting Standards Committee has recently issued IAS 38 to regulate the reporting of intangible assets, and includes therein the prohibition of those intangible assets, which have been internally generated. This prohibition would cut across recently developed practices in Australia and New Zealand. The problem is compounded by an increasingly close relationship between IASs and the national standards of both Australia and New Zealand, making it very likely that the problem areas within IAS 38 will be transferred to the national standards. This paper examines the areas within IAS 38, which are likely to lead to undesirable consequences, both for internally generated intangible assets but also in terms of the reinforcement of somewhat conservative aspects of financial accounting including historical cost and the inhibiting effects on new developments generally. The possible compounding effects of an expectations gap between the traditional and expected role of financial statements is briefly examined as a possible explanation of the divergence of opinion between different groups involved in the development of accounting standards and reports

Vector boson production in association with KK modes of the ADD model to NLO in QCD at LHC

Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the associated production of vector boson (Z/W) with the the Kaluza-Klein modes of the graviton in large extra dimensional model at the LHC, are presented. We have obtained various kinematic distributions using a Monte Carlo code which is based on the two cut off phase space slicing method that handles soft and collinear singularities appearing at NLO level. We estimate the impact of the QCD corrections on various observables and find that they are significant. We also show the reduction in factorization scale uncertainty when QCD corrections are included.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Unparticle effects in rare (t -> c g g) decay

Rare (t -> c g g) decay can only appear at loop level in the Standard Model (SM), and naturally they are strongly suppressed. These flavor changing decays induced by the mediation of spin-0 and spin-2 unparticles, can appear at tree level in unparticle physics. In this work the virtual effects of unparticle physics in the flavor-changing (t -> c g g) decay is studied. Using the SM result for the branching ratio of the (t -> c g g) decay, the parameter space of d_U and Lambda_U, where the branching ratio of this decay exceeds the one predicted by the SM, is obtained. Measurement of the branching ratio larger than 10^(-9) can give valuable information for establishing unparticle physics.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, LaTeX formatte

Concept tagging in Moodle

The Moodle learning management system (LMS) is becoming increasingly widespread due to its adoption by education providers at all levels. The system however does not provide educators with the ability to create connections between online course material and domain concepts easily and visibly. We chose concept tagging as the method for allowing teachers to provide these links in a new concept tags plug-in for Moodle. Our concept tagging plug-in allows the creation, management and application of concept tags to course content. Students and teachers will mutually benefit from the use of such a mechanism, as it would aid information location in and retrieval from course content. An initial evaluation of the plug-in showed that teachers find the concept tagging of course modules to be a desirable and usable functionality that Moodle lacks. The work in this paper describes the first prototype of the plug-in, the aim of which is provide the first step in contributing to the addition of basic student modelling functionality to Moodle as part of a wider project. By continually keeping track of a student’s progress on each concept tag, Moodle will be able to suggest appropriate course modules for further study based on this progress

Data-driven misconception discovery in constraint-based intelligent tutoring systems

Students often have misconceptions in the domain they are studying. Misconception identification is a difficult task but allows teachers to create strategies to appropriately address misconceptions held by students. This project investigates a data-driven technique to discover students' misconceptions in interactions with constraint-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems(ITSs). This analysis has not previously been done. EER-Tutor is one such constraint-based ITS, which teaches conceptual database design using Enhanced Entity-Relationship (EER) data modelling. As with any ITS, a lot of data about each student's interaction within EER-Tutor are available: as individual student models, containing constraint histories, and logs, containing detailed information about each student action. This work can be extended to other ITSs and their relevant domains

Corporate social responsibility in the Russian energy industry

Purpose - The paper looks into the institutional factors that shape CSR adoption in the Russian energy industry. Underpinned by theoretical foundations, this paper helps to understand which of Scott’s (1995) three institutional pillars dominate the structuring of CSR in the Russian energy industry. CSR understanding depends heavily upon the institutional context of the countries (Kim et al. 2013). CSR is now employed internationally, facing various institutional contexts, with different cultures, regulations, norms and behaviours (Hira and Hira, 2000). Different motivational factors and value systems shape CSR internationally (Kim et al.2013). Institutions are formal or informal rules, regulations, norms and understandings that constrain and enable behavior (North, 1990). This study employs neo-institutional theory to explore the specific factors that shape CSR in the context of the Russian energy industry. A neo-institutional framework provides an approach for the understanding different attitudes and practices in a specific social context (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991; Scott, 1995). The study is a detailed qualitative analysis of CSR in Russia, a country with different value and political systems from the U.S where CSR was initially developed (Campbell, 2007). This study employs the three ‘pillars of institutions’ regulative, normative and cognitive to identify pressures on CSR actions (Scott, 1995; Kostova and Roth,2002). Design/methodology/approach - Qualitative research is appropriate for this study as it enables to develop a deep understanding of people’s hidden interpretation, motivations and understanding (Subhasis and Siva, 2014). Semi-structured interviews are conducted as it allows the employees to raise and discuss matters of importance to them (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). Following Miles and Huberman (1994), qualitative content analysis technique is used to analyse the interviews to identify themes in the data. Preliminary Findings – The findings reveal so far that CSR practice in Russian is not related to any single institutional pressure. However, for a post-communist economy such as Russia, a regulation implementation might be weak and may not play an important role in forming CSR. In fact, the non-regulatory processes such as normative influence may have a greater impact instead. The companies have been under media pressure over the social and environmental consequences over the past several years. Companies need to meet expectations of internal stakeholders such as employees, and external such as community where the company wants to perform. Russia has a strong traditional ideology of collectivism, which places strong obligations on employers for their employees (Mamontov et al. 2014). Companies are expected to provide various social benefits to employees in terms of healthcare, education, housing. This is taken-for-granted common social belief, which is embedded in culture and specific for this particular context (Bashtovaya, 2014). This belief has been inherited from the communist era where companies were considered as ‘social caretakers’, constantly providing social benefits (Fifka and Pobizhan, 2014). This belief is culturally formed unlike the regulative and the normative pillars (Scott, 2008). Practical Implications – This paper offers an understanding on why Russian energy companies adopt CSR and what institutional factors shape their adoption. This sheds more light on institutional logics that underline CSR practices, and puts forward implications for managers and policy makers to construct more effective CSR strategies. In particular, this helps multinational companies to construct effective CSR strategies and not just adopt their CSR from home country. Value -This paper looks into institutional factors in particular, which of three institutional pillars seem more relevant in shaping CSR in the Russian energy industry. The theoretical contribution from this research is to neo-institutional theory and three pillars of institutions, and its application to understand CSR in the Russian context. Based on a wide range of literature review, I integrate literature on CSR, neo-institutional theory, and post-communist economy. Thus theoretically conceptualizing the effects of three institutional dimensions such as regulative, normative and cognitive on CSR at international level. Although prior literature suggests a connection between CSR and institutions, I attempt to extend the theoretical framework by looking at a new contextual environment. Crotty and Rodgers (2012) argue CSR research requires to be more contextualised by tacking into consideration characteristics of the country. I attempt to broaden the Western interpretation about CSR by considering the post-communist economy of the country. If contextualisation is not in place, than the type and nature of CSR undertaken in non-western contexts might be diminished and misinterpreted

Generation of Curvature Perturbations with Extra Anisotropic Stress

We study the evolution of curvature perturbations and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum in the presence of an hypothesized extra anisotropic stress which might arise, for example, from the dark radiation term in brane-world cosmology. We evolve the scalar modes of such perturbations before and after neutrino decoupling and analyze their effects on the CMB spectrum. A novel result of this work is that the cancellation of the neutrino and extra anisotropic stress could lead to a spectrum of residual curvature perturbations which is similar to the observed CMB power spectrum. This implies a possible additional consideration in the determination of cosmological parameters from the CMB analysis.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures; improved discussio