A Consulting Giant; a Disgruntled Client: a ?Failed? Attempt to Change Management Controls in a Public Sector Organisation

There has been very little research into management consulting interventions in public sector organisations especially in emerging economies. This paper aims to fill this void by narrating the empirics of a consulting assignment carried out by a large international consulting firm in a Pakistani public sector organisation. The paper found that consultants? recommendations of modern day management accounting and control practices, such as a modern performance measurement system and a ?state-of-the-art? information system, were rejected by the management, who stopped the balance of payment of the consultants? fee. Employing a theoretical perspective that focuses on the structural conditions facing both the client and the consultants, and the strategies adopted by the consultants and the client, the paper aims to explain the empirics of the case. Through identification of the structural conditions operating in emerging economies, this paper sheds light on the nature of the relationship between consultants and client in these settings. The consultants? strategies and what went ?wrong? with these strategies was also analysed. Client management counter-strategies and management?s reasons for implementing them were also explored. Thus, through structural and strategic analysis, this paper aims to enhance our understanding of the dynamics of management consulting in public sector organisations especially in emerging economies

Understanding Management Accounting Changes in a Family-Owned Company: A Greek Case Study

This study seeks to understand the changes to management accounting controls in a large Greek company in the context of the rapidly changing socio-economic environment. The paper investigates the case of FA (here anonymised), a Greek dairy company, as it has been transformed from a small family-run firm to one of the biggest companies in Greece. Familial and informal management controls have been transformed into a relatively formal and professional form of control over the years. The dynamics and nature of management accounting changes are understood by drawing on critical realism, a theoretical framework pioneered by Roy Bhaskar (1975, 1979). Our analysis revealed that a changed wider structural environment, changed control needs of owners and ?politics of control within capital? between competing management positions (Armstrong, 1989) precipitated the changes in the management control practices of the organization

Near NP-Completeness for Detecting p-adic Rational Roots in One Variable

We show that deciding whether a sparse univariate polynomial has a p-adic rational root can be done in NP for most inputs. We also prove a polynomial-time upper bound for trinomials with suitably generic p-adic Newton polygon. We thus improve the best previous complexity upper bound of EXPTIME. We also prove an unconditional complexity lower bound of NP-hardness with respect to randomized reductions for general univariate polynomials. The best previous lower bound assumed an unproved hypothesis on the distribution of primes in arithmetic progression. We also discuss how our results complement analogous results over the real numbers.Comment: 8 pages in 2 column format, 1 illustration. Submitted to a conferenc

Shear capacity of reinforced concrete beams using neural network

NoOptimum multi-layered feed-forward neural network (NN) models using a resilient back-propagation algorithm and early stopping technique are built to predict the shear capacity of reinforced concrete deep and slender beams. The input layer neurons represent geometrical and material properties of reinforced concrete beams and the output layer produces the beam shear capacity. Training, validation and testing of the developed neural network have been achieved using 50%, 25%, and 25%, respectively, of a comprehensive database compiled from 631 deep and 549 slender beam specimens. The predictions obtained from the developed neural network models are in much better agreement with test results than those determined from shear provisions of different codes, such as KBCS, ACI 318-05, and EC2. The mean and standard deviation of the ratio between predicted using the neural network models and measured shear capacities are 1.02 and 0.18, respectively, for deep beams, and 1.04 and 0.17, respectively, for slender beams. In addition, the influence of different parameters on the shear capacity of reinforced concrete beams predicted by the developed neural network shows consistent agreement with those experimentally observed

Hydrogen Transport and the Spatial Requirements of Renewable Energy

Unlike oil and coal, which are compressed forms of energy, renewable energy requires unusually large land areas. This article calculates the consequences of a switch to hydrogen-cell vehicles powered by electricity from wind turbines. It then re-does the calculation for three other green energy sources : wave power ; biofuels ; solar energy. We argue that policy-makers and social scientists need to understand the significant spatial demands of a move to a carbon-free society.Renewable energy ; wind power ; land use ; energy efficiency ; wind turbines ; transport ; environmental ; solar ; biomass ; wave

Association between testosterone level and Coronary Artery Disease

AIM OF THE STUDY: The Aim of the study is to evaluate the difference between the Plasma Sex Hormone and the degree of Coronary Artery Disease in male patients undergoing Coronary Angiography and in matched controls. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This study was performed at the Department of Physiology, Thanjavur Medical College, Thanjavur. The study group was from the General Community in and around Thanjavur. This study includes 80 male subjects, grouped into (Group A) 40 subjects were in control group and (Group B) 40 subjects were in study group. Ethical committee approval was obtained before initiating the study. Exclusion criteria were the patients with diagnosis of Hypogonadism and Hypopituitarism or taking drugs that might affect sex hormone level, High CRP (> 5mg/l), if they had previous Cardiovascular Event, Coronary or Periphery Atherosclerosis. For this study, Serum Total Testosterone (ng/dL) level, FSH (mIU/ml) level and LH (mIU/ml) level were analyzed by ChemiLuminescence Immunoassay. Patients underwent thorough Clinical Examination and Overnight Fasting blood samples were taken from 40 male patients referred for diagnostic Coronary Angiography, because of symptoms suggestive of Coronary Artery Disease and 40 Control Group of same age group and sex. The Degree of Coronary Artery Stenosis was >50%. The results of Angiogram was reported by the Cardiologist, before the Hormonal assay. Serum Total Testosterone (ng/dL) level, FSH (mIU/ml) level and LH (mIU/ml) level and BMI were statistically analyzed between Group A and Group B. RESULT: In the Coronary Artery Disease group, the level of Serum Testosterone showed the P-value 0.001 and was statistically significant. Level of Serum FSH was statistically significant and higher in the Coronary Artery Disease group than the normal coronary subjects (P-value 0.003). Level of Serum LH was statistically significant and higher in the Coronary Artery Disease group than the normal coronary subjects (P-value 0.001). BMI was statistically insignificant in the Coronary Artery Disease group than the normal coronary subjects (P-value 0.051). The association between low Testosterone and Coronary Artery Disease was found to be significant. CONCLUSION: This study reveals that Hypotestosteronemia is a risk factor for Coronary Artery Disease

Modeling Probability of Path Loss for DSDV, OLSR and DYMO above 802.11 and 802.11p

This paper presents path loss model along with framework for probability distribution function for VANETs. Furthermore, we simulate three routing protocols Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV), Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO) in NS-2 to evaluate and compare their performance using two Mac-layer Protocols 802.11 and 802.11p. A novel approach of this work is modifications in existing parameters to achieve high efficiency. After extensive simulations, we observe that DSDV out performs with 802.11p while DYMO gives best performance with 802.11.Comment: IEEE 8th International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications (BWCCA'13), Compiegne, Franc