Farm Enterprise Analysis: Has It Lost Its Usefulness?

Farm enterprise analysis is a term that has traditionally been used to describe the process of determining costs associated with farm business enterprises and enterprise profitability. A key challenge to those who would know their costs has been the lack of guidance on cost accounting principles and the application of those principles to agriculture. However, that recently changed with the publication of the Farm Financial Standards Council’s Management Accounting Principles for Agricultural Producers, which has led to questions about the usefulness of enterprise analysis. The differences between the two approaches to determining costs for farm business enterprises are discussed as they relate to the usefulness of the output to managers for decision making.Productivity Analysis,

Estimating frequencies of emotions and actions: a web-based diary study

Mental health questionnaires often ask respondents to report how frequently they experience different emotions. We report two experiments designed to assess the accuracy of these reports and the strategies used to generate them. Each day for 2 weeks, participants in Experiment 1 filled out a web-based emotions-and-activities checklist. Then, they estimated the diary-period frequency of these emotions and activities and indicated how they generated each estimate. In Experiment 2, participants provided frequency estimates and strategy reports, but did not fill out the checklist. We found that (a) the frequency estimates were quite accurate for emotions and activities, (b) participants relied on memory-based strategies (enumeration and direct retrieval) when estimating activity frequencies, but (c) used self-knowledge strategies (personality beliefs and schematic inferences) somewhat more than memory strategies for emotions and (d) the relationship between strategy use and question type was unaffected by diary keeping. We conclude by considering practical and theoretical implications. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/55948/1/1303_ftp.pd

Anomalous Chiral Symmetry Breaking above the QCD Phase Transition

We study the anomalous breaking of U_A(1) symmetry just above the QCD phase transition for zero and two flavors of quarks, using a staggered fermion, lattice discretization. The properties of the QCD phase transition are expected to depend on the degree of U_A(1) symmetry breaking in the transition region. For the physical case of two flavors, we carry out extensive simulations on a 16^3 x 4 lattice, measuring a difference in susceptibilities which is sensitive to U_A(1) symmetry and which avoids many of the staggered fermion discretization difficulties. The results suggest that anomalous effects are at or below the 15% level.Comment: 10 pages including 2 figures and 1 tabl

Accounting students' expectations and transition experiences of supervised work experience

Political and economic discourses position employability as a responsibility of higher education, which utilise mechanisms such as supervised work experience (SWE) to embed employability into the undergraduate curriculum. However, sparse investigation of students' contextualised experiences of SWE results in little being known about the mechanisms through which students derive employability benefits from SWE. The aim of this study is to examine the impact of students' expectation and conception of workplace learning on their transition into SWE. Analysis of accounting students' experiences reveal two broad conceptions of workplace learning, the differing impacts of which on transition experience are explored using existing learning transfer perspectives. Students displaying the more common 'technical' conception construct SWE as an opportunity to develop technical, knowledge-based expertise and abilities that prioritize product-based or cognitive learning transfer. Students with an 'experiential' conception were found to construct SWE primarily as an experience through which the development of personal skills and abilities beyond technical expertise are prioritized using process-based or socio-cultural learning transfer. Further data analysis suggests that these two learning transfer approaches have differing impacts on students' employability development which may indicate a need for universities to consider how to develop appropriate student expectations of and approaches to SWE and meaningful support for students' SWE transition

The impact of New Labour’s English health inequalities strategy on geographical inequalities in infant mortality : a time trend analysis

Background The English health inequalities strategy (1999-2010) aimed to reduce health inequalities between the most deprived local authorities and the rest of England. The multifaceted strategy included increased investment in healthcare, the early years, education and neighbourhood renewal. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the strategy was associated with a reduction in geographical inequalities in the infant mortality rate (IMR). Methods We used segmented regression analysis to measure inequalities in the IMR between the most deprived local authorities and the rest of England before, during and after the health inequalities strategy period. Results Before the strategy was implemented (1983-1998), absolute inequalities in the IMR increased between the most deprived local authorities and the rest of England at a rate of 0.034 annually (95% CI 0.001 to 0.067). Once the strategy had been implemented (1999-2010), absolute inequalities decreased at a rate of -0.116 annually (95% CI -0.178 to -0.053). After the strategy period ended (2011-2017), absolute inequalities increased at a rate of 0.042 annually (95% CI -0.042 to 0.125). Relative inequalities also marginally decreased during the strategy period. Conclusion The English health inequalities strategy period was associated with a decline in geographical inequalities in the IMR. This research adds to the evidence base suggesting that the English health inequalities strategy was at least partially effective in reducing health inequalities, and that current austerity policies may undermine these gains