A Loophole In Financial Accounting: A Detailed Analysis Of Repo 105

From 2000 to 2008, Lehman used repo transactions to hide billions of dollars on their statements. They alsomisrepresented the repo transactions as secured borrowings even though they actually recorded the transactions as sales. Valukas report in 2010 stimulated an extensive coverage of the repo transactions and spurred an array of studies addressing issues related to the collapse of financial institutions. Since the Repo 105 maneuver of Lehman provides a good example on how regulatory deficiencies can induce companies to obscure financial reporting and the importance of ethics in deterring these abuses, our study intends to examine repo transactions related accounting standards, illustrate how repo transactions can enhance a banks financial statements, and discuss the importance of business ethics in curtailing accounting irregularities

Investing In Accounting: A Call For Professional Involvement In Higher Education

The current financial crisis has created serious repercussions for accounting education. Public universities have lost funding and initiated huge budget cuts. These drastic cutbacks have resulted in the losses of courses, enrollment, and faculty. These losses will translate into inaccessibility of education will reduce the future accounting work force. To recover from the recession, well trained accountants are critical to provide the financial fundamentals for businesses. While most of us understand that an investment in accounting education is an investment in successful business, effective practices for recruitment are needed in a time of scarce resources. In this paper, we would like to focus on the difficulties occurring in accounting education, which will negatively affect business. Furthermore, we would strongly encourage companies to continuously reach out to potential employees and support accounting education. Some suggestions are provided for cost saving avenues to reduce recruiting costs and develop high quality accounting professionals

SASMU: boost the performance of generalized recognition model using synthetic face dataset

Nowadays, deploying a robust face recognition product becomes easy with the development of face recognition techniques for decades. Not only profile image verification but also the state-of-the-art method can handle the in-the-wild image almost perfectly. However, the concern of privacy issues raise rapidly since mainstream research results are powered by tons of web-crawled data, which faces the privacy invasion issue. The community tries to escape this predicament completely by training the face recognition model with synthetic data but faces severe domain gap issues, which still need to access real images and identity labels to fine-tune the model. In this paper, we propose SASMU, a simple, novel, and effective method for face recognition using a synthetic dataset. Our proposed method consists of spatial data augmentation (SA) and spectrum mixup (SMU). We first analyze the existing synthetic datasets for developing a face recognition system. Then, we reveal that heavy data augmentation is helpful for boosting performance when using synthetic data. By analyzing the previous frequency mixup studies, we proposed a novel method for domain generalization. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of SASMU, achieving state-of-the-art performance on several common benchmarks, such as LFW, AgeDB-30, CA-LFW, CFP-FP, and CP-LFW.Comment: under revie

Stepwise Increases in Left Ventricular Mass Index and Decreases in Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction Correspond with the Stages of Chronic Kidney Disease in Diabetes Patients

Aims. Patients with diabetic nephropathy are reported to have a high prevalence of left ventricular structural and functional abnormalities. This study was designed to assess the determinants of left ventricular mass index (LVMI) and left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) in diabetic patients at various stages of chronic kidney disease (CKD). Methods. This cross-sectional study enrolled 285 diabetic patients with CKD stages 3 to 5 from our outpatient department of internal medicine. Clinical and echocardiographic parameters were compared and analyzed. Results. We found a significant stepwise increase in LVMI (P < 0.001), LVH (P < 0.001), and LVEF <55% (P = 0.013) and a stepwise decrease in LVEF (P = 0.038) corresponding to advance in CKD stages. Conclusions. Our findings suggest that increases in LVMI and decreases in LVEF coincide with advances in CKD stages in patients with diabetes

Effects of orthographic consistency and homophone density on Chinese spoken word recognition

Studies of alphabetic language have shown that orthographic knowledge influences phonological processing during spoken word recognition. This study utilized the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to differentiate two types of phonology-to-orthography (P-to-O) mapping consistencies in Chinese, namely homophone density and orthographic consistency. The ERP data revealed an orthographic consistency effect in the frontal-centrally distributed N400, and a homophone density effect in central-posteriorly distributed late positive component (LPC). Further source analyses using the standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) demonstrated that the orthographic effect was not only localized in the frontal and temporal-parietal regions for phonological processing, but also in the posterior visual cortex for orthographic processing, while the homophone density effect was found in middle temporal gyrus for lexical-semantic selection, and in the temporal-occipital junction for orthographic processing. These results suggest that orthographic information not only shapes the nature of phonological representations, but may also be activated during on-line spoken word recognition

The feedback consistency effect in Chinese character recognition:evidence from a psycholinguistic norm

Researchers have demonstrated the importance of phonology in literacy acquisition and in visual word recognition. For example, the spelling-to-sound consistency effect has been observed in visual word recognition tasks, in which the naming responses are faster and more accurate for words with the same letters that also have the same pronunciation (e.g. -ean is always pronounced /in/, as in lean, dean, and bean). In addition, some studies have reported a much less intuitive feedback consistency effect when a rime can be spelled in different ways (e.g. /ip/ in heap and deep) in lexical decision tasks. Such findings suggest that, with activation flowing back and forth between orthographic and phonological units during word processing, any inconsistency in the mappings between orthography and phonology should weaken the stability of the feedback loop, and, thus, should delay recognition. However, several studies have failed to show reliable feedback consistency in printed word recognition. One possible reason for this is that the feedback consistency is naturally confounded with many other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or bigram frequency, as these variables are difficult to tease apart. Furthermore, there are challenges in designing factorial experiments that perfectly balance lexical stimuli on all factors besides feedback consistency. This study aims to examine the feedback consistency effect in reading Chinese characters by using a normative data of 3,423 Chinese phonograms. We collected the lexical decision time from 180 college students. A linear mixed model analysis was used to examine the feedback consistency effect by taking into account additional properties that may be confounded with feedback consistency, including character frequency, number of strokes, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, semantic ambiguity, phonetic consistency, noun-to-verb ratios, and morphological boundedness. Some typical effects were observed, such as the more frequent and familiar a character, the faster one can decide it is a real character. More importantly, the linear mixed model analysis revealed a significant feedback consistency effect while controlling for other factors, which indicated that the pronunciation of phonograms might accommodate the organization of Chinese orthographic representation. Our study disentangled the feedback consistency from the many other factors, and supports the view that phonological activation would reverberate to orthographic representation in visual word recognition