Separation – integration – and now …? - An historical perspective on the relationship between German management accounting and financial accounting

German accounting has traditionally followed a dual ledger approach with strictly separated internal cost accounting, as the basis for management information, and external financial accounting focusing on creditor protection and based on the commercial law. However, the increased adoption of integrated accounting system implies a significant change in the relationship between financial and management accounting systems. We use Hegelian dialectic to trace the historical development of German accounting from separated systems towards antithetical propositions of full integration, and the emergence of partial integration as the synthesis of this transformation process. For this reason, our paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the literature on the relationship between financial and management accounting in Germany. On this basis, we elaborate how financial accounting in Germany has been shaped by its economic context and legislation, and how financial accounting – accompanied by institutional pressures – in turn influenced management accounting. We argue that the changing relationship between management and financial accounting in the German context illustrates how current accounting practice is shaped not only by its environment, but also by its historical path. Based on this reasoning, we discuss several avenues for future research

The H1 Neural Network Trigger

At the HERA ep collider the H1 experiment is successfully operating a set of hardwired digital neural networks at the second trigger level. The latency of the network triggers, which are of the feed-forward type, is about 20 microseconds. The inputs to the networks are suitably preprocessed 8 bit quantities, based on the trigger information available from the various subdetectors of H1 at level 1. In this article we describe the principles of the neural hardware trigger and its use within the overall H1 trigger strategy. We concentrate here on the preprocessing of the neural input and discuss further developments for the future high luminosity running at HERA beyond the year 2000. 1 Introduction Since its start in 1992 the HERA ep collider has constantly improved its machine currents and its luminosity. Before the switch to electrons in 1998 the largest integrated luminosity of about 35 pb \Gamma1 was collected in 1997. During these years it became clear that many high cross sectio..