Some observations on the extent of bank audits in America: 1800-1863

The study described here investigates the extent to which something resembling auditing may have existed or may even have been required by state law. (Most banks which existed had some sort of state or territorial charter before 1863, prior to the creation of a federal central banking system.

On mercantile accounting in pre-industrial Iran

Iranian village accounting, which we studied by translating and analyzing the records of a trading house in the early twentieth century, was relatively unaffected by Western contact. The records were kept on a slightly modified cash basis, single-entry, with little distinction between business and personal transactions; this mirrors accounting practices in many developing societies. What was indeed unique was a distinctive set of numerical symbols, comprehensible to but a few initiates in each community, and whose primary goal was secrecy and privacy of the records. The system was used well before 1900 and is still in use in some rural areas today

Examination of the status of probability sampling in the courts

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/dl_proceedings/1191/thumbnail.jp

Development of Neural Electromagnetic Ontologies (NEMO): Ontology-based Tools for Representation and Integration of Event-related Brain Potentials

We describe a first-generation ontology for
representation and integration of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The ontology is designed following OBO “best practices” and is augmented with tools to perform ontology-based labeling and annotation of ERP data, and a database that enables semantically based reasoning over these data. Because certain high-level concepts in the ERP domain are illdefined, we have developed methods to support coordinated updates to each of these three components. This approach consists of “top-down” (knowledge-driven) design and implementation, followed by “bottom-up” (data-driven) validation and refinement. Our goal is to build an ERP ontology that is logically valid, empirically sound, robust in application, and transparent to users. This ontology will be used to support sharing and meta-analysis of EEG and MEG data collected within our Neural Electromagnetic Ontologies (NEMO) project

Limited Role of Functional Differentiation in Early Diversification of Animals

The origin of most animal phyla and classes during the Cambrian explosion has been hypothesized to represent an ‘early burst’ of evolutionary exploration of functional ecological possibilities. However, the ecological history of marine animals has yet to be fully quantified, preventing an assessment of the early-burst model for functional ecology. Here we use ecological assignments for 18,621 marine animal genera to assess the relative timing of functional differentiation versus taxonomic diversification from the Cambrian to the present day. We find that functional diversity increased more slowly than would be expected given the history of taxonomic diversity. Contrary to previous inferences of rapid ecological differentiation from the early appearances of all well-fossilized phyla and classes, explicit coding of functional characteristics demonstrates that Cambrian genera occupied comparatively few modes of life. Functional diversity increased in the Ordovician and, especially, during the recoveries from the end-Permian and end-Cretaceous mass extinctions. Permanent shifts in the relationship between functional and taxonomic diversity following the era-bounding extinctions indicates a critical role for these biotic crises in coupling taxonomic and functional diversity