The Proliferation of Special Accounting Items: A Threat to Corporate Credibility

Betty L. Brewer, DBA, CFP, is associate professor of finance, Department of Business and Economics, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC 27411. Robert J. Angell, DBA, is professor of finance, Department of Business Administration, School of Business and Economics, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC 27411. R. David Mautz, Jr., Ph.D., CPA, is associate professor of accounting, Department of Accounting, School of Business and Economics, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC 27411

Optimal foraging and community structure: implications for a guild of generalist grassland herbivores

A particular linear programming model is constructed to predict the diets of each of 14 species of generalist herbivores at the National Bison Range, Montana. The herbivores have body masses ranging over seven orders of magnitude and belonging to two major taxa: insects and mammals. The linear programming model has three feeding constraints: digestive capacity, feeding time and energy requirements. A foraging strategy that maximizes daily energy intake agrees very well with the observed diets. Body size appears to be an underlying determinant of the foraging parameters leading to diet selection. Species that possess digestive capacity and feeding time constraints which approach each other in magnitude have the most generalized diets. The degree that the linear programming models change their diet predictions with a given percent change in parameter values (sensitivity) may reflect the observed ability of the species to vary their diets. In particular, the species which show the most diet variability are those whose diets tend to be balanced between monocots and dicots. The community-ecological parameters of herbivore body-size ranges and species number can possibly be related to foraging behavior.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47765/1/442_2004_Article_BF00377109.pd

Dual-Electrode Detection of Amino Acids for Microfluidic Chip

The open-ended rectangular waveguide probe is a powerful tool for characterizing the dielectric and reflection properties of various materials and structures [1–11]. In these applications the measurable parameter, Г(i.e. the reflection coefficient), is used to determine the sought-for parameters. The said reflection coefficient is defined as the ratio of the reflected electric field at the aperture of the waveguide to that of the incident electric field

The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance

In the ‘dance language’ of honeybees, the dancer generates a specific, coded message that describes the direction and distance from the hive of a new food source, and this message is displaced in both space and time from the dancer's discovery of that source. Karl von Frisch concluded that bees ‘recruited’ by this dance used the information encoded in it to guide them directly to the remote food source, and this Nobel Prize-winning discovery revealed the most sophisticated example of non-primate communication that we know of. In spite of some initial scepticism, almost all biologists are now convinced that von Frisch was correct, but what has hitherto been lacking is a quantitative description of how effectively recruits translate the code in the dance into flight to their destinations. Using harmonic radar to record the actual flight paths of recruited bees, we now provide that description