Factors affecting ethical judgement of South African chartered accountants

The start of the twenty-first century was marred by a spate of company collapses that involved fraudulent accounting activity. In many cases, company executives, many of whom belonged to the accounting profession, perpetrated the fraud. As a result, internationally, the accounting profession has suffered an enormous loss of goodwill, and its reputation as a profession with integrity has been severely harmed. Accounting professionals are no longer accorded the high regard they commanded in the past. The consequences for the profession have been far-reaching: accounting now faces a long, uphill battle to restore its reputation and to regain the trust of the international business community. This study replicates two famous international studies in the South African context. The focus of the study was to establish whether factors such as the Code of Professional Conduct of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA), the corporate ethical environment and their age influence the ethical judgement of individual accountants. The first such study was conducted in the United States of America (USA), and it was followed by similar research in Turkey. The results of these two studies suggested very different factors that could influence accountants' ethical judgement. The study reported in this article investigated South African chartered accountants; and its results were similar to those obtained in the US study

Supporting the learning of deaf students in higher education: a case study at Sheffield Hallam University

This article is an examination of the issues surrounding support for the learning of deaf students in higher education (HE). There are an increasing number of deaf students attending HE institutes, and as such provision of support mechanisms for these students is not only necessary but essential. Deaf students are similar to their hearing peers, in that they will approach their learning and require differing levels of support dependant upon the individual. They will, however, require a different kind of support, which can be technical or human resource based. This article examines the issues that surround supporting deaf students in HE with use of a case study of provision at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU), during the academic year 1994-95. It is evident that by considering the needs of deaf students and making changes to our teaching practices that all students can benefit

Chemical oxygen demand fate from cottage cheese (acid) whey applied to a sodic soil

Cottage cheese (acid) whey is an effective amendment in sodic soil reclamation, but the high chemical oxygen demand (COD) of whey is of concern in land application. The objective of this research was to determine the fate of COD from cottage cheese whey applied to a sodic soil. Treatments of 0, 25, 50, and 100 mm (0, 20, 40, and 80 Mg COD ha-1) of whey were applied to dry-unacclimated Freedom silt loam (fine-silty, mixed, mesic, Xerollic Calciorthids) in greenhouse lysimeters. The COD from lysimeter leachate at 1 m depth was monitored. Ninety days after whey application, total accumulative leachate COD for 0-, 25-, and 50-mm whey applications was not significantly different. Leachate COD concentrations from the 100-mm application reached 37% (29 400 mg COD L-1) of the applied whey COD. Twenty-eight days after whey treatment, infiltration was reduced in all whey-treated lysimeters, probably as a result of increased microbial activity. Barley (Hordeum vulgare L cv. Ludd) grain yield was 0.0, 0.0, 0.44, and 0.26 kg m-2 and total dry matter yield was 0.54, 0.72, 2.0, and 1.4 kg m-2 for the 0-, 25-, 50-, and 100-mm treatments, respectively. Salts and/or organic overloading appeared to inhibit initial barley growth in the 100-mm treatment. Results indicate a single 100-mm application to be excessive in terms of organic matter and/or salts

Force-Extension Relations for Polymers with Sliding Links

Topological entanglements in polymers are mimicked by sliding rings (slip-links) which enforce pair contacts between monomers. We study the force-extension curve for linear polymers in which slip-links create additional loops of variable size. For a single loop in a phantom chain, we obtain exact expressions for the average end-to-end separation: The linear response to a small force is related to the properties of the unstressed chain, while for a large force the polymer backbone can be treated as a sequence of Pincus--de Gennes blobs, the constraint effecting only a single blob. Generalizing this picture, scaling arguments are used to include self-avoiding effects.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures; accepted to Phys. Rev. E (Brief Report

Inpatient Transition to Virtual Care During COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction: During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, novel approaches to diabetes care have been employed. Care in both the inpatient and outpatient setting has transformed considerably. Driven by the need to reduce the use of personal protective equipment and exposure for patients and providers alike, we transitioned inpatient diabetes management services to largely "virtual" or remotely provided care at our hospital. Methods: Implementation of a diabetes co-management service under the direction of the University of North Carolina division of endocrinology was initiated in July 2019. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the diabetes service was largely transitioned to a virtual care model in March 2020. Automatic consults for COVID-19 patients were implemented. Glycemic outcomes from before and after transition to virtual care were evaluated. Results: Data over a 15-week period suggest that using virtual care for diabetes management in the hospital is feasible and can provide similar outcomes to traditional face-to-face care. Conclusion: Automatic consults for COVID-19 patients ensure that patients with serious illness receive specialized diabetes care. Transitioning to virtual care models does not limit the glycemic outcomes of inpatient diabetes care and should be employed to reduce patient and provider exposure in the setting of COVID-19. These findings may have implications for reducing nosocomial infection in less challenging times and might address shortage of health care providers, especially in the remote areas

Meeting Medicare requirements for transitional care: Do stroke care and policy align?

ObjectiveThis study (1) describes transitional care for stroke patients discharged home from hospitals, (2) compares hospitals' standards of transitional care with core transitional care management (TCM) components recognized by Medicare, and (3) examines the association of policy and hospital specialty designations with TCM implementation.MethodsHospitals participating in the Comprehensive Post-Acute Stroke Services (COMPASS) Study provided data on their hospital, stroke patient population, and standards of transitional care. Hospital-reported transitional care strategies were compared with the federal TCM definition (2-day follow-up, 14-day visit, non-face-to-face services). We examined the associations of TCM billing, stroke center certification, and Magnet nursing excellence designation with TCM implementation.ResultsTransitional care varied widely among 41 hospitals in North Carolina and no one strategy was universally applied or provided across hospitals. One third of hospitals met the TCM definition (37% provided telephone follow-up, 76% provided face-to-face provider follow-up, all provided a type of non-face-to-face support). There were no differences between groups (TCM met/not met) in hospital characteristics or transitional care resources and processes. Stroke center certification, Magnet designation, and use of TCM billing codes were not different for hospitals that did and did not meet the TCM definition.ConclusionsThere was substantial variation in the provision of strategies supporting stroke patients' transition home from the hospital. Supportive stroke care transitions are essential when more than 50% of stroke patients are discharged home and more than half experience moderate to severe strokes. More research is needed to identify drivers of TCM uptake.Clinicaltrials.gov identifierNCT02588664

Inflation with improved D3-brane potential and the fine tunings associated with the model

We investigate brane-antibrane inflation in a warped deformed conifold background that includes contributions to the potential arising from imaginary anti-self-dual (IASD) fluxes including the term with irrational scaling dimension discovered recently. We find that the model can give rise to required number of e-foldings; observational constraint on COBE normalization is easily satisfied and low value of the tensor to scalar ratio of perturbations is achieved. We observe that these corrections to the effective potential help in relaxing the severe fine tunings associated with the earlier analysis.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; typos corrected, minor clarifications and new refs added, to appear in epj

Quantum feedback with weak measurements

The problem of feedback control of quantum systems by means of weak measurements is investigated in detail. When weak measurements are made on a set of identical quantum systems, the single-system density matrix can be determined to a high degree of accuracy while affecting each system only slightly. If this information is fed back into the systems by coherent operations, the single-system density matrix can be made to undergo an arbitrary nonlinear dynamics, including for example a dynamics governed by a nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. We investigate the implications of such nonlinear quantum dynamics for various problems in quantum control and quantum information theory, including quantum computation. The nonlinear dynamics induced by weak quantum feedback could be used to create a novel form of quantum chaos in which the time evolution of the single-system wave function depends sensitively on initial conditions.Comment: 11 pages, TeX, replaced to incorporate suggestions of Asher Pere