The classification of Information and Communication Technology Investment in Financial Accounting

Financial accounting is well known in its responsibility for book keeping the organisational expenditure and the preparation of the financial statements. ICT investment has become important to investors and not reporting these investments on financial statement leads to misevaluation of the organisation market value. Moreover, the misclassification of ICT investment has been indicated, yet not investigated in the past researches. The unreported ICT investment and the misclassification of ICT investment could affect the measurement of ICT investment at firm level. By analysing the content of the financial statement for 86 firms listing in Australian Stock Exchange, this study explains how ICT investments were being classified with the other investment in financial reports from 2006 to 2010. Differentiating between ICT asset and expense is an initial step into the understanding about the classification of ICT investment in financial accounting. The accounting standards requires the capitalisation conditions including future economic benefit, controllability, identifiability, existence, and reliability measurement to be justified for the expenditure before it can be capitalised as asset. The study use fuzzy set qualitative and comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyse the information collected from the experts in the accounting fields. Base on fsQCA analysis, the study is able to shows that the factors considered by the organisation to differentiate ICT asset from ICT expense is beyond the requirement in definition of asset stated in the International Accounting Standards and the Australian Accounting Standards

The PLATO 2.0 mission

PLATO 2.0 has recently been selected for ESA's M3 launch opportunity (2022/24). Providing accurate key planet parameters (radius, mass, density and age) in statistical numbers, it addresses fundamental questions such as: How do planetary systems form and evolve? Are there other systems with planets like ours, including potentially habitable planets? The PLATO 2.0 instrument consists of 34 small aperture telescopes (32 with 25 s readout cadence and 2 with 2.5 s candence) providing a wide field-of-view (2232 deg 2) and a large photometric magnitude range (4-16 mag). It focusses on bright (4-11 mag) stars in wide fields to detect and characterize planets down to Earth-size by photometric transits, whose masses can then be determined by ground-based radial-velocity follow-up measurements. Asteroseismology will be performed for these bright stars to obtain highly accurate stellar parameters, including masses and ages. The combination of bright targets and asteroseismology results in high accuracy for the bulk planet parameters: 2 %, 4-10 % and 10 % for planet radii, masses and ages, respectively. The planned baseline observing strategy includes two long pointings (2-3 years) to detect and bulk characterize planets reaching into the habitable zone (HZ) of solar-like stars and an additional step-and-stare phase to cover in total about 50 % of the sky. PLATO 2.0 will observe up to 1,000,000 stars and detect and characterize hundreds of small planets, and thousands of planets in the Neptune to gas giant regime out to the HZ. It will therefore provide the first large-scale catalogue of bulk characterized planets with accurate radii, masses, mean densities and ages. This catalogue will include terrestrial planets at intermediate orbital distances, where surface temperatures are moderate. Coverage of this parameter range with statistical numbers of bulk characterized planets is unique to PLATO 2.0. The PLATO 2.0 catalogue allows us to e.g.: - complete our knowledge of planet diversity for low-mass objects, - correlate the planet mean density-orbital distance distribution with predictions from planet formation theories,- constrain the influence of planet migration and scattering on the architecture of multiple systems, and - specify how planet and system parameters change with host star characteristics, such as type, metallicity and age. The catalogue will allow us to study planets and planetary systems at different evolutionary phases. It will further provide a census for small, low-mass planets. This will serve to identify objects which retained their primordial hydrogen atmosphere and in general the typical characteristics of planets in such low-mass, low-density range. Planets detected by PLATO 2.0 will orbit bright stars and many of them will be targets for future atmosphere spectroscopy exploring their atmosphere. Furthermore, the mission has the potential to detect exomoons, planetary rings, binary and Trojan planets. The planetary science possible with PLATO 2.0 is complemented by its impact on stellar and galactic science via asteroseismology as well as light curves of all kinds of variable stars, together with observations of stellar clusters of different ages. This will allow us to improve stellar models and study stellar activity. A large number of well-known ages from red giant stars will probe the structure and evolution of our Galaxy. Asteroseismic ages of bright stars for different phases of stellar evolution allow calibrating stellar age-rotation relationships. Together with the results of ESA's Gaia mission, the results of PLATO 2.0 will provide a huge legacy to planetary, stellar and galactic science

Dissipation of Alfven wave pulses propagating along dipole magnetic tubes with reflections at the ionosphere

A ratio of the maximal and minimal cross sections of the magnetic tube (contraction ratio) is a crucial parameter which affects very strongly on reflections of MHD wave pulses propagating along a narrowing magnetic flux tube. In cases of large contraction ratios of magnetospheric magnetic tubes, the wave energy flux at the ionospheric boundary can be rather small. Therefore the dissipation of the wave perturbations can be very weak for each reflection, in spite of a finite conductivity of the planet's ionosphere. The dissipation is stronger for the pulses with shorter wave scales. Because of that, Alfven wave pulses with sufficiently long wave scales have a very small energy loss for each reflection at the conducting ionosphere, and thus, they have many reflections without a noticeable decrease of their amplitude. This effect related to converging magnetic lines is dependent very strongly on the polarization of the Alfven wave. In case of a dipole magnetic field, the effect is most pronounced for wave pulses characterized by velocity and magnetic perturbations in the meridional plane. (C) 2005 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The double-gradient magnetic instability: Stabilizing effect of the guide field

© 2015 AIP Publishing LLC. The role of the dawn-dusk magnetic field component in stabilizing of the magnetotail flapping oscillations is investigated in the double-gradient model framework (Erkaev et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 235003 (2007)), extended for the magnetotail-like configurations with non-zero guide field By. Contribution of the guide field is examined both analytically and by means of linearized 2-dimensional (2D) and non-linear 3-dimensional (3D) MHD modeling. All three approaches demonstrate the same properties of the instability: stabilization of current sheet oscillations for short wavelength modes, appearing of the typical (fastest growing) wavelength λpeakof the order of the current sheet width, decrease of the peak growth rate with increasing Byvalue, and total decay of the mode for By∼0.5 in the lobe magnetic field units. Analytical solution and 2D numerical simulations claim also the shift of λpeaktoward the longer wavelengths with increasing guide field. This result is barely visible in 3D simulations. It may be accounted for the specific background magnetic configuration, the pattern of tail-like equilibrium provided by approximated solution of the conventional Grad-Shafranov equation. The configuration demonstrates drastically changing radius of curvature of magnetic field lines, Rc. This, in turn, favors the "double-gradient" mode (λ > Rc) in one part of the sheet and classical "ballooning" instability (λ < Rc) in another part, which may result in generation of a "combined" unstable mode.status: publishe