Towards Automated Analysis of Business Processes for Financial Audits

Financial audits play a significant role in the economy by safeguarding the correctness of published financial information. Public auditors face the challenge to audit financial statements that are created by increasingly integrated and complex information systems. This paper addresses a specific problem in the auditing process. A major challenge in this process is the analysis and audit of business processes that produce financial entries. We illustrate results from applying business process mining techniques to extensive test and real life data and discuss gained insights from the application for the development of automated business process analysis methods in the context of financial audits

Metacognitive monitoring via strategies and judgments

Metacognitive monitoring is conceptualized as a situation-specific and context-dependent process that helps learners to regulate their learning. The current study builds on the idea that metacognitive monitoring can fulfil monitoring functions in different phases (when to monitor: during learning or during testing), and that it refers to several objects (what to monitor: processing or retrieval). The cross-sectional study with 184 higher-education students used a situation-specific approach and referred to students’ monitoring via monitoring strategies and monitoring judgments during test preparation and test processing. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that monitoring via strategies and judgments can be directed at different objects. In addition, monitoring different objects was more strongly correlated within the same phase than across different phases. The study results emphasize the need for an object-specific and comprehensive consideration of metacognitive monitoring via monitoring strategies and monitoring judgments

Simulated single-layer forest canopies delay Northern Hemisphere snowmelt

Single-layer vegetation schemes in modern land surface models have been found to overestimate diurnal cycles in longwave radiation beneath forest canopies. This study introduces an empirical correction, based on forest stand-scale simulations, which reduces diurnal cycles of sub-canopy longwave radiation. The correction is subsequently implemented in land-only simulations of the Community Land Model version 4.5 (CLM4.5) in order to assess the impact on snow cover. Nighttime underestimations of sub-canopy longwave radiation outweigh daytime overestimations, which leads to underestimated averages over the snow cover season. As a result, snow temperatures are underestimated and snowmelt is delayed in CLM4.5 across evergreen boreal forests. Comparison with global observations confirms this delay and its reduction by correction of sub-canopy longwave radiation. Increasing insolation and day length change the impact of overestimated diurnal cycles on daily average subcanopy longwave radiation throughout the snowmelt season. Consequently, delay of snowmelt in land-only simulations is more substantial where snowmelt occurs early

Modelling and analysis of planar cell polarity

Planar cell polarity (PCP) occurs in the epithelia of many animals and can lead to the alignment of hairs, bristles and feathers; physiologically, it can organise ciliary beating. Here we present two approaches to modelling this phenomenon. The aim is to discover the basic mechanisms that drive PCP, while keeping the models mathematically tractable. We present a feedback and diffusion model, in which adjacent cell sides of neighbouring cells are coupled by a negative feedback loop and diffusion acts within the cell. This approach can give rise to polarity, but also to period two patterns. Polarisation arises via an instability provided a sufficiently strong feedback and sufficiently weak diffusion. Moreover, we discuss a conservative model in which proteins within a cell are redistributed depending on the amount of proteins in the neighbouring cells, coupled with intracellular diffusion. In this case polarity can arise from weakly polarised initial conditions or via a wave provided the diffusion is weak enough. Both models can overcome small anomalies in the initial conditions. Furthermore, the range of the effects of groups of cells with different properties than the surrounding cells depends on the strength of the initial global cue and the intracellular diffusion

Participatory Design of Web 2.0 Applications in SME Networks

In increasingly complex and dynamic markets, small and medium sized enterprises (SME) face new challenges. Amongst others, these are innovativeness and technological expertise. In order to counteract the challenges, SMEs cooperate in corporate networks. Here, information and communication technologies are main drivers. At this point, Web 2.0 technologies are uttermost important. Until now, the development and implementation of Web 2.0 applications in SMEs was proceeded independently from the future users. We aim at bridging this gap by developing a participatory procedural model. The presented model includes the futures users from the beginning of the development process. The model respects SME specific characteristics

Relativistic effects on the Fukui function

The extent of relativistic effects on the Fukui function, which describes local reactivity trends within conceptual density functional theory (DFT), and frontier orbital densities has been analysed on the basis of three benchmark molecules containing the heavy elements: Au, Pb, and Bi. Various approximate relativistic approaches have been tested and compared with the four-component fully relativistic reference. Scalar relativistic effects, as described by the scalar zeroth-order regular approximation methodology and effective core potential calculations, already provide a large part of the relativistic corrections. Inclusion of spin-orbit coupling effects improves the results, especially for the heavy p-block compounds. We thus expect that future conceptual DFT-based reactivity studies on heavy-element molecules can rely on one of the approximate relativistic methodologie

Tackling Complexity: Process Reconstruction and Graph Transformation for Financial Audits

A key objective of implementing business intelligence tools and methods is to analyze voluminous data and to derive information that would otherwise not be available. Although the overall significance of business intelligence has increased with the general growth of processed and available data it is almost absent in the auditing industry. Public accountants face the challenge to provide an opinion on financial statements that are based on the data produced by the automated processing of countless business transactions in ERP systems. Methods for mining and reconstructing financially relevant process instances can be used as a data analysis tool in the specific context of auditing. In this article we introduce and evaluate an algorithm that effectively reduces the complexity of mined process instances. The presented methods provide a part of the foundation for implementing automated analysis and audit procedures that can assist auditors to perform more efficient and effective audits

Is a persistent global bias necessary for the establishment of planar cell polarity?

Planar cell polarity (PCP) — the coordinated polarisation of a whole field of cells within the plane of a tissue — relies on the interaction of three modules: a global module that couples individual cellular polarity to the tissue axis, a local module that aligns the axis of polarisation of neighbouring cells, and a readout module that directs the correct outgrowth of PCP-regulated structures such as hairs and bristles. While much is known about the molecular components that are required for PCP, the functional details of—and interactions between—the modules remain unclear. In this work, we perform a mathematical analysis of two previously proposed computational models of the local module (Amonlirdviman et al., Science, 307, 2005; Le Garrec et al., Dev. Dyn., 235, 2006). Both models can reproduce wild-type and mutant phenotypes of PCP observed in the Drosophila wing under the assumption that a tissue-wide polarity cue from the global module persists throughout the development of PCP. We demonstrate that both models can also generate tissue-level PCP when provided with only a transient initial polarity cue. However, such transient cues are not sufficient to ensure robustness of the resulting cellular polarisation