IFRS für KMU

Mit der Publikation des International Financial Reporting Standard for Small and Medium-Sized Entities – kurz: IFRS for SMEs – im Juli 2009 ging das bisher langwierigste Projekt des International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) zu Ende: ein einziges Regelwerk weltweit für Finanzberichte privater Unternehmen! Während die „vollen“ IFRS (full IFRS) und US GAAP immer komplexer werden, wird mit dem IFRS for SMEs eine Variante light in den Markt gebracht. Der vorliegende Beitrag erläutert Geltungsbereich, Werdegang und Wesensmerkmale des neuen Standards, dessen wesentliche Unterschiede zu den „vollen“ IFRS sowie den Swiss GAAP FER und beleuchtet das Marktpotenzial in der Schweiz

Tropical Forest Protection, Uncertainty, and the Environmental Integrity of Carbon Mitigation Policies

Tropical forests are estimated to release approximately 1.7 PgC per year as a result of deforestation. Avoiding tropical deforestation could potentially play a significant role in carbon mitigation over the next 50 years if not longer. Many policymakers and negotiators are skeptical of our ability to reduce deforestation effectively. They fear that if credits for avoided deforestation are allowed to replace fossil fuel emission reductions for compliance with Kyoto, the environment will suffer because the credits will not reflect truly additional carbon storage. This paper considers the nature of the uncertainties involved in estimating carbon stocks and predicting deforestation. We build an empirically based stochastic model that combines data from field ecology, geographical information system (GIS) data from satellite imagery, economic analysis and ecological process modeling to simulate the effects of these uncertainties on the environmental integrity of credits for avoided deforestation. We find that land use change, and hence additionality of carbon, is extremely hard to predict accurately and errors in the numbers of credits given for avoiding deforestation are likely to be very large. We also find that errors in estimation of carbon storage could be large and could have significant impacts. We find that in Costa Rica, nearly 42% of all the loss of environmental integrity that would arise from poor carbon estimates arises in one life zone, tropical wet. This suggests that research effort might be focused in this life zone.climate, economics, carbon sequestration, uncertainty, policy, tropics

EXPRESSION OF EMOTION IN INSTANT MESSAGING

poster abstractEmotion expression in text-based instant messaging (IM) has received little empirical scrutiny. The emotional cues people use to express their dif-ferent emotions in IM communication and how their personality traits affect those cues are the main focus of this study. Results of a preliminary study in IM suggest that in stressful situations people apply significantly fewer vocal spelling emotional cues than in non-stressful situations. There is also a sig-nificant relationship between conscientiousness as a personality trait and use of lexical surrogate emotional cues in this type of communication. Our pro-posed study expands upon preliminary data to uncover more significant dif-ferences among the emotional cues people use to express different emotions in IM, including the role of relevant personality traits. Identifying how users express emotions in IM assists researchers and designers in focusing on the users’ emotional needs and results in the improvement of emotional com-munication strategies in IM

Carbon Dynamics and Land-Use Choices: Building a Regional-Scale Multidisciplinary Model

Policy enabling tropical forests to approach their potential contribution to global-climate-change mitigation requires forecasts of land use and carbon storage on a large scale over long periods. In this paper, we present an integrated modeling methodology that addresses these needs. We model the dynamics of the human land-use system and of C pools contained in each ecosystem, as well as their interactions. The model is national scale, and is currently applied in a preliminary way to Costa Rica using data spanning a period of over fifty years. It combines an ecological process model, parameterized using field and other data, with an economic model, estimated using historical data to ensure a close link to actual behavior. These two models are linked so that ecological conditions affect land-use choices and vice versa. The integrated model predicts land use and its consequences for C storage for policy scenarios. These predictions can be used to create baselines, reward sequestration, and estimate the value in both environmental and economic terms of including C sequestration in tropical forests as part of the efforts to mitigate global climate change. The model can also be used to assess the benefits from costly activities to increase accuracy and thus reduce errors and their societal costs.carbon, sequestration, climate change, land use, modelling

The GRaPPa Lab: Supporting Team Decision Making in Complex Environments

poster abstractThe GRaPPa (Group Psychology and Performance) Lab operates within the School of Informatics at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), in cooperation with the User Simulation and Experience Research Lab. The focus of our research is on interdependent teams in technologically complex work environments characterized by uncertainty, stress, high risk, changing moods, and varying levels of expertise. The GRaPPa Lab employs a mixed-methodological approach. Field studies provide rich and nuanced knowledge about individuals and teams at work in complex environments. Likewise, controlled laboratory experiments have provided the foundation for countless contributions to our understanding of the human characteristics that impact the development and use of systems, devices, and environments. Yet such experiments are limited in what they can tell us about work situated in real-world settings, just as field studies are limited in their support for precision and replicability. The GRaPPa Lab leverages the strengths of both through the use of simulated task environments and scaled worlds in the search for holistic assessments of group behavior and task performance. This poster will showcase aspects of an ongoing research program, Bridging the Situation Space to Decision Space Gap. This project is examining the modeling and visualization of decision space information to supplement situation space information in the contexts of disease contagion and emergency management. To enhance the decision support of emergency responders, we are examining the ability of decision space visualization tools to enhance option awareness and support more robust decision making. This work is focused on detailing the impact of the decision space information provided to users, relating the correctness of decisions to the levels of complexity represented in the events, and the affordances for understanding alternative actions. This ongoing project is focused on prototyping multiple visualization methods and testing them in human-in-the-loop experiments based on the domain of emergency crisis management. In addition, the computer models underlying the decision space are being expanded to support increasingly complex situations. This research provides further insight into the value of decision space information and option awareness for users working in complex environments

Locus specific reduction of L1 expression in the cortices of individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

The activation and dysregulation of retrotransposons has been identified in the CNS of individuals with the fatal neurodegenerative disorder Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This includes elements from multiple different families and subfamilies of retrotransposons, however there is limited knowledge of the specific loci from which this expression occurs in ALS. The long interspersed element-1 (L1) is the only autonomous retrotransposon in the human genome and members of this family of elements maintain the ability to mobilise. Despite L1s contributing to 17% of the human genome only 80–100 L1s encode the required proteins for mobilisation and are retrotransposition competent. Identifying the specific loci from which L1 expression occurs will inform on the potential functional consequences of their expression, such as the potential for somatic retrotransposition or DNA damage caused by the endonuclease activity of the ORF2 protein of the L1. Here we characterised L1 loci expression using the L1EM tool (https://github.com/FenyoLab/L1EM) in RNA sequencing data from 518 samples across four tissues (motor cortex, frontal cortex, cerebellum and cervical spinal cord) in the Target ALS cohort obtained from the New York Genome Center. There was a significant reduction in total intact L1 expression (those that encode functional proteins) in two brain regions of individuals with ALS compared to controls and clustering of the ALS brain regions occurred based on their intact L1 expression profile. Although overall the levels of L1 expression were reduced in ALS/ALS with other neurological disorder (ND) there were individuals in which L1s were expressed at much higher levels than the rest of the ALS/ALSND cohort. Expressed L1 loci were more frequently located in introns compared to those not expressed and the level of L1 expression positively correlated with the expression of the gene in which it was located. Significant differences were observed in the expression profiles of L1s in ALS and specific features of these elements, such as location in the genome and whether or not they are intact, were significantly associated with those that were expressed in the cohort

Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling Through E-region Turbulence 1: Energy Budget

During periods of intense geomagnetic activity, strong electric fields and currents penetrate from the magnetosphere into high-latitude ionosphere where they dissipate energy, form electrojets, and excite plasma instabilities in the E-region ionosphere. These instabilities give rise to plasma turbulence which induces non-linear currents and strong anomalous electron heating (AEH) as observed by radars. These two effects can increase the global ionospheric conductances. This paper analyzes the energy budget in the electrojet, while the companion paper applies this analysis to develop a model of anomalous conductivity and frictional heating useful in large-scale simulations and models of the geospace environment. Employing first principles, this paper proves for the general case an earlier conjecture that the source of energy for plasma turbulence and anomalous heating equals the work by external field on the non-linear current. Using a two-fluid model of an arbitrarily magnetized plasma and the quasilinear approximation, this paper describes the energy conversion process, calculates the partial sources of anomalous heating, and reconciles the apparent contradiction between the inherently 2-D non-linear current and the 3-D nature of AEH.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure; 1st of two companion paper

Robust concurrent remote entanglement between two superconducting qubits

Entangling two remote quantum systems which never interact directly is an essential primitive in quantum information science and forms the basis for the modular architecture of quantum computing. When protocols to generate these remote entangled pairs rely on using traveling single photon states as carriers of quantum information, they can be made robust to photon losses, unlike schemes that rely on continuous variable states. However, efficiently detecting single photons is challenging in the domain of superconducting quantum circuits because of the low energy of microwave quanta. Here, we report the realization of a robust form of concurrent remote entanglement based on a novel microwave photon detector implemented in the superconducting circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) platform of quantum information. Remote entangled pairs with a fidelity of $0.57\pm0.01$ are generated at $200$ Hz. Our experiment opens the way for the implementation of the modular architecture of quantum computation with superconducting qubits.Comment: Main paper: 7 pages, 4 figures; Appendices: 14 pages, 9 figure

Strange New Canons: The Aesthetics of Classical Reception in 20th Century American Experimental Poetics.

American experimental poets after modernism turned to Greek and Latin texts as pretexts to explode the ideal of the classical tradition, and to explore, instead, the radical discontinuity and linguistic alterity of the classics. Focusing on divergent but related modes of classical reception in American avant-garde poetry, this dissertation asks why and how “the classical” is a key site for poetic experiments by several generations of poets, including Louis Zukofsky, David Melnick, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe. Though heterogeneous in many respects, their poetics demonstrate the irreconcilability of classical texts—in all their graphic, phonic, and material particularity—with an idea of classics at the center of Anglo-American culture. They create “strange new canons” through epitextual, paratextual, and metatextual engagements with classicism, demonstrating how canon becomes anti-canon, and opening up alternative models for canonical revision. After a theoretical introduction about literary canonicity and poetic innovation, each of the dissertation’s three chapters pairs two authors according to the dual criteria of literary period and mode of classical reception, tracing a line from late modernist Objectivism to the New American Poetry and Language Writing. Chapter One analyzes homophonic translation in Zukofsky’s Catullus and Melnick’s Homer, as two examples of “epitextual” poetics that foreground the material text. Chapter Two turns to Ginsberg and Spicer to compare different “paratextual” strategies of adaptation through the figures of Catullus and Orpheus, simultaneously critiquing hegemonic classicism and adapting “classics” for their own poetic purposes: while Ginsberg usurps and transposes classical authority for alternative texts and social identities, Spicer responds critically to Ginsberg by offering up an even more potent critique in his self-cancelling classical poetics. Chapter Three contrasts Bernstein’s poetics of citation with Howe’s poetics of luminous fragments (in Pythagorean Silence) with Bernstein’s poetics of citation (in The Sophist and elsewhere) as two examples of “metatextual” reception, creating classical simulacra divorced from Greek and Latin texts for ironic critique or historical transformation. The conclusion reflects further on the implications of American experimental poetics for rethinking the past and future of classical reception studies, and extends its implications into contemporary canon debates and avant-garde poetics.PHDComparative LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100079/1/mpfaff_1.pd

Characterisation of the Function of a SINE-VNTR-Alu Retrotransposon to Modulate Isoform Expression at the MAPT Locus

SINE-VNTR-Alu retrotransposons represent one class of transposable elements which contribute to the regulation and evolution of the primate genome and have the potential to be involved in genetic instability and disease progression. However, these polymorphic elements have not been extensively analysed when addressing the missing heritability of neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease (PD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). SVA_67, a retrotransposon insertion polymorphism, is located in a 1.8 Mb region of high linkage disequilibrium, called the MAPT locus, which is known to contribute to increased risk of developing PD, frontotemporal dementia and other tauopathies. To investigate the role of SVA_67 in directing differential gene expression at this locus, we characterised the impact of SVA_67 allele dosage on isoform expression of several genes in the MAPT locus using the datasets from both the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative and New York Genome Center Consortium Target ALS cohort. The Parkinson’s data was from gene expression in the blood and the ALS data from a variety of CNS regions and allowed us to demonstrate that SVA_67 presence or absence correlated with both isoform- and tissue-specific expression of multiple genes at this locus. This study highlights the importance of addressing SVA polymorphism in disease genetics to gain insight into a better understanding of the role of these regulatory domains to a variety of neurodegenerative diseases