Financial reporting fraud : a practical guide to detection and internal control;

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/1116/thumbnail.jp

Financial reporting fraud : a practical guide to detection and internal control

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/1812/thumbnail.jp

A comparison of land-use determinations using data from ERTS-1 and high altitude aircraft

A manual interpretation of ERTS-1 MSS system corrected imagery has been performed on a study area within the Houston Area Test Site to classify land use using the Level 1 categories proposed by the Department of the Interior. The two types of imagery used included: (1) black and white transparencies of each band enlarged to a scale of approximately 1:250,000 and (2) color transparencies composited from the computer compatible tapes using the film recorder on a multispectral data analysis station. The results of this interpretation have been compared with the 1970 land use inventory of HATS which was compiled using color ektachrome imagery from high altitude aircraft (scale 1:120,000). Urban data from the same scene was also analyzed using a computer-aided (clustering) technique. The resulting clusters, representing areas of similar content, were compared with existing land use patterns in Houston. A technique was developed to correlate the spectral clusters to specific urban features on aircraft imagery by the location of specific, high contrast objects in particular resolution elements. It was concluded that ERTS-1 data could be used to develop Level 1 and many Level 2 land use categories for regional inventories and perhaps to some degree on a local level

Asymptotics of relative heat traces and determinants on open surfaces of finite area

The goal of this paper is to prove that on surfaces with asymptotically cusp ends the relative determinant of pairs of Laplace operators is well defined. We consider a surface with cusps (M,g) and a metric h on the surface that is a conformal transformation of the initial metric g. We prove the existence of the relative determinant of the pair $(\Delta_{h},\Delta_{g})$ under suitable conditions on the conformal factor. The core of the paper is the proof of the existence of an asymptotic expansion of the relative heat trace for small times. We find the decay of the conformal factor at infinity for which this asymptotic expansion exists and the relative determinant is defined. Following the paper by B. Osgood, R. Phillips and P. Sarnak about extremal of determinants on compact surfaces, we prove Polyakov's formula for the relative determinant and discuss the extremal problem inside a conformal class. We discuss necessary conditions for the existence of a maximizer.Comment: This is the final version of the article before it gets published. 51 page

On the appearance of Eisenstein series through degeneration

Let $\Gamma$ be a Fuchsian group of the first kind acting on the hyperbolic upper half plane $\mathbb H$, and let $M = \Gamma \backslash \mathbb H$ be the associated finite volume hyperbolic Riemann surface. If $\gamma$ is parabolic, there is an associated (parabolic) Eisenstein series, which, by now, is a classical part of mathematical literature. If $\gamma$ is hyperbolic, then, following ideas due to Kudla-Millson, there is a corresponding hyperbolic Eisenstein series. In this article, we study the limiting behavior of parabolic and hyperbolic Eisenstein series on a degenerating family of finite volume hyperbolic Riemann surfaces. In particular, we prove the following result. If $\gamma \in \Gamma$ corresponds to a degenerating hyperbolic element, then a multiple of the associated hyperbolic Eisenstein series converges to parabolic Eisenstein series on the limit surface.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures. This paper has been accepted for publication in Commentarii Mathematici Helvetic

Sum of Lyapunov exponents of the Hodge bundle with respect to the Teichmuller geodesic flow

We compute the sum of the positive Lyapunov exponents of the Hodge bundle with respect to the Teichmuller geodesic flow. The computation is based on the analytic Riemann-Roch Theorem and uses a comparison of determinants of flat and hyperbolic Laplacians when the underlying Riemann surface degenerates.Comment: Minor corrections. To appear in Publications mathematiques de l'IHE

Cheek Tooth Morphology and Ancient Mitochondrial DNA of Late Pleistocene Horses from the Western Interior of North America: Implications for the Taxonomy of North American Late Pleistocene Equus

Horses were a dominant component of North American Pleistocene land mammal communities and their remains are well represented in the fossil record. Despite the abundant material available for study, there is still considerable disagreement over the number of species of Equus that inhabited the different regions of the continent and on their taxonomic nomenclature. In this study, we investigated cheek tooth morphology and ancient mtDNA of late Pleistocene Equus specimens from the Western Interior of North America, with the objective of clarifying the species that lived in this region prior to the end-Pleistocene extinction. Based on the morphological and molecular data analyzed, a caballine (Equus ferus) and a non-caballine (E. conversidens) species were identified from different localities across most of the Western Interior. A second non-caballine species (E. cedralensis) was recognized from southern localities based exclusively on the morphological analyses of the cheek teeth. Notably the separation into caballine and non-caballine species was observed in the Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of ancient mtDNA as well as in the geometric morphometric analyses of the upper and lower premolars. Teeth morphologically identified as E. conversidens that yielded ancient mtDNA fall within the New World stilt-legged clade recognized in previous studies and this is the name we apply to this group. Geographic variation in morphology in the caballine species is indicated by statistically different occlusal enamel patterns in the specimens from Bluefish Caves, Yukon Territory, relative to the specimens from the other geographic regions. Whether this represents ecomorphological variation and/or a certain degree of geographic and genetic isolation of these Arctic populations requires further study

Plio-Pleistocene climatic change had a major impact on the assembly and disassembly processes of Iberian rodent communities

Comprehension of changes in community composition through multiple spatio-temporal scales is a prime challenge in ecology and palaeobiology. However, assembly, structuring and disassembly of biotic metacommunities in deep-time is insufficiently known. To address this, we used the extensively sampled Iberian Plio-Pleistocene fossil record of rodent faunas as our model system to explore how global climatic events may alter metacommunity structure. Through factor analysis, we found five sets of genera, called faunal components, which co-vary in proportional diversity over time. These faunal components had different spatio-temporal distributions throughout the Plio-Pleistocene, resulting in non-random changes in species assemblages, particularly in response to the development of the Pleistocene glaciations. Three successive metacommunities with distinctive taxonomic structures were identified as a consequence of the differential responses of their members to global climatic change: (1) Ruscinian subtropical faunas (5.3–3.4 Ma) dominated by a faunal component that can be considered as a Miocene legacy; (2) transition faunas during the Villafranchian–Biharian (3.4–0.8 Ma) with a mixture of different faunal components; and (3) final dominance of the temperate Toringian faunas (0.8–0.01 Ma) that would lead to the modern Iberian assemblage. The influence of the cooling global temperature drove the reorganisation of these rodent metacommunities. Selective extinction processes due to this large-scale environmental disturbance progressively eliminated the subtropical specialist species from the early Pliocene metacommunity. This disassembly process was accompanied by the organisation of a diversified metacommunity with an increased importance of biome generalist species, and finally followed by the assembly during the middle–late Pleistocene of a new set of species specialised in the novel environments developed as a consequence of the glaciations

Oblivious Gradient Clock Synchronization

Abstract. We study the gradient clock synchronization (GCS) problem, in which the worst-case clock skew between neighboring nodes has to be minimized. In particular, we consider oblivious clock synchronization algorithms which base their decision on how to adapt the clock solely on the most accurate timing information received from each neighbor. For several intuitive clock synchronization algorithms, which attempt to minimize the skew at all times, we show that the clock skew between neighboring nodes can be significantly larger than the proven lower bound of Ω( log D log log D), where D denotes the diameter of the network. All of these natural algorithms belong to the class of oblivious clock synchronization algorithms. Additionally, we present an oblivious algorithm with a worstcase skew of O(d + √ D) between any two nodes at distance d