Incorporating Financial Literacy into the Accounting Curriculum

Financial literacy education, or the lack thereof, has received much attention in recent years. Over the past two decades, we have witnessed the dot com bubble, corporate scandals that stirred the market, and a large recession. Because many individuals turn to accountants for financial advice, it is now more important than ever for professionals to possess a strong foundation in basic financial literacy to better serve their clients. While the responsibility of financial literacy education does not lie with one institution or one individual, multiple efforts have been put in place to provide financial literacy education to the public. The purpose of this paper is to describe how financial literacy education was successfully incorporated into the accounting classroom to provide tomorrow’s professionals with a strong foundation in financial literacy

Spectra of heavy-light and heavy-heavy mesons containing charm quarks, including higher spin states for Nf=2+1N_f=2+ 1

We study the spectra of heavy-light and heavy-heavy mesons containing charm quarks, including higher spin states. We use two sets of $N_f = 2 + 1$ gauge configurations, one set from QCDSF using the SLiNC action, and the other configurations from the Budapest-Marseille-Wuppertal collaboration, using the HEX smeared clover action. To extract information about the excited states, we choose a suitable basis of operators to implement the variational method.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, Talk presented at the XXIX International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, Lattice2011, July 11-16, 2011, The Village at Squaw Valley, California, US

Is a ‘new feminist visibility’ emerging in the UK PR industry? Senior women’s discourse and performativity within the neoliberal PR firm

Despite persistent gender inequalities, the Public Relations (PR) industry in the UK has historically reflected unease with feminism (Yaxley, 2013; L'Etang, 2015). However, indications of a ‘new feminist visibility’ raise significant questions. Do these feminist moves reflect a blossoming of feminist practice in the PR industry? Or rather, in an occupation that is strongly intertwined with neoliberalism and promotional culture (Miller and Dinan, 2000; Cronin, 2018), is the PR industry emblematic of a highly individualised ‘neoliberal feminism’ (Rottenberg, 2014) and a postfeminist sensibility in which ‘multiple and contradictory ideas’ co-exist? (Gill, 2016: 622). Adopting Edley’s (2000) discourse analysis framework, data drawn from interviews with seven senior female practitioners, supported by observational data, was critically explored in relation to literature in gender sociology, cultural studies and feminist literature in PR. While the online presence of women’s networks in PR provide evidence of a feminist visibility to address inequalities, the ‘subject positions’ and ‘interpretative repertoires’ in the data were characteristic of neoliberal feminist individualism that calls upon women to provide for their own needs and aspirations through ‘self help’ measures. Further, while sex discrimination in the PR industry featured prominently within the discursive repertoires of some participants, inequalities in everyday agency practice were either left unchallenged in response to client expectations or tackled through individual actions. Contradictory repertoires, including the repudiation of sexism, were indicative of entrepreneurial discourse (Lewis, 2006) and a postfeminist sensibility (Gill et al, 2017). Senior PR women providing client services appear to have limited scope beyond individualised, performative strategies to challenge the structures that perpetuate inequalities in PR and bring about transformative change (Golombisky, 2015). Although findings are limited to a small-scale study, this paper contributes a unique perspective of the intersections between neoliberalism, third wave feminism, postfeminism and performativity within the UK PR industry. Keywords: Neoliberalism, postfeminism, performativity, discourse, women, public relations agencie

Spectroscopy and Renormalisation Group Flow of a Lattice Nambu-Jona-Lasinio Model

We investigate a lattice Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model both by the Monte Carlo method and Schwinger-Dyson equations. A comparison allows the discussion of finite size effects and the extrapolation to infinite volume. We pay special attention to the identification of particles and resonances. This enables us to discuss renormalisation group flows in the neighbourhood of the critical coupling where the chiral symmetry breaking phase transition takes place. In no region of the bare parameter space do we find renormalisability for the model.Comment: 66 pages, latex and postscript figures. The postscript file for this paper (called njl.ps) is also available from ftp://dirac.physik.fu-berlin.de/ in the directory nj

Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Quenched Massive Strong-Coupling QED4_4

We present results from a study of subtractive renormalization of the fermion propagator Dyson-Schwinger equation (DSE) in massive strong-coupling quenched QED$_4$. Results are compared for three different fermion-photon proper vertex {\it Ans\"{a}tze\/}: bare $\gamma^\mu$, minimal Ball-Chiu, and Curtis-Pennington. The procedure is straightforward to implement and numerically stable. This is the first study in which this technique is used and it should prove useful in future DSE studies, whenever renormalization is required in numerical work.Comment: REVTEX 3.0, 15 pages plus 7 uuencoded PostScript figure

Large orders in strong-field QED

We address the issue of large-order expansions in strong-field QED. Our approach is based on the one-loop effective action encoded in the associated photon polarisation tensor. We concentrate on the simple case of crossed fields aiming at possible applications of high-power lasers to measure vacuum birefringence. A simple next-to-leading order derivative expansion reveals that the indices of refraction increase with frequency. This signals normal dispersion in the small-frequency regime where the derivative expansion makes sense. To gain information beyond that regime we determine the factorial growth of the derivative expansion coefficients evaluating the first 80 orders by means of computer algebra. From this we can infer a nonperturbative imaginary part for the indices of refraction indicating absorption (pair production) as soon as energy and intensity become (super)critical. These results compare favourably with an analytic evaluation of the polarisation tensor asymptotics. Kramers-Kronig relations finally allow for a nonperturbative definition of the real parts as well and show that absorption goes hand in hand with anomalous dispersion for sufficiently large frequencies and fields.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figure

Calorons and localization of quark eigenvectors in lattice QCD

We analyze the localization properties for eigenvectors of the Dirac operator in quenched lattice QCD in the vicinity of the deconfinement phase transition. Studying the characteristic differences between the Z_3 sectors above the critical temperature T_c, we find indications for the presence of calorons.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

A lattice calculation of the nucleon's spin-dependent structure function g_2 revisited

Our previous calculation of the spin-dependent structure function g_2 is revisited. The interest in this structure function is to a great extent motivated by the fact that it receives contributions from twist-two as well as from twist-three operators already in leading order of 1/Q^2 thus offering the unique possibility of directly assessing higher-twist effects. In our former calculation the lattice operators were renormalized perturbatively and mixing with lower-dimensional operators was ignored. However, the twist-three operator which gives rise to the matrix element d_2 mixes non-perturbatively with an operator of lower dimension. Taking this effect into account leads to a considerably smaller value of d_2, which is consistent with the experimental data.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figure

Lattice QCD at the physical point: Simulation and analysis details

We give details of our precise determination of the light quark masses m_{ud}=(m_u+m_d)/2 and m_s in 2+1 flavor QCD, with simulated pion masses down to 120 MeV, at five lattice spacings, and in large volumes. The details concern the action and algorithm employed, the HMC force with HEX smeared clover fermions, the choice of the scale setting procedure and of the input masses. After an overview of the simulation parameters, extensive checks of algorithmic stability, autocorrelation and (practical) ergodicity are reported. To corroborate the good scaling properties of our action, explicit tests of the scaling of hadron masses in N_f=3 QCD are carried out. Details of how we control finite volume effects through dedicated finite volume scaling runs are reported. To check consistency with SU(2) Chiral Perturbation Theory the behavior of M_\pi^2/m_{ud} and F_\pi as a function of m_{ud} is investigated. Details of how we use the RI/MOM procedure with a separate continuum limit of the running of the scalar density R_S(\mu,\mu') are given. This procedure is shown to reproduce the known value of r_0m_s in quenched QCD. Input from dispersion theory is used to split our value of m_{ud} into separate values of m_u and m_d. Finally, our procedure to quantify both systematic and statistical uncertainties is discussed.Comment: 45 page