A U.S. Manager\u27s Guide to Differences Between IFRS and U.S. GAAP

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are now required for consolidated financial reports for all European Union exchange-listed companies. Officials estimated that for 2005, the initial year of EU adoption, 8,000 financial statements were prepared in accordance with IFRS for the first time. Other countries have also adopted IFRS or IFRS-equivalent financial reporting standards. IFRS differ from U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) in many key areas. The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) are working on various convergence projects designed to reduce or eliminate differences between the two sets of reporting standards. But existing differences will likely continue for at least the next two years, and, for many accounting topics, differences are likely to last much longer. This article highlights the 20 convergence projects and summarizes the differences between the two sets of standards. In addition, differences in three topics that are not included in the convergence efforts are identified. Differences between IFRS and U.S. GAAP found in actual EU company Form 20-F filings are used to illustrate the impact of the reporting-standard differences

Derived Equivalences of K3 Surfaces and Twined Elliptic Genera

We use the unique canonically-twisted module over a certain distinguished super vertex operator algebra---the moonshine module for Conway's group---to attach a weak Jacobi form of weight zero and index one to any symplectic derived equivalence of a projective complex K3 surface that fixes a stability condition in the distinguished space identified by Bridgeland. According to work of Huybrechts, following Gaberdiel--Hohenegger--Volpato, any such derived equivalence determines a conjugacy class in Conway's group, the automorphism group of the Leech lattice. Conway's group acts naturally on the module we consider. In physics the data of a projective complex K3 surface together with a suitable stability condition determines a supersymmetric non-linear sigma model, and supersymmetry preserving automorphisms of such an object may be used to define twinings of the K3 elliptic genus. Our construction recovers the K3 sigma model twining genera precisely in all available examples. In particular, the identity symmetry recovers the usual K3 elliptic genus, and this signals a connection to Mathieu moonshine. A generalization of our construction recovers a number of the Jacobi forms arising in umbral moonshine. We demonstrate a concrete connection to supersymmetric non-linear K3 sigma models by establishing an isomorphism between the twisted module we consider and the vector space underlying a particular sigma model attached to a certain distinguished K3 surface.Comment: 62 pages including 7 pages of tables; updated references and minor editing in v.2; to appear in Research in the Mathematical Science

The Moonshine Module for Conway's Group

We exhibit an action of Conway's group---the automorphism group of the Leech lattice---on a distinguished super vertex operator algebra, and we prove that the associated graded trace functions are normalized principal moduli, all having vanishing constant terms in their Fourier expansion. Thus we construct the natural analogue of the Frenkel--Lepowsky--Meurman moonshine module for Conway's group. The super vertex operator algebra we consider admits a natural characterization, in direct analogy with that conjectured to hold for the moonshine module vertex operator algebra. It also admits a unique canonically-twisted module, and the action of the Conway group naturally extends. We prove a special case of generalized moonshine for the Conway group, by showing that the graded trace functions arising from its action on the canonically-twisted module are constant in the case of Leech lattice automorphisms with fixed points, and are principal moduli for genus zero groups otherwise.Comment: 54 pages including 11 pages of tables; minor revisions in v2, submitte

Intrapreneurship - An international study

This paper presents the results of a novel international study of intrapreneurship ( i.e., employees developing new business activities for their employer), carried out in eleven countries in the framework of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. At the individual level, it is found that intrapreneurs are much more likely to have intentions to start a new independent business than other employees. However, at the macro level�the study finds a negative correlation between intrapreneurship and independent entrepreneurship. One explanation for these contrasting outcomes is�a diverging effect of per capita income on intrapreneurship (positive effect) and early-stage entrepreneurial activity (negative effect). �

Visual pathways from the perspective of cost functions and multi-task deep neural networks

Vision research has been shaped by the seminal insight that we can understand the higher-tier visual cortex from the perspective of multiple functional pathways with different goals. In this paper, we try to give a computational account of the functional organization of this system by reasoning from the perspective of multi-task deep neural networks. Machine learning has shown that tasks become easier to solve when they are decomposed into subtasks with their own cost function. We hypothesize that the visual system optimizes multiple cost functions of unrelated tasks and this causes the emergence of a ventral pathway dedicated to vision for perception, and a dorsal pathway dedicated to vision for action. To evaluate the functional organization in multi-task deep neural networks, we propose a method that measures the contribution of a unit towards each task, applying it to two networks that have been trained on either two related or two unrelated tasks, using an identical stimulus set. Results show that the network trained on the unrelated tasks shows a decreasing degree of feature representation sharing towards higher-tier layers while the network trained on related tasks uniformly shows high degree of sharing. We conjecture that the method we propose can be used to analyze the anatomical and functional organization of the visual system and beyond. We predict that the degree to which tasks are related is a good descriptor of the degree to which they share downstream cortical-units.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

A Survey of AACSB Accredited Institutions and the Use of Work Experiences as part of the Business Curricula

This paper describes a survey of all American AACSB-accredited schools of business. The survey gathered information concerning work experiences (internships or cooperative education) required or offered in business curricula. Of the targeted schools, 133 responded. Results are presented regarding internship characteristics (prerequisites, student compensation, and course credit); assessment of students\u27 performance (grading. learning objectives, academic and work components of grade determination); and administrative issues (site visits, release time, and faculty compensation). Of the 133 respondents. 12 require work experience of all majors, 14 require it of some majors, 88 offer but do not require, and J 9 offer no work experience

Fluctuations and stability in front propagation

Propagating fronts arising from bistable reaction-diffusion equations are a purely deterministic effect. Stochastic reaction-diffusion processes also show front propagation which coincides with the deterministic effect in the limit of small fluctuations (usually, large populations). However, for larger fluctuations propagation can be affected. We give an example, based on the classic spruce-budworm model, where the direction of wave propagation, i.e., the relative stability of two phases, can be reversed by fluctuations.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Growth modes of Fe(110) revisited: a contribution of self-assembly to magnetic materials

We have revisited the epitaxial growth modes of Fe on W(110) and Mo(110), and propose an overview or our contribution to the field. We show that the Stranski-Krastanov growth mode, recognized for a long time in these systems, is in fact characterized by a bimodal distribution of islands for growth temperature in the range 250-700°C. We observe firstly compact islands whose shape is determined by Wulff-Kaischev's theorem, secondly thin and flat islands that display a preferred height, ie independant from nominal thickness and deposition procedure (1.4nm for Mo, and 5.5nm for W on the average). We used this effect to fabricate self-organized arrays of nanometers-thick stripes by step decoration. Self-assembled nano-ties are also obtained for nucleation of the flat islands on Mo at fairly high temperature, ie 800°C. Finally, using interfacial layers and solid solutions we separate two effects on the preferred height, first that of the interfacial energy, second that of the continuously-varying lattice parameter of the growth surface.Comment: 49 pages. Invited topical review for J. Phys.: Condens. Matte