Extending The Use And Effectiveness Of The Monopoly® Board Game As An In-Class Economic Simulation In The Introductory Financial Accounting Course

This paper extends the use of the Monopoly® board game as an economic simulation exercise designed to reinforce an understanding of how the accounting cycle impacts the financial statements used to evaluate management performance. This extension adds elements of debt not previously utilized to allow for an introduction of the fundamentals of ratio analysis at a foundation level in financial accounting instruction. This extended approach uses the rules and strategies of a familiar board game to create a simulation of business and economic realities, which then becomes an effective, interactive, in-class financial accounting practice set. The unique combination of each player’s skill and luck provides for unlimited outcome possibilities, delivering an interpretive result that students can neither predict nor easily manipulate. This pedagogical approach serves to provide students with a sense of proprietorship in the activities of the instruction and fosters a competitive spirit to succeed in class activities that will ultimately be presented to the entire class. While the instructor surrenders a significant level of control in the class exercise, the uniqueness of each Monopoly® team’s game results requires active engagement in-class and additional individual effort on the follow-up assignments outside the classroom. In the previous use of the Monopoly® board game, the class activity provided a valuable parallel for reality in practicing the financial accounting cycle and emphasizing its use by external parties. Because of the dynamic sense of capturing the “real-time” aspect of the game into finished financial statements for analysis, students start to sense a greater appreciation for the role that accounting cycle activities play in business reporting and the assessment of operating results. Using the Monopoly® board game in the first course in financial accounting tends to generate a higher level of competitive energy in the classroom experience, with more actively engaged students grasping the nature and purpose of the financial accounting system more quickly and actively than with other pedagogical approaches previously used. More recently, using Microsoft Excel to reflect the game results and present the financial statements has added to the robust learning experience achieved by incorporating the Monopoly® board game.

Using The Monopoly Board Game As An Efficient Tool In Introductory Financial Accounting Instruction

This paper discusses the use of the Monopoly board game as a tool to contrast the concept of income from an economic perspective with the financial accounting (GAAP) concept of income. This approach is used in a principles of accounting course to make more efficient use of time in an environment where only one academic term is devoted to presenting basic financial accounting concepts. The use of an engaging and unusual medium early in the principles course helps students build confidence and provides positive reinforcement of understanding in a course that undergraduate business students do not always enjoy. The board game medium allows for a simple presentation of some of the differences in economic and accounting definitions of income. Further, it provides a familiar economic simulation of business activity that saves time in demonstrating the value of accounting information from the users perspective

Using The Monopoly Board Game As An In-Class Economic Simulation In The Introductory Financial Accounting Course

This paper discusses using the Monopoly® board game as an economic simulation exercise to reinforce an understanding of how the accounting cycle impacts financial statements used to evaluate management performance. This approach uses the rules and strategies of a familiar board game to create a simulation of business and economic realities, which then becomes an effective in-class financial accounting practice set. The unique combination of each player’s skill and luck provides for unlimited outcome possibilities, delivering an interpretive result that cannot be predicted. This provides the students with a sense of ownership and “their own business” activities to record and present in class. While there is a definite lack of control over homework assigned by the instructor, the uniqueness of each Monopoly® team’s game results requires active engagement in class and individual effort on the assignments outside the classroom. The game establishes a valuable parallel for reality in practicing the financial accounting cycle and emphasizing its use by external parties. Because of the dynamic sense of capturing the “real-time” aspect of the game into finished financial statements for analysis, the students start to sense a greater appreciation for the role that accounting plays in business. This makes the first course in financial accounting move more quickly, and students appear to grasp the nature and purpose of the financial accounting system more readily and actively than with other pedagogical approaches previously used. This tends to offset the generally negative reputation of financial accounting courses on campus and also creates positive buzz about the principles of accounting class for students who must take it as a required course

A Retrospective View Of The IFRS Conceptual Path And Treatment Of Fair Value Measurements In Financial Reporting

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) require some assets, liabilities and equity instruments to be measured at fair value (IASB ED/2009/5). Thus begins the Fair Value Measurement IASB 2009 Exposure Draft. The IFRS requirement for fair value reporting has actually existed since 1975, due to the adoption of pronouncement IAS 2 (IASC/IAS 2 1975). This standard required that Inventory be valued at fair value less costs to sell for both reporting and disclosure purposes. But, as is the case in the history of many accounting standards and practice, the devil has always been in the details. This paper explores a brief historical path of fair value accounting within the venue of international accounting standards. Because of the impending plan of convergence and harmonization, plus potential global acceptance of standards of reporting and content, both the IASB and FASB have extensively explored the relevance and reliability of fair value reporting as compared with the more traditional costbased system. This exploration has been controversial because it goes to the very heart of the centuries-old cost-based foundation of financial accounting. In spite of the ongoing controversy of fair value versus historical cost accounting and the multiple uses and requirements of the fair value theoretical concept in IFRSs, there has been no definitive guidance on the various alternative calculations and appropriate uses of these differing representations of fair value. As the comment period closes on a second exposure draft directed at resolving Fair Value Measurement, this retrospective view of the international standards moves through the past standards and into the future methodology of reporting fair value. With FASBs latest exposure draft on fair value currently pending, the convergence opportunity of a more closely defined concept and its subsequent use in global practice is quite possibly at hand

A consensus‑based ensemble approach to improve transcriptome assembly

Background: Systems-level analyses, such as differential gene expression analysis, co-expression analysis, and metabolic pathway reconstruction, depend on the accuracy of the transcriptome. Multiple tools exist to perform transcriptome assembly from RNAseq data. However, assembling high quality transcriptomes is still not a trivial problem. This is especially the case for non-model organisms where adequate reference genomes are often not available. Different methods produce different transcriptome models and there is no easy way to determine which are more accurate. Furthermore, having alternative-splicing events exacerbates such difficult assembly problems. While benchmarking transcriptome assemblies is critical, this is also not trivial due to the general lack of true reference transcriptomes. Results: In this study, we first provide a pipeline to generate a set of the simulated benchmark transcriptome and corresponding RNAseq data. Using the simulated benchmarking datasets, we compared the performance of various transcriptome assembly approaches including both de novo and genome-guided methods. The results showed that the assembly performance deteriorates significantly when alternative transcripts (isoforms) exist or for genome-guided methods when the reference is not available from the same genome. To improve the transcriptome assembly performance, leveraging the overlapping predictions between different assemblies, we present a new consensus-based ensemble transcriptome assembly approach, ConSemble. Conclusions: Without using a reference genome, ConSemble using four de novo assemblers achieved an accuracy up to twice as high as any de novo assemblers we compared. When a reference genome is available, ConSemble using four genomeguided assemblies removed many incorrectly assembled contigs with minimal impact on correctly assembled contigs, achieving higher precision and accuracy than individual genome-guided methods. Furthermore, ConSemble using de novo assemblers matched or exceeded the best performing genome-guided assemblers even when the transcriptomes included isoforms. We thus demonstrated that the ConSemble consensus strategy both for de novo and genome-guided assemblers can improve transcriptome assembly. The RNAseq simulation pipeline, the benchmark transcriptome datasets, and the script to perform the ConSemble assembly are all freely available from: http:// bioin folab. unl. edu/ emlab/ conse mble/

The Antarctic ozone hole during 2014

We review the 2014 Antarctic ozone hole, making use of a variety of ground-based and space-based measurements of ozone and ultra-violet radiation, supplemented by meteorological reanalyses. Although the polar vortex was relatively stable in 2014 and persisted some weeks longer into November than was the case in 2012 or 2013, the vortex temperature was close to the long-term mean in September and October with modest warming events occurring in both months, preventing severe depletion from taking place. Of the seven metrics reported here, all were close to their respective median values of the 1979–2014 record, being ranked between 16th and 21st of the 35 years for which adequate satellite observations exist

The Antarctic ozone hole during 2015 and 2016

We reviewed the 2015 and 2016 Antarctic ozone holes, making use of a variety of ground-based and spacebased measurements of ozone and ultraviolet radiation, supplemented by meteorological reanalyses. The ozone hole of 2015 was one of the most severe on record with respect to maximum area and integrated deficit and was notably longlasting, with many values above previous extremes in October, November and December. In contrast, all assessed metrics for the 2016 ozone hole were at or below their median values for the 37 ozone holes since 1979 for which adequate satellite observations exist. The 2015 ozone hole was influenced both by very cold conditions and enhanced ozone depletion caused by stratospheric aerosol resulting from the April 2015 volcanic eruption of Calbuco (Chile)

Divergent evolution of extreme production of variant plant monounsaturated fatty acids

Metabolic extremes provide opportunities to understand enzymatic and metabolic plasticity and biotechnological tools for novel biomaterial production. We discovered that seed oils of many Thunbergia species contain up to 92% of the unusual monounsaturated petroselinic acid (18:1Δ6), one of the highest reported levels for a single fatty acid in plants. Supporting the biosynthetic origin of petroselinic acid, we identified a Δ6-stearoyl-acyl carrier protein (18:0-ACP) desaturase from Thunbergia laurifolia, closely related to a previously identified Δ6-palmitoyl-ACP desaturase that produces sapienic acid (16:1Δ6)- rich oils in Thunbergia alata seeds. Guided by a T. laurifolia desaturase crystal structure obtained in this study, enzyme mutagenesis identified key amino acids for functional divergence of Δ6 desaturases from the archetypal Δ9-18:0-ACP desaturase and mutations that result in nonnative enzyme regiospecificity. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of the T. laurifolia desaturase for the production of unusual monounsaturated fatty acids in engineered plant and bacterial hosts. Through stepwise metabolic engineering, we provide evidence that divergent evolution of extreme petroselinic acid and sapienic acid production arises from biosynthetic and metabolic functional specialization and enhanced expression of specific enzymes to accommodate metabolism of atypical substrates