56,138 research outputs found
Management accounting education: is there a gap between academia and practitioner perceptions?
A mail survey was conducted of all Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand accredited Tertiary Education Institutions and 300 randomly selected New Zealand companies to ascertain the views of management accounting academics and practitioners on the contents of management accounting courses and the skills and competencies of recent graduates.
The results show that practitioners placed an emphasis on traditional management accounting techniques, while academics placed an emphasis on contemporary techniques. Both groups were in agreement on the skills and characteristics required of recent graduates. An interesting finding was the emergence of negative comments on the arrogance of new graduates and an increased need for graduates to be work ready. These two aspects were not a feature of previous studies.
The implications of the results are that academics cannot ignore the teaching of traditional management accounting techniques and may need to increase the coverage of the issues involved in implementing contemporary management accounting techniques
Grappling with Issues of Learning Science from Everyday Experiences: An Illustrative Case Study
There are different perceptions among researchers with regard to the infusion of everyday experience in the teaching of science: 1) it hinders the learning of science concepts; or, 2) it increases the participation and motivation of students in science learning. This article attempts to contemplate those different perspectives of everyday knowledge in science classrooms by using everyday contexts to teach grade 3 science in Singapore. In this study, two groups of grade 3 students were presented with a scenario that required them to apply the concept of properties of materials to design a shoe. Subsequently, the transcripts of classroom discussions and interactions were analyzed using the framework of sociocultural learning and an interpretative analytic lens. Our analysis suggests that providing an authentic everyday context is insufficient to move young learners of science from their everyday knowledge to scientific knowledge. Further, group interactions among young learners of science to solve an everyday issue need to be scaffolded to ensure meaningful, focused, and sustained learning. Implications for research in science learning among younger students are discussed
Smooth critical points of planar harmonic mappings
In a work in 1992, Lyzzaik studies local properties of light harmonic
mappings. More precisely, he classifies their critical points and accordingly
studies their topological and geometrical behaviours. We will focus our study
on smooth critical points of light harmonic maps. We will establish several
relationships between miscellaneous local invariants, and show how to connect
them to Lyzzaik's models. With a crucial use of Milnor fibration theory, we get
a fundamental and yet quite unexpected relation between three of the numerical
invariants, namely the complex multiplicity, the local order of the map and the
Puiseux pair of the critical value curve. We also derive similar results for a
real and complex analytic planar germ at a regular point of its Jacobian
level-0 curve. Inspired by Whitney's work on cusps and folds, we develop an
iterative algorithm computing the invariants. Examples are presented in order
to compare the harmonic situation to the real analytic one.Comment: 36 pages, 5 figure
(k,q)-Compressed Sensing for dMRI with Joint Spatial-Angular Sparsity Prior
Advanced diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) techniques, like
diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) and high angular resolution diffusion imaging
(HARDI), remain underutilized compared to diffusion tensor imaging because the
scan times needed to produce accurate estimations of fiber orientation are
significantly longer. To accelerate DSI and HARDI, recent methods from
compressed sensing (CS) exploit a sparse underlying representation of the data
in the spatial and angular domains to undersample in the respective k- and
q-spaces. State-of-the-art frameworks, however, impose sparsity in the spatial
and angular domains separately and involve the sum of the corresponding sparse
regularizers. In contrast, we propose a unified (k,q)-CS formulation which
imposes sparsity jointly in the spatial-angular domain to further increase
sparsity of dMRI signals and reduce the required subsampling rate. To
efficiently solve this large-scale global reconstruction problem, we introduce
a novel adaptation of the FISTA algorithm that exploits dictionary
separability. We show on phantom and real HARDI data that our approach achieves
significantly more accurate signal reconstructions than the state of the art
while sampling only 2-4% of the (k,q)-space, allowing for the potential of new
levels of dMRI acceleration.Comment: To be published in the 2017 Computational Diffusion MRI Workshop of
MICCA
Experimental investigation on thermal comfort model between local thermal sensation and overall thermal sensation
To study the human local and overall thermal sensations, a series of experiments under various conditions were carried out in a climate control chamber. The adopted analysis method considered the effect of the weight coefficient of local average skin temperature and density of the cold receptors’ distribution in different local body areas. The results demonstrated that the thermal sensation of head, chest, back and hands is warmer than overall thermal sensation. The mean thermal sensation votes of those local areas were more densely distributed. In addition, the thermal sensation of arms, tight and calf was colder than the overall thermal sensation, which pronounced that thermal sensation votes were more dispersed. The thermal sensation of chest and back had a strong linear correlation with overall thermal sensation. Considering the actual scope of air-conditioning regulation, the human body was classified into three local parts: a) head, b) upper part of body and c) lower part of body. The prediction model of both the three-part thermal sensation and overall thermal sensation was developed. Weight coefficients were 0.21, 0.60 and 0.19 respectively. The model provides scientist basis for guiding the sage installation place of the personal ventilation system to achieve efficient energy use
Non-equilibrium spatial distribution of Rashba spin torque in ferromagnetic metal layer
We study the spatial distribution of spin torque induced by a strong Rashba
spin-orbit coupling (RSOC) in a ferromagnetic (FM) metal layer, using the
Keldysh non-equilibrium Green's function method. In the presence of the s-d
interaction between the non-equilibrium conduction electrons and the local
magnetic moments, the RSOC effect induces a torque on the moments, which we
term as the Rashba spin torque.
A correlation between the Rashba spin torque and the spatial spin current is
presented in this work, clearly mapping the spatial distribution of Rashba Spin
torque in a nano-sized ferromagnetic device. When local magnetism is turned on,
the out-of-plane (Sz) Spin Hall effect (SHE) is disrupted, but rather
unexpectedly an in-plane (Sy) SHE is detected. We also study the effect of
Rashba strength (\alpha_R) and splitting exchange (\Delta) on the
non-equilibrium Rashba spin torque averaged over the device. Rashba spin torque
allows an efficient transfer of spin momentum such that a typical switching
field of 20 mT can be attained with a low current density of less than 10^6
A/cm^2
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