19,718 research outputs found
Was the Accounting Profession Really That Bad?
To gain insight into the extent of malpractice in the State of California prior to the Passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, we examined the nature and magnitude of complains filed with the California Board of Accountancy (CBA) against both licensed and unlicensed accountants during the fiscal years 2000, 2001, and 2002. The CBA currently licenses and regulates over 73,000 licenses, with 1,431 complaints filed during the period reviewed. Disciplinary actions were taken against 283 different licensees for the three fiscal years reviewed. SEC issues were involved in 19 cases, theft or embezzlement 46 cases, public accounting malpractice 146 cases, improper retention of client records 11 cases, cheating on the CPA examination 9 cases, and miscellaneous other 52 cases. Over half of the complaints involved public accounting issues. Audit related complaints accounted for 48%, tax related complaints 36%, and compilations or reviews accounted for 16% of the complaints. These statistics were in line with the experience of the AICPA Professional Liability program. Within the above sections, the paper contains specifics with regards to the most common problems identified as a result of this work. While a number of interesting facts were discovered, one item of particularly interest was the significant number of claims that involved non-profit organizations. CBA administrators do not believe there is any greater tendency for non profit reporting versus for profit reporting, thus appearing to indicate this is just an area that has a greater possibility of accounting malpractice
Float-polishing process and analysis of float-polished quartz
A fluid-mechanical model is developed for the float-polishing process. In this model laminar flow between the sample and the lap results in pressure gradients at the grooves that support the sample on a fluid layer. The laminar fluid motion also produces supersmooth, damage-free surfaces. Quartz substrates for applications in high-stress environments were float polished, and their surfaces were analyzed by optical scatterometry, photoacoustic spectroscopy, and atomic force microscopy. The removal of 100 µm of material by a lapping-polishing process, with final float polishing, left low levels of subsurface damage, with a surface roughness of approximately 0.2-nm rms
Chromatin proteins and RNA are associated with DNA during all phases of mitosis.
Mitosis brings about major changes to chromosome and nuclear structure. We used recently developed proximity ligation assay-based techniques to investigate the association with DNA of chromatin-associated proteins and RNAs in Drosophila embryos during mitosis. All groups of tested proteins, histone-modifying and chromatin-remodeling proteins and methylated histones remained in close proximity to DNA during all phases of mitosis. We also found that RNA transcripts are associated with DNA during all stages of mitosis. Reduction of H3K27me3 levels or elimination of RNAs had no effect on the association of the components of PcG and TrxG complexes to DNA. Using a combination of proximity ligation assay-based techniques and super-resolution microscopy, we found that the number of protein-DNA and RNA-DNA foci undergoes significant reduction during mitosis, suggesting that mitosis may be accompanied by structural re-arrangement or compaction of specific chromatin domains
Wind tunnel investigation of an oblique wing transport model at mach numbers between 0.6 and 1.4
Models of three practical oblique-wing transport configurations were tested in the NASA Ames 11 foot wind tunnel. The three configurations used a common forward fuselage, wing, and support system but employed different aft fuselage sections simulating alternate propulsion system installations. These included an integrated propulsion system, pylon-mounted nacelles, and clean (no propulsion system) configuration. The tests were conducted over a Mach number range from 0.6 to 1.4 and at sweep angles from 0 to 60 degrees. The nominal unit Reynolds number was 1.83 million per meter and the angle of attack range was -3 to +6 degrees. The models were mounted in the tunnel by means of a lower blade support system. The interference effects of this lower blade and the flow inclination were determined by using an image blade system and testing the configuration in both the upright and inverted positions
Exact correlation functions of the BCS model in the canonical ensemble
We evaluate correlation functions of the BCS model for finite number of
particles. The integrability of the Hamiltonian relates it with the Gaudin
algebra . Therefore, a theorem that Sklyanin proved for the
Gaudin model, can be applied. Several diagonal and off-diagonal correlators are
calculated. The finite size scaling behavior of the pairing correlation
function is studied.Comment: 4 pages revtex; 2 figures .eps. Revised version to be published in
Phys. Rev. Let
A Fast and Accurate Pitch Estimation Algorithm Based on the Pseudo Wigner-Ville Distribution
Estimation of fundamental frequency (F0) in voiced segments of speech
signals, also known as pitch tracking, plays a crucial role in pitch
synchronous speech analysis, speech synthesis, and speech manipulation. In this
paper, we capitalize on the high time and frequency resolution of the pseudo
Wigner-Ville distribution (PWVD) and propose a new PWVD-based pitch estimation
method. We devise an efficient algorithm to compute PWVD faster and use
cepstrum-based pre-filtering to avoid cross-term interference. Evaluating our
approach on a database with speech and electroglottograph (EGG) recordings
yields a state-of-the-art mean absolute error (MAE) of around 4Hz. Our approach
is also effective at voiced/unvoiced classification and handling sudden
frequency changes
Bayesian inference with an adaptive proposal density for GARCH models
We perform the Bayesian inference of a GARCH model by the Metropolis-Hastings
algorithm with an adaptive proposal density. The adaptive proposal density is
assumed to be the Student's t-distribution and the distribution parameters are
evaluated by using the data sampled during the simulation. We apply the method
for the QGARCH model which is one of asymmetric GARCH models and make empirical
studies for for Nikkei 225, DAX and Hang indexes. We find that autocorrelation
times from our method are very small, thus the method is very efficient for
generating uncorrelated Monte Carlo data. The results from the QGARCH model
show that all the three indexes show the leverage effect, i.e. the volatility
is high after negative observations
Self-Supervised Models of Speech Infer Universal Articulatory Kinematics
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) based models of speech have shown remarkable
performance on a range of downstream tasks. These state-of-the-art models have
remained blackboxes, but many recent studies have begun "probing" models like
HuBERT, to correlate their internal representations to different aspects of
speech. In this paper, we show "inference of articulatory kinematics" as
fundamental property of SSL models, i.e., the ability of these models to
transform acoustics into the causal articulatory dynamics underlying the speech
signal. We also show that this abstraction is largely overlapping across the
language of the data used to train the model, with preference to the language
with similar phonological system. Furthermore, we show that with simple affine
transformations, Acoustic-to-Articulatory inversion (AAI) is transferrable
across speakers, even across genders, languages, and dialects, showing the
generalizability of this property. Together, these results shed new light on
the internals of SSL models that are critical to their superior performance,
and open up new avenues into language-agnostic universal models for speech
engineering, that are interpretable and grounded in speech science
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