A letter to COVID-19

This is an accounting lecturer’s letter to COVID-19. In the letter the accounting lecturer reflects on the existence of coronavirus and its impacts on her life, of how she finds her voice and “dwellings” through creating art prints for COVID-19. The letter, in the form of a combination of text, art and photo, aims to record a time of disruption, as well as, a time of love and support in a more-than-human world

Listen up! Listening skills in accounting education : gaps and proposed new research and teaching agendas

Utilising a systematic literature review, this paper synthesises alternative theoretical perspectives on listening and studies of accounting students’ listening skills. It identifies gaps in the conceptualisation of listening within accounting education research. Research and teaching agendas are then developed which provide a framework for more effectively fostering the development of listening skills in accounting education. We identify the need for research and teaching around: why listening matters; the elements of effective listening; and developing listening skills. Greater focus on the interpersonal, social, and reflexive aspects of listening is needed, going beyond an existing focus on comprehension and information acquisition. There is also a need to explicitly address the role and benefits of listening in facilitating an ethical organisational culture, recognising the ethical dimensions of professional responsibility and active listening as part of empathetic leadership

Listen up! Listening skills in accounting education: gaps and proposed new research and teaching agendas

Utilising a systematic literature review, this paper synthesises alternative theoretical perspectives on listening and studies of accounting students’ listening skills. It identifies gaps in the conceptualisation of listening within accounting education research. Research and teaching agendas are then developed which provide a framework for more effectively fostering the development of listening skills in accounting education. We identify the need for research and teaching around: why listening matters; the elements of effective listening; and developing listening skills. Greater focus on the interpersonal, social, and reflexive aspects of listening is needed, going beyond an existing focus on comprehension and information acquisition. There is also a need to explicitly address the role and benefits of listening in facilitating an ethical organisational culture, recognising the ethical dimensions of professional responsibility and active listening as part of empathetic leadership

Fecal microbiota transplantation research output from 2004 to 2017: a bibliometric analysis

Background Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) is an emerging therapy against Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Although the therapy has gained prominence, there has been no bibliometric analysis of FMT. Methods Studies published from 2004 to 2017 were extracted from the Science Citation Index Expanded. Bibliometric analysis was used to evaluate the number or cooperation network of publications, countries, citations, references, journals, authors, institutions and keywords. Results A total of 796 items were included, showing an increasing trend annually. Publications mainly came from 10 countries, led by the US (n = 363). In the top 100 articles ranked by the number of citations (range 47–1,158), American Journal of Gastroenterology (2017 IF = 10.231) took the top spot. The co-citation network had 7 co-citation clusters headed by ‘recurrent Clostridium difficile infection’. The top 7 keywords with the strongest citation bursts had three parts, ‘microbiota’, ‘ diarrhea ’, and ‘case series’. All keywords were divided into four domains, ‘disease’, ‘nosogenesis’, ‘trial’, and ‘therapy’. Conclusions This study shows the research performance of FMT from 2004 to 2017 and helps investigators master the trend of FMT, which is also an ongoing hotspot of research

An ethnographic study of front-line audit work in China

This thesis cares about the front-line auditors who work day and night during an audit season in China and pays attention to their work experience. I explore how audit work is carried out in practices, what norms are embedded in different ways of doing the work, and how these relate to the shaping of auditor identity. Based on a ten-month period of fieldwork in Dalian and Beijing, I write about my encounters and engagements with the auditors I met in the field and aim to amplify their voices and knowledge of how audit work is done and what it means to be a front-line auditor. Schatzki’s practice theory underpins this research as the ontological framework. Within this framework, audit work is perceived as being constituted and reconstituted by practices, and my fieldwork attention was paid to the sayings and doings of front-line auditors in real audit sites. I develop the notion of praxiography as the methodology of the research and use it to discover the norms of the work and an embodied understanding of how to practise as an auditor. My fieldwork practices are intertwined with my learning of being a proper audit junior in an audit team. Thereby, the writing of this thesis is shaped by an auto-ethnographic reflection of my experience of learning to be an auditor in the field. By examining how time demands are generated through different practices, I confirm working beyond normal office hours as the norm in doing the audit work. Further, I explore the influences of these practices on auditors’ physical and emotional bodies, the boundary between professional and family life, and auditors’ understanding of what constitutes the right things to do in audit work. Auditors who are “too lively”, ask “too many questions”, dare to challenge the leader in a public manner, are not “obedient enough” to follow the template of the audit working sheet, or interrupt the normal pace of the audit work schedules are marginalised in the audit work and regarded as questionable non-fitters. Auditors who have successfully passed the test of time are transformed and disciplined to the norms of the work. This reveals segregation and vulnerability within the hierarchical order of the professionals in accounting firms and that junior accountants feel a sense of displacement. I discuss the revealed vulnerabilities within the practices of front-line auditors. I show a true embodied understanding of vulnerability in daily audit work has a critical potential in doing audit work differently. I explore the practice of presence, particularly within the being of a female partner working inside the audit team and reflect on how the practice of presence facilitates mutual recognition and empathy within audit work. By giving voices to front-line auditors, I reflect how different practices of audit work influence auditor’s wellbeing at work. This thesis makes a methodological contribution to accounting literature by illustrating the practices of doing practice-theory-based research in audit work. It also contributes to accounting literature by extending the notion of time in audit work from a performance management technology to a notion of “being” and experiencing, highlighting the embodied knowledge and affects in audit work, and discussing the critical potential of embodied affects in audit work practices

Methodological insights experiencing and knowing in the field: an autoethnographic account of conducting audit fieldwork in China

Purpose: This paper provides a researcher's account of fieldwork experience in conducting audit research in China. By illustrating on-site fieldwork encounters, the paper reflects stages of access negotiation and management in the fieldwork, reveals the researcher's embodied “affects” in the fieldwork and reasserts the value of researcher's openness and attention in the fieldwork. Design/methodology/approach: This paper uses autoethnography as its overall epistemology. Fieldwork diaries and vignettes are written in the first-person voice to present the researcher's embodied account of fieldwork experience, researcher’s learning and coping skills in managing the fieldwork. Findings: The research findings are not detached from the researcher's experience of the fieldwork. The fieldwork experiences in this study highlight that the fieldwork access is an ongoing process. Different stages of access negotiations, from rejection to acceptance, reveal the tensions between researcher and participants. This study draws attention to the online platform, WeChat, in connecting with auditors to learn from them and suggests openness to the fieldwork encounters and a resilient engagement with auditors. Originality/value: In reflecting on the researcher's transformation during the fieldwork, this paper argues for a relational and engaged way of conducting fieldwork, rather than a disengaged and judgemental approach in studying auditors' working lives. The paper pays attention to fieldwork as a process and how the knowledge learned in the field is infused with researcher's fieldwork experiences

Speculative accountability for animal kinship

In this paper we argue that the dominant model of accountability, which binds it to responsibility, is untenable, and propose a conception of speculative accountability as an alternative. We develop and apply that conception in context of the problematic of the animal as explored in Jacques Derrida’s posthumanism; in Donna Haraway’s critical response to Derrida; in the ethology of Vinciane Despret; and in María Puig de la Bellacasa’s studies of speculative ethics and care. The speculative accountability we propose is grounded in a commitment to responsiveness to the other and to the particularity of situation, and in a recognition that accountability is always enacted in contexts of real uncertainty and incomplete and provisional understandings. This accountability does not at all reject measurement, calculation, and standards of comparison, but it does insist that accountability cannot properly be reduced to the (re)enactment of predetermined routines and the values they carry; it should proceed speculatively through creative experiment, in an open-ended quest of better ways of taking the other into account. We support our contentions with illustrations drawn from ethology and animal studies, and in particular studies of animal husbandry for dairy and meat production. We use the example of accountability enacted in the meat industry through, the audit practices developed by Temple Grandin, to illustrate the application of a real speculative accountability in practice

CSAC-Net: Fast Adaptive sEMG Recognition through Attention Convolution Network and Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning

Gesture recognition through surface electromyography (sEMG) provides a new method for the control algorithm of bionic limbs, which is a promising technology in the field of human–computer interaction. However, subject specificity of sEMG along with the offset of the electrode makes it challenging to develop a model that can quickly adapt to new subjects. In view of this, we introduce a new deep neural network called CSAC-Net. Firstly, we extract the time-frequency feature from the raw signal, which contains rich information. Secondly, we design a convolutional neural network supplemented by an attention mechanism for further feature extraction. Additionally, we propose to utilize model-agnostic meta-learning to adapt to new subjects and this learning strategy achieves better results than the state-of-the-art methods. By the basic experiment on CapgMyo and three ablation studies, we demonstrate the advancement of CSAC-Net

Additively Manufactured Scaffolds with Optimized Thickness Based on Triply Periodic Minimal Surface

Triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) became an effective method to design porous scaffolds in recent years due to their superior mechanical and other engineering properties. Since the advent of additive manufacturing (AM), different TPMS-based scaffolds are designed and fabricated for a wide range of applications. In this study, Schwarz Primitive triply periodic minimal surface (P-TPMS) is adopted to design a novel porous scaffold according to the distribution of the scaffold stress under a fixed load with optimized thickness to tune both the mechanical and biological properties. The designed scaffolds are then additively manufactured through selective laser melting (SLM). The micro-features of the scaffolds are studied through scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and micro-computed tomography (CT) images, and the results confirm that morphological features of printed samples are identical to the designed ones. Afterwards, the quasi-static uniaxial compression tests are carried out to observe the stress–strain curves and the deformation behavior. The results indicate that the mechanical properties of the porous scaffolds with optimized thickness were significantly improved. Since the mass transport capability is important for the transport of nutrients within the bone scaffolds, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are used to calculate the permeability under laminar flow conditions. The results reveal that the scaffolds with optimized structures possess lower permeability due to the rougher inner surface. In summary, the proposed method is effective to tailor both the mechanical properties and permeability, and thus offers a means for the selection and design of porous scaffolds in biomedical fields