18,725 research outputs found
Water Quality and the Landscape: Long-term monitoring of rapidly developing suburban watersheds 2014
The Accounting Industry in the Age of Globalization and Offshore Outsourcing
The phenomenon of outsourcing has engulfed the accounting industry and offers a wide range of services from bookkeeping, accounts payable, debt collection, invoicing, to tax return preparation. As companies become more comfortable with the services provided by outsourcing facilitators, the level of outsourcing in the accounting industry will increase to allow U.S. firms to focus on higher margin services and meet client demands in more technical areas of tax, estate, and retirement planning. This research uses a survey to collect primary data focusing on three areas, namely outsourcing drivers, concerns stakeholders have about outsourcing, and the perspectives about the offshorability of specific functions. The study concludes that firms that are engaging in outsourcing activities realize benefits in and ease their perceptions about doing so. Firms who outsource have been able to cut costs and increase staff. These same firms also are less concerned about most of the issues (privacy, client relationships, etc.) which may be as a result of their positive experience with outsourcing activities. Furthermore, these firms also have a higher confidence about the outsourecability of most of the functions in the accounting industry. The study further presents policy implications to all stakeholders in the accounting industry: students, professors, accounting professionals and firms, regulatory bodies, and politicians
Understanding the agility of running birds: Sensorimotor and mechanical factors in avian bipedal locomotion
Birds are a diverse and agile lineage of vertebrates that all use bipedal locomotion for at least part of their life. Thus birds provide a valuable opportunity to investigate how biomechanics and sensorimotor control are integrated for agile bipedal locomotion. This review summarizes recent work using terrain perturbations to reveal neuromechanical control strategies used by ground birds to achieve robust, stable and agile running. Early experiments in running guinea fowl aimed to reveal the immediate intrinsic mechanical response to an unexpected drop ('pothole') in terrain. When navigating the pothole, guinea fowl experience large changes in leg posture in the perturbed step, which correlates strongly with leg loading and perturbation recovery. Analysis of simple theoretical models of running has further confirmed the crucial role of swing-leg trajectory control for regulating foot contact timing and leg loading in uneven terrain. Coupling between body and leg dynamics results in an inherent trade-off in swing leg retraction rate for fall avoidance versus injury avoidance. Fast leg retraction minimizes injury risk, but slow leg retraction minimizes fall risk. Subsequent experiments have investigated how birds optimize their control strategies depending on the type of perturbation (pothole, step, obstacle), visibility of terrain, and with ample practice negotiating terrain features. Birds use several control strategies consistently across terrain contexts: 1) independent control of leg angular cycling and leg length actuation, which facilitates dynamic stability through simple control mechanisms, 2) feedforward regulation of leg cycling rate, which tunes foot-contact timing to maintain consistent leg loading in uneven terrain (minimizing fall and injury risks), 3) load-dependent muscle actuation, which rapidly adjusts stance push-off and stabilizes body mechanical energy, and 4) multi-step recovery strategies that allow body dynamics to transiently vary while tightly regulating leg loading to minimize risks of fall and injury. In future work, it will be interesting to investigate the learning and adaptation processes that allow animals to adjust neuromechanical control mechanisms over short and long timescales
Improved phase locked loop receiver
Improved phase locked loop receiver tracks and demodulates a signal whose signal-to-noise ratio may be low and whose information sidebands are close in frequency. This receiver recovers the carrier from input signals and applies it to a demodulator which recovers the sidebands
Percolation of hard disks
Random arrangements of points in the plane, interacting only through a simple
hard core exclusion, are considered. An intensity parameter controls the
average density of arrangements, in analogy with the Poisson point process. It
is proved that at high intensity, an infinite connected cluster of excluded
volume appears with positive probability.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure
Quantum trajectories and open many-body quantum systems
The study of open quantum systems has become increasingly important in the
past years, as the ability to control quantum coherence on a single particle
level has been developed in a wide variety of physical systems. In quantum
optics, the study of open systems goes well beyond understanding the breakdown
of quantum coherence. There, the coupling to the environment is sufficiently
well understood that it can be manipulated to drive the system into desired
quantum states, or to project the system onto known states via feedback in
quantum measurements. Many mathematical frameworks have been developed to
describe such systems, which for atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) systems
generally provide a very accurate description of the open quantum system on a
microscopic level. In recent years, AMO systems including cold atomic and
molecular gases and trapped ions have been applied heavily to the study of
many-body physics, and it has become important to extend previous understanding
of open system dynamics in single- and few-body systems to this many-body
context. A key formalism that has already proven very useful in this context is
the quantum trajectories technique. This was developed as a numerical tool for
studying dynamics in open quantum systems, and falls within a broader framework
of continuous measurement theory as a way to understand the dynamics of large
classes of open quantum systems. We review the progress that has been made in
studying open many-body systems in the AMO context, focussing on the
application of ideas from quantum optics, and on the implementation and
applications of quantum trajectories methods. Control over dissipative
processes promises many further tools to prepare interesting and important
states in strongly interacting systems, including the realisation of parameter
regimes in quantum simulators that are inaccessible via current techniques.Comment: 66 pages, 29 figures, review article submitted to Advances in Physics
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Transfigurative Power of the Holy Spirit by Prayer and Preaching
United Methodist churches (UMC) are declining due to the neglect of the Holy Spirit’s presence and action in congregational settings. Current day United Methodists have sanitized the experiential nature of the Holy Spirit; as well as under emphasizing the Spirit’s authority and wisdom. The Holy Spirit is a gift to the church, yet it is often rejected.
The UMC churches have missed the signs of the culture and have lost their connection within their communities. As a result, the church has become clueless to what the Spirit is up to. This loss of the vernacular spirit-voice has silently morphed into institutionalism and structure. Institutionalism has blinded us from seeing the very people Jesus was interested in: the poor and needy, the oppressed, blinded, hurt, and broken.
We live in a society fascinated with death more than life. However, our death throes can be a prime time for the church to exercise its Divine power to pray life into our churches and into our communities. It is a prime time for preachers to be bold with the prophetic Word of God. It is a prime time the people of God seek a deeper spirit-led experiential life to be witnessed in their neighborhoods. The time is ripe to rediscover the teachings and power of the Holy Spirit. The time is ripe for a revival.
This dissertation postulates that the most effective way for the United Methodist Church to reclaim the embodiment of the Holy Spirit in the 21st century church as experienced during historical revivals is by Spirit-infused Preaching and Spirit-powered Prayer. This is our roadmap to revival. It is a reminder that we are not called to transform institutions, but instead are called to transfigure lives. And that can only be done by the transfiguring power of the Holy Spirit
A “Local” Model of the Firm: Sticky prices and the Phillips Curve
Assume a firm concerns itself exclusively with local shocks (copious citations including Lucas 1972 and Bomhoff 1983 validate that this type of assumption may be reasonable). Changes in a firm's production policy should occur when the actual demand in a period Dt suggests that the underlying demand function has shifted from expected demand E(Dt). Since firms face uncertainty, this is non-trivial and they must find a way to determining (given information from a single, current period) whether or not the underlying demand has changed or whether the firm has simply obtained a draw from its expected demand distribution. In a simplified model, a firm can use a concept similar to a Statistical Hypothesis Test on E(Dt) = Dt to come to this conclusion. Rather than select an arbitrary confidence threshold (alpha), a firm can reverse the process and use the "marginal" alpha (where the hypothesis is just rejected or accepted) as its confidence that the mean has changed, allowing it to update its expectations to E(Dt+1) = (1-a) * E(Dt) + a * (Dt) and price accordingly. By weighting new demand information using this "confidence factor," the model introduces significant and persistent rigidity around NAIRU/equilibrium. This model is also powerful because it explains the qualified success of threshold like behaivor in classical "menu cost" theories (as the threshold reflects the classic hypothesis test strategy), behavior similar to a learning model (via the weighted introduction of new data) and seeming information lags (via the low confidence in new information immediately after shifts), among others.phillips curve
Even if it's not Bribery: The Case for Campaign Finance Reform
We develop a dynamic multidimensional signaling model of campaign finance
in which candidates can signal their ability by enacting policy and/or by raising
and spending campaign funds, both of which are costly. Our model departs
from the existing literature in that candidates do not exchange policy influence
for campaign contributions; rather, they must decide how to allocate their
efforts between policymaking and fundraising. If high-ability candidates are
better policymakers and better fundraisers, then they will raise and spend
campaign funds even if voters care only about legislation. Campaign finance
reform alleviates this phenomenon and improves voter welfare at the expense
of politicians. Thus, we expect successful politicians to oppose true campaign
finance reform. We also show that our model is consistent with findings in the
empirical and theoretical campaign finance literature
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