Railroad audits: Some arrived ahead of schedule

Through 1975, the shareholder annual reports of publicly- owned U.S. railroads were exempt from the Securities and Exchange Commission\u27s accounting regulations, audit and disclosure rules because railroads were common carriers subject to the rules and regulations of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). Publicly-owned Class railroads voluntary began to away from ICC-type towards GAAP-type accounting and disclosures in their shareholder reports just after World War II.1 This paper reviews early industry practices with respect to internal and external audits. Using a sample of major Class I railroads from 1946 to 1975, the paper shows: the extent to which certain railroads voluntarily presented audited financial statements before being required, the extent to which particular CPA firms were involved with the railroad industry, and the types of audit reports that issued to these railroads during this period

Early 20th Century Examples of Stakeholder Reporting from U.S. Corporate Annual Reports

The content of traditional annual reports for publicly owned corporations is undergoing significant change. Whether in the traditional printed form, or increasingly, via web-based formats, annual reports are moving beyond the mere reporting of the fiscal year’s financial results. Corporate annual reports are beginning to include supplemental disclosures on the corporation’s labor and supplier activities environmental activities, governance, social responsibility and, most recently, sustainability. This trend has been observed more frequently for corporations based outside of the United States, though a small number of U.S corporations have embraced these concepts as well. Such supplemental disclosures are made not only to its shareholders, but also to individuals, groups and other entities that have a direct stake (i.e. stakeholders) in the corporation’s activities, successes and/or other matters at hand. This paper looks at the development of the stakeholder model and some of groups involved in the expansion of annual reports to include their concerns. Looking back historically, the paper examines early examples of stakeholder reporting from 20th Century annual reports of Ford Motor Company and by certain publicly owned U.S. railroads. Lastly, the paper provides evidence of an earlier example of stakeholder reporting then that previously identified in the literature

An active, ontology-driven network service for Internet collaboration

Web portals have emerged as an important means of collaboration on the WWW, and the integration of ontologies promises to make them more accurate in how they serve users’ collaboration and information location requirements. However, web portals are essentially a centralised architecture resulting in difficulties supporting seamless roaming between portals and collaboration between groups supported on different portals. This paper proposes an alternative approach to collaboration over the web using ontologies that is de-centralised and exploits content-based networking. We argue that this approach promises a user-centric, timely, secure and location-independent mechanism, which is potentially more scaleable and universal than existing centralised portals

Longitudinal Aging Study in India: Vision, Design, Implementation, and Some Early Results

India is poised to experience a dramatic rise in its aging population in coming decades, yet comprehensive research and effective policy to confront this transition are lacking. According to projections constructed by the United Nations Population Division, the share of Indians aged 60 and over will increase from 8% today to 19% by 2050 (representing 323 million people, more than the entire US population in 2011). This demographic shift will pose significant challenges. India’s traditional reliance on private family networks to provide older people with care, companionship, and financial support will be stressed not only by the increasing number of aging Indians who rely on it, but also by changing household dynamics and patterns of spatial mobility among younger family members. The Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI) is intended to inform the design and expansion of a new generation of institutions – public and private – for the care and support of India’s population of older people by providing comprehensive data to the scientific and policy community. LASI is an evidence base for analyzing the (1) health, (2) economic and financial resources, and (3) living arrangements and social connections of older Indians. It enhances opportunities for cross-national analysis by adding India to the growing number of countries with harmonized data on their older populations. LASI surveys will be carried out every two years, providing longitudinal data to support research and policy development. This paper provides an overview of the conception and content of the 2010 LASI pilot survey that was conducted in four states: Punjab, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Kerala. We highlight key aspects of the field work, such as response rates and interview duration, and discuss the breadth and quality of the economic, health, and social data collected. We pay close attention to the cultural and geographic diversity LASI is able to capture, and bring to light interesting patterns in, and relationships among, measures of health, social connectedness, labor force participation, and hardship among the elderly.aging, longitudinal, India

Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems

To be effective, data-intensive systems require extensive ongoing customisation to reflect changing user requirements, organisational policies, and the structure and interpretation of the data they hold. Manual customisation is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. In large complex systems, the value of the data can be such that exhaustive testing is necessary before any new feature can be added to the existing design. In most cases, the precise details of requirements, policies and data will change during the lifetime of the system, forcing a choice between expensive modification and continued operation with an inefficient design.Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems outlines an approach to dealing with these problems in software and data engineering, describing a methodology for aligning these processes throughout product lifecycles. It discusses tools which can be used to achieve these goals, and, in a number of case studies, shows how the tools and methodology have been used to improve a variety of academic and business systems

Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems

To be effective, data-intensive systems require extensive ongoing customisation to reflect changing user requirements, organisational policies, and the structure and interpretation of the data they hold. Manual customisation is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. In large complex systems, the value of the data can be such that exhaustive testing is necessary before any new feature can be added to the existing design. In most cases, the precise details of requirements, policies and data will change during the lifetime of the system, forcing a choice between expensive modification and continued operation with an inefficient design.Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems outlines an approach to dealing with these problems in software and data engineering, describing a methodology for aligning these processes throughout product lifecycles. It discusses tools which can be used to achieve these goals, and, in a number of case studies, shows how the tools and methodology have been used to improve a variety of academic and business systems

Prisoner resettlement in Newark, NJ

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 164-174).This thesis considers how cities can improve employment outcomes of recently released, formerly incarcerated people. The Newark Prisoner Reentry Initiative (NPRI) is a unique case where the city directly managed six resettlement providers. The city also pledged to use its influence to support the goals of NPRI by encouraging employers to hire NPRI participants. I use interviews and performance data to understand two questions: (1) To what extent did the city, as a policy-maker and a grant manager, help organizations meet their benchmarks and change the hiring behavior of employers? (2) What are the prerequisite organizational characteristics, including resources, structure and strategy, for successful programs, and are these characteristics bound to a certain scale? On the whole, NPRI participants fared much better than the typical person leaving New Jersey state prisons, though program performance was negatively correlated with size of enrollment. The city, for its part, demonstrated competence in holding organizations accountable to performance goals, but failed to influence employer behavior. To strengthen and scale the initiative, I recommend first, that the city set specific hiring goals for local employers and engage its resettlement providers to enforce these goals. Secondly, the city should fund program directors and additional case managers, so programs retain their capacity to relate to stakeholders as they grow. A cost-neutral agreement with the state could provide the necessary funds to continue the initiative.by Kevin Joseph Feeney.M.C.P

A Macroscope for Global History. Seshat Global History Databank: a methodological overview

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Digital Humanities Quarterly following peer review. The final published version is available online at: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/4/000272/000272.html This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 LicenseThis article introduces the ‘Seshat: Global History’ project, the methodology it is based upon and its potential as a tool for historians and other humanists. The article describes in detail how the Seshat methodology and platform can be used to tackle big questions that play out over long time scales whilst allowing users to drill down to the detail and place every single data point both in its historic and historiographical context. Seshat thus offers a platform underpinned by a rigorous methodology to actually do 'longue durée' history and the article argues for the need for humanists and social scientists to engage with data driven ‘longue durée' history. The article argues that Seshat offers a much needed infrastructure in which different skills sets and disciplines can come together to analyze the past using long timescales. In addition to highlighting the theoretical and methodological underpinnings, the potential of Seshat is demonstrated by showcasing three case studies. Each of these case studies is centred around a set of long standing questions and historiographical debates and it is argued that the introduction of a Seshat approach has the potential to radically alter our understanding of these questions.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Seshat: The Global History Databank

The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great differentials in wealth and power, and elaborate governance structures of today? Why do modern states sometimes fail to meet the basic needs of their populations? Why do economies decline, or fail to grow? In this article, we describe the structure and uses of a massive databank of historical and archaeological information, Seshat: The Global History Databank. The data that we are currently entering in Seshat will allow us and others to test theories explaining how modern societies evolved from ancestral ones, and why modern societies vary so much in their capacity to satisfy their members’ basic human needsPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Metabolic molecular markers of the tidal clock in the marine crustacean Eurydice pulchra

SummaryIn contrast to the well mapped molecular orchestration of circadian timekeeping in terrestrial organisms, the mechanisms that direct tidal and lunar rhythms in marine species are entirely unknown. Using a combination of biochemical and molecular approaches we have identified a series of metabolic markers of the tidal clock of the intertidal isopod Eurydice pulchra. Specifically, we show that the overoxidation of peroxiredoxin (PRX), a conserved marker of circadian timekeeping in terrestrial eukaryotes [1], follows a circatidal (approximately 12.4 hours) pattern in E. pulchra, in register with the tidal pattern of swimming. In parallel, we show that mitochondrially encoded genes are expressed with a circatidal rhythm. Together, these findings demonstrate that PRX overoxidation rhythms are not intrinsically circadian; rather they appear to resonate with the dominant metabolic cycle of an organism, regardless of its frequency. Moreover, they provide the first molecular leads for dissecting the tidal clockwork