'True and fair view' versus 'Present fairly in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles'

The ‘true and fair view’ concept is one of two competing but not mutually exclusive legal standards for financial reporting quality that have been subject to debate on their meaning, use and importance. The other is ‘present fairly in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles’ (GAAP). While the former is closely identified with judgement and is used in the United Kingdom, the European Union, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, the latter is the standard for United States financial reporting and tends to be more rule based. This paper presents the findings of an empirical investigation of the ‘true and fair view’ in New Zealand. It reports the results of a survey of financial directors, auditors and shareholders of New Zealand listed companies investigating their perceptions of, and preferences for, ‘true and fair view’ versus other standards for financial statement reporting including ‘present fairly in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles’ (GAAP), 'fairly reflects' and 'present fairly', and compares the findings with relevant international research. The purpose of the research was twofold; firstly to determine if ‘within-group’ and ‘betweengroup’ differences in perceptions and preferences for the terms existed, thus contributing to an expectations gap; and, secondly, to examine whether or not the New Zealand respondents shared the preference for ‘true and fair view’ versus ‘present fairly in conformity with GAAP’ found in previous international research. The results show that a clear majority of all three groups share similar perceptions of the meaning of the 'true and fair view’ concept, and support its use in financial reporting. All groups preferred ‘true and fair view’ to other terms including ‘fairly present in conformity with GAAP’, a result consistent with previous comparisons of United Kingdom, and United States investors’ opinions. This illustrates that the 'true and fair view' concept remains an important international overall standard for financial reporting quality

Comment on: Diffusion through a slab

Mahan [J. Math. Phys. 36, 6758 (1995)] has calculated the transmission coefficient and angular distribution of particles which enter a thick slab at normal incidence and which diffuse in the slab with linear anisotropic, non-absorbing, scattering. Using orthogonality relations derived by McCormick & Kuscer [J. Math. Phys. 6, 1939 (1965); 7, 2036 (1966)] for the eigenfunctions of the problem, this calculation is generalised to a boundary condition with particle input at arbitrary angles. It is also shown how to use the orthogonality relations to relax in a simple way the restriction to a thick slab.Comment: 3 pages, LaTeX, uses RevTe

Web assisted teaching: an undergraduate experience

The emergence of the Internet has created a number of claims as to the future of education and the possibility of dramatically changing the way in which education is delivered. Much of the attention has focussed on the adoption of teaching methods that are solely web-based. We set out to incorporate web-based teaching as support for more traditional teaching methods to improve the learning outcomes for students. This first step into web-based teaching was developed to harness the benefits of web-based teaching tools without supplanting traditional teaching methods. The aim of this paper is to report our experience with web-assisted teaching in two undergraduate courses, Accounting Information Systems and Management Accounting Services, during 2000. The paper evaluates the approach taken and proposes a tentative framework for developing future web-assisted teaching applications. We believe that web-assisted and web-based teaching are inevitable outcomes of the telecommunications and computer revolution and that academics cannot afford to become isolated from the on-line world. A considered approach is needed to ensure the integration of web-based features into the overall structure of a course. The components of the course material and the learning experiences students are exposed to need to be structured and delivered in a way that ensures they support student learning rather than replacing one form of learning with another. Therefore a careful consideration of the structure, content, level of detail and time of delivery needs to be integrated to create a course structure that provides a range of student learning experiences that are complimentary rather than competing. The feedback was positive from both extramural (distance) and internal students, demonstrating to us that web sites can be used as an effective teaching tool in support of more traditional teaching methods as well as a tool for distance education. The ability to harness the positives of the web in conjunction with more traditional teaching modes is one that should not be overlooked in the move to adopt web based instruction methods. Web-based teaching need not be seen as an all or nothing divide but can be used as a useful way of improving the range and type of learning experiences open to students. The Web challenges traditional methods and thinking but it also provides tools to develop innovative solutions to both distance and on campus learning. Further research is needed to determine how we can best meet the needs of our students while maintaining high quality learning outcomes

Context-Independent Task Knowledge for Neurosymbolic Reasoning in Cognitive Robotics

One of the current main goals of artificial intelligence and robotics research is the creation of an artificial assistant which can have flexible, human like behavior, in order to accomplish everyday tasks. A lot of what is context-independent task knowledge to the human is what enables this flexibility at multiple levels of cognition. In this scope the author analyzes how to acquire, represent and disambiguate symbolic knowledge representing context-independent task knowledge, abstracted from multiple instances: this thesis elaborates the incurred problems, implementation constraints, current state-of-the-art practices and ultimately the solutions newly introduced in this scope. The author specifically discusses acquisition of context-independent task knowledge from large amounts of human-written texts and their reusability in the robotics domain; the acquisition of knowledge on human musculoskeletal dependencies constraining motion which allows a better higher level representation of observed trajectories; the means of verbalization of partial contextual and instruction knowledge, increasing interaction possibilities with the human as well as contextual adaptation. All the aforementioned points are supported by evaluation in heterogeneous setups, to bring a view on how to make optimal use of statistical & symbolic applications (i.e. neurosymbolic reasoning) in cognitive robotics. This work has been performed to enable context-adaptable artificial assistants, by bringing together knowledge on what is usually regarded as context-independent task knowledge

Automatic segmentation of magnetic resonance images of the brain

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a technique used primarily in medical settings to produce high quality images of the human body’s internal anatomy. Each image is of a thin slice through the body, with the typical distance between slices being a few millimeters. Brain segmentation is the delineation of one or more anatomical structures within images of the brain. It promotes greater understanding of spatial relationships to aid in such tasks as surgical planning and clinical diagnoses, particularly when the segmented outlines from each image slice are displayed together as a surface in three-dimensions. A review of the literature indicates that current brain segmentation methods require a trained human expert to inspect the images and decide appropriate parameters, thresholds, or regions of interest to achieve the proper segmentation. This is a tedious time-consuming task because of the large number of images involved. A truly automatic method is needed to transform brain segmentation into a practical clinical tool. This dissertation describes a novel pattern classification approach to the problem of automatically segmenting magnetic resonance images of the brain. Based on this approach, algorithms were designed and implemented to automatically segment a number of anatomical structures. These algorithms were applied to several standard image data sets of human subjects obtained from the Internet Brain Segmentation Repository (IBSR). The resulting segmentations of the lateral ventricles and the caudate nuclei were compared to reference manual segmentations done by expert radiologists. The Tanimoto similarity coefficient was very good for the lateral ventricles (0.81) and good for the caudate nuclei (0.67)

Cardiac-directed expression of a catalytically inactive adenylyl cyclase 6 protects the heart from sustained β-adrenergic stimulation.

ObjectivesIncreased expression of adenylyl cyclase type 6 (AC6) has beneficial effects on the heart through cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP)-dependent and cAMP-independent pathways. We previously generated a catalytically inactive mutant of AC6 (AC6mut) that has an attenuated response to β-adrenergic receptor stimulation, and, consequently, exhibits reduced myocardial cAMP generation. In the current study we test the hypothesis that cardiac-directed expression of AC6mut would protect the heart from sustained β-adrenergic receptor stimulation, a condition frequently encountered in patients with heart failure.Methods and resultsAC6mut mice and transgene negative siblings received osmotic mini-pumps to provide continuous isoproterenol infusion for seven days. Isoproterenol infusion caused deleterious effects that were attenuated by cardiac-directed AC6mut expression. Both groups showed reduced left ventricular (LV) ejection fraction, but the reduction was less in AC6mut mice (p = 0.047). In addition, AC6mut mice showed superior left ventricular function, manifested by higher values for LV peak +dP/dt (p = 0.03), LV peak -dP/dt (p = 0.008), end-systolic pressure-volume relationship (p = 0.003) and cardiac output (p<0.03). LV samples of AC6mut mice had more sarco/endoplasmic reticulum Ca2+-ATPase (SERCA2a) protein (p<0.01), which likely contributed to better LV function. AC6mut mice had lower rates of cardiac myocyte apoptosis (p = 0.016), reduced caspase 3/7 activity (p = 0.012) and increased B-cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl2) expression (p = 0.0001).ConclusionMice with cardiac-directed AC6mut expression weathered the deleterious effects of continuous isoproterenol infusion better than control mice, indicating cardiac protection

Giving voice to equitable collaboration in participatory design

An AHRC funded research project titled Experimenting with the Co-experience Environment (June 2005 – June 2006) culminated in a physical environment designed in resonance with a small group of participants. The participants emerged from different disciplines coming together as a group to share their expertise and contribute their knowledge to design. They engaged in storytelling, individual and co-thinking, creating and co-creating, sharing ideas that did not require justification, proposed designs even though most were not designers …and played. The research questioned how a physical environment designed specifically for co-experiencing might contribute to new knowledge in design? Through play and by working in action together the participants demonstrated the potential of a physical co-experience environment to function as a scaffold for inter-disciplinary design thinking,saying, doing and making (Ivey & Sanders 2006). Ultimately the research questioned how this outcome might influence our approach to engaging participants in design research and experimentation

The effect of environmental variability on livestock and land-use management: The Borana plateau, southern Ethiopia

The Borana people are the predominant ethnic group on the Borana Plateau in southern Ethiopia. Though traditionally transhumant pastoralists, they have recently increased their reliance on crops. Rainfall in the region averages between 353 mm to 873 mm; variability in rainfall is quite high, with coefficients of variation ranging from.21 to.68. The past decade has witnessed a dramatic increase in land allocated to crops, and land in pastures that are either becoming privatised, or accessible to only a small sub-group of people. In this paper, we derive an empirical model of stocking rates and land allocation, which is then used to estimate the effects of exogenous parameters on stocking densities, land allocated to crops, and land allocated to private pastures. Results indicate the following: a) regions with high coefficients of variation in rainfall have lower livestock densities and less land allocated to crops, b) communities with greater numbers of households and higher population densities have larger indices of non-cooperation, higher stock densities, and more land allocated to crops, c) heterogeneity within a community, measured by the distribution of wealth levels, is positively related to an index of non-cooperation, and to higher stock densities, d) higher relative prices of livestock and shorter distances to market are associated with greater stock densities as well as greater land allocated to crops, e) the greater is mobility into an area, the higher are stock densities, and the lower is the cooperation level, whereas outward mobility by community members has no effect on either stock densities or the level of cooperation reached, f) the proportion of members engaged in wage work outside has a significant negative effect on the ability of the community to cooperate. Outside wage work also increases land allocated to crops, but has a significant negative effect on land allocated to private pastures, and g) the greater is the index of non-cooperation, the higher are stock densities and the greater is land allocated to crops.

HB 346 - Tenant Retaliation Protection

The Act prohibits landlords from taking retaliatory action when tenants exercise their rights or express habitability concerns. The Act provides for several authorized tenant actions that notify and hold landlords responsible for fixable property defects. If the landlord attempts to deprive the tenant of the use or enjoyment of the premises because the tenant expressed habitability concerns, the Act finds a prima facie case of retaliation. The Act specifically protects landlord action when a tenant damages property or is delinquent in rent. The Act provides for civil penalties against landlords who have retaliated under the statute