Accounting Standards in Regards to the Mobile Tech Industry

The mobile tech industry is one of the most influential and useful industries to both consumers and businesses because of how necessary that level of functionality is. The value that this industry adds to businesses and individuals is significant, and will likely only increase as the world continues to shift to the mobile landscape. And unlike other valuable industries such as energy, it is not geographically dependent where mobile tech companies are stationed. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the accounting topics which are most prevalent to the mobile tech industry; namely research and development, inventory, and other intangibles like advertising. The two most significant sets of accounting standards, US GAAP and IFRS, treat these topics differently. This paper analyzes these differences in order to determine which system is more beneficial to the current trends and strategies used by mobile tech companies today. The result is that there are no significant definite differences between GAAP and IFRS in the mobile tech industry with regard to inventory and intangibles, but there is potential for significant benefit under IFRS depending upon specific business practice. There is also significant benefit for IFRS when R&D costs are rising

Die Rückkehr des Nationalpopulismus in Österreich

"Since the early 1980s, Austria has been one of the European countries with the strongest electoral results of right wing national-populist parties. In 2000, the FPÖ (Freedom Party of Austria) became partner of a coalition government on the national level. After a short weakness at the 2002 national elections, the Party seems to be an accepted political actor once again. The 2008 national and the 2009 European elections have proven this trend. After the death of Jörg Haider, a new charismatic leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, has stepped into the limelight. The Austrian political system is under strong pressure of the national-populist radical right. This latter is surfing on a wave of authoritarian, individualistic, xenophobe, and anti-European attitudes of the collective Austrian value system. Young people consider the FPÖ and its youthful chairman Strache the representatives of a counterculture which might be able to break down the political and social conformity of the weck and unpopular Grand Coalition." (author's abstract

Die kommunistischen und postkommunistischen Parteien Westeuropas: ein unaufhaltsamer Niedergang?

'Mit dem Untergang des Sowjetkommunismus sind die ehedem an ihm orientierten Parteien keineswegs von der politischen Landkarte Europas verschwunden. Ein Vergleich der westeuropäischen Formationen fördert drei ideologisch- programmatische Strömungen zu Tage: Traditionelle KPen halten am Erbe des Marxismus-Leninismus weitgehend fest, während sich postkommunistische Organisationen weitgehend davon lösen, Kapitalismuskritik zum Teil mit ökologistischen Konzepten verbinden. Dazwischen angesiedelt sind Reformkommunisten, die dem Leninismus in Teilen abschwören, dem Marxismus aber überwiegend die Treue halten. Angesichts der Auflösung traditioneller Milieus gehen alle drei Strömungen im Wettbewerb mit der etablierten gemäßigten Linken einer ungewissen Zukunft entgegen.' (Autorenreferat)'The demise of Soviet Communism by no means implies that the parties formerly bound up with it have disappeared from Europe's political landscape. A comparison of these formations in western Europe distinguishes three ideological and programmatic currents: 'traditional' Communist parties largely adhere to the heritage of Marxism and Leninism, while 'post-Communist' organizations have largely dissociated themselves from it, frequently combining criticism of capitalism with ecological concepts. Between these two poles are the 'reform Communists', who have partly turned away from Leninism but largely retain their allegiance to Marxism. The disintegration of their traditional milieus are an essential reason for their uncertain prospects in the ongoing competition with established moderate left-wing organizations.' (author's abstract)

Demonstrating an absolute quantum advantage in direct absorption measurement

Engineering apparatus that harness quantum theory promises to offer practical advantages over current technology. A fundamentally more powerful prospect is that such quantum technologies could out-perform any future iteration of their classical counterparts, no matter how well the attributes of those classical strategies can be improved. Here, for optical direct absorption measurement, we experimentally demonstrate such an instance of an absolute advantage per photon probe that is exposed to the absorbative sample. We use correlated intensity measurements of spontaneous parametric downconversion using a commercially available air-cooled CCD, a new estimator for data analysis and a high heralding efficiency photon-pair source. We show this enables improvement in the precision of measurement, per photon probe, beyond what is achievable with an ideal coherent state (a perfect laser) detected with 100% efficient and noiseless detection. We see this absolute improvement for up to 50% absorption, with a maximum observed factor of improvement of 1.46. This equates to around 32% reduction in the total number of photons traversing an optical sample, compared to any future direct optical absorption measurement using classical light

Expression of HLA-G in human cornea, an immune-privileged tissue.

Human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-G retains the capacity to modulate immune responses, favoring the establishment of tolerance in solid-tissue allotransplants. To better understand the mechanisms that promote corneal allograft survival, we investigated whether HLA-G was an immunoregulatory factor involved in corneal immunology. We therefore sought HLA-G expression in corneal tissues. Corneal transplantation consists in replacing the center of a diseased cornea with normal corneal tissue. Two corneal parts are not used in such surgery: diseased central corneal tissue and peripheral normal cornea. For this study, we used healthy corneas obtained from deceased donors and diseased corneas obtained from patients with pseudophakic bullous keratopathy or keratoconus who had undergone corneal transplantation. Immunohistochemical analysis carried out on the cryopreserved corneas showed a positive immunohistochemical staining with anti-HLA-G, anti-HLA-A, -B, and -C, and anti-HLA class I monoclonal antibodies. Staining was obtained for keratocytes, epithelial cells, and endothelial cells from both healthy and pathologic human corneas, revealing the presence of HLA class I proteins, including HLA-G. HLA-G transcripts were detected in normal cornea by reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction with a classical pattern of alternative splicing. The detection of HLA-G protein in adult corneas leads to the conclusion that this protein may contribute to the maintenance of the privileged immune status of cornea

TXTGate: profiling gene groups with text-based information

We implemented a framework called TXTGate that combines literature indices of selected public biological resources in a flexible text-mining system designed towards the analysis of groups of genes. By means of tailored vocabularies, term- as well as gene-centric views are offered on selected textual fields and MEDLINE abstracts used in LocusLink and the Saccharomyces Genome Database. Subclustering and links to external resources allow for in-depth analysis of the resulting term profiles

A novel di-acidic motif facilitates ER export of the syntaxin SYP31

It is generally accepted that ER protein export is largely influenced by the transmembrane domain (TMD). The situation is unclear for membrane-anchored proteins such as SNAREs, which are anchored to the membrane by their TMD at the C-terminus. For example, in plants, Sec22 and SYP31 (a yeast Sed5 homologue) have a 17 aa TMD but different locations (ER/Golgi and Golgi), indicating that TMD length alone is not sufficient to explain their targeting. To establish the identity of factors that influence SNARE targeting, mutagenesis and live cell imaging experiments were performed on SYP31. It was found that deletion of the entire N-terminus domain of SYP31 blocked the protein in the ER. Several deletion mutants of different parts of this N-terminus domain indicated that a region between the SNARE helices Hb and Hc is required for Golgi targeting. In this region, replacement of the aa sequence MELAD by GAGAG or MALAG retained the protein in the ER, suggesting that MELAD may function as a di-acidic ER export motif EXXD. This suggestion was further verified by replacing the established di-acidic ER export motif DLE of a type II Golgi protein AtCASP and a membrane-anchored type I chimaera, TMcCCASP, by MELAD or GAGAG. The MELAD motif allowed the proteins to reach the Golgi, whereas the motif GAGAG was found to be insufficient to facilitate ER protein export. Our analyses indicate that we have identified a novel and transplantable di-acidic motif that facilitates ER export of SYP31 and may function for type I and type II proteins in plants