An environmental assessment activity to promote active distance learning and challenge of personal lifestyles and values

This paper introduces a new distance learning course, 'Working with our Environment: Technology for a Sustainable Future'. An inter-disciplinary team within the Technology Faculty of the Open University developed this undergraduate course, which enrols over 1500 students per year. One of the overall aiims is to help students understand how the use of technology to meet human material needs contributes to environmental effects. The process of producing this course, its philosophy, aims and design will be briefly discussed. At the start of the course a lifestyle environmental assessment activity, called EcoCal, is intergrated within students’ study materials. The activity enables students to assess the main impacts on the environment arising from their own household’s consumption of energy, transport, food and water and production of waste. Through the use, either of a printed questionnaire or publicly available software, students can calculate their ‘Ecological Footprint’ and then consider and model the effects of changes to their lifestyle. Through the combination of undertaking this activity and submitting an appropriate assignment, students are encouraged to think critically and creatively about their impacts on the environment and how these might be reduced at both individual and societal levels. At the end of the course students were surveyed to explore whether their attitudes and behaviour had changed

New estimates of Hilbert-Kunz multiplicities for local rings of fixed dimension

We present results on the Watanabe-Yoshida conjecture for the Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity of a local ring of positive characteristic. By improving on a "volume estimate" giving a lower bound for Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity, we obtain the conjecture when the ring either has Hilbert-Samuel multiplicity less than or equal to five, or dimension less than or equal to six. For non-regular rings with fixed dimension, a new lower bound for the Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity is obtained.Comment: minor corrections, final version, accepted for publication in Nagoya Math Journa

[Review of] H. Henrietta Stockel. Women of the Apache Nation: Voices of Truth

At a time when books about Native American women need to provide the reader with unromanticized images of strong women in their own right, Stockel’s book, Women of the Apache Nation, succeeds only partially. The sixty-two page historical introduction and the two shorter introductions to the Mescalero (New Mexico) and Fort Sill (Oklahoma) Apache, while important to situating the women’s narratives that follow, are flawed by inaccuracies, overly dependent on secondary sources, and replete with unnecessary references to historical male figures and male relatives. Stockel, for example, incorrectly uses the term ”Western pache” which does not include Mescalero or Fort Sill (cf. Keith Basso, “Western Apache,” in Handbook of North American Indians. Vol 10. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1983, 462-488). The photos enhance the narrative; a map would have been helpful. The writing is personal, but for this reviewer, overly sentimental

The Effect of State Income Tax Structure On Interstate Migration

This research paper addresses the issue of whether state income tax treatment affects the location decision of individuals. There have been some estimates of the effects of tax differences on the migration patterns of individuals, but this is a hard issue to research. Data are often not available and it is very difficult to compute all of the taxes faced by individuals. Also, taxes are not the only thing that influences people's decisions of where to live. Other amenities are important, including public services, weather, proximity to family, and employment opportunities. In fact, individuals may be compensated for higher taxes by these other amenities. For example, a high taxing state might have a terrific system of public education, which individuals are willing to support via higher taxes. Higher wages may be offered to compensate for higher taxes. Unless we try to separate these different influences, it will be very difficult to offer policy advice regarding whether or not individual's migration patterns are affected by taxes. Report #7

Genetics Crime and Justice

This review is unashamedly from the perspective of English law because busy United Kingdom criminal law solicitors and barristers mostly wish to know what the law states, which case is a precedent case and whether the author has provided up-to-date legal information. This is because legal practitioners deal with real and urgent cases. The English Income Tax Act gained Royal Assent in 1799 the first government attempt to stop early tax avoidance. Later, tax avoidance schemes (which in English Law were deemed a legitimate method of minimising one payment of taxation) became de rigueur all over the world and often involved creation of Deeds of Covenant and Trusts, notably Discretionary Trusts under civil law. Man’s ingenuity knows no bounds and this applies to man’s characteristic of criminality as it does to scholarship, enterprise and innovation. Despite protestations by some countries police agencies, contrary to the rise of crime, the fact is that that crime is increasing exponentially worldwide, but the number of people committing crime is not increasing because many crimes are repeated crimes committed by persons with habitual criminal behaviour, ie hard-core criminals

Why did(n't) the accountant cross the road? Towards a model of European enforcement of International Financial Reporting Standards

International studies of accounting have recognised the importance of 'culture' in accounting systems. Various definitions of and proxies for culture have been used in the accounting literature. These have contributed little to our understanding, save that culture is a complex issue and is clearly important for the development and practice of accounting. This paper brings together two strands of literature (culture and regulatory compliance) to point out practical weaknesses in the transition to global reporting in the form of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The discussion centres on the European Union (EU), a culturally diverse region that is requiring the use of IFRS in the consolidated financial statements of listed companies from 2005. The article goes on to contribute to the emerging literature on enforcement by proposing a model for policing IFRS