A Consulting Giant; a Disgruntled Client: a ?Failed? Attempt to Change Management Controls in a Public Sector Organisation

There has been very little research into management consulting interventions in public sector organisations especially in emerging economies. This paper aims to fill this void by narrating the empirics of a consulting assignment carried out by a large international consulting firm in a Pakistani public sector organisation. The paper found that consultants? recommendations of modern day management accounting and control practices, such as a modern performance measurement system and a ?state-of-the-art? information system, were rejected by the management, who stopped the balance of payment of the consultants? fee. Employing a theoretical perspective that focuses on the structural conditions facing both the client and the consultants, and the strategies adopted by the consultants and the client, the paper aims to explain the empirics of the case. Through identification of the structural conditions operating in emerging economies, this paper sheds light on the nature of the relationship between consultants and client in these settings. The consultants? strategies and what went ?wrong? with these strategies was also analysed. Client management counter-strategies and management?s reasons for implementing them were also explored. Thus, through structural and strategic analysis, this paper aims to enhance our understanding of the dynamics of management consulting in public sector organisations especially in emerging economies

Understanding Management Accounting Changes in a Family-Owned Company: A Greek Case Study

This study seeks to understand the changes to management accounting controls in a large Greek company in the context of the rapidly changing socio-economic environment. The paper investigates the case of FA (here anonymised), a Greek dairy company, as it has been transformed from a small family-run firm to one of the biggest companies in Greece. Familial and informal management controls have been transformed into a relatively formal and professional form of control over the years. The dynamics and nature of management accounting changes are understood by drawing on critical realism, a theoretical framework pioneered by Roy Bhaskar (1975, 1979). Our analysis revealed that a changed wider structural environment, changed control needs of owners and ?politics of control within capital? between competing management positions (Armstrong, 1989) precipitated the changes in the management control practices of the organization

A patient agent controlled customized blockchain based framework for internet of things

Although Blockchain implementations have emerged as revolutionary technologies for various industrial applications including cryptocurrencies, they have not been widely deployed to store data streaming from sensors to remote servers in architectures known as Internet of Things. New Blockchain for the Internet of Things models promise secure solutions for eHealth, smart cities, and other applications. These models pave the way for continuous monitoring of patient’s physiological signs with wearable sensors to augment traditional medical practice without recourse to storing data with a trusted authority. However, existing Blockchain algorithms cannot accommodate the huge volumes, security, and privacy requirements of health data. In this thesis, our first contribution is an End-to-End secure eHealth architecture that introduces an intelligent Patient Centric Agent. The Patient Centric Agent executing on dedicated hardware manages the storage and access of streams of sensors generated health data, into a customized Blockchain and other less secure repositories. As IoT devices cannot host Blockchain technology due to their limited memory, power, and computational resources, the Patient Centric Agent coordinates and communicates with a private customized Blockchain on behalf of the wearable devices. While the adoption of a Patient Centric Agent offers solutions for addressing continuous monitoring of patients’ health, dealing with storage, data privacy and network security issues, the architecture is vulnerable to Denial of Services(DoS) and single point of failure attacks. To address this issue, we advance a second contribution; a decentralised eHealth system in which the Patient Centric Agent is replicated at three levels: Sensing Layer, NEAR Processing Layer and FAR Processing Layer. The functionalities of the Patient Centric Agent are customized to manage the tasks of the three levels. Simulations confirm protection of the architecture against DoS attacks. Few patients require all their health data to be stored in Blockchain repositories but instead need to select an appropriate storage medium for each chunk of data by matching their personal needs and preferences with features of candidate storage mediums. Motivated by this context, we advance third contribution; a recommendation model for health data storage that can accommodate patient preferences and make storage decisions rapidly, in real-time, even with streamed data. The mapping between health data features and characteristics of each repository is learned using machine learning. The Blockchain’s capacity to make transactions and store records without central oversight enables its application for IoT networks outside health such as underwater IoT networks where the unattended nature of the nodes threatens their security and privacy. However, underwater IoT differs from ground IoT as acoustics signals are the communication media leading to high propagation delays, high error rates exacerbated by turbulent water currents. Our fourth contribution is a customized Blockchain leveraged framework with the model of Patient-Centric Agent renamed as Smart Agent for securely monitoring underwater IoT. Finally, the smart Agent has been investigated in developing an IoT smart home or cities monitoring framework. The key algorithms underpinning to each contribution have been implemented and analysed using simulators.Doctor of Philosoph

Management Accounting Research and Structuration Theory: A Critical Realist Critique

The article extends the critique of structuration theory from a critical realist perspective, in particular by demonstrating how its theoretical shortcomings are manifest in management accounting research. Examining of one of the most cited structuration-based accounting studies and other more recent structuration-based accounting studies, the article highlights what accounting researchers who have embraced a structuration lens may have ignored. It also demonstrates why accounting researchers could not get a better theoretical purchase out of structuration. We find that a critical realist account provides a far more in-depth account of budgeting changes and is likely to avoid the problems encountered in using a structuration theoretical lens. The article has important implications for accounting researchers as it demonstrates that analytical dualism instead of duality has much better potential to offer deeper understanding of accounting changes

IC 630: Piercing the Veil of the Nuclear Gas

IC 630 is a nearby early-type galaxy with a mass of $6 \times 10^{10} M_{\odot}$ with an intense burst of recent (6 Myr) star formation. It shows strong nebular emission lines, with radio and X-ray emission, which classifies it as an AGN. With VLT-SINFONI and Gemini North-NIFS adaptive optics observations (plus supplementary ANU 2.3m WiFeS optical IFU observations), the excitation diagnostics of the nebular emission species show no sign of standard AGN engine excitation; the stellar velocity dispersion also indicate that a super-massive black hole (if one is present) is small ($M_{\bullet} = 2.25 \times 10^{5}~M_{\odot}$). The luminosity at all wavelengths is consistent with star formation at a rate of about $1-2 M_{\odot}$/yr. We measure gas outflows driven by star formation at a rate of $0.18 M_{\odot}$/yr in a face-on truncated cone geometry. We also observe a nuclear cluster or disk and other clusters. Photo-ionization from young, hot stars is the main excitation mechanism for [Fe II] and hydrogen, whereas shocks are responsible for the H$_2$ excitation. Our observations are broadly comparable with simulations where a Toomre-unstable, self-gravitating gas disk triggers a burst of star formation, peaking after about 30 Myr and possibly cycling with a period of about 200 Myr.Comment: 32 pages, 19 figures Accepted for publication in Ap

Sequence-to-sequence learning-based conversion of pseudo-code to source code using neural translation approach

Pseudo-code refers to an informal means of representing algorithms that do not require the exact syntax of a computer programming language. Pseudo-code helps developers and researchers represent their algorithms using human-readable language. Generally, researchers can convert the pseudo-code into computer source code using different conversion techniques. The efficiency of such conversion methods is measured based on the converted algorithm's correctness. Researchers have already explored diverse technologies to devise conversion methods with higher accuracy. This paper proposes a novel pseudo-code conversion learning method that includes natural language processing-based text preprocessing and a sequence-to-sequence deep learning-based model trained with the SPoC dataset. We conducted an extensive experiment on our designed algorithm using descriptive bilingual understudy scoring and compared our results with state-of-the-art techniques. Result analysis shows that our approach is more accurate and efficient than other existing conversion methods in terms of several performances metrics. Furthermore, the proposed method outperforms the existing approaches because our method utilizes two Long-Short-Term-Memory networks that might increase the accuracy. © 2013 IEEE

Blockchain leveraged task migration in body area sensor networks

Blockchain technologies emerging for healthcare support secure health data sharing with greater interoperability among different heterogeneous systems. However, the collection and storage of data generated from Body Area Sensor Net-works(BASN) for migration to high processing power computing services requires an efficient BASN architecture. We present a decentralized BASN architecture that involves devices at three levels; 1) Body Area Sensor Network-medical sensors typically on or in patient's body transmitting data to a Smartphone, 2) Fog/Edge, and 3) Cloud. We propose that a Patient Agent(PA) replicated on the Smartphone, Fog and Cloud servers processes medical data and execute a task offloading algorithm by leveraging a Blockchain. Performance analysis is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Blockchain leveraged, distributed Patient Agent controlled BASN. © 2019 IEEE.E

A lightweight blockchain based framework for underwater ioT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has facilitated services without human intervention for a wide range of applications, including underwater monitoring, where sensors are located at various depths, and data must be transmitted to surface base stations for storage and processing. Ensuring that data transmitted across hierarchical sensor networks are kept secure and private without high computational cost remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a multilevel sensor monitoring architecture. Our proposal includes a layer-based architecture consisting of Fog and Cloud elements to process and store and process the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) data securely with customized Blockchain technology. The secure routing of IoUT data through the hierarchical topology ensures the legitimacy of data sources. A security and performance analysis was performed to show that the architecture can collect data from IoUT devices in the monitoring region efficiently and securely. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland