Saturday\u27s Child Has Far To Go

The courthouse square of our town is always crowded on summer Saturday nights. Cars are wedged neatly around the four sides of the square in every available parking place, the shops and groceries are ablaze with lights, and horns honk wildly as little children dash across the streets to join their friends in playing tag on the courthouse lawn. As one makes one\u27s way through the crowd, women with bundles of all sizes and shapes and grocery bags with celery peeping out of the tops jostle one from all sides. Farmers dressed in faded overalls and toddlers licking ice cream cones bump elbows with girls in too short skirts and soldiers in from the nearby camp. Everyone seems in a great hurry to go nowhere, except the teen-age boys and girls, whose destination is well-known

Bacharach and Burg Stahleck, 1817

Article describing and identifying as authentic a watercolour in the Hunterian collection which was recorded in the Turner literature but listed as location unknown

Valid plane trees: Combinatorial models for RNA secondary structures with Watson-Crick base pairs

The combinatorics of RNA plays a central role in biology. Mathematical biologists have several commonly-used models for RNA: words in a fixed alphabet (representing the primary sequence of nucleotides) and plane trees (representing the secondary structure, or folding of the RNA sequence). This paper considers an augmented version of the standard model of plane trees, one that incorporates some observed constraints on how the folding can occur. In particular we assume the alphabet consists of complementary pairs, for instance the Watson-Crick pairs A-U and C-G of RNA. Given a word in the alphabet, a valid plane tree is a tree for which, when the word is folded around the tree, each edge matches two complementary letters. Consider the graph whose vertices are valid plane trees for a fixed word and whose edges are given by Condon, Heitsch, and Hoos's local moves. We prove this graph is connected. We give an explicit algorithm to construct a valid plane tree from a primary sequence, assuming that at least one valid plane tree exists. The tree produced by our algorithm has other useful characterizations, including a uniqueness condition defined by local moves. We also study enumerative properties of valid plane trees, analyzing how the number of valid plane trees depends on the choice of sequence length and alphabet size. Finally we show that the proportion of words with at least one valid plane tree goes to zero as the word size increases. We also give some open questions.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure

Was the Accounting Profession Really That Bad?

To gain insight into the extent of malpractice in the State of California prior to the Passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, we examined the nature and magnitude of complains filed with the California Board of Accountancy (CBA) against both licensed and unlicensed accountants during the fiscal years 2000, 2001, and 2002. The CBA currently licenses and regulates over 73,000 licenses, with 1,431 complaints filed during the period reviewed. Disciplinary actions were taken against 283 different licensees for the three fiscal years reviewed. SEC issues were involved in 19 cases, theft or embezzlement 46 cases, public accounting malpractice 146 cases, improper retention of client records 11 cases, cheating on the CPA examination 9 cases, and miscellaneous other 52 cases. Over half of the complaints involved public accounting issues. Audit related complaints accounted for 48%, tax related complaints 36%, and compilations or reviews accounted for 16% of the complaints. These statistics were in line with the experience of the AICPA Professional Liability program. Within the above sections, the paper contains specifics with regards to the most common problems identified as a result of this work. While a number of interesting facts were discovered, one item of particularly interest was the significant number of claims that involved non-profit organizations. CBA administrators do not believe there is any greater tendency for non profit reporting versus for profit reporting, thus appearing to indicate this is just an area that has a greater possibility of accounting malpractice

Globalization of the Food Industry: Transnational Food Corporations, the Spread of Processed Food, and Their Implications for Food Security and Nutrition

We are currently experiencing a significant shift in our world’s food systems and dietary patterns. Access, availability, and the quality of food are changing and the need for proper nutrition and food security has come to the forefront of the global health agenda. While globalization has fostered greater variety and access to food in many places; access to healthy, affordable food is not universal, leaving many populations buying cheaper food that has poor nutritional value. My purpose for this paper is to determine how the forces of globalization, the business practices of transnational food companies, and the prevalence of processed foods contribute to these shifts in food security and nutrition. I have found that urbanization and foreign direct investment lead to greater availability, affordability, and consumption of processed westernized foods due to an increased presence of transnational food corporations in local markets. This presence highly influences consumer preference and consumption of processed foods due to the advanced advertising, marketing and business strategies of large companies. Additionally, the sheer control that large food corporations have over domestic markets puts small farmers at a disadvantage because they are often unable to compete with the high international standards and market power of such corporations. As a result, food security, food sovereignty, and the presence of healthy food can be diminished. This creates adverse health affects like malnutrition, which can lead to disease and lower economic productivity, among other things. Certain forces of globalization and business practices of transnational food corporations, when they go unmonitored and unaccounted for, can contribute greatly to food insecurity and malnutrition. However, globalization and the private sector can also be a part of the solution in combatting these ills. Overall, the purpose of this paper is to shed light on flaws within the global food system so that we may better approach more equitable, sustainable, and healthy food systems in developing countries

Web Analytics: A Picture of the Academic Library Web Site User

This article describes the usefulness of Web analytics for understanding the users of an academic library Web site. Using a case study, the analysis describes how Web analytics can answer questions about Web site user behavior, including when visitors come, the duration of the visit, how they get there, the technology they use, and the most popular content using an open-source Web log analysis tool. The author offers suggestions for future research into user motivations to complement the findings possible using Web analytics