An Effectiveness Review of Section 404 of the Sarbanes Oxley Act (2002)

The accounting scandals that occurred in the early 2000s launched the current day regulations set fourth in the Sarbanes Oxley Act. The Sarbanes Oxley Act is comprised of several titles, all aimed to help eliminate financial accounting errors and the potential of fraud. Within this piece of legislation, there is one section that has created a lot of discussion. Section 404, which discusses the way in which disclosures of internal control deficiencies are handled, is the topic of this paper. In addition to a literature review of a research paper written by Sarah Rice and David Weber, this paper will look at different elements to see if this section of the Sarbanes Oxley Act has changed the regulatory environment. Through comparative studies, this paper is aimed to see if the legislation created to stop these financial scandals from happening, was successful and effective

The relationship of intrinsic, extrinsic, and quest religious orientations to Jungian psychological type among churchgoers in England and Wales

Employing the New Indices of Religious Orientation (NIRO), this study examines the theory that different religious orientations are related to individual differences in psychological type as developed by Carl Jung and operationalized by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Data provided by 481 weekly churchgoing Christians who completed the MBTI and the NIRO demonstrated that quest religious orientation scores were higher among intuitives than among sensers, but were unrelated to introversion and extraversion, thinking and feeling, or judging and perceiving; that intrinsic religious orientation scores were higher among extraverts than introverts, higher among sensers than intuitives and higher among feelers than thinkers, but unrelated to judging and perceiving; and that extrinsic religious orientation scores were unrelated to any of the four components of psychological type. The findings relating to Jungian psychological type differences are applied in order to elucidate the psychological significance of extrinsic, intrinsic, and quest orientations to religion

Introducing the modified paranormal belief scale: distinguishing between classic paranormal beliefs, religious paranormal beliefs and conventional religiosity among undergraduates in Northern Ireland and Wales

Previous empirical studies concerned with the association between paranormal beliefs and conventional religiosity have produced conflicting evidence. Drawing on Rice's (2003) distinction between classic paranormal beliefs and religious paranormal beliefs, the present study proposed a modified form of the Tobacyk Revised Paranormal Belief Scale to produce separate scores for these two forms of paranormal belief, styled 'religious paranormal beliefs' and 'classic paranormal beliefs'. Data provided by a sample of 143 undergraduate students in Northern Ireland and Wales, who completed the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity alongside the Tobacyk Revised Paranormal Belief Scale, demonstrated that conventional religiosity is positively correlated with religious paranormal beliefs, but independent of classic paranormal beliefs. These findings provide a clear framework within which previous conflicting evidence can be interpreted. It is recommended that future research should distinguish clearly between these two forms of paranormal beliefs and that the Tobacyk Revised Paranormal Beliefs Scale should be routinely modified to detach the four religious paranormal belief items from the total scale score

Religious orientation, mental health and culture : conceptual and empirical perspectives

This special edition of Mental Health, Religion and Culture brings together thirteen original empirical studies that employ theories and measures based on the notion of ‘religious orientation’. As originally conceived, Allport’s notion of religious orientation distinguished between the two motivational styles of intrinsic religiosity and extrinsic religiosity. Subsequent work distinguished between extrinsic-personal and extrinsic social motivations, and added the third orientation styled as quest religiosity. The first set of seven studies draws on a variety of measures of religious orientation developed since the mid-1960s, including single-item measures. The second set of six studies draws on the New Indices of Religious Orientation proposed by Francis in 2007. Collectively these studies confirm the continuing vitality of the notion of religious orientation for informing empirical research within the psychology of religion and strengthen the foundation for future work in this area

Electronic energy transfer in synthetic polymers : a reinvestigation

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Investigating the spatial variability of Abrupt Cooling Events during the Lateglacial Interstadial (c. 14.7 – 12.5 ka cal BP) in Britain and Ireland using chironomids and oxygen isotopes to assess potential forcing mechanisms

NW Europe will become more susceptible to abrupt cooling events (ACE) due to a reduction in the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) caused by anthropogenic warming (IPCC, 2021). The Lateglacial Interstadial (LGIS) (~GI-1; c. 14.7-12.9 kyr ago), a relatively warm period at the end of the last glaciation, provides an excellent opportunity to study centennial-scale ACEs which are potential analogues to future ACEs. Three centennial-scale ACEs are clearly expressed in the Greenland ice core records, however, the spatial variation in magnitude of these ACEs across the British Isles and continental Europe is poorly understood due to the paucity of high-resolution well-dated records with quantified temperature reconstructions. By studying the spatial expression of ACE magnitude, potential forcing mechanisms can be assessed.Three sites were selected to improve the spatial coverage of LGIS sites in the British Isles: Crudale Meadow (Orkney), Llangorse (Wales), and Old Buckenham Mere (East Anglia). Chironomid and oxygen-isotope analysis was conducted at a high temporal resolution (~decadal), allowing for quantitative reconstructions of past climatic temperature change, insight into seasonal temperature change and understanding of hydrological regime shifts. All three sites have robust age models based on radiocarbon dated terrestrial plant macrofossils and/or tephrochronology. Differences in the spatiotemporal signatures in the magnitude and abruptness of the observed ACEs indicate that each ACE has a unique combination of forcing mechanisms operating at different times. The early-LGIS ACE may have primarily driven by North Sea sea-ice amplification of cooling that originated in the NW Atlantic, while the late-LGIS ACE was potentially the result of oceanic forcing from the NW and NE Atlantic. During the Mid-LGIS, numerous ACEs occurred of varying amplitude and apparent timing. This study shows the important of combining high-resolution analysis and high-precision age models in order to understand regional patterns, and potential drivers, of ACEs. <br/

Attitudes of advanced Australian medical oncology trainees to rural practice

Aim: To identify the views of medical oncology trainees regarding rural training posts and rural practice overall, and to identify factors that may improve recruitment. Methods: A questionnaire was posted to all advanced oncology trainees in Australia in June 2006. The trainees were questioned on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of rural practice, their experience during previous rural rotations and potential incentives and barriers in recruiting trainees and specialist oncologists to regional and rural centers. Results: There was a 60% response rate. Of all participants 58% had considered rural practice. Those with a rural family background were more likely to have considered rural practice. Attitudes based on responses to listed disadvantages and advantages of rural practice were heterogenous. Lifestyle factors seemed to be of particular importance. Although there were perceived deficiencies in opportunities for professional education in rural oncology rotations, 94% felt their rotation had been a positive experience overall and 62% were more likely to consider a rural career following their rural rotation. Improving locum cover for leave was seen as a potential incentive by 97% trainees. Conclusion: Despite positive attitudes towards rural practice, many barriers exist preventing recruitment of medical oncology trainees to rural areas, in particular lifestyle factors that are difficult to modify. Factors that can be improved include improving access to clinical trials, enabling access to locum cover. Educational opportunities for current rural trainees need to be improved. Further study into potential incentives to enhance rural recruitment is required

Identification and Analysis of Prohibitin in B16 Mouse Melanoma Cells

Prohibitin, a highly conserved protein found in eukaryotic cells, has been found in recent years to possess a wide variety of functions in the cell. Whereas the mechanisms by which the protein functions are still largely unknown, it is clear that prohibitin possesses very strong anti-proliferative properties in the cell, as well as potentially both nuclear and mitochondrial functions based upon its movement and localization upon apoptotic signaling. Upon treatment with retinoic acid, transformed B16 mouse melanoma cells also indicate a differential expression of prohibitin in which production of the protein is increased. The purpose of this work was to both validate the initial findings reported using this cell line and 2D gel electrophoresis, as well as attempt to identify, isolate, and analyze prohibitin using mass spectrometry in order to determine if in its function within the cell, prohibitin was in any way being modified. Although several proteins such as carbamoyl phosphate synthase I, heat shock protein 70, and annexin A5 were identified as part of this experiment, prohibitin was never isolated by immunoprecipitation and was only observed using western blotting

Adversarial Generation of Natural Language

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have gathered a lot of attention from the computer vision community, yielding impressive results for image generation. Advances in the adversarial generation of natural language from noise however are not commensurate with the progress made in generating images, and still lag far behind likelihood based methods. In this paper, we take a step towards generating natural language with a GAN objective alone. We introduce a simple baseline that addresses the discrete output space problem without relying on gradient estimators and show that it is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on a Chinese poem generation dataset. We present quantitative results on generating sentences from context-free and probabilistic context-free grammars, and qualitative language modeling results. A conditional version is also described that can generate sequences conditioned on sentence characteristics.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 5 table

Simplified vector-thread architectures for flexible and efficient data-parallel accelerators

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-170).This thesis explores a new approach to building data-parallel accelerators that is based on simplifying the instruction set, microarchitecture, and programming methodology for a vector-thread architecture. The thesis begins by categorizing regular and irregular data-level parallelism (DLP), before presenting several architectural design patterns for data-parallel accelerators including the multiple-instruction multiple-data (MIMD) pattern, the vector single-instruction multiple-data (vector-SIMD) pattern, the single-instruction multiple-thread (SIMT) pattern, and the vector-thread (VT) pattern. Our recently proposed VT pattern includes many control threads that each manage their own array of microthreads. The control thread uses vector memory instructions to efficiently move data and vector fetch instructions to broadcast scalar instructions to all microthreads. These vector mechanisms are complemented by the ability for each microthread to direct its own control flow. In this thesis, I introduce various techniques for building simplified instances of the VT pattern. I propose unifying the VT control-thread and microthread scalar instruction sets to simplify the microarchitecture and programming methodology. I propose a new single-lane VT microarchitecture based on minimal changes to the vector-SIMD pattern.(cont.) Single-lane cores are simpler to implement than multi-lane cores and can achieve similar energy efficiency. This new microarchitecture uses control processor embedding to mitigate the area overhead of single-lane cores, and uses vector fragments to more efficiently handle both regular and irregular DLP as compared to previous VT architectures. I also propose an explicitly data-parallel VT programming methodology that is based on a slightly modified scalar compiler. This methodology is easier to use than assembly programming, yet simpler to implement than an automatically vectorizing compiler. To evaluate these ideas, we have begun implementing the Maven data-parallel accelerator. This thesis compares a simplified Maven VT core to MIMD, vector-SIMD, and SIMT cores. We have implemented these cores with an ASIC methodology, and I use the resulting gate-level models to evaluate the area, performance, and energy of several compiled microbenchmarks. This work is the first detailed quantitative comparison of the VT pattern to other patterns. My results suggest that future data-parallel accelerators based on simplified VT architectures should be able to combine the energy efficiency of vector-SIMD accelerators with the flexibility of MIMD accelerators.by Christopher Francis Batten.Ph.D