The effects of team-skills training on transactive memory and performance

The existence of effective Transactive Memory Systems (TMS) in teams has been found to enhance task performance. Methods of developing Transactive Memory (TM) are therefore an important focus of research. This study aimed to explore one such method, the use of a generic team-skills training programme to develop TM and subsequent task performance. Sixteen three-member teams were all trained to complete a complex collaborative task, prior to which half the teams (n=8), completed a team-skills training programme. Results confirmed that those teams who had been trained to develop a range of team skills such as problem-solving, interpersonal relationships, goal setting and role allocation, evidenced significantly higher team skill, TM and performance than those who were not trained in such skills. Results are discussed with reference to the wider TM literature and the mechanisms through which team-skills training could facilitate the more rapid development of TM

Crime at Sea: Admiralty Sessions and the Background to Later Colonial Jurisdiction

The conference program describes the legal history of Nova Scotia as terra incognita. Whether this is so for the province\u27s own inhabitants is not a question that someone from the other side of the Atlantic should presume to judge, since ignorance there is not limited to the legal history of Nova Scotia but extends to colonial legal history generally. We have, I fear, been intimidated by the task, and we have tended to leave each erstwhile colony to trace its own legal history. I comfort myself, therefore, with the thought that any transatlantic contribution is likely to be a modest one taking the form of a topic of English legal history in the hope of prompting a corresponding interest in the history of that topic in Nova Scotia. Since Nova Scotia is a maritime province, a maritime topic may not be amiss-some problems of jurisdiction in respect of crimes committed at sea that England experienced in the century or so before and after the founding of Halifax. The problems, such as they were, were experienced in Admiralty Sessions, for it was in Admiralty Sessions that crime at sea was tried for the three centuries between 1536 and 1834. Very little has ever been published about Admiralty Sessions. Holdsworth has barely a couple of pages upon them in the sixteen volumes of his History of English Law-yet the records have a unique character and are of interest to the social and economic historian as well as the lawyer

Development of a prototype public file repository for XBRL documents : challenges and opportunities

Within the past few years, companies have begun publishing financial reports in an XML-based open-standard file format called XBRL. Providing easy public access to XBRL formatted data of company disclosures would provide investors, analysts, and accounting researchers the data in a highly flexible and usable format. EDGAR currently provides public access to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's required filings for publicly traded companies. Currently, EDGAR filings must be in either ASCII, HTML, and in some select cases, XML format. Though EDGAR has recently started to provide XBRL formatted data to the public for a limited number of companies, their primary distribution method remains in traditional file formats including plain text files, PDF, and GIF. Regardless of difficulties with XBRL specification versioning and customized taxonomies, XBRL data aggregators have yet to address any simple mechanism to retrieve XBRL documents. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a prototype public file repository for XBRL documents and present challenges and opportunities of having this public file repository. Also, in response to an anticipated demand for XBRL documents for the purpose of more frequent reporting and auditing of financial information, we compare two approaches of public access to XBRL documents on the web: file repository and file registry