Practical Training and the Audit Expectations Gap:The Case of Accounting Undergraduates of Universiti Utara Malaysia

The accounting profession has long faced the issue of an audit expectations gap; being the gap between the quality of the profession’s performance, its objectives and results, and that which the society expects. The profession believes that the gap could be reduced over time through education. Studies have been carried out overseas and in Malaysia to determine the effect of education in narrowing the audit expectations gap. Extending the knowledge acquired, this paper investigates whether academic internship programs could reduce the audit expectations gap in Malaysia. Using a pre-post method, the research instrument adapted from Ferguson et al. (2000) is administered to the Universiti Utara Malaysia’s accounting students at the beginning and end of their internship program. The results show there is a significant change in perceptions among students after the internship program. However, changes in perceptions do not warrant an internship program as a means of reducing the audit expectations gap as misperceptions are still found among respondents on issues of auditing after the completion of the internship program. Nevertheless, an internship program can still be used to complement audit education in a university as it is an ideal way to expose students to professional issues and enables them to have a better insight of the actual performance and duties of auditors

Very Massive Stars and the Eddington Limit

We use contemporary evolutionary models for Very Massive Stars (VMS) to assess whether the Eddington limit constrains the upper stellar mass limit. We also consider the interplay between mass and age for the wind properties and spectral morphology of VMS, with reference to the recently modified classification scheme for O2-3.5If*/WN stars. Finally, the death of VMS in the local universe is considered in the context of pair instability supernovae.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, from "Four Decades of Massive Star Research" (Quebec, Jul 2011), ASP Conf Ser, in press (L. Drissen, C. Robert, N. St-Louis, A.F.J. Moffat, eds.

Perkembangan Industri Nasional dan Peran Penanaman Modal

This paper discuses about the advantages and disadvantages which happen in the national industries as a result of the dominant of foreign investment Indonesia has been losing the momentum of development of its nation industries. From the 1970s until 1980s. Indonesia had the opportunity to take control of industries in the Asian region, especially as China. Malaysia, and Thailand had still not developed their power to build and develop their industries.Without a good infrastructure and a good logistic, qualified human resources, ability to control technology which support dynamic innovational activity and intensive cooperation between universities and business world, Indonesia will be left behind by any industri from any other country. This paper result, foreign investment is important for the development of industries. Indonesia must try to absorb the advantages deriving from foreign investment. Therefore domestic companies in Indonesia will not only become the medium but also would be able to absorb the new technology associated with foreign investment

A modified kohonen self-organizing map (KSOM) clustering for four categorical data

The Kohonen Self-Organizing Map (KSOM) is one of the Neural Network unsupervised learning algorithms. This algorithm is used in solving problems in various areas, especially in clustering complex data sets. Despite its advantages, the KSOM algorithm has a few drawbacks; such as overlapped cluster and non-linear separable problems. Therefore, this paper proposes a modified KSOM that inspired from pheromone approach in Ant Colony Optimization. The modification is focusing on the distance calculation amongst objects. The proposed algorithm has been tested on four real categorical data that are obtained from UCI machine learning repository; Iris, Seeds, Glass and Wisconsin Breast Cancer Database. From the results, it shows that the modified KSOM has produced accurate clustering result and all clusters can clearly be identified

Traffic sign detection based on simple XOR and discriminative features

Traffic Sign Detection (TSD) is an important application in computer vision. It plays a crucial role in driver assistance systems, and provides drivers with safety and precaution information. In this paper, in addition to detecting Traffic Signs (TSs), the proposed technique also recognizes the shape of the TS. The proposed technique consist of two stages. The first stage is an image segmentation technique that is based on Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ), which divides the image into six different color regions. The second stage is based on discriminative features (area, color, and aspect ratio) and the exclusive OR logical operator (XOR). The output is the location and shape of the TS. The proposed technique is applied on the German Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark (GTSDB), and achieves overall detection and shape matching of around 97% and 100% respectively. The testing speed is around 0.8 seconds per image on a mainstream PC, and the technique is coded using the Matlab toolbox

Morpheme {BuN-}: an Example of Morphological Process Through Affixation in Bidayuh-Somu Language

The goals of this research were to identify the allomorph of morpheme {buN-}, describe its affixation process, and determine the function of the allomorphs. The qualitative method was applied to gather the data from an informant who was done by recording technique on the field research. The informant was a Bidayuh-Somu language native speaker. The collected data included the derivational words derived from free morpheme that was root, base, and bound morpheme. The free and bound morpheme were then sorted into nominal and verbal class, as well as described qualitatively. Affixation as one of the morphological processes to derive complex derivational word in Bidayuh-Somu Language involved free and bound morpheme. Morpheme {buN-} was chosen as an example to describe the process of affixation in deriving complex derivational word of the language. It is found that the morpheme {buN-} is a prefix and verbal, affixed to the verb, and noun and adjective. Therefore, it functions both as class-maintaining and class-changing. Moreover, it is identified that the morpheme {buN-} has five allomorphs, namely /bu-/ with its alternant /bur-/ and /b-/, and /bum-/, /bun-/, /buN-/ and /bu-/. The morpheme {buN-} is affixed to free morpheme which is initiated with all consonant and vowel phonemes. The morpheme {buN-}also bears meaning

Formulation of linguistic regression model based on natural words

When human experts express their ideas and thoughts, human words are basically employed in these expressions. That is, the experts with much professional experiences are capable of making assessment using their intuition and experiences. The measurements and interpretation of characteristics are taken with uncertainty, because most measured characteristics, analytical result, and field data can be interpreted only intuitively by experts. In such cases, judgments may be expressed using linguistic terms by experts. The difficulty in the direct measurement of certain characteristics makes the estimation of these characteristics imprecise. Such measurements may be dealt with the use of fuzzy set theory. As Professor L. A. Zadeh has placed the stress on the importance of the computation with words, fuzzy sets can take a central role in handling words [12, 13]. In this perspective fuzzy logic approach is offten thought as the main and only useful tool to deal with human words. In this paper we intend to present another approach to handle human words instead of fuzzy reasoning. That is, fuzzy regression analysis enables us treat the computation with words. In order to process linguistic variables, we define the vocabulary translation and vocabulary matching which convert linguistic expressions into membership functions on the interval [0–1] on the basis of a linguistic dictionary, and vice versa. We employ fuzzy regression analysis in order to deal with the assessment process of experts from linguistic variables of features and characteristics of an objective into the linguistic expression of the total assessment. The presented process consists of four portions: (1) vocabulary translation, (2) estimation, (3) vocabulary matching and (4) dictionary. We employed fuzzy quantification theory type 2 for estimating the total assessment in terms of linguistic structural attributes which are obtained from an expert

Bauran Kebijakan Moneter dan Makroprudensial Bank Indonesia Semenjak Maret 2011 Hingga Maret 2012

: Monetary Policy and Macroprudential of Bank Indonesia 2011-2012. Indonesia economic growth since February 2011 until the fourth quarter of 2011 was 6.5%. Throughout the year of 2011, CPI inflation has declined from 6.65 % in March to 4.15% in December. Investment increased in early 2012 in line with the development of infrastructure, reduction in the BI rate thus providing a favorable climate and positive perceptions for investors. In the first two quarters of 2011, export exceeded import, but in the fourth quarter of 2011, there was a deficit in the balance of payment as import increased. In early 2011, Indonesia foreign exchange reserve amounted to US $99.6 billion, which increased in August to US$124.6 billion. At the end of January 2012 the foreign exchange reserves increased by $US 112 billion. Performance of financial market and banking was fairly steady in February 2011 further demonstrated by the CAR above 8% and gross NPL below 8%, while credit growth of 24.6% of this state wake up to early 2012