Career Choice and Salary Modeled with Stella

Objectives: Students will select a career choice and corresponding starting salary. To develop an understanding of numbers in the real world and demonstrate the concept of percent, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers to complete a W2 and a 1040EZ form

Comment: Microchipping Employees and Privacy Implications - Does My Boss Know Where I am Right Now?

Existing law surrounding employee privacy does not adequately address privacy concerns raised by microchip programs. A handful of states have passed laws that prohibit mandatory employee microchipping programs, but the vast majority have not passed any preventative legislation. In states that have passed laws, the limited protections that do exist fail to address a wide range of issues that have not yet come up in the context of employer-provided technology. This comment will briefly overview employee privacy law to highlight some of the issues that will arise if the law remains untouched. Then, it will propose solutions that would serve to better protect employees from these issues. As technology continues to develop, it will gather more information and the potential for abuse will only increase. Without legal safeguards, employees will be left nearly defenseless against employers with access to ever-increasing information about their employees

Understanding the Use of Balanced Scorecard in the Context of State-Owned Enterprises in Developing Countries: A Case from Ghana

This paper examines the conception, adoption and implementation of BSC from the context of a developing country and relatively less researched tier of the public sector – State-owned enterprises. The study adopts a case study approach where data was collected via semi-structured interview. Results show a BSC that emphasizes performance measurement and management and to some degree strategic management. Evidence on the extent of normalisation is mixed. Less than 50% of the interviewees on the average assert that there is collective action when it comes to the BSC. Furthermore, on the average a higher percent of the interviews took a neutral position (N) under each of the four elements that provide evidence in establishing the normalisation of the BSC. The limitation of this study are primarily those associated with case studies. This limitation instigates future studies drawing on other research strategies.   At public sector level and SOEs in particular, this the findings of this study provide a first view of BSC being used in a Ghanaian state-owned enterprise Keywords: state-owned enterprises, balanced scorecard, Normalisation process theory, Ghana

Evaluating Performance Contracting as a Tool for Evaluating State-Owned Enterprises in Two Developing Countries: A Look at the Performance Dimensions

This paper is concerned about the performance evaluation aspect of performance contracting (PC), particularly, the performance dimensions used in performance contract system for evaluating the performance of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). The paper draws on evidence from the Ghanaian and Kenyan SOE sectors. The performance indicators under each broad performance dimension of the performance contract system were reviewed. This was achieved using data collected from multiple secondary sources including policy documents, government reports and publications. The findings of the paper revealed a number of insights into the evaluation of performance contracting as a tool for evaluating SOEs. Keywords: performance evaluation system, performance contracting, State-owned enterprises, performance dimensions, Ghana, Keny

Beyond 'Monk' Lewis

Abstract “What do you think of my having written in the space of ten weeks a Romance of between three and four hundred pages Octavo?”, asks Matthew Gregory Lewis to his mother. Contrary to the evidence—previous letters to his mother suggest the romance was a more thoughtful and time-consuming piece—Lewis was the first to feed a myth that would follow him for the rest of his life and beyond, implying he hurriedly cobbled together The Monk (1796) and that it was the product of an impulsive, immature and crude mind to be known soon after as, ‘Monk’ Lewis. The novel would stigmatise his name: he was famously criticised by Coleridge for his blasphemy, Thomas J Mathias described The Monk as a disease, calling for its censure, and The Monthly Review, for example, insisted the novel was “unfit for general circulation”. All these readings distract us from the intellectual and philosophic exploration of The Monk and, as Rachael Pearson observes, “overshadow…the rest of his writing career”. This thesis is concerned with looking beyond this idea of ‘Monk’ Lewis in three different ways which will comprise the three chapters of this thesis. The first chapter engages with The Monk’s more intellectual, philosophic borrowings of French Libertinism and how it relates to the 1790s period in which he was writing. The second chapter looks at Lewis’s dramas after The Monk and how Lewis antagonised the feared proximities of foreign influence and traditional British theatre. The third chapter attempts to look more closely at The Monk’s influences on later gothic novels— Zofloya, or The Moor (1806) and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)—in light of Lewis’s philosophic explorations I discuss in the first chapter

The Complexity of Pebbling in Diameter Two Graphs*

Given a simple, connected graph, a pebbling configuration is a function from its vertex set to the nonnegative integers. A pebbling move between adjacent vertices removes two pebbles from one vertex and adds one pebble to the other. A vertex r is said to be reachable from a configuration if there exists a sequence of pebbling moves that places one pebble on r. A configuration is solvable if every vertex is reachable. We prove tight bounds on the number of vertices with two and three pebbles that an unsolvable configuration on a diameter two graph can have in terms of the size of the graph. We also prove that determining reachability of a vertex is NP-complete, even in graphs of diameter two

Turnover intentions and job performance of accountants: The role of religiosity and spiritual intelligence

This paper examined the turnover intentions of accountants practicing with audit firms in Ghana. The study specifically, investigated the factors that influence the intentions of accountants to quit their jobs and further ascertained if the intentions to quit have any implications on the job performance of accountants. A survey method of research was adopted and a set of questionnaires was administered to accountants working with accounting firms certified and approved by the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Ghana (ICAG). The hypothesized relationships of the study were tested using the Partial Least Square-based structural equation modeling technique. The findings of this study demonstrate that organizational commitment, job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and religiosity are good predictors of turnover intentions of accountants. Further, our analysis also indicates that turnover intentions impact negatively on job performance of accountants. Our findings have two important implications. First, we highlight the relevance of the spiritual dimension of the determinants of turnover intentions by demonstrating with evidence that the extent of an individual’s attachment and commitment to religious values and beliefs have important implications on turnover intentions. Second, while job performance has been found to influence turnover intentions of employees, the evidence provided in this study suggests that turnover intentions are also a good predictor of employees’ job performance

The response of the ‘Critical Power’ concept to both acute and chronic interventions as determined by the 3-min all-out cycling test.

The hyperbolic relationship between power output and endurance time can be measured using all-out exercise. The aims of this thesis were to (i) assess whether the all-out test could be used under novel testing protocols to provide valid power-duration (P-D) parameter estimates; and (ii) attempt to elucidate the likely physiological composition of the P-D curvature constant. All-out tests were initiated from moderate-(M), heavy-(H) and severe-(S2 & S4) intensity ‘baselines’ (chapter 4). The work performed above end power (WEP) was not different to control under M or H conditions but was significantly, predictably reduced under the S2 & S4 conditions (control: 16.3 ± 2.2; M: 17.2 ± 2.4; H: 15.6 ± 2.3 kJ, P > 0.05; S2: 11.5 ± 2.5; S4: 8.9 ± 2.2 kJ, P < 0.05). The 3-min all-out test end power (EP) parameter was unaffected. Muscle glycogen may form part of the WEP. Type I (T1) and type II (T2) muscle fibres were depleted of their glycogen content prior to the all-out test (chapter 5). EP and WEP were unaffected by either T1 or T2 glycogen depletion. The all-out tests was conducted under hypoxic conditions alongside the criterion assessment of the P-D relationship (chapter 6). Normobaric moderate hypoxia caused a reduction in CP (control: 175 ± 25; hypoxia: 132 ± 17 W, P 0.05). The 3-min all-out test provided EP and WEP estimates, which did not differ to CP and W′ (control: EP 172 ± 30 W, WEP 12.0 ± 2.6 kJ; hypoxia EP 134 ± 23 W, WEP 12.5 ± 1.4 kJ, P > 0.05) providing the ergometer resistance was adjusted for the hypoxic conditions. Furthermore, a significant negative relationship was observed between %∆ ( O2peak – CP) and %∆W′ (r = -0.83, P < 0.001); thus, W′ may represent the relative ‘size’ of the severe-intensity domain. The all-out test was used to track training-induced changes in P-D parameters in response to 6-weeks of sprint or endurance training (chapter 7). EP & WEP were differently altered compared to CP and W′ following sprint training (CP 12 ± 9; EP -0 ± 9 % change; W′ -5 ± 25; WEP 11 ± 15 % change). The all-out test reliably tracked changes in CP and W′ following endurance training. In conclusion, the all-out test provides reliable EP and WEP values. Its validity is acceptable, but is perhaps affected by exercise training that is specific to the execution of the test. The W′ appears to be determined, to a large extent, by the relative size of the severe-intensity domain

The Set Splittablity Problem

A collection of sets is called splittable if there is a set S such that for each set B in the collection, the intersection of S and B is half the size of B. Splittability is a generalization of graph colorability, which is an active area of research with numerous applications such as scheduling and matching. We show that the problem of deciding whether a collection is splittable is NP-complete. Nevertheless we characterize splittability for some special collections. Finally we study a further generalization called p-splittability, in which the splitter S is required to contain a given fraction of each set B