When we think about the future of the modern state, we encounter a puzzling variety of scholarly diagnoses and prophecies. Some authors predict nothing less than the total demise of the state as a useful model for organizing society – its powers eroded by a dynamic global economy and by an increasing transference of political decision-making powers to supranational bodies. Others disagree p…
Petroleum refers to crude oil and natural gas or simply oil and gas. These are mixtures of hydrocarbons which are molecules, in various shapes and sizes, of hydrogen and carbon atoms found in the small, connected pore spaces of some underground rock formations. These petroleum reservoirs are generally thousands of feet below the surface. Crude oil and natural gas are believed to be the remains …
The necessity and desirability of pursuing sustainable forms of development have gained considerable currency over the last two decades. Sustainable development (SD) has been championed at inter-governmental, national, regional and sectoral levels (see Table 1.1) and now appears to be cemented in the public policy arena as the only just and appropriate goal for human activities. This move has…
The sixth edition of Accounting Information Systems includes a full range of new and revised homework assignments, up-to-date content changes, as well as several reorga- nized chapters. All of these changes add up to more student and instructor enhancements than ever before. As this preface makes clear, we have made these changes to keep stu- dents and instructors as current as possible on issu…
The book primarily is about financial management and, as its title implies, real options are an integral, subsidiary theme. Real options are opportunities available to management permitting them to adapt the enterprise to changing needs. Understanding the value of real options is essential to corporate financial management. Examples in several chapters demonstrate why failure to assess the va…
Forecasts are usually made to help and guide decision making. Good fore- casts are preconditions for good, informed decisions. These decisions may vary from a financial market bet on interest rate changes to the policy decision on how to structure a country’s pension system. Ideally, decision-makers should be as well prepared as possible for the future, which would allow them to act appropria…
This essay is concerned with the development of professional ethics in service institutions. The discussion deals with the transition from simple acceptance of definite responsibilities in functional relationships to the primal teleological problem of selecting among competing groups with their own semi-independent value systems and conflicting ends in view (objectives). In the process, a profe…
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Anyone who has read a newspaper or watched the evening news in recent years is well aware that fraudulent financial reporting by big businesses has reached alarming levels. Equally startling is the frequency of fraudulent financial reporting by small businesses—as many bankers and government agencies will confirm—and even by non–business entities such as not-for- profit organizations.
Architects and other designers inhabit a curious borderland between the virtual and the physical. They have always been concerned with conjuring up things that don’t exist but might, imagining them in detail, and eventually finding ways to translate these visions into physical reality. Over the last half-century, computer-generated virtual worlds have played an increasingly crucial role i…
R is a language and environment for data analysis and graphics. It may be considered an implementation of S, an award-winning language initially developed at Bell Laboratories since the late 1970s. The R project was initiated by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in the early 1990s, and has been developed by an international team since mid-1997. Histori…
Over the last five decades, significant advances in the estimation and inference of various econometric models have taken place. This includes the classical linear model where the explanatory variables are nonstochastic (fixed) and the error is normally distributed, and the non-classical models, where these classical assumptions are violated. These models are frequently used in applied work, su…