Books on the topic 'Positive Accounting Theory'

What are the purposes of accounting? How do these purposes affect how accounting works? What is double-entry bookkeeping? ‘The international evolution of accounting’ considers these questions and outlines some examples of how different countries have contributed to the development of accounting. Double-entry bookkeeping, conceived in thirteenth-century Italy, balances the debits and credits. It enables the calculation of profit and the presentation of a business's financial position. Publication of accounting information is required to protect shareholders and creditors from potential malpractice by company directors. The globalization of world business has resulted in International Financial Reporting Standards, now used by around 90 countries. The US use their Financial Accounting Standards Board's ‘generally accepted accounting principles’.

The significance of a palliative care approach for patients with neurological disorders other than dementia is increasingly recognized. Whereas the care for these patients, for example, those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or motor neuron disease, had been incorporated in the initial concept by Dame Cicely Saunders, recent scientific evidence supports this position. The need for palliative care in these patients is underpinned by their frequent wish for hastening death. This chapter describes palliative care approaches for a number of neurological disorders other than dementia. For ALS, palliative care management including specific issues such as respiratory insufficiency or malnutrition are fairly well established. Also, in parkinsonian syndromes, a lot of palliative care needs can be recognized and managed effectively. For patients with multiple sclerosis, the first randomized controlled trial showed clearly positive effects on symptoms as well as usage of health-care resources. The chapter also summarizes the drug use for specific symptom management, accounting for alternative application routes.

Selecting the best strategy is important if a firm is to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage, but many strategies fail not because they are improperly formulated but because they are poorly implemented. Strategy implementation is among the most important and most challenging issues with which top executives must deal, and effective implementation can help firms achieve high performance. Therefore, a greater understanding of the critical dimensions of strategy implementation is needed. This handbook is designed to provide a deeper understanding of topics important for the implementation of strategy. There are three major sections of the book: resources and governance, managing human capital, and accounting control systems. Resources must be acquired, developed, and configured to create the capabilities needed for implementing a firm’s strategy. However, because of the dynamic competitive landscapes in which most firms operate, strategies frequently change. Corporate governance not only guides the formulation of appropriate strategies but also ensures that proper implementation actions are taken. Because the most important resource for implementing strategy is human capital, the firm must engage in highly effective human resource management practices that attract, motivate, develop, and retain the highest quality human talent available. As a result, effective workforce management at all levels in the organization is essential to successful strategy implementation. Managing assets and controlling managerial behavior are critical to strategy implementation: assets can be managed and managerial behavior controlled using accounting-based data. The careful design of such systems promotes innovation and creative activity and identifies earnings, thereby promoting positive managerial actions to achieve desired financial outcomes.

This chapter seeks to evaluate the relative merits of two competing views of how lexical insertion should work in a nanosyntactic framework. One view holds that a sequence of heads meeting certain conditions, a “span,” can be replaced by a single morpheme even when those heads do not form a constituent in the input tree. The other view allows lexical insertion only to target constituents. The article focuses on certain properties of portmanteau prefixes identified by investigating the nominal class prefixes in Bantu languages. Accounting for portmanteau prefixes looks like a serious challenge to the theory restricting lexical insertion to constituents. They can be accommodated by positing only a richer syntactic structure than is usual. However, various empirical arguments show that the richer syntactic structure is in fact needed in an analysis of the nominal class prefixes in Bantu and that this conclusion extends to class prefixes in other languages.

Judging what is and what should be are everyday human activities, and, by understanding how they are done, analysts can explore the issue central to this chapter: that citizens are losing sight of the positive functions of politics and becoming too focused on its unavoidable and undesirable traits. Two aspects of political culture are making it more challenging for citizens to embrace the mixed nature of politics. First, too much fast thinking—intuitively driven cognition processes—is framing the political exchanges between citizens and political elites by citizens leading the former to focus too much on the negative features of politics. Second, a weakened system of moral accounting means that citizens do not have the satisfaction of seeing a moral balancing of the books that might in turn reconcile them to the yin and yang of politics.

Imagine that two pressures of equal intensity are applied on your cheek and on your knee inducing two tactile sensations. In what sense do these two sensations feel different? In other words, is there a specific spatial phenomenology that is constitutive of bodily sensations? If one replies negatively, then one would expect free-floating sensations but there seems to be no such thing. But if one replies positively, then one has to explain what grounds this spatial phenomenology that seems to differ on many respects from the one encountered in visual experiences. One may then suggest accounting for it in terms of dispositions to direct actions at the locations of bodily sensations. However, sensorimotor approaches to bodily awareness face major conceptual and empirical difficulties.

Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies indicate a positive association between obesity and depression. While some evidence suggests that depression is a risk factor for obesity, other findings indicate that obesity is a risk factor for depression. Therefore the directionality of this relationship remains unclear. Alternatively, there may be common mediating biological or environmental contributors accounting for this association. Potential biological mediators include dysregulation of the HPA axis, leptin resistance, and inflammatory immune responses. Environmental and psychological mediators may include a history of abuse and binge eating. It is also possible that the association between obesity and depression is most pronounced among particular subsets of individuals (e.g., women, those with more severe obesity). A better understanding of this depression-obesity association is needed to guide treatment recommendations for obese clients with comorbid depression. Future research is also needed to determine who is most vulnerable to experiencing comorbid depression and obesity.

Lifetime uncertainty represents an additional risk that affects intertemporal choice, because consumers may live longer than expected and run the risk of exhausting the resources accumulated for retirement. Lifetime uncertainty introduces an incentive to consume earlier in life because consumers discount future utility at a higher rate. Second, since in each period there is some positive probability that the consumer will not survive to the next period, the terminal condition on wealth corresponds effectively to a liquidity constraint. Third, with lifetime uncertainty, the decumulation of wealth by the elderly is slower than predicted by the life-cycle model. Finally, the model with lifetime uncertainty generates transfers of wealth across generations even without an express bequest motive, through what we can term involuntary or accidental bequests. The chapter highlights the necessity of accounting for lifetime uncertainty when interpreting empirical age-wealth profiles estimated from microeconomic data.

This book studies the micro-variation in the syntax of negation of Southern Levantine, Gulf and Standard Arabic. By including new and recently published data that support key issues for the syntax of negation, the book challenges the standard parametric view that negation has a fixed parametrized position in syntactic structure. It particularly argues for a multi-locus analysis with syntactic, semantic, morphosyntactic and diachronic implications for the various structural positions. Thus accounting for numerous word order restrictions, semantic ambiguities and pragmatic interpretations without complicating narrow syntax with special operations, configurations or constraints. The book includes data from Southern Levantine, Gulf and Standard Arabic, which shed light on word order contrasts in negative clauses and their interaction with tense/aspect, mood/modality, semantic scope over adverbs, and negative sensitive items. It also has new data challenging the standard claim in Arabic linguistics literature that negation has a fixed parametrized position in the clause structure. The book brings a new perspective on the role of negation in licensing negative sensitive items, scoping over propositions and interacting with pragmatic notions such as presupposition and speech acts.

Human rights must sometimes be restricted to further social interests or the rights of others. Yet, we like to think that human rights are not reducible to interests like security and cannot be weighed and balanced against them. This position holds a middle ground between Kantian absolutism and prioritization of rights and utilitarian consequentialism and weighing and balancing of rights. It reflects the sheer theoretical difficulty of accounting for moral trade-offs that are not quantitative. This ambivalence is also echoed in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR): restrictions to human rights are usually hard to justify or even excluded in some cases. This chapter proposes an interpretation that comes close to a form of qualitative balancing of human rights by reference to their egalitarian dimension. It also accounts for seemingly contradictory elements in the ECtHR’s reasoning: the ‘proportionality’ test and the reference to ‘absolute’ rights.

Three successive parts are presented within this article, all intended to raise the visibility and show the utility of classical geopolitics as a deserving and separate international-relations model: (a) a common traditional definition, (b) relevant theories that correspond to that definition, and (c) applications of certain theories that will delve at some depth into three case studies (the Ukrainian shatterbelt, contemporary Turkish geopolitics, and a North American heartland).The placement of states, regions, and resources, as affecting international relations and foreign policies, defines classical geopolitics. This definition emphasizes the application of spatially composed unbiased theories that should bring insight into foreign-affairs events and policies. Specifically, a “model” contains theories that correspond to its description. A “theory” is a simple sentence of probability, with “A” happening to likely affect “B.” Importantly, models are passive; they merely hold theories. In contrast, theories possess their own titles and perform actively when taken from such models.Various methodological challenges are presented: (a) combining concepts with theories, (b) estimating probability for testing theories, (c) claiming the “scientific,” (d) accounting for determinism, (e) revealing a dynamic environment for geopolitics, (f) separating realism from geopolitics, and (g) drawing classical geopolitics away from the critical. Certain theories that are placed within the geopolitical model are examined next: (a) heartlands and rimlands, (b) land and sea power, (c) choke points and maritime lines of communication, (d) offshore balancing, (e) the Monroe doctrine, (f) balances of power, (g) checkerboards, (h) shatterbelts, (i) pan-regions, (j) influence spheres, (k) dependency, (l) buffer states, (m) organic borders, (n) imperial thesis, (o) borders/wars, (p) contagion, (q) irredentism, (r) demography, (s) fluvial laws, (t) petro-politics, and (u) catastrophic events in nature. Additional theories apply elsewhere in the article as well.Of the three case studies, the Ukrainian shatterbelt represents the sole contemporary geopolitical configuration of this type, a regional conflict coupling with a strategic rivalry. Here, partisans of the civil war between the eastern and the western sectors of the country have joined with the Russians against the Europeans and Americans, respectively. Next, Turkey’s pivotal location has afforded it both advantages and disadvantages, a topic discussed at some length earlier in the article. Its “zero-problems” strategy of seeking positive relations with neighbors has now been forced to change tactics, reflective of new forces within and beyond the country. Finally, a North American heartland compares nicely to Halford Mackinder’s earlier Eurasia heartland thesis, with the American perhaps proving more stable, wealthy, and enduring, based in large part on its stronger geopolitical features.

A bicycle-sharing system, or “bike share,” is a program that distributes and organizes fleets of publicly shared bikes throughout a city or region for users to rent for transportation or recreation. Through single-use fees or membership plans, users are able to access bikes across each system’s designated service area. Bicycle-sharing programs have been delivering benefits of increased urban mobility, accessible recreation, and more sustainable transportation in more than 2,000 cities around the world. In the United States of America, bicycle-sharing systems are present within all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Spreading rapidly in a positive trend, expansions of existing bicycle sharing systems and implementation of new systems occur in the United States on a near-monthly basis. The first public bike-sharing system to be developed and implemented within the United States was SmartBike DC in 2008, which was later replaced by the Capital Bikeshare system in 2010. During 2010, four additional systems launched in the cities of Denver, Colorado; Des Moines, Iowa; and Minneapolis, Minnesota and on the campus of Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. By the end of 2018 there were nearly 250 municipalities (either cities or counties) with active bike-sharing systems that had been implemented within their jurisdictions. This publication summarizes the current landscape of bicycle-sharing systems across various municipalities and jurisdictions in the United States of America. The document is a comprehensive accounting of all presently-implemented systems with at least five stations and/or 20 bikes across the country. PAHO hopes this publication serves as a source of information for policymakers, community leaders, NGOs, and others who may be interested in implementing new bike shares or further developing existing systems. Resources in this document can help identify other cities or municipalities with similar objectives and/or comparable contexts in order to learn from each other’s actions, experiences, and challenges.