Unicorn University

This book provides a guide for autonomy-supportive leadership training, which is not limited to language learning but can be applied to any field where learners become empowered leaders. The principles and activities featured in this book aim to foster and sustain student-led learning communities that prioritize learners’ well-being, ensure everyone's voice is heard, and build a positive emotional climate conducive to learning. The authors believe that autonomy-supportive leadership training sets a positive cycle in motion, empowering student leaders in the present and continuing to inspire future generations of learners.

DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the pros and cons of the financial accounting standards rule, known also as Mark-to-Market Rule. Enacted November 15, 2007, required that all companies to be evaluated on the basis of prices reflecting actual market situation. We have shown this pro-cyclical rule significantly worsened the U.S. Financial Crisis of 2007. The article includes a discussion of reasons why US authorities adopted this rule for already third time in history, whereas the two preceding cases are also discussed. The US government did implement the discussed rule just on the eve of the recession or the financial crisis to relatively ease the rule during the period when the US economy was due for a rebound. Based on our analysis of the definition and strong pro-cyclical effects of MTM rule we have shown that just in the aftermath of factual easing of this rule the economy and equity markets sharply rebounded (other reasons for the last rebound of March 2009 have been discussed too). Timeline of important dates and developments during the US banking crisis of 2007 has been presented and so we hope such a rule will never be adopted again, especially not ahead or just after the start of a financial crisis in any country as it happened in 2007.

Service Oriented Architecture has become the architecture of choice providing a flexible and responsive enterprise computing architecture that addresses the business needs of modern organizations. However, developing SOA applications involves many challenges, in particular for large-scale projects that require highly skilled practitioners. In this paper we discuss the challenges associated with developing SOA applications and describe how such challenges are addressed using the uuApp framework.

This article looks at the very intricate and highly contentious issue of internally generated intangible assets as presented in the financial statements prepared under IFRS, with a special focus on research and development. In the first section, intangible assets are defined and then further classified as either purchased or internally generated; crucial distinction when choosing the right approach. The second section deals with research and development in a greater detail and provides not only a number of answers, but also raises several key questions, e.g. the question of objectivity and possible earnings management. Third section is devoted to measurement issues and in the last section, the reader finds excerpts from financial statements of different companies from various industries which illustrate the fact that some useful information is clearly missing. The conclusion suggest an easy, yet very efficien solution in tune with the ongoing convergence process between IFRS and U.S. GAAP, namely to move IAS 38 in the direction of U.S. GAAP and to forbid any capitalisation of development costs.

The Purchasing Power Standard (PPS) is widely used for economic analyses, studies and strategic documents in the European Union. Although it is a necessity to take the purchasing power i.e. price level into consideration the state of art of PPS is not usable at regional level. The current PPS is not reflecting regional prices but is based on one country price level. This might lead to serious imperfections and misspecifications especially in relation to regionally oriented policies like the Cohesion Policy. Using PPS for analyzing convergence reveals quite puzzling conclusions which are supporting this possible problem of PPS. It is vital for the EU policies to become efficient to compute new regional price levels or to substantially modify current PPS.

We are investigating different options for the cover of the Journal and thought it might be appropriate to include pictures of major Canadian Cities and/or Universities as taken by our readers.