Looking Back … And Looking Forward

We investigated whether there are differences in women’s progress in Romanian accounting academia between the communist and post-communist periods, and compared to the international context; and whether the legal framework in Romania influenced women’s accounting careers in academia. For the communist period, we found that for our topic training for the exercise of the profession, the evolution of women’s academics, although it did not exceed that of men, outperformed that of women in other contexts, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. Then, our findings were similar to the international context for teaching and leadership in academia. For the post-communist period, we observed Romanian academics’ similitude in teaching and bachelor studies and superiority in scientific publications and doctoral studies compared to their international counterparts. Also, the complexity of provisions assuring general or women’s rights, as well as the pace of their issuance aligned with women’s experiences in accounting academia.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”—Charles Darwin It is with great enthusiasm that I begin my term as the fourth Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research (JBMR). I follow in the footsteps of the past editors who have made this Journal great—Larry Raisz, Marc Drezner, and John Eisman—and I pledge to the readership to protect their historic legacy. The broad mission of the Journal remains the same: to publish high-quality original papers on the clinical, cellular, and molecular mechanisms of skeletal metabolism under normal and abnormal circumstances with the view to understanding disease pathogenesis and to developing effective therapeutics for human bone diseases. Thanks to the hard work of John Eisman, the JBMR has increased its impact factor to 6.635, solidifying its place as the premier journal in the bone field. However, as the Darwin epigraph above suggests, ongoing change and growth are essential for our survival, particularly in the fast moving arena of science publications. Consequently, several new features are being planned to broaden the appeal of the JBMR. In the spring of 2008, we will launch a Special Features section. Articles in this series will take different forms, from commentaries to reviews to point-counterpoint debates. My editorial team and I feel that this section will provide an ideal forum in which to address issues that impact biomedical research and its translation into clinical practice. In addition, the JBMR website will be further developed as a focal point for access to the Journal's content as well as a place for information, dialogue, and debate on issues that are important to you. I am joined in my editorial efforts by a new team of Associate Editors selected on the basis of their broad scientific expertise. At the top of the Journal's masthead I have appointed two Senior Associate Editors: John P Bilezikian and Xu Cao. The Senior Associate Editors' roles will include helping me to establish JBMR as the repository of choice for the best biomedical research in bone from all investigators, whether they are MDs, PhDs, or MD-PhD scientists. They will also help to solicit Special Features. In addition, I have appointed nine outstanding individuals who will serve as Associate Editors. Their diverse backgrounds cover literally all aspects of our field and will help to insure that the very best research finds its way into the JBMR. All of us invite your suggestions, comments, and constructive criticism. As Editors, we are acutely aware of the trust placed in us to perpetuate the JBMR's mission. The JBMR belongs to you—its readers and contributors—who will ultimately be the best judges of our efforts. Finally, my job will be made infinitely easier because of the excellent editorial office under the leadership of Lisa Dittrich and her extraordinary staff in Durham. I look forward to working with all of you as we enter an era that promises to experience tremendous breakthroughs in basic and clinical research in bone and mineral diseases.

Anatomy of a Journal: A Reflection on the Evolution of Academic Accounting in Canada 1984-2010

The Year in Review: Time to Celebrate

The basic premise of this paper is that academic accountants and financial accounting standard setters have traded places in their normative vs positive orientations. Academics have shifted from normative to positive, while standard setters have shifted from positive to normative. This paper was developed from a speech given at the August 2012 American Accounting Association Annual Meeting, which was followed by speeches by Ross Watts, Richard Macve, and Steve Zeff on the same subject. Ross Watts argued that a lack of understanding about accounting history and evolution is a likely source of problems. He also summarized the recent evidence in Towards an understanding of the role of standard setters in standard setting. Journal of Accounting and Economics, 55(1), 66-90) on the association between standard setters' backgrounds and the positions they take. Richard Macve added UK and IFRS perspectives (Macve, R. (2013). "Trading places":

Keywords: ways of knowing; clinical scholarship; nursing journals; writing for publication

An assessment of patterns of co-authorship for academic accountants within premier journals: Evidence from 1979–2004

I am pleased to present “our” new strategic plan for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS 2012). I say that it’s “our” plan because the entire document reflects tremendous thought, discussion, and sharing of ideas by hundreds of scientists and community stakeholders, and it speaks to the entire field of environmental health research. This plan is about what we will strive to accomplish together as we devote ourselves to research that, in my opinion, has the greatest chance for preventing disease and for improving health throughout the world. As reflected in the new strategic plan (NIEHS 2012), the NIEHS has a fresh vision, not because our values have changed but because our research has been so successful—and many of you have made a huge contribution to that progress. New technologies and increasing knowledge bring exciting new opportunities each and every year. The NIEHS’s new strategic plan builds upon the accomplishments and vision that came before. The NIEHS has come a long way in making environmental health research responsive to the needs and concerns of the American people— to make environmental health part of the public health debate. This continues to be a source of motivation and purpose for NIEHS staff and our research partners. Environmental justice is an everlasting core value for NIEHS research. In the past few years, we at the NIEHS have made some important progress in exposure science, supporting new technologies for sensor devices and bioinformatics. We have been embracing new science such as epigenetics and exposure phenotyping, focusing on interdisciplinary research and translational research. In addition, our clinical research unit is now up and running. As the NIEHS moves forward, our overall goal is to make the institute, including the National Toxicology Program (NTP), the foremost trusted source of environmental health knowledge, leading the field in innovation and the application of research to solve health problems. Our new vision statement (NIEHS 2012) captures our collective dreams and aspirations, and reflects our strong commitment to making a real difference: The vision of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is to provide global leadership for innovative research that improves public health by preventing disease and disability from our environment. What this means in practical terms is that we are pursuing some of the “big influences” that have been understudied, all of which interact with traditional environmental exposures: the microbiome, for example, and inflammation pathways, immunological pathways, nutrition, and epigenetic processes. We also want to lead the process of defining the “exposome,” which is the totality of exposure encountered by humans. We have elevated the NTP to the divisional level within the NIEHS. And we will continue to integrate our toxicology research with our excellent basic and translational science programs, not because I am a toxicologist but because the NTP is a problem-solving program—a truly translational component of the NIEHS. For example, the NTP is part of our consortium on bisphenol A, contributing to the scientific deliberations, right along with our intramural scientists and our grantees. The NTP is leading the Tox21 initiative along with the National Institute of Health’s National Center for Comparative Genomics, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration. This high throughput testing program shows great promise not only as a new and faster method but also for moving toxicology into a predictive science. The NTP is moving beyond the traditional approaches of testing one chemical at a time and are taking on the significant challenge of evaluating mixtures. We are also looking at the effects of exposures throughout the life span, expanding our research and testing to include prenatal exposures and how they may link to adult disease. It is clear that there are multiple windows of susceptibility and that exposures early in life may have long-lasting consequences to both health and disease. Finally, the antiquated idea that the dose makes the poison is overly simplistic. The newest research clearly shows that biology is affected by low doses of chemicals, often within the range of general population exposure, and that these biological changes can be harmful, especially during periods of development. Therefore, low-dose research must go hand in hand with our life-span approach. The NIEHS’s job doesn’t stop with the publication of scientific results. We also have an obligation to help translate the nation’s research investment into public health intervention, new policy, and preventive clinical practice. To be successful, we at the NIEHS need to conduct and support the best science, whether it is led by an individual researcher or a multidisiplinary team, and this means working together with all of our partners. We thank everyone who joined us in our strategic planning process. We appreciate your commitment and support.

PurposeThis paper aims to explore whether cultural values identified by Hofstede (1980) are relevant with respect to the relationship between career drivers and students’ intentions of pursuing a career in accounting.Design/methodology/approachA total of 266 Turkish, East African, West African, Iranian and Arabic business-related students studying at Eastern Mediterranean University in North Cyprus have participated in this study. To test the hypotheses, a t-statistic at the univariate level and a discriminant analysis at the multivariate level have been performed.FindingsThe results reveal that collectivism and/or large power distance are associated with the statistically significant relationship between parental and peers’ influence and students’ intentions of choosing an accounting career. The results further demonstrate that collectivism and/or strong uncertainty avoidance is/are relevant to insignificant relationship between beliefs factors and students’ career aspirations into accounting profession.Research limitations/implicationsThe main implication derived from this study states that the accounting educators and professional accounting firms should mostly target parents and convince them of the positive aspects of accounting study and profession to attract more students from cultures characterized by collectivism and large power distance. Parallel to this, the results suggest that universities and professional accounting firms should use their current students to attract more students into their accounting-related programs.Practical implicationsGiven evidence that cost of education is an important issue for the students opting to pursue a career in accounting, educators could attract more students into their accounting programs by providing scholarships to bright students intending to study accounting. They could also increase attractiveness by offering reductions in tuition fees to the students for obtaining good grades in accounting courses.Originality/valueThis study is unique in the sense that it takes a new step to investigate the influence of career-choice factors by using multiple dimensions of cultural values. In addition, this could be the first study exploring the factors that may influence decision of the students studying in North Cyprus in choosing accounting career.

The autonomic brainstem generates and modifies breathing rhythm by integrating inputs from chemo‐ and mechanosensors in the viscera while coordinating descending outputs from higher CNS structures. Hypoglossal motoneurons (XII MNs) receive inputs from respiratory premotor neurons in the medulla. Previous studies in rodents have demonstrated significant changes in breathing control during the first three weeks of life, with a putative sensitive period at 10 to 13 days post‐birth (P10–P13) characterized by pronounced changes in neurotransmitters, receptors, excitation‐inhibition balance, and breathing physiology [Li et al., J Physiol, 577:957–770, 2006]. However, age‐dependent morphological changes of XII MNs during the first three weeks post‐birth and especially during this sensitive period, have not been thoroughly studied. In this study, we comprehensively characterize and quantify the postnatal morphological changes in rat XII MNs. We hypothesized that morphological changes occur in XII MN morphology and arbor complexity corresponding to the functionally‐defined sensitive period observed at P10–P13. To test this hypothesis, we used innovative statistical approaches to quantify and compare developmental changes in Golgi‐Cox stained XII MNs at nine postnatal ages between P1–P21. Soma size increased ~40% from P1 to P21, with no significant change in shape. However, dendritic arborization increased in extent and complexity. Dendritic branching of developing neurons significantly increased from P1 through P13, with the greatest increase at P10–P13 based on the Sholl method. For many parameters, three age groups 1) P1–P5, 2) P7–P12, and 3) P13–P21 were used as possible windows of development. We also found that at specific ages certain parameters such as soma size and dendrite distance were non‐normally distributed. Our detailed characterization of XII MN morphological development establishes a foundation for the study and elucidation of morphological changes caused by maternal and perinatal conditions using a rigorous statistical approach.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

Change point detection in multivariate time series is a complex task since next to the mean, the correlation structure of the monitored variables may also alter when change occurs. DeCon was recently developed to detect such changes in mean and\or correlation by combining a moving windows approach and robust PCA. However, in the literature, several other methods have been proposed that employ other non-parametric tools: E-divisive, Multirank, and KCP. Since these methods use different statistical approaches, two issues need to be tackled. First, applied researchers may find it hard to appraise the differences between the methods. Second, a direct comparison of the relative performance of all these methods for capturing change points signaling correlation changes is still lacking. Therefore, we present the basic principles behind DeCon, E-divisive, Multirank, and KCP and the corresponding algorithms, to make them more accessible to readers. We further compared their performance through extensive simulations using the settings of Bulteel et al. (Biological Psychology, 98 (1), 29-42, 2014) implying changes in mean and in correlation structure and those of Matteson and James (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 109 (505), 334-345, 2014) implying different numbers of (noise) variables. KCP emerged as the best method in almost all settings. However, in case of more than two noise variables, only DeCon performed adequately in detecting correlation changes.

Energy consumption of data center has increased dramatically due to the massive computing demands driven from every sector of the economy. Hence, data center energy management has become very important for operating data centers within environmental standards while achieving low energy cost. In order to advance the understanding of thermal management in data centers, relevant environmental information such as temperature, humidity and air quality are gathered through a network of real-time sensors or simulated via sophisticated physical models (e.g. computational fluid dynamics models). However, sensor readings of environmental parameters are collected only at sparse locations and thus cannot provide a detailed map of temperature distribution for the entire data center. While the physics models yield high resolution temperature maps, it is often not feasible, due to computational complexity of these models, to run them in real-time, which is ideally required for optimum data center operation and management. In this work, we propose a novel statistical modeling approach to updating physical model outputs in real-time and providing automatic scheduling for re-computing physical model outputs. The proposed method dynamically corrects the discrepancy between a steady-state output of the physical model and real-time thermal sensor data. We show that the proposed method can provide valuable information for data center energy management such as real-time high-resolution thermal maps. Moreover, it can efficiently detect systematic changes in a data center thermal environment, and automatically schedule physical models to be re-executed whenever significant changes are detected.

Comparison of insulin sensitivity assessment indices with euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp data after a dietary and exercise intervention in older adults

Seed collections in gene banks are useful for the preservation of wild germplasm, providing inexpensive insurance for species that survive in conventional cold storage (−18 °C). Seeds that cannot survive these conditions must be pretreated with cryoprotectants and stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures, which presents unique technical and methodological challenges. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that these added manipulations do not change the genetic diversity of the preserved collections. We used polymorphic microsatellite markers for an endangered aquatic grass, Texas wild rice (Zizania texana), to conduct a preliminary evaluation of the effects of cryogenic preservation of mature embryos on genetic diversity. Using several statistical approaches, we show that allele frequencies did not change in collections of seeds that underwent cryopreservation (cryoprotected) compared to those samples that was not exposed to cryopreservation (control). The retention of the allelic diversity at the five loci examined suggests that there were no significant changes in genetic diversity due to treatments and that these protocols may be appropriate for ex situ conservation of genetically diverse wild germplasm.

Magnetic mesoporous polymelamine formaldehyde nanocomposite-incorporating ZnO nanoparticles were successfully synthesized using solvothermal and sol-gel methods. Fourier-transform infrared spectrometry (FT-IR), X-ray diffraction, Brunauer-Emmett-Teller, vibrating sample magnetometer, thermogravimetric analysis, elemental analysis, transmission electron microscopy and field emission scanning electron microscopy techniques were then utilized for evaluation of nanocomposites. The as-prepared nanocomposite can be used as heterogeneous nanocatalyst with remarkable performance for A3 coupling reaction toward one-pot synthesis of propargylamine and its derivatives under solvent-less condition. In order to maximize the product yield, the variables, i.e., reaction time, temperature and catalyst amount, were optimized by using a statistical approach. The synthesized nanocomposite can be easily separated from the reaction medium and reused over and over, without significant changes in its catalytic activity.