Auditing Goodwill in the Post‐Amortization Era: Challenges for Auditors

The elimination of goodwill amortization in 2001 brought about significant change in how companies are required to account for goodwill. This change in accounting also brought with it new challenges for auditors, namely evaluating the reasonableness of management's assumptions related to goodwill valuation. In addition to introducing technical challenges, this task is particularly difficult given the misalignment in incentives it creates between managers who likely prefer to avoid recording an impairment and auditors who seek to minimize the bias in management's impairment testing. This study focuses on the consequences of the misaligned incentives that auditors face under the current goodwill assessment process. We find that the decision to record a goodwill impairment is associated with an increase in the probability of auditor dismissal. Consistent with the presence of significant friction with clients, our results also indicate that the likelihood of auditor dismissals is negatively related to the favorability of the impairment decision. Furthermore, we find that companies impairing goodwill prior to dismissing auditors subsequently employ auditors that are, on average, more favorable to clients in their impairment decisions.     

一种新的卫星通信信号快速盲检测方法

提出了一种卫星通信信号快速盲检测算法,该算法能够适应频谱不重叠的多信号环 境,并能准确估计信号的数量、中心频率及带宽等参数。算法既高效又简单,所需数据量少 且适应低信噪比条件,适于在星载设备上实现。理论分析和仿真及测试结果证明了算法的有 效 性。     

物理化学课程改革探索与实践

在物理化学课程教学中,笔者针对材料学专业特点,因材施教;结合物理化学特点,适当引入英语教学;结合现实生活,强化物理化学内容的应用;不断吸收现代科学发展的新成果,将学术研究的最新成果转化为教学内容,激发了学生的学习兴趣,培养了学生的逻辑思维能力和创新能力。     

Tourism and regional development a genetic approach

Research on tourism and regional development should include a temporal perspective, for studies of contemporary and economic impact are, by themselves, insufficient to explain tourism's contribution to regional development. Such a genetic approach is used to examine the growth and impact of tourism in Queenstown, New Zealand. Events and interrelationships are examined over the last twenty-five years to show the process of growth, changes in the patterns of local and outside involvement and the increasing sophistication of a resort once based largely on scenic factors alone. Certain sectors of the industry have been developed primarily by individuals and companies from the local region, while others have been dominated by outsiders. Although the former contribute the most to regional development through local participation in the development process, external developments have also generated complementary growth. A consideration of events over a certain time span allows these different factors to be placed more clearly in the context of regional development.     

Job Classification for the Purpose of Making Optimal Decisions Concerning Management Control

The job classification literature has been dominated by a micro‐level orientation reflective of the needs of specialists in human resources. In contrast, we take a multidisciplinary approach involving both micro‐ and macro‐level variables to propose a relatively simple system comprised of four job classes. Our model isintended to inform management as to the type and mix of controls (e.g., centralization, formalization, and various human resources policies) that could be applied to different job types to optimally promote the overall goals of the organization. Fuzzy numbers analysis is employed to illustrate the application of the system using four jobs in a car dealership in Spain. Copyright © 2012 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

三维地下空间信息系统应用综述

探讨三维空间信息系统在城市规划以及国民经济建设中的应用。     

Never on Sunday? Mexican tourists at the beach

This paper examines contemporary middle class Mexican recreational tourism through a micro-ethnographic study of tourist behavior at a small beach resort in the state of Chiapas. Majority behavior represents the inversion of aspects of normal behavior, particularly in the deregulation of meal-times, night and day activities, and the rules for play. It is hypothesized that the particular, and comparatively excessive, behaviors described may stem from both the historically antecendant Spanish and Indian cultures, with their baroque tendencies, and from the recent liberation of the new middle classes from the “Victorian-like” rules of daily behavior. Behavior at the beach resorts resembles earlier types of vacation in the U.S.A. and this suggests there may be an evolution of tourist behaviors characteristic of the historical situation of the national home cultures of the tourists.     

Towards a cohesive curriculum tourism: The case for a distinct discipline

This paper addresses a controversial topic in tourism scholarship which is simultaneously a problem and an opportunity in tourism education: the philosophical issue of academic disciplines and specifically, the question of a distinct discipline in tourism studies. It is argued that the orthodox approach to tourism education, multi-disciplinary studies, has become an impediment. It is suggested that a new discipline can be created by organizing the existing body of knowledge and that such a discipline can become the core of an inter-disciplinary approach. Certain characteristics of an embryonic discipline are outlined and innovations in this area at Sydney Technical College are discussed.     

Earthquake effects on tourism in central Italy

This paper proposes an approach to economic assessment of the impact on tourist flows of the earthquake that hit the Umbria region in Central Italy on September 26, 1997. Local arrivals in Assisi fell drastically the month following the main shock, compared to the same month of the previous year. The event study methodology, frequently applied in finance, is employed to evaluate the statistical relevance of the shock over time and space. A further and straightforward application of the event study analysis assesses the substantial amount of loss between October 1997 and June 1998 due to the drop of tourism business.