Yan Zhang

Recent research has linked the reduction of abnormal accruals to corporate governance metrics. The results of these studies, however, are based on samples taken from periods prior to promulgated board independence requirements. In other words, during this time period, management not only had discretion over accounting accruals, but also significant influence over the choice of membership on the board of directors. This study suggests that ethical management practices may be a correlated omitted variable in these studies, thus resulting in causal inference problems in the previous research. We argue that, rather than the board of directors monitoring and reducing abnormal accruals as has been posited, management who was not engaging in abusive earnings management was attempting to signal the market regarding the quality of the firm’s financial information through its choice of board membership.

In accordance with the principle of historical materialism, nature of the property depends primarily on the fact that the actual possession of the property, rather than on their legal ownership first. Accordingly, the Isle of Man from the stock of the "separation of ownership 'departure, the actual property is not recognized joint-stock private property, but" social property ", so they also hopes to achieve socialism in stock. However, the situation at the time, the Isle of Man is sometimes still only legal private ownership of property from the stock starting to think so, sometimes with analysis of private enterprise, "Das Kapital" residual value analysis on the model of joint-stock company, joint-stock property changes on the significant underestimate, even such as the stock is still equivalent to private ownership. According to the principle of materialism, the feature of property first depends on the reality of factual possession of property, but does not first depend on its legal ownership. Hence, from the theory of share holding system of its "separdtion of ownership and manageship" , Marx and Engels considered that the property of share holding system is actually not the private property, but the "public property". They, therefore, put the hope of realizing socialism on the share holding system. But under that situation, Marx and Engels could only consider the problems from the legal private ownership of the property of share holding system by using the theory of surplus values ​​and even regard the share holding system as private ownership

The article describes an approach of systematic, rule guided qualitative text analysis, which tries to preserve some methodological strengths of quantitative content analysis and widen them to a concept of qualitative procedure. First the development of content analysis is delineated and the basic principles are explained (units of analysis, step models, working with categories, validity and reliability). Then the central procedures of qualitative content analysis, inductive development of categories and deductive application of categories, are worked out. The possibilities of computer programs in supporting those qualitative steps of analysis are shown and the possibilities and limits of the approach are discussed

There have been a number of publications in recent years on generalising the AGM paradigm to the Horn fragment of propositional logic. Most of them focused on adapting AGM contraction and revision to the Horn setting. It remains an open question whether the adapted Horn contraction and Horn revision are inter-definable as in the AGM case through the Levi and Harper identities. In this paper, we give a positive answer by providing methods for generating contraction and revision from their dual operations. Noticeably, we cannot apply the Levi and Harper identities directly in such methods as the Horn fragment does not fully support negation. To overcome this difficulty, a Horn approximation technique called Horn strengthening is used. We show that Horn contraction generated from Horn revision is always plausible whereas Horn revision generated from Horn contraction is, in general, implausible and, to regain plausibility, the generating contraction has to be properly restricted.

Single‐cell microinjection has been successfully used to deliver exogenous proteins, cDNA constructs, peptides, drugs and particles into transfection‐challenged cells. With precisely controlled delivery dosage and timing, microinjection has been used in many studies of primary cultured cells, transgenic animal production, in vitro fertilization and RNA inference. This review discusses the advantages and limits of microinjection as a mechanical delivery method and its applications to attached and suspended cells. BioEssays 30:606–610, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.