Profit Calculation in a late 14th century sole proprietorship, the case of Francesco DATINI

This paper examines the Profit on merchandise accounts (a forerunner of the income statement) in a sole proprietorship in Pisa that officially operated between 1386 and 1392, but took several months to finally end its activities, which it did in 1393. The Profit on merchandise account was where the balance on each goods account was transferred when all the items recorded in it were sold. The principal contribution of this paper is the identification of a unique approach to medieval product costing that ensured indirect expenses on merchandise were recovered from customers when sales took place, while earning an average return of over 10 percent on those costs. It also highlights the problems encountered when working with archival material that has deteriorated over time; and presents a research method that reconstructs missing data using the trail to original entries and contra entries recorded in double entry.

Ability, relevant possibilities, and the fixity of the past

In several writings, John Martin Fischer has argued that those who deny a principle about abilities that he calls ‘the Fixity of the Past’ are committed to absurd conclusions concerning practical reasoning. I argue that Fischer’s ‘practical rationality’ argument does not succeed. First, Fischer’s argument may be vulnerable to the charge that it relies on an equivocation concerning the notion of an ‘accessible’ possible world. Secondly, even if Fischer’s argument can be absolved of that charge, I maintain that it can be defeated by appeal to an independently plausible principle about practical reasoning that I call ‘the Knowledge Principle’. In addition, I point out that Fischer’s own presentation of his argument is flawed by the fact that the principle that he labels ‘the Fixity of the Past’ does not, in fact, succeed in representing the intuitive idea that it is intended to capture. Instead, the debate (including Fischer’s practical rationality argument) should be recast in terms of a different (and stronger) principle, which I call ‘the Principle of Past-Limited Abilities’. The principal contribution of my paper is thus twofold: to clarify the terms of the debate about the fixity of the past, and to undermine Fischer’s ‘practical rationality’ argument for the fixity of the past.

Social Mobility Patterns in the World's Populated Cities Through COVID-19

Objective: identify social mobility patterns in the world's most populated cities from the ravaging pandemic of COVID-19 and the confinement and social distancing measures. Method: ternary diagrams to examine the simultaneous movement to different places (grocery, services, parks, workplaces, residence, and transit). Specifically, we use crosshair ternary plots and a Gaussian Kernel Density Estimator (KDE) for ternary density diagrams. Results: for the most part, the mobility reduction was between 40% and 60% in the selected cities. Nevertheless, there were more significant transit cases, but not workplaces or residences, suggesting that the informal market may absorb part of the labor work. Limitations and implications: the main limitation of this analysis is in scaling the data since the mobility statistics represent negative percentages. Main contribution: the work's principal contribution and originality lie in using ternary diagrams, allowing the identification of social mobility patterns in the largest cities and understanding how displacement of populations has changed since COVID-19.

Feasibility of Automatic Seed Generation Applied to Cardiac MRI Image Analysis

We present a method of using interactive image segmentation algorithms to reduce specific image segmentation problems to the task of finding small sets of pixels identifying the regions of interest. To this end, we empirically show the feasibility of automatically generating seeds for GrowCut, a popular interactive image segmentation algorithm. The principal contribution of our paper is the proposal of a method for automating the seed generation method for the task of whole-heart segmentation of MRI scans, which achieves competitive unsupervised results (0.76 Dice on the MMWHS dataset). Moreover, we show that segmentation performance is robust to seeds with imperfect precision, suggesting that GrowCut-like algorithms can be applied to medical imaging tasks with little modeling effort.

A Territorial Estimate for Household Energy Vulnerability: An Application for Spain

This paper proposes a composite indicator intended to assess territorial differences in household energy vulnerability. Although the estimation of household energy vulnerability has received less attention in scientific literature than energy poverty, it is a key element for political action as it allows for the diagnosis and subsequent action to tackle potential situations of household poverty before they actually occur. In this sense, the principal contribution of this article is a proposal for a tool designed to quantify the abstract and multidimensional phenomenon of household energy vulnerability. The technique used for constructing this synthetic indicator allows for the participation of stakeholders, especially policy makers, in defining and calculating the index. The synthetic index for energy vulnerability has been estimated for Spanish provinces. The results allow for the creation of a map providing an approximate insight into the spatial distribution of household energy vulnerability in Spain.

Reflections on the progress in accounting for people and some observations on the prospects for a more successful future

PurposeThe paper celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Flamholtz’s seminal paper on the Human Resource Accounting approach to taking people into account, providing a critical review of its progress since that time and offering some thoughts on how the project might now be beneficially shaped.Design/methodology/approachThe paper provides an authoritative review of the progress of the accounting for people project to date.FindingsThe continuing exploration of how it might be possible to take people into account is identified to be entering a new and exciting phase.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors readily acknowledge that what the paper provides is an account of the evolution of the accounting for people field, which they argue is currently extending into a new and important phase relating to employee health and wellbeing.Originality/valueThe paper’s principal contribution lies in bringing together three authors who have made significant contributions to the topic of accounting for people over the past 50 years.

Conceptualising and measuring the location of work: Work location as a probability space

There is currently considerable interest in workers performing tasks from a variety of workplaces, such as co-working spaces, transport-networks and cafés. However, it remains difficult to ascertain the extent to which this workplace mobility is altering urban economic geography, since most analyses of the location of economic activity in cities are based upon census-type data that assume a unique place of work for each worker. In this paper I propose a framework that extends the concept of place of work: work is probabilistically assigned to different types of workplace according to the proportion of work time spent in each. The limitations of census data are discussed and illustrated, after which the framework is operationalised in an exploratory survey. Census data suggest a modest increase in workplace mobility, with most work still taking place either at home or in a fixed workplace. The paper’s principal contribution is to explain these data’s limitations and show how work location can be operationalised as a probability space.

Does the Indian Act Influence the Income and Education Outcomes of Manitoban Urban Indian People?

This article answers the question, 'is the influence of the Indian Act associated with worse economic income and education outcomes in Manitoba? This investigation focuses on the category of Aboriginal persons who self-reported as First Nations and compared the economic outcome of Status Indians (those affected by the Indian Act) with those of non-Status Indians. This paper's principal contribution to the field is that it assesses empirically the effect of the Indian Act on the economic outcomes of the Indian population in Manitoba using the 2011 NHS individual data. The results indicate that being a Status Indian is associated with a lower probability of higher economic outcomes in terms of income and education.

Benchmarking of Graph Partitioning Tools and Techniques

In this paper the authors have used a systematic literature review to provide benchmarking on influencing parameters for graph partitioning tools, which is the principal contribution of the present paper. Tools are compared on the basis of parameters which will impact the performance of tool. The paper elucidates about the tools and techniques along with their features, merits and demerits and also highlighted on influencing parameters which is missing in other reviews. These techniques are analysed by identifying merits and demerits of each technique. This research paper can help the researchers to choose the appropriate tool or technique for their own partitioning problems. Also authors have suggested future research directions and anomalies for improvement in tools and techniques for Graph Partitioning.

Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur belongs to the first generation of French phenomenology, and his principal contribution to the phenomenological tradition is to be found in his development of a hermeneutical phenomenology. Ricoeur’s work spans more than half a century and is shaped by his conviction that philosophy is first and foremost to create a dialogue between various fields of knowledge. He considers phenomenology a necessary, but not sufficient theory to make sense of human life. In fact, Ricoeur’s turn to hermeneutics in the beginning of his career is an attempt to make sense of the complexity of human identity. We experience ourselves are autonomous creatures, and yet we constantly find ourselves restricted by various kinds of heteronomous factors (e.g. biological, cultural, ethical). This dialectics of autonomy and passivity constitutive of human identity is at the core of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology, and in particular of his influential theory of narrative identity.