The Clothing of a Regency Poet, Lord Byron (1788–1824)

Byron was a best-selling poet and a celebrity with a notorious reputation. This article seeks to examine how his public image and private person were related, the part clothing played in the projection of his public image, and the degree of control he exerted over his body and his self-image. The article examines a number of sources relating to Lord Byron — his journals and letters, his poetry and public output, biographies, bills and accounts, paintings and illustrations, and the surviving clothing associated with the poet. From these a clothing narrative of the poet's early life, up until the time of his departure for Europe in 1816, can be constructed and examined in relation to the fashions of his era and the idiosyncrasies of the poet. Some of the surviving clothes are examined for their cut and construction and discussed in relation to others of the period. A companion article, dealing with his life abroad until the time of his death in 1824, will follow at a later date.

Ecotaxonomy: Linking traits, taxa, individuals and samples in a flexible virtual research environment for ecological studies

Major research progress in ecology is being achieved through large-scale collaborations across people, groups and countries. In large-scale projects harmonization of data is tedious and time-consuming, but needs to be done reliably and rapidly. This is especially true if projects investigate under-explored organism groups such as tropical invertebrates. To link taxa to their role in ecosystems, functional traits of the taxa need to be considered. However, despite the urgent need for a common database for invertebrate traits, this is yet to be established. We developed an open web platform, Ecotaxonomy (ecotaxonomy.org), that allows traits, taxa, individuals and samples to be linked within research projects. Ecotaxonomy includes a virtual research environment, allowing project members to work jointly online on the data input, integration and retrieval. The taxonomic system of Ecotaxonomy is based on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (gbif.org), but may be complemented by morphospecies, pictures, literature and other parameters. Any parameters can be customized inside the system and attached either to taxa, individuals, or environmental samples (Fig. 1). As public output, the system provides interactive identification keys and web catalogs of traits and taxa. Ecotaxonomy is implemented on GCore platform, that is being developed by Complex Cloud Solutions (http://ccs.msk.ru/en/). The GCore is based on Node.js, allowing for fast and efficient standardised programming. Thus, custom modules can be implemented in the future by external developers in the framework of the platform. Ecotaxonomy is now open for beta-testing. After a public release (presumably in 2020), our goal is to keep the system and the code open and ensure data interoperability via Darwin core standards. The initial stage of Ecotaxonomy development (2016-2023) is funded in the framework of a DFG-funded project (SFB 990). To ensure long-term sustainability, we are involving ecological laboratories around the world and ultimately seek to establish a permanent funding by governmental or non-governmental organisations. Using and developing Ecotaxonomy, and linking it to existing open repositories will greatly improve the efficiency and integration of research in trait-based ecology.

Measuring the Effectiveness of National Enforcers in the IFRS Context: A Proactive Approach

It is widely acknowledged that an effective enforcement system represents a crucial element to achieve significant improvements in financial reporting through the adoption of high-quality accounting standards. Indeed, the quality of financial reporting is considerably influenced not only by the standards to be adopted but also by their actual implementation, and consequently by enforcement mechanisms.The topic has generated considerable interest among scholars, who devoted their attention to developing different measures of the quality of the enforcement system. Building upon this literature, this paper aims at exploring the accounting enforcement system and focuses on controls over financial reporting considering two levels, namely the auditing activity and the controls performed by national enforcers.This paper extends the prior literature by proposing a dynamic measure of the accounting enforcement system capturing controls at those two levels. More specifically, the index here proposed focuses on the quality of the accounting enforcement operated by national enforcers in terms of proactivity, intended as the national enforcers’ capability to detect problems not highlighted in the auditors’ opinions, thus shifting the focus from an input to an output perspective. Indeed, the activities of auditors and national enforcers are strictly connected, given that the auditors’ opinion is the first public output of accounting controls and that is normally one of the bases for further investigation by national enforcers. An illustrative empirical analysis is carried out on the German and the Italian contexts to show the potential of the index for enforcement studies.

Rare and Endangered Government Publications: Capturing the Moment

What are rare and endangered government publications? In short, they are the materials representing that which is valued most in our collections. Each depository library collects documents that are important to its community: some arrive through a depository program, some come through direct solicitation from agencies, some come through traditional means of acquisition, and some come through emerging models of building digital collections. Managing these resources to ensure their availability for long-term access is a critical part of government documents librarianship. Put another way, rare and endangered government publications are the pieces of the public output of government that are most likely to go missing.

The Analyses of Albanian Budget Expenditure

Public expenditure efficiency has been an issue of concern for many researchers. Studies have shown that public budget of the developed and developing economies is not optimally allocated and managed. Anyway, discrepancies are found between both economies. This paper aims to investigate and critical analyze the allocation of public expenditure in the Republic of Albania. In addition, it provides some relevant comparison of the performance indicators among Albania, regional countries and OECD states. Data provided by the Ministry of Finance and Open Access Data are evaluated by considering the functional classification of the budget expenditure. Results of this study suggest that Albania spends more on social protection and social security, and less on education and health compared with the average of the EU countries and OECD countries. In addition, inefficiency of the public sector is discovered. This research recommends the necessity in the improvement of input allocation by using 70 percent less resources to achieve the same amount of public output and consequently contributing positively on fiscal consolidation.