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Almost everything around us is the output of software-driven machines or working with software. Software firms are working hard to meet the user’s requirements. But developing a fault-free software is not possible. Also due to market competition, firms do not want to delay their software release. But early release software comes with the problem of user reporting more failures during operations due to more number of faults lying in it. To overcome the above situation, software firms these days are releasing software with an adequate amount of testing instead of delaying the release to develop reliable software and releasing software patches post release to make the software more reliable. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors have developed a generalized framework by assuming that testing continues beyond software release to determine the time to release and stop testing of software. As the testing team is always not skilled, hence, the rate of detection correction of faults during testing may change over time. Also, they may commit an error during software development, hence increasing the number of faults. Therefore, the authors have to consider these two factors as well in our proposed model. Further, the authors have done sensitivity analysis based on the cost-modeling parameters to check and analyze their impact on the software testing and release policy.

From the proposed model, the authors found that it is better to release early and continue testing in the post-release phase. By using this model, firms can get the benefits of early release, and at the same time, users get the benefit of post-release software reliability assurance.

The authors are proposing a generalized model for software scheduling.

By deferring profits and anticipating losses, conservatism makes earnings increases more persistent and earnings declines more likely to revert. Therefore, the level of conservatism in current earnings has implications for future earnings expectations. Past research shows that outsiders can fail to understand these implications. This paper aims to investigate whether firms help outsiders by voluntarily disclosing their expectations about how conservatism will affect future earnings trends.

The authors examine the likelihood and content of “early” earnings guidance – i.e. guidance about future earnings that is released around or before the announcement of current earnings. The sample is made of 8,820 annual earnings announcements, 62 per cent of which are combined with early guidance.

The authors find that the more conservative current earnings, the higher: the likelihood that the firm releases early guidance; the likelihood that the firm predicts a positive change in earnings; and the difference between the forecasted earnings and current earnings. The authors also find such guidance to be relevant to analysts, who use it to update their forecasts.

By showing that firms use early guidance to disclose the effect of conservatism on future earnings, the study is interesting to users and preparers because it shows that analysts need and use such disclosure; and regulators because it alleviates concerns about the information consequences of conservatism.

The findings show that firms do not refrain from committing to positive early guidance to disclose the earnings effects of conservatism. This is interesting in light of the difficulty of predicting such effects, the manager incentives to keep expectations low and the cost of committing to positive guidance instead of less risky qualitative disclosure alternatives. In this way, the authors contribute to the literature on the interrelation between voluntary disclosure and conservatism in financial reports.

We investigate the effect of the PCAOB’s Part II report on annually inspected firms’ audit fees and audit quality. The PCAOB replaced the peer review auditor program with an independent inspection of audit firms. Upon completion of each inspection, the PCAOB issued inspection reports that include a public portion (Part I) of identified audit deficiencies, and (in most cases) a nonpublic portion (Part II) of identified quality control weaknesses. The Part II report is only made public when the PCAOB deems that remediation was insuffcient after at least 12 months have passed. Starting around the time of the 2007 Deloitte censure (Boone et al., 2015), the PCAOB shifted from a soft synergistic approach to an antagonistic approach, such that Part II reports were imminent, despite delays that ultimately led to their release one to four years later than expected. Our study spans the period from 2007 to 2015, and examines the effect on audit fees and audit quality at the earliest date that the Part II report could have been released – 12 months after the Part I report was issued. We find that following the 12 month period, that annually inspected audit firms eventually lost reputation by lower audit fees, while they concurrently made remedial efforts to increase the quality of their client’s financial reporting quality (abnormal accruals magnitude and restatements). However, three years after the Part II report was actually released, audit fees increased.

Following the ‘Sarkozy’ era (2007–2012), France has engaged in ‘zero-tolerance’ policies, which have brought an increasing number of people into the criminal justice system (CJS). In an already extremely impoverished CJS, these policies have led to serious financial problems and have made an already existing prison overcrowding problem worse. Consequently, the CJS has gradually opted for a McDonald (Ritzer, 2019; Robinson, 2019) type of offender processing, whether in prosecutor-led procedures (representing roughly half of all penal procedures: Ministry of Justice, 2019) or in the sentencing phase (Danet, 2013). A similar trend has been found in probation and in prisoner release (in French: ‘sentences’ management).

The prison and probation services, which merged in 1999, have since then been in a position to benefit from the 1958 French Republic Constitution, which places the executive in a dominant position and notably allows it to draft the bills presented to a rather passive legislative power (Rousseau, 2007) and even to enjoy its own set of normative powers (‘autonomous decrees’ – Hamon & Troper, 2019). By way of law reforming (2009, 2014, and 2019 laws), the prison and probation services have thus embraced the McDonaldisation ethos. Their main obsession has been to early release as many prisoners as possible in order to free space and to accommodate more sentenced people. To do so, the prison services have created a series of so-called ‘simplified’ early release procedures, where prisoners are neither prepared for nor supported through release, where they are deprived of agency and where due process and attorney advice are removed. Behind a pretend rehabilitative discourse, the executive is only interested in efficiently flushing people out of prison; not about re-entry efficacy. As Ritzer (2019) points out, McDonaldisation often leads to counter-productive or absurd consequences. In the case of early release, the stubborn reality is that one cannot bypass actually doing the rehabilitative and re-entry work. I shall additionally argue that not everything truly qualifies as an early release measure (Ostermann, 2013). Only measures which respect prisoners’ agency prepare them for their release, which support them once they are in the community, which address their socio-psychological and criminogenic needs, and which are pronounced in the context of due process and defence rights truly qualify as such. As it is, French ‘simplified’ release procedures amount to McRe-entry and mass nothingness.

In this paper, an integrated model for order release and due‐date management is developed to enhance manufacturers’ confidence in the due‐dates offered to customers. The proposed model utilised the backward finite scheduling order release control method and five different due‐date assignment rules. The proposed model is implemented using C++ computer programming language. Due‐date of each order is calculated by a due‐date assignment rule selected. Then the program tries to schedule the whole order with as lowest value as possible of tightness parameter (k). The output of the C++ program is production schedule of the whole order using backward finite scheduling order release method. Experiment results indicate that the modified number of operations due‐date rule_MNOP is superior with respect to the other due‐dates rules of the whole order.

The purpose of this study was to systematically review literature to investigate trends in compassionate release policies, facility implementation, barriers at both the incarcerated individual and institutional levels, as well as gaps in the literature. The absence of uniform and appropriate policies to address suitable interventions at the end-of-life has aggravated the challenges and issues facing health-care systems within a correctional facility. A response to address and alleviate these barriers is policies related to compassionate release, a complex route that grants eligible inmates the opportunity to die in their community. Despite the existence of compassionate release policies, only 4% of requests to the Federal Bureau of Prisons are granted, with evidence demonstrating similarly low rates among numerous state prison systems, signifying the underuse of these procedures as a vital approach to decarceration.

A systematic review was completed using preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses guidelines. Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International Abstracts, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Cochrane Library, Education Resources Information Center, Google Scholar, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, PubMed, Social Services Abstracts and Social Work Abstracts were searched from inception to March 2021. Inclusion criteria included: the compassionate release policy (or related policy) is implemented in the USA; reported qualitative and/or quantitative outcomes; and reported original data.

Twenty studies formed the final data set. Data analysis revealed four main themes: language barriers, complexities of eligibility criteria, over-reliance on prognostication and social stigma. Barriers to inmates’ access to compassionate release policies include unclear or technical language used in policy documents. Eligibility criteria appear to vary across the country, including disease prognoses and the ability to predict terminal declines in health, creating confusion amongst inmates, lawyers and review boards. Stigmas surrounding the rights of incarcerated individuals frequently influence policymakers who experience pressure to maintain a punitive stance to appease constituents, thus discouraging policies and interventions that promote the release of incarcerated individuals.

Further research is vital to strengthen the understanding of compassionate release policies and related barriers associated with accessing various types of early parole. To promote social justice for this marginalized population, end-of-life interventions in corrections need to be consistently evaluated with outcomes that improve care for dying inmates.

Within correctional facilities, correctional health-care workers should play an integral role in influencing prison and medical staff attitudes toward dying inmates by providing an understanding of how to effectively support this vulnerable population. Social workers should participate in research that focuses on effective guidelines for correctional facilities to provide compassionate end-of-life care for inmates.

Racial disparities in the US criminal justice system are prevalent and well documented, as individuals of color are arrested far out of proportion to their share of all individuals in the USA. This particular population is thus challenged with poor access to and quality of health care in corrections. Correctional health-care workers can play an integral role in influencing policymakers, as well as prison and medical staff attitudes toward dying inmates by providing an understanding of how to effectively support this vulnerable population.

Currently, there are no published research articles that provide a systematic review of compassionate release policies in the USA.

Aging and mental illness both represent significant public health challenges for incarcerated people in the USA. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the vulnerabilities of incarcerated people because of the risks of infectious disease transmission in correctional facilities. Focusing on older adults with mental illness, this paper aims to examine efforts to decarcerate US correctional facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic and whether these approaches may lead to sustainable reforms beyond the pandemic.

A narrative literature review was conducted using numerous online resources, including PubMed, Google Scholar and LexisNexis. Search terms used included “decarceration pandemic,” “COVID-19 decarceration,” “aging mental illness decarceration,” “jails prisons decarceration,” “early release COVID-19” and “correctional decarceration pandemic,” among others. Given the rapidly changing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, this narrative literature review included content from not only scholarly articles and federal and state government publications but also relevant media articles and policy-related reports. The authors reviewed these sources collaboratively to synthesize a review of existing evidence and opinions on these topics and generate conclusions and policy recommendations moving forward.

To mitigate the risks of COVID-19, policymakers have pursued various decarceration strategies across the USA. Some efforts have focused on reducing inflow into correctional systems, including advising police to reduce numbers of arrests and limiting use of pretrial detention. Other policies have sought to increase outflow from correctional systems, such as facilitating early release of people convicted of nonviolent offenses or those nearing the end of their sentences. Given the well-known risks of COVID-19 among older individuals, age was commonly cited as a reason for diverting or expediting release of people from incarceration. In contrast, despite their vulnerability to complications from COVID-19, people with serious mental illness (SMI), particularly those with acute treatment needs, may have been less likely in some instances to be diverted or released early from incarceration.

Although much has been written about decarceration during the COVID-19 pandemic, little attention has been paid to the relevance of these efforts for older adults with mental illness. This paper synthesizes existing proposals and evidence while drawing attention to the public health implications of aging and SMI in US correctional settings and explores opportunities for decarceration of older adults with SMI beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this study is to introduce the top-level design ideas and the overall architecture of earthquake early-warning system for high speed railways in China, which is based on P-wave earthquake early-warning and multiple ways of rapid treatment.

The paper describes the key technologies that are involved in the development of the system, such as P-wave identification and earthquake early-warning, multi-source seismic information fusion and earthquake emergency treatment technologies. The paper also presents the test results of the system, which show that it has complete functions and its major performance indicators meet the design requirements.

The study demonstrates that the high speed railways earthquake early-warning system serves as an important technical tool for high speed railways to cope with the threat of earthquake to the operation safety. The key technical indicators of the system have excellent performance: The first report time of the P-wave is less than three seconds. From the first arrival of P-wave to the beginning of train braking, the total delay of onboard emergency treatment is 3.63 seconds under 95% probability. The average total delay for power failures triggered by substations is 3.3 seconds.

The paper provides a valuable reference for the research and development of earthquake early-warning system for high speed railways in other countries and regions. It also contributes to the earthquake prevention and disaster reduction efforts.

In the current market scenario, software upgrades and updates have proved to be very handy in improving the reliability of the software in its operational phase. Software upgrades help in reinventing working software through major changes, like functionality addition, feature enhancement, structural changes, etc. In software updates, minor changes are undertaken which help in improving software performance by fixing bugs and security issues in the current version of the software. Through the current proposal, the authors wish to highlight the economic benefits of the combined use of upgrade and update service. A cost analysis model has been proposed for the same.

The article discusses a cost analysis model highlighting the distinction between launch time and time to end the testing process. The number of bugs which have to be catered in each release has been determined which also consists of the count of latent bugs of previous version. Convolution theory has been utilized to incorporate the joint role of tester and user in bug detection into the model. The cost incurred in debugging process was determined. An optimization model was designed which considers the reliability and budget constraints while minimizing the total debugging cost. This optimization was used to determine the release time and testing stop time.

The proposal is backed by real-life software bug dataset consisting of four releases. The model was able to successfully determine the ideal software release time and the testing stop time. An increased profit is generated by releasing the software earlier and continues testing long after its release.

The work contributes positively to the field by providing an effective optimization model, which was able to determine the economic benefit of the combined use of upgrade and update service. The model can be used by management to determine their timelines and cost that will be incurred depending on their product and available resources.