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The purpose of this paper is to examine efforts made by the UNESCO Hong Kong Association (UNESCOHK) in integrating education for sustainable development (ESD) into school subjects and into the curriculum in 2009-2016. It investigates: the distribution and development of the three key components of environment, society and economy in student work, and in school assessment reports; the relevancy level of ESD learning to school subjects; the condition in Hong Kong in practicing the integration of ESD learning into the school curriculum; and the practices of integration of ESD learning into the school curriculum in Hong Kong and other countries.

Grounded theory is deployed to analyze the distribution and development of ESD as understood by students and schools, and the application of knowledge acquired through school subjects to ESD learning activities undertaken by students and schools.

The study succeeds in identifying the precise distribution and development of the three key components of environment, society and economy in ESD, and in establishing the level of relevancy of ESD learning activities to school subjects and to the school curriculum. UNESCOHK’s initiative is in line with the general trend adopted by countries to integrate ESD into the school curriculum.

The scope of investigation is limited to ESD learning activities in eight schools and to one single economy.

The study facilitates attempts to reorientate the lifestyles of students and their parents.

The study is a pioneering work in Hong Kong to integrate ESD learning into school subjects, which is in alignment with the trend to integrate ESD into the school curriculum.

In industrialised countries water service providers (WSPs) must provide an appropriate level of service with an acceptable performance at an acceptable cost to customers. In the UK a move towards sustainable development is now also a major goal for WSPs. However, the imposition of institutional systems and regulatory targets still encourage the adoption of less sustainable technologies or solutions by the water industry. It is within this context, that the Sustainable Water industry Asset Resource Decisions (SWARD) project has developed a set of decision support processes that allow WSPs to assess the relative sustainability of water/wastewater system asset development decisions. A Guidebook has been produced that takes the WSP and its stakeholders through the processes essential to incorporating sustainability in asset investment decision‐making. Several case studies that demonstrate the SWARD principles in application are included within the Guidebook, the experience of which is described in this paper.

A relatively simple way to analyse a company’s financial status is to examine the positive or negative signs of its cash flow patterns and to link certain characteristics to selected cash flow patterns. In this article, the frequencies of cash flow patterns in South African listed industrial companies are examined for a single financial period, as well as for three different cumulative periods, ending in 1993, 1996 and 2002 respectively. Mature companies, i.e. those with positive cash flow from operating activities, negative cash flow from investing activities and negative cash flow from financing activities, were identified as the most frequently occurring pattern during the selected periods. The study shows that the mature companies had the highest median amongst the more regular cash flow patterns, for the net profit percentage, for the cash flow from operating activities before the payment of dividends as a percentage of sales and for dividend payout. The study also reveals that companies in their growth phase had the highest medians for investment outflow, for sales growth and growth in total assets, for accounts payable and inventories. Start‐up companies had the highest medians for inflow from financing activities and for total debt to total assets.

This paper contributes to the literature of accountability and ethics by providing historical perspective by way of archival discovery of original, primary documentation as to corporate practices and behaviors of an early major U.S. corporation during the period 1849–1862. The authors provide the results of examination and analysis of surviving corporate records.

The challenges to appropriate behavior and the application of stewardship principles with regard to the custody of property and the sanctions imposed for transgressions are all identified from primary corporate documents and hand-written minutes books of the board of directors of the Mobile & Ohio Railroad during the period. The de facto development of a corporate code of conduct enumerated by the board provides an early example of explicit corporate governance guidance. This unique discovery informs contemporary understanding of ethical issues identified in the accountability literature by adding the perspective of management experiences from over 150 years ago.

A major difficulty in continuous speech recognition research is the lack of effective and objective evaluation of the statistical models of text. Herbert Simon's view for evaluating theories is here applied to the statistical modelling of text. Three significant contributions can be identified. First, a time‐series representation of text is used to identify three well‐known empirical laws of text generation. These laws provide an effective and objective approach for evaluating four leading statistical models of text. Second, it is shown that the Simon‐Yule model of text provides a constructive mechanism for those laws. Third, based on Simon's explanatory processes of imitation and association, an adaptive framework for continuous speech recognition is suggested.

Evidence of audit committee activity in the formative years of the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad indicates that control and reporting activity developed long before the existence of regulatory mandate or the external auditing function. This is the earliest example of such an organized and continuing activity in American business history. With no previous business experience to model this enterprise, the organizers of the corporation put in place an audit committee of directors as a control device to safeguard assets and ensure proper handling of cash receipts and disbursements. Research into primary materials establishes that the committee not only performed regular routine audits of the “treasurer’s report,” but also identified and addressed critical problems of control and payment weaknesses. The discovery of the function of value‐for‐money (VFM) auditing by a committee of directors establishes historical context for today’s audit process and audit committee. Because the B&O was such an important entity, it influenced other railroads; and the railroad industry, in turn, greatly influenced the development of modern American businesses during the Industrial Revolution.

The purpose of this case is to allow students the opportunity to examine how the recent changes to depreciation incentives in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (P.L. 115-97, Dec. 22, 2017) may affect the purchase of capital assets. Bonus depreciation has been extended to allow an immediate 100% deduction for eligible property, which also now includes used property. This bonus depreciation will be phased out over a nine-year period. Additionally, the progressive marginal tax rate used for business income has been eliminated and replaced by a flat 21% tax rate, representing a 14% drop in the tax rate on businesses.

Specifically, this case will examine how a change from 50% to 100% bonus depreciation affects purchasing decisions between asset classes, due to the exaggerated impact on the net present value for longer lived assets. In keeping with the evolution of accounting in academia, students will be asked both to solve a realistic problem and to communicate their investment decisions effectively. To prepare students for the assignment, the informational building blocks are presented in modules following Bloom’s taxonomy – culminating in the application of the concepts in a decision-making scenario. The learning method applied in this case has been tested in the classroom, with quantifiable results showing a positive learning outcome. Pre- and post-case assessment questions were administered with significant improvement in students reported understanding across all six measures. Based on these results, this case achieves the dual goals of teaching students how to apply the concept of bonus depreciation to maximize value and how to communicate this information effectively.

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