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A central question in sensory neuroscience is how neurons represent complex natural stimuli. This process involves multiple steps of feature extraction to obtain a condensed, categorical representation useful for classification and behavior. It has previously been shown that central auditory neurons in the starling have composite receptive fields composed of multiple features when probed with conspecific songs. Whether this property is an idiosyncratic characteristic of songbirds, a group of highly specialized vocal learners, or a generic characteristic of central auditory systems in different animals is, however, unknown. To address this question, we have recorded responses from auditory cortical neurons in mice, and characterized their receptive fields using mouse ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) as a natural and ethologically relevant stimulus and pitch-shifted starling songs as a natural but ethologically irrelevant control stimulus. We have found that auditory cortical neurons in the mouse display composite receptive fields with multiple excitatory and inhibitory subunits. Moreover, this was the case with either the conspecific or the heterospecific vocalizations. We then trained the sparse filtering algorithm on both classes of natural stimuli to obtain statistically optimal features, and compared the natural and artificial features using UMAP, a dimensionality-reduction algorithm previously used to analyze mouse USVs and birdsongs. We have found that the receptive-field features obtained with the mouse USVs and those obtained with the pitch-shifted starling songs clustered together, as did the sparse-filtering features. However, the natural and artificial receptive-field features clustered mostly separately. These results indicate that composite receptive fields are likely a generic property of central auditory systems in different classes of animals. They further suggest that the quadratic receptive-field features of the mouse auditory cortical neurons are natural-stimulus invariant.

Head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) capture the direction-dependant way that sound interacts with the head and torso. In virtual audio systems, which aim to emulate these effects, non-individualized, generic HRTFs are typically used leading to an inaccurate perception of virtual sound location. Training has the potential to exploit the brain’s ability to adapt to these unfamiliar cues. In this study, three virtual sound localization training paradigms were evaluated; one provided simple visual positional confirmation of sound source location, a second introduced game design elements (“gamification”) and a final version additionally utilized head-tracking to provide listeners with experience of relative sound source motion (“active listening”). The results demonstrate a significant effect of training after a small number of short (12-minute) training sessions, which is retained across multiple days. Gamification alone had no significant effect on the efficacy of the training, but active listening resulted in a significantly greater improvements in localization accuracy. In general, improvements in virtual sound localization following training generalized to a second set of non-individualized HRTFs, although some HRTF-specific changes were observed in polar angle judgement for the active listening group. The implications of this on the putative mechanisms of the adaptation process are discussed.

The increased national attention on health care issues in the United States has created the opportunity and the responsibility for action by the academic community, particularly in the fields of health care, accountancy, and finance. Innovative and creative courses must be developed and implemented to integrate acounting-related and health care-related topics. This article reports on a graduate level course in health care accounting and finance that used an interdisciplinary approach with faculty from the Department of Accountancy, the College of Nursing, and the School of Public and Allied Health. The article details the content and structure of the course, students' response, and lessons learned.

For those interested in studying the effects of stakeholder theory on organizational performance, the establishment of measures that represent both explicit and implicit claims on the firm’s outputs is vital. While net organizational capital (NOC) has been shown to represent the value of the firm after honouring implicit claims of stakeholder groups, practical application requires the use of surrogates such as net intangible assets (NIA). Attempts to extend research in this area by establishing additional surrogates, segment sales (SS) and research and development intensity (RD), which can be easily calculated and reflect operating characteristics of the organization being observed. Concludes that RD is a reasonable indicator of the firm’s NIA for both bond upgrade and downgrade situations, but that SS can be viewed as a surrogate for NIA during upgrade situations. Both, however, can provide great insights to the researcher and can be used to assist in classifying firms with respect to stakeholder group influence.

Firms which adapt new manufacturing technologies, such as flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) or computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) and concepts such as just‐in‐time (JIT), can expect to exert a significant influence on various stakeholder groups. Additionally, innovative accounting systems which are currently being developed to monitor and evaluate the performance of manufacturing systems will have a direct impact on certain stakeholder constituencies. Uses stakeholder theory as a basis for explaining the complex relationships among the firm and various constituencies or stakeholders. Major stakeholder groups include educators, auditors, trainers, line managers, human resource managers, suppliers, customers, stockholders, labour unions, the financial community, government, local community organizations, environmentalists, employees, directors, management and bondholders. The needs of the various groups are placed in the context of the new global competitive environment.

In recent years few US and European executives have been faced with the task of managing in a highly complex, dynamic business environment. There is a growing awareness of the need to consider the interests of a variety of stakeholder groups when making business decisions. This awareness has quickly become a requirement for executives across the globe, even among those in Japanese firms who have historically been less encumbered due to different societal, cultural, and business expectations. This article addresses these differences and discusses the global evolution of stakeholder group influence with an emphasis on US, European, and Japanese executives.

Certified public accountants (CPAs) must advise their clients about potential environmental problems and solutions. Only by doing this can the long‐term survival and profitability of many clients be ensured. Reports on a survey of 940 CPA firms which identified their inconsistent attitudes to timing of disclosure, measurement issues and income statement presentation. Inconsistent practices are mainly owing to lack of authoritative support in the area. Recommends future actions and suggests the CPA should be aware of three critical issues that can adversely affect clients′ operations: valuation of the business, acquisition and divestiture and access to capital. Discusses the CPA′s role as external adviser.

Within most organizations, accounting has traditionally been a stand‐alone discipline with little effort to integrate accountants into the strategic aspects of management. Other functional areas within a firm often view accountants as producers of dated and irrelevant information. The accounting profession, in particular the education sector, has recognized the increased importance of the field in the management process. However, owing to the present structure of the majority of accounting programmes, graduates in accounting are often not prepared to assume a role in strategic decision making. Given this deficiency, constructive changes are being made to the accounting curricula. Discusses how these changes aid accountant graduates in becoming part of the strategic alliance of the firm and helps managers better to understand the changing role of accountants. There are lessons to be learned for the internal auditing profession from this experience.

The competitive bidding process is the method by which firms efficiently and effectively make purchases for necessary goods and services at a desired level of quality. Those firms with managers who understand the competitive bid process and are sufficiently sophisticated with regard to its implementation can create a tremendous competitive advantage in the marketplace. Explains the concept of buyer sophistication in terms of the skills necessary for successful competition in markets heavily influenced by the competitive bid process. Places particular emphasis on how the seller must map the sophistication level of the buyer in order to determine the most appropriate sales and negotiation strategy.

Cochlear implants provide a degraded input to the auditory system. Despite this, cochlear implant users are able to discriminate speech sounds in quiet with a degree of accuracy comparable to that of normal hearing listeners. The neural bases of this phenomenon is not well understood. A set of vowel-consonant-vowel phoneme sequences, each produced by multiple talkers, were parametrically degraded using a noise vocoder. Neural responses were recorded in the guinea pig midbrain and cortex, and auditory nerve responses were generated using a computational model. The discriminability of these responses was quantified using a nearest neighbor classifier. When envelope modulations were limited to 16 Hz, classifier performance was qualitatively similar to that of human listeners for all brain regions. However, in the auditory nerve and the midbrain, the preservation of high rate envelope cues enabled the near perfect discrimination of speech tokens even for heavily spectrally degraded speech. High rate envelope ...