Determinants of academic cheating behavior: The future for accountancy in Ireland

This paper considers the potential for improving the reputation of the Irish accountancy profession by exploring undergraduate accounting students’ intolerance of academic cheating as a predictor of future attitudes to unethical workplace practices. The study reports that females are significantly more intolerant of cheating than males. Further, with regard to ethical ideology, idealism was found to have a significant positive association with intolerance of cheating while relativism reported no association. It is anticipated that the growing admission of women to professional accountancy membership together with educational intervention to increase idealism may improve ethical attitudes and help restore the profession's reputation.

Green Media: The Future of Wireless Multimedia Networks:Guest Editorial

By 2015, with the proliferation of wireless multimedia applications and services (e.g., mobile TV, video on demand, online video repositories, immersive video interaction, peer to peer video streaming, and interactive video gaming), and any-time anywhere communication, the number of smartphones and tablets will exceed 6.5 billion as the most common web access devices. Data volumes in wireless multimedia data-intensive applications and mobile web services are projected to increase by a factor of 10 every five years, associated with a 20 percent increase in energy consumption, 80 percent of which is multimedia traffic related. In turn, multimedia energy consumption is rising at 16 percent per year, doubling every six years. It is estimated that energy costs alone account for as much as half of the annual operating expenditure. This has prompted concerted efforts by major operators to drastically reduce carbon emissions by up to 50 percent over the next 10 years. Clearly, there is an urgent need for new disruptive paradigms of green media to bridge the gap between wireless technologies and multimedia applications.

Report on the Remedying the Past, Healing for the Future Conference

Deliberative Perfectionism: Why We Can and Should Talk about the Good

In contemporary political theory, perfectionists believe that the state should promote substantive conceptions of the good through its legislation. Supporters of neutrality, instead, claim that the state should refrain from doing so. In this article I analyse perfectionism in relation to Jürgen Habermas’ theory of discourse and deliberative politics (1996) and critique Habermas’ distinction between ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ discourses (1984, 1990). By relating Habermas’ theory to George Sher’s account of perfectionism (1997), I argue that we can establish the meta-ethical grounds for a model of deliberation encompassing ethical matters (that is, questions concerning the good life) not confined to the limits of specific communities. I conclude by arguing that ethical deliberation is not only feasible but also desirable. Given the fact of ethical pluralism, and in order to show respect towards their fellow citizens, political perfectionists ought to be ready to show how their ethical claims (which they want to see translated into state policy) relate to deeper meta-ethical human goals on which we can ideally find a consensus through deliberation.

Gerodontology: now and the future

In this the first article in a series, the discipline of Gerodontology is placed in context and the issues of what constitutes ageing, the demography of the older population, and changes in oral health are considered. Future clinical challenges to the profession and in the delivery of oral healthcare are also outlined.

Preaching to the Choir? An Analysis of DUP Discourses about the Northern Ireland Peace Process

This article analyses the Democratic Unionist Party's (DUP) discursive responses to the Northern Ireland peace process. Drawing on narrative analysis of DUP discourses in the Belfast News Letter (1998–2005), it argues that the party has articulated five themes: the de‐legitimisation of David Trimble and the Ulster Unionist Party, the immorality of the peace process, the security threat, the victimisation of Protestants, and the ‘renegotiation’ of the Belfast Agreement. These discourses are analysed in light of a framework for understanding the relationship between the party's public discourses and the political strategies that have allowed for its electoral success. The framework includes the relationship between discourses, agenda‐setting in the media, ‘the politics of support’, and ‘the politics of power’. It considers how the DUP's discourses may impact on its relationships with nationalists and unionists. However, efforts by the DUP to communicate with the unionist grassroots may allow it to minimise alienation, thus contributing to a space in which principles such as power‐sharing can become bedded down.

Perspectives on the Future of Public Private Partnership in the UK

During the past two decades the UK has played a leading position in the development and application of Public Private Partnership (PPP) based infrastructure procurement through its Private Finance Initiative model. This model had been developed during the last years of the Major Government and expanded during the early years of the Blair Government. The banking and economic crisis of 2007-09 has created major challenges to the use of PPP in the UK, making the sustainability of past levels of PPP investment and the future direction of PPP based infrastructure procurement in that country uncertain. This chapter summarises key developments in UK PPP up to the crisis; reviews the economic issues that have led up to the crisis; discusses the immediate impact of the crisis on the UK PFI and PPP market together with the transition arrangements that were put into to place by the Brown government; and, lastly, looks at recent initiatives taken by Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal Coalition Government under the designation of Private Finance 2 (PF2).