The managerial benefits of tax compliance: perception by small business taxpayers

Research undertaken in 2006 – 2007 investigated the perception of managerial benefits of tax compliance by small business taxpayers. Survey data from a sample of 300 small business taxpayers and responses to semi-structured interviews of owner managers were examined. The study found that a majority of small business taxpayers recognised that tax compliance activities led to better record keeping and to an improved knowledge of their financial affairs. However, there seemed to be a general reluctance by respondents to accept the idea that benefits could be derived as a result of complying with tax. The findings of this study are important as it is the first research that systematically investigated managerial benefits and their perception by small business taxpayers in Australia.

Empowerment for lifelong learning : embedding information literacy into the business curriculum

Success in modern business demands effective information literacy to address the ever-changing business context. This context includes changes in Government policy reflected through legislation and regulations, developments in case law and expectations of professional associations and the public. Students require the skills to continue their own learning beyond the completion of their degree, since learning the subject content of a course alone sufficient. This paper considers the methods utilised to embed information literacy, in the context of generic skills and graduate attributes, into a Business degree’s curriculum. The paper describes how information literacy has been embedded in two sequential third-year Taxation Law courses, allowing for the explicit development of information literacy. Through the development of legal reasoning and research skills, students are empowered to continue their lifelong learning, which successful professional practice demands. The study will draw upon the experience of the course convener in designing, teaching and evaluating the courses, and on students’ experiences as illustrated through evaluation questionnaire responses and interviews. The findings of this study could be relevant to other business courses, especially company law and auditing.

Low Vision

The care of low-vision patients is termed vision rehabilitation, and optometrists have an essential role to play in the provision of vision rehabilitation services. Ideally, if patients stay with one optometrist or practice, their low-vision care becomes part of a continuum of eye care, from the time when they had normal vision. If progressive vision loss occurs, the role of the optometrist changes from primary eye care only to one of monitoring vision loss and gradually introducing low-vision care, especially magnification and advice on lighting and contrast, in conjunction with other vision rehabilitation professionals.

An experimental and finite element investigation of the biomechanics of vertebral compression fractures

Osteoporosis is a disease characterized by low bone mass and micro-architectural deterioration of bone tissue, with a consequent increase in bone fragility and susceptibility to fracture. Osteoporosis affects over 200 million people worldwide, with an estimated 1.5 million fractures annually in the United States alone, and with attendant costs exceeding $10 billion dollars per annum. Osteoporosis reduces bone density through a series of structural changes to the honeycomb-like trabecular bone structure (micro-structure). The reduced bone density, coupled with the microstructural changes, results in significant loss of bone strength and increased fracture risk. Vertebral compression fractures are the most common type of osteoporotic fracture and are associated with pain, increased thoracic curvature, reduced mobility, and difficulty with self care. Surgical interventions, such as kyphoplasty or vertebroplasty, are used to treat osteoporotic vertebral fractures by restoring vertebral stability and alleviating pain. These minimally invasive procedures involve injecting bone cement into the fractured vertebrae. The techniques are still relatively new and while initial results are promising, with the procedures relieving pain in 70-95% of cases, medium-term investigations are now indicating an increased risk of adjacent level fracture following the procedure. With the aging population, understanding and treatment of osteoporosis is an increasingly important public health issue in developed Western countries. The aim of this study was to investigate the biomechanics of spinal osteoporosis and osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures by developing multi-scale computational, Finite Element (FE) models of both healthy and osteoporotic vertebral bodies. The multi-scale approach included the overall vertebral body anatomy, as well as a detailed representation of the internal trabecular microstructure. This novel, multi-scale approach overcame limitations of previous investigations by allowing simultaneous investigation of the mechanics of the trabecular micro-structure as well as overall vertebral body mechanics. The models were used to simulate the progression of osteoporosis, the effect of different loading conditions on vertebral strength and stiffness, and the effects of vertebroplasty on vertebral and trabecular mechanics. The model development process began with the development of an individual trabecular strut model using 3D beam elements, which was used as the building block for lattice-type, structural trabecular bone models, which were in turn incorporated into the vertebral body models. At each stage of model development, model predictions were compared to analytical solutions and in-vitro data from existing literature. The incremental process provided confidence in the predictions of each model before incorporation into the overall vertebral body model. The trabecular bone model, vertebral body model and vertebroplasty models were validated against in-vitro data from a series of compression tests performed using human cadaveric vertebral bodies. Firstly, trabecular bone samples were acquired and morphological parameters for each sample were measured using high resolution micro-computed tomography (CT). Apparent mechanical properties for each sample were then determined using uni-axial compression tests. Bone tissue properties were inversely determined using voxel-based FE models based on the micro-CT data. Specimen specific trabecular bone models were developed and the predicted apparent stiffness and strength were compared to the experimentally measured apparent stiffness and strength of the corresponding specimen. Following the trabecular specimen tests, a series of 12 whole cadaveric vertebrae were then divided into treated and non-treated groups and vertebroplasty performed on the specimens of the treated group. The vertebrae in both groups underwent clinical-CT scanning and destructive uniaxial compression testing. Specimen specific FE vertebral body models were developed and the predicted mechanical response compared to the experimentally measured responses. The validation process demonstrated that the multi-scale FE models comprising a lattice network of beam elements were able to accurately capture the failure mechanics of trabecular bone; and a trabecular core represented with beam elements enclosed in a layer of shell elements to represent the cortical shell was able to adequately represent the failure mechanics of intact vertebral bodies with varying degrees of osteoporosis. Following model development and validation, the models were used to investigate the effects of progressive osteoporosis on vertebral body mechanics and trabecular bone mechanics. These simulations showed that overall failure of the osteoporotic vertebral body is initiated by failure of the trabecular core, and the failure mechanism of the trabeculae varies with the progression of osteoporosis; from tissue yield in healthy trabecular bone, to failure due to instability (buckling) in osteoporotic bone with its thinner trabecular struts. The mechanical response of the vertebral body under load is highly dependent on the ability of the endplates to deform to transmit the load to the underlying trabecular bone. The ability of the endplate to evenly transfer the load through the core diminishes with osteoporosis. Investigation into the effect of different loading conditions on the vertebral body found that, because the trabecular bone structural changes which occur in osteoporosis result in a structure that is highly aligned with the loading direction, the vertebral body is consequently less able to withstand non-uniform loading states such as occurs in forward flexion. Changes in vertebral body loading due to disc degeneration were simulated, but proved to have little effect on osteoporotic vertebra mechanics. Conversely, differences in vertebral body loading between simulated invivo (uniform endplate pressure) and in-vitro conditions (where the vertebral endplates are rigidly cemented) had a dramatic effect on the predicted vertebral mechanics. This investigation suggested that in-vitro loading using bone cement potting of both endplates has major limitations in its ability to represent vertebral body mechanics in-vivo. And lastly, FE investigation into the biomechanical effect of vertebroplasty was performed. The results of this investigation demonstrated that the effect of vertebroplasty on overall vertebra mechanics is strongly governed by the cement distribution achieved within the trabecular core. In agreement with a recent study, the models predicted that vertebroplasty cement distributions which do not form one continuous mass which contacts both endplates have little effect on vertebral body stiffness or strength. In summary, this work presents the development of a novel, multi-scale Finite Element model of the osteoporotic vertebral body, which provides a powerful new tool for investigating the mechanics of osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures at the trabecular bone micro-structural level, and at the vertebral body level.

Relative income, happiness, and utility : an explanation for the Easterlin paradox and other puzzles

The well-known Easterlin paradox points out that average happiness has remained constant over time despite sharp rises in GNP per head. At the same time, a micro literature has typically found positive correlations between individual income and individual measures of subjective well-being. This paper suggests that these two findings are consistent with the presence of relative income terms in the utility function. Income may be evaluated relative to others (social comparison) or to oneself in the past (habituation). We review the evidence on relative income from the subjective well-being literature. We also discuss the relation (or not) between happiness and utility, and discuss some nonhappiness research (behavioral, experimental, neurological) related to income comparisons. We last consider how relative income in the utility function can affect economic models of behavior in the domains of consumption, investment, economic growth, savings, taxation, labor supply, wages, and migration.

Diagramming the interior

Mark Taylor's new essay assesses the impact of the diagram on interior design from the late 19th century to the present. Taylor identifies the pop-cultural discourse of advice writing in both books and magazines as a starting point for his analysis. Drawing on diverse sources, his analysis focuses on texts relating to the dynamics of use and flexibility by Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Melusina Fay Peirce, Mary Haweis and Christine Frederick among others. The examples in these texts use the home, domestic housekeeping and kitchens as the sites and practices of intervention through which interior design innovations can be enacted. Taylor's analysis identified the innovations in both the social and the political aspects of space and the critique of static space behind these seemingly amateurish and innocuous texts. Identifying these contributions as early precursors of Modernism's open-plan and flexible, dynamic spaces, Taylor also interprets them with a critical concern for the oppositions and hierarchies that can exist in spatial design, and which are the hallmarks of recent Postmodern, phenomenological approaches to interior design and its theorisations. The progressive and subversive "paradigms for living" implicit in these diagrams can be argued to present a model of greater economic, social and political equality as well as representing a more balanced set of power relations in the home. Progressing through the 20th century to the present, Taylor's analysis shifts byond the dressed body and on to the more intimate rituals of the revealed body to further examine how diagrams of the interior, and the interior as a set of diagrams, are also mediators, sites and grounds for the design of social and sexual intimacy. Through a consideration of the link between design, indentity and intimacy (whether of the invisible, fashioned or sexualised body), the diagrms of interiors are reconfigured as radical and critical tools for an animate, material and emancipatory "redressing" of the balance between the body, identity, sexuality, gender, function, mis(use), aesthetics and the interior.

Four Ideas to Improve the Human Condition

A collection of four progressive ideas targeted for the improvement of the human condition has been compiled in this book. They were derived from the first attempted MEDP Australian Summit. Although the Summit itself did not meet expectations for a variety of reasons, the four ideas contained herein are gems derived from the Summit processes.

Image synthesis based on a model of human vision

Modern computer graphics systems are able to construct renderings of such high quality that viewers are deceived into regarding the images as coming from a photographic source. Large amounts of computing resources are expended in this rendering process, using complex mathematical models of lighting and shading. However, psychophysical experiments have revealed that viewers only regard certain informative regions within a presented image. Furthermore, it has been shown that these visually important regions contain low-level visual feature differences that attract the attention of the viewer. This thesis will present a new approach to image synthesis that exploits these experimental findings by modulating the spatial quality of image regions by their visual importance. Efficiency gains are therefore reaped, without sacrificing much of the perceived quality of the image. Two tasks must be undertaken to achieve this goal. Firstly, the design of an appropriate region-based model of visual importance, and secondly, the modification of progressive rendering techniques to effect an importance-based rendering approach. A rule-based fuzzy logic model is presented that computes, using spatial feature differences, the relative visual importance of regions in an image. This model improves upon previous work by incorporating threshold effects induced by global feature difference distributions and by using texture concentration measures. A modified approach to progressive ray-tracing is also presented. This new approach uses the visual importance model to guide the progressive refinement of an image. In addition, this concept of visual importance has been incorporated into supersampling, texture mapping and computer animation techniques. Experimental results are presented, illustrating the efficiency gains reaped from using this method of progressive rendering. This visual importance-based rendering approach is expected to have applications in the entertainment industry, where image fidelity may be sacrificed for efficiency purposes, as long as the overall visual impression of the scene is maintained. Different aspects of the approach should find many other applications in image compression, image retrieval, progressive data transmission and active robotic vision.