The Business Cycle

Economic growth is not a steady phenomenon; rather, it tends to exhibit a pattern as follows:

1. an expansion of above-average growth

2. a peak

3. a contraction of below-average growth

4. a trough or low-point

The troughs then are followed by periods of expansion and the cycle generally repeats, though not in a regular manner. These fluctuations in economic growth are known as the business cycle and are depicted conceptually in the following diagram:

The Business Cycle

Indicators of the Business Cycle

Because the business cycle is related to aggregate economic activity, a popular indicator of the business cycle in the U.S. is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The financial media generally considers two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth to indicate a recession. Used as such, the GDP is a quick and simple indicator of economic contractions.

However, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) weighs GDP relatively low as a primary business cycle indicator because GDP is subject to frequent revision and it is reported only on a quarterly basis (the business cycle is tracked on a monthly basis). The NBER relies primarily on indicators such as the following:

* employment
* personal income
* industrial production

Additionally, indicators such as manufacturing and trade sales are used as measures of economic activity.

Accountants and Auditors

Job Outlook

Strong growth of accountants and auditor jobs over the 2006-16 decade is expected to result from stricter accounting and auditing regulations, along with an expanding economy. The best job prospects will be for accountants and auditors who have a college degree or any certification, but especially a CPA.

Employment change.

Employment of accountants and auditors is expected to grow by 18 percent between 2006 and 2016, which is faster than the average for all occupations. This occupation will have a very large number of new jobs arise, almost 226,000 over the projections decade. An increase in the number of businesses, changing financial laws, and corporate governance regulations, and increased accountability for protecting an organization’s stakeholders will drive growth.

As the economy grows, the number of business establishments will increase, requiring more accountants and auditors to set up books, prepare taxes, and provide management advice. As these businesses grow, the volume and complexity of information reviewed by accountants and auditors regarding costs, expenditures, taxes, and internal controls will expand as well. The globalization of business also has led to more demand for accounting expertise and services related to international trade and accounting rules and international mergers and acquisitions.

An increased need for accountants and auditors also will arise from changes in legislation related to taxes, financial reporting standards, business investments, mergers, and other financial events. As a result of accounting scandals at several large corporations, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in an effort to curb corporate accounting fraud. This legislation requires public companies to maintain well-functioning internal controls to ensure the accuracy and reliability of their financial reporting. It also holds the company’s chief executive personally responsible for falsely reporting financial information.

These changes are expected to lead to increased scrutiny of company finances and accounting procedures and should create opportunities for accountants and auditors, particularly CPAs, to audit financial records more thoroughly. Management accountants and internal auditors increasingly will also be needed to discover and eliminate fraud before audits, and ensure that important processes and procedures are documented accurately and thoroughly. Also, efforts to make government agencies more efficient and accountable will increase demand for government accountants.

Increased focus on and numbers of financial crimes such as embezzlement, bribery, and securities fraud will increase the demand for forensic accountants to detect illegal financial activity by individuals, companies, and organized crime rings. Computer technology has made these crimes easier to commit, and they are on the rise. At the same time, the development of new computer software and electronic surveillance technology has made tracking down financial criminals easier, thus increasing the ease, and likelihood of, discovery. As success rates of investigations grow, demand for forensic accountants will increase.

The changing role of accountants and auditors also will spur job growth, although this will be slower than in the past because of changes in the law. Federal legislation now prohibits accountants from providing many types of management and consulting services to clients whose books they audit. However, accountants will still be able to advise clients that are not publicly traded companies and those they do not audit.

Also, the increasing popularity of tax preparation firms and computer software will shift accountants away from tax preparation. As computer programs continue to simplify some accounting-related tasks, clerical staff will increasingly handle many routine calculations.

Job prospects.

Overall, job opportunities for accountants and auditors should be favorable. Those who earn a CPA should have excellent job prospects. After most States instituted the 150-hour rule for CPAs, enrollment in accounting programs declined. However, enrollment is again growing as more students have become attracted to the profession by the attention from the accounting scandals.

In the aftermath of the accounting scandals, professional certification is even more important to ensure that accountants’ credentials and knowledge of ethics are sound. Regardless of specialty, accountants and auditors who have earned professional recognition through certification or licensure should have the best job prospects. Applicants with a master’s degree in accounting or a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in accounting also will have an advantage.

Individuals who are proficient in accounting and auditing computer software or have expertise in specialized areas—such as international business, specific industries, or current legislation—may have an advantage in getting some accounting and auditing jobs. In addition, employers increasingly seek applicants with strong interpersonal and communication skills. Many accountants work on teams with others who have different backgrounds, so they must be able to communicate accounting and financial information clearly and concisely. Regardless of qualifications, however, competition will remain keen for the most prestigious jobs in major accounting and business firms.

In addition to openings from job growth, the need to replace accountants and auditors who retire or transfer to other occupations will produce numerous job openings in this large occupation.

What is Petty Cash ??

Petty cash refers to small amounts of cash kept on hand in a business.

(The term "petty" comes from "petite," or "small.")

There are two reasons to keep petty cash:

To make change for customers or patients, and

To pay for small purchases which require cash, such as food for the office lunch or coffee supplies, or for parking. Most retail businesses keep a cash drawer as do health care practices.

Fractal Geometry

Hmm,...what a beautiful topic???
till mr.ikhsan said to Lia, "i deal with this title and i'll guide it!" without think a second, ogh,.!

it's different when i show mine,..
vector differentiation of square form !
mr. ikhsan ask me to explain--again and again--before deal, need long argument and sweat to fight it. finally, he said okey,..and you'll be guided by mrs. erni !

fiuhhh,..Alhamdulillah,..!
i hav headache again and again when looked for the title for my colloquium class.

ok,.today i'll share u some about fractals, check it out!

Fractals

A fractal is generally "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity.

Roots of mathematical interest on fractals can be traced back to the late 19th Century, the term however was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning "broken" or "fractured."
A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion.

A fractal often has the following features:

* It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales.
* It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
* It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
* It has a Hausdorff dimension which is greater than its topological dimension (although this requirement is not met by space-filling curves such as the Hilbert curve).
* It has a simple and recursive definition.

Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex (in informal terms).
Natural objects that approximate fractals to a degree include clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines, snow flakes, even various vegetables (cauliflower and broccoli).
However, not all self-similar objects are fractals—for example, the real line (a straight Euclidean line) is formally self-similar but fails to have other fractal characteristics; for instance, it is regular enough to be described in Euclidean terms.

Generating fractals

Four common techniques for generating fractals are:

* Escape-time fractals – (also known as "orbits" fractals) These are defined by a formula or recurrence relation at each point in a space (such as the complex plane). Examples of this type are the Mandelbrot set, Julia set, the Burning Ship fractal, the Nova fractal and the Lyapunov fractal. The 2d vector fields that are generated by one or two iterations of escape-time formulae also give rise to a fractal form when points (or pixel data) are passed through this field repeatedly.

* Iterated function systems – These have a fixed geometric replacement rule. Cantor set, Sierpinski carpet, Sierpinski gasket, Peano curve, Koch snowflake, Harter-Highway dragon curve, T-Square, Menger sponge, are some examples of such fractals.

* Random fractals – Generated by stochastic rather than deterministic processes, for example, trajectories of the Brownian motion, Lévy flight, fractal landscapes and the Brownian tree. The latter yields so-called mass- or dendritic fractals, for example, diffusion-limited aggregation or reaction-limited aggregation clusters.

* Strange attractors – Generated by iteration of a map or the solution of a system of initial-value differential equations that exhibit chaos.

In Nature

Approximate fractals are easily found in nature. These objects display self-similar structure over an extended, but finite, scale range.
Examples include clouds, snow flakes, crystals, mountain ranges, lightning, river networks, cauliflower or broccoli, and systems of blood vessels and pulmonary vessels.
Coastlines may be loosely considered fractal in nature.

Hmm,...i think it's hard to prove in math formula.
ok,..that's all for this shine monday,.many thanks to wikipedia !

see ya,..^o^ !

Accounting Basic Info

Hi guys,..how hav u been?!
today i wanna share u some basic info of accounting.
hopefully useful !

Accountancy
or accounting is the art of communicating financial information about a business entity to users such as shareholders and managers. The communication is generally in the form of financial statements that show in money terms that show the economic resources under the control of management.

Etymology
The English term accountant is derived from accomptant, which was pronounced by dropping the 'p' and over time further changed in pronunciation and spelling. Accomptant was derived from the French compter, itself originating from the Latin computare. From the word accountant the term accountancy is derived.

Types of accounting
* Financial accounting is "a major branch of accounting involving the collection, recording and extraction of financial information, and the summary of it in the form of a periodic profit and loss account, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement in accordance with legal, professional, and capital market requirements".
* Management accounting is another branch of accounting performed within an organization to provide information only accessible to its decision-makers.
* Open-book accounting is an accounting principle that aims to improve accounting transparency of organizations.
* Tax accounting is the accounting needed to comply with jurisdictional tax regulations.
* Accounting scholarship is the academic discipline which studies the theory of accountancy.

The related, but separate financial audit comprises internal audit and external audit. External audit—carried out by independent auditors—examines the financial statements and accounting records in order to express an opinion as to the truth and fairness and adherence to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Commonly used GAAP include the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), which issues FASB Pronouncements including Statements of Accounting Standards, and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), which issues International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Many other countries have instituted local standards resulting in a local country GAAP. Internal audit aims at providing information for management usage, and is typically carried out by employees.

Accounting scandals
The year 2001 witnessed a series of financial information frauds involving Enron Corporation, auditing firm Arthur Andersen, the telecommunications company WorldCom, Qwest and Sunbeam, among other well-known corporations. These problems highlighted the need to review the effectiveness of accounting standards, auditing regulations and corporate governance principles. In some cases, management manipulated the figures shown in financial reports to indicate a better economic performance. In others, tax and regulatory incentives encouraged over-leveraging of companies and decisions to bear extraordinary and unjustified risk.

The Enron scandal deeply influenced the development of new regulations to improve the reliability of financial reporting, and increased public awareness about the importance of having accounting standards that show the financial reality of companies and the objectivity and independence of auditing firms.

In addition to being the largest bankruptcy reorganization in American history, the Enron scandal undoubtedly is the biggest audit failure.The scandal caused the dissolution of Arthur Andersen, which at the time was one of the five largest accounting firms in the world.It involved a financial scandal of Enron Corporation and their auditors Arthur Andersen, which was revealed in late 2001. After a series of revelations involving irregular accounting procedures conducted throughout the 1990s, Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2001

One consequence of these events was the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, as a result of the first admissions of fraudulent behavior made by Enron. The act significantly raises criminal penalties for securities fraud, for destroying, altering or fabricating records in federal investigations or any scheme or attempt to defraud shareholders.

Hmm....that's all for now, many thanks to wikipedia.

ok,.see ya!

Assalamu'alaikum,..^-^

Hi,..! what's up guys ?!
This 's My First Post !

Hmm,,,,
i dont know what should i say,.
But i'm happy now!
After spend hours reading other people's blog, finally i decide to start my own at blogger. it's not my first time in blogging, i have one at multiply before. you can click here to see but it's not recommended ;P !

Okey,. that's all for now.
enjoy the site with your smile ^-^