Accounting

Project accounting (sometimes referred to as job cost accounting) is the practice of creating financial reports specifically designed to track the financial progress of projects, which can then be used by managers to aid project management.

Standard accounting is primarily aimed at monitoring financial progress of organizational elements (geographical or functional departments, divisions and the enterprise as a whole) over defined time periods (typically weeks, months, quarters and years).

Projects differ in that they frequently cross organizational boundaries, may last for anything from a few days or weeks to a number of years, during which time budgets may also be revised many times. They may also be one of a number of projects that make up a larger overall project or program.

Consequently, in a project management environment costs (both direct and overhead) and revenues are also allocated to projects, which may be subdivided into a work breakdown structure, and grouped together into project hierarchies. Project accounting permits reporting at any such level that has been defined, and often allows comparison with historical as well as current budgets.

Project accounting is commonly use at government contractors, where the ability to account for costs by contract (and sometimes contract line item, or CLIN) is usually a requirement for interim payments.

Percentage-of-completion is frequently independently assessed by a project manager. Funding advances and actual-to-budget cost variances are calculated using the project budget adjusted to percent-of-completion.

Where labor costs are a significant portion of overall project cost, it is usually necessary for employees to fill out a timesheet in order to generate the data to allocate project costs.

The capital budget processes of corporations and governments are chiefly concerned with major investment projects that typically have upfront costs and longer term benefits. Investment go / no-go decisions are largely based on net present value assessments. Project accounting of the costs and benefits can provide crucially important feedback on the quality of these important decisions.

An interesting specialized form of project accounting is production accounting, which tracks the costs of individual movie and television episode film production costs. A movie studio will employ production accounting to track the costs of its many separate projects.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_accounting

A programmer will never start to create a program without a well-defined requirement. The same thing as what most business owners usually does, having a business plan before they actually start their business. A clear and concise business plan would take their business where they want it to. And of course the enabler of getting there more efficiently and a lot faster is by creating a budget and sales forecast report.

The preparation of the report should not be time consuming. Make it as simple as possible. The figures must always be conservative and yet reasonable and should not deprive you of what you want. It is also very advisable to use accounting software right from the very start of your business. Accounting PRO V1.0 has a very nice feature that should allow business owners create these reports. The Budget and Sales Forecast Report in Accounting PRO V1.0 allows users to analyze at an early stage the share of the market a company’s product can attain. With their proprietary algorithm, the result can be attain at optimal level with very small margin of error.

Reverse engineering (RE) is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation. With this in mind, if we are able to reverse engineer the cell, can we reverse engineer the brain? The answer probable is yes if we are lucky. But I doubt if the human race can do this in our lifetime given the fact that we hardly know how the cell works. I hope I am wrong, Ray Kurzweil seems to be very optimistic. Watch his video below.

These are jokes compiled by several IT Professionals originally for mom experts:

Joke #1:

Abaper: Can you tell me the business process?

Nanny: Customer Place and Order, we ship the product, we process payment, then issue invoice, then issue delivery note and then goods issuance.

Joke #2:

CEO: You don’t deserve a Secretary, I’ll just hire EcoQuest Intl if I want to. I am going to place you in IT as a Manager because I saw that you have a very good track record in IT. Can you tell me your skills in IT?

Nanny: I know how to remove dust on the PC, read “Nanny” on the tv, I know emails, I see videos with my boyfriend, and read Miami Art and Social Coverage because I am so sociable and of course persiankitty.com because I love cats especially persians.

CEO: Really? How interesting, can you lock the door please…

Joke #3:

Nanny: The authorizations in R/3 is very erroneous. Users has a lot of complaints.

Basis: We are doing our best to resolve all issues being raised.

Nanny: I have an idea…anyway you know how to create authorizations right? And since all authorizations are currently created by SAP, we should just delete all these standard authorizations and replace it with our own authorizations.

Joke #4:

Day 1:

Nanny: The program is almost ok except for the scenario where I have to process one payment for several envoices.

Abaper: Ok, I’ll include that scenario.

Day 2:(Nanny was upset)

Nanny: Why am I encountering a lot of errors, I told you to include the scenario, but the programs generates a lot of errors.

Abaper: I have no idea, I only did what you ask me to do.

Nanny: I ask you to include the scenario where I need to process 1 payment transaction for serveral invoices.

Abaper: Yes, that’s what I did.

Nanny: How did this invoice shows up as fully paid, I only entered it to be partially paid?

Joke #5:

Day 1:

Abaper: I have already finished the part of the Stock Requirement where we have to trace the Finish Goods. Please do not check the the Document Types coz I need some clarification.

Nanny: Ok, I’ll check it later.

Day 2:(Nanny was angry)

Nanny: Your program is infested with bugs, all the Document Types being shown is wrong.

Joke #6:

Nanny(a.k.a. Sr Abaper): What is an Idoc?

Abaper: I don’t know yet.

Nanny(a.k.a. Sr Abaper) :(( : You should know, you just don’t want to tell me…huhuhu…waahhhh…I’ll tell my boyfriend who just happens to be the Technical Manager to prepare an Incidence Report about this….wwaaahhhh…huhuuuhhhuuu….(She continued to cry).

Accounting Software Efficiency is a measure on how the software performs and meets the expectation of the client. Several Factors should be considered in calculating the efficiency of the software and these are as follows:

1. Ease of Use
2. Number of Downtimes in a particular period
3. What other users has to say about the software
4. Cost of post implementation maintenance
5. Availability of not only competent but professional and honest consultants

I’ve read the news recently and I am not surprise to see how contoversial this software is in the industry. Read the news here. Well, it could be the start of the downfall of the giant. Which is very eminent.

Cells as we all know is the most basic biological machine that enables life to thrive in our world. And yet until today, just like what I have been mentioning over and over, we still know so little about it. It is in our modern time that we are slowly beginning to tinker with it in order for us to understand the complex processes that I believe is still so incomprehensible that it performs. Some people that used to be atheiest like Antony Flew has turned away from Atheism upon learning about the latest findings about how and what informations contained within these cells. It must have made them believe that this information with the cells is to impossible that it was created by chance, it is just way too impossible, is it? To give you more insights, this website about Information and Natural Processes will explain further about what I am talking about and watch this video to know more about our DNA:

The translation of English to First-Order Logic is also a major development effort in the creation of Intelligent Systems. The first requirement in order to carry out this task efficiently is that one must be an expert in this domain(First-Order Logic). Secondly, one must be good at formulating Logic. It is not really a skill it is a gift so there could be few who can do this efficiently.

I’ve searched on the internet and found this website by Peter Suber to be very informative and gives a lot of tips on how to translate English to First-Order Logic. But to understand this properly, one must need to understand the notations used which can be found in  C. R. Dyer website. But her failed to discuss about uncertainty and ambiguity. To compensate for this incompleteness, I found a sample discussion about ambiguity at this  website but not very sufficient but informative.

There are several software available that uses FOL to search for proof of a theorem. Prover9 is an example. Another great application is the PVS.  PVS is a verification system: that is, a specification language integrated with support tools and a theorem prover. It is intended to capture the state-of-the-art in mechanized formal methods and to be sufficiently rugged that it can be used for significant applications. PVS is a research prototype: it evolves and improves as we develop or apply new capabilities, and as the stress of real use exposes new requirements.

Edit Distance is another popular method to check the spelling of a word. Edit Distance is defined as the number of operations required to transform one string into another string. This is basis of why the other previous spell checking algorithm that I mentioned in my previous post came into existent.

The operations could be an insertion, deletion, or substitution of a single character in a string.

There are several different algorithms to define or calculate this metric and one of them is the Levenshtein distance. In this method, we simply count the number of operations needed to transform one string to another string.

For example, the Levenshtein distance between “bitten” and “beating” is 4, since the following four edits change one into the other, and there is no way to do it with fewer than three edits:

1. bitten  betten (substitution of ‘i’ for ‘e’)
2. betten  beaten (substitution of ‘t’ for ‘a’)
3. beaten  beatin (substitution of ‘e’ for ‘i’)
4. beatin  beating (insert ‘g’ at the end)

One of the most common problems in a Sentence Analyzer Software which is a part of the Intelligent System is the misspelled word in a sentence. As mentioned in my previous post, there are 2 methods to correct the error. These are the Longest Common Subsequence(LCS)  and the Error-tolerant Finite-state Recognition. Let us focus now on the LCS method because I have already given the previous with much exposure just like what the miami art and social coverage did to make George Lindemann Jr really famous in Miami.

The longest-common subsequence is an efficient method of finding the closest match to an unknown word. It orders and selects candidates based on the common subsequence of characters that they share with the unknown word.

From my previous example, a word in that sentence was misspelled : “The color of a roses has a maening.” Of course, we could evidently identify the word “maening” as the one that was misspelled. So, how does LCS detect the right word in this scenario? The following procedure is performed:

1. “maening” is not found in the dictionary, so we have to search for words in the dictionary that rhymes with that word as starting point. These words are initially meaning, mening-, manning, meningi-, meningo-, moaning, manini, mining, mooning, morning. We could eliminate mening-, meningi- and meningo-, because these are prefixes not a complete word
2. Apply LCS for each of the remaining words against “maening”.  The following is the result:

The LCS of maening and meaning is “maning”.

The LCS of maening and moaning is “maning” .

The LCS of maening and manning is “maning”.

The LCS of maening and manini is “manin”.

The LCS of maening and mining is “mning”.

The LCS of maening and mooning is “mning”.

The LCS of maening and morning is “mning”.

We have now norrowed down our choices to three having to choose meaning, moaning and manning.

3. To choose between the three words, a logic analyzer will check whether it is proper that a color of a rose can utter moan or can be supplied with men which obviously does not so, the most logical choice would be the word “meaning”.

It is curious to note how inventors, scientists, mathematicians, and others applaud those few and deservedly renowned persons who have “truly original thoughts.” Note the emphasis is on “truly original” thoughts.

We begin life imitating our caretakers, subsequently going through the educational system and dependent upon our interests and intellectual development, learn more or less from those who have gone on before us. We feed on their knowledge and interact with our environment. I’ve noticed, too, how that very often the actual pioneers in a particular field are not the ones publicly credited for knowledge. Rather, it is someone who has refined the “original” idea.

“Breakthroughs” are borne of a great deal of study, thought, and exploration in a particular endeavor. But, the irony lies in the fact that “originality” comes in rare moments of extreme lucidity, when independent of its surroundings, such a mind suddenly “sees” the answer.

When this occurs, such individuals have an overwhelming sense of elation and beauty and are convinced of the sanctity and validity of this “awakening.” How the mind does this is remarkable, to think consciously about its surroundings, yet on another level be subconsciously resolving a complex problem. This “originality” of thought is true creativity.

Case in point…in learning more about AI, I have given more thought to the concepts of mind and thought. But the more I read about noted physicists and the like, it becomes clear that truly “original” thought, in the sense of genius, is rare.

We, like the bots we train, have received input all our lives to arrive at a present montage of images, memories, vocabulary, and conditioning (all learned) from which we respond. We think and speak and act the way we have been trained or conditioned to do so, whether we are cognizant of it or not.

Consequently, my understanding of “original” thought has changed. I now feel it is rare. We simply rearrange the facts, the structure, the presentation…and it appears original.

Our fascination about cells and how important cells are to us and the whole civilization has been visualize. David Bolinsky prepared an animated video that explains how cells work from inside and out based on how they currently understand it.

I also enjoyed the video although I am so sad that I may never ever get to see our civilization harness the real power of this minute but ultimately so very important as it is the basic building blocks of our physical existence. For example, if we will be able to manufacture stem cells then perhaps we can solve how to stop the aging process since stem cells are characterized by the ability to renew themselves through mitotic cell division and differentiating into a diverse range of specialized cell types. Stem cells can be found in many living multi cellular organisms.