specialist microfinance institutions (MFIs). The Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) has traditionally pursued an active "developmental" role in the microfinance sector, although this has been changing. It should further reduce its developmental activities by diluting its ownership of regional development banks and taking a less hands-on role in project implementation. Conversely, it would be appr...

Alan Turing’s fundamental inquiry asking “Can Machines think?” has given rise to a wide variety of contrasting approaches to building intelligent machines. Thinking requires that a computer must know what it processes and form conscious about meaningful concepts based on which subjective mental activities (e.g. seeing, knowing, learning, judging, evaluating, deciding, reasoning, etc.) can be ca...

This paper presents a weakness in the key schedule of the AES candidate HPC (Hasty Pudding Cipher). It is shown that for the HPC version with a 128-bit key, 1 in 256 keys is weak in the sense that it has 2 equivalent keys. An efficient algorithm is proposed to construct these weak keys and the corresponding equivalent keys. If a weak key is used, it can be recovered by exhaustive search trying ...

A knot (or link) diagram is said to be everywhere equivalent if all the diagrams obtained by switching one crossing represent the same knot (or link). We classify such diagrams of a closed 3-braid.

some of the difficulties and misunderstandings that happen in accounting theory, practice, regulation and education are grounded in language and linguistics. as an illustration of this the persian equivalent of 'accounting' is linguistically analysed to reveal how a mistranslation may cause difficulties in understanding and improving iranian accounting. this paper shows how hesaabdaar...