The world renowned Cranfield School of Management in the UK will present a scholarship to any member of the three leading IFAC accountancy bodies in Sri Lanka, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the Institute of Chartered Accountants Sri Lanka (ICASL) or the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants Sri Lanka Branch (CIMA). Full Time MBA Programme Director Sean Rickard who informed Sri Lanka of the scholarship said, “We hope the scholarship attracts candidates who will benefit from this initiative and that, with the help of the accounting bodies in Sri Lanka, it will raise Cranfield’s profile. We are extremely grateful for the support of the institutes in this. We will be reviewing the success of the programme after two years.”

ACCA Sri Lanka’s Immediate Past President, Dilshan Rodrigo, himself an alumni of the Cranfield School of Management extends his best wishes to all candidates and says, “I hope most sincerely that this initiative will signal the birth of a new generation of professional skilled managers who will add value to the corporate boardrooms of Sri Lanka.” Stating that this is truly a world class MBA ranked consistently as one of the top MBAs in Europe, he adds, “This one year full time programme is ideally suited for members in middle and senior management positions with ambitious career goals.” Rodrigo, who has continued to maintain ties with Cranfield, further reinforced the relationship once he became President of ACCA Sri Lanka, sourcing resource speakers for the ACCA National Conferences in the last two years. “Two people who played significant roles in mooting this scholarship from the Cranfield end are the former Director of the MBA Programme Professor Leo Murray who was the Keynote Speaker at our conference in 2006 and has a soft spot for Sri Lankans and Sri Sriskanthan, a Sri Lankan faculty member on the MBA programme.”

Cranfield has produced a distinguished honour roll of MBA alumni from Sri Lanka over the last two decades including Managing Director of Hatton National Bank Rajendra Theagarajah, Senior Vice President of WNS Arul Sivagananathan and Group Financial Controller of Stretchline Hasantha de Silva. Members of ICASL, ACCA and CIMA must apply directly to Cranfield School of Management, for which instructions are available on the Cranfield website ww.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/mba/, marking the application ‘Sri Lanka Scholarship’.

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Two researchers surprised the public in a convention of security during the last month of its finding a version of Microsoft Windows is more secure than Linux, an operating system competitor.

Download a copy of Windows vs. Linux study in PDF (265K).

This week, researchers released their finished report, and they contain more of a surprise: Microsoft was funded by the project long.

Researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology and Boston-based Security Innovation Inc., and defend their conclusions valid. They say they have “full control over all editorial research and analysis” on the project. His report details of its methods, and they invite other experts to examine and duplicate their work.

But their disclosure of the project, source of financing this week is agitation new debate on what has otherwise been encouraging messages for Microsoft in a field in which they fight. Researchers have been presented during last month’s RSA Conference, which attracts some of the biggest names in computer security.

“It was proof that Microsoft was better, and now the evidence unclean,” said Counterpane Internet Security founder Bruce Schneier, a long RSA Conference speaker. “The results may well, but now nobody is going to mind, because they all see, this is a prejudice that has not been revealed.”

But one of the researchers, Herbert Thompson of Security Innovation, said he and his colleagues have examined the final report, which has not gone presentation, the proper place for advertising. In addition, he said, the report presenting the detailed project research methods should be any concern about the possible prejudices.

“We knew that some of the criticism, which are collected in the report Microsoft is funding,” said Thompson. As a result, he said: “Our own method claim, it is very open and transparent. We wanted the recipe for humans, they could go further and recalculation of figures themselves. ”

The 37-page final report, published Tuesday, it is expressly Redmond on the role of the company: “This study and our analysis, under a research contract from Microsoft,” he says on the fourth page.

But during his presentation on February 16 on the RSA Conference, Thompson and Richard Ford Fellow researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology does not mention that one of the subjects of their research was part of a project financing.

Thompson said yesterday that it had decided it would be better to wait until the release of the final report on that disclosure. In part, he says, the idea was to avoid some of the divisiveness, which are often characterized by Windows vs. Linux debate.

The presentation of the RSA Conference “does not seem like the ideal place for the conduct of religious war,” said Thompson.