The Benefits of a Benefit Corporation Statute for Alaska Native Corporations

In the forty-five years since the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) created the Alaska Native regional corporation and village corporations, shareholders and outside observers have criticized the statute’s use of the traditional corporate form as inappropriate for Alaska Native communities. The emergence of the benefit corporation entity across the United States may soon mean that Native corporations have a promising alternative. If Alaska joins the majority of states that have adopted this new legal entity, Native corporations would have an opportunity to significantly reform their corporate governance within the existing framework of ANCSA. This Note will argue that Alaska should enact a benefit corporation statute because it would give Native corporations a legal entity that better fits their purpose. As benefit corporations, Native corporations would commit to pursuing public benefits, and their directors would be required to consider factors beyond shareholder value in making decisions

Improving particle filter performance by smoothing observations

This article shows that increasing the observation variance at small scales can reduce the ensemble size required to avoid collapse in particle filtering of spatially-extended dynamics and improve the resulting uncertainty quantification at large scales. Particle filter weights depend on how well ensemble members agree with observations, and collapse occurs when a few ensemble members receive most of the weight. Collapse causes catastrophic variance underestimation. Increasing small-scale variance in the observation error model reduces the incidence of collapse by de-emphasizing small-scale differences between the ensemble members and the observations. Doing so smooths the posterior mean, though it does not smooth the individual ensemble members. Two options for implementing the proposed observation error model are described. Taking discretized elliptic differential operators as an observation error covariance matrix provides the desired property of a spectrum that grows in the approach to small scales. This choice also introduces structure exploitable by scalable computation techniques, including multigrid solvers and multiresolution approximations to the corresponding integral operator. Alternatively the observations can be smoothed and then assimilated under the assumption of independent errors, which is equivalent to assuming large errors at small scales. The method is demonstrated on a linear stochastic partial differential equation, where it significantly reduces the occurrence of particle filter collapse while maintaining accuracy. It also improves continuous ranked probability scores by as much as 25%, indicating that the weighted ensemble more accurately represents the true distribution. The method is compatible with other techniques for improving the performance of particle filters.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

The correlation between inbreeding and performance in the Hanoverian sport horse : a thesis presented for the degree Master of Science in Animal Science at Massey University

The following content is not available due to proprietary nature. Please contact the author. "Chapter 12 Appendices and Annova – see CD attached.”The aim of this thesis was to examine the relationship between inbreeding and performance in the Hanoverian Sport Horse. A total of 84,724 hanoverian horses born between the years 1990 and 2009 were used for the study, of which 78,907 had their own performance records. Pedigree records were traced back as far as possible, with a maximum of 37 generations used. There was 100% completeness of pedigree up to the grandparent generation for all horses. The majority of horses (80%) had completeness of pedigree past the sixth generation. Inbreeding were calculated using two methods; the Meuwissen method and the van Raden Method. Both methods gave identical results (100% fit). As aquantitative measure of performance, the Integrated Estimated Breeding Value (iEBV), using both breed and competition results was used. The Evaluation was carried out using the BLUP (Best Linear Unbiased Prediction) Multitrait Repeatability Animal Model. Two different GLM were run with the inbreeding coefficient (IBC) modelled as either a continuous variable or as a fixed class of five differing levels of inbreeding (IBC=0.00; 0<IBC≤0.01: 0.01<IBC≤0.02; 0.02<IBC≤0.05; 0.05<IBC). Age and Sex were included as fixed effects within the model. All subgroups in both dressage and jumping data, with either fixed effect or linear covariate for the IBC, generated a similar result. Due to the large sample size there was a significant (p<0.001) relationship between inbreeding (IBC) and performance (iEBV). In dressage horses there was a significant positive relationship in all categories while in jumping horses there was a significant negative relationship in all catagories. However, the effect of inbreeding on iEBV explained only ±1% of the variance in the models. The models were simultaneously adjusted for the bias of the confounding factor of sex which also accounted for ±1% of the variance. The majority of variance in iEBV is due to the year cohort effect which accounts for ± 95%. The low level of inbreeding (±1.5%) and lack of biological effect on iEBV indicate that inbreeding is not a problem in the Hannoverian horse

Viewpoints of elementary principals and their teachers concerning teachers' meetings as they are conducted within schools in five Massachusetts towns

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Sleep as a victim of the “time crunch” – A multinational analysis

As reflected in many popular and academic writings, there is general concern that contemporary life is becoming ruled by a societal “time crunch”, in which work and family pressures make daily life more hectic. One implica-tion of this condition is that sleep time has been reduced in order to accommodate these pressures. While this view seems supported by recent national surveys in which Americans now claim to get less than 7 hours of sleep a night, it is not supported by sleep times reported in 2003-07 ATUS time diaries. If anything, time-diary sleep hours are higher than in previous decades, approaching 60 hours a week in both the US and Canada. Similar levels of sleep hours are found in 18 European counties, with most of those having trend data also showing no decrease in sleep over recent decades, with the exceptions of Germany and Japan. The major predictors of sleep time in US and Canada are work hours and, increasingly, education. The US-Canada finding that women sleep slightly more than men is mainly a reflection of these two predictors. Higher sleep for women is also found in more Northern and Western European countries, but not in more Eastern and Southern Europe; moreover, men in Japan, the country with by far the least sleep report more diary hours of sleep than women.Sleep time, time-diary sleep hours, men, women

Global Capitalism Theory and the Emergence of the Transnational Elites

The class and social structure of developing nations has undergone profound transformation in recent decades as each nation has incorporated into an increasingly integrated global production and financial system. National elites have experienced a new fractionation. Emergent transnationally-oriented elites grounded in globalized circuits of accumulation compete with older nationally-oriented elites grounded in more protected and often state-guided national and regional circuits. This essay focuses on structural analysis of the distinction between these two fractions of the elite and the implications for development. I suggest that nationally-oriented elites are often dependent on the social reproduction of at least a portion of the popular and working classes for the reproduction of their own status, and therefore on local development processes however so defined whereas transnationally-oriented elites are less dependent on such local social reproduction. The shift in dominant power relations from nationally- to transnationally-oriented elites is reflected in a concomitant shift to a discourse from one that defines development as national industrialization and expanded consumption to one that defines it in terms of global market integration.Elites, development, globalization, transnational, capitalism, crisis

Operator-Valued Frames for the Heisenberg Group

A classical result of Duffin and Schaeffer gives conditions under which a discrete collection of characters on $\mathbb{R}$, restricted to $E = (-1/2, 1/2)$, forms a Hilbert-space frame for $L^2(E)$. For the case of characters with period one, this is just the Poisson Summation Formula. Duffin and Schaeffer show that perturbations preserve the frame condition in this case. This paper gives analogous results for the real Heisenberg group $H_n$, where frames are replaced by operator-valued frames. The Selberg Trace Formula is used to show that perturbations of the orthogonal case continue to behave as operator-valued frames. This technique enables the construction of decompositions of elements of $L^2(E)$ for suitable subsets $E$ of $H_n$ in terms of representations of $H_n$

Non-contact temperature measurement of a falling drop

The 105 meter drop tube at NASA-Marshall has been used in a number of experiments to determine the effects of containerless, microgravity processing on the undercooling and solidification behavior of metals and alloys. These experiments have been limited, however, because direct temperature measurement of the falling drops has not been available. Undercooling and nucleation temperatures are calculated from thermophysical properties based on droplet cooling models. In most cases these properties are not well known, particularly in the undercooled state. This results in a large amount of uncertainty in the determination of nucleation temperatures. If temperature measurement can be accomplished then the thermal history of the drops could be well documented. This would lead to a better understanding of the thermophysical and thermal radiative properties of undercooled melts. An effort to measure the temperature of a falling drop is under way. The technique uses two color pyrometry and high speed data acquisition. The approach is presented along with some preliminary data from drop tube experiments. The results from droplet cooling models is compared with noncontact temperature measurements

New predictions for Λb→Λc\Lambda_b\to\Lambda_c semileptonic decays and tests of heavy quark symmetry

The heavy quark effective theory makes model independent predictions for semileptonic $\Lambda_b \to \Lambda_c$ decays in terms of a small set of parameters. No subleading Isgur-Wise function occurs at order $\Lambda_{\rm QCD}/m_{c,b}$, and only two sub-subleading functions enter at order $\Lambda_{\rm QCD}^2/m_c^2$. These features allow us to fit the form factors and decay rates calculated up to order $\Lambda_{\rm QCD}^2/m_c^2$ to LHCb data and lattice QCD calculations. We derive a significantly more precise standard model prediction for the ratio ${\cal B}(\Lambda_b\to \Lambda_c \tau\bar\nu) / {\cal B}(\Lambda_b\to \Lambda_c \mu\bar\nu)$ than prior results, and find the expansion in $\Lambda_{\rm QCD}/m_c$ well-behaved, addressing a long-standing question. Our results allow more precise and reliable calculations of $\Lambda_b\to \Lambda_c\ell\bar\nu$ rates, and are systematically improvable with better data on the $\mu$ (or $e$) modes.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figure