Potential Competitive Effects of Vertical Mergers: A How-To Guide for Practitioners

The purpose of this short article is to aid practitioners in analyzing the competitive effects of vertical and complementary product mergers. It is also intended to assist the agencies if and when they undertake revision of the 1984 U.S. Vertical Merger Guidelines. Those Guidelines are out of date and do not reflect current enforcement or economic thinking about the potential competitive effects of vertical mergers. Nor do they provide the tools needed to carry out a modern competitive effects analysis. This article is intended to partially fill the gap by summarizing the various potential competitive harms and benefits that can occur in vertical mergers and the types of economic and factual analysis of competitive effects that can be applied to those mergers during the HSR review process. The analysis in the article also identifies several legal and policy issues that the agencies would consider when they undertake the process of revising the Vertical Merger Guidelines. The Appendix contains a listing and summary of the vertical merger cases challenged by the DOJ and FTC since 1994

Making Women's Voices Count in Community Decision-Making on Land Investments

The adverse impacts of commercialization and largescale land acquisitions in the global South are often disproportionately borne by women. The loss of access to farmland and common areas hit women harder than men in many communities, and women are often excluded from compensation and benefit schemes. Women's social disadvantages, including their lack of formal land rights and generally subordinate position, make it difficult for them to voice their interests in the management and proposed allocation of community land to investors. While the development community and civil society have pushed for standards and safeguard policies that promote the meaningful involvement of rural communities generally in land acquisitions and investments, strengthening the participation of women as a distinct stakeholder group requires specific attention.This working paper examines options for strengthening women's participatory rights in the face of increasing commercial pressures on land in three countries: Mozambique, Tanzania, and the Philippines. It focuses on how regulatory reform—reforms in the rules, regulations, guidelines, and procedures that implement national land acquisition and investment laws—can promote gender equity and allow women to realize the rights afforded by national legal frameworks and international standards. The paper stems from a collaborative project between World Resources Institute and partner organizations in the three countries studied

SNS programming environment user's guide

The computing environment is briefly described for the Supercomputing Network Subsystem (SNS) of the Central Scientific Computing Complex of NASA Langley. The major SNS computers are a CRAY-2, a CRAY Y-MP, a CONVEX C-210, and a CONVEX C-220. The software is described that is common to all of these computers, including: the UNIX operating system, computer graphics, networking utilities, mass storage, and mathematical libraries. Also described is file management, validation, SNS configuration, documentation, and customer services

Sixth Annual Users' Conference

Conference papers and presentation outlines which address the use of the Transportable Applications Executive (TAE) and its various applications programs are compiled. Emphasis is given to the design of the user interface and image processing workstation in general. Alternate ports of TAE and TAE subsystems are also covered

Post-Crisis Economic Reform in Indonesia:Policy for Intervening in Ownership in Historical Pe rspective

Introduction : Economic reform in Indonesia after the Asian currency crisis is often discussed in parallel with Thailand and South Korea, which were alike hit by the crisis. It should however be noted that what happened in Indonesia was a change of political regime from authoritarianism to democracy, not just a change of government as seen in Thailand and South Korea. Indonesia' post-crisis reform should be understood in the context of dismantling of the Soeharto regime to seek a new democratic state system. In the political sphere, dramatic institutional changes have occurred since the downfall of the Soeharto government in May 1998. In comparison, changes in the economic sphere are more complex than the political changes, as the former involve at least three aspects. The first is the continuity in the basic framework of capitalist system with policy orientation toward economic liberalization. In this framework, the policies to overcome the crisis are continued from the last period of the Soeharto rule, under the support system of IMF and CGI (Consultative Group on Indonesia). The second aspect is the impact of the political regime change on the economic structure. It is considered that the structure of economic vested interests of the Soeharto regime is being disintegrated as the regime breaks down. The third aspect is the impact of the political regime change on economic policy-making process. The process of formulating and implementing policies has changed drastically from the Soeharto time. With these three aspects simultaneously at work, it is not so easy to identify which of them is the main cause for a given specific economic phenomenon emerging in Indonesia today. Keeping this difficulty in mind, this paper attempts to situate the post-crisis economic reform in the broader context of the historical development of Indonesian economic policies and their achievements. We focus in particular on the reform policies for banking and corporate sectors and resulting structural changes in these sectors. This paper aims at understanding the significance of the changes in the economic ownership structure that are occurring in the post-Soeharto Indonesia. Economic policies here do not mean macro economic policies, such as fiscal, financial and trade policies, but refer to micro economic policies whereby the government intervenes in the economic ownership structure. In Section 1, we clarify why economic policies for intervening in the ownership structure are important in understanding Indonesia. Section 2 follows the historical development of Indonesia' economic policies as specified above, throughout the four successive periods since Indonesia' independence, namely, the parliamentary democracy period, the Guided Democracy period under Soekarno, the Soeharto-regime consolidation period, and the Soeharto-regime transfiguration period2. Then we observe what economic ownership structure was at work in the pre-crisis last days of the Soeharto rule as an outcome of the economic policies. In Section 3, we examine what structural changes have taken place in the banking and corporate sectors due to the reform policies in the post-crisis and post-Soeharto Indonesia. Lastly in Section 4, we interpret the current reorganization of the economic ownership in the context of the historical transition of the ownership structure, taking account of the changes in the policy-making processes under democratization.Economic reform, Indonesia, Asian currency crisis, Economic liberalization, Economic polic y-making

An on-the-job training system at Alias PCB Technologies

Includes bibliographical references

Run-time Variability with First-class Contexts

Software must be regularly updated to keep up with changing requirements. Unfortunately, to install an update, the system must usually be restarted, which is inconvenient and costly. In this dissertation, we aim at overcoming the need for restart by enabling run-time changes at the programming language level. We argue that the best way to achieve this goal is to improve the support for encapsulation, information hiding and late binding by contextualizing behavior. In our approach, behavioral variations are encapsulated into context objects that alter the behavior of other objects locally. We present three contextual language features that demonstrate our approach. First, we present a feature to evolve software by scoping variations to threads. This way, arbitrary objects can be substituted over time without compromising safety. Second, we present a variant of dynamic proxies that operate by delegation instead of forwarding. The proxies can be used as building blocks to implement contextualization mechanisms from within the language. Third, we contextualize the behavior of objects to intercept exchanges of references between objects. This approach scales information hiding from objects to aggregates. The three language features are supported by formalizations and case studies, showing their soundness and practicality. With these three complementary language features, developers can easily design applications that can accommodate run-time changes

Simple, safe, and efficient memory management using linear pointers

Efficient and safe memory management is a hard problem. Garbage collection promises automatic memory management but comes with the cost of increased memory footprint, reduced parallelism in multi-threaded programs, unpredictable pause time, and intricate tuning parameters balancing the program's workload and designated memory usage in order for an application to perform reasonably well. Existing research mitigates the above problems to some extent, but programmer error could still cause memory leak by erroneously keeping memory references when they are no longer needed. We need a methodology for programmers to become resource aware, so that efficient, scalable, predictable and high performance programs may be written without the fear of resource leak. Linear logic has been recognized as the formalism of choice for resource tracking. It requires explicit introduction and elimination of resources and guarantees that a resource cannot be implicitly shared or abandoned, hence must be linear. Early languages based on linear logic focused on Curry-Howard correspondence. They began by limiting the expressive powers of the language and then reintroduced them by allowing controlled sharing which is necessary for recursive functions. However, only by deviating from Curry-Howard correspondence could later development actually address programming errors in resource usage. The contribution of this dissertation is a simple, safe, and efficient approach introducing linear resource ownership semantics into C++ (which is still a widely used language after 30 years since inception) through linear pointer, a smart pointer inspired by linear logic. By implementing various linear data structures and a parallel, multi-threaded memory allocator based on these data structures, this work shows that linear pointer is practical and efficient in the real world, and that it is possible to build a memory management stack that is entirely leak free. The dissertation offers some closing remarks on the difficulties a formal system would encounter when reasoning about a concurrent linear data algorithm, and what might be done to solve these problems

Team Network News, October 11, 1996

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_news/3558/thumbnail.jp