Venture Capital on the Downside: Preferred Stock and Corporate Control

This Article takes the occasion of the simultaneous collapse of the high technology stock market and the failure of the dot-coin startups, along with the subsequent retrenchment of the venture capital business, to examine the law and economics of downside arrangements in venture capital contracts. The subject matter implicates core concerns of legal and economic theory of the firm. Debates about the separation of ownership and control, relational investing, takeover policy, the law and economics of debt capitalization, and bankruptcy reform, all grapple with the downside problem of controlling and terminating unsuccessful managers for the benefit of outside debt and equity investors (and the related upside problem of incentivizing effective but fallible managers). The factors motivating these debates also bear on venture capital contracting. But venture capital presents a special puzzle for solution. Convertible preferred stock is the dominant financial contract in the venture capital market, at least in the United States. This contrasts with other contexts in corporate finance, where preferred stock is thought to be a financing vehicle long in decline. The only mature firms that finance with preferred, which once was ubiquitous in American capital structures, tend to be firms in regulated industries having little choice in the matter. Tax rules favoring debt finance provide the primary explanation for preferred\u27s decline. But many corporate law observers would suggest dysfunctional downside contracting as a concomitant cause. Simply, preferred performs badly on the downside, where senior security contracts supposedly are at their most effective. Preferred stockholders routinely have been victimized in distress situations by opportunistic issuers who strip them of their contract rights, transferring value to the junior equity holders who control the firm\u27s management. The cumulation of bad experiences adds impetus to a wider trend in favor of debt as the mode of senior participation

Identifying tools, materials and adhesive methods used in the primary school and factors influencing the opportunities to use them

The focus of this study was to identify when tools, materials and adhesive methods were introduced into the primary school and to explore the links to the development of fine motor and manipulative skills. A significant phase in child development is located in primary school, which in Queensland schools begins in the prep year and progresses through to year six (ages five to twelve). The formalisation of the curriculum and growing independence of children’s movements means greater access to a wider variety of ideas, understandings, skills, tools and materials as the children progress through the primary school years. It is a child’s right to learn about and access new tools, materials and adhesive methods. There are expectations that cognitive and creative skills inherent in the STEAM discipline areas will become critical in formal education as part of the skills for the twenty-first century. Paralleling the growth in discipline knowledge is the continued growth of curiosity and wonder, critical and creative thinking, collaboration and communication as well as the physical development of the child, including greater control and competence in fine and gross motor skills. Teachers are responsible for providing learning experiences and opportunities that enable the child to develop the strength, dexterity and competence in the use of tools to engage with materials in safe and novel ways. This study investigated the specific tools and materials accessed throughout primary school via a quantitative survey phase, then followed by a qualitative phase using semi-structured interviews. The survey was completed by one hundred and seventy-two individual teachers (N=172). An initial analysis of this data provided questions for the targeted interviews (N=12). This study calls into question the experiences and opportunities offered to children in the primary school to learn and grow with the use of tools, materials and adhesive methods as an avenue to explore and develop their curiosity and create new and innovative products for their satisfaction and future employability opportunities. It found that the identified range of tools and materials do not match with current trends in skills and knowledge required for the twenty-first century. Teachers identified limited funding, time, professional skill development and narrowing of the curriculum as major reasons for reduction in the provision of experiences in hands-on activity. The narrowing focus of educational experiences does not reflect the spirit of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, especially article 29 UNICEF (1989), in physical development nor the practical experiences needed to enhance learning in the science, technology, arts or mathematical fields touted as the disciplines critical for the twenty- first century. The failure of education authorities to ensure effective learning opportunities are enacted has led to the inability of children to effectively develop competencies and strength in fine motor control to use tools, both traditional and modern, and that severely limits their future learning and therefore employability skills. The ability to construct, deconstruct and problem solve new products in the twenty-first century are dependent upon the ability to manipulate and use tool and materials established in primary school

A comparison point of view video modeling and video self-modeling for preschool-aged children with autism spectrum disorder

Video modeling interventions have been recognized as effective and evidence-based behavioral interventions for individuals with autism spectrum disorders; however, the effectiveness of different types of video modeling is still being explored. The present study examined the effectiveness of point of view video modeling compared to video self-modeling using a novel object retrieval task. A multiple baseline, across participants research design was used to assess four, three to four-year-old children with a primary diagnosis of autism. Although both forms of video modeling were successful in teaching the task to all of the participants, point of view video modeling resulted in faster acquisition. Possible explanations for the difference in effectiveness between the models are discussed

East Asia's dynamic development model and the Republic of Korea's experiences

No region has been more dynamic in recent years than East Asia. Despite its successful economic development, evaluations of the East Asian development model have often been capricious, shifting from"miracle"to"cronyism."How can we explain East Asia's ups and downs consistently? To respond to this challenge, it is necessary to study the progress of East Asian development and to trace the influence of Asian cultural values. This study mainly focuses on cultural aspects of economic progress and analyzes East Asia's philosophical and historical backgrounds to explain the dynamic process. East Asians believe that balance between opposite but complementary forces, Yin and Yang, will ensure social stability and progress. Through repeated rebalancing to maintain harmony, the society comes to maturity. In traditional East Asian societies, a balance was maintained between Confucianism (Yang) and Taoism, Buddhism, and other philosophies (Yin). In modern societies, the challenge is to balance traditional systems (Yang) and Western style capitalism (Yin). This East Asian development model explains the Republic of Korea's rise, fall, and recovery. Korea was a poor country until the early 1960s, during the time when spiritualism (Yang) dominated. From the 1960s through the 1980s, Korea achieved rapid growth by finding a new balance and moving toward materialism (Yin) from spiritualism (Yang). But the failure to maintain a harmonious balance between cooperative systems and collectivism (Yang) and individualism (Yin) led to major weaknesses in labor and financial markets that contributed significantly to the financial crisis in 1997. As Korea arrived at a new balance by instituting reform programs, the venture-oriented information and communication technology (ICT) industry blossomed and led to a rapid economic recovery. Since 2000, domestic financial scandals and political corruption have emerged as new social issues. Korea's next challenge is to find a new harmonization between morality (Yang) and legal frameworks (Yin).Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Ethics&Belief Systems,Earth Sciences&GIS,Decentralization,Earth Sciences&GIS,Ethics&Belief Systems,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance

Obituary − Emeritus Professor Dr John Davidson McCraw (1925−2014) MBE, MSc NZ, DSc Well, CRSNZ, FNZSSS.

John McCraw was an Earth scientist who began working as a pedologist with Soil Bureau, DSIR, then became the Foundation Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, inspiring a new generation to study and work in Earth sciences . In retirement, John McCraw was an author and historian with a special emphasis on Central Otago as well as the Waikato region. Throughout his career, marked especially by exemplary leadership, accomplished administration, and commitment to his staff and students at the University of Waikato, John McCraw also contributed to the communities in which he lived through public service organizations and as a public speaker. He received a number of awards including an MBE, fellowship, and companionship, and, uniquely, is commemorated also with a glacier, a fossil, and a museum-based research room named for him. Emeritus Professor John McCraw passed away on the 14th of December, 2014. An obituary, entitled “Dedicated to earth science and his students”, was published in the Waikato Times on the 10th of January, 2015

Spartan Daily, October 13, 1997

Volume 109, Issue 31https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9178/thumbnail.jp

Accurate and budget-efficient text, image, and video analysis systems powered by the crowd

Crowdsourcing systems empower individuals and companies to outsource labor-intensive tasks that cannot currently be solved by automated methods and are expensive to tackle by domain experts. Crowdsourcing platforms are traditionally used to provide training labels for supervised machine learning algorithms. Crowdsourced tasks are distributed among internet workers who typically have a range of skills and knowledge, differing previous exposure to the task at hand, and biases that may influence their work. This inhomogeneity of the workforce makes the design of accurate and efficient crowdsourcing systems challenging. This dissertation presents solutions to improve existing crowdsourcing systems in terms of accuracy and efficiency. It explores crowdsourcing tasks in two application areas, political discourse and annotation of biomedical and everyday images. The first part of the dissertation investigates how workers' behavioral factors and their unfamiliarity with data can be leveraged by crowdsourcing systems to control quality. Through studies that involve familiar and unfamiliar image content, the thesis demonstrates the benefit of explicitly accounting for a worker's familiarity with the data when designing annotation systems powered by the crowd. The thesis next presents Crowd-O-Meter, a system that automatically predicts the vulnerability of crowd workers to believe \enquote{fake news} in text and video. The second part of the dissertation explores the reversed relationship between machine learning and crowdsourcing by incorporating machine learning techniques for quality control of crowdsourced end products. In particular, it investigates if machine learning can be used to improve the quality of crowdsourced results and also consider budget constraints. The thesis proposes an image analysis system called ICORD that utilizes behavioral cues of the crowd worker, augmented by automated evaluation of image features, to infer the quality of a worker-drawn outline of a cell in a microscope image dynamically. ICORD determines the need to seek additional annotations from other workers in a budget-efficient manner. Next, the thesis proposes a budget-efficient machine learning system that uses fewer workers to analyze easy-to-label data and more workers for data that require extra scrutiny. The system learns a mapping from data features to number of allocated crowd workers for two case studies, sentiment analysis of twitter messages and segmentation of biomedical images. Finally, the thesis uncovers the potential for design of hybrid crowd-algorithm methods by describing an interactive system for cell tracking in time-lapse microscopy videos, based on a prediction model that determines when automated cell tracking algorithms fail and human interaction is needed to ensure accurate tracking