Teaching Bankruptcy Valuations to Law Students and Other Unnatural Acts

We often measure that which we can as opposed to that in which we are most interested, and fail to appreciate the difference between the two. Experts may aid a trier of fact in measuring fair market value, fair value, investment value, or some other measure of value; however, courts make determinations with regard to a legal standard, not a financial standard. For example, “fair valuation” may be used for determinations of insolvency or the “fair and equitable” rule may be used for determinations of chapter 11 cramdown plan confirmation disputes. Other measures of value may be used in determining the amount of a claim or to satisfy other financial tests in bankruptcy. There is a difference between employing common valuation standards using traditional and well-accepted techniques and fashioning equitable relief demanded by bankruptcy law. Through the lenses of the “insolvency” and “fair and equitable” tests in the bankruptcy process, I suggest that principles of equity offer a competing vision in approaching valuation issues where an expert provides significant input in an overall assessment of the totality of circumstances, the bedrock principle of exercises of equitable remedies. In building the case, I challenge the body of criticisms directed at experts and courts in their construction of valuation models, susceptibility to hindsight bias, and manipulations of assumptions and inputs. I also modestly reject the notion that a market approach is less speculative than an income approach. Both approaches require considerable judgment—one more transparent and the other more opaque. Both approaches must be considered in the robust context of unique disputes, and their use may be driven by the application of specific statutory language. Throughout this Article, I identify various assumptions and inputs to classic valuation approaches and methods that have been rightly contested or unnecessarily confused. The process often requires an expert and a court to make tradeoffs between degrees of (i) relevance and reliability and (ii) opaqueness and transparency. In the end, valuations in bankruptcy disputes look less like lessons in finance, and more like classic fashionings of equitable relief in a court of equity, a needed reminder that finance is the handmaiden of the court and not its jailer

Exhibiting Climate Change: An Examination of the Thresholds of Arts-Sciences Collaborations in the Context of Learning for a Sustainable Future

This dissertation probes the cultural and political thresholds of arts–sciences collaborations in the context of the development of public pedagogy about a sustainable response to climate change. The dissertation is an in-depth case study of a civil society group called Cape Farewell that is organizing collaborations between contemporary artists and climate scientists. Since 2003, Cape Farewell has been leading expeditions to the Arctic, the Andes, and the Scottish Islands and Faroes that bring artists, scientists, educators, and other creative communicators together to innovate public pedagogy about a sustainable response to climate change. Drawing on sustainability theory, Jacques Rancière’s theory of political aesthetics, Grant Kester’s theory of artistic collaboration, phenomenological curriculum theory, and Tim Ingold’s notion of wayfinding, the dissertation describes these expeditionary field studies as forms of ecological wayfinding. By following the wayfaring path of learners alongside materials and shared metaphors from field studies to cultural productions, I describe the multifaceted dimensions of ecological wayfinding in relation to arts-based research, curriculum, and pedagogy. Building on Elizabeth Ellsworth’s theory of pedagogical pivot points, I describe the potential of the climate exhibitions, art works, films, websites, and concerts to produce visionary possibilities for a sustainable future on the planet. These public pedagogies variously negotiate the political thresholds of neoliberalism, the cultural thresholds of Romanticism, and disciplinary thresholds in higher education. Central to my argument is that we need to develop place-based and interdisciplinary sustainability curricula and pedagogy in postsecondary art education in order to foster more meaningful forms of collaboration across the arts and the sciences and alongside socioecological places. Finally, we need to envision an ethics of sustainability on the scale of the cosmos rather than the market via the intimate expenditure of bodies-in-motion and the generosity, empathy, and hospitality that can be inspired by emergent forms of relational and site-specific art practice

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

Personal Finance: Economic Citizenship and Financial form in the Contemporary Novel

My dissertation, “Personal Finance: Economic Citizenship and Financial Form in the Contemporary Novel” theorises the novel’s engagement with the post-1970s financialisation of the economy from the ground up. Contrary to the dominant perception of finance as a turn away from the solidity of industry and production in favour of a realm of hyperbolic abstraction, finance capital emerges in this project as a thickly material concern. My writing follows the money, tracking the way that finance is routed through social forms: urban planning, philanthrocapitalism, migrant access to citizenship in global cities, and the fleshy finance of corporate nanotechnology. These material forms do not replace the abstract form of finance capital; rather, the two must be theorised together. Nowhere is this articulated more eloquently than in the contemporary novel. As a form that has emerged to mediate the relationship between the individual and the social, investigating the broadest economic shifts with the sensitive instrument of character, the contemporary novel is both an essential archive and a highly ambivalent response to new financial realities. A second and related claim of “Personal Finance” concerns the complexity of theorising a mode of capital that is both deeply national and rapaciously global. Critical work on finance in the humanities slips swiftly from identifying the lived experience of finance in a US context to arguing that this financialised form of citizenship will play out identically across the globe. Countering this claim informs both the archive and the methodology of my project. My dissertation reads a set of contemporary US novels that trace the felt experiences of the global economy within North America alongside a set of contemporary novels from the wider Anglophone world. Building on recent theoretical work in literature and economics and urban studies, the emphasis of “Personal Finance” throughout is to unsettle hegemonic claims about the financial, the global, and the national through the material and affective archive of the contemporary novel

Fuzzy Techniques for Decision Making 2018

Zadeh's fuzzy set theory incorporates the impreciseness of data and evaluations, by imputting the degrees by which each object belongs to a set. Its success fostered theories that codify the subjectivity, uncertainty, imprecision, or roughness of the evaluations. Their rationale is to produce new flexible methodologies in order to model a variety of concrete decision problems more realistically. This Special Issue garners contributions addressing novel tools, techniques and methodologies for decision making (inclusive of both individual and group, single- or multi-criteria decision making) in the context of these theories. It contains 38 research articles that contribute to a variety of setups that combine fuzziness, hesitancy, roughness, covering sets, and linguistic approaches. Their ranges vary from fundamental or technical to applied approaches

ECOS 2012

The 8-volume set contains the Proceedings of the 25th ECOS 2012 International Conference, Perugia, Italy, June 26th to June 29th, 2012. ECOS is an acronym for Efficiency, Cost, Optimization and Simulation (of energy conversion systems and processes), summarizing the topics covered in ECOS: Thermodynamics, Heat and Mass Transfer, Exergy and Second Law Analysis, Process Integration and Heat Exchanger Networks, Fluid Dynamics and Power Plant Components, Fuel Cells, Simulation of Energy Conversion Systems, Renewable Energies, Thermo-Economic Analysis and Optimisation, Combustion, Chemical Reactors, Carbon Capture and Sequestration, Building/Urban/Complex Energy Systems, Water Desalination and Use of Water Resources, Energy Systems- Environmental and Sustainability Issues, System Operation/ Control/Diagnosis and Prognosis, Industrial Ecology

A Kleinian analysis of Lamentations

The Book of Lamentations is incoherent, illogical, unstable and contradictory, with disjunctive and unitary tendencies. There have been many attempts to define its tensions. They all have something interesting to say, but some are more persuasive than others. I read Lamentations as a lament over the severing of an individual’s bond with his God, which reprises the severing of the bond with his mother and loss of his idealised good object. Of Lamentations’ various tensions, I highlight the tension between form and content – a highly controlling (unitary) acrostic form and a highly labile (disjunctive) emotional content. I relate these to Melanie Klein’s ‘depressive’ and ‘paranoid-schizoid’ positions, two configurations of early experience, which are constructed from the psychological mechanisms of projection and introjection. I consider Klein’s view that art is an attempt to repair the internal object, which arises in the guilt of the depressive position. I also consider the work of art critic Adrian Stokes, who draws heavily on Klein, and for the first time extend his celebrated distinction between modelling and carving into poetry, arguing that the acrostic is a literary version of stone. I contend that Lamentations is a form of survival literature whose acrostic performs several important, complex, unconscious, functions related to the Poet’s need to control and repair the sources of his emotional pain. The tension between the unstable shapelessness of emotional pain found in its content and the firm acrostic lines of the recreated object found in its acrostic form are a literary equivalent of the tension between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. The acrostic becomes a substitute object, which needs to be carefully preserved. While the conscious hopefulness of Lamentations has been over-read, the Poet’s use of the acrostic to draw a perfect and undamaged breast makes Lamentations a powerful, unconscious, expression of hope

Reports of Planetary Geology and Geophysics Program, 1990

Abstracts of reports from NASA's Planetary Geology and Geophysics Program are presented. Research is documented in summary form of the work conducted. Each report reflects significant accomplishments within the area of the author's funded grant or contract