The Corporate Anomaly

Excerpts from the closing chapter of Professor Conrad\u27s book Corporations in Perspectiv

Manipulation of Share Priorities

Investors, who seldom read law reviews, continue to put their money into preferred stocks. In the last five reported years, approximately 3 billion of dollars worth of preferred shares have been offered to the public, or more than a third of the value of all stock offered. Can Mr. Becht and the investors both be right? Presumably the investors are directing their attention to different aspects of preferred stock than is Mr. Becht. Like other lawyers, he is considering what managements can do to preferred shareholders if they do their worst. His conclusions are based on the records of cases which have been fought through to judicial decision. The investors, if they consider anything at all, would properly direct their attention to what is likely to happen, or what has happened most frequently in the past. On this point there is little information in the law reviews or, so far as we have discovered, in financial literature. This paper reports on an attempt to find out how frequently the investor in preferred stocks is subjected to the manipulations which legal analysts have described. It is based on the record made from 1932 through 1951 by 79 preferred stocks which were listed on the New York Stock Exchange

Business Corporations in American Society

Delivered at the Second Regional Symposium on Sturcture and Governance of Corporations, sponsored by The American Law Insitute-American Bar Association Committee on Continuing Professional Education, Sea Island, Georgia, Dec. 1, 197

Elder Choice and Health Care Costs

Adapted with permission from the American Journal of Law and Medicine, Vol. 19 No. 3. While strategists struggle with the dilemmas of health care, they seem to overlook a practive that might simultaneously relive the suffering of elder patients and limit the costs of their treatment. To serve their clients\u27 fully, health care providers and insurers need to provide not only means of maximizing health, but also means of minimizing misery and the dread of misery. They can provide these means by distributing acceptable forms of advance directives to their elder patients

The Directors\u27 Dilemma

The article is based on a paper delivered by Professor Conrad at a conference of corporation executives, corporation counsel, and management consultants

Undergraduate Research Participation in Electrical Engineering

During the 1990-2003 summers the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maine will offer ten undergraduate students the opportunity to actively participate in research. Students will receive financial awards plus a subsistence allowance. The available research projects include (1) Environmental Sensors; (2) Intelligent Systems for Automation; (3) Communications Devices and Applications; (4) Motion Control; (5) Microprocessor/Instrumentation Applications; (6) Growth and Characterization of Thin Film Materials; and (7) Power Systems Applications. At least five students will come from institutions where research opportunities are limited and at least four students will be women, minorities or students with disabilities. Students chosen for the program will have displayed a high degree of initiative and independence of thought in both laboratories and course work. Student research projects are chosen to match the student\u27s interest and educational level. In addition to extensive University facilities, students will also have access to facilities at various nearby industries such as Sensor Research and Development Corporation, BIODE Corporation, Bangor Hydro Electric and Central Maine Power Companies, James River, Champion, and Scott Paper Companies, Digital Equipment Corporation, Fairchild and National Semiconductor. At the program culmination a written report and an oral seminar are required from the student. Three academic credits are awarded to the student upon satisfactory completion of the program

Was it Uruguay or Coffee? The causes of the beef jerky industry’s decline in southern Brazil (1850 – 1889)

What caused the decline of the beef jerky’s production in Brazil? The main sustenance for slaves, beef jerky was the most important industry in southern Brazil. Nevertheless, by 1850, producers were already worried that they could not compete with Uruguayan industry. Traditional interpretations impute the decline to labor markets differences in productivity, since Brazil used slaves while Uruguay had abolished slavery in 1842. Recent research also raises the possibility of a Brazilian “Dutch Disease”, resulting from the coffee exports boom. We test both hypothesis and argue that Brazilian production’s decline was associated with structural changes in demand for low quality meat. Trade protection policies created disincentives for Brazilian producers to increase productivity and diversify its cattle industry

The development and validation of a scoring tool to predict the operative duration of elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background: The ability to accurately predict operative duration has the potential to optimise theatre efficiency and utilisation, thus reducing costs and increasing staff and patient satisfaction. With laparoscopic cholecystectomy being one of the most commonly performed procedures worldwide, a tool to predict operative duration could be extremely beneficial to healthcare organisations. Methods: Data collected from the CholeS study on patients undergoing cholecystectomy in UK and Irish hospitals between 04/2014 and 05/2014 were used to study operative duration. A multivariable binary logistic regression model was produced in order to identify significant independent predictors of long (> 90 min) operations. The resulting model was converted to a risk score, which was subsequently validated on second cohort of patients using ROC curves. Results: After exclusions, data were available for 7227 patients in the derivation (CholeS) cohort. The median operative duration was 60 min (interquartile range 45–85), with 17.7% of operations lasting longer than 90 min. Ten factors were found to be significant independent predictors of operative durations > 90 min, including ASA, age, previous surgical admissions, BMI, gallbladder wall thickness and CBD diameter. A risk score was then produced from these factors, and applied to a cohort of 2405 patients from a tertiary centre for external validation. This returned an area under the ROC curve of 0.708 (SE = 0.013, p  90 min increasing more than eightfold from 5.1 to 41.8% in the extremes of the score. Conclusion: The scoring tool produced in this study was found to be significantly predictive of long operative durations on validation in an external cohort. As such, the tool may have the potential to enable organisations to better organise theatre lists and deliver greater efficiencies in care

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The Directors\u27 Dilemma

The article is based on a paper delivered by Professor Conrad at a conference of corporation executives, corporation counsel, and management consultants