Legal Issues in Terminations of Single-Employer Pension Plans: Beck v. PACE International Union

[Excerpt] On January 19, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in Beck v. PACE International Union. The case concerns the decision by an employer in bankruptcy proceedings to terminate its pension plans. The employer, which was both plan sponsor and administrator, had the option of terminating the plans by buying annuities for plan participants and beneficiaries or by merging the plans with a multiemployer plan. It chose the annuity option. At issue in Beck is whether the employer breached the fiduciary duty owed under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) to plan participants and beneficiaries by failing to adequately consider the merger proposal. This report discusses the Beck case and will be updated as events warrant

Correlations in superstatistical systems

We review some of the properties of higher-dimensional superstatistical stochastic models. As an example, we analyse the stochastic properties of a superstatistical model of 3-dimensional Lagrangian turbulence, and compare with experimental data. Excellent agreement is obtained for various measured quantities, such as acceleration probability densities, Lagrangian scaling exponents, correlations between acceleration components, and time decay of correlations. We comment on how to proceed from superstatistics to a thermodynamic description.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures. To appear in the proceedings of CTNEXT07 'Complexity, Metastability and Nonextensivity', Catania 1-5 July 2007, eds. S. Abe, H.J. Herrmann, P. Quarati, A. Rapisarda, C. Tsallis, AIP 200

Resilience and unemployment: A case study of East German women

This is the author's PDF version of an article published in German politics ©2005. The definitive version is available at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/gpThis article discusses unemployment in the former East Germany and the impact that exceptionally high unemployment in the new German states has had on East German women since reunification. It reflects, in particular, on the potential influence of their experience of life in the GDR in developing coping strategies to deal with the effects of unemployment, an ongoing resistance to unemployment and, most significantly, to a male-breadwinner ethos

Variations of Andrews-Beck type congruences

We prove three variations of recent results due to Andrews on congruences for $NT(m,k,n)$, the total number of parts in the partitions of $n$ with rank congruent to $m$ modulo $k$. We also conjecture new congruences and relations for $NT(m,k,n)$ and for a related crank-type function.Comment: 15 pages, typos corrected, to appear in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Application