A Comparative Analysis of Takeover Regulation in the European Community

An attempt is made to disperse some of the regulatory haze created by the various philosophies of corporate governance within the EC. Understanding the different systems of takeover regulation within the European countries Before attempting an acquisition can provide a company with more than just important technical knowledge about the requirements of an acquisition

Temporal and Spatial Classification of Active IPv6 Addresses

There is striking volume of World-Wide Web activity on IPv6 today. In early 2015, one large Content Distribution Network handles 50 billion IPv6 requests per day from hundreds of millions of IPv6 client addresses; billions of unique client addresses are observed per month. Address counts, however, obscure the number of hosts with IPv6 connectivity to the global Internet. There are numerous address assignment and subnetting options in use; privacy addresses and dynamic subnet pools significantly inflate the number of active IPv6 addresses. As the IPv6 address space is vast, it is infeasible to comprehensively probe every possible unicast IPv6 address. Thus, to survey the characteristics of IPv6 addressing, we perform a year-long passive measurement study, analyzing the IPv6 addresses gleaned from activity logs for all clients accessing a global CDN. The goal of our work is to develop flexible classification and measurement methods for IPv6, motivated by the fact that its addresses are not merely more numerous; they are different in kind. We introduce the notion of classifying addresses and prefixes in two ways: (1) temporally, according to their instances of activity to discern which addresses can be considered stable; (2) spatially, according to the density or sparsity of aggregates in which active addresses reside. We present measurement and classification results numerically and visually that: provide details on IPv6 address use and structure in global operation across the past year; establish the efficacy of our classification methods; and demonstrate that such classification can clarify dimensions of the Internet that otherwise appear quite blurred by current IPv6 addressing practices

The nature of gravitational singularities

The nature of gravitational singularities, long mysterious, has now become clear through a combination of mathematical and numerical analysis. As the singularity is approached, the time derivative terms in the field equations dominate, and the singularity behaves locally like a homogeneous oscillatory spacetime.Comment: received "honorable mention" in Gravity Research Foundation essay contes

Bank Scale Economies, Mergers, Concentration, and Efficiency: The U.S. Experience

There have been numerous econometric studies of bank scale and scope economies, efficiency, mergers, and market structure and performance in U.S. banking. According to the authors, these studies have come to the following conclusions: Scale: For the very smallest banks, there are scale economies that allow average costs to fall with increases in bank size, but they account for less than 5% of costs. For larger banks, constant average costs or slight diseconomies of scale prevail. Scope: There are at most relatively minor scope economies that reduce cost by 5% or less when multiple products are produced jointly. Revenues appear to be unaffected by product mix. X-Efficiency: Managerial ability to control costs is much more important than scale and scope. Banks may have costs 20% higher than the industry minimum for the same scale and product mix. Mergers: On average, mergers had no significant, predictable effect on cost and efficiency. Market Structure and Bank Performance: Greater local market concentration results in slightly lower deposit rates for small borrowers and slightly higher loan rates for small borrowers. Differences in local market concentration have virtually no effect on bank profitability. The implications of the U.S. experience for Europe are that cross-border mergers and acquisitions by banks in Europe are not like to lower costs by any significant amount. What cost improvements there are will most likely be generated by improvement in X-efficiency, or better management of resources, rather than through improved scale or scope economies. There may be more potential for efficiency gains from mergers on the revenue side than on the cost side, but these have not yet been thoroughly explored. To the degree that cross-border expansions increase local market competition, they may also yield the social benefit of slightly more favorable prices for the consumer of financial services.

Who will become dominant? Investigating the roles of individual behaviour, body size, and environmental predictability in brown trout fry hierarchies

This paper presents a study investigating performance of brown trout fry, with different behavioural characteristics, in environments differing in food predictability. Based on previous experimental findings, we hypothesised that more active individuals would be favoured by a predictable environment, as compared to an unpredictable environment, as a consequence of being more aggressive and likely to dominate the best feeding stations. This hypothesis was not supported, as more active individuals instead tended to perform better, in terms of growth and survival, in unpredictable environments. However, this effect may stem from initial size differences, as more active fish also tended to be larger. In predictable environments, no trends between activity (or size) and performance were detected. Dominant individuals could be identified based on lighter body colouration in 9 out of 10 rearing tanks, but dominance appeared not to be related to activity score. The results highlight a potential advantage of more active and/or larger fry in unpredictable environments, while performance in predictable environments is likely depending on other phenotypic characteristics. Our general experimental approach can be useful for further developments in the investigation of performance of different ethotypes of brown trout fry

Cosmo-Particle Searches for Supersymmetry at the Collider Detector at Fermilab

Some theories of particle physics are so compelling that it is worth doing a comprehensive and systematic set of experimental searches to see if they are realized in nature. Supersymmetry is one such theory. This review focuses on the motivation for a broad set of cosmology-inspired search strategies at the Tevatron and on their implementation and results at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) with the first few fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity of data.Comment: 15 Pages, 23 figure