Corporate Dissolution in New York: Liberalizing the Rights of Minority Shareholders

(Excerpt) This article will focus upon the addition to the arsenal of minority shareholders\u27 rights evidenced by sections 1104-a and 1118 of the BCL and their unique application in Topper. Section I examines the law of involuntary dissolution as applied to minority shareholders in New York close corporations prior to the adoption of sections 1104-a and 1118. Section II undertakes an analysis of the recently enacted statutes and the reasonable expectations test enunciated in Topper. Section III considers the potential shortcomings of the statutory provisions and suggests provisions which may alleviate several of the problems relating to this area

Corporate Dissolution in New York: Liberalizing the Rights of Minority Shareholders

(Excerpt) This article will focus upon the addition to the arsenal of minority shareholders\u27 rights evidenced by sections 1104-a and 1118 of the BCL and their unique application in Topper. Section I examines the law of involuntary dissolution as applied to minority shareholders in New York close corporations prior to the adoption of sections 1104-a and 1118. Section II undertakes an analysis of the recently enacted statutes and the reasonable expectations test enunciated in Topper. Section III considers the potential shortcomings of the statutory provisions and suggests provisions which may alleviate several of the problems relating to this area

Condominium Unit Real Estate Tax Assessment Problems

(Excerpt) To meet ever-increasing demands for public services, local governments have relied upon taxation of real property as a primary source of revenue.\u27 Since most realty is subject to these exactments, the number of individuals affected is substantial. The statutory framework for realty taxation has been complicated by the emergence of the condominium form of property ownership. Usually, a condominium owner holds title to his particular apartment or unit in fee simple. In addition, he has an undivided interest in the land and all other parts of the building held for the common use or benefit of the unit owners. Although the form which the condominium assumes may be residential or commercial, freehold or leasehold, the individual holders possess real property interests subject to taxation. The condominium presents taxing authorities with a two-phase assessment problem. The value of the overall property must first be appraised, a task made difficult by the scarcity of relevant market data. Once the assessed value is determined, the tax liability must be equitably apportioned among the unit holders. Should the authorities fail to make fair assessments, the unit holders must, in turn, choose the most effective means of mounting a tax protest

Within-Neighborhood Patterns and Sources of Particle Pollution: Mobile Monitoring and Geographic Information System Analysis in Four Communities in Accra, Ghana

BACKGROUND: Sources of air pollution in developing country cities include transportation and industrial pollution, biomass and coal fuel use, and resuspended dust from unpaved roads. OBJECTIVES: Our goal was to understand within-neighborhood spatial variability of particulate matter (PM) in communities of varying socioeconomic status (SES) in Accra, Ghana, and to quantify the effects of nearby sources on local PM concentration. METHODS: We conducted 1 week of morning and afternoon mobile and stationary air pollution measurements in four study neighborhoods. PM with aerodynamic diameters RESULTS: In our measurement campaign, the geometric means of PM2.5 and PM10 along the mobile monitoring path were 21 and 49 microg/m3, respectively, in the neighborhood with highest SES and 39 and 96 microg/m3, respectively, in the neighborhood with lowest SES and highest population density. PM2.5 and PM10 were as high as 200 and 400 microg/m3, respectively, in some segments of the path. After adjusting for other factors, the factors that had the largest effects on local PM pollution were nearby wood and charcoal stoves, congested and heavy traffic, loose dirt road surface, and trash burning. CONCLUSIONS: Biomass fuels, transportation, and unpaved roads may be important determinants of local PM variation in Accra neighborhoods. If confirmed by additional or supporting data, the results demonstrate the need for effective and equitable interventions and policies that reduce the impacts of traffic and biomass pollution

Genetic variance in fitness indicates rapid contemporary adaptive evolution in wild animals

Funding: Hoge Veluwe great tits: the NIOO-KNAW, ERC, and numerous funding agencies; Wytham great tits: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, ERC, and the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).The rate of adaptive evolution, the contribution of selection to genetic changes that increase mean fitness, is determined by the additive genetic variance in individual relative fitness. To date, there are few robust estimates of this parameter for natural populations, and it is therefore unclear whether adaptive evolution can play a meaningful role in short-term population dynamics. We developed and applied quantitative genetic methods to long-term datasets from 19 wild bird and mammal populations and found that, while estimates vary between populations, additive genetic variance in relative fitness is often substantial and, on average, twice that of previous estimates. We show that these rates of contemporary adaptive evolution can affect population dynamics and hence that natural selection has the potential to partly mitigate effects of current environmental change.PostprintPeer reviewe

Condominium Unit Real Estate Tax Assessment Problems

(Excerpt) To meet ever-increasing demands for public services, local governments have relied upon taxation of real property as a primary source of revenue.\u27 Since most realty is subject to these exactments, the number of individuals affected is substantial. The statutory framework for realty taxation has been complicated by the emergence of the condominium form of property ownership. Usually, a condominium owner holds title to his particular apartment or unit in fee simple. In addition, he has an undivided interest in the land and all other parts of the building held for the common use or benefit of the unit owners. Although the form which the condominium assumes may be residential or commercial, freehold or leasehold, the individual holders possess real property interests subject to taxation. The condominium presents taxing authorities with a two-phase assessment problem. The value of the overall property must first be appraised, a task made difficult by the scarcity of relevant market data. Once the assessed value is determined, the tax liability must be equitably apportioned among the unit holders. Should the authorities fail to make fair assessments, the unit holders must, in turn, choose the most effective means of mounting a tax protest

Correlation and studies of habitat selection: problem, red herring or opportunity?

With the advent of new technologies, animal locations are being collected at ever finer spatio-temporal scales. We review analytical methods for dealing with correlated data in the context of resource selection, including post hoc variance inflation techniques, ‘two-stage’ approaches based on models fit to each individual, generalized estimating equations and hierarchical mixed-effects models. These methods are applicable to a wide range of correlated data problems, but can be difficult to apply and remain especially challenging for use–availability sampling designs because the correlation structure for combinations of used and available points are not likely to follow common parametric forms. We also review emerging approaches to studying habitat selection that use fine-scale temporal data to arrive at biologically based definitions of available habitat, while naturally accounting for autocorrelation by modelling animal movement between telemetry locations. Sophisticated analyses that explicitly model correlation rather than consider it a nuisance, like mixed effects and state-space models, offer potentially novel insights into the process of resource selection, but additional work is needed to make them more generally applicable to large datasets based on the use–availability designs. Until then, variance inflation techniques and two-stage approaches should offer pragmatic and flexible approaches to modelling correlated data