“Profit, People, Planet” Perverted: Holding Benefit Corporations Accountable to Intended Beneficiaries

For-profit social entrepreneurship is a steadily growing movement. As part of this movement, numerous states have enacted legislation authorizing the incorporation of benefit corporations, a new for-profit corporate form. In addition to generating profit for shareholders, benefit corporations must “create” a “public benefit.” The mandate that a for-profit corporation pursue a humanitarian cause in addition to generating profit is a significant departure from shareholder primacy: the maxim that the sole purpose of a corporation is to generate return on investment for its shareholders. Although this legislation is a necessary and progressive evolution in corporate law, the current benefit corporation form lacks meaningful accountability and oversight mechanisms. It does little to deter bad actors from taking advantage of socially conscious consumers willing to pay a premium for ethically sourced goods and services by incorporating and operating sham benefit corporations. This Note argues for amending benefit corporation legislation to allow state attorneys general to oversee the creation of public benefits. An oversight and enforcement mechanism would root out and deter bad actors from perverting the purpose of the benefit corporation form, and it would hold benefit corporations accountable to their intended beneficiaries

The Puzzle of the Antebellum Fertility Decline in the United States: New Evidence and Reconsideration

All nations that can be characterized as developed have undergone the demographic transition from high to low levels of fertility and mortality. Most presently developed nations began their fertility transitions in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. The United States was an exception. Evidence using census-based child-woman ratios suggests that the fertility of the white population of the United States was declining from at least the year 1800. By the end of the antebellum period in 1860, child-woman ratios had declined 33 percent. There is also indication that the free black population was experiencing a fertility transition. This transition was well in advance of significant urbanization, industrialization, and mortality decline and well in advance of every other presently developed nation with the exception of France. This paper uses census data on county-level child-woman ratios to test a variety of explanations on the antebellum American fertility transition. It also uses micro data from the IPUMS files for 1850 and 1860. A number of the explanations, including the land availability hypothesis, the local labor market-child default hypothesis, and the life cycle saving hypothesis, are consistent with the data, but nuptiality, not one of the usual explanations, emerges as likely very important.

American Indian Mortality in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Impact of Federal Assimilation Policies on a Vulnerable Population

Under the urging of late nineteenth-century humanitarian reformers, U.S. policy toward American Indians shifted from removal and relocation efforts to state-sponsored attempts to "civilize" Indians through allotment of tribal lands, citizenship, and forced education. There is little consensus, however, whether and to what extent federal assimilation efforts played a role in the stabilization and recovery of the American Indian population in the twentieth century. In this paper, we rely on a new IPUMS sample of the 1900 census of American Indians and census-based estimation methods to investigate the impact of federal assimilation policies on childhood mortality. We use children ever born and children surviving data included in the censuses to estimate childhood mortality and [responses to] several questions unique to the Indian enumeration [including tribal affiliation, degree of "white blood", type of dwelling, ability to speak English, and whether a citizen by allotment] to construct multivariate models of child mortality. The results suggest that mortality among American Indians in the late nineteenth century was very high - approximately 62% [standardize as % or percent throughout] higher than that for the white population. The impact of assimilation policies was mixed. Increased ability to speak English was associated with lower child mortality, while allotment of land in severalty was associated with higher mortality. The combined effect was a very modest four percent [as above] decline in mortality. As of 1900, the government campaign to assimilate Indians had yet to result in a significant decline in Indian mortality while incurring substantial economic and cultural costs.

A 100-element planar Schottky diode grid mixer

The authors present a Schottky diode grid mixer suitable for mixing or detecting quasi-optical signals. The mixer is a planar bow-tie grid structure periodically loaded with diodes. A simple transmission line model is used to predict the reflection coefficient of the grid to a normally incident plane wave. The grid mixer power handling and dynamic range scales as the number of devices in the grid. A 10-GHz 100-element grid mixer has shown an improvement in dynamic range of 16.3 to 19.8 dB over an equivalent single-diode mixer. The conversion loss and noise figure of the grid are equal to those of a conventional mixer. The quasi-optical coupling of the input signals makes the grid mixer suitable for millimeter-wave and submillimeter-wave applications by eliminating waveguide sidewall losses and machining difficulties. The planar property of the grid potentially allows thousands of devices to be integrated monolithically

Legionella pneumophila: an aquatic microbe goes astray

Legionella pneumophila is naturally found in fresh water were the bacteria parasitize within protozoa. It also survives planctonically in water or biofilms. Upon aerosol formation via man-made water systems, L. pneumophila can enter the human lung and cause a severe form of pneumonia, called Legionnaires’ disease. The pathogenesis of Legionnaires’ disease is largely due to the ability of L. pneumophila to invade and grow within macrophages. An important characteristic of the intracellular survival strategy is the replication within the host vacuole that does not fuse with endosomes or lysosomes. In recent times a great number of bacterial virulence factors which affect growth of L. pneumophila in both macrophages and protozoa have been identified. The ongoing Legionella genome project and the use of genetically tractable surrogate hosts are expected to significantly contribute to the understanding of bacterium–host interactions and the regulation of virulence traits during the infection cycle. Since person-to-person transmission of legionellosis has never been observed, the measures for disease prevention have concentrated on eliminating the pathogen from water supplies. In this respect detection and analysis of Legionella in complex environmental consortia become increasingly important. With the availability of new molecular tools this area of applied research has gained new momentum

Reef-top currents in vicinity of Heron Island boat harbour, Great Barrier Reef, Australia: 1. Overall influence of tides, winds and waves.

Heron Island is a small coral cay on the western end of a large platform reef in the southern Great Barrier Reef, Australia. In 1967 a boat access channel and a small mooring basin were dredged between the western reef-rim and the island. Since then reef-top currents have flowed out through this channel, removing sediment from the reef-flat and the island’s beaches. The mooring basin and access channel were enlarged in 1987. Offreef waves (hourly) and reef-top currents (at 10 minute intervals) were measured on either side of the island during a twelve month period (17 March 1996 – 18 March 1997). An initial analysis of the experimental data gathered during this period is presented in this report. Under mild (tidally dominated) conditions, maximum reef-top currents of about 0.3 m/s occurred during ebb spring tides when flow on the reef-flat was controlled by weir action at the harbour bund walls. There were four current reversals per tidal cycle on the northern reef-flat and two on the southern reef-flat. As offreef wave heights increased, waves breaking on the reef-rims generated wave-generated flows towards the boat harbour and these became sufficiently strong to reverse and eventually suppress the tidal flow on the reef-top around the island. The wave height required to reverse the tidal flow increased with increasing tidal range. When offreef wave heights reached 3 m there were unidirectional flows from the reef-rims into the boat harbor throughout the tidal cycle. When tidal ranges were small, the magnitudes of the wave-generated currents increased approximately linearly with increasing wave heights. A second report provides a more detailed analysis of this data set

Transition to Turbulence in Shear above the Tropopause

2000 FLORIDA AVE NW, WASHINGTON, USA, DC, 2000

A 6.5 GHz-11.5 GHz source using a grid amplifier with a twist reflector

The authors have constructed and tested an oscillator using a grid amplifier with external feedback from a twist reflector. The twist reflector serves two functions; it changes the output polarization to match the input, and its position sets the feedback phase. This permits a wider tuning range than has been possible with previous grid oscillators. The source could be continuously tuned from 8.2 GHz to 11.0 GHz by moving the twist reflector. By moving the polarizer and mirror in the twist reflector independently, a 1.8-to-1 frequency range from 6.5 GHz to 11.5 GHz was achieved. The peak effective radiated power was 6.3 W at 9.9 GHz