Other People\u27s Money: The Effects of Ownership on Compensation Strategy and Executive Pay

In this paper we develop and test hypotheses based on agency theory and managerial capitalism to address the question of whether firms\u27 compensation strategies are designed to motivate actions in the interests of equity holders or those of management. We examined differences in the organizational incentive structure of lower-level executives in management-controlled, owner controlled, and owner-managed firms. We found that when managers controlled the firm, there was pervasively weak incentive alignment for managers within the hierarchy and that, beyond base pay, they were able to extract compensation premiums through bonuses and long-term incentives, in spite of the fact that their firms did not demonstrate better economic performance than other types of firms. We were also able to demonstrate that equity holders pay substantial agency costs in management-controlled firms compared with owner-controlled firms. We end with a discussion of the organizational context for rationalizing executive compensation and the role of compensation consultants

Switzer\u27s Farewell

[Verse 1, English] Adieu dear land, With beauty teeming, Where first I rov’d a careless child; Of thee my heart Will e’er be dreaming, Thy snow clad peaks and mountains wild. Dear land! That I cherish. Oh! Long mays’t thou flourish; My mem’ry must perish E’re I forget thee. La la la la la la la la [Verse 2, English] Far from my home, I soon must wander, In stranger land, be doom’d to dweel O! best beloved! My heart grows fonder, While thus I breath my last farewell, Receive this sad token, I leave thee, heartbroken, Our parting is spoken, Belov’d one farewellLa la la la la la la la la [Verse 1, German] Von meine Berge muss I steige Wo’s gar so lieblich ist und schӧn Kann nimmer in de Heimath Bleibe muss doch zum Deindel noch mal gehn. Jo li lo li [Verse 2, German] B’hu et di Gott mei liebe En gel gibe mir no a mal die Hand gar lang’wirst mi Ja nimma she’n den I roas In a frem dea Land, Jo li o l

Central stars of planetary nebulae: The white dwarf connection

This paper is focused on the transition phase between central stars and white dwarfs, i.e. objects in the effective temperature range 100,000 - 200,000 K. We confine our review to hydrogen-deficient stars because the common H-rich objects are subject of the paper by Ziegler et al. in these proceedings. We address the claimed iron-deficiency in PG1159 stars and [WC] central stars. The discovery of new Ne VII and Ne VIII lines in PG1159 stars suggests that the identification of O VII and O VIII lines that are used for spectral classification of [WCE] stars is wrong. We then present evidence for two distinct post-AGB evolutionary sequences for H-deficient stars based on abundance analyses of the He-dominated O(He) stars and the hot DO white dwarf KPD0005+5106. Finally, we report on evidence for an H-deficient post-super AGB evolution sequence represented by the hottest known, carbon/oxygen-atmosphere white dwarf H1504+65 and the recently discovered carbon-atmosphere "hot DQ" white dwarfs.Comment: Invited review, Proceedings IAU Symp. 283, Planetary Nebulae: An Eye to the Future, A. Manchado, L. Stanghellini, & D. Schoenberner, eds., Cambridge University Pres

On the mod-p cohomology of Out(F2(p−1))

AbstractWe study the mod-p cohomology of the group Out(Fn) of outer automorphisms of the free group Fn in the case n=2(p−1) which is the smallest n for which the p-rank of this group is 2. For p=3 we give a complete computation, at least above the virtual cohomological dimension of Out(F4) (which is 5). More precisely, we calculate the equivariant cohomology of the p-singular part of outer space for p=3. For a general prime p>3 we give a recursive description in terms of the mod-p cohomology of Aut(Fk) for k≤p−1. In this case we use the Out(F2(p−1))-equivariant cohomology of the poset of elementary abelian p-subgroups of Out(Fn)

Multi-color pyrometer for materials processing in space

The design, construction and calibration of a computer-linked multicolor pyrometer is described. The device was constructed for ready adaptation to a spacecraft and for use in the control of thermal processes for manufacturing materials in space. The pyrometer actually uses only one color at a time, and is relatively insensitive to uncertainties in the heated object's emissivity because the product of the color and the temperature has been selected to be within a regime where the radiant energy emitted from the body increases very rapidly with temperature. The instrument was calibrated and shown to exceed its design goal of temperature measurements between 300 and 2000 C, and its accuracy in the face of imprecise knowledge of the hot object's emissivity was demonstrated

Observations of Diffuse Ultraviolet Emission from Draco

We have studied small scale (2 arcmin) spatial variation of the diffuse UV radiation using a set of 11 GALEX deep observations in the constellation of Draco. We find a good correlation between the observed UV background and the IR 100 micron flux, indicating that the dominant contributor of the diffuse background in the field is the scattered starlight from the interstellar dust grains. We also find strong evidence of additional emission in the FUV band which is absent in the NUV band. This is most likely due to Lyman band emission from molecular hydrogen in a ridge of dust running through the field and to line emissions from species such as C IV (1550 A) and Si II (1533 A) in the rest of the field. A strong correlation exists between the FUV/NUV ratio and the FUV intensity in the excess emission regions in the FUV band irrespective of the optical depth of the region. The optical depth increases more rapidly in the UV than the IR and we find that the UV/IR ratio drops off exponentially with increasing IR due to saturation effects in the UV. Using the positional details of Spitzer extragalactic objects, we find that the contribution of extragalactic light in the diffuse NUV background is 49 +/- 13 photon units and is 30 +/- 10 photon units in the FUV band.Comment: 30 pages, 13 figures, Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), November 2010, v723 issu

BluePyOpt: Leveraging open source software and cloud infrastructure to optimise model parameters in neuroscience

At many scales in neuroscience, appropriate mathematical models take the form of complex dynamical systems. Parametrising such models to conform to the multitude of available experimental constraints is a global nonlinear optimisation problem with a complex fitness landscape, requiring numerical techniques to find suitable approximate solutions. Stochastic optimisation approaches, such as evolutionary algorithms, have been shown to be effective, but often the setting up of such optimisations and the choice of a specific search algorithm and its parameters is non-trivial, requiring domain-specific expertise. Here we describe BluePyOpt, a Python package targeted at the broad neuroscience community to simplify this task. BluePyOpt is an extensible framework for data-driven model parameter optimisation that wraps and standardises several existing open-source tools. It simplifies the task of creating and sharing these optimisations, and the associated techniques and knowledge. This is achieved by abstracting the optimisation and evaluation tasks into various reusable and flexible discrete elements according to established best-practices. Further, BluePyOpt provides methods for setting up both small- and large-scale optimisations on a variety of platforms, ranging from laptops to Linux clusters and cloud-based compute infrastructures. The versatility of the BluePyOpt framework is demonstrated by working through three representative neuroscience specific use cases

Studying the spatial distribution of interstellar dust

The spacial distribution of interstellar dust reflects both interstellar dynamics and the processes which form and destroy dust in the interstellar medium (ISM). The IRAS survey, because of its high sensitivity to thermal emission from dust in the IR, provides new approaches to determining the spatial distribution of dust. The initial results are reported of an attempt to use the IRAS data to probe the spatial distribution of dust - by searching for thermal emission from dust in the vicinity of bright stars. These results show that this technique (which relies on finding IR emission associated with randomly selected stars) can ultimately be used to study the distribution of dust in the ISM. The density of the cloud producing the IR emission may be derived by assuming that the dust is at its projected distance from the star and that the heating is due to the star's (known) radiation field. The heating radiation is folded into a grain model, and the number of emitting grains adjusted to reproduce the observed energy distribution. It is noted that this technique is capable in principle of detecting dust densities much lower than those typical of the cirrus clouds