How Laws Affect Contracts: Evidence from Yankee Bond Covenants

We examine how country-level legal and institutional differences in creditor and shareholder rights shape the use of bond covenants. Using comprehensive debt covenant information for a sample of Yankee bonds issued by firms from more than 50 countries, we find that bond contracts for firms incorporated in countries with stronger creditor rights use fewer restrictive covenants. This finding suggests that creditor rights laws substitute for debt covenants in reducing the agency cost of debt. On the other hand, bond contracts for firms incorporated in legal regimes with stronger shareholder rights include more covenants, suggesting that greater shareholder rights may actually increase the shareholder-bondholder agency conflict. These results are robust to alternative measures of creditor rights and shareholder rights. We also document that stronger firm-level corporate governance is positively related to the use of restrictive covenants even after controlling for country institutions.Covenants, contracts, creditor rights, shareholder rights, corporate governance

The Felling

Fiction by John Rot

Aftermath

Fiction by John Roth

Pathways of genetic adaptation: multistep origin of mutants under selection without induced mutagenesis in Salmonella enterica.

In several bacterial systems, mutant cell populations plated on growth-restricting medium give rise to revertant colonies that accumulate over several days. One model suggests that nongrowing parent cells mutagenize their own genome and thereby create beneficial mutations (stress-induced mutagenesis). By this model, the first-order induction of new mutations in a nongrowing parent cell population leads to the delayed accumulation of visible colonies. In an alternative model (selection only), selective conditions allow preexisting small-effect mutants to initiate clones that grow and give rise to faster-growing mutants. By the selection-only model, the delay in appearance of revertant colonies reflects (1) the time required for initial clones to reach a size sufficient to allow the second mutation plus (2) the time required for growth of the improved subclone. We previously characterized a system in which revertant colonies accumulate slowly and contain cells with two mutations, one formed before plating and one after. This left open the question of whether mutation rates increase under selection. Here we measure the unselected formation rate and the growth contribution of each mutant type. When these parameters are used in a graphic model of revertant colony development, they demonstrate that no increase in mutation rate is required to explain the number and delayed appearance of two of the revertant types

Sierra Nevada Corporation\u27s Space System

Environmental Systems and Payloads Propulsion Systems NextSTEP-2 Habitat Power & Propulsion Element (PPE) Missions Dream Chaser Cargo Syste

Plasmid copy number underlies adaptive mutability in bacteria.

The origin of mutations under selection has been intensively studied using the Cairns-Foster system, in which cells of an Escherichia coli lac mutant are plated on lactose and give rise to 100 Lac+ revertants over several days. These revertants have been attributed variously to stress-induced mutagenesis of nongrowing cells or to selective improvement of preexisting weakly Lac+ cells with no mutagenesis. Most revertant colonies (90%) contain stably Lac+ cells, while others (10%) contain cells with an unstable amplification of the leaky mutant lac allele. Evidence is presented that both stable and unstable Lac+ revertant colonies are initiated by preexisting cells with multiple copies of the F'lac plasmid, which carries the mutant lac allele. The tetracycline analog anhydrotetracycline (AnTc) inhibits growth of cells with multiple copies of the tetA gene. Populations with tetA on their F'lac plasmid include rare cells with an elevated plasmid copy number and multiple copies of both the tetA and lac genes. Pregrowth of such populations with AnTc reduces the number of cells with multiple F'lac copies and consequently the number of Lac+ colonies appearing under selection. Revertant yield is restored rapidly by a few generations of growth without AnTc. We suggest that preexisting cells with multiple F'lac copies divide very little under selection but have enough energy to replicate their F'lac plasmids repeatedly until reversion initiates a stable Lac+ colony. Preexisting cells whose high-copy plasmid includes an internal lac duplication grow under selection and produce an unstable Lac+ colony. In this model, all revertant colonies are initiated by preexisting cells and cannot be stress induced

From Paraphrase Database to Compositional Paraphrase Model and Back

The Paraphrase Database (PPDB; Ganitkevitch et al., 2013) is an extensive semantic resource, consisting of a list of phrase pairs with (heuristic) confidence estimates. However, it is still unclear how it can best be used, due to the heuristic nature of the confidences and its necessarily incomplete coverage. We propose models to leverage the phrase pairs from the PPDB to build parametric paraphrase models that score paraphrase pairs more accurately than the PPDB's internal scores while simultaneously improving its coverage. They allow for learning phrase embeddings as well as improved word embeddings. Moreover, we introduce two new, manually annotated datasets to evaluate short-phrase paraphrasing models. Using our paraphrase model trained using PPDB, we achieve state-of-the-art results on standard word and bigram similarity tasks and beat strong baselines on our new short phrase paraphrase tasks.Comment: 2015 TACL paper updated with an appendix describing new 300 dimensional embeddings. Submitted 1/2015. Accepted 2/2015. Published 6/201

Hydrostatic extrusion of tubular products

The production of quality tubular products by hydrostatic extrusion has been demonstrated to be a highly satisfactory method. The forming of tubes by the floating mandrel method has been accomplished on mild steel, aluminum alloy, and brass. This thesis describes the method, equipment design and operation, and the results obtained in the hydrostatic tube extrusion. A discussion on the advantages of the use of hydrostatic over conventional extrusion is included. The hydrostatic extrusion system designed for this study is described in detail --Abstract, page ii

Survey of The Qualifications of Kansas High School Coaches With Recommendations For Certification

The question, should athletic coaches be required to have basic qualifications, has been a very controversial one for a number of years. With the increased knowledge of youth and better education methods, has come the certification of instructors in other fields. Along with this has progressed the idea that athletic coaches should have sane type of basic requirements, because they have as their responsibility the health and welfare of our youth for a number of hours almost daily. Due to the shortage of teachers in Kansas, people in the education 2 and coaching fields have been rather reluctant to enforce any requirements for athletic coaches, therefore in many instances an instructor is hired for classroom teaching and if he has any knowledge of a sport, he is also given the job of coaching athletics. The administrators hire instructors, but the instructors are more apt to be fired for poor coaching than for poor classroom work. Athletic coaching demands more than a vague knowledge of a. sport. To be an athletic coach, a person should have at least a knowledge of the fundamentals and theory of the sport he is to coach, and also a working knowledge of how to prevent injuries and how to take care of them in case they should happen. How can a coach prepare himself in the aforementioned way? By completing a physical education major is one way. Many high school coaches of athletics in the state of Kansas have completed a physical education major or minor even thou hit is not required. The author, a physical education graduate student and a future coach, has undertaken this study in an attempt to find out whether the athletic coaching profession is a recognized profession which demands well trained and high caliber personnel and also has set standards for entrance, or is it a pseudo profession . Is there only a deceptive resemblance between the coaching profession and a bonafide profession? It would follow, that if there are no definite standards which must be met to enter the field, then coaching as a profession has only a deceptive resemblance and does not represent a bonafide profession. The men 3 entering the coaching profession surely need some type of qualifications, if they are to up- grade the profession and make their contributions to society