The final frontier : the integration of banking and commerce. Part 1, the likely outcome of eliminating the barrier

Exploring the potential effects of removing the legal barriers between banks and commercial firms, this article surveys economic theory as well as experience in other developed countries and in U.S. nonbank conglomerates.Banks and banking ; Banking law

ADEPT2 - Next Generation Process Management Technology

If current process management systems shall be applied to a broad spectrum of applications, they will have to be significantly improved with respect to their technological capabilities. In particular, in dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement and deploy new processes, to enable ad-hoc modifications of single process instances at runtime (e.g., to add, delete or shift process steps), and to support process schema evolution with instance migration, i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running instances. These requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and by preserving the robustness of the process management system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed and solved in the ADEPT2 Process Management System. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation process management technology which can be used in a variety of application domains

Environmental and Brownfield Liability: Relative Influence on Corporate Expansion and Relocation

Many states in America have enacted laws to encourage the development of contaminated properties. The laws attempt to do this by addressing one barrier to redevelopment, the environmental liability attached to contaminated properties. In general, the laws attempt to remove or reduce the significance of that barrier by reducing or eliminating the environmental liability risk attached to these properties. Our hypothesis was that these efforts cannot significantly encourage redevelopment because they fail to address non-environmental barriers to urban redevelopment. To determine whether this legislative focus on environmental liability is misplaced, we conducted a survey of Northeast Ohio businesses, which had decided, since the enactment of Ohio\u27s brownfields law, either to move to a new location, or expand at an existing location. The survey asked businesses to rank the relative importance to their relocation decision of environmental and non-environmental factors. The results of the survey show that numerous non-environmental factors were of equal or greater importance to the decision-maker than the environmental status of the property. Therefore, legislative efforts to encourage redevelopment of contaminated urban properties must be expanded to include non-environmental barriers to redevelopment

Information disclosure, bank performance and bank stability

Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. The purpose of this research is to identify the effects of information disclosure on commercial bank performance and stability. Specifically, the study examines the relationship between different levels of information disclosure and the subsequent impact on various measures of bank return and risk. The focus is on securitised assets and credit derivative activities, both of which were at the heart of the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008. Using a sample of 27 US bank holding companies (BHCs) for the period from June 2001 to December 2008, a significant relationship between the quantity and quality of information disclosure and bank performance and stability is observed. A \u27switching\u27 behaviour is identified, whereby performance and stability initially decrease and then improve when additional information on a bank\u27s securitisation and credit derivative activities are disclosed. This switching effect is possibly explained by economies-of-scale and a \u27learning curve\u27 effect. The results provide guidance for managing both the volume and quality of information disclosed by both bank managers and the regulatory authorities

Colloidal hydrodynamic coupling in concentric optical vortices

Optical vortex traps created from helical modes of light can drive fluid-borne colloidal particles in circular trajectories. Concentric circulating rings of particles formed by coaxial optical vortices form a microscopic Couette cell, in which the amount of hydrodynamic drag experienced by the spheres depends on the relative sense of the rings' circulation. Tracking the particles' motions makes possible measurements of the hydrodynamic coupling between the circular particle trains and addresses recently proposed hydrodynamic instabilities for collective colloidal motions on optical vortices.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Europhysics Letter

Home country effects of offshoring. A critical survey on empirical literature.

The International fragmentation of production processes is of rising importance. One part of this fragmentation involves the relocation of a production process from a home- to a new host country. This literature survey deals with the effects of such relocations on the home country. First of all, we try to conceptualize the terms and definitions most frequently used in this context which are "outsourcing", "offshore outsourcing" and "offshoring". Despite the fact that there is little textual documentation dealing directly with the phenomena of offshoring and offshore outsourcing we try to give an overview of possible empirical literature to which one can regard to. Including FDI literature we try to cover empirical literature which can provide helpful insight on the effects of a relocation to foreign countries on the home country in connection with wages, skill upgrading, prices, profits, taxes and unions. (author's abstract)Series: Discussion Papers SFB International Tax Coordinatio

A study of the ultrasonic treatment effect on microstructure and mechanical properties of commercial purity titanium

This work presents a study of the ultrasonic treatment effect on microstructure and mechanical properties of ac-received and recrystallized commercial purity titanium specimens by means XRD, EBSD and TEM. It was demonstrated that the dislocation density growth and the twins with special boundaries [sigma]7b and [sigma]11b increase within the surface grains during ultrasonic treatment depend on initial structural state of the titanium specimens. The relationship between the structural parametrs change and the surface layer microhardness value of the titanium specimens subjected to ultrasonic treatment was shown. It was found that differences in the hardened surface layer depth and the surface microhardness of ac-received and recrystallized titanium specimens result in the same yield and ultimate tensile strength increment during ultrasonic treatment

Drosophila adult muscle development and regeneration

Myogenesis is a highly orchestrated, complex developmental process by which cell lineages that are mesodermal in origin generate differentiated multinucleate muscle cells as a final product. Considerable insight into the process of myogenesis has been obtained for the embryonic development of the larval muscles of Drosophila. More recently, the postembryonic development of the muscles of the adult fly has become a focus of experimental investigation of myogenesis since specific flight muscles of the fly manifest remarkable similarities to vertebrate muscles in their development and organization. In this review, we catalog some of the milestones in the study of myogenesis in the large adult-specific flight muscles of Drosophila. The identification of mesoderm-derived muscle stem cell lineages, the characterization of the symmetric and asymmetric divisions through which they produce adult-specific myoblasts, the multifaceted processes of myoblast fusion, and the unexpected discovery of quiescent satellite cells that can be activated by injury are discussed. Moreover, the finding that all of these processes incorporate a plethora of signaling interactions with other myogenic cells and with niche-like neighboring tissue is considered. Finally, we briefly point out possible future developments in the area of Drosophila myogenesis that may lead to of new avenues of genetic research into the roles of muscle stem cells in development, disease and aging