“Mediation-Only” Filings in the Delaware Court of Chancery: Can New Value Be Added by One of America’s Business Courts?

The following Essay by Vice Chancellor Leo Strine of the Delaware Court of Chancery advocates the enactment of legislation that authorizes the Court of Chancery to handle mediation-only cases. Such cases would be filed solely to invoke the aid of a Chancellor to mediate a business dispute between parties. By advocating this innovative dispute resolution option, the Essay embraces a new dimension of the American judicial role that allows American businesses to more efficiently solve complicated business controversies. The mediation-only device was conceived in 2001 by members of the Delaware judiciary, including Vice Chancellor Strine, in consultation with members of the Delaware Bar and the Administration of Delaware Governor Ruth Ann Minner. After this Essay was widely circulated to certain constituencies and presented at a symposium sponsored by the Duke Law Journal and the Institute for Law and Economic Policy (ILEP), legislation that contained the mediation-only device was drafted. In June 2003, with the full support of the Court of Chancery, Delaware Governor Minner secured passage of the legislation from Delaware\u27s General Assembly. The mediation-only device was enacted into law as 346 and 347 of Title 10 of the Delaware Code. To the Editors\u27 knowledge, this legislation is the first of its kind adopted in the United States

The reorganization decisions of troubled firms: exit, downscale or relocate.

Decision; Firms; Management;

A Semiotic Analysis on the Perceived Meanings of Coca Cola “Anthem” Video Commercial

This study observes the perceived meanings produced by young adult (18 to 30 years old) and older (50 to 65 years old) respondents as respondents from different age group can produce different perceived meanings from each other. The writer's finding is that in perceiving, young adult respondents tend to emphasize on Coca Cola's emotional roles. On the other hand, the older respondents emphasize on Coca Cola's physical roles

Quantum decoupling transition in a one-dimensional Feshbach-resonant superfluid

We study a one-dimensional gas of fermionic atoms interacting via an s-wave molecular Feshbach resonance. At low energies the system is characterized by two Josephson-coupled Luttinger liquids, corresponding to paired atomic and molecular superfluids. We show that, in contrast to higher dimensions, the system exhibits a quantum phase transition from a phase in which the two superfluids are locked together to one in which, at low energies, quantum fluctuations suppress the Feshbach resonance (Josephson) coupling, effectively decoupling the molecular and atomic superfluids. Experimental signatures of this quantum transition include the appearance of an out-of-phase gapless mode (in addition to the standard gapless in-phase mode) in the spectrum of the decoupled superfluid phase and a discontinuous change in the molecular momentum distribution function.Comment: 4 RevTeX pages, 1 figure, submitted to PR

Reference image selection for difference imaging analysis

Difference image analysis (DIA) is an effective technique for obtaining photometry in crowded fields, relative to a chosen reference image. As yet, however, optimal reference image selection is an unsolved problem. We examine how this selection depends on the combination of seeing, background and detector pixel size. Our tests use a combination of simulated data and quality indicators from DIA of well-sampled optical data and under-sampled near-infrared data from the OGLE and VVV surveys, respectively. We search for a figure-of-merit (FoM) which could be used to select reference images for each survey. While we do not find a universally applicable FoM, survey-specific measures indicate that the effect of spatial under-sampling may require a change in strategy from the standard DIA approach, even though seeing remains the primary criterion. We find that background is not an important criterion for reference selection, at least for the dynamic range in the images we test. For our analysis of VVV data in particular, we find that spatial under-sampling is best handled by reversing the standard DIA procedure and convolving target images to a better-sampled (poor seeing) reference image.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA