Reviving Reliance

This Article explores the misalignment between the disclosure requirements of the federal securities laws and the private causes of action available to investors to enforce those requirements. Historically, federally mandated disclosures were designed to allow investors to set an appropriate price for publicly traded securities. Today’s disclosures, however, also enable stockholders to participate in corporate governance and act as a check on managerial misbehavior. To enforce these requirements, investors’ chief option is a claim under the general antifraud statute, section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. But courts are deeply suspicious of investors’ attempts to use the Act to hold corporations liable for false statements related to governance. As this Article demonstrates, judicial skepticism can be traced to the functional elimination of the element of reliance from private investors’ claims. Without the element of reliance, courts cannot discriminate between deception, which section 10(b) prohibits, and poor managerial decisionmaking, to which section 10(b) does not speak. Doctrines that courts developed to distinguish between the two now have the perverse effect of devaluing disclosures intended to facilitate shareholder participation in corporate governance. More troublingly, they enforce a normative viewpoint that shareholders do not, or should not, have interests beyond the short-term maximization of a firm’s stock price. This interpretation of shareholder preferences undermines modern regulatory initiatives that employ shareholders as a restraining force on antisocial corporate conduct. This Article proposes that courts adopt new interpretations of section 10(b) that reestablish the centrality of reliance. By doing so, courts can facilitate shareholders’ participation in the corporate governance structure and reward investors who inhabit the role of corporate monitor

Evaluation of a simple tagging method to monitor the growth of endangered species of seahorse

Identification of an individual seahorse is important for captive breeding and conservation studies. A simple and cost-effective tagging method was devised to suit the rigid body structure and small fins of Hippocampus kuda. The first generation sexually matured individuals (452 numbers) were tagged using plastic strips tied around the neck. No significant differences (P > 0.05) in growth between the tagged and untagged groups were noted. All the tags persisted for one year without any perceptible changes in sexual and social behaviour

Species-specific proteins in closely-related seahorses

Non-denatured polyacrylanlide gel shows the respective species-specific characteristics on the muscle protein of' Hippocampus kuda and N. trirnacrtiahs. Two proteins; of molecular weight 66.8 and 39.8 kDa were found exclusively in 11. kuda. These constituted about 69.8 and 16.2% respectively of its protein. In M. trintucuirtus, two other specific proteins with molecular weight of 674.3 and 50.5 kDa were recorded, which constituted 46.0 and 7.5% respectively of its protein. These species-specific proteins are important for species identification, which paves avenues for further characterization and upgrading of the available information on seahorse taxonomy

Efficient Dynamic Approximate Distance Oracles for Vertex-Labeled Planar Graphs

Let $G$ be a graph where each vertex is associated with a label. A Vertex-Labeled Approximate Distance Oracle is a data structure that, given a vertex $v$ and a label $\lambda$, returns a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation of the distance from $v$ to the closest vertex with label $\lambda$ in $G$. Such an oracle is dynamic if it also supports label changes. In this paper we present three different dynamic approximate vertex-labeled distance oracles for planar graphs, all with polylogarithmic query and update times, and nearly linear space requirements

Verification of Hierarchical Artifact Systems

Data-driven workflows, of which IBM's Business Artifacts are a prime exponent, have been successfully deployed in practice, adopted in industrial standards, and have spawned a rich body of research in academia, focused primarily on static analysis. The present work represents a significant advance on the problem of artifact verification, by considering a much richer and more realistic model than in previous work, incorporating core elements of IBM's successful Guard-Stage-Milestone model. In particular, the model features task hierarchy, concurrency, and richer artifact data. It also allows database key and foreign key dependencies, as well as arithmetic constraints. The results show decidability of verification and establish its complexity, making use of novel techniques including a hierarchy of Vector Addition Systems and a variant of quantifier elimination tailored to our context.Comment: Full version of the accepted PODS pape