The effectiveness of shareholder dispute resolution in private companies under UK companies legislation: an evaluation

The aim of the research is to evaluate the effectiveness of the legal means of resolving shareholder disputes in private companies. The principal means are ex ante contracting in shareholders' agreements and court-based dispute resolution mechanism in sections 994-996 of the Companies Act 2006. Private companies are often formed on the basis of mutual trust deriving from personal relationships between shareholders. The breakdown of these relationships termed 'relational breakdown' commonly precipitates squeeze-out behaviour that causes disputes over the terms of exit. Ex ante contracting in shareholders' agreements cannot eliminate the underlying factors that cause relational breakdown, but can only mitigate the effects of relational breakdown by qualifying the powers of the majority and providing an exit to the minority on fair terms. Moreover, due to a range of limitations associated with ex ante contracting in shareholders' agreements, shareholders need recourse to a legal mechanism such as sections 994-996 of the Companies Act 2006 (formerly sections 459-461 of the Companies Act 1985) to resolve their disputes. In a Consultation Paper and subsequent Report published in October 1997 the Law Commission criticised the length, cost and complexity of proceedings under these provisions which were said to diminish their effectiveness as a tool for resolving shareholder disputes. After the Law Commission Report there have been significant developments both in terms of substantive law and procedure which have sought to streamline the remedy and make it more effective. The present research is the first attempt to consider from a legal perspective the effectiveness of sections 994-996 of the Companies Act 2006 as a court-based dispute resolution mechanism, in the decade since the Law Commission produced its Report on shareholders' remedies

Cooperative three- and four- player quantum games

A cooperative multi-player quantum game played by 3 and 4 players has been studied. Quantum superposed operator is introduced in this work which solves the non-zero sum difficulty in previous treatment. The role of quantum entanglement of the initial state is discussed in details.Comment: 7 pages with 3 figures. To appear in Physics Letters

Public health care system, quasi-experimental study: Acceptance and attitude to implicate clinical services

A six-month longitudinal intervention arm study with a pre-post cross-sectional questionnaire-based survey was performed. A 3-phase objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) design was utilized for evaluation of acceptance and attitude of pharmacy students towards clinical pharmacy services. The pre-OSCE survey showed increased disagreement with the role of clinical pharmacists, compared to a significant positive shift in attitude towards their services in the healthcare team after 6 months of the trial. Responses improved for awareness (the current healthcare system could be improved by involving pharmacists, p < 0.02) and positive attitude categories (doctors and nurses would be happy to welcome the services of competent clinical pharmacists as part of their team, p < 0.01) in addition to competency (pharmacists have sufficient clinical training to advise doctors and nurses, p < 0.01). The predictive model suggested a strong positive effect on patient interaction, medical information tasks, clinical decisions on drug-related problems (DRPs), and communication with healthcare professionals (R2 = 0.41, F = 1.51, p < 0.001)

Prestressed concrete targets under high rate of loading

© The Author(s) 2018. Prestressed concrete is highly being preferred as material for construction in the case of strategic and relevant structures such as, for instance, nuclear containments, armor deposits, shelters, bridges, and military bunkers. It is highly durable, fire and corrosion resistant, and non-porous. In order to study the influence of prestressing on the mechanics of deformation, energy absorption capacity, and failure modes of concrete targets, finite element simulations have been carried out using hard steel bullets and compared with the experiments carried out by the authors earlier. Prestressed concrete targets of plan size 450 mm × 450 mm and thickness of 80 mm were impacted by 0.5-kg hard steel projectiles. The concrete was designed to obtain an unconfined compressive strength of 48 MPa. An initial stress of 10% magnitude of compressive strength was induced by 4-mm-diameter high-tensile-strength (1700 MPa) steel wires in prestressed concrete targets. A grid of 8-mm-diameter steel bars was inserted in the reinforced and prestressed concrete targets to enable the straight comparison between these concretes. The prestressing in concrete has been found to be effective in reducing the volume of scabbed material as well as the ballistic resistance of prestressed concrete targets. The ballistic limit of prestressed concrete with 10% induced stress was found to be, respectively, 14% higher than that of the plain concrete target and 10.2% higher than the reinforced concrete. Failure modes predicted through finite element simulations were found in agreement with that of the actual results

Potentials of molecular based breeding to enhance drought tolerance in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)

The ability of plant to sustain itself in limited water conditions is crucial in the world of agriculture. To breed for drought tolerance in wheat, it is essential to clearly understand drought tolerant mechanisms. Conventional breeding is time consuming and labor intensive being inefficient with low heritability traits like drought tolerance. Recent progress made in the field of genomics enabling us to access genes linked with drought tolerance has enhanced our understanding of this complex phenomenon. The purpose of this review paper was to briefly overview the accomplishments in molecular breeding for drought tolerance in wheat. Thus, by knowing the genetics of drought tolerance and identifying quantitative trait loci (QTLs) linked with DNA markers will help wheat breeders to develop high yielding drought tolerant cultivars.Key words: Triticum aestivum L, drought tolerance, QTLs, marker assisted selection (MAS)

Proposal for optically realizing quantum game

We present a proposal for optically implementing the quantum game of the two-player quantum prisoner's dilemma involving nonmaximally entangled states by using beam splitters, phase shifters, cross-Kerr medium, photon detector and the single-photon representation of quantum bits.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Comparative study of peroxidase purification from apple and orange seeds

This paper reports the isolation and purification of peroxidase from low cost material; moreover, no significant work has been done on the isolation and purification of peroxidase from such cost effective sources (apple and orange seeds). Peroxidases had attracted considerable interest in recent years because of their activities towards a wide variety of chromogenic substances. Peroxidase activity in crude extract of apple and orange seeds was measured by recording a spectrophotometric value. Partial purification of crude enzyme extract was done by ammonium sulfate precipitation and ion exchange chromatography. It was observed that after partial purification, the enzyme activity was increased as compared to crude enzyme extract. Peroxidase from orange seed was purified up to 17.17 fold with specific activity of 10.17 U/mg and that from apple seed was 6.82 fold with specific activity of 7.53 U/mg after diethyl amino ethyl (DEAE) cellulose chromatography. It was shown that orange seed peroxidase had more activity than apple seed peroxidase in crude extract and each step of purification. Further purification was obtained through gel filtration chromatography by using sephadex-G-75 column. Peroxidase from orange and apple seeds got purified up to 30.64 and 8.34 fold with their specific activity of 18.16 and 9.20 U/mg, respectively. It is more evident that peroxidase is the most heat stable enzyme; therefore, it is concluded that it may be potentially useful for industrial purposes.Key words: Apple and orange seeds, extraction, peroxidase, purification

N-player quantum games in an EPR setting

The $N$-player quantum game is analyzed in the context of an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) experiment. In this setting, a player's strategies are not unitary transformations as in alternate quantum game-theoretic frameworks, but a classical choice between two directions along which spin or polarization measurements are made. The players' strategies thus remain identical to their strategies in the mixed-strategy version of the classical game. In the EPR setting the quantum game reduces itself to the corresponding classical game when the shared quantum state reaches zero entanglement. We find the relations for the probability distribution for $N$-qubit GHZ and W-type states, subject to general measurement directions, from which the expressions for the mixed Nash equilibrium and the payoffs are determined. Players' payoffs are then defined with linear functions so that common two-player games can be easily extended to the $N$-player case and permit analytic expressions for the Nash equilibrium. As a specific example, we solve the Prisoners' Dilemma game for general $N \ge 2$. We find a new property for the game that for an even number of players the payoffs at the Nash equilibrium are equal, whereas for an odd number of players the cooperating players receive higher payoffs.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figure