Introduction

On February 22, 2018, the Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal hosted its Fifteenth Annual Symposium. Each year, the Journal seeks to highlight and address timely bankruptcy topics that will engage academics, practitioners, and students alike. This year\u27s Symposium featured a consumer bankruptcy panel and a corporate bankruptcy panel. The Consumer Panel explored access to consumer bankruptcy and the Corporate Panel discussed the Supreme Court\u27s recent Jevic case

Identifying and enabling core management competencies and compliance factors in high reliability organisations : a study in organisational risk management psychology and training: A small n modified grounded theory qualitative analysis

High reliability entities governed by statutory regulations are required to comply with safety guidelines and specifications. When fatalities or serious injuries occur in otherwise preventable accidents these entities are routinely exonerated from any responsibility by claiming to have ‘systemic management problems’ and their managing coalitions have been able to hide behind the ‘corporate veil’. This thesis maintains that the core managerial competencies needed to prevent preventable accidents, can be acquired through training, particularly if their mastery is mandated by a strong regulatory and compliance regime. The cases chosen for analysis revealed ten core managerial and organisational competencies and compliance as issues of concern, in a small n study Commission of Inquiry and Coronial reports. Other than ‘acts of God’, most accidents resulting in fatalities and serious injury, occur in organisations where prior knowledge of a potential accident existed and this knowledge was not utilised. Most accidents in high reliability organisations might have been prevented if the cascade of events leading to the accidents could have been interrupted. The competencies, revealed by the research as necessary to intervene in the unfolding of preventable accidents, are generally not taught in orthodox management studies programs in higher education institutions. However, when these competencies are inadequate they not only result in accidents but also cause orthodox management problems such as production delays and losses, costly litigation, increasing indemnity insurance and erosion of an organisation’s credibility in the marketplace

Foreword: International Perspectives in Outdoor Education Research

The article offers information related to papers that were published in the publication Research in Outdoor Education Volume 15. This special issue of ROE contains four articles presented at the 7th International Outdoor Education Research Conference (IOERC), plus an additional two that speak to an international audience. The 7th IOERC was hosted from July 4 – 8, 2016 at Cape Breton University (CBU), on Unama’ki (Cape Breton Island) in Nova Scotia, Canada. The foreword also acknowledges the efforts of all who contributed to the publication

Rainbow Trout Cage Culture Utilizing Different Strains, Stocking Densities, and Feeding Methods in Eastern South Dakota Dugout Ponds

Rainbow trout (Salmo gairdneri) cage culture techniques were investigated in dugouts as part of a continuing program to evaluate the potential of small-scale, landowner-based aquaculture operations. Trout raised in the study did not reach a marketable size (200 g) due to the short growing season and small size at stocking. No significant (P \u3e0.05) differences in growth were detected between stocking densities of 60, 80, 100, and 120 fish/m³. Demand feeding resulted in significantly greater length (P≤0.01), weight (P≤0.01), and relative weight (P≤0.05) than hand feeding in both years tested. Rainbow trout of the Hildebrand strain reached a significantly greater (P≤0.01) length, weight, and relative weight than those of the Growth or Kamloops strains. Hildebrand strain rainbow trout also had significantly (P≤0.01) better food conversion ratios than the other two strains. Due to the short growing season it is not economically feasible to raise rainbow trout in eastern South Dakota dugouts at this time. It is recommended that further trout culture work be centered on more heat tolerant strains

Spatial dynamics of mammals and their pathogens and parasites

In this dissertation, I explore several aspects of the ecological dynamics of mammals and their pathogens and parasites. I approach this broad topic at various scales, using Ecological Niche Models, field surveys, and theoretical simulations. I focus on two pathogens, hantavirus and plague (Yersinia pestis), and a group of parasites, fleas, and address their spatial and ecological relationships. Each of the four chapters presents a set of questions and tests hypotheses regarding the distribution of these taxa. I begin by demonstrating that plague-infected host distributions are not similar to the non-infected host distributions, suggesting that vector ecology may drive the distribution of plague in the western United States. I then show that hantavirus prevalence and flea communities are not mediated by mammalian communities across a contiguous landscape, and flea communities differ with increasing elevation. Finally, I show that re-appearance of hantavirus after a decline in host populations likely is not driven by metapopulation dynamics

Patterns of host and flea communities along an elevational gradient in Colorado

Patterns in community composition across a landscape are the result of mechanistic responses and species interactions. Interactions between hosts and parasites have additional complexity because of the contingency of host presence and interactions among parasites. To assess the role of environmental changes within host and parasites communities, we surveyed small mammals and their fleas over a dynamic elevational gradient in the Front Range in Colorado, USA. Communities were characterized using several richness and diversity metrics and these were compared using a suite of frequentist and randomization approaches. We found that flea species richness was related to the number of host species based upon rarefaction, but no patterns in richness with elevation were evident. Values of diversity measures increased with elevation, representing that small-mammal and flea communities were more even upslope, yet turnover in composition was not related to examined variables. The results suggest there are strong local effects that drive these small-mammal and flea communities, although the breadth of flea species is tied to host availability

Fast recursive ensemble convolution of haar-like features

International audienceHaar-like features are ubiquitous in computer vision, e.g. for Viola and Jones face detection or local descriptors such as Speeded-Up-Robust-Features. They are classically computed in one pass over integral image by reading the values at the feature corners. Here we present a new, general, parsing formalism for convolving them more efficiently. Our method is fully automatic and applicable to an arbitrary set of Haar-like features. The parser reduces the number of memory accesses which are the main computational bottleneck during convolution on modern computer architectures. It first splits the features into simpler kernels. Then it aligns and reuses them where applicable forming an ensemble of recursive convolution trees, which can be computed faster. This is illustrated with experiments, which show a significant speed-up over the classic approach