State Defiance of Bankruptcy Law

Bankruptcy is the principal device by which failing businesses and financially-troubled families get one last chance to reorganize their affairs back to financial health. It is also the graveyard for business failures, the place where we bury dead corporations and divide their remaining assets among their surviving creditors. In the last decade, the bankruptcy system has given seven million middle-class families a way to start over-an opportunity to save their homes from foreclosure, rid themselves of overwhelming debts, and reintegrate themselves into the workforce as productive citizens. It has also been the way that 10,000 corporations have restructured their way from failure to health, avoiding the disruptive costs of dissolution and liquidation and instead preserving jobs, stabilizing community tax bases, and fueling the longest period of economic expansion in United States history. Another 100,000 less fortunate corporations have had their funerals in bankruptcy, as their creditors have divided their assets and facilitated the redistribution of capital and labor resources that must accompany liquidation. Bankruptcy is the safety valve in America\u27s capitalist system: technical and arcane, but so important. For the last 100 years, bankruptcy has functioned efficiently, providing a vital lubricant at the rough edges of the American economy. We do not expect individuals to live life without hope and force them into the underground economy to avoid a mountain of debt. Nor do we discourage entrepreneurs from starting new ventures by holding them personally liable if that corporate venture fails. Instead, we give each individual and business person a fair chance to start over. This second chance breeds innovation and risk taking that puts the United States at the cutting edge of technological and scientific development. When our corporations experience liquidity problems, we do not allow lenders to shut them down and break them up. Rather, we permit sick businesses to file under chapter 11 to provide a breathing spell to rehabilitate themselves; if rehabilitation cannot be accomplished, we provide a forum for liquidation of the businesses for the collective good of all creditors

Comparación de dos estilos de la enseñanza del Español como una lengua extranjera

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)El método de enseñanza de uso común en el aula de hoy, el comunicativo, se ve frecuentemente con algunas ciertas incongruencias. Esto a veces llega a ser una fuente de frustración para el/la profesor/a que quiere transmitir el lenguaje de una manera efectiva, pero que lo ve difícil a causa de lo que parece, según muchos, una falta de información muy clara acerca de cómo y cuándo enseñar las formas gramaticales. Las investigaciones ofrecen puntos de vista muy opuestos: hay mucho debate acerca de si se debe enseñar la gramática en primer lugar; y si se enseña, ¿cómo se enseña para alcanzar el producto final de un grupo de estudiantes que usa la lengua con fluidez? ¿Existe alguna fórmula mágica, algún método eficaz para contestar estas preguntas a la satisfacción de los que requieren evaluar algo tan difícil de medir? En búsqueda de alguna respuesta concreta, aquí se va a investigar dos modelos comunicativos de la enseñanza de la gramática: uno que aparece frecuentemente en los libros de textos comunicativos, y uno de llegada más recién- el de la Instrucción Basada en el Procesamiento del Input (IBPI) de Bill VanPatten (1996, 2004a, 2004b, 2005). Las metas de esta investigación son dos. Primero, se va a demostrar las diferencias metodológicas entre la IBPI y la instrucción comunicativa estándar con lecciones explícitas. Además, se va a explorar la eficacia de estos dos métodos pedagógicos en la enseñanza de un punto gramatical con un estudio piloto de pequeña escala

An update on the Hirsch conjecture

The Hirsch conjecture was posed in 1957 in a letter from Warren M. Hirsch to George Dantzig. It states that the graph of a d-dimensional polytope with n facets cannot have diameter greater than n - d. Despite being one of the most fundamental, basic and old problems in polytope theory, what we know is quite scarce. Most notably, no polynomial upper bound is known for the diameters that are conjectured to be linear. In contrast, very few polytopes are known where the bound $n-d$ is attained. This paper collects known results and remarks both on the positive and on the negative side of the conjecture. Some proofs are included, but only those that we hope are accessible to a general mathematical audience without introducing too many technicalities.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figures. Many proofs have been taken out from version 2 and put into the appendix arXiv:0912.423