Investment Advice and the Fraud Rules

Every day thousands of Americans are assaulted by mail, telephone, and personal contact with advice on how to invest their money for capital gains, often with dazzling reminders of the opportunity for great profits. If the advice is good, they may indeed one day have their treasure ship which will send their children to college or provide a round-the-world trip after retirement. If the advice is bad, they will of course learn by experience. But many of them will have to apply their lesson to a second inheritance or twenty years\u27 savings. The quality of investment advice is therefore a subject with serious human implications, and implications, too, for the health of a national economy which depends on investment by the masses. This article aims to tell something about who gives the advice, how it is formulated, and what legal controls govern its sincerity and competence

Corporate Social-Reform, the Business Judgment Rule and Other Considerations

In recent years there has been a well-publicized movement to induce corporations to use their economic wealth and power to achieve social-reform, rather than carry on as usual by professing to be guided only by profit-making. Social change is sought by allowing shareholders to make, or influence directly, those management decisions which significantly affect the quality of life in this country. This approach has found support on college campuses and among the commentators in this field. The Securities Exchange Commission and the courts also have endorsed this approach by legitimating such a role for shareholders despite the fact that it is contrary to one of the most fundamental rules underlying the law of corporate governance in this country

Developing reading-writing connections; the impact of explicit instruction of literary devices on the quality of children's narrative writing

The purpose of this collaborative schools-university study was to investigate how the explicit instruction of literary devices during designated literacy sessions could improve the quality of children's narrative writing. A guiding question for the study was: Can children's writing can be enhanced by teachers drawing attention to the literary devices used by professional writers or “mentor authors”? The study was conducted with 18 teachers, working as research partners in nine elementary schools over one school year. The research group explored ways of developing children as reflective authors, able to draft and redraft writing in response to peer and teacher feedback. Daily literacy sessions were complemented by weekly writing workshops where students engaged in authorial activity and experienced writers' perspectives and readers' demands (Harwayne, 1992; May, 2004). Methods for data collection included video recording of peer-peer and teacher-led group discussions and audio recording of teacher-child conferences. Samples of children's narrative writing were collected and a comparison was made between the quality of their independent writing at the beginning and end of the research period. The research group documented the importance of peer-peer and teacher-student discourse in the development of children's metalanguage and awareness of audience. The study suggests that reading, discussing, and evaluating mentor texts can have a positive impact on the quality of children's independent writing

A 'Multiple Lenses' Approach to Policy Change: the Case of Tobacco Policy in the UK

This article examines a period of rapid policy change following decades of stability in UK tobacco. It seeks to account for such a long period of policy stability, to analyse and qualify the extent of change, and to explain change using a 'multiple lenses' approach. It compares the explanatory value of policy network models such as punctuated equilibrium and the advocacy coalition framework, with models stressing change from 'above and below' such as multi-level governance and policy transfer. A key finding is that the value of these models varies according to the narrative of policy change that we select. The article challenges researchers to be careful about assuming the nature of policy change before embarking on explanation. While the findings of the case study may vary with other policy areas in British politics, the call for clarity and lessons from multiple approaches are widely applicable

The limits of corporate social responsibility : Techniques of neutralization, stakeholder management and political CSR

Since scholarly interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has primarily focused on the synergies between social and economic performance, our understanding of how (and the conditions under which) companies use CSR to produce policy outcomes that work against public welfare has remained comparatively underdeveloped. In particular, little is known about how corporate decision-makers privately reconcile the conflicts between public and private interests, even though this is likely to be relevant to understanding the limitations of CSR as a means of aligning business activity with the broader public interest. This study addresses this issue using internal tobacco industry documents to explore British-American Tobacco’s (BAT) thinking on CSR and its effects on the company’s CSR Programme. The article presents a three-stage model of CSR development, based on Sykes and Matza’s theory of techniques of neutralization, which links together: how BAT managers made sense of the company’s declining political authority in the mid-1990s; how they subsequently justified the use of CSR as a tool of stakeholder management aimed at diffusing the political impact of public health advocates by breaking up political constituencies working towards evidence-based tobacco regulation; and how CSR works ideologically to shape stakeholders’ perceptions of the relative merits of competing approaches to tobacco control. Our analysis has three implications for research and practice. First, it underlines the importance of approaching corporate managers’ public comments on CSR critically and situating them in their economic, political and historical contexts. Second, it illustrates the importance of focusing on the political aims and effects of CSR. Third, by showing how CSR practices are used to stymie evidence-based government regulation, the article underlines the importance of highlighting and developing matrices to assess the negative social impacts of CSR

Mu2e Technical Design Report

The Mu2e experiment at Fermilab will search for charged lepton flavor violation via the coherent conversion process mu- N --> e- N with a sensitivity approximately four orders of magnitude better than the current world's best limits for this process. The experiment's sensitivity offers discovery potential over a wide array of new physics models and probes mass scales well beyond the reach of the LHC. We describe herein the preliminary design of the proposed Mu2e experiment. This document was created in partial fulfillment of the requirements necessary to obtain DOE CD-2 approval.Comment: compressed file, 888 pages, 621 figures, 126 tables; full resolution available at http://mu2e.fnal.gov; corrected typo in background summary, Table 3.