Beyond the Corporate Veil a commentary on the approach of the South African Courts to the question of lifting the corporate veil, with particular reference to a tax-avoidance based structure in common use in South Africa at this time

"The Court of Appeal has declared that the formation of the respondent company and the agreement to take over the business of the appellant were a scheme "contrary to the true intent and meaning of the Companies Act". I know of no means of ascertaining what is the intent and meaning of the Companies Act except by examining its provisions and finding what regulations it has imposed as a condition of trading with limited liability .... we have to interpret the law, not make it." Salomon v Salomon & Co Ltd, per Herschell, LJ. Thus the starting point of the court in this seminal case (which has been followed ever since in regard to corporate personality) was to interpret the law as they found it in the Act - if the formalities had been complied with a separate judicial person came into being: 2 "The Company is at law a different person altogether from the subscribers to the memorandum; and, although it may be that after incorporation the business is precisely the same as before, and the same persons are managers, and the same hands receive the profits company is not in law the agent of the subscribers or trustee for them"

At The End Of A Beautiful Day

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/1177/thumbnail.jp

Magnetic resonance elastography studies of the musculoskeletal system

Manual palpation is a clinical methodology to determine tissue mechanical properties, such as viscoelasticity (i.e. stiffness and viscosity), which is a primary indicator of the development of tissue pathology. Advancing medical imaging technology means it is now possible to reliably non-invasively measure tissue stiffness in-vivo through the use of Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE). Muscle pathology is traditionally assessed in the clinic through measurement of muscle morphology and function (e.g. Maximum Voluntary Contraction [MVC]). However, MRE has been shown to be an effective method to study muscle pathology and may offer novel biomechanical insight into, for example, muscle engagement, injury and recovery, which cannot be obtained through conventional testing. The aim of this thesis is to perform a series of exploratory investigations to determine the precision, sensitivity and reliability of the muscle MRE technique for studying the relationships between muscle mechanical properties and morphology. This is especially relevant to the clinical application of the technique which is investigated in two pilot studies. Specific interests are to investigate whether muscle MRE offers reliable insight regarding muscle ageing, injury and loading and has potential clinical application such as in monitoring recovery after time in Critical Care and the effects of Total Knee Replacement (TKR) in patients with osteoarthritis of the knee. This thesis begins with a review of musculoskeletal biomechanics, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and MRE research to date. A limited number of clinical musculoskeletal elastography research studies were identified and which motivated several investigations conducted in this thesis. A musculoskeletal MRE analysis pipeline was developed to accurately acquire and analyse MRE data and consists of image co-registration, quantification of muscle mechanical (i.e. stiffness) and morphological properties (i.e. muscle cross-sectional area and a shape measure referred to as circularity), which may be related to clinical measures and relevant functional indices such as MVC. The pipeline includes quality control procedures to detect image artefacts and provides results which can be potentially reliably compared with those of other research groups. The first two investigations to be reported concern the study of changes in the mechanical properties of muscles that have occurred passively. In particular, the effects of ageing are studied together with the effect of time spent in Critical Care and subsequent rehabilitation. The effect of ageing was primarily evident in the quadriceps muscle group which decreased significantly in cross-sectional area and significantly increased in stiffness. The effects produced by immobilisation were also predominantly in the quadriceps but here a significant decrease in muscle cross-sectional area was associated with a decrease in muscle stiffness. The next three exploratory studies all involve an intervention or manipulation in terms of an eccentric exercise protocol which produces muscle injury as well as muscle loading. The former was based on a re-analysis of previously published work with the aim of determining whether there was a significant difference in muscle stiffness in subjects in whom injury was shown to be associated with muscle oedema on T2-weighted MR images. Here the new pixel-wise analysis of the data showed that although the two groups of subjects performed a similar workload, subjects who developed oedema may have used a different combination of muscles to perform the task, and especially may have additionally recruited medial muscles rather than efficiently co-contracting the quadriceps and hamstrings. A loading study revealed a significant relationship between the stiffness and shape (i.e. circularity) of especially rectus femoris and first steps were taken to investigate whether this relationship may show insight into the recovery of patients following TKR surgery. Taken together these exploratory investigations demonstrate the precision, sensitivity and viability of the muscle MRE technique and its promise for potential clinical application

Airborne lidar for woodland habitat quality monitoring: exploring the significance of lidar data characteristics when modelling organism-habitat relationships

Structure is a fundamental physical element of habitat, particularly in woodlands, and hence there has been considerable recent uptake of airborne lidar data in forest ecology studies. This paper investigates the significance of lidar data characteristics when modelling organism-habitat relationships, taking a single species case study in a mature woodland ecosystem. We re-investigate work on great tit (Parus major) habitat, focussing on bird breeding data from 1997 and 2001 (years with contrasting weather conditions and a demonstrated relationship between breeding success and forest structure). We use a time series of three lidar data acquisitions across a 12-year period (2000–2012). The lidar data characteristics assessed include time-lag with field data (up to 15 years), spatial sampling density (average post spacing in the range of 1 pulse per 0.14 m2–17.77 m2), approach to processing (raster or point cloud), and the complexity of derived structure metrics (with a total of 33 metrics assessed, each generated separately using all returns and only first returns). Ordinary least squares regression analysis was employed to investigate relationships between great tit mean nestling body mass, calculated per brood, and the various canopy structure measures from all lidar datasets. For the 2001 bird breeding data, the relationship between mean nestling body mass and mean canopy height for a sample area around each nest was robust to the extent that it could be detected strongly and with a high level of statistical significance, with relatively little impact of lidar data characteristics. In 1997, all relationships between lidar structure metrics and mean nestling body mass were weaker than in 2001 and more sensitive to lidar data characteristics, and in almost all cases they were opposite in trend. However, whilst the optimum habitat structure differed between the two study years, the lidar-derived metrics that best characterised this structure were consistent: canopy height percentiles and mean overstorey canopy height (calculated using all returns or only first returns) and the standard deviation of canopy height (calculated using all returns). Overall, our results suggest that for relatively stable woodland habitats, ecologists should not feel prohibited in using lidar data to explore or monitor organism–habitat relationships because of perceived data quality issues, as long as the questions investigated, the scale of analysis, and the interpretation of findings are appropriate for the data available