“Working the System”—British American Tobacco's Influence on the European Union Treaty and Its Implications for Policy: An Analysis of Internal Tobacco Industry Documents

Katherine Smith and colleagues investigate the ways in which British American Tobacco influenced the European Union Treaty so that new EU policies advance the interests of major corporations, including those that produce products damaging to health

Is the meiofauna a good indicator for climate change and anthropogenic impacts?

Our planet is changing, and one of the most pressing challenges facing the scientific community revolves around understanding how ecological communities respond to global changes. From coastal to deep-sea ecosystems, ecologists are exploring new areas of research to find model organisms that help predict the future of life on our planet. Among the different categories of organisms, meiofauna offer several advantages for the study of marine benthic ecosystems. This paper reviews the advances in the study of meiofauna with regard to climate change and anthropogenic impacts. Four taxonomic groups are valuable for predicting global changes: foraminifers (especially calcareous forms), nematodes, copepods and ostracods. Environmental variables are fundamental in the interpretation of meiofaunal patterns and multistressor experiments are more informative than single stressor ones, revealing complex ecological and biological interactions. Global change has a general negative effect on meiofauna, with important consequences on benthic food webs. However, some meiofaunal species can be favoured by the extreme conditions induced by global change, as they can exhibit remarkable physiological adaptations. This review highlights the need to incorporate studies on taxonomy, genetics and function of meiofaunal taxa into global change impact research

The determinants of genetic diversity in butterflies

This is the final version. Available on open access from Nature Research via the DOI in this recordUnder the neutral theory, genetic diversity is expected to increase with population size. While comparative analyses have consistently failed to find strong relationships between census population size and genetic diversity, a recent study across animals identified a strong correlation between propagule size and genetic diversity, suggesting that r-strategists that produce many small offspring, have greater long-term population sizes. Here we compare genome-wide genetic diversity across 38 species of European butterflies (Papilionoidea), a group that shows little variation in reproductive strategy. We show that genetic diversity across butterflies varies over an order of magnitude and that this variation cannot be explained by differences in current abundance, propagule size, host or geographic range. Instead, neutral genetic diversity is negatively correlated with body size and positively with the length of the genetic map. This suggests that genetic diversity is determined both by differences in long-term population size and the elect of selection on linked sites.Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)European Research CouncilNatural Environmental Research Council (NERC)Institute of Evolutionary Biology at Edinburgh Universit

The credit crunch: the collapse of Lehman Brothers - and a Hong Kong scheme to handle Lehman claims

Anthony Connerty (Barrister and Chartered Arbitrator) looks at the Lehman collapse - considering the background to the collapse of Lehman Brothers investment bank, claims related to the collapse, an example of a credit crunch claim, a criminal prosecution and a Hong Kong mediation and arbitration scheme aimed at dealing speedily with Lehman Brothers-related claims. Versions of this article have been published in Hong Kong in the January 2010 edition of Asian Dispute Review and in London in the July 9, 2010 edition of New Law Journal. Published in Amicus Curiae – Journal of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by SALS at the IALS (Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London)

Student leadership development

An increasing amount of leadership development programs (LDPs) is being promoted to enhance individual skills and to foster the development of leadership capabilities, particularly in response to today’s volatile, complex and ambiguous business world. Investment in soft skills and leadership development also enables industries to prosper in the long term as management and leadership skill gaps are reduced.With the anticipated tourism and hotel development growth across the world, there is a rising need for managers who have the right skills and capabilities to help businesses and organisations achieve sustainable business performance. As industry practitioners look for graduates with the right mix of hard and soft skills, tourism and hospitality educators should further nurture the development of such skills to allow their graduates to prosper. The aim of this exploratory research is to determine leadership development needs of students studying tourism and hospitality courses, and inform the development of student leadership program initiatives, encouraging individual and industry growth

A mechanism for supporting collective innovation: the open contract-based challenge

The paper proposes a multi-attribute combinatorial auction-based mechanism, called open contract mechanism (OCM), which allows an organization or an individual (seeker) to dynamically and simultaneously bargain the features of distinct innovation contracts with other organizations and individuals (solvers), in general collective innovation environments. In such contexts, a seeker does not possess specific skills and technical knowledge which are crucial for an innovation or for a part of a new product development project, while some solvers might be willing to provide their relevant know-how to the seeker. To induce collaboration between the seeker and solvers, voluntary and legally enforceable agreements need to be formulated, where a fair evaluation of the intellectual property rights of any party is guaranteed, and all technical and economic aspects are detailed. Therefore, OCM allows the seeker to involve solvers in defining a collection of open contract schemes, related to the supply of the required specific skills and technical knowledge. The solvers must submit offers in terms of contract versions of these contract schemes. In such a way, OCM aims at partially extracting from the solvers their multidimensional private information regarding economic and technical issues, in order to reduce the occurrences of pre- and post-contractual opportunistic behaviours. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg