Conversion and Mergers of Disparate Business Entities

Legislation permitting a business organized in one form, such as a corporation, to merge with a business of a different form, such as a limited liability company, is relatively recent, but reasonable and beneficial. A logical extension of this legislation is to permit a single business entity to convert its organizational form without involving a second entity. Recognition of these cross-entity transactions flows naturally from the expansion of organizational options in recent years, particularly the introduction of limited liability companies and limited liability partnerships. Conversion and merger of disparate entities are already available in a few states, with varying degrees of liberality, and are likely to become increasingly common. Both the Revised Uniform Partnership Act and the Model Business Corporation Act support the key principles behind conversion and merger. This Article examines the policies, principles, and drafting issues of cross-entity conversion and merger legislation. It focuses on Oregon\u27s comprehensive statutory scheme and urges other states to emulate that approach

Robert Morgan: The Age of Discovery

2011 Kentucky Folk Art Center exhibition catalog of artist Robert Morgan.https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kfac_exhibition_catalogs/1008/thumbnail.jp

Automated impact assessment - How digitizing government enables rapid and tailor-made policy responses

As interest in the digital transformation of public administration grows, the main challenge remains to improve government governance systems and integrate a wider range of evidence into decisionmaking processes. The successful digitalization and application of such approaches improves the quality, responsiveness and flexibility of public administrations. The digialtization of processes has made it possible to use micro-level data to assess the impact of a policy or program and apply the feedback to improve the design and delivery of public services. Evidence-based policy-making evaluates programs based on their visible impacts. Large-scale data collected through digitized governance, coupled with econometric impact assessment, provides an ideal working toolkit for this. However, the current situation of European governments is one of slow adoption, as they are often slow to respond to new challenges. This is due to the static one-off impact assessment approaches used, the results of which quickly become outdated. With further digitalization, improvement of systems, and a rapidly changing situation, there is a need to speed up institutions’ ability to quickly draw working solutions to offset the effects of unexpected events in society and economy and react without delays if policy effects dissipate. This paper demonstrates how a high level of digitalization in government allows addressing such issues by automating causal impact assessment and making it a continuous part of the service delivery. The use case is an automated system for assessing active labour market policies in Estonia using individual-level data from government digital registers. Building on this, it shows how impact assessment automation depends on automatically generated data, only available due to the digitalization of other public services, and how versatile it is when it comes to proving casual evidence in a suddenly changing environment

Building an Engineering Honors Curriculum: Collegiate Consistency with Individual Flexibility

Recently, Honors at Iowa developed a curriculum that all student members must complete to graduate with University Honors. The curriculum has two primary components; the first is building knowledge through course work and the second is the application of knowledge through hands on learning experiences. Because, however, the engineering undergraduate curriculum is more structured and sequential in nature than the curriculum of the other undergraduate colleges, a distinct honors engineering curriculum was developed collaboratively between the College of Engineering and the University Honors Program. This engineering-specific honors curriculum maintained the key features of course work and experience-based learning valued by engineering and honors, but allowed for unique out-of-class experiences available to University of Iowa engineering students to be woven into the curriculum. The standard Honors curriculum for undergraduates at Iowa is 12 credit hours of honors coursework and 12 credit hours of experience-based learning. The 12 credits of coursework are commonly completed early in the students’ education through honors offerings of general education courses. In contrast, the experiential component is most commonly pursued by upper class students and includes opportunities such as Honors in the major, research, study abroad, internships, and a variety of types of courses such as teaching practica, service learning, and graduate courses. This standard 12/12 Honors curriculum is still available to engineering honors students, but many engineering students’ schedules are limited in flexibility, and the number of honors offerings that fit their needs is also limited. To maintain consistency in University Honors across the colleges and also accommodate the emphasis in engineering on applied learning, the College of Engineering and Honors Program agreed to reduce the required number of hours of honors coursework and increase proportionately the amount of experience-based learning in the honors curriculum. This has become known as the Engineering Alternative and highlights more out-of-class opportunities that provide discipline-specific learning. For example, engineering students can count leadership positions in engineering student organizations for honors credit because these organizations incorporate a project with faculty oversight. Engineering honors students may also deepen their knowledge and help other students by serving as tutors or by participating in other service roles in the College of Engineering. These opportunities are in addition to the standard experiential learning options of honors in the major, research, study abroad, and internships. Together, the varied options of the Honors Engineering Alternative curriculum allow students great flexibility in completing University Honors that is of equivalent depth to the 12/12 standard Honors Curriculum. The result of the collaboration between Honors and the College of Engineering is an honors curriculum that meets the general requirements of the Honors curriculum but also is flexible enough to accommodate the more structured and sequential nature of the engineering curriculum

European Interoperability Landscape Report 2022

The delivery of cross-border digital public services largely depends on the ability of public administrations and businesses to transfer data across borders. Therefore, access to trusted, interoperable, and secure data-exchange solutions is essential for delivering cross-border services but is also crucial for establishing the Single Digital Gateway (SDG) and building a functioning European Digital Single Market (DSM). Numerous projects, alliances, and partnerships have been implemented to explore and develop different solutions that would support the creation of an interoperable future for Europe. Thus far, a clear understanding of cross-border data exchange initiatives is lacking, especially regarding roles, specifications, interdependencies, and technological differences between initiatives. This study report aims to start mapping European cross-border data-exchange solutions and initiatives, analyse the status of adoption, and investigate different aspects of these initiatives pertaining to legal, commercial, and technical specifications. Also, the report discusses the future outlook of European cross-border digital public services. Findings from this study could provide valuable insights for policymakers, solution owners, and service providers as it informs them about the interoperability, extensibility, and sustainability of European cross-border data exchange initiatives and project