On the Clawbacks in the Madoff Liquidation Proceeding

At a Meeting of Creditors held on February 20, 2009, counsel for the trustee overseeing the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC, announced the advent of clawback suits seeking to recover sums paid out to defrauded investors.\u27 This Essay explains the legal framework for the clawback suits and anticipates that many investors in the Ponzi scheme 2 will not have submitted claims by the July 2, 2009 deadline, which may result in clawback litigation before multiple courts. The Essay then discusses ways to streamline clawbacks and other Madoff-related litigation so that investors who have already been defrauded are not further damaged by the measures taken to compensate them. It closes with an invitation for additional proposals

On the Clawbacks in the Madoff Liquidation Proceeding

At a Meeting of Creditors held on February 20, 2009, counsel for the trustee overseeing the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC, announced the advent of clawback suits seeking to recover sums paid out to defrauded investors.\u27 This Essay explains the legal framework for the clawback suits and anticipates that many investors in the Ponzi scheme 2 will not have submitted claims by the July 2, 2009 deadline, which may result in clawback litigation before multiple courts. The Essay then discusses ways to streamline clawbacks and other Madoff-related litigation so that investors who have already been defrauded are not further damaged by the measures taken to compensate them. It closes with an invitation for additional proposals

Knowledge management, absorptive capacity and organisational culture: A case study from Chinese SMEs

Copyright © 2008 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Based on the analysis of an innovative medium sized enterprise from mainland China, this paper investigated the Knowledge Management (KM) issues by focusing on its KM enablers and process. This paper attempts to investigate how Chinese enterprises absorb knowledge from external sources; how they developed culture to facilitate Knowledge Management Processes (KMPs) and what major challenges they raise for the future by looking at the case study of a Chinese Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). The case study indicates that Chinese enterprises emphasised knowledge acquisition and the capacities of knowledge absorption, application, creation, sharing and integration as vital to sustaining competitive advantage for these firms. Corporative organisational culture also has significant impact on the KM in those enterprises

Digital Technology and the End of Social Studies Education

In Fall 2000, when "Theory and Research in Social Education" (TRSE) first dedicated an issue to technologies in social studies education, Neil Postman contributed a View Point piece to this issue. Postman, who died in 2003, was an interesting choice because he was an outspoken critic of educational technology who believed that, as he said at the time, "the new technologies both in and out of the classroom are a distraction and an irrelevance." Taking his cue from Postman, the author addresses the issue of digital technology in social studies education by telling a story of his own. He offers a wandering narrative -- and an old-fashioned one at that -- common in the religious stories that Postman saw as the prototype for all cultural stories: the narrative of faith, tested by doubt, emerging reaffirmed. He also discusses two elements that he believes need to be far more present in social studies education, at the pre-service and K-12 level: (1) Clearer disciplinary perspectives; and (2) easier ways of working with data within these perspectives. Technologies, if carefully designed, can be helpful in both areas

Formed by Place: Spatiality, Irony, and Empire in Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress’

In its ironic narrative and distinctive geography, Joseph Conrad’s 1897 short story ‘An Outpost of Progress’ is well suited for geocritical analysis, insofar as Conrad demonstrates the degree to which space and place affect both the characters in the story and style of the text. Focusing on the unique setting—the ‘outpost’—in which the events take place, Rutledge and Tally argue that Conrad’s tale employs an ironic narrator in order to highlight the tale’s distinctive spatiality, particularly with respect to a geopolitical system that too neatly divides the spaces of the globe into civilized and barbaric regions. The spatiality of ‘An Outpost of Progress’ can be seen in the geographical aspects of the narrative, with the specific site or heterotopia of the ‘outpost’ situated at the edge of a territory coded as ‘barbaric’ or ‘uncivilized,’ thus connecting the colonized domain in central Africa to the metropolitan society of northwestern Europe, largely unseen, but implicitly present throughout the story. But this spatiality may also be observed in its formal or stylistic elements, especially in the point of view and voice of the narrator, as the perspective shifts from omniscient overseer to ironic commentator and then to a free indirect style in which the distance between narrator and subject is dramatically reduced. In this way, Conrad produces an ironic, spatial narrative that highlights, in both content and form, the absurdity of the imperialist ‘civilizing mission’ in Africa