Fraudulent Conveyance Law and Its Proper Domain

In 1571 Parliament passed a statute making illegal and void any transfer made for the purpose of hindering, delaying, or defrauding creditors.\u27 This law, commonly known as the Statute of Elizabeth, was intended to curb what was thought to be a wide-spread abuse. Until the seventeenth century, England had certain sanctuaries into which the King\u27s writ could not enter. A sanctuary was not merely the interior of a church, but certain precincts defined by custom or royal grant. Debtors could take sanctuary in one of these precincts, live in relative comfort, and be immune from execution by their creditors. It was thought that debtors usually removed themselves to one of these precincts only after selling their property to friends and relatives for a nominal sum with the tacit understanding that the debtors would reclaim their property after their creditors gave up or compromised their claims. The Statute of Elizabeth limited this practice. The basic prohibition of this statute, which prevents debtors from making transfers that hinder, delay, or defraud their creditors, has survived for over four centuries. A debtor cannot manipulate his affairs in order to shortchange his creditors and pocket the difference. Those who collude with a debtor in these transactions are not protected either. An individual creditor who discovers his debtor\u27s assets have been fraudulently conveyed can reduce his claim to judgment and have the sheriff levy on the property that is now no longer in the debtor\u27s hands (as long as the property is not in the hands of a bona fide purchaser for value). \u27The difficulty that courts and legislatures have faced for hundreds of years has been one of trying to define what kinds of transactions hinder, delay, or defraud creditors. From very early on,common law judges developed per se rules, known as badges of fraud, that would allow the courts to treat a transaction as a fraudulent conveyance even though no specific evidence suggested that the debtor tried to profit at his creditors\u27 expense. For example, common law judges assumed that an insolvent debtor who sold property but retained possession of it without any special reason(such as a need to complete unfinished goods) was up to no good

A Spatially Distributed Energy Balance Snowmelt Model

This paper describes an energy balance snowmelt model developed for the prediction of rapid snowmelt rates responsible for soil erosion and water input to a distributed water balance model. The model uses a lumped representation of the snowpack with two state variables, namely, water equivalent and energy content relative to a reference state of water in the ice phase at 0 degrees Celcius. This energy content is used to determine snowpack average temperature of liquid fraction. This representation of the snowpack is used to determine snowpack average temperature of liquid fraction. This representation of the snowpack is used in a distributed version of the model with each of these state variables modeled at each point on a rectangular grid corresponding to a digital elevation model. Inputs are air temperature, precipitation, wind speed, humidity and radiation at hourly time steps. The model uses physically based calculations of radiative, sensible, latent and advective heat exchanges. An equilibrium parameterization of snow surface temperature accounts for differences between snow surface temperature and average snowpack temperature without having to introduce additional state variables. Melt outlfow is a function of the liquid fraction, using Darcy\u27s law. This allows the model to account for continued outlflow even when the energy balance is negative. A detailed description of the model is given together with results of tests of individual components and the complete model against data collected at the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, California; Reynolds Creek Experimental Watershed, Boise Idaho; and at the Utah State University drainage research farm, Logan Utah. The testing includes comparisons against melt outflow collected in lysimeters and melt collectors, surface snow temperatures collected using infrared temperature sensors and depth and water equivalent measured using snow core samplers

Representing Structural Information of Helical Charge Distributions in Cylindrical Coordinates

Structural information in the local electric field produced by helical charge distributions, such as dissolved DNA, is revealed in a straightforward manner employing cylindrical coordinates. Comparison of structure factors derived in terms of cylindrical and helical coordinates is made. A simple coordinate transformation serves to relate the Green function in cylindrical and helical coordinates. We also compare the electric field on the central axis of a single helix as calculated in both systems.Comment: 11 pages in plain LaTex, no figures. Accepted for publication in PRE March, 199

Analysis of turbulent free-convection boundary layer on flat plate

A calculation was made for the flow and heat transfer in the turbulent free-convection boundary layer on a vertical flat plate. Formulas for the heat-transfer coefficient, boundary layer thickness, and the maximum velocity in the boundary layer were obtained

Perfect imaging with positive refraction in three dimensions

Maxwell's fish eye has been known to be a perfect lens within the validity range of ray optics since 1854. Solving Maxwell's equations we show that the fish-eye lens in three dimensions has unlimited resolution for electromagnetic waves

Modelling a Dune Field

We present a model to describe the collective motion of barchan dunes in a field. Our model is able to reproduce the observation that a typical dune stays confined within a stripe. We also obtain some of the pattern structures which ressemble those observed from aerial photos which we do analyse and compare with the specific field of La\^ayounne.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figure