The Philosophy of Midcentury Corporation Statutes

Professor Katz, in a Symposium issue for another journal, theorizes about the purpose of corporation statutes. At its heart, the theory of business enterprise attempts to delineate the areas of risk, control, and profit, that partners can allocate amongst themselves and to define defaults when these areas are not allocated. Statutes are approached three ways: enabling, which gives ample freedom to corporations to structure themselves; mix, which provides a statutory structure but still relies on corporate responsibility; and a paternal responsibility structure, which limits what a corporation can do; and a fourth approach, a social responsibility theory not yet reflected in statutes, that advocates that corporations should include the public good when making decisions. Professor Katz then considers various statutory topics within the framework of the three approaches. Most of the statutes that Professor Katz examines fall into the first theory, enabling statutes; North Carolina statutes are the only that apply the other two theories. Interestingly, the dominant enabling theory is one that has been under attack for almost one hundred years; and the new revolution of statutes (corporate gifts to charity) will not have the impact others think it will, but rather will serve as an impetus to ensure that there is still a means by which to punish corporations

Portable light detection system for the blind

System can be used to detect "ready" light on automatic cooking device, to tell if lights are on for visitors, or to tell whether it is daylight or dark outside. Device is actuated like flashlight. Light impinging on photo cell activates transistor which energizes buzzer to indicate presence of light

Evaluating experiential education through an intertidal ecology field trip.

*Background/Question/Methods*

Stanford SEEDS and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve have worked together with Redwood High School to implement an experiential ecology education program. The Redwood Environmental Academy of Leadership(REAL) is designed to bring underserved high school students out of the classroom and into the outdoors to create a unique and effective learning experience. Though the program focuses on riparian ecosystem restoration, the course curriculum is interdisciplinary and designed to inspire continuation high school students to attend college or pursue environmental careers. Through a SEEDS special grant, REAL students were taken to Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in Half Moon Bay, California, to learn about marine ecology and intertidal ecosystems at a minus tide. Redwood High School students were joined by their teachers and Stanford faculty and students to study the adaptations of intertidal organisms to their harsh environment.

*Results/Conclusions*

SEEDS and REAL were able to evaluate the success of the field trip by comparing the students’ knowledge of intertidal habitat, the nature of the ocean ecosystems, plants, animals, and reproduction both before and after the trip. This opportunity provides insight into the effectiveness of experiential education for the REAL program and recommendations for future ecology outreach programs

Computing with functions in spherical and polar geometries I. The sphere

A collection of algorithms is described for numerically computing with smooth functions defined on the unit sphere. Functions are approximated to essentially machine precision by using a structure-preserving iterative variant of Gaussian elimination together with the double Fourier sphere method. We show that this procedure allows for stable differentiation, reduces the oversampling of functions near the poles, and converges for certain analytic functions. Operations such as function evaluation, differentiation, and integration are particularly efficient and can be computed by essentially one-dimensional algorithms. A highlight is an optimal complexity direct solver for Poisson's equation on the sphere using a spectral method. Without parallelization, we solve Poisson's equation with $100$ million degrees of freedom in one minute on a standard laptop. Numerical results are presented throughout. In a companion paper (part II) we extend the ideas presented here to computing with functions on the disk.Comment: 23 page