Are the causes of bank distress changing? can researchers keep up?

Since 1990, the banking sector has experienced enormous legislative, technological and financial changes, yet research into the causes of bank distress has slowed. One consequence is that current supervisory surveillance models may no longer accurately represent the banking environment. After reviewing the history of these models, we provide empirical evidence that the characteristics of failing banks has changed in the last ten years and argue that the time is right for new research employing new empirical techniques. In particular, dynamic models that utilize forward-looking variables and address various types of bank risk individually are promising lines of inquiry. Supervisory agencies have begun to move in these directions, and we describe several examples of this new generation of early-warning models that are not yet widely known among academic banking economists.Bank failures ; Bank supervision

Fast scan control for deflection type mass spectrometers

A high speed scan device is reported that allows most any scanning sector mass spectrometer to measure preselected gases at a very high sampling rate. The device generates a rapidly changing staircase output which is applied to the accelerator of the spectrometer and it also generates defocusing pulses that are applied to one of the deflecting plates of the spectrometer which when shorted to ground deflects the ion beam away from the collector. A defocusing pulse occurs each time there is a change in the staircase output

Decoding the Impossibility Defense

Impossible attempts were first officially recognized as non-criminal in 1864, the idea being that a person whose anti-social bent poses no appreciable risk of harm is no criminal. To reassure myself the subject doesn’t “smell of the lamp,” I tapped “impossibility” into Westlaw, which designated over 3000 criminal cases as on point, 1200 or so more recent than 1999. Impossible attempts thus turn out to be not merely a professorial hobby horse, but instead, expressive of a non-trivial tension between risk-taking and harm-causing within the very real world of criminal litigation. Although it is now hornbook that impossible attempts are punishable as crimes, there remains a sense of a non-trivial difference between failing at larceny by picking the empty pocket of a passerby on a sidewalk and by picking the empty pocket of a mannequin in a department store. What remains up in the air is what accounts for that difference. Here I decode the impossibility defense by “hounding down the minutiae” of what it means to make a mistake. I am certainly not the first to insist that the impossibility defense lives on. I am, however, the first to base such a claim on the grammar or criteria of mistakes, which can get us closer to the bottom of what makes attempts impossible and why it matters

Overcoming Hiddenness: The Role of Intentions in Fourth Amendment Analysis

This Article rehearses a response to the problems posed to and by the Supreme Court\u27s attempts to work out the meaning and operation of the word search. After commencing Part II by meditating on the notion of privacy, I take up its relation to the antecedent suspicion or knowledge that Fourth-Amendment law requires as a justification for all privacy invasions. From there, I look specifically at that uneasy relation in Supreme Court jurisprudence, which has come to privilege privacy over property as a Fourth Amendment value. From there, Part III reviews the sources or bases that can tell us what can count as private: 1) the positive laws of property, tort, crime, and contract; 2) laborious questioning of the sort performed by Chris Slobogin; and 3) the routine versus nonroutine nature of the governmental surveillance in question (let\u27s call this the O\u27Connor position from Florida v. Riley, recently resurrected in Bond v. United States). To the extent that the routine nature of some intrusive actions does not disqualify them as unacceptably intrusive, Part IV suggests an alternative method for determining what constitutes a search. In order to establish that the intentions of both search victim and police should play an important role in this determination, I take some care to look at the unhappy role that intentions currently play in Supreme Court jurisprudence, particularly in the context of so-called pretexts. After mapping my criticisms of the Court\u27s analysis of intentions in that context onto the question of what constitutes a search, I am able to take a position on the extent to which spying (as opposed to more coercive police actions) should be regulated by the Fourth Amendment

Helping, Doing, and the Grammar of Complicity

This essay is about the grammatical and, to a lesser extent, moral aspects of the law of complicity, which treats someone who helps someone else commit a crime as though the helper himself committed the crime. The point I hope to make here is similar to the one Professor Phillip Johnson made about what he called the unnecessary crime of conspiracy