Acquire a practical overview of 'good faith' in commercial contracting

The twists and turns in the ongoing development of the implied common law good faith obligation in the commercial contractual arena continue to prove fertile academic ground. Despite a lack of guidance from the High Court, the lower courts have been besieged by claims based, in part, on the implied obligation. Although lower court authority is lacking consistency and the ‘decisions in which lower courts have recognised the legitimacy of implication of a term of good faith vary in their suggested rationales’, the implied obligation may provide some comfort to a party to ‘at least some commercial contracts’ faced with a contractual counterpart exhibiting symptoms of bad faith

Survival on the Titantic: Illustrating Wald and LM Tests for Proportions and Logits

Students are very interested in lecture examples and class exercises involving data connected to the maiden voyage and the sinking of the liner Titanic. Information on the passengers and their fate can be used to explore relationships between various tests for differences in survival rates between different groups of passengers. Among the concepts examined are tests for differences of proportions using a normal distribution, a chi-square test for independence, a test for the equality of two logits and a test for the significance of the coefficient of a binary variable in logit model. The relationship between Wald and LM test statistics is also examined. Two related examples are given, one to be used for step by step instructional purposes and one to be given as an exercise to students.Contingency table, Difference in proportions, Logit model, Statistical tests

Performing Economics: A Critique of 'Teaching and Learning'

Economics students find difficulty in developing effective learning strategies; they would also welcome and benefit from a more pluralistic teaching of economics. Nevertheless, economics teaching has become less pluralistic over the recent past. Recent benchmark statements seem content to underwrite an essentially monist approach to the discipline in the hope that a deepening crisis in economics teaching can be averted by expanding teaching and learning programmes taking the content of teaching as given and instead concentrating on presentational reform. The paper argues that such teaching and learning strategies are part of the problem rather than its solution.

Property Agents and Motor Dealers Act (Qld) : disclosure, cooling-off and marketeers

The Property Agents and Motor Dealers Act 2000 commenced on 1 July 2001. Significant changes have now been made to the Act by the Property Agents and Motor Dealers Amendment Act 2001 (“the amending Act”). The amending Act contains two distinct parts. First, ss 11-19 of the amending Act provide for increased disclosure obligations on real estate agents, property developers and lawyers together with an extension of the 5 business day cooling-off period imposed by the original Act to all residential property (other than contracts formed on a sale by auction). These provisions are expected to commence on 29 October 2001. The remaining provisions of the amending Act provide for increased jurisdiction and powers to the Property Agents and Motor Dealers Tribunal (“the Tribunal”) enabling the Tribunal to deal with claims against marketeers. These provisions commenced on the date of assent (21 September 2001)

Funding: Patterns and Guideposts in the Nonprofit Sector

Although funding is a pressing concern for nonprofit organizations across the United States, detailed information about how dollars flow within the sector is hard to come by. For example, are there distinct patterns to the ways in which nonprofit organizations are funded? If the answer to this question is "yes," those patterns could provide important "guideposts" for similar organizations planning their funddevelopment strategies.To begin answering this question, the Bridgespan Group researched the funding for three samples of nonprofit organizations using Form 990 returns, complemented by company-specific reports and personal interviews. 1. The largest organizations tend to rely on a single type of funding for the majority of their revenue, rather than having a balanced mix from a variety of funders. Among youth services and environmental advocacy organizations, there are distinct transition points across a spectrum ofrevenue sizes where organizations move from heterogeneous to singletypefunding.2. Among the largest organizations, the kind of work an organization does influences, but does not dictate, the identity of its dominant funding type.3. In the fields we selected for in-depth analysis -- youth services and environmental advocacy -- growth to a significant size is extremely rare, and the largest organizations control most of the resources.4. In youth services and environmental advocacy, there seem to be transition points in the typical funding mix used by organizations of different sizes, suggesting that the size of an organization influences its dominant funding type

Extracting adverse drug reactions and their context using sequence labelling ensembles in TAC2017

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are unwanted or harmful effects experienced after the administration of a certain drug or a combination of drugs, presenting a challenge for drug development and drug administration. In this paper, we present a set of taggers for extracting adverse drug reactions and related entities, including factors, severity, negations, drug class and animal. The systems used a mix of rule-based, machine learning (CRF) and deep learning (BLSTM with word2vec embeddings) methodologies in order to annotate the data. The systems were submitted to adverse drug reaction shared task, organised during Text Analytics Conference in 2017 by National Institute for Standards and Technology, archiving F1-scores of 76.00 and 75.61 respectively.Comment: Paper describing submission for TAC ADR shared tas

Towards a simplified taxonomy of Capsella bursa-pastoris (L.) Medik. (Brassicaceae)

Capsella bursa-pastoris (L.) Medik. is a species with a cosmopolitan distribution which shows considerable morphological variation. Numerous authors have recognised widely differing numbers of varieties, microspecies or other infraspecific subdivisions (segregates) of this species. In an attempt to clarify this situation, we grew British material of the species under controlled conditions through to the F) generation to remove environmental variation, and assessed the plants on the basis of a range of morphological criteria, namely leaf shape, capsule size and also length of time taken to flower. Analysis of these characteristics consistently produced four basic groups, which had been previously described. Herbarium specimens could also nearly always be assigned to one of these groups. Limited chromosome counts suggest that two of these groups are diploid and two are tetraploid. We suggest this fourfold division into broad groups reflects the major genetic separations within the species, but that there is also considerable phenotypic plasticity shown by C. bursapastoris in response to factors such as shade or trampling. These four groups appear to differ in their geographic.al distribution in Britain. KEYWORDS: Shepherd's Purse, morphological variation, leaf characters, capsule characters, chromosom

Predicting Student Retention Using Scholarship and Grant Aid

Since the beginning, the field of higher education has represented the possibility of a better future for many. For some, education represents a way to better oneself and to prepare for a future career. This is the one of the strongest drivers of going to college, that it will open doors to a better future. The number of students attending colleges and universities has increased over the decades but so too has the expense of going to college. The dissertation report presented here attempts to look at the retention rates of colleges and universities and how forms of financial gift aid may impact the retention rate of college students. Participants for this study included all public and private colleges and universities who award at least a bachelor’s degree and receive federal financial aid. These schools are required to submit information to the National Center for Educational Statistics and an archival database was used to pull financial aid and student enrollment information for each of these schools. Using a correlational predictive design, these data were examined to see if student retention rates can be predicted by the average amount of federal, state, and institutional grant and gift aid awarded per new incoming student and if one form of aid is more predictive than the others

PREDICTION AND CONTROL OF VITAMIN C LOSS IN SPACEFLIGHT FOODS

Shelf stable foods that require no refrigeration or freezing are the predominant food source for astronauts. Due to its high impact on astronauts’ health, it is crucial to know if the astronauts are getting all the necessary nutrients from shelf stable foods, specifically vitamins. With limited knowledge on vitamin degradation in spaceflight foods during storage and processing, our team decided to tackle this issue focusing on unstable vitamins, which included vitamin C (ascorbic acid) and vitamin B1 (thiamine); however, this thesis will specifically focus on vitamin C. A two-year storage and retort processing study was conducted on 5 different foods (i.e. sugar snap peas, strawberries, and rhubarb applesauce at three different pH levels) to determine the vitamin degradation kinetics and this information was used to determine a mathematical model reliability to predict and control vitamin C degradation during long term storage and retort processing using experimental data. Validation and improvement of model was implemented based on experimental data. For the storage study, each food was retorted and freeze dried to make it shelf stable according to NASA specifications. The foods were stored at five constant temperatures (-20, -80, 4, 20, and 37 °C). Over a two-year period, samples were periodically pulled and HPLC analysis was used to measure vitamin C. With vitamin C measured at two experimental points, degradation parameters, kTref and c, were determined to make predictive degradation curves for each food, process, and positive temperature for vitamin C using the endpoints method model. When the two-year storage study was completed, the predictive degradation curves were compared to experimental data. Additionally, the combined first order kinetics model incorporating all experimental data was used to determine degradation parameters: Casymptote, kTref, and c. With both models and physiochemical properties (i.e. pH and moisture content) of each food, two databases were created to determine degradation parameters for vitamin C with inputting a pH, moisture content, and storage temperature to retrieve estimated degradation parameters. The knowledge obtained during these studies will help ensure that NASA’s astronauts are getting all the necessary nutrients needed at any time to maintain health and wellness in space