Upper-Level Courses: Three Exemplars

This Article presents three exemplars of upper-level law school classes, and is divided into three parts. Part I discusses Securitization and Asset-Backed Securities ; Part II discusses Using Transactions to Teach Secured Transactions ; and Part III discusses Teaching Deals Through a Focus on the Entertainment Industry

A STUDY OF THE NASCENT POLYPEPTIDES SYNTHESIZED ON THE FREE POLYRIBOSOMES OF RAT BRAIN IN VIVO 1

The free polyribosomes of the cerebral cortex of the immature rat (12-14 days old) were exposed to very low concentrations of trypsin at 0°C and for very brief periods of time and the conditions under which their breakdown to smaller aggregates occurs were determined. Trypsin also caused the release of nascent, radioactive polypeptides from polyribosomes prelabelled with [ 14 C]amino acids in vivo. An examination of the kinetics of release of the nascent chains by trypsin revealed that it was dependent on the concentration of trypsin as well as on the duration of incubation in the presence of trypsin. The influence of the nature of the [ 14 C]amino acid used as precursor of the nascent polypeptides and of the duration of the radioactive pulse in vivo was also determined. The radioactivity associated with polyribosomes as a result of the brief radioactive pulses administered (2 to 10 minutes) was incompletely removed even after the ribosomes were dissociated into subunits by EDTA. These findings suggest that the assembly of the cerebral ribosome in vivo must be a very rapid process, particularly in the immature animal. The nature of the nascent, radioactive polypeptides was studied by disc gel and high voltage electrophoresis and by thin-layer and column chromatography. Evidence was obtained that a rather limited number of qualitatively different molecules resides on the polyribosomes at any given moment.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65454/1/j.1471-4159.1971.tb00223.x.pd

Effects of Sodium Chloride Particles, Ozone, UV, and Relative Humidity on Atmospheric Corrosion of Silver

The corrosion of Ag contaminated with NaCl particles in gaseous environments containing humidity and ozone was investigated. In particular, the effects of relative humidity and UV light illumination were quantitatively analyzed using a coulometric reduction technique. The atmospheric corrosion of Ag was greatly accelerated in the presence of ozone and UV light. Unlike bare Ag (i.e., with no NaCl particles on the surface), Ag with NaCl exhibited fast corrosion even in the dark, with no UV in the presence of ozone. Samples exposed to different outdoor environments and samples exposed in a salt spray chamber were studied for comparison. Ag corroded at extremely low rates in a salt spray chamber partly because of the combined absence of light and oxidizing agents such as ozone

Upper-Level Courses: Three Examplars

I\u27m Mark Fagan, and I co-teach a course on securitization with Tamar Frankel at Boston University School of Law. We have come together to teach several interdisciplinary courses that combine law, business and public policy. Our course on securitization is a wonderful exemplar because it touches so many aspects of law as well as business and public policy. We spent quite a bit of time wrestling with how to teach it. Do you teach it in a process fashion? Do you teach it by legal topic? Do you take examples and examine them? After much debate and discussion, we actually went with the linear, process path. We begin with the borrower and show the students how the originator of the loan fits in, how they take and create a Special Purpose Vehicle ( SPV ), and the SPV in turn takes the assets and turns them into securities. We walk through this process and explain how the assets can move in one direction, and the cash in the other, and then the repayment. On the surface, this seems quite straightforward. Basically, we\u27re taking the illiquid assets and turning them into tradable securities. But, when you unbundle it, you find a level of complexity, because in addition to our primarily players, many of whom they\u27ve already had some exposure to, we get our additional players: the rating agencies, the appraisers, the security brokers, and the servicers, which layer on a very interesting dynamic into this process, because they\u27re actually not part of the core process yet have a significant impact on the outcome of the securitization process

Financial Transaction Tax: Small is Beautiful

The case for taxing financial transactions merely to raise more revenues from the financial sector is not particularly strong. Better alternatives to tax the financial sector are likely to be available. However, a tax on financial transactions could be justified in order to limit socially undesirable transactions when more direct means of doing so are unavailable for political or practical reasons. Some financial transactions are indeed likely to do more harm than good, especially when they contribute to the systemic risk of the financial system. However, such a financial transaction tax should be very small, much smaller than the negative externalities in question, because it is a blunt instrument that also drives out socially useful transactions. There is a case for taxing over-the-counter derivative transactions at a somewhat higher rate than exchange-based derivative transactions. More targeted remedies to drive out socially undesirable transactions should be sought in parallel, which would allow, after their implementation, to reduce or even phase out financialtransaction taxes

Moving frames applied to shell elasticity

Exterior calculus and moving frames are used to describe curved elastic shells. The kinematics follow from the Lie-derivative on forms whereas the dynamics via stress-forms.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figur

Kinetic Inductance and Penetration Depth of Thin Superconducting Films Measured by THz Pulse Spectroscopy

We measure the transmission of THz pulses through thin films of YBCO at temperatures between 10K and 300K. The pulses possess a useable bandwidth extending from 0.1 -- 1.5 THz (3.3 cm^-1 -- 50 cm^-1). Below T_c we observe pulse reshaping caused by the kinetic inductance of the superconducting charge carriers. From transmission data, we extract values of the London penetration depth as a function of temperature, and find that it agrees well with a functional form (\lambda(0)/\lambda(T))^2 = 1 - (T/T_c)^{\alpha}, where \lambda(0) = 148 nm, and \alpha = 2. *****Figures available upon request*****Comment: 7 Pages, LaTe

From error bounds to the complexity of first-order descent methods for convex functions

This paper shows that error bounds can be used as effective tools for deriving complexity results for first-order descent methods in convex minimization. In a first stage, this objective led us to revisit the interplay between error bounds and the Kurdyka-\L ojasiewicz (KL) inequality. One can show the equivalence between the two concepts for convex functions having a moderately flat profile near the set of minimizers (as those of functions with H\"olderian growth). A counterexample shows that the equivalence is no longer true for extremely flat functions. This fact reveals the relevance of an approach based on KL inequality. In a second stage, we show how KL inequalities can in turn be employed to compute new complexity bounds for a wealth of descent methods for convex problems. Our approach is completely original and makes use of a one-dimensional worst-case proximal sequence in the spirit of the famous majorant method of Kantorovich. Our result applies to a very simple abstract scheme that covers a wide class of descent methods. As a byproduct of our study, we also provide new results for the globalization of KL inequalities in the convex framework. Our main results inaugurate a simple methodology: derive an error bound, compute the desingularizing function whenever possible, identify essential constants in the descent method and finally compute the complexity using the one-dimensional worst case proximal sequence. Our method is illustrated through projection methods for feasibility problems, and through the famous iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (ISTA), for which we show that the complexity bound is of the form $O(q^{k})$ where the constituents of the bound only depend on error bound constants obtained for an arbitrary least squares objective with $\ell^1$ regularization