Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distinguishing the Illegal from the Legal in Antitrust Damages Calculations: Lessons from Netscape v. Microsoft

Appropriately calculating antitrust damages often entails separating out the effects of anticompetitive acts on a plaintiff from the effects of legal acts on that plaintiff. The availability of methods for accomplishing this task is highly important as it can determine the ability of antitrust plaintiffs to recover damages and the precision with which those damages are calculated. Recent private antitrust suits against Microsoft have provided a good opportunity to evaluate the complexities involved in performing such a disaggregation of the effects of illegal acts from legal acts. Indeed, the disaggregation complexities involved in these suits have led some commentators to conjecture that plaintiffs may have difficulty obtaining damages (Lopatka and Page, 2001). In this article, I use the context of one of the most significant private antitrust suits against Microsoft, Netscape Communications Corporation v. Microsoft Corporation1 to evaluate methodologies potentially available to antitrust plaintiffs for disaggregating the effects of illegal acts from legal acts and accurately measuring damages. I conclude that damages methodologies based on stock price data require the availability of "events" that will often be unavailable. Multiple alternative methodologies are potentially available, however, and I demonstrate the application of several of these methodologies. Upon the announcement of Microsoft's internet strategy in 1995, Netscape's stock price promptly plummeted by 18%. Following its announcement, Microsoft engaged in a variety of aggressive actions in an attempt to gain browser share and win the "browser wars" against Netscape. Its actions were ultimately successful. By 2002, Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser reached a browser share of well above 80%. In the United States v. Microsoft, the Court of Appeals ruled that many of Microsoft's acts related to its browser were antitrust violations.2 However, it
The Extreme Right in Eastern Europe: EU Accession and the Quality of Governance

This paper investigates variation in voter support for extreme-right parties in Eastern Europe, especially among the new EU members. It suggests that the success of the extreme right is a reaction to corruption and the absence of political accountability, and that extremists thrive in competitive democracies where the rule of law is weak. Moreover, it shows that the accession process and EU conditionality contributed to emptying the policy-oriented issue space, and that as EU conditionality has withered away, so too have rapid improvements in the quality of governance. Variation in cross-national support for the extreme right is therefore a reaction to the convergence of the major political parties on the most salient policy issue of the late 1990s—joining the EU. The technocratic and bureaucratic process of EU accession, which was accompanied by declining improvements in the quality of governance, contributed to a ‘vacuum’ effect in the policy space that led to party competition based on identity-based appeals, such as ethnic hatred, and set the stage for the success of the extreme right in Eastern Europe.
AFRICOM's Role in an African Future: Bridge or Dam?

In the recent past America’s leaders created a major new military entity – the US Africa Command (AFRICOM). In a well researched article, authors James Forest and Rebecca Crispin describe AFRICOM and the motivations for its creation, offering an interesting glimpse into the ways America’s political leaders see the world and their role in it, and calling attention to the way the United States reacts to the complex security dilemmas of the early 21st century. Yet it remains to be seen what the new command really means for Americans and Africans, and whether it can effectively address the security equities of either or both. This article briefly examines these issues, offering implications for African and American policymakers. Forest and Crispin infer the existence of at least four fundamental (and not always entirely compatible) assumptions underlying contemporary American foreign policy: first that the nation’s military establishment necessarily plays a central role in securing the country from foreign threats, whatever those may be; then, that the United States has a fundamental missionary imperative to do good in the world; this is followed by a conviction that virtually all human problems are solvable if the right approach can be found; and concludes with an implicit confidence that American civil servants are sufficiently endowed with the wisdom and moral insight to discern an appropriate future for the rest of humanity. Each of these assumptions is reflected in the advent of AFRICOM. To the extent that they are largely unconscious to Americans, each has the potential to undermine the productive relations with Africans necessary for AFRICOM’s ultimate success. American military leaders often talk about ‘legacy’ weapons systems – expensive armaments still in the American inventory but better suited to the requirements of earlier conflicts. However, much worse than legacy weapons are legacy ideas – prevalent models of human organization and human behaviour no longer appropriate to the needs of the human family. These are particularly problematic when it comes to security. Given the priority and resources that societies devote to this requirement, legacy ideas are not merely unfortunate; they can have tragic consequences. Legacy ‘security’ ideas compete in Africa with newer thinking. This is a domain in which AFRICOM can make a difference, for good or ill. Since the end of the Cold War, scholars, intellectuals, and practitioners have engaged in a fascinating series of debates about the concept of security. The full scope is far too complex to describe in detail here, but several noteworthy trends have emerged. One is a general acceptance of much broader definitions, so that the concept no longer applies exclusively to the inviolability of national sovereignty and national borders, preservation of elite privilege, or even protection of
The Impact Market

With the new responsibility to account for impact, UK universities and the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) are territorializing social and political practices, which were once beyond the bounds of scholarly labour. In Hannah Arendt's terms, an academic's vita activa, their active life beyond university, is now part of the professional work for which they are contracted. Through the professionalization of making impact for university workers, everyday political action and social change, which were exterior to the academy, have become colonized by production and need to be demonstrated. This is both closely in line with Paolo Virno's (2004) argument around the dissolving of boundaries between poiesis and praxis, and with what Stephano Harney and Fred Moten suggest about 'the spread of the university beyond the university' (2013). The Research Excellence Framework (REF) measures lecturers' performance in the public sphere against criteria for excellence, commodifying our social acts and their affects. No longer common, felt impacts and community change are claimed as outputs belonging to the university, institutional property or assets, which can be capitalized upon and attract future funding. Just as 'public space has been privatized to such an extent' – as Hardt & Negri argue (2001) – that the 'dialectic between private and public space' no longer makes sense as a way to 'understand social organization', it now makes little sense to speak of an inside or outside of the university. The job of producing impact case studies for the 2014 REF fell to practitioner-researchers in many institutions, whose professional practices already engaged publics beyond the academy. As a practitioner working within the university, this essay explores my role in the discursive enclosure of embodied know-how within the institution's resource of knowledge, the appropriation and professionalization of performance as practice-as-research, along with my complicity in the capture, measurement and commodification of sociocultural impact.
FROM THE CORPORATE OFFICE TO MINISTRY: A CASE STUDY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WHO LEAVE CORPORATE LEADERSHIP POSITIONS FOR SPIRITUAL PURSUITS

Fonda M. Harris. FROM THE CORPORATE OFFICE TO MINISTRY: A CASE STUDY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WHO LEAVE CORPORATE LEADERSHIP FOR SPIRILTUAL PURSUITS. (Under the direction of Dr. Andrew T. Alexson) College of Business and Leadership, DECEMBER 2012. The purpose of this dissertation was to explore through phenomenological inquiry the experiences, perceptions, personal journeys, insights, and in-depth reflections of African American women who after experiencing leadership success in corporate America opt-out to pursue spiritual endeavors. To develop a conceptual framework, a literature review was developed that examined the historical perspective of women in leadership. Further, it investigated the spiritual dynamics of change, particularly as it related to women; and it provided a review of critical life events and its influence on career choice. Additionally, the research study incorporated personal interviews and narratives of 3 African American women between the ages of 40 and 60 who resided in the Metropolitan Nashville, TN area who formerly held mid to top level positions and are now pastors, missionaries, or participate in other ministry vocations. These women were allowed to tell the unique stories of their career journey and the precipitating events that led to their career path change. The researcher provided a 10 item questionnaire to each participant to obtain demographic information and answer general questions regarding their experience in leadership and ministry. To eliminate researcher bias, Underwood‘s Daily Spiritual Experience Scale (2006) was administered, which was a 16 question validated instrument to measure participants‘ religious well-being and existential well-being. Leaving Corporate America v
Protein inheritance (prions) based on parallel in‐register β‐sheet amyloid structures

Most prions (infectious proteins) are self‐propagating amyloids (filamentous protein multimers), and have been found in both mammals and fungal species. The prions [URE3] and [PSI+] of yeast are disease agents of Saccharomyces cerevisiae while [Het‐s] of Podospora anserina may serve a normal cellular function. The parallel in‐register beta‐sheet structure shown by prion amyloids makes possible a templating action at the end of filaments which explains the faithful transmission of variant differences in these molecules. This property of self‐reproduction, in turn, allows these proteins to act as de facto genes, encoding heritable information. BioEssays 30:955–964, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Bandwidth, power and noise considerations in airborne cMUTs

Capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (cMUTs) offer wider bandwidth in air due to their low mechanical impedances. The impedance mismatch between the air and transducer decreases with the smaller device dimensions increasing the bandwidth at the expense of the degradation in the transmit power and the receive sensitivity. In this work, the bandwidth of cMUT is optimized by increasing its radiation resistance. This is done by properly choosing the size of cMUT membranes and their placement within an array. This selection not only brings an improvement in the transmitted power when it is used as a transmitter, but also improves the noise figure when it is used as a receiver. A further improvement in the noise figure is possible when the cells are clustered and connected to separate receivers.
Why European Union funding of academic research should be increased: a radical proposal

The role of publicly funded academic research in Europe's future economic and social development has been both misunderstood and neglected in Europe's science and technology policy. Experience in the USA suggests that the generous public funding of high-quality academic research is the source of major new technological opportunities, as well as an attraction for high-quality business activities in an increasingly globalised world. The European Union should consider establishing an agency to complement and compete with national agencies in funding academic research. Its success would depend on its capacity to identify and support exciting multi-disciplinary programmes of research and related training in promising fields, rather than on its capacity to forecast or demonstrate specific applications. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.
Working hours mismatch and well-being: comparative evidence from Australian and German panel data

This study uses subjective measures of well-being to analyze how workers perceive working hours mismatch. Our particular interest is in the question of whether workers perceive hours of underemployment differently from hours of overemployment. Previous evidence on this issue is ambiguous. We call attention to the level of well-being in the absence of hours mismatch that serves as a reference state for comparison purposes and to the consequences of restrictive functional form assumptions. Using panel data from Australia and Germany, this study estimates the relationship between working hours mismatch and well-being as a bivariate smooth function of desired hours and mismatch hours by tensor product p-splines. The results indicate that well-being is highest in the absence of hours mismatch. In general, the perception of overemployment is statistically significantly different from the perception of underemployment in both countries. In Australia, workers tolerate some underemployment, as their well-being tends to be unaltered in the presence of short hours of underemployment. However, the marginal loss from underemployment appears to be larger than that from overemployment once the mismatch exceeds approximately ten hours. In Germany, on the contrary, underemployment is clearly more detrimental for well-being than overemployment. German males with preferences for full-time hours hardly respond to overemployment.
Securities Class Action Settlements: 2006 Review and Analysis

Laarni Bulan is a principal in Cornerstone Research’s Boston office, where she specializes in finance. Her work has focused on securities and other complex litigation addressing class certification, damages, and loss causation issues, firm valuation, and corporate governance, executive compensation, and risk management issues. She has also consulted on cases related to insider trading, market manipulation and trading behavior, financial institutions and the credit crisis, derivatives, foreign exchange, and securities clearing and settlement. Dr. Bulan has published several academic articles in peer-reviewed journals. Her research covers topics in dividend policy, capital structure, executive compensation, corporate governance, and real options. Prior to joining Cornerstone Research, Dr. Bulan had a joint appointment at Brandeis University as an assistant professor of finance in its International Business School and in the economics department. Laura Simmons is a senior advisor with Cornerstone Research. She has more than 25 years of experience in economic and financial consulting. Dr. Simmons has focused on damage and liability issues in securities and ERISA litigation, as well as on accounting issues arising in a variety of complex commercial litigation matters. She has served as a testifying expert in litigation involving accounting analyses, securities case damages, ERISA matters, and research on securities lawsuits. Dr. Simmons’s research on pre– and post–Reform Act securities litigation settlements has been published in a number of reports and is frequently cited in the public press and legal journals. She has spoken at various conferences and appeared as a guest on CNBC addressing the topic of securities case settlements. She has also published in academic journals, including research focusing on the intersection of accounting and litigation. Dr. Simmons was previously an accounting faculty member at the Mason School of Business at the College of William & Mary. From 1986 to 1991, she was an accountant with Price Waterhouse.
Does the identity of engagement partners matter? An analysis of audit partner reporting decisions

This study examines the persistence and economic consequences of variations in reporting style across audit partners in individual engagements. Our results show that both aggressive and conservative audit reporting, measured by the pattern of prior Type 2 and Type 1 audit reporting error rates in auditor-specific clienteles, persist over time and extend to other clients of the same partner. Analyses of abnormal accruals and persistence of client firms’ accrual estimates corroborate this finding, and hold both for private and publicly listed companies. Further, our results also show that the market penalizes client firms susceptible to aggressive audit partner reporting decisions. In particular, we find that our proxies for aggressive audit reporting are related to higher interest rates, worse credit ratings and less favorable forecasts of insolvency for private client companies, and a lower Tobin's Q for publicly listed client companies. Collectively, these results imply that audit partner aggressive or conservative reporting is a systematic audit partner attribute and not randomly distributed across engagements.
The Impact of Changing the Racial Composition of Congressional Districts on Legislators' Roll Call Behavior

The 1991-1992 redrawing of congressional districts produced the greatest changes of any remapping since the mid-1960s. In many states, particularly in the South, the driving force was the Justice Department demand that majority-minority districts be drawn wherever possible. In this article the author explores the consequences of changing the racial composition of districts on legislative behavior. A measure of conservatism and a measure of support for civil rights concerns serve as the dependent variables. Comparing voting records of southern legislators in 1993 with those from the 102nd Congress shows that freshman Republicans were particularly conservative and more senior representatives were often more conservative. Some evidence suggests that first-term Democrats were more liberal than their predecessors. At first it appeared that legislators modified their voting records in response to changes in the racial composition of their districts. Once further controls were imposed, it became clear that the relationship between constituency change and roll call voting was limited to Black legislators who replaced Whites.
Impact of Celebrity Endorsement on Consumers' Buying Behaviour

The modern world of marketing communication has become colorful and flooded with advertisements, and it is hard to get noticed. It is an uphill task for the designer of an advertising campaign to differentiate itself from others and attract viewers' attention. In this jet age, people tend to ignore all commercials and advertisements while flipping through the magazines and newspapers or viewing TV. But even then, the glamour of a celebrity seldom goes unnoticed. Thus, celebrity endorsement in advertisement and its impact on the overall brand is of great significance. This Paper gives an insight of the effect of celebrity endorsement on the buying behaviour of the consumers. ABSTRACT
Organizing interests in Western Europe : pluralism, corporatism, and the transformation of politics

Preface Introduction Suzanne Berger Part I. The determinants of interest group formation: 1. 'Fictitious bonds . of wealth and law' Charles S. Maier 2. Class formation, interest articulation and public policy Jurgen Kocka 3. Regime and interest representation Suzanne Berger 4. Local corporatism Gudmund Hernes and Arne Selvik Part II. The functioning of interest groups 5. The attribution of public status to interest groups Claus Offe 6. German interest group alliances in war and inflation, 1914-1923 Gerald D. Feldman 7. Corporatism and official hegemony John T. S. Keeler 8. The internal politics of trade unions Charles F. Sabel Part III. State, society and representation: the changing relationship 9. Interests and parties in pluralism Alessandro Pizzorno 10. Interest intermediation and regime governability in contemporary Western Europe and North America Philippe C. Schmitter 11. May 1968 and the Hot Autumn of 1969 Michele Salvati 12. A century of politics and interests in Spain Juan J. Linz Index.
Utility of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in the treatment of operable breast cancer

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is a legitimate alternative to first‐line surgical therapy for the treatment of breast cancer patients, as level one evidence shows the effect on overall survival is equivalent to that of adjuvant chemotherapy. In the treatment of women with operable breast cancer, NAC provides a number of potential advantages including: improving the chance of achieving breast‐conserving surgery, improving cosmesis after breast‐conserving surgery, downstaging the breast and axilla, allowing time to fully consider surgical options, time for genetic testing and facilitating breast reconstruction in otherwise high‐risk patients. However, in Australia, NAC is poorly utilized with less than 3% of women with operable breast cancer receiving NAC. This review discusses the potential harms and benefits of NAC, discusses areas of controversy in the use of NAC and describes how we have used NAC in our own practice. We conclude that if it is obviously necessary for the newly presenting breast cancer patient to have chemotherapy as part of the treatment, it is worth considering NAC. In many patients, the potential benefits of NAC outweigh the harms. However, maximizing these benefits is closely aligned with appropriate patient selection and timely multidisciplinary team communication.
Persistent Human Papilloma Virus Infection as an Indicator of Risk of Recurrence of High-Grade Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia Treated by the Loop Electrosurgical Excision Procedure

Objective To evaluate the recurrence rate of high-grade cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) treated by the loop electrosurgical excision procedure (LEEP) according to the persistence of human papilloma virus (HPV) infection. Design Prospective observational study. Setting The Florence District screening program for cervical cancer. Sample Eighty-four cases of CIN2/3 consecutively treated by LEEP and actively followed up. Method Cases underwent HPV testing (polymerase chain reaction) prior to LEEP and after 6 months, and then cyto-colposcopic followup every 6 months. Main outcomes measures Recurrence was defined as histological evidence of high-grade CIN. The association of recurrence to age and CIN grade at treatment and to cytologic and HPV test findings at recurrence was determined. Results The average recurrence rate was 11.9% (10/84 cases; 95% CI, 5.9-20.8%). Recurrence probability was not significantly associated to age (χ2 = 0.25, df = 2, P = 0.88) or CIN grade (CIN 3 = 8/57, CIN2 = 2/27, χ2 = 0.26, df = 1, P = 0.6), whereas a significant association was evident for the cytology report (<LSIL = 6/76, HSIL ≥4/8, χ2 = 8.55, df = 1, P = 0.003) and HPV testing (absent = 1/48, present = 9/36, χ2 = 8.23, df = 1, P = 0.004). Conclusions Most CIN2> recurrences after LEEP occur in subjects with persistent HPV infection. Subjects with negative findings at cytology, colposcopy and HPV testing are at negligible risk of recurrence and might return safely to standard screening protocol.