NEWSBOYS: SPANISH AMERICAN PATRIOT CHILDREN AND ‘THE HAZELWOOD MAGAZINE’ IN BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND, 1820s

There was a close connection between the expansion of the press and experiments with new pedagogical strategies in the early industrial age. An expanding public school system required textbooks thus creating a whole new category of demand which appealed to printers who always on the lookout for reliable markets. At the same time, literacy was increasingly understood to be a desirable characteristic for a productive, patriotic citizenry. For a period of five years or so in the 1820s, several sons of important Spanish American patriot leaders were sent abroad to study in a progressive school called Hazelwood, near Birmingham in the heart of industrializing England. While there, the boys and their friends wrote and published a monthly periodical called the Hazelwood Magazine that clearly imitated the contents of professional newspapers andshared the underlying values of the medium.

How Vague Can Your Patent Be? Vagueness Strategies in U.S. Patents

Patent claims define the protection scope of the intellectual property sought by the patent applicant or patentee. Broad claims are valuable as they can describe more expansive rights to the invention. Therefore, if these claims are too broad a potential infringer will more easily argue against them. But if the claims are too narrow the scope of protection of the intellectual property is greatly reduced. Patent claims have to be, on the one hand, determinate and precise enough and, on the other hand, as inclusive as possible. Therefore patent applicants must find a balance in the broadness of the scope defined by their claims. This balance can be achieved by the choice of words with a convenient degree of semantic indeterminacy, by the choice of modifiers or other strategies. In fact, vagueness in patent claims is a desirable characteristic for such documents. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of 350 U.S. patents provides a promising starting point to understand the linguistic instruments used to achieve the balance between property claim scope and precision of property description. To conclude, some issues relating vagueness and pragmatics are suggested as a line of further research.

Flash of green: are environmentally driven stock returns sustainable?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the source of apparent abnormal returns accrued by “green” company stocks. Though one cannot completely rule out that market-to-book and size factors may already capture the information of Trucosts’ total damage measure, the authors attempt to attribute the effect to risk, a persistent desirable characteristic or a short-run attention effect. Design/methodology/approach The authors construct portfolios of stocks using the Trucost data for identifying more environmentally friendly companies. The authors then compare the risk-adjusted returns of the green portfolios to the non-green portfolios. A secondary analysis of the price impact of being listed on the Newsweek green company listed is used to determine attention effects. Findings The authors find that green stock returns outperform the most polluting stocks by 3.7 percent per year on a risk-adjusted basis. The evidence is most consistent with a significant but economically small attention effect coupled with a longer lasting and greater magnitude desirable characteristic driving green returns. The authors do not find evidence of a risk-contribution to the performance after controlling for well-known factors. Practical implications Fund managers may benefit from this research in selecting green stocks, and thereby enhancing investment performance, with desirable characteristics without fear of increasing risk. Social implications One social implication is that investing in sustainable and green firms may not only be beneficial for the common good but also for the investor. Increased capital flows, and hence lower borrowing costs, for green firms may assist in creating a more ecologically sustainable economy. Originality/value To the authors’ knowledge this paper unique in attempting to determine if the green premium is a short-run inefficiency resolved by attention or a result of a desirable characteristic.

How Much Do Analysts Influence Each Other's Forecasts?

This paper develops and applies a new approach for disentangling the influence of analysts on each other's earnings forecasts from the effects of correlated information shocks. We estimate that, on average, each cent a new forecast by an analyst is above (below) another analyst's most recent forecast causes the other analyst to revise her forecast upwards (downwards) by between 0.21 and 0.36 cents. More reputable analysts are more influential, while those that tend to be optimistic are less influential and are influenced more by the forecasts of other analysts. We do not find support for career concerns-driven herding or anti-herding. Finally, we find that more influential analysts are more likely to subsequently be ranked as All-Stars and to move from a less to a more prestigious brokerage house, and less likely to leave the analyst profession, suggesting that influence is a desirable characteristic.

Buoyancy and Elasticity of Tax Revenue: Measurement Techniques

High degree of responsiveness of tax yield to changes in national income is a desirable characteristic of any tax system. If a government depends on tax revenue to finance a large part of its expenditure then it is necessary to ensure that an increasing proportion of national income flows into the public treasury as taxes. In other words, the requirement is to increase the incremental tax ratio. Computation of tax buoyancy and elasticity becomes relevant in this context. This paper explains the concepts of buoyancy and elasticity of tax revenue and describes the various methods to compute them.

Anterior Teeth and Smile Designing: A Prospective View

ABSTRACT Smile is a person's greatest beauty asset. A defective smile might be considered as a physical handicap as the mouth act as a focal point where a large share of attention is directed toward mouth and teeth, it would be nice to have some sort of tools to assess beauty, which currently does not exist. Standards for beauty are actually a compilation and comparison of everything we have seen or experienced. Smile design is different from tooth design, with tooth design one is concerned with contour, position and color of individual teeth, while integration of these teeth into the face and facial features is paramount in smile design. This article describes some average desirable characteristic features of smile to help and achieve optimum result in esthetic oral rehabilitation. How to cite this article Rajtilak G, Deepa S, Rajasekar V, Vanitha R. Anterior Teeth and Smile Designing: A Prospective View. Int J Prosthodont Restor Dent 2012;2(3):117-127.

Incorporating Infatuation in Multi-Agent Systems

In this paper we describe incorporating infatuation in multi-agent systems. Modal operators Ii+ for infatuation (the focusing on a single attractive or desirable characteristic of another agent and then considering the total agent as that one positive characteristic) and Ii- for the reverse infatuation (the focusing on a negative characteristic of an agent and then considering the total agent as that one negative characteristic) are defined. Some relationships between the operator Ii+ and the logical operators ∧, ∨, and ⇒ are characterized.