In Standard Yiddish, -s and -ən are used as default allomorphs for plural word formation. It is argued here that the choice is left to the phonology, with -s acting as a default within a default. This status is used to explain the exclusive use of -s in the pluralization of proper names, which are claimed to be formed with no sensitivity to the phonological form of the base.

Resources for tackling animal welfare issues are often limited. Obtaining a consensus of expert opinion on the most pressing issues to address is a valuable approach to try to ensure that resources are wisely spent. In this study, seven independent experts in a range of disciplines (including veterinary medicine, animal behaviour and welfare science and ethics) were consulted on the relative prioritisation of welfare issues impacting companion dogs in Great Britain. Experts first anonymously ranked the priority of 37 welfare issues, pre-defined from a literature review and an earlier published survey. In a subsequent two-day panel workshop, experts refined these issues into 25 composite groups and used specific criteria to agree their relative priorities as a Welfare Problem (WP; incorporating numbers of dogs affected, severity, duration and counter-balancing benefits) and a Strategic Priority (SP; a combination of WP and tractability). Other criteria — anthropogenicity, ethical significance and confidence in the issue-relevant evidence — were also discussed by the panel. Issues that scored highly for both WP and SP were: inappropriate husbandry, lack of owner knowledge, undesirable behaviours, inherited disease, inappropriate socialisation and habituation and conformation-related disorders. Other welfare issues, such as obese and overweight dogs, were judged as being important for welfare (WP) but not strategic priorities (SP), due to the expert-perceived difficulties in their management and resolution. This information can inform decisions on where future resources can most cost-effectively be targeted, to bring about the greatest improvement in companion dog welfare in Great Britain.

In Phillips v Phillips, Lord Westbury stated that, against a bona fide purchaser faced with an “equity” to rescind, “the Court will not interfere”. This has been interpreted to mean that purchasers of even an equitable interest shall take free of prior equities. Yet the distinction between “equities” and equitable interests has been, and remains, uncertain; some have therefore questioned the intent behind Phillips. This paper shall elucidate Lord Westbury's intentions within their historical context and argues that Phillips offers a coherent, functional explanation of both: (1) the protection given to equity's darling; and (2) how that protection was effected.

The Spanish philosopher Sebastián Izquierdo was a luminary of seventeenth-century scholasticism. In his main philosophical work, Pharus scientiarum, Izquierdo claims to be the first to provide a systematic analysis of the notion of priority. Izquierdo is not the first to attempt an analysis of priority, but his treatment is original and rigorous. Izquierdo distinguishes between accidental and essential priority. This distinction crosscuts his distinction between relative and absolute priority. Izquierdo also recognizes four types of absolute priority: priority of duration, priority of origin, priority of nonmutual connection, and priority of worth. In this article I explain Izquierdo's various priority relations, their formal properties, and how they all cohere in a general theory of priority.

The specialization process associated with genetic selection could be associated with functional disorders, affecting the reproductive success of females (fitness). We hypothesized that by modulating energy acquisition and allocation of females we could balance productivity and reproductive success. To test this hypothesis, we used 203 rabbit females belonging to three genetic types: H (n=66) maternal line specialized in prolificacy, LP (n=67) generalist maternal line, R (n=70) paternal line specialized in growth rate. We fed each genetic type with two diets specifically designed to promote milk yield (AF) or body reserves recovery (CS). We controlled females between their first and fifth reproductive cycles, recording traits related with productivity and fitness of females. H females fed CS had on average 11.2±0.43 kits with an individual weight of 54±1.2 g at birth and 525±11 g at weaning. Their conception rate when multiparous was 44% and their survival rate at the end of the experiment 30%. When they were fed AF, the individual weight of kits was 3.8 g heavier (P<0.05) at birth and 38 g heavier at weaning (P<0.05), the conception rate when multiparous increased 23 percentage points (P<0.05) and the survival rate at the end of the experiment 25 percentage points (P<0.05). LP females fed CS had on average 10.8±0.43 kits with an individual weight of 52±1.2 g at birth and 578±11 g at weaning. Their conception rate when multiparous was 79% and their survival rate at the end of the experiment 75%. When they were fed AF, it only increased individual weight of kits at weaning (+39 g; P<0.05). R females fed CS had on average 8.4±0.43 kits with an individual weight of 60±1.2 g at birth and 568±11 g at weaning. Their conception rate when multiparous was 60% and their survival rate at the end of the experiment 37%. When they were fed AF, they presented 1.4 kits less at birth (P<0.05) but heavier at birth (+4.9 g; P<0.05) and at weaning (+37 g; P<0.05). Therefore, we observed that genetic types prioritized different fitness components and that diets could affected them. In this sense, seems that more specialized genetic types, were more sensitive to diets than the more generalist type.

This paper questions the distinction between egalitarianism and prioritarianism, arguing that it is important to separate the reasons for particular social preferences from the contents of these preferences, that it is possible to like equality and separability simultaneously, and that some egalitarians and prioritarians may therefore share the same social preferences (though for different reasons). The case of risky prospects, for which Broome has proposed an interesting example meant to show that egalitarians and prioritarians cannot share the same preferences, is scrutinized. The levelling down objection is also examined.

Between 1822 and the late 1830s a highly personal priority dispute was fought between the celebrated surgeon and anatomist Sir Charles Bell and his ex-student Herbert Mayo. The dispute was over the motor and sensory functions of the Vth and VIIth cranial nerves. Over the course of the 1820s and the 1830s, the competing claims of Bell and Mayo were presented in newspapers, journals, and textbooks. But by the time of Bell’s death in 1842, Mayo had been discredited, a seemingly tragic footnote in the history of nervous discovery. And yet, with the benefit of hindsight, Bell’s case was at best disingenuous. His success was not due to any intrinsic scientific merit in his argument, but rather his ability to create a narrative that undermined the credibility of Mayo. However, only when Mayo’s public performances elided with Bell’s descriptions did this ploy succeed. As a result, the dispute illuminates the importance of credibility to the creation of an idealised scientific medical practitioner.

This paper examines a recently proposed per se rule to automatically treat as equity secured loans granted by shareholders to the corporation on the eve of insolvency. It shows that arguments based on the dual quality of the lender-shareholder are insufficient by themselves to propose such a rigid rule, which would curb potentially socially beneficial loans. Further empirical research is needed to shed light on this issue.

Using a 1977 article by Robert Clark as the starting point, this article attempts to shed new light on the question of whether and when shareholder loans to her company should be either equitably subordinated or, as courts have done in a few recent cases, recharacterized as equity. In its emphasis on the particular issue of shareholder loans, the article has a narrower compass than Clark’s article, which uses a four-part typology to explore the relationship among fraudulent conveyance law, equitable subordination, veil piercing and dividend restrictions. But the article also expands Clark's analysis in several respects. The most important adjustment involves the general Nonhindrance ideal, which we use to identify a crucially important form of interference with the rights of creditors that Clark does not himself consider directly.

Part 1 of the article very briefly describes the 1939 Supreme Court case that served as a well-spring for equitable subordination doctrine in general, and for subordination of shareholder loans in particular. Part 2 then focuses on a series of recent decisions that have wrestled with the question whether shareholder loans should be recharacterized as equity contributions. Recharacterization doctrine is closely related to equitable subordination, but most courts view it as a separate development. Part 2 suggests that much of the confusion in the cases could be eliminated by disentangling two issues, whether the status of a loan is ambiguous (which raises issues of Truth, in terms of Clark's typology) and whether it was likely to destroy value that would otherwise go to creditors (the Nonhindrance concern); and by distinguishing bankruptcy recharacterization from the tax characterization cases that seem to have spawned the new doctrine. Part 3 then concludes by briefly considering the German and Austrian approaches to these same issues, which focus on capitalization and creditworthiness.

The most important, and initially counterintuitive, implication comes in Part 2: whereas US courts have treated security interests as a badge of legitimacy in assessing shareholder loans, secured loans are actually the most worrisome form of shareholder investment. These security interests, we argue, should be disallowed.

Representing defeasibility is an important issue in common sense reasoning. In reasoning about action and change, this issue becomes more difficult because domain and action related defeasible information may conflict with general inertia rules. Furthermore, different types of defeasible information may also interfere with each other during the reasoning. In this paper, we develop a prioritized logic programming approach to handle defeasibilities in reasoning about action. In particular, we propose three action languages ${\cal AT}^{0}$, ${\cal AT}^{1}$, and ${\cal AT}^{2}$ which handle three types of defeasibilities in action domains named defeasible constraints, defeasible observations and actions with defeasible and abnormal effects respectively. Each language with a higher superscript can be viewed as an extension of the language with a lower superscript. These action languages inherit the simple syntax of ${\cal A}$ language but their semantics is developed in terms of transition systems where transition functions are defined based on prioritized logic programs. By illustrating various examples, we show that our approach eventually provides a powerful mechanism to handle various defeasibilities in temporal prediction and postdiction. We also investigate semantic properties of these three action languages and characterize classes of action domains that present more desirable solutions in reasoning about action within the underlying action languages.

We consider the Klimov model for an open network of two types of jobs. Jobs of type i arrive at station i, have processing times that are exponentially distributed with parameter µi, and when processed either go on to station j with probability pij, or depart the network with probability pi0. Costs are charged at a rate that depends on the number of jobs of the two types in the system. It is shown that for arbitrary arrival processes the policy that gives priority to those jobs for whom the rate of change of the cost function is greatest minimizes the expected cost rate at every time t. This result is stronger than the Klimov result in two ways: arrival processes are arbitrary, and the minimization is at each time t. But the result holds for only two types.

Waiting-time distributions for M/G/1 systems with priority dependent on class, order of arrival, service length, etc., are difficult to obtain. For single-server multipurpose processors the difficulties are compounded. A certain ergodic post-arrival depletion time is shown to be a true maximum for all delay times of interest. Explicit numerical evaluation of the distribution of this time is available. A heavy-traffic distribution for this time is shown to provide a simple and useful engineering tool with good results and insensitivity to service-time distribution even at modest traffic intensity levels. The relationship to the diffusion approximation for heavy traffic is described.