Delaware would lose its status as the premier venue for U.S. bankruptcy cases, costing the state’s economy an estimated $100 million a year, under a bipartisan bill sponsored by leaders of the House Judiciary Committee. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the Judiciary panel, introduced the bill with Michigan’s John Conyers, its ranking Democrat. The aim is to prevent court-shopping and make companies reorganize at home “to ensure maximum input from all affected stakeholders,” Smith said in a statement. Delaware’s Congressional delegation disagreed, citing the Wilmington-based court’s expertise. “When someone has a specific medical problem, they go to a specialist,” Representative John Carney, a Democrat, said in an e-mail. “Delaware’s courts are our nation’s bankruptcy specialists.” The state’s two U.S. senators, Democrats Thomas Carper and Chris Coons, also oppose the bill. Under the measure, a corporation may file for Chapter 11 reorganization only in the federal district where its principal place of business or assets are located. The Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Venue Reform Act of 2011 would thus rule out most of the 90 public companies that since 2006 have sought protection from creditors in U.S. Bankruptcy Courtin Wilmington, Delaware, where they are incorporated. Delaware’s ascendance as a center for bankruptcy filings came in response to New Jersey’s quest more than a century ago to become the U.S. corporation capital, according to University of California, Los Angeles Professor Lynn M. LoPucki in his 2005 book, “Courting Failure.” The Delaware General Corporation Law of 1899 sought to make state regulations less burdensome and develop a more predictable basis of court precedent for business disputes. The reform attracted more companies and, by the 1920s, “no state could best Delaware,” LoPucki wrote. “Nearly all of the large companies that file for bankruptcy in Delaware are incorporated in Delaware,” David A. Skeel Jr., a University of Pennsylvania law professor, said last month in testimony to Congress. The proposed legislation “would make it impossible for most to file” for bankruptcy there. Under current law, a company can file for bankruptcy in its state of incorporation, which for 63 percent of Fortune 500 companies is Delaware, according to the state. The state’s economy garners about $100 million a year in bankruptcy-generated legal fees and spending, according to a database maintained by LoPucki. The UCLA database shows that 155 public companies with assets of more than $500 million sought bankruptcy protection in Delaware from 2000 to 2011. That is 38 percent of the U.S. total of 405. New York’s Southern District, which includes Manhattan, was second with 93 cases, or 23 percent. The New York economy benefitted by as much as $190 million because of larger cases and higher costs, according to the data. Gregory J. Wawro, a political scientist at Columbia University in New York, said backers of the bill have an advantage because Delaware is a small state with just one House member. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-18/delaware-s-status-as-u-s-bankruptcy-capital-may-end-under-proposed-law.html

The English Language has borrowed a lot of words from other languages like Greek and Latin. Latin is a major lender. One example is Oct: eight: October, Octave, Octagon, Octopus, Octillion. Find other examples at: http://www.brighthub.com/education/languages/articles/21707.aspx
The reason that October is named as the eight month is that, in the Latin calendar, it was.

Charity of the Week from the October 28, 2011 issue of The Week magazine
Shoes That Fit provides new shoes to children in need for school. Shoes That Fit has an ongoing need for specific items all year long.
New boys’ and girls’ athletic shoes – sizes youth 10 through adult 12.
New underwear and socks.
Assorted clothing appropriate for school, including: pants or jeans, knit shirts, sweaters, hoodies and warm jackets.
Gift cards are always welcome from Target, Payless, Rack Room, Wal-Mart and other major retailers.
To donate any of these items to a Shoes That Fit chapter near you, contact the charity at info@shoesthatfit.org.

The Compact Cassette is a plastic case containing a spool of 3.81 mm magnetic tape spooled between two reels. The tape is run at a rate of 4.76 cm/second. A tape head in the tape player or deck, in contact with an exposed portion of the tape, interprets an analog signal from the tape's magnetic surface. Read a well-organized history: the dawn of magnetic recording (1878-1930), magnetic recording on tape (1938-58), cartridges and cassettes (1958-65), the king emerge: compact cassette, and the reign: compact cassette (1965-90) at: http://vintagecassettes.com/_history/history.htm

Most music lovers have abandoned cassettes. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is removing the term "cassette player" from its Concise dictionary. Sony says it stopped shipments of its Walkman cassette player in Japan earlier this year. But cassette devotees say that tapes are underappreciated. They see cassettes following in the shadows of their analog brethren, vinyl records, which are currently enjoying a renaissance. The Compact Cassette was invented by Philips, the Netherlands electronics giant, in 1963, and took off in the 1970s, especially after Sony introduced its legendary Walkman in 1979. U.S. music-cassette shipments peaked in 1988 at 450 million tapes, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The cassette's decline began as compact discs took over. U.S. music-cassette sales are up about 50% to 23,000 albums so far this year, compared with the same period last year, according Nielsen SoundScan. But that statistic doesn't include all private tape production or sales of blank and used tapes. Steve Stepp, president of National Audio Co., the largest U.S. cassette-tape manufacturer, says he has seen a surge in cassette-tape sales. He says he has doubled his staff to about 60 from 30 in 2009 to increase production at his Springfield, Mo., factory. "Four years ago, most people thought the audiocassette was finished," he says. "It's our well kept secret that it never was." One of Mr. Stepp's customers is Billy Sprague, owner of Sanity Muffin, a cassette-only music label in Oakland, Calif. When Mr. Sprague noticed his musician friends had backlogs of recordings but couldn't afford CD or vinyl distribution, he cooked up the label. Cassettes average $2.50 per tape to produce, he says, and sell for $5 to $7. Lauren Rudser http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204002304576631361693349974.html

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. Information theory was developed by Claude E. Shannon to find fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as compressing data and on reliably storing and communicating data. Since its inception it has broadened to find applications in many other areas, including statistical inference, natural language processing, cryptography generally, networks other than communication networks — as in neurobiology, the evolution and function of molecular codes, model selection in ecology, thermal physics, quantum computing, plagiarism detection and other forms of data analysis. A key measure of information is known as entropy, which is usually expressed by the average number of bits needed to store or communicate one symbol in a message. Entropy quantifies the uncertainty involved in predicting the value of a random variable. For example, specifying the outcome of a fair coin flip (two equally likely outcomes) provides less information (lower entropy) than specifying the outcome from a roll of a die (six equally likely outcomes). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

The income earned by the top 1% of Americans has declined for the second year in a row while their average tax rate has increased, according to a new Tax Foundation study. The average federal tax rate for those reporting at least $343,927 in income has increased from 22.5% in 2007 to 24.0% in 2009, while the average income for the top 1% has declined from $1.4 million to $1 million over the same period. The Tax Foundation's analysis is based on new data from the Internal Revenue Service on individual income taxes, reporting on calendar year 2009. The amount of individual income tax paid steeply declined by $166 billion, twice the decline from 2007 to 2008. Nationally, average effective income tax rates were at their lowest levels since the IRS began tracking them in 1986. The average tax rate for returns with a positive liability went from 12.2% in 2008 to 11.1% in 2009...In 2009, the top 1% of tax returns earned 16.9% of adjusted gross income and paid 36.7% of all federal individual income taxes. In 2008 those figures were 20.0% and 38.0%, respectively. Each year from 2005 to 2007, the top 1 percent's constantly growing share of income earned and taxes paid set a record. The 2008 reversal of this trend continued in 2009."
See 11-page Tax Foundation Fiscal Fact No. 285, Summary of Latest Federal Individual Income Tax Data, October 20, 2011 by economist David S. Logan at: http://taxfoundation.org/files/ff285.pdf