In Print & On the Air
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL reported May 14 that the harsh public spotlight on business dealings may be doing its job: Fewer class-action lawsuits related to federal securities law are being filed, according to a new study by the Stanford Law School Securities Class-Action Clearinghouse. The study reported there were 175 securities class-action filings in 2003, down from 225 in 2002 -- a drop of 22 percent -- and an average of 192 suits a year for each of the years from 1996 to 2002. Corporations, and therefore shareholders, appeared to be benefiting from the litigation let-up: Although companies sued in 2003 lost more than $540 billion in market capitalization during the class-action periods, that amount was a 72 percent decline from 2002's staggering $1.9 trillion in market-cap losses, the study said.
RESEARCHERS AT STANFORD AND NASA are developing a system to keep astronauts informed of their physiology while drifting in zero gravity, CNN.com reported May 13. The LifeGuard system is a collection of biosensors that feed health and physiology data to a compact wearable device designed to record an astronaut's vital signs, much like an airplane's "black box" data recorder captures flight information. The getup is easier to wear than the bulky systems astronauts currently get hooked up to and, as a result, other groups have expressed interest in using it. GREG KOVACS, associate professor of electrical engineering and one of the project leaders, noted: "There are tons of applications for medical use, home use, athletic training and uses in many other areas. There is, if anything, too much interest." The medical community says it could be adapted to monitor patients with new pacemakers, while high-performance athletes hope to track their body's performance in training.
LINGUISTS WHO HAVE SPENT their lives studying American dialects say blacks and whites not only speak two different forms of English, the dialects are more different today than they were a century ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reported May 16. Education Professor JOHN BAUGH said it is an overstatement to treat black English as a foreign language, "but the nuanced mastery of a foreign dialect is often more complicated and more difficult than the mastery of a second language." Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ended school segregation 50 years ago, did not contemplate the linguistic dimension of the problem, Baugh explained. "The underlying aspect of the decision was that segregation was based on race and if you integrated students, then racial disparities would go away," he said. "But the linguistic dimension was understated and misunderstood. When overt segregation went away, new barriers became apparent."
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