The New Zealand Animal Welfare Act 1999 imposes a duty of care on all owners and persons in charge, to provide for the physical, health and behavioural needs of the animals in their care. The Act provides for the development of codes of welfare by the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee (NAWAC) and gives legal status to the minimum standards that they contain when issued by the Minister of Agriculture. Codes are used to promote appropriate behaviour, establish minimum standards of animal care and encourage best practice by those in charge of animals. One of the main challenges in developing codes of welfare is to integrate the various, and often conflicting, social, ethical, economic and production management value judgments, with the available science, in a way that does not stifle innovation or require frequent alteration of the codes. In New Zealand we believe this is best achieved using minimum standards which are designed as animal-orientated statements of desired welfare outcomes, accompanied by one or more indicators by which achievement of the outcome can be measured or objectively assessed. Codes are primarily directed at educating the owners or persons in charge of animals of their legal obligations, encouraging voluntary compliance, and supporting industries in the development of compliance and quality assurance programmes. The challenge is to develop a consistent, whole-of-system approach to animal welfare compliance that focuses on interventions which encourage voluntary compliance or deter non-compliance before offending becomes serious and animal welfare is unnecessarily compromised. The aim of this paper is to describe New Zealand's policy, which is to develop outcome-based welfare standards, to promote and demonstrate maximum voluntary industry compliance with them, and to ensure that any serious breaches are detected and responded to effectively.

Exposing the chimpanzee to language training appears to enhance the animal's ability to perform some kinds of tasks but not others. The abilities that are enhanced involve abstract judgment, as in analogical reasoning, matching proportions of physically unlike exemplars, and completing incomplete (external) representations of action. The abilities that do not improve concern the location of items in space and the inferences one might make in attempting to obtain them. Representing items in space and making inferences about them could be done with an imaginal code, but representing relations and judging the relations between them, as in analogies, requires a more abstract code. Language training cannot instill such an abstract code, but for species that have the code to start with, it may enhance the animal's ability to use it.

We consider the defect theorem in the context of labelled polyominoes, i.e., two-dimensional figures. The classical version of this property states that if a set of n words is not a code then the words can be expressed as a product of at most n - 1 words, the smaller set being a code. We survey several two-dimensional extensions exhibiting the boundaries where the theorem fails. In particular, we establish the defect property in the case of three dominoes (n × 1 or 1 × n rectangles).

Since the publication of the Cadbury Code (1992), there has been a rapid international diffusion of corporate governance codes containing recommendations on boards, executive pay, disclosure and investor relations. But there has been little or no scientific evidence to support the recommendations, so it is questionable whether they can be explained by market failures. Instead, based on public choice theory, I propose the alternative hypothesis that the codes reflect rent seeking by institutional investors in a bargaining game with other stakeholders, including investment banks, auditing firms, incumbent owners, managers and employees. I argue that this hypothesis can explain a number of puzzling features about codes, including their remarkable similarity, the ‘one size fits all’ approach and their pattern of diffusion. A study of fifty-two corporate governance codes and a qualitative review of their core contents provide empirical support for the institutional investor hypothesis. The key focus is on empowering boards and making them accountable to minority investors, i.e., capturing the overall control of listed companies. Since it is not clear that these initiatives contribute to overall value creation, an evaluation of the costs of governance is called for.

The paper presents an elementary approach for the calculation of the entropy of a class of languages. This approach is based on the consideration of roots of a real polynomial and is also suitable for calculating the Bernoulli measure. The class of languages we consider here is a generalisation of the Łukasiewicz language.

A decomposition of a set X of words over a d-letter alphabet A = {a1,...,ad} is any sequence X1,...,Xd,Y1,...,Yd of subsets of A* such that the sets Xi, i = 1,...,d, are pairwise disjoint, their union is X, and for all i, 1 ≤ i ≤ d, Xi ~ aiYi, where ~ denotes the commutative equivalence relation. We introduce some suitable decompositions that we call good, admissible, and normal. A normal decomposition is admissible and an admissible decomposition is good. We prove that a set is commutatively prefix if and only if it has a normal decomposition. In particular, we consider decompositions of Bernoulli sets and codes. We prove that there exist Bernoulli sets which have no good decomposition. Moreover, we show that the classical conjecture of commutative equivalence of finite maximal codes to prefix ones is equivalent to the statement that any finite and maximal code has an admissible decomposition.

A ${{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}}$-action with “maximal number of isolated fixed points” (i.e., with only isolated fixed points such that ${{\dim}_{k}}\left( {{\oplus }_{i}}{{H}^{i}}\left( M;k \right) \right)\,\,=\,\,\left| {{M}^{{{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}}}} \right|,\,k\,=\,\left. {{\mathbb{F}}_{2}} \right)$ on a 3-dimensional, closed manifold determines a binary self-dual code of $\text{length}\,\text{=}\,\left| {{M}^{{{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}}}} \right|$. In turn this code determines the cohomology algebra ${{H}^{*}}\,\left( M;k \right)$ and the equivariant cohomology $H_{{{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}}}^{*}\,\left( M;k \right)$. Hence, from results on binary self-dual codes one gets information about the cohomology type of 3-manifolds which admit involutions with maximal number of isolated fixed points. In particular, “most” cohomology types of closed 3-manifolds do not admit such involutions. Generalizations of the above result are possible in several directions, e.g., one gets that “most” cohomology types (over ${{\mathbb{F}}_{2}}$) of closed 3-manifolds do not admit a non-trivial involution.