cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Scalar quantum field theory on fractals

Abstract We investigate scale invariant measures over multiple variables for scalar field theories by imitating Wiener’s construction of the measure on the space of functions of one variable. We assign random fields values on the vertices of simple geometric shapes (triangles, squares, tetrahedra) which are subdivided into a finite number of similar shapes. We find several Gaussian measures with anomalous scaling associated with these field variables. A non-Gaussian fixed point arises from the Ising model on a fractal. In the continuum limit, we construct correlation functions that vary as a power of the distance. It is either a positive power (analogous to the Wiener process) or a negative power depending on the subdivision scheme used; however it is an irrational number for all the examples. This suggests that in the continuum limits it corresponds to quantum field theories (random fields) on spaces of fractional dimension.
Richardson Varieties Have Kawamata Log Terminal Singularities

Let $X^v_w$ be a Richardson variety in the full flag variety $X$ associated to a symmetrizable Kac-Moody group $G$. Recall that $X^v_w$ is the intersection of the finite dimensional Schubert variety $X_w$ with the finite codimensional opposite Schubert variety $X^v$. We give an explicit $\bQ$-divisor $\Delta$ on $X^v_w$ and prove that the pair $(X^v_w, \Delta)$ has Kawamata log terminal singularities. In fact, $-K_{X^v_w} - \Delta$ is ample, which additionally proves that $(X^v_w, \Delta)$ is log Fano. We first give a proof of our result in the finite case (i.e., in the case when $G$ is a finite dimensional semisimple group) by a careful analysis of an explicit resolution of singularities of $X^v_w$ (similar to the BSDH resolution of the Schubert varieties). In the general Kac-Moody case, in the absence of an explicit resolution of $X^v_w$ as above, we give a proof that relies on the Frobenius splitting methods. In particular, we use Mathieu's result asserting that the Richardson varieties are Frobenius split, and combine it with a result of N. Hara and K.-I. Watanabe relating Frobenius splittings with log canonical singularities.
Cosmological topologically massive gravitons and photons

We study topologically massive (2+1)-dimensional gravity with a negative cosmological constant. The masses of the linearized curvature excitations about AdS3 backgrounds are not only shifted from their flat background values but also, more surprisingly, split according to chirality. For all finite values of the topological mass, we find a single bulk degree of freedom with positive energy, and exhibit a complete set of normalizable, finite-energy wave packet solutions. This model can also be written as a sum of two higher-derivative SL(2,R) Chern–Simons theories, weighted by the central charges of the boundary conformal field theory. At two particular ‘critical’ values of the couplings, one of these central charges vanishes, and linearized topologically massive gravity becomes equivalent to topologically massive electromagnetism; however, the physics of the bulk wave packets remains unaltered here.
Interdisciplinary Connections:: Evaluating Collaboration between AFNR and Leadership, Mathematics, and Science Educators

Agriculture, food, and/or natural resources (AFNR) content offers a tremendous context for interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Collaboration between AFNR and core content area educators has been recommended to increase interdisciplinarity in school-based AFNR Education; however, existing research lacks an empirical investigation of the relationship between interdisciplinary collaboration and outcomes associated with interdisciplinary teaching in school-based AFNR Education. Therefore, the current study explores the scope of collaboration between AFNR, leadership, mathematics, and science educators and the relationship between collaboration and interdisciplinary teaching in school-based AFNR Education. Findings indicate opportunities to initiate and strengthen interdisciplinary communities of practice through purposeful interactions, especially regarding length of interactions between AFNR and core content area educators. Recommendations for practitioners, teacher educators, and researchers are provided.
Principal arc analysis on direct product manifolds

We propose a new approach to analyze data that naturally lie on manifolds. We focus on a special class of manifolds, called direct product manifolds, whose intrinsic dimension could be very high. Our method finds a low-dimensional representation of the manifold that can be used to find and visualize the principal modes of variation of the data, as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) does in linear spaces. The proposed method improves upon earlier manifold extensions of PCA by more concisely capturing important nonlinear modes. For the special case of data on a sphere, variation following nongeodesic arcs is captured in a single mode, compared to the two modes needed by previous methods. Several computational and statistical challenges are resolved. The development on spheres forms the basis of principal arc analysis on more complicated manifolds. The benefits of the method are illustrated by a data example using medial representations in image analysis.
BEAMING AND RAPID VARIABILITY OF HIGH-ENERGY RADIATION FROM RELATIVISTIC PAIR PLASMA RECONNECTION

We report on the first study of the angular distribution of energetic particles and radiation generated in relativistic collisionless electron-positron pair plasma reconnection using two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. We discover a strong anisotropy of the particles accelerated by reconnection and the associated strong beaming of their radiation. The focusing of particles and radiation increases with their energy; in this sense, this "kinetic beaming" effect differs fundamentally from the relativistic Doppler beaming usually invoked in high-energy astrophysics, in which all photons are focused and boosted achromatically. We also present, for the first time, the modeling of the synchrotron emission as seen by an external observer during the reconnection process. The expected light curves comprise several bright symmetric sub-flares emitted by the energetic beam of particles sweeping across the line of sight intermittently, and exhibit super-fast time variability as short as about one-tenth of the system light-crossing time. The concentration of the energetic particles into compact regions inside magnetic islands and particle anisotropy explain the rapid variability. This radiative signature of reconnection can account for the brightness and variability of the gamma-ray flares in the Crab Nebula and in blazars.
Theoretical Models of Sunspot Structure and Dynamics

Recent progress in theoretical modeling of a sunspot is reviewed. The observed properties of umbral dots are well reproduced by realistic simulations of magnetoconvection in a vertical, monolithic magnetic field. To understand the penumbra, it is useful to distinguish between the inner penumbra, dominated by bright filaments containing slender dark cores, and the outer penumbra, made up of dark and bright filaments of comparable width with corresponding magnetic fields differing in inclination by some 30° and strong Evershed flows in the dark filaments along nearly horizontal or downward-plunging magnetic fields. The role of magnetic flux pumping in submerging magnetic flux in the outer penumbra is examined through numerical experiments, and different geometric models of the penumbral magnetic field are discussed in the light of high-resolution observations. Recent, realistic numerical MHD simulations of an entire sunspot have succeeded in reproducing the salient features of the convective pattern in the umbra and the inner penumbra. The siphon-flow mechanism still provides the best explanation of the Evershed flow, particularly in the outer penumbra where it often consists of cool, supersonic downflows.
Signature of Cooper pairs in the non-superconducting phases of amorphous superconducting tantalum films

We have studied the magnetic field or disorder induced insulating and metallic phases in amorphous Ta superconducting thin films. The evolution of the nonlinear transport in the insulating phase exhibits a non-monotonic behavior as the magnetic field is increased. We suggest that this observation could be evidence of the presence of localized Cooper pairs in the insulating phase. As the metallic phase intervenes the superconducting and insulating states in Ta films, this result further reveals that Cooper pairs also exist in the metallic ground state.
Separating electric field and thermal effects across the metal-insulator transition in vanadium oxide nanobeams

We present results from an experimental study of the equilibrium and non-equilibrium transport properties of vanadium oxide nanobeams near the metal-insulator transition (MIT). Application of a large electric field in the insulating phase across the nanobeams produces an abrupt MIT, and the individual roles of thermal and non-thermal effects in driving the transition are studied. Transport measurements at temperatures (T) far below the critical temperature (Tc) of MIT, in nanoscale vanadium oxide devices, show that both T and electric field play distinctly separate, but critical roles in inducing the MIT. Specifically, at T≪Tc, electric field dominates the MIT through an avalanche-type process, whereas thermal effects become progressively critical as T approaches Tc.
In-Medium Charmonium Production in Proton-Nucleus Collisions

We study charmonium production in proton-nucleus (p-A) collisions focusing on final-state effects caused by the formation of an expanding medium. Toward this end we utilize a rate equation approach within a fireball model as previously employed for a wide range of heavy-ion collisions, adapted to the small systems in p-A collisions. The initial geometry of the fireball is taken from a Monte-Carlo event generator where initial anisotropies are caused by fluctuations. We calculate the centrality and transverse-momentum dependent nuclear modification factor (RpA) as well as elliptic flow (v2) for both J/ψ and ψ(2S) and compare them to experimental data from RHIC and the LHC. While the RpAs show an overall fair agreement with most of the data, the large v2 values observed in p-Pb collisions at the LHC cannot be accounted for in our approach. While the former finding generally supports the formation of a near thermalized QCD medium in small systems, the discrepancy in the v2 suggests that its large observed values are unlikely to be due to the final-state collectivity of the fireball alone.
cuSZ: An Efficient GPU-Based Error-Bounded Lossy Compression Framework for Scientific Data

Error-bounded lossy compression is a state-of-the-art data reduction technique for HPC applications because it not only significantly reduces storage overhead but also can retain high fidelity for postanalysis. Because supercomputers and HPC applications are becoming heterogeneous using accelerator-based architectures, in particular GPUs, several development teams have recently released GPU versions of their lossy compressors. However, existing state-of-the-art GPU-based lossy compressors suffer from either low compression and decompression throughput or low compression quality. In this paper, we present an optimized GPU version, cuSZ, for one of the best error-bounded lossy compressors-SZ. To the best of our knowledge, cuSZ is the first error-bounded lossy compressor on GPUs for scientific data. Our contributions are fourfold. (1) We propose a dual-quantization scheme to entirely remove the data dependency in the prediction step of SZ such that this step can be performed very efficiently on GPUs. (2) We develop an efficient customized Huffman coding for the SZ compressor on GPUs. (3) We implement cuSZ using CUDA and optimize its performance by improving the utilization of GPU memory bandwidth. (4) We evaluate our cuSZ on five real-world HPC application datasets from the Scientific Data Reduction Benchmarks and compare it with other state-of-the-art methods on both CPUs and GPUs. Experiments show that our cuSZ improves SZ's compression throughput by up to 370.1x and 13.1x, respectively, over the production version running on single and multiple CPU cores, respectively, while getting the same quality of reconstructed data. It also improves the compression ratio by up to 3.48x on the tested data compared with another state-of-the-art GPU supported lossy compressor.
Estimating the average treatment effects of nutritional label use using subclassification with regression adjustment

Propensity score methods are common for estimating a binary treatment effect when treatment assignment is not randomized. When exposure is measured on an ordinal scale (i.e. low-medium-high), however, propensity score inference requires extensions which have received limited attention. Estimands of possible interest with an ordinal exposure are the average treatment effects between each pair of exposure levels. Using these estimands, it is possible to determine an optimal exposure level. Traditional methods, including dichotomization of the exposure or a series of binary propensity score comparisons across exposure pairs, are generally inadequate for identification of optimal levels. We combine subclassification with regression adjustment to estimate transitive, unbiased average causal effects across an ordered exposure, and apply our method on the 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to estimate the effects of nutritional label use on body mass index.
Arming the public with artificial intelligence to counter social bots

The increased relevance of social media in our daily life has been accompanied by efforts to manipulate online conversations and opinions. Deceptive social bots -- automated or semi-automated accounts designed to impersonate humans -- have been successfully exploited for these kinds of abuse. Researchers have responded by developing AI tools to arm the public in the fight against social bots. Here we review the literature on different types of bots, their impact, and detection methods. We use the case study of Botometer, a popular bot detection tool developed at Indiana University, to illustrate how people interact with AI countermeasures. A user experience survey suggests that bot detection has become an integral part of the social media experience for many users. However, barriers in interpreting the output of AI tools can lead to fundamental misunderstandings. The arms race between machine learning methods to develop sophisticated bots and effective countermeasures makes it necessary to update the training data and features of detection tools. We again use the Botometer case to illustrate both algorithmic and interpretability improvements of bot scores, designed to meet user expectations. We conclude by discussing how future AI developments may affect the fight between malicious bots and the public.
Fourier DiffuserScope: single-shot 3D Fourier light field microscopy with a diffuser

Light field microscopy (LFM) uses a microlens array (MLA) near the sensor plane of a microscope to achieve single-shot 3D imaging of a sample without any moving parts. Unfortunately, the 3D capability of LFM comes with a significant loss of lateral resolution at the focal plane. Placing the MLA near the pupil plane of the microscope, instead of the image plane, can mitigate the artifacts and provide an efficient forward model, at the expense of field-of-view (FOV). Here, we demonstrate improved resolution across a large volume with Fourier DiffuserScope, which uses a diffuser in the pupil plane to encode 3D information, then computationally reconstructs the volume by solving a sparsity-constrained inverse problem. Our diffuser consists of randomly placed microlenses with varying focal lengths; the random positions provide a larger FOV compared to a conventional MLA, and the diverse focal lengths improve the axial depth range. To predict system performance based on diffuser parameters, we, for the first time, establish a theoretical framework and design guidelines, which are verified by numerical simulations, and then build an experimental system that achieves < 3 µm lateral and 4 µm axial resolution over a 1000 × 1000 × 280 µm3 volume. Our diffuser design outperforms the MLA used in LFM, providing more uniform resolution over a larger volume, both laterally and axially.
Unsupervised adaptation with domain separation networks for robust speech recognition

Unsupervised domain adaptation of speech signal aims at adapting a well-trained source-domain acoustic model to the unlabeled data from target domain. This can be achieved by adversarial training of deep neural network (DNN) acoustic models to learn an intermediate deep representation that is both senone-discriminative and domain-invariant. Specifically, the DNN is trained to jointly optimize the primary task of senone classification and the secondary task of domain classification with adversarial objective functions. In this work, instead of only focusing on learning a domain-invariant feature (i.e. the shared component between domains), we also characterize the difference between the source and target domain distributions by explicitly modeling the private component of each domain through a private component extractor DNN. The private component is trained to be orthogonal with the shared component and thus implicitly increases the degree of domain-invariance of the shared component. A reconstructor DNN is used to reconstruct the original speech feature from the private and shared components as a regularization. This domain separation framework is applied to the unsupervised environment adaptation task and achieved 11.08% relative WER reduction from the gradient reversal layer training, a representative adversarial training method, for automatic speech recognition on CHiME-3 dataset.
Eco-Critique and Thought as a Force of Nature

It occurred to me not long ago that each time I read something new I pay special attention, without really meaning to, to how the work projects forward into a future or futures. This has been going...
Superdeterministic hidden-variables models II: conspiracy

We prove that superdeterministic models of quantum mechanics are conspiratorial in a mathematically well-defined sense, by further development of the ideas presented in a previous article A. We con...
Internal regulation in compressible turbulent shear layers

High-resolution simulations of temporally evolving mixing layers, for convective Mach numbers ranging from . These reduced spatial scales serve to reduce the effective velocity scale for turbulent motions, suppressed Reynolds stresses, turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) production and dissipation, and the mixing-layer thickness growth rate.
Ultrasparse Ultrasparsifiers and Faster Laplacian System Solvers

In this paper we provide an $O(m (\log \log n)^{O(1)} \log(1/\epsilon))$-expected time algorithm for solving Laplacian systems on $n$-node $m$-edge graphs, improving improving upon the previous best expected runtime of $O(m \sqrt{\log n} (\log \log n)^{O(1)} \log(1/\epsilon))$ achieved by (Cohen, Kyng, Miller, Pachocki, Peng, Rao, Xu 2014). To obtain this result we provide efficient constructions of $\ell_p$-stretch graph approximations with improved stretch and sparsity bounds. Additionally, as motivation for this work, we show that for every set of vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$ (not just those induced by graphs) and all $k > 0$ there exist an ultra-sparsifiers with $d-1 + O(d/k)$ re-weighted vectors of relative condition number at most $k^2$. For small $k$, this improves upon the previous best known multiplicative factor of $k \cdot \tilde{O}(\log d)$, which is only known for the graph case.
Interactive Visualization of Terascale Data in the Browser: Fact or Fiction?

Information visualization applications have become ubiquitous, in no small part thanks to the ease of wide distribution and deployment to users enabled by the web browser. Scientific visualization applications, relying on native code libraries and parallel processing, have been less suited to such widespread distribution, as browsers do not provide the required libraries or compute capabilities. In this paper, we revisit this gap in visualization technologies and explore how new web technologies, WebAssembly and WebGPU, can be used to deploy powerful visualization solutions for large-scale scientific data in the browser. In particular, we evaluate the programming effort required to bring scientific visualization applications to the browser through these technologies and assess their competitiveness against classic native solutions. As a main example, we present a new GPU-driven isosurface extraction method for block-compressed data sets, that is suitable for interactive isosurface computation on large volumes in resource-constrained environments, such as the browser. We conclude that web browsers are on the verge of becoming a competitive platform for even the most demanding scientific visualization tasks, such as interactive visualization of isosurfaces from a 1TB DNS simulation. We call on researchers and developers to consider investing in a community software stack to ease use of these upcoming browser features to bring accessible scientific visualization to the browser.
Duluth at SemEval-2020 Task 7: Using Surprise as a Key to Unlock Humorous Headlines

We use pretrained transformer-based language models in SemEval-2020 Task 7: Assessing the Funniness of Edited News Headlines. Inspired by the incongruity theory of humor, we use a contrastive approach to capture the surprise in the edited headlines. In the official evaluation, our system gets 0.531 RMSE in Subtask 1, 11th among 49 submissions. In Subtask 2, our system gets 0.632 accuracy, 9th among 32 submissions.
Brain imaging and courtroom evidence: on the admissibility and persuasiveness of fMRI

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is currently the most advanced technique for measuring and depicting brain function. Functional MRI studies abound in neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology. Inevitably, fMRI-based evidence will be offered in court as proof of matters involving parties’ mental states and capabilities. This paper analyses the likely admissibility of fMRI testimony and images. Cases involving other types of functional neuroimaging (PET and SPECT), which may shed light on judges’ receptivity to fMRI evidence, are briefly surveyed. The conceptual and methodological underpinnings of fMRI are then explored, prompting basic questions about the evidentiary reliability and relevance of fMRI results. The first reported case involving fMRI evidence, which raises several of these questions, is described. Finally, the admissibility and probative value of the fMRI images themselves are discussed. Assuming that the expert testimony that the images are offered to illustrate is admissible, it is argued that the law can obtain the benefits of fMRI science while minimising the judgmental risks by allowing triers of fact to see the images and encouraging experts and lawyers to educate the triers to interpret the images properly.
Ownership and Possession in the Early Common Law

Much has been written on the possible influence of Roman or canon law on the early English common law of property. Maitland thought that the canonist's actio spolii was the inspiration for the assize of novel disseisin. Sutherland argued that the assize borrowed from the Roman interdict unde vi. Milsom, by contrast, thinks that the early common-law writs must be understood within a feudal framework, and that the early common law took nothing from Roman law than the Latin language. This Article offers a new perspective on ownership and possession in the early common law. It examines the theoretical development of proprietary and possessory concepts in the ius commune as it would have been understood in England in the late twelfth century, taking into account the Liber pauperum and the early ordines as well as reports of ecclesiastical court cases. After surveying the current debate, the Article then turns to the advowson writs, which have not yet been studied as a possible example of Roman law influence. Finding some evidence of the ownership/possession distinction in the advowson writs, the Article comes to the conclusion that the possibility of influence from the ius commune is greater than Milsom thinks.
Efficient Likelihood Inference in Nonstationary Univariate Models

Recent literature shows that embedding fractionally integrated time series models with spectral poles at the long-run and/or seasonal frequencies in autoregressive frameworks leads to estimators and test statistics with nonstandard limiting distributions. However, we demonstrate that when embedding such models in a general I(d) framework the resulting estimators and tests regain desirable properties from standard statistical analysis. We show the existence of a local time domain maximum likelihood estimator and its asymptotic normality—and under Gaussianity asymptotic efficiency. The Wald, likelihood ratio, and Lagrange multiplier tests are asymptotically equivalent and chi-squared distributed under local alternatives. With independent and identically distributed Gaussian errors and a scalar parameter, we show that the tests in addition achieve the asymptotic Gaussian power envelope of all invariant unbiased tests; i.e., they are asymptotically uniformly most powerful invariant unbiased against local alternatives. In a Monte Carlo study we document the finite sample superiority of the likelihood ratio test.I am grateful to Bent Jesper Christensen, Niels Haldrup, Pentti Saikkonen (the co-editor), and two anonymous referees for many useful comments and suggestions that significantly improved this paper. This work was done while the author was at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
State Tax Haven Legislation and Corporate Income Tax Revenues

In response to the rise of foreign tax haven usage by multinational corporations, several US states have enacted laws that require income from affiliated entities operating in tax haven jurisdictio...
Post-Conflict Justice in Iraq

In Post-Conflict Iraq, justice meant holding the previous Iraqi government liable for its thirty five years' of atrocities against Iraqi citizens and reconstructing the judicial system while introducing the notion of an independent judiciary. In this article, I analyze the Iraqi Transitional Authority's approach and initiative regarding Post-Conflict justice in Iraq. Describing the actions of the authority, I seek to answer three questions: first did the statute of special tribunal meet international standards? Second, did the trial of Saddam Hussein serve to satisfy the goals of Post-Conflict justice? Third, did the Transitional Authority's actions associated with reconstructing the justice system comply with its mandate under International Law?
Traffic Circles: The Legal Logic of Drug Extraditions

This Article examines nationality, transjudicialism, and the “war on drugs” as they have played out in extradition proceedings around the world. The judicial decisions explored here are from the Privy Council (on appeal from the English-speaking Caribbean), the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court of Canada. All of the judgments cite the same sources, engage in the same analytic process, and are under the same legal influence: a common language that talks about constitutional rights and then circles back to a starting point in international relations that augments rather than restricts state power. They also share a similar approach to the subject of drug policy and extradition law, in that all three national courts are located in states that have embraced U.S.-sponsored law enforcement while they at the same time have eschewed U.S. jurisprudence as a legal source. As the Article’s title suggests, the theory presented here is that the antidrug campaign, with its non-American legal sources harnessed in support of American policy, has produced a self-referential legal world built on a peculiar form of logic whose circularity is hard to escape.
After Atrocity: Optimizing UN Action Toward Accountability for Human Rights Abuses

With the UN's attention to individual accountability for human rights abuses now well into its third decade, this paper appraises the added value of a UN role and the best methods for accomplishing it. The paper argues that human rights fact-finding is an especially important task for the UN and considers, based on past practice, the factors that contribute to successful fact-finding as well as the pitfalls for the UN to avoid in the future. Some of the insights are based on the author's membership in the Secretary-General Group of Experts for Cambodia and the Secretary-General's Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka. This paper was originally delivered as the John P. Humphrey Lecture in Human Rights at McGill University in September 2014.
THE ETHICS OF BIODEFENSE

This essay reviews major areas of ethical debate with regard to biodefense, focusing on cases in which biodefense presents ethical problems that diverge from those presented by naturally-occurring outbreaks of infectious disease. It concludes with a call for ethicists to study not only the ethical issues raised in biodefense programs, but also the ethics of biodefense more generally.
Service Competition with General Queueing Facilities

In many service industries, companies compete with each other on the basis of the waiting time their customers experience, along with the price they charge for their service. A firm's waiting-time standard may either be defined in terms of the expected value or a given, for example 95%, percentile of the steady state waiting-time distribution. We investigate how a service industry's competitive behavior depends on the characteristics of the service providers' queueing systems. We provide a unifying approach to investigate various standard single-stage systems covering the spectrum from M/M/1 to general G/GI/s systems, along with open Jackson networks to represent multistage service systems. Assuming that the capacity cost is proportional with the service rates, we refer to its dependence on (i) the firm's demand rate, and (ii) the waiting-time standard as the capacity cost function. We show that across the above broad spectrum of queueing models, the capacity cost function belongs to a specific four-parameter class of function, either exactly or as a close approximation. We then characterize how this capacity cost function impacts the equilibrium behavior in the industry. We give separate treatments to the case where the firms compete in terms of (i) prices (only), (ii) their service level or waiting-time standard (only), and (iii) simultaneously in terms of both prices and service levels. The firms' demand rates are given by a general system of equations of the prices and waiting-time standards in the industry.
The European origins of economic development

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe during colonization had an enduring effect on economic development, researchers have been unable to assess these predictions directly because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. We construct a new database on the European share of the population during colonization and examine its association with economic development today. We find a strong, positive relation between current income per capita and colonial European settlement that is robust to controlling for the current proportion of the population of European descent, as well as many other country characteristics. The results suggest that any adverse effects of extractive institutions associated with small European settlements were, even at low levels of colonial European settlement, more than offset by other things that Europeans brought, such as human capital and technology.
Sterile neutrino dark matter and leptogenesis in Left-Right Higgs Parity

Author(s): Dunsky, D; Hall, LJ; Harigaya, K | Abstract: The standard model Higgs quartic coupling vanishes at (109 − 1013) GeV. We study SU(2)L× SU(2)R× U(1)B−L theories that incorporate the Higgs Parity mechanism, where this becomes the scale of Left-Right symmetry breaking, vR. Furthermore, these theories solve the strong CP problem and predict three right-handed neutrinos. We introduce cosmologies where SU(2)R× U(1)B−L gauge interactions produce right-handed neutrinos via the freeze-out or freeze-in mechanisms. In both cases, we find the parameter space where the lightest right-handed neutrino is dark matter and the decay of a heavier one creates the baryon asymmetry of the universe via leptogenesis. A theory of flavor is constructed that naturally accounts for the lightness and stability of the right-handed neutrino dark matter, while maintaining sufficient baryon asymmetry. The dark matter abundance and successful natural leptogenesis require vR to be in the range (1010− 1013) GeV for freeze-out, in remarkable agreement with the scale where the Higgs quartic coupling vanishes, whereas freeze-in requires vR ≳ 109 GeV. The allowed parameter space can be probed by the warmness of dark matter, precise determinations of the top quark mass and QCD coupling by future colliders and lattice computations, and measurement of the neutrino mass hierarchy.
How Efficient are Decentralized Auction Platforms

We model a decentralized, dynamic auction market platform in which a continuum of buyers and sellers participate in simultaneous, single-unit auctions each period. Our model accounts for the endogenous entry of agents and the impact of intertemporal optimization on bids. We estimate the structural primitives of our model using Kindle sales on eBay. We find that just over one-third of Kindle auctions on eBay result in an inefficient allocation with deadweight loss amounting to 14% of total possible market surplus. We also find that partial centralization—for example, running half as many 2-unit, uniform-price auctions each day—would eliminate a large fraction of the inefficiency, but yield lower seller revenues. Our results also highlight the importance of understanding platform composition effects—selection of agents into the market—in assessing the implications of market redesign. We also prove that the equilibrium of our model with a continuum of buyers and sellers is an approximate equilibrium of the analogous model with a finite number of agents.
Doubling Down on Litigation Isolationism

Last year in the Stanford Law Review, I described an emerging trend in U.S. courts: litigation isolationism. Through developments in personal jurisdiction, forum non conveniens, international comity, and the presumption against extraterritoriality, I argued, courts have developed increasingly strong tools for avoiding transnational litigation. Decisions advancing litigation isolationism often fail to accomplish their stated goals—typically promoting separation of powers, avoiding interstate friction, and protecting defendants from the inconvenience of U.S. litigation. They also undermine important U.S. interests, often by excluding or dismissing cases that have close ties to the United States. At the end of that article, I cautioned against the continuation of the trend.
The Language of Law and the Language of Business

Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Of Counsel, Kaye Scholer Fierman Hays & Handler LLP, New York City. A substantial portion of the work on this article took place while I was a member of the faculty of Brooklyn Law School. I thank all my former colleagues for their friendship and support over the past decade; Ms. Eileen Josephson of the Kaye Scholer law firm and Ms. Whitney Bagnall of the Columbia Law School library for the ir assistance in gaining access to the papers of Professor Milton Handler; Howard Bergman, Jim Fanto, Bert Foer, David Gerber, Ted Janger, Michael Jacobs, Leo Raskind, and Larry Solan for their helpful comments; Wose Tura Ebba and Camellia Noreiga for their research assistance; and workshops at DePaul University College of Law, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, University of Wisconsin Law School, and Fordham University School of Law which generated many helpful suggestions and critiques. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of both Brooklyn Law School and Loyola University Chicago School of Law through summer research stipends. 1 ALAN HUNT & GARY WICKHAM, FOUCAULT AND LAW: TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF LAW AS GOVERNANCE 8 (1994). The Language of Law and the Language of Business
Keynote Address: What Election Law Has to Say to Constitutional Law

This paper briefly reexamines the relationship between election law and constitutional law. It begins with a tongue-in-cheek history of the field's development as it moved from a faraway outpost of constitutional law to an independent field in its own right. The notion of election law's exceptionalism has by now become conventional wisdom among scholars in the field, as most agree that constitutional law cannot be applied witlessly to the domain of elections. If scholars are divided between lumpers and splitters - those who see connections across subject areas and those who think contextual differences matter most - then scholars have written about the relationship between election law and constitutional law largely in the cadence of the splitter. This paper calls for a bit more lumping. While election law is exceptional, portions of constitutional law are exceptional as well. There may be more opportunities for intellectual arbitrage than people have typically imagined. For this reason, the paper argues that during the next stage of the field's development, election law scholars ought to have imperial aims. They should do more than declare their independence from constitutional law; they should colonize it. There are lessons to be drawn from election law, sensibilities that permeate the field that are not as prevalent elsewhere, a distinctive perspective that might help reframe conventional constitutional law debates. The remainder of the paper charts some of the ways in which we might translate election law’s insights into the domain of constitutional law.
Financial factors in foreign direct investments: A dynamic analysis of international data

Abstract In contrast to existing empirical foreign direct investment (FDI) studies that examine the static effects of strategic or real economic variables, this paper focuses on the impacts of financial variables on FDI outflows for four largest industrial countries using dynamic time series methods. The results show that FDI outflows are non-stationary but have a long-run cointegrating relationship with real exchange rates. In addition, there are causal effects of exchange rates on direct investments in the short run. Multivariate cointegration analysis shows the significance of financial channels such as cost of capital and real wealth through which the real exchange rate effects operate. The effects of financial channels are comparable to those of the real wage rate channel. Overall, the present paper provides significant and methodologically consistent international evidence for dynamic interactions between FDIs and financial variables.
Economics and Sociology: The Prospects for an Interdisciplinary Discourse of Law

My purposes in this essay are two-fold. First, I provide some background on the disciplines of economics and sociology as a basis for the discussion at this Symposium and for my own discussion of the potential for an interdisciplinary discourse on law. In this regard, in the first section of the essay I provide a brief history of the relationship between the two disciplines, a brief outline of the basic characteristics of each disciplinary perspective, and a brief discussion of the emerging opportunities for useful exchange between the two disciplines. Second, I examine the prospects that the economic analysis of law can be usefully informed by sociological perspectives. I examine just this portion of the possible discourse between the two disciplines because, as a law and economics scholar, it is this portion of the discourse that I feel most competent to address. I leave it to my colleagues who study law from a sociological perspective to discern what can be gleaned from the economic perspective that is of most use to them in their analysis.
What do dividends tell us about earnings quality

Over the past 30 years, there have been significant changes in the distribution of earnings—cross-sectional variation has increased, with increasing left skewness—as well as in corporate payout policy, with many fewer firms paying dividends and the emergence of stock repurchases. We investigate whether the informativeness of payout policy with respect to earnings quality changes over this period. We find that the reported earnings of dividend-paying firms are more persistent than those of other firms and that this relation is remarkably stable over time. We also find that dividend payers are less likely to report losses and those losses that they do report tend to be transitory losses driven by special items. These results do not hold as strongly for stock repurchases, consistent with them representing less of a commitment than dividends.
The Regulation of Mutual Fund Names and the Societal Role of Trust: An Exploration of Section 35(d) of the Investment Company Act

Section 35(d) of the Investment Company Act ("the Act") authorizes the Securities and Exchange Commission ("the SEC" or "the Commission") to regulate the names of investment companies that are registered with the Commission, and bars registered investment companies the vast majority of which are mutual funds from using names that contain words "that the Commission finds are materially deceptive or misleading." This article relates the regulation of investment company names to the importance to society of trust. Pertinent case law under section 35(d) is reviewed and Rule 35d-1 is discussed. This article also considers fund names that are not covered either by section 35(d) or by Rule 35d-1 specifically, names that are 'cute' or 'catchy' and suggests a possible revision of the section. The suggested revision employs a behavioral science, value-neutral approach to fund names rather than the present value-based approach.
Team familiarity, role experience, and performance: evidence from indian software services

M of the literature on team learning views experience as a unidimensional concept captured by the cumulative production volume of, or the number of projects completed by, a team. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that teams are stable in their membership and internal organization. In practice, however, such stability is rare, because the composition and structure of teams often change over time (e.g., between projects). In this paper, we use detailed data from an Indian software services firm to examine how such changes may affect the accumulation of experience within, and the performance of, teams. We find that the level of team familiarity (i.e., the average number of times that each member has worked with every other member of the team) has a significant positive effect on performance, but we observe that conventional measures of the experience of individual team members (e.g., years at the firm) are not consistently related to performance. We do find, however, that the role experience of individuals in a team (i.e., years in a given role within a team) is associated with better team performance. Our results offer an approach for capturing the experience held by fluid teams and highlight the need to study context-specific measures of experience, including role experience. In addition, our findings provide insight into how the interactions of team members may contribute to the development of broader firm capabilities.
IS THE ENDOWMENT EFFECT AN EXPECTATIONS EFFECT

A hallmark result within behavioral economics is that individuals' choices are affected by current endowments. A recent theory due to Kőszegi and Rabin (2006, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121, 1133–1165) explains such endowment effect with a model of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences. Departing from past work, we conduct complementary experiments to disentangle expectations—verified probabilistic beliefs held by subjects—from other features of endowment—such as “assignment” to a good—hence allowing us to compare the effect of expectations with that of other variations. While mere assignment can affect choices, we do not find a large role in the effect for Kőszegi–Rabin expectations.
Parental leave and child health across OECD countries

To understand the relationship between parental leave and child health better, this study examines the aggregate effects of parental leave policies on child health outcomes using data from 18 OECD countries1 from 1969–2000. The focus is investigating the effects of both job-protected paid leave and other leave – including non-job-protected paid leave and unpaid leave – on child health outcomes, more specifically, infant mortality rates, low birth weight and child immunisation coverage. This study explores the effects of other social policies related to families and young children, such as public expenditures on family cash benefits, family allowances, and family services per child, on child health outcomes.
Where is an oil shock

Much of the literature examining the effects of oil shocks asks the question “What is an oil shock?” and has concluded that oil-price increases are asymmetric in their effects on the US economy. That is, sharp increases in oil prices affect economic activity adversely, but sharp decreases in oil prices have no effect. We reconsider the directional symmetry of oil-price shocks by addressing the question “Where is an oil shock?”, the answer to which reveals a great deal of spatial/directional asymmetry across states. Although most states have typical responses to oil-price shocks—they are affected by positive shocks only—the rest experience either negative shocks only (5 states), both positive and negative shocks (5 states), or neither shock (5 states).
Environmental Externalities and Cost of Capital

Ianalyze the impact of a firm's environmental profile on its cost of equity and debt capital. Using implied cost of capital derived from analysts' earnings estimates, I find that investors demand significantly higher expected returns on stocks excluded by environmental screens such as hazardous chemical, substantial emissions, and climate change concerns compared to firms without such environmental concerns. Lenders also charge a significantly higher interest rate on the bank loans issued to firms with these environmental concerns. I provide evidence that the environmental profile of a firm is not simply proxying for an omitted component of its default risk. Further, firms with these environmental concerns have lower institutional ownership and fewer banks participate in their loan syndicate than firms without such environmental concerns. These results suggest that exclusionary socially responsible investing and environmentally sensitive lending can have a material impact on the cost of equity and debt capital of affected firms. This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, finance.
An oligopoly model of dynamic advertising competition

Abstract An oligopoly model is presented that allows the determination of feedback Nash equilibrium advertising strategies for an oligopoly. Analyses of symmetric and asymmetric oligopolies with the model show that unit contribution and advertising effectiveness have positive effects on a competitor’s own advertising and steady-state sales, while discount rate and decay rate have negative effects. An asymmetric analysis further shows that unit contribution and advertising effectiveness affect positively, and discount rate and decay rate negatively, a competitor’s rivals’ advertising, but have effects in opposite directions regarding rivals’ steady-state sales. The symmetric and asymmetric analyses also show that steady-state sales per competitor decline with the number of competitors in the oligopoly, while total oligopoly steady-state sales increase. The model is applied empirically to the triopolistic competition involving Anheuser-Busch, SABMiller, and Molson Coors in the beer industry.