cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Judicial independence and economic freedom in the US states

AbstractThis article addresses the extent to which differences in judicial independence across US states influence economic freedom by using the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of North America Index. Overall, the results suggest that, as judicial independence increases within a state’s court of last resort, so does a state’s overall economic freedom score, along with each of the subcomponent index scores. These findings add important nuances to the literature and provide opportunities for future research.
Trade classification algorithms for electronic communications network trades

Abstract Ellis et al. [Ellis, K., Michaely, R., O’Hara, M., 2000. The accuracy of trade classification rules: Evidence from Nasdaq. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 35 (4), 529–551] find that trade classification rules have limited success in classifying trades which execute inside the quotes. We reconfirm this result and propose an alternative algorithm to improve the classification accuracy for trades inside the quotes. This alternative algorithm improves the overall success rate for classifying trades, especially for trades that occur inside the quotes. Additionally, we show that the Lee and Ready [Lee, C., Ready, M., 1991. Inferring trade direction from intraday data. Journal of Finance 46, 733–747] and Ellis et al. (2000) trade classification algorithms provide biased estimates of the actual effective spreads and price impacts, while our algorithm provides statistically unbiased estimates of actual effective spreads and price impacts.
Market forces and the public good: competition among hospitals and provision of indigent care.

The research presented here focuses on the impact of competitive forces on the provision of social or merit goods by non-profit hospitals. We specifically examine the behavior of altruistic non-profit hospitals in the supply of charity care. The effects of competitive pressures and past charity care provision on the supply of philanthropic donations to nonprofit hospitals are also examined. Empirical models of the supply of donations and charity care are specified and estimated using data on nonprofit hospitals in Florida for the years 1980-1984. The coefficient estimates imply strong income effects in the charity care supply equations. This raises the possibility that competitive pressures and limits on hospital payments, under public insurance programs, may reduce the supply of indigent care. The results from the supply of donations models suggest that philanthropic donations will alleviate the competitive pressures to a small degree.
Intergenerational Long Term Effects of Preschool - Structural Estimates from a Discrete Dynamic Programming Model

This paper formulates a structural dynamic programming model of preschool investment choices of altruistic parents and then empirically estimates the structural parameters of the model using the NLSY79 data. The paper finds that preschool investment significantly boosts cognitive and non-cognitive skills, which enhance earnings and school outcomes. It also finds that a standard Mincer earnings function, by omitting measures of non-cognitive skills on the right-hand side, overestimates the rate of return to schooling. From the estimated equilibrium Markov process, the paper studies the nature of within generation earnings distribution, intergenerational earnings mobility, and schooling mobility. The paper finds that a tax-financed free preschool program for the children of poor socioeconomic status generates positive net gains to the society in terms of average earnings, higher intergenerational earnings mobility, and schooling mobility.
CONFIDENCE AND ANGEL INVESTORS: DOES GENDER MATTER?

We investigate whether men and women angel investors have different levels of confidence based on participation in the angel capital market, rate of investments, and stage of investments. We find evidence consistent with women angels having lower levels of confidence compared to men, although we do not suggest that this difference is deleterious for women angel investor’s wealth. However, women entrepreneurs, who disproportionately seek funding from women angels, may have more restricted access to early-stage capital than men.
Tax and Expenditure Limitations: Introduction and Overview

DANIEL R. MULLINS and BRUCE A. WALLINA principle and an event were key motivating factors behind the American Revolutionand subsequent establishment of the United States. The principle was ‘‘No taxationwithout representation,’’ protesting the absence of colonists’ representation in Englandon decisions relating to the colonial power’s ability to extract payment for the support ofgovernment. The event was the Boston Tea Party, where patriots threw bags of tea intoBoston Harbor to protest taxation of that everyday staple.Over 200 years later, 1978’s Proposition 13 in California reignited the ﬂames oftaxpayer revolt in America. Voters found that they could go into a voting booth andgrant themselves a $7 billion property tax break. While other state and local tax and ex-penditure limitations (TELs) had been imposed throughout our nation’s history, and thetrend had accelerated in the 1970s, Proposition 13 captured the attention of the nation,yielding its sponsor, Howard Jarvis, an unlikely Time magazine cover. The general issueof the level of, and dissatisfaction with, taxes swept across the land, and played a largepart in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. The anti-tax stance hasremained a staple of campaigns ever since.As Proposition 13 had been put on the ballot through the initiative process, its prog-eny appeared most rapidly and widely in those states where voters had direct access tothe ballot. Indeed, one study of early initiatives found that access to the ballot was amore significant predictor of a voter initiative passing than was the level of a state’staxation. Legislators in states with the initiative process often either passed their ownTEL measures or put legislatively crafted limits out to referendum in an effort to preventmore severe voter-initiated action. Legislators in states without the initiative often didthe same, fearful of retribution at reelection time for failure to act. Within two years ofthe passage of Proposition 13, 43 states had implemented some kind of property tax
Gender and the Language of Crowdfunding

In this study, we set out to examine the role of language in the success of online fundraising--a new form of entrepreneurial project financing. In particular, we evaluate the influence of linguist...
Whence GARCH? A Preference-Based Explanation for Conditional Volatility

We develop a preference-based equilibrium asset pricing model that explains low-frequency conditional volatility. Similar to Barberis, Huang, and Santos (2001), agents in our model care about wealth changes, experience loss aversion, and keep a mental scorecard that affects their level of risk aversion. A new feature of our model is that when perturbed by unexpected returns, investors become temporarily more sensitive to news. Gradually investors become accustomed to the new level of wealth, restoring prior levels of risk aversion and news sensitivity. The state-dependent sensitivity to news creates the type of volatility clustering found in low-frequency stock returns. We find empirical support for our model's predictions that relate the scorecard to conditional volatility and skewness. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.
The battle of ideas and discourses before democratic transition: Different democratic conceptions in authoritarian China

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we propose a theoretical framework to examine popular democratic conceptions in societies with limited experiences of democratic politics. Second, following this framework, we use new survey instruments to investigate the origins and consequences of popular democratic conceptions in mainland China, with particular emphasis on how the Chinese government indoctrinates its people with a guardianship discourse on democracy to disguise its authoritarian nature. Using national survey data, this paper demonstrates that the Chinese government has effectively taken advantage of its regulated education and media systems, as well as its lingering Confucian and Leninist traditions, to promote and indoctrinate its people with the guardianship discourse. A majority of Chinese citizens indeed understand democracy following this particular discourse and, thus, perceive the Chinese government as more or less a democracy.
Optoelectromechanical transducer: Reversible conversion between microwave and optical photons

Quantum states encoded in microwave photons or qubits can be effectively manipulated, whereas optical photons can be coherently transferred via optical fibre and waveguide. The reversible conversion of quantum states between microwave and optical photons will hence enable the distribution of quantum information over long distance and significantly improve the scalability of hybrid quantum systems. Owning to technological advances, mechanical resonators couple to quantum devices in distinctly different spectral range with tunable coupling, and can serve as a powerful interface to connect those devices. In this review, recent theory and experimental progress in the coherent conversion between microwave and optical fields via optoelectromechanical transducers are summarized. The challenges and perspectives in achieving single-photon-level quantum state conversion are also discussed.
Risk-Based Capital Standards, Deposit Insurance, and Procyclicality *

Abstract This article shows that risk-based deposit insurance premiums generate smaller procyclical effects than do risk-based capital requirements. Thus, Basel II's procyclical impact can be reduced by integrating risk-based deposit insurance. If deposit insurance is structured as a moving average of contracts, its procyclical effects can be decreased further. Empirical illustrations of this are presented for 42 banks over the period 1987 to 1996. The results confirm that lengthening the contracts' maturities intertemporally smooths premiums but raises the average premium level needed to compensate the insurer for greater systematic risk. The distribution of risk-based premiums across banks is skewed.
The Fortunes and Foibles of Exchange-Traded Funds: A Positive Market Response to the Problems of Mutual Funds

One of the most dynamic and complex new investment vehicles on the market today is the exchange-traded fund (ETF), a security that provides the diversification of a mutual fund but trades on a securities exchange like a stock. In just fifteen years, the number of ETFs has proliferated to well over 600, attracting more than half a trillion dollars in investment. The majority of that expansion has occurred in just the past two years, largely as a consequence of recent difficulties in the mutual fund industry. With ETF sponsors aggressively seeking to create novel kinds of ETFs and to add ETFs to retirement account menus, these funds are projected to continue growing at a pace far faster than hedge funds and mutual funds in the coming years. Yet, for all this extraordinary growth, legal scholars have virtually ignored ETFs. This article seeks to establish a descriptive and conceptual framework for the scholarly discussion of these funds as they gain evergreater prominence, for good or for ill, in the coming years. In exploring the structure, advantages, and shortcomings of ETFs, this article argues that ETFs are a positive market response to the shortcomings of mutual funds. ETFs use a novel pricing mechanism that harnesses the utility of arbitrage to provide investors with accuracy, efficiency, tax advantages, and a range of investment choices, while insulating investors from many of the structural problems associated with mutual funds. Despite these advantages, critics decry their brokerage fees and vulnerability to harmful shortterm trading. This article argues that the mutual fund industry and its recent spate of dramatic scandals contributed to the emergence of ETFs and concludes that mutual funds offer vivid warnings of the conflicts of interest that may come to afflict the ETF industry as it continues to grow. Assistant Professor of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Chicago, Illinois. Thanks to Alison LaCroix, Holly Lakatos, Danielle Lurtz, and Bob Borzone.
The Legal Effects of Resolutions of the UN Security Council and General Assembly in the Jurisprudence of the ICJ

This article aims to extract from the jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice a basic theory of legal effects of unilateral instruments of international organizations in public international law. These effects can be divided into three categories. The first is substantive effects. These include binding, authorizing and (dis)empowering effects. The second category is causative effects, whereby determinations of fact or of law bring substantive effects into existence. The third category is modal effects - how and when the substantive effects come into existence (e.g. immediate or deferred, retroactive or non- retroactive, reversible or irreversible effect). Each of these categories of legal effects behaves differently according to whether the effects are intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic effects are based on the special treaty powers of the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly. In this hypothesis, all three categories of effects exist to the full extent that the explicit and implicit powers of the adopting body allow for them. Extrinsic effects are directly based on general international law, in particular on the rules of formation of customary international law. Here, there are no causative effects. Substantive effects do not strictly speaking exist; only pre-substantive ones do. And modal effects are always immediate, non-retroactive and reversible.
Deviations from rules-based policy and their effects

Abstract Rules-based monetary policy evaluation has long been central to macroeconomics. Using the original Taylor rule, a modified Taylor rule with a higher output gap coefficient, and an estimated Taylor rule, we define rules-based and discretionary eras by smaller and larger policy rule deviations, the absolute value of the difference between the actual federal funds rate and the federal funds rate prescribed by the three rules. We use tests for multiple structural changes to identify the eras so that knowledge of subsequent economic outcomes cannot influence the choice of the dates. With the original Taylor rule, monetary policy in the U.S. is characterized by a rules-based era until 1974, a discretionary era from 1974 to 1985, a rules-based era from 1985 to 2000, and a discretionary era from 2001 to 2013. With the modified Taylor rule, the rules-based era extends further into the 1970s and there is an additional rules-based period starting in 2006. We calculate various loss functions and find that economic performance is uniformly better during rules-based eras than during discretionary eras, and that the original Taylor rule provides the largest loss during discretionary periods relative to loss during rules-based periods.
From Resistance to Advocacy: Political Representation for Disabled People in China

Although many state agencies in China are designated with a function of “representing” ordinary people's interests, they are poorly structured for that purpose. It is therefore puzzling why some of them have at times actively and effectively advocated the interests of ordinary people, even when such interests may conflict with state policies. To solve this puzzle, this article examines a recent campaign by the Chinese Disabled Persons Federation to resist a national trend to ban the use of three-wheelers for passenger transport by many local governments. Our analysis recognizes the importance of personal motivations and favourable political structure, but it emphasizes that forceful popular collective action can create both pressure and opportunity for active state advocacy. Such a pattern of mutual-reinforcement between mass organizations and their constituency has sometimes contributed to the dynamics of political change in the reform era.
The Roles of Religion in National Legitimation: Judaism and Zionism's Elusive Quest for Legitimacy

Why and how do nations turn to religion to justify claims for statehood? This article addresses this question in both theory and practice, showing that religion plays multiple legitimating roles that shift dynamically according to the success they yield for national movements. I posit four legitimating models: (1) nationalism instead of religion (“secular nationalism”), (2) nationalism as a religion (“civil religion”), (3) religion as a resource for nationalism (“auxiliary religion”), and (4) religion as a source of nationalism (“chosen people”). Empirically, I analyze the roles of religion in Zionist efforts to legitimate a Jewish state in Palestine. I argue that Zionism has responded to persistent delegitimation by expanding the role of religion in its political legitimation. The right of self-determination, which stands at the core of the “secular Zionism” legitimation, has given way to leveraging Judaism, which in turn has been eclipsed by constructing a Zionist civil religion and a “chosen people” justification.
In respect of people living in a permanent vegetative state--and allowing them to die.

This article considers the controversy surrounding the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube and argues for a new approach in determining treatment decisions for people in a permanent vegetative state. Examination of the duty to respect living people as persons rather than as objects reveals that people in a permanent vegetative state are particularly vulnerable under our current statutory and case law to being kept alive only in service to the interests of others. The article proposes that we replace the current legal presumption in favor of continued life support with a presumption to discontinue it for those in a permanent vegetative state and that judicial or quasi-judicial review be brought to bear on decisions in favor of continued life support, particularly tube feeding.
Gambling Preference and the New Year Effect of Assets with Lottery Features

This paper examines whether investors exhibit a New Year's gambling preference and whether such preference impacts prices and returns of assets with lottery features. In January, calls options have higher demand than put options, especially by small investors. In addition, relative to at-the-money calls, out-of-the-money calls are the most expensive and actively traded. In the equity markets, lottery-type stocks in the US outperform their counterparts mainly in January, but tend to underperform in other months. Lottery-type Chinese stocks outperform in the Chinese New Year month, but not in January. This New Year effect provides new insights into the broad phenomena related to the January effect.
Cluster Analysis of Presolar Silicon Carbide Grains: Evaluation of Their Classification and Astrophysical Implications

Cluster analysis of presolar silicon carbide grains based on literature data for 12C/13C, 14N/15N, δ 30Si/28Si, and δ 29Si/28Si including or not inferred initial 26Al/27Al data, reveals nine clusters agreeing with previously defined grain types but also highlighting new divisions. Mainstream grains reside in three clusters probably representing different parent star metallicities. One of these clusters has a compact core, with a narrow range of composition, pointing to an enhanced production of SiC grains in asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars with a narrow range of masses and metallicities. The addition of 26Al/27Al data highlights a cluster of mainstream grains, enriched in 15N and 26Al, which cannot be explained by current AGB models. We defined two AB grain clusters, one with 15N and 26Al excesses, and the other with 14N and smaller 26Al excesses, in agreement with recent studies. Their definition does not use the solar N isotopic ratio as a divider, and the contour of the 26Al-rich AB cluster identified in this study is in better agreement with core-collapse supernova models. We also found a cluster with a mixture of putative nova and AB grains, which may have formed in supernova or nova environments. X grains make up two clusters, having either strongly correlated Si isotopic ratios or deviating from the 2/3 slope line in the Si 3-isotope plot. Finally, most Y and Z grains are jointly clustered, suggesting that the previous use of 12C/13C = 100 as a divider for Y grains was arbitrary. Our results show that cluster analysis is a powerful tool to interpret the data in light of stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis modeling and highlight the need of more multi-element isotopic data for better classification.
Predicting Early Indicators of Cognitive Decline from Verbal Utterances

Dementia is a group of irreversible, chronic, and progressive neurodegenerative disorders resulting in impaired memory, communication, and thought processes. In recent years, clinical research advances in brain aging have focused on the earliest clinically detectable stage of incipient dementia, commonly known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Currently, these disorders are diagnosed using a manual analysis of neuropsychological examinations. We measure the feasibility of using the linguistic characteristics of verbal utterances elicited during neuropsychological exams of elderly subjects to distinguish between elderly control groups, people with MCI, people diagnosed with possible Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and probable AD. We investigated the performance of both theory-driven psycholinguistic features and data-driven contextual language embeddings in identifying different clinically diagnosed groups. Our experiments show that a combination of contextual and psycholinguistic features extracted by a Support Vector Machine improved distinguishing the verbal utterances of elderly controls, people with MCI, possible AD, and probable AD. This is the first work to identify four clinical diagnosis groups of dementia in a highly imbalanced dataset. Our work shows that machine learning algorithms built on contextual and psycholinguistic features can learn the linguistic biomarkers from verbal utterances and assist clinical diagnosis of different stages and types of dementia, even with limited data.
An Estimation Algorithm for General Linear Single Particle Tracking Models with Time-Varying Parameters.

Single Particle Tracking (SPT) is a powerful class of methods for studying the dynamics of biomolecules inside living cells. The techniques reveal the trajectories of individual particles, with a resolution well below the diffraction limit of light, and from them the parameters defining the motion model, such as diffusion coefficients and confinement lengths. Most existing algorithms assume these parameters are constant throughout an experiment. However, it has been demonstrated that they often vary with time as the tracked particles move through different regions in the cell or as conditions inside the cell change in response to stimuli. In this work, we propose an estimation algorithm to determine time-varying parameters of systems that discretely switch between different linear models of motion with Gaussian noise statistics, covering dynamics such as diffusion, directed motion, and Ornstein–Uhlenbeck dynamics. Our algorithm consists of three stages. In the first stage, we use a sliding window approach, combined with Expectation Maximization (EM) to determine maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters as a function of time. These results are only used to roughly estimate the number of model switches that occur in the data to guide the selection of algorithm parameters in the second stage. In the second stage, we use Change Detection (CD) techniques to identify where the models switch, taking advantage of the off-line nature of the analysis of SPT data to create non-causal algorithms with better precision than a purely causal approach. Finally, we apply EM to each set of data between the change points to determine final parameter estimates. We demonstrate our approach using experimental data generated in the lab under controlled conditions.
Closed strings and weak gravity from higher-spin causality

We combine old and new quantum field theoretic arguments to show that any theory of stable or metastable higher spin particles can be coupled to gravity only when the gravity sector has a stringy structure. Metastable higher spin particles, free or interacting, cannot couple to gravity while preserving causality unless there exist higher spin states in the gravitational sector much below the Planck scale Mpl. We obtain an upper bound on the mass Λgr of the lightest higher spin particle in the gravity sector in terms of quantities in the non-gravitational sector. We invoke the CKSZ uniqueness theorem to argue that any weakly coupled UV completion of such a theory must have a gravity sector containing infinite towers of asymptotically parallel, equispaced, and linear Regge trajectories. Consequently, gravitational four-point scattering amplitudes must coincide with the closed string four-point amplitude for s, t ≫ 1, identifying Λgr as the string scale. Our bound also implies that all metastable higher spin particles in 4d with masses m ≪ Λgr must satisfy a weak gravity condition.
The Feasibility of Studying Metabolites in PICU Multi-Organ Dysfunction Syndrome Patients over an 8-Day Course Using an Untargeted Approach.

Metabolites are generated from critical biological functions and metabolism. This pediatric study reviewed plasma metabolites in patients suffering from multi-organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS) in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) using an untargeted metabolomics approach. Patients meeting the criteria for MODS were screened for eligibility and consented (n = 24), and blood samples were collected at baseline, 72 h, and 8 days; control patients (n = 4) presented for routine sedation in an outpatient setting. A subset of MODS patients (n = 8) required additional support with veno-atrial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VA-ECMO) therapy. Metabolites from thawed blood plasma were determined from ion pairing reversed-phase liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS) analysis. Chromatographic peak alignment, identification, relative quantitation, and statistical and bioinformatics evaluation were performed using MAVEN and MetaboAnalyst 4.0. Metabolite analysis revealed 115 peaks per sample. From the partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) with variance of importance (VIP) scores above ≥2.0, 7 dynamic metabolites emerged over the three time points: tauro-chenodeoxycholic acid (TCDCA), hexose, p-hydroxybenzoate, hydroxyphenylacetic acid (HPLA), 2_3-dihydroxybenzoic acid, 2-keto-isovalerate, and deoxyribose phosphate. After Bonferroni adjustment for repeated measures, hexose and p-hydroxybenzoate were significant at one time point or more. Kendall’s tau-b test was used for internal validation of creatinine. Metabolites may be benign or significant in describing a patient’s pathophysiology and require operator interpretation.
A Unified Framework for One-Shot Achievability via the Poisson Matching Lemma

We introduce a fundamental lemma called the Poisson matching lemma, and apply it to prove one-shot achievability results for various settings, namely channels with state information at the encoder, lossy source coding with side information at the decoder, joint source-channel coding, broadcast channels, distributed lossy source coding, multiple access channels and channel resolvability. Our one-shot bounds improve upon the best known one-shot bounds in most of the aforementioned settings (except multiple access channels and channel resolvability, where we recover bounds comparable to the best known bounds), with shorter proofs in some settings even when compared to the conventional asymptotic approach using typicality. The Poisson matching lemma replaces both the packing and covering lemmas, greatly simplifying the error analysis. This paper extends the work of Li and El Gamal on Poisson functional representation, which mainly considered variable-length source coding settings, whereas this paper studies fixed-length settings, and is not limited to source coding, showing that the Poisson functional representation is a viable alternative to typicality for most problems in network information theory.
Wildfire smoke impacts respiratory health more than fine particles from other sources: observational evidence from Southern California.

Wildfires are becoming more frequent and destructive in a changing climate. Fine particulate matter, PM2.5, in wildfire smoke adversely impacts human health. Recent toxicological studies suggest that wildfire particulate matter may be more toxic than equal doses of ambient PM2.5. Air quality regulations however assume that the toxicity of PM2.5 does not vary across different sources of emission. Assessing whether PM2.5 from wildfires is more or less harmful than PM2.5 from other sources is a pressing public health concern. Here, we isolate the wildfire-specific PM2.5 using a series of statistical approaches and exposure definitions. We found increases in respiratory hospitalizations ranging from 1.3 to up to 10% with a 10 μg m−3 increase in wildfire-specific PM2.5, compared to 0.67 to 1.3% associated with non-wildfire PM2.5. Our conclusions point to the need for air quality policies to consider the variability in PM2.5 impacts on human health according to the sources of emission. Recent toxicological studies suggest that wildfire particulate matter may be more toxic than equal doses of ambient PM2.5. Here, the authors show that even for similar exposure levels, PM2.5 from wildfires is considerably more dangerous for respiratory health at the population level.
Genetic risk scores for cardiometabolic traits in sub-Saharan African populations.

Background There is growing support for the use of genetic risk scores (GRS) in routine clinical settings. Due to the limited diversity of current genomic discovery samples, there are concerns that the predictive power of GRS will be limited in non-European ancestry populations. GRS for cardiometabolic traits were evaluated in sub-Saharan Africans in comparison with African Americans and European Americans. Methods We evaluated the predictive utility of GRS for 12 cardiometabolic traits in sub-Saharan Africans (AF; n = 5200), African Americans (AA; n = 9139) and European Americans (EUR; n = 9594). GRS were constructed as weighted sums of the number of risk alleles. Predictive utility was assessed using the additional phenotypic variance explained and the increase in discriminatory ability over traditional risk factors [age, sex and body mass index (BMI)], with adjustment for ancestry-derived principal components. Results Across all traits, GRS showed up to a 5-fold and 20-fold greater predictive utility in EUR relative to AA and AF, respectively. Predictive utility was most consistent for lipid traits, with percentage increase in explained variation attributable to GRS ranging from 10.6% to 127.1% among EUR, 26.6% to 65.8% among AA and 2.4% to 37.5% among AF. These differences were recapitulated in the discriminatory power, whereby the predictive utility of GRS was 4-fold greater in EUR relative to AA and up to 44-fold greater in EUR relative to AF. Obesity and blood pressure traits showed a similar pattern of greater predictive utility among EUR. Conclusions This work demonstrates the poorer performance of GRS in AF and highlights the need to improve representation of multiple ethnic populations in genomic studies to ensure equitable clinical translation of GRS.
Corporate Activism and Corporate Identity

Research shows that corporate engagement in social issues often backfires. We suggest this may be because the corporate organizational form is viewed as inappropriate for social activism in general and/or because a particular campaign or organizational action is viewed as hypocritical. To test these ideas, we conduct three studies. In the first study, we examine subject ratings of 90 real-world corporate social movement campaigns and show that subjects support campaigns that involve nonprofit or public organizations, which are of an appropriate organizational form, and penalize campaigns that are inconsistent with the firm business practices, which may be seen as hypocritical. In a second study, we experimentally validate these effects by directly manipulating appropriateness of organizational form and hypocrisy of organizational action. We show that benefit corporations (B Corps) do not suffer from the same hypocrisy penalty in donation and recruitment as do other for-profit corporations, evidencing an interaction between organizational form and action. In a third study, we show that firm collaboration with a social movement organization (SMO) reduces the inappropriateness penalty, while collaboration with an SMO that has organizational practices consistent with the campaign issue reduces the hypocrisy penalty.
Self-Tuning Bandits over Unknown Covariate-Shifts.

Bandits with covariates, a.k.a. contextual bandits, address situations where optimal actions (or arms) at a given time $t$, depend on a context $x_t$, e.g., a new patient's medical history, a consumer's past purchases. While it is understood that the distribution of contexts might change over time, e.g., due to seasonalities, or deployment to new environments, the bulk of studies concern the most adversarial such changes, resulting in regret bounds that are often worst-case in nature. Covariate-shift on the other hand has been considered in classification as a middle-ground formalism that can capture mild to relatively severe changes in distributions. We consider nonparametric bandits under such middle-ground scenarios, and derive new regret bounds that tightly capture a continuum of changes in context distribution. Furthermore, we show that these rates can be adaptively attained without knowledge of the time of shift nor the amount of shift.
Hand-to-mouth Consumption and Calorie Consciousness: Consequences for Junk-food Taxation:

Junk-food taxes have mixed effects on obesity and junk-food consumption. We build a theoretical model to explain empirical results and better understand how to address the obesity crisis. In our fr...
Show Me the Money! Dividend Policy in Countries with Weak Institutions

We hypothesize that, in weak‐institution countries, firms adjust the ‘timing’ of dividend payments by committing to distribute a percentage of current earnings as dividends, revealing the extent of firm‐level agency conflicts to future investors and facilitating the raising of external capital. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that, on average, firms in weak‐institution countries have a higher speed of adjustment (SOA) to their target payout ratio, pay dividends earlier in the life cycle, and are more likely to disclose a dividend policy committing to pay a minimum percentage of earnings. Within‐country tests show that, in weak‐institution countries, the firms with the highest SOA dividend policies have fewer agency problems and an increased ability to raise external capital. Finally, returns tests around earnings announcements show that high‐SOA dividend policies are associated with larger market reactions to earnings in weak‐institution countries. Collectively, our findings suggest that dividend policy helps to alleviate agency conflicts in weak‐institution countries between firms and (future) investors.
A Model-free Variable Screening Method Based on Leverage Score

With rapid advances in information technology, massive datasets are collected in all fields of science, such as biology, chemistry, and social science. Useful or meaningful information is extracted...
Deep embedded clustering of coral reef bioacoustics.

Deep clustering was applied to unlabeled, automatically detected signals in a coral reef soundscape to distinguish fish pulse calls from segments of whale song. Deep embedded clustering (DEC) learned latent features and formed classification clusters using fixed-length power spectrograms of the signals. Handpicked spectral and temporal features were also extracted and clustered with Gaussian mixture models (GMM) and conventional clustering. DEC, GMM, and conventional clustering were tested on simulated datasets of fish pulse calls (fish) and whale song units (whale) with randomized bandwidth, duration, and SNR. Both GMM and DEC achieved high accuracy and identified clusters with fish, whale, and overlapping fish and whale signals. Conventional clustering methods had low accuracy in scenarios with unequal-sized clusters or overlapping signals. Fish and whale signals recorded near Hawaii in February–March 2020 were clustered with DEC, GMM, and conventional clustering. DEC features demonstrated the highest accuracy of 77.5% on a small, manually labeled dataset for classifying signals into fish and whale clusters.
Substrate-Versatile Direct-Write Printing of Carbon Nanotube-Based Flexible Conductors, Circuits, and Sensors

Printed electronics rely on the deposition of conductive liquid inks, typically onto polymeric or paper substrates. Among available conductive fillers for use in electronic inks, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have high conductivity, low density, processability at low temperatures, and intrinsic mechanical flexibility. However, the electrical conductivity of printed CNT structures has been limited by CNT quality and concentration, and by the need for nonconductive modifiers to make the ink stable and extrudable. This study introduces a polymer-free, printable aqueous CNT ink, and presents the relationships between printing resolution, ink rheology, and ink-substrate interactions. A model is constructed to predict printed feature sizes on impermeable substrates based on Wenzel wetting. Printed lines have conductivity up to 10,000 S/m. The lines are flexible, with < 5% change in DC resistance after 1,000 bending cycles, and <3% change in DC resistance with a bending radius down to 1 mm. Demonstrations focus on (i) conformality, via printing CNTs onto stickers that can be applied to curved surfaces, (ii) interactivity using a CNT-based button printed onto folded paper structure, and (iii) capacitive sensing of liquid wicking into the substrate itself. Facile integration of surface mount components on printed circuits is enabled by the intrinsic adhesion of the wet ink.
Bayesian inference for big spatial data using non-stationary spectral simulation

Abstract It is increasingly understood that the assumption of stationarity is unrealistic for many spatial processes. In this article, we combine dimension expansion with a spectral method to model big non-stationary spatial fields in a computationally efficient manner. Specifically, we use Mejia and Rodriguez-Iturbe’s (1974) spectral simulation approach to simulate a spatial process with a covariogram at locations that have an expanded dimension. We introduce Bayesian hierarchical modeling to dimension expansion, which originally has only been modeled using a method of moments approach. We consider a novel scheme to re-weight levels in a Bayesian spatial hierarchical model that allows one to use non-stationary spectral simulation within a collapsed Gibbs sampler. Our method is both full rank and non-stationary, and can be applied to big spatial data because it does not involve storing and inverting large covariance matrices. We demonstrate the wide applicability of our approach through simulation studies, and an application using ozone data obtained from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Future considerations for the mRNA-lipid nanoparticle vaccine platform.

Vaccines based on mRNA-containing lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) pioneered by Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania are a promising new vaccine platform used by two of the leading vaccines against coronavirus disease in 2019 (COVID-19). However, there are many questions regarding their mechanism of action in humans that remain unanswered. Here we consider the immunological features of LNP components and off-target effects of the mRNA, both of which could increase the risk of side effects. We suggest ways to mitigate these potential risks by harnessing dendritic cell (DC) biology.
The Twelvefold Way of Non-Sequential Lossless Compression

Many information sources are not just sequences of distinguishable symbols but rather have invariances governed by alternative counting paradigms such as permutations, combinations, and partitions. We consider an entire classification of these invariances called the twelvefold way in enumerative combinatorics and develop a method to characterize lossless compression limits. Explicit computations for all twelve settings are carried out for i.i.d. uniform and Bernoulli distributions. Comparisons among settings provide quantitative insight.
Text Synopsis Generation for Egocentric Videos

Mass utilization of body-worn cameras has led to a huge corpus of available egocentric video. Existing video summarization algorithms can accelerate browsing such videos by selecting (visually) interesting shots from them. Nonetheless, since the system user still has to watch the summary videos, browsing large video databases remain a challenge. Hence, in this work, we propose to generate a textual synopsis, consisting of a few sentences describing the most important events in a long egocentric videos. Users can read the short text to gain insight about the video, and more importantly, efficiently search through the content of a large video database using text queries. Since egocentric videos are long and contain many activities and events, using video-to-text algorithms results in thousands of descriptions, many of which are incorrect. Therefore, we propose a multi-task learning scheme to simultaneously generate descriptions for video segments and summarize the resulting descriptions in an end-to-end fashion. We Input a set of video shots and the network generates a text description for each shot. Next, visual-language content matching unit that is trained with a weakly supervised objective, identifies the correct descriptions. Finally, the last component of our network, called purport network, evaluates the descriptions all together to select the ones containing crucial information. Out of thousands of descriptions generated for the video, a few informative sentences are returned to the user. We validate our framework on the challenging UT Egocentric video dataset, where each video is between 3 to 5 hours long, associated with over 3000 textual descriptions on average. The generated textual summaries, including only 5 percent (or less) of the generated descriptions, are compared to groundtruth summaries in text domain using well-established metrics in natural language processing. 1
A Metamodel Structure For Regression Analysis: Application To Prediction Of Autism Spectrum Disorder Severity

Traditional regression models do not generalize well when learning from small and noisy datasets. Here we propose a novel metamodel structure to improve the regression result. The metamodel is composed of multiple classification base models and a regression model built upon the base models. We test this structure on the prediction of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) severity as measured by the ADOS communication (ADOS_COMM) score from resting-state fMRI data, using a variety of base models. The metamodel outperforms traditional regression models as measured by the Pearson correlation coefficient between true and predicted scores and stability. In addition, we found that the metamodel is more flexible and more generalizable.
Predicting shear transmission across grain boundaries with an iterative stress relief model

Abstract A new model is proposed to quantitatively predict the specific deformation system activity that accommodates impinging slip at a grain boundary. The model uses an iterative approach to sequentially determine (at most) three accommodating slip systems and their relative shear. The outcome of this iterative stress relief model is mainly controlled by the continuity of Burgers vector in the grain boundary and the iterative evolution of the impinging stress tensor at the grain boundary. The model was tested by comparing predictions with 22 distinct observations of shear accommodation in α -titanium quantified using orientation-informed slip trace analysis and atomic force microscopy. All 16 cases displaying a single accommodating system and four out of six observed cases with two accommodating systems were predicted correctly. Optimization of adjustable model parameters indicates that the local and global stresses are of comparable importance and jointly determine the accommodating systems and their activity. Moreover, the optimized ratios of critical resolved shear stress for the different deformation system families are consistent with literature values for α -titanium.
A parasitoid wasp of Drosophila employs preemptive and reactive strategies to deplete its host's blood cells.

The wasps Leptopilina heterotoma parasitize and ingest their Drosophila hosts. They produce extracellular vesicles (EVs) in the venom that are packed with proteins, some of which perform immune suppressive functions. EV interactions with blood cells of host larvae are linked to hematopoietic depletion, immune suppression, and parasite success. But how EVs disperse within the host, enter and kill hematopoietic cells is not well understood. Using an antibody marker for L. heterotoma EVs, we show that these parasite-derived structures are readily distributed within the hosts' hemolymphatic system. EVs converge around the tightly clustered cells of the posterior signaling center (PSC) of the larval lymph gland, a small hematopoietic organ in Drosophila. The PSC serves as a source of developmental signals in naive animals. In wasp-infected animals, the PSC directs the differentiation of lymph gland progenitors into lamellocytes. These lamellocytes are needed to encapsulate the wasp egg and block parasite development. We found that L. heterotoma infection disassembles the PSC and PSC cells disperse into the disintegrating lymph gland lobes. Genetically manipulated PSC-less lymph glands remain non-responsive and largely intact in the face of L. heterotoma infection. We also show that the larval lymph gland progenitors use the endocytic machinery to internalize EVs. Once inside, L. heterotoma EVs damage the Rab7- and LAMP-positive late endocytic and phagolysosomal compartments. Rab5 maintains hematopoietic and immune quiescence as Rab5 knockdown results in hematopoietic over-proliferation and ectopic lamellocyte differentiation. Thus, both aspects of anti-parasite immunity, i.e., (a) phagocytosis of the wasp's immune-suppressive EVs, and (b) progenitor differentiation for wasp egg encapsulation reside in the lymph gland. These results help explain why the lymph gland is specifically and precisely targeted for destruction. The parasite's simultaneous and multipronged approach to block cellular immunity not only eliminates blood cells, but also tactically blocks the genetic programming needed for supplementary hematopoietic differentiation necessary for host success. In addition to its known functions in hematopoiesis, our results highlight a previously unrecognized phagocytic role of the lymph gland in cellular immunity. EV-mediated virulence strategies described for L. heterotoma are likely to be shared by other parasitoid wasps; their understanding can improve the design and development of novel therapeutics and biopesticides as well as help protect biodiversity.
Extremal Functions for Morrey’s Inequality

We give a qualitative description of extremals for Morrey’s inequality. Our theory is based on exploiting the invariances of this inequality, studying the equation satisfied by extremals, and the observation that extremals are optimal for a related convex minimization problem.