cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Evolving Consumption Patterns in the U.S. Alcohol Market: Disaggregated Spatial Analysis

Global consumption patterns for alcoholic beverages are evolving, with some convergence in per capita consumption among nations as traditionally beer-drinking nations increase their consumption of wine and, conversely, wine-consuming nations shift towards beer. This article explores regional patterns of alcoholic beverage consumption within the United States. One purpose is to see if similar patterns of spatial convergence in consumption patterns can be observed within countries as have been documented in international comparisons. A more fundamental purpose is to explore the converse question and seek to better understand the persistent differences in alcoholic beverage consumption among groups. These issues are addressed using annual U.S. national and state-level data over four decades and, for the more recent period, supermarket scanner data at finer scales of geopolitical aggregation. Socioeconomic and other demographic variables appear to play significant roles in accounting for the spatial differences in consumption patterns, although the details vary across different models and data sets. The analysis of demand using less-aggregative data for a shorter time period reveals some shortcomings in the corresponding analysis based on state-level data over a longer time period, but with poorly measured prices. These findings might extrapolate to studies making international comparisons using national aggregate data. (JEL Classifications: D12, L66)
The Crisis of the American Law School

The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile for more than 30 years now the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector accounted for 2.01% of the nation’s GDP: by 2009 that figure had shrunk to 1.37% -- a 32% decrease. These two trends are not mutually sustainable. If the cost of becoming a lawyer continues to rise while the economic advantage conferred by a law degree continues to fall then eventually both the market for new lawyers and for admission to law school will crash. In the early years of the 21st century, this abstract theoretical observation has begun to be confirmed by concrete events. The ongoing contraction in the employment market for new lawyers has combined with the continuing increase in the cost of legal education to produce what has begun to be recognized as a genuine crisis for both law schools and the legal profession.
What Motivates Minority Acquisitions? The Trade-Offs between a Partial Equity Stake and Complete Integration

Minority acquisitions, involving less than 50% of the target, represent a distinct organizational choice. Minority acquisition can mitigate some of the incentive problems that arise in contractual relationships. Less is known, however, about the trade-off between minority acquisitions and complete integration. We find that minority acquisitions are more common when keeping target managerial incentives intact is important and when the target is financially constrained or can benefit from certification. Minority acquisitions are also more likely when the target's valuation is especially uncertain; integrating internal capital markets will be costly; and consolidating earning will lower earnings per share (EPS). The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.
Thin-Slice Forecasts of Gubernatorial Elections

We showed 10-second, silent video clips of unfamiliar gubernatorial debates to a group of experimental participants and asked them to predict the election outcomes. The participants' predictions explain more than 20 percent of the variation in the actual two-party vote share across the 58 elections in our study, and their importance survives a range of controls, including state fixed effects. In a horse race of alternative forecasting models, participants' forecasts significantly outperform economic variables in predicting vote shares, and are comparable in predictive power to a measure of incumbency status. Participants' forecasts seem to rest on judgments of candidates' personal attributes (such as likeability), rather than inferences about candidates' policy positions. Though conclusive causal inference is not possible in our context, our findings may be seen as suggestive evidence of a causal effect of candidate appeal on election outcomes.
Beyond the Polemic Against Junk Science: Navigating the Oceans that Divide Science and Law with Justice Breyer at the Helm

This Article posits that the problem of science that is misused or misunderstood by judges, lawyers, and jurors is real; but that the "junk science" literature consistently ignores the range of scientific mistakes and misunderstandings that permeate the law. Junk science is neither the source nor the scope of the problem among scientists, legal scholars, and practitioners, but is instead the byproduct of an adversarial system that too often fails to seek practical methods to enhance communication and collaboration with disciplines outside the law. The Article offers a specific two-pronged response to Justice Breyer's charge that judges "must aim for decisions that, roughly speaking, approximately reflect the scientific state of the art." The first component is a new interpretation of the evidentiary standards that places the judicial exploration of scientific validity squarely in the context of a relevance inquiry. The second is a detailed and specific exploration of basic scientific terminology, methodology, and statistical concepts designed to facilitate the operation of this reenvisioned standard.
Why Just Two? Disaggregating Traditional Parental Rights and Responsibilities to Recognize Multiple Parents

The traditional nuclear family of one mother / one father is in decline and other family forms are emerging in increasing numbers, such as blended families with stepparents, and same-sex parents. Many children are being raised by and/or have as a significant presence in their lives more than two parents. From a legal standpoint, recognition as "parent" entitles the individual to pursue all the benefits of parentage and may require the individual to assume all of the duties. Even though there may be a person who functions as a parent in a de facto capacity, s/he may not have legal protection because of the reluctance to grant legal parental status to more then two individuals. One major difficulty of recognizing multiple parents is the long entrenched legal vision of a nuclear family with two parents (based, in part, on parental autonomy). Legal parents enjoy considerable protection from state and third party interference. In addition to constitutional concerns, the logistics of recognizing multiple parents presents a significant legal challenge. It is difficult enough to have two parents share responsibility for a child, especially post dissolution; how can more than two parties share parental responsibilities without too much distress? Recognizing multiple parenthood will likely require greater court intervention - not only at outset, to legitimize multiple parental relationships, but also to manage the relationships. Critical to the recognition of multiple parents is the disaggregation of parental rights and responsibilities. At present, the establishment of legal parentage entails all of the responsibilities of parentage, such as financial and medical support, and all of the benefits, such as the right to custody and visitation. By delinking and disaggregating all of these rights and responsibilities, more than two individuals may hold the designation of "legal parent" yet each can make different contributions. I suggest that disaggregating parentage should allow for recognition of all the relevant adults in a child's life, yet not grant equal parental rights to all individuals, unless specifically agreed upon. A scheme of relative rights, dependent upon the adult's relationship with, and contributions to, the child should enable multiple parentage to work.
Propagation of Financial Shocks: The Case of Venture Capital

This paper investigates how venture-backed companies are affected when others sharing the same investor suffer a negative shock. In theory, companies may be helped or hurt in this scenario. To examine the topic empirically, I estimate the impact of the collapse of the technology bubble on non-information-technology non-IT companies that were held alongside IInternet companies in venture portfolios. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that the end of the bubble was associated with a significantly larger decline in the probability of raising continuation financing for these non-IT companies in comparison to others. This does not appear to be driven by unobservable company characteristics such as company quality or IT relatedness; for the same portfolio company receiving capital from multiple venture firms, investors with greater Internet exposure were significantly less likely to continue to participate in follow-on rounds. This paper was accepted by Itay Goldstein, operations management.
Using query-driven simulations for querying outcomes of business processes

Abstract When decision makers want to know outcomes of business processes in their organizations, they often use simulations to do this. Traditionally, this is achieved by running simulations, collecting statistics and answering questions of interests to the decision makers based on the collected statistics. This paper describes an alternative approach to simulations, called the Query-Driven Simulations (QDS) approach, in which the user first asks the queries of interest and then, depending on the query asked, appropriate simulations are run to answer that query. The QDS approach empowers the end-user by making it easier, faster, and more reliable to ask ad-hoc questions about outcomes of business processes than what is done in traditional simulations. To substantiate this point, the paper describes the types of questions decision makers ask about outcomes of business processes and studies how easy it is to express these questions in terms of an SQL-like query language SimQL designed for Query-Driven Simulations. In addition, a case study of using the QDS approach in a manufacturing application developed by a major management consulting company is presented and the QDS approach is tested on that application.
Using bidder asymmetry to increase seller revenue

Abstract We construct the optimal selling mechanism in a pure common value environment with two bidders that are not equally well informed. With an optimal mechanism, the seller benefits from bidder asymmetry: her expected revenue increases if the bidder asymmetry increases.
Design Is Everything

This essay attempts to demarcate the industrial practice of product design and situate it in the context of academic research. The term product design presents definitional challenges, as it is used in practice in different ways, and even varies in usage regionally. For this article, product design is “conceiving and giving form to goods and services that address needs.” The activity of product design can be thought of as comprising several key decisions. Because the decisions of product design do not map cleanly to any one academic discipline, the subject has not garnered enough attention in any one field to develop fully its own academic identity. Scholarly research in product design has often been cultivated by the emergence of a methodological paradigm. While several such paradigms are in use, several others offer substantial promise.
The effects of macroeconomic policy shocks on the UK labour market

This paper discusses the dynamic response of employment, average hours, and real wages to macroeconomic policy shocks in the UK in the period 1970 Q1–2003 Q1. Following a monetary policy shock the adjustment of labour input is primarily along the extensive margin. However, there is also significant adjustment along the intensive margin 1 year after the shock. A government spending shock leads to a fall in employment and hours, whereas real wages rise. This is attributed to the wage bill component of government consumption. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Dynamic factor demands under rational expectations

We model the industrial demands for structures, equipment, and blue- and white-collar labor in a manner consistent with rational expectations and stochastic dynamic optimization in the presence of adjustment costs, but allowing generality of functional form. We represent the technology by a translog input requirement function that specifies the amount of blue-collar labor needed to produce an output level given quantities of three quasi-fixed factors: nonproduction workers, equipment, and structures. A complete description of the production structure is obtained by simultaneously estimating the input requirement function and three stochastic Euler equations. We find adjustment costs are small in total but large on the margin, and differ considerably across factors.
Convicting the Innocent in Transnational Criminal Cases: A Comparative Institutional Analysis Approach to the Problem

The adjudication of transnational criminal cases is burdened by a very narrow compulsory process mechanism known as Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties. These treaties regularize foreign evidence gathering for prosecutors and explicitly prevent their use by criminal defendants. The danger of inaccurate verdicts and wrongful convictions that may result from unequal access to evidence highlights the need to resolve this flawed transnational adjudication process, and specifically, its evidentiary method. Building on the works of Neil Komesar, Ronald Coase, and Mancur Nelson, the author utilizes a comparative institutional analysis approach to consider the question of how to obtain parity between the prosecution and the defense in the ability to compel foreign evidence in transnational criminal cases. The issue is of great importance in a post-9/11 world, where the fairness and accuracy norms that underpin criminal prosecutions are increasingly ephemeral and illusory. The comparative framework illumes the important considerations for identifying the institution best suited to achieve the norm of parity. No criminal process scholar explicitly utilizes the comparative institutional analysis framework. This oversight is a mistake. The comparative framework provides an ideal theory to dissect criminal process questions. Explicit institutional comparison, rather than simplistic single institutional considerations, should underlie all criminal process Copyright
Evolutionary history and the species problem

In the last thirty years systematics has transformed itself from a discipline concerned with classification into a discipline concerned with reconstructing the evolutionary history of life. This transformation has been driven by cladistic analysis, a set of techniques for reconstructing evolutionary trees. Long interested in the large-scale structure of evolutionary history, cladistically oriented systematists have recently begun to apply «tree thinking» to problems near the species level. In any local («non-dimensional») situation, species are usually well-defined, but across space and time the grouping of organisms into species is often problematic. Three views of species are in common use today: the biological species concept, the evolutionary species concept, and the phylogenetic species concept
Overcoming NGO Accountability Concerns in International Governance

Most scholars treat NGOs as a homogenous group and base their theoretical and normative arguments around such a generalization, even when recognizing that NGOs vary significantly on a number of levels. This Article seeks to advance the literature on NGO accountability by unpacking NGOs by functional role in international governance, relating the functional roles of NGOs to accountability theory. This Article proposes that participation of NGOs in international governance should not always depend upon democratic accountability. Instead, the accountability required of NGOs when participating in international governance should depend upon the particular function performed. As a result, the accountability mechanisms used to achieve such accountability will necessarily vary by function. Failing to recognize this, theories which elaborate theories of NGO participation in international governance, have missed the mark, focusing primarily on ensuring greater accountability of NGOs generally. This Article seeks to remove the debate from the provision of accountability from the level of the actor to that of function. Part I begins with a discussion of accountability in international governance, establishing a general typology of accountability mechanisms, based largely upon the work of Grant and Keohane. Part II then describes some of the different functions performed by NGOs in international governance, providing examples of how such systems are arranged under existing frameworks and illustrating the relationship between the function performed and the accountability needed. Part III seeks to refine NGO accountability theory by proposing a new model to guide NGO participation in international governance which links accountability to function. Part III also identifies some concerns in implementing the theory. The Article concludes by calling for further research into the costs of implementing this new framework so an appropriate balance between fairness, operability, and accountability may be reached in international governance.
Bond Supply and Excess Bond Returns

We examine empirically how the supply and maturity structure of government debt affect bond yields and expected returns. We organize our investigation around a term-structure model in which risk-averse arbitrageurs absorb shocks to the demand and supply for bonds of different maturities. These shocks affect the term structure because they alter the price of duration risk. Consistent with the model, we find that the maturity-weighted-debt-to-GDP ratio is positively related to bond yields and future returns, controlling for the short rate. Moreover, these effects are stronger for longer-maturity bonds and following periods when arbitrageurs have lost money.
A 20th Century Debate About Imprisonment for Debt

In the early twentieth century, Parliament debated whether to abolish imprisonment for debt. Parliament’s Select Committee on Debtors (Imprisonment) of 1909 heard testimony from witnesses and issued a report recommending the continuation of imprisonment for debt. This testimony and report make for fascinating history. Although imprisonment is not part of contemporary debates about debt collection and personal insolvency (consumer bankruptcy) law, the competing views expressed in Parliament over a century ago about consumer debtors and those who lend to them will be recognizable to anyone familiar with contemporary debates on either side of the Atlantic.
The role of brand communications on front line service employee beliefs, behaviors, and performance

Frontline service employees often vary in their delivery of the brand promise, leaving service firms with less direct control on other stakeholders’ brand perceptions. Internal branding efforts have been suggested as a way to improve employee performance. With this in mind, we develop a two-process model based on identification and internalization theories to explain how internally disseminating brand-relevant information to frontline employees enhances performance. Using multi-source data from the employees, managers, and customers of a business-to-business firm in the hospitality industry, we find that providing brand-specific information directly to frontline employees increases their identification with the brand (as evidenced in perceptions of firm authenticity) and enhances their internalization of brand values. Additional results suggest that firms should make an extra effort to communicate brand-specific information to frontline employees if they desire brand-consistent performance that is observable to managers and customers alike.
The high cost of low wages: Economic scarcity effects in organizations

Abstract Due to current economic circumstances (e.g., stagnating wages, increasing material aspirations, mounting student debt), an increasing number of employees are prone to experiencing economic scarcity, defined here as the perception that one has fewer financial resources than one's needs require. In this paper, we focus primarily on an under-studied population in the organizational sciences: The working poor—employees who hold jobs but do not earn enough to sustain a reasonable standard of living for themselves and their dependents. Taking into account recent research suggesting that scarcity can have profound psychological consequences, we argue that organizations have a vested interest in reducing feelings of financial deprivation among its employees because the psychology of scarcity has the potential to spill over into organizational functioning. Furthermore, we assert that most organizations’ approaches to managing low-wage work are not only ineffective at reducing the spillover effects of scarcity on organizational outcomes, but also increase their endurance because they do not account for the behavioral consequences of financial deprivation. As such, we present more sustainable initiatives through which organizations can reduce scarcity among its employees. Finally, we discuss ways in which organizational researchers can become more involved in relevant public policy debates.
Work Culture and Discrimination

Whether in response to civil rights laws or demographic shifts in the labor pool, employers today seem to realize that women and minorities will be a part of their workforces. Indeed, many employers broadly espouse diversity as part of doing good business. At the same time, over the past several decades, employers have increasingly turned to employee fit as a formal job requirement and have retreated from detailed bureaucratic structures in ways that place heightened importance on social relations. These structural moves raise new concerns about workplace equality, for they strengthen demands to conform with prevailing work culture by making social relations more crucial to an individual's employment success. In this Article, I seek to frame an expanded antidiscrimination discourse that isolates work culture as a source of discrimination and puts legal pressure on employers to devise meaningful programs for reform. Drawing on a rich literature on the meaning of culture and the operation of human bias, I examine how particular work cultures can develop and persist along gender and/or racial lines and expose the harms that those cultures can impose on women and minorities. I then locate a substantial gap in existing legal discourse, where work culture is more frequently seen as a matter of business prerogative than one of antidiscrimination concern. For both normative and practical reasons, however, I argue against the creation of a new legal right to be free from discriminatory work culture, and I explore several alternatives to a legal rights approach, one that builds on existing legal doctrine and another that is driven by an administrative obligation, that might be used to trigger the type of contextual problem solving needed for meaningful work culture change.
The mitigating influence of time preference on the relation between smoking and BMI scores.

Prior studies have found a strong negative relation between smoking and body mass index (BMI). Smoking and unhealthy eating both imply a preference for utility in the present at the expense of future consumption. This analysis seeks to proxy this preference through a composite index of equally weighted intertemporal behaviors to isolate the impact of smoking upon BMI independent of time discounting. Ordinary least squares regression is used to analyze BMI score based on a number of key independent variables A total of 2970 individuals who provided data for the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII) 1994–1996, as well as the Diet and Health Knowledge Survey (DHKS). Adding time preference to a multivariate model inflates the magnitude of the smoking effect, consistent with discounted utility theory. Results suggest that full effect of the non-intertemporal aspects of smoking (e.g., the substitution of cigarettes for food) on BMI scores may be underestimated in previous studies that fail to account for the mitigating influence of time preference.
The type-agent core for exchange economies with asymmetric information

Abstract The type-agent core is a new solution concept for exchange economies with asymmetric information. It coincides with the set of subgame-perfect equilibrium outcomes of a simple competitive screening game. Uninformed intermediaries help the agents to cooperate in an attempt to make some profit. The paper extends the work of Perez-Castrillo [Cooperative outcomes through non-cooperative games, Games Econ. Behav. 7 (1994) 428–440] to exchange economies with non-transferable utility and asymmetric information. The type-agent core is a subset of Wilson's coarse core [Wilson, Information, efficiency, and the core of an economy, Econometrica 46 (1978) 807–816]. It is never empty, even though it may be a strict subset of Wilson's fine core. In addition, it converges towards the set of constrained market equilibria as the economy is replicated.
Culture and the regulation of entry

Abstract Does culture affect the manner in which a society regulates the entry of new firms? Our results suggest it does. We find more individualistic countries regulate entry more lightly. We investigate how culture matters presenting evidence of significant interactions between individualism and formal legal and political institutions. Individualism has a greater impact on entry regulation in societies with democratic political institutions or a common law tradition. This outcome is consistent with the idea that culture influences social preference for regulation, and political and legal institutions determine the degree to which those preferences are expressed as policy outcomes.
‘Idiot’s Guide’ to Sovereign Debt Restructuring

INTRODUCTION 1189 I. THE PROBLEMS OF SOVEREIGN DEBT RESTRUCTURING 1192 II. A PUBLIC-LAW ApPROACH CAN SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS 1197 A. Solving the Collective Action Problem ... 1197 B. Solving the Moral Hazard and Taxation Problems 1199 III. PRIVATE-LAW ApPROACHES ARE INADEQUATE 1203 IV. A PUBLIC-LAW ApPROACH WOULD BE EASY TO IMPLEMENT 1206 A. Binding States and Their Creditors to a Convention 1206 B. Administering a Convention 1208 C. Adjudication and Enforcement 1209 CONCLUSION 1212 APPENDIX: Model Sovereign Debt Restructuring Convention 1215
A Note on the Theme of Too Many Instruments

The difference and system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators are growing in popularity. As implemented in popular software, the estimators easily generate instruments that are numerous and, in system GMM, potentially suspect. A large instrument collection overfits endogenous variables even as it weakens the Hansen test of the instruments’ joint validity. This paper reviews the evidence on the effects of instrument proliferation, and describes and simulates simple ways to control it. It illustrates the dangers by replicating Forbes [American Economic Review (2000) Vol. 90, pp. 869–887] on income inequality and Levine et al. [Journal of Monetary Economics] (2000) Vol. 46, pp. 31–77] on financial sector development. Results in both papers appear driven by previously undetected endogeneity.
Contrastive Explanations for Reinforcement Learning via Embedded Self Predictions

We investigate a deep reinforcement learning (RL) architecture that supports explaining why a learned agent prefers one action over another. The key idea is to learn action-values that are directly represented via human-understandable properties of expected futures. This is realized via the embedded self-prediction (ESP) model, which learns said properties in terms of human provided features. Action preferences can then be explained by contrasting the future properties predicted for each action. To address cases where there are a large number of features, we develop a novel method for computing minimal sufficient explanations from an ESP. Our case studies in three domains, including a complex strategy game, show that ESP models can be effectively learned and support insightful explanations.
Is Only Fair Lovely in Indian Politics? Consequences of Skin Color in a Survey Experiment in Delhi

Adoration for fair skin color and bias against dark skin color are strong in Indian society. The theory of colorism suggests that, irrespective of a voter’s own phenotype, voters prefer lighter- to darker-skinned candidates. And yet, a substantial number of dark-skinned politicians get elected into office in India. In the first systematic study of voter preferences for candidate skin color in India, we conducted a survey experiment in which respondents were randomly administered one of three treatments based upon candidate skin tone: fair, wheatish (medium-brown), and dark. We find only weak evidence for colorism in the sample as a whole—the fair candidate is supported more than the dark and wheatish candidates, but at only marginal significance levels. This is because color preferences are heterogeneous amongst respondent groups. Dalits and the poor, groups that are darker relative to other groups and have been politically mobilized, exhibit much stronger support for dark candidates than other groups, consistent with a desire for descriptive representation. Amongst those who do not belong to these two groups, including dark respondents, the fair candidate finds more support than the dark candidate. This shows that even in the absence of skin color-based electoral appeals, skin color can emerge as an implicit marker of politically mobilized identities, and that this mobilization can undercut colorism.
A Simple Model of Entrepreneurship for Principles of Economics Courses

The critical roles of entrepreneurs in creating, operating, and destroying markets, as well as their importance in driving long-term economic growth are still generally either absent from principles of economics texts or relegated to later chapters. The primary difficulties in explaining entrepreneurship at the principles level are the lack of a universally accepted definition, a plausible explanation of the demand for entrepreneurship, and a diagram that summarizes the impact of entrepreneurship on market equilibrium and growth—a definition, a story, and a picture. This article discusses how the notion of the stationary state associated with Schumpeter (1911/1983), Knight (1921/1971), and Weber (1930/2002) can provide a framework for integrating the entrepreneur into the early part of principles of economics courses.
Calling a Truce in the Culture Wars: From Enron to the CIA

This Article compares and evaluates recent Congressional efforts to improve institutional “cultures” in the private and public sectors. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was designed to upgrade corporate culture by patching up the “walls” that separate corporate management from boards of directors, accountants, lawyers, and financial analysts. The Intelligence Reform Act of 2005 took a different tack, hammering away at walls that supposedly segmented the intelligence community. The logic was that the market failed because people did not observe sufficient formalities in their dealings with one another, while the intelligence community failed precisely because people kept their distance from one another and declined to share information. The way to improve their respective cultures, Congress determined, was to build up walls in the one case and to tear them down in the other. This Article expresses some skepticism, however, about these solutions. Building walls in the private sector increases transaction costs, which may outweigh any benefits in detecting fraud. With respect to the intelligence community, compartmentalization of information diminishes risks associated with double agents; redundancy of tasks may provide a safety margin; and segmentation of government agencies may guard against civil liberties violations as well as provide additional spurs to action. Furthermore, thriving firms in the private sector forge successful, though likely idiosyncratic, cultures designed to exploit business opportunities. Because the market is largely self-correcting, regulatory efforts to dictate a particular reorganization or cultural shift are probably unnecessary and possibly harmful. By contrast, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and all other government agencies operate without fear of bankruptcy, which is to say in the absence of penalties for deficient cultures (or rewards for successful ones). Nonetheless, efforts to re-structure government bureaucracies, nominally to re-make their cultures, should be regarded with caution. First, such efforts will almost inevitably be undertaken by political actors, whose motivations are at a minimum suspect. Second, even assuming the best of intentions and the utmost of human wisdom, central planners cannot forecast the untold costs and benefits to a major governmental reorganization. The Intelligence Reform Act’s overhaul of the intelligence community will have certain and substantial costs in the short-term, and very uncertain, if any, benefits in the long term. Calling a Truce in the Culture Wars: From Enron to the CIA Craig S. Lerner Associate Professor, George Mason University School of Law
Pseudospectral Shattering, the Sign Function, and Diagonalization in Nearly Matrix Multiplication Time

We exhibit a randomized algorithm which given a square matrix $A\in \mathbb{C}^{n\times n}$ with $\Vert A\Vert\leq 1$ and $\delta > 0$ , computes with high probability an invertible $V$ and diagonal $D$ such that \begin{equation*}\Vert A-VDV^{-1}\Vert\leq\delta\end{equation*} in $O(T_{\text{MM}}(n)\log^{2}(n/\delta))$ arithmetic operations on a floating point machine with $O(\log^{4}(n/\delta)\log n)$ bits of precision. The computed similarity $V$ additionally satisfies $\Vert V\Vert\Vert V^{-1}\Vert \leq O(n^{2.5}/\delta)$ . Here $T_{\text{MM}}(n)$ is the number of arithmetic operations required to multiply two $n\times n$ complex matrices numerically stably, known to satisfy $T_{\text{MM}}(n)=O(n^{\omega+\eta})$ for every $\eta > 0$ where $\omega$ is the exponent of matrix multiplication [1]. The algorithm is a variant of the spectral bisection algorithm in numerical linear algebra [2] with a crucial Gaussian perturbation preprocessing step. Our running time is optimal up to polylogarithmic factors, in the sense that verifying that a given similarity diagonalizes a matrix requires at least matrix multiplication time. It significantly improves the previously best known provable running times of $O(n^{10}/\delta^{2})$ arithmetic operations for diagonalization of general matrices [3], and (with regards to the dependence on n) $O(n^{3})$ arithmetic operations for Hermitian matrices [4], and is the first algorithm to achieve nearly matrix multiplication time for diagonalization in any model of computation (real arithmetic, rational arithmetic, or finite arithmetic). The proof rests on two new ingredients. (1) We show that adding a small complex Gaussian perturbation to any matrix splits its pseudospectrum into $n$ small well-separated components. In particular, this implies that the eigenvalues of the perturbed matrix have a large minimum gap, a property of independent interest in random matrix theory. (2) We give a rigorous analysis of Roberts' [5] Newton iteration method for computing the sign function of a matrix in finite arithmetic, itself an open problem in numerical analysis since at least 1986 [6]. This is achieved by controlling the evolution of the pseudospectra of the iterates using a carefully chosen sequence of shrinking contour integrals in the complex plane.
Performance in even a simple perceptual task depends on mouse secondary visual areas

Primary visual cortex (V1) in the mouse projects to numerous brain areas, including several secondary visual areas, frontal cortex, and basal ganglia. While it has been demonstrated that optogenetic silencing of V1 strongly impairs visually guided behavior, it is not known which downstream areas are required for visual behaviors. Here we trained mice to perform a contrast-increment change detection task, for which substantial stimulus information is present in V1. Optogenetic silencing of visual responses in secondary visual areas revealed that their activity is required for even this simple visual task. In vivo electrophysiology showed that, although inhibiting secondary visual areas could produce some feedback effects in V1, the principal effect was profound suppression at the location of the optogenetic light. The results show that pathways through secondary visual areas are necessary for even simple visual behaviors.
Short‐Termism, Shareholder Payouts, and Investment in the EU*

Investor-driven "short-termism" is said to harm EU public firms' ability to invest for the long term, prompting calls for the EU to better insulate managers from shareholder pressure. But the evidence offered---rising levels of repurchases and dividends---is incomplete and misleading: it ignores large offsetting equity issuances that move capital from investors to EU firms. We show that, over the last 30 years and the last decade, net shareholder payouts have been moderate, and investment and cash balances have increased. In sum, the data provide little basis for the view that short-termism in the EU warrants corporate governance reforms.
Examining the Reading-Related Competencies of Struggling Adult Readers: Nuances across Reading Comprehension Assessments and Performance Levels.

Research with school-age readers suggests that the contributions of reading and language skills vary across reading comprehension assessments and proficiency levels. With a sample of 168 struggling adult readers, we estimated the explanatory effects of decoding, oral vocabulary, listening comprehension, fluency, background knowledge, and inferencing across three reading comprehension tests and across low, average, and high levels of performance. OLS regression models accounted for 66% of the variance in WJ Passage Comprehension scores with all competencies except listening comprehension as significant predictors; 43% of the variance in RAPID Reading Comprehension scores with decoding and listening comprehension as significant predictors; and 31% of the variance in RISE Reading Comprehension scores with decoding as a significant predictor. Quantile regression models and between-quantile slope comparisons showed that the effects of some predictors on reading comprehension varied across performance levels on one or more tests. Implications for instruction, assessment, and future research are discussed.
ASYMMETRY HELPS: EIGENVALUE AND EIGENVECTOR ANALYSES OF ASYMMETRICALLY PERTURBED LOW-RANK MATRICES.

This paper is concerned with the interplay between statistical asymmetry and spectral methods. Suppose we are interested in estimating a rank-1 and symmetric matrix $\boldsymbol{M}^{\star }\in \mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$, yet only a randomly perturbed version $\boldsymbol{M}$ is observed. The noise matrix $\boldsymbol{M}-\boldsymbol{M}^{\star }$ is composed of independent (but not necessarily homoscedastic) entries and is, therefore, not symmetric in general. This might arise if, for example, when we have two independent samples for each entry of $\boldsymbol{M}^{\star }$ and arrange them in an asymmetric fashion. The aim is to estimate the leading eigenvalue and the leading eigenvector of $\boldsymbol{M}^{\star }$. We demonstrate that the leading eigenvalue of the data matrix $\boldsymbol{M}$ can be $O(\sqrt{n})$ times more accurate (up to some log factor) than its (unadjusted) leading singular value of $\boldsymbol{M}$ in eigenvalue estimation. Moreover, the eigen-decomposition approach is fully adaptive to heteroscedasticity of noise, without the need of any prior knowledge about the noise distributions. In a nutshell, this curious phenomenon arises since the statistical asymmetry automatically mitigates the bias of the eigenvalue approach, thus eliminating the need of careful bias correction. Additionally, we develop appealing nonasymptotic eigenvector perturbation bounds; in particular, we are able to bound the perturbation of any linear function of the leading eigenvector of $\boldsymbol{M}$ (e.g., entrywise eigenvector perturbation). We also provide partial theory for the more general rank-$r$ case. The takeaway message is this: arranging the data samples in an asymmetric manner and performing eigendecomposition could sometimes be quite beneficial.
Oxidation shuts down an auto-inhibitory mechanism of von Willebrand factor

The blood protein von Willebrand factor (VWF) is a key link between inflammation and pathological thrombus formation. In particular, oxidation of methionine residues in specific domains of VWF due to the release of oxidants in inflammatory conditions has been linked to an increased platelet-binding activity. However, the atomistic details of how methionine oxidation activates VWF have not been elucidated to date. Yet understanding the activation mechanism of VWF under oxidizing conditions can lead to the development of novel therapeutics that target VWF selectively under inflammatory conditions in order to reduce its thrombotic activity while maintaining its haemostatic function. In this manuscript, we used a combination of a dynamic flow assay and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to investigate how methionine oxidation removes an auto-inhibitory mechanism of VWF. Results from the dynamic flow assay revealed that oxidation does not directly activate the A1 domain, which is the domain in VWF that contains the binding site to the platelet surface receptor glycoprotein Ibα (GpIbα), but rather removes the inhibitory function of the neighboring A2 and A3 domains. Furthermore, the MD simulations combined with free energy perturbation calculations suggested that methionine oxidation may destabilize the binding interface between the A1 and A2 domains leading to unmasking of the GpIbα-binding site in the A1 domain.
When Therapy Goes Public: Copyright Gatekeepers and Sharing Therapeutic Artifacts on Social Media

This study offers new insights into (1) sharing health-related information on social media, (2) copyright gatekeeper motivations, and (3) the emotional injury for improper takedowns of online content. Through 18 in-depth interviews, we investigate music therapists’ copyright-comfort-zone. In music therapy, using patient-preferred music yields superior therapeutic results: The rub is that patient-preferred music is often copyrighted music. Therapists are comfortable using copyrighted music in private therapy sessions, but copyright concerns arise when recorded artifacts from therapy are shared online. Social media affordances permit sharing of therapeutic artifacts outside the private therapy bubble. Notwithstanding the desire and affordances to share therapeutic artifacts online, our results show that music therapists discourage social media sharing. Music therapists act as copyright gatekeepers not only to avoid legal liability, but also to forestall emotional harm to patients and families should these artifacts be subject to an online takedown notice. Our findings inform a more nuanced framework for understanding copyright’s influence on sharing digital artifacts.
A Maneuver-based Urban Driving Dataset and Model for Cooperative Vehicle Applications

Short-term future of automated driving can be imagined as a hybrid scenario in which both automated and human-driven vehicles co-exist in the same environment. In order to address the needs of such road configuration, many technology solutions such as vehicular communication and predictive control for automated vehicles have been introduced in the literature. Both aforementioned solutions rely on driving data of the human driver. In this work, we investigate the currently available driving datasets and introduce a real-world maneuver-based driving dataset that is collected during our urban driving data collection campaign. We also provide a model that embeds the patterns in maneuver-specific samples. Such model can be employed for classification and prediction purposes.
Automatic atmospheric correction for shortwave hyperspectral remote sensing data using a time-dependent deep neural network

Abstract Atmospheric correction is an essential step in hyperspectral imaging and target detection from spectrometer remote sensing data. State-of-the-art atmospheric correction approaches either require extensive filed experiments or prior knowledge of atmospheric characteristics to improve the predicted accuracy, which are computational expensive and unsuitable for real time application. To take full advantages of remote sensing observation in quickly and reliably acquiring data for a large area, an automatic and efficient processing tool is required for atmospheric correction. In this paper, we propose a time-dependent neural network for automatic atmospheric correction and target detection using multi-scan hyperspectral data under different elevation angles. In addition to the total radiance, the collection day and time are also incorporated to improve the time-dependency of the network and represent the seasonal and diurnal characteristics of atmosphere and solar radiation. Results show that the proposed network has the capacity to accurately provide atmospheric characteristics and estimate precise reflectivity spectra with 95.72 % averaged accuracy for different materials, including vegetation, sea ice, and ocean. Additional experiments are designed to investigate the network’s temporal dependency and performance on missing data. The error analysis confirms that our proposed network is capable of estimating atmospheric characteristics under both seasonally and diurnally varying environments and handling the influence of missing data. Both the predicted results and error analysis are promising and demonstrate that our network has the ability of providing accurate atmospheric correction and target detection in real time.
Analyzing mechanisms in Co( i ) redox catalysis using a pattern recognition platform

Redox catalysis has been broadly utilized in electrochemical synthesis due to its kinetic advantages over direct electrolysis. The appropriate choice of redox mediator can avoid electrode passivation and overpotential, which strongly inhibit the efficient activation of substrates in electrolysis. Despite the benefits brought by redox catalysis, establishing the precise nature of substrate activation remains challenging. Herein, we determine that a Co(I) complex bearing two N,N,N-tridentate ligands acts as a competent redox catalyst for the reduction of benzyl bromide substrates. Kinetic studies combining electroanalytical techniques with multivariable linear-regression analysis were conducted, disclosing an outer-sphere electron-transfer mechanism, which occurs in concert with C–Br bond cleavage. Furthermore, we apply a pattern recognition platform to distinguish between mechanisms in the activation of benzyl bromides, found to be dependent on the ligation state of the cobalt(I) center and ligand used.
Investor Sentiment and Stock Option Vesting Terms

Using the details of vesting terms, we document that stock options granted in high-investor-sentiment periods tend to have shorter vesting periods and durations and are more likely to vest complete...