cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The X-Ray Binary Population of the Nearby Dwarf Starburst Galaxy IC 10: Variable and Transient X-Ray Sources

We have monitored the Cassiopeia dwarf galaxy (IC 10) in a series of 10 Chandra ACIS-S observations to capture its variable and transient X-ray source population, which is expected to be dominated by High Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXBs). We present a sample of 21 X-ray sources that are variable between observations at the 3 sigma level, from a catalog of 110 unique point sources. We find 4 transients (flux variability ratio greater than 10) and a further 8 objects with ratio > 5. The observations span years 2003 - 2010 and reach a limiting luminosity of >10$^{35}$ erg/s, providing sensitivity to X-ray binaries in IC 10 as well as flare stars in the foreground Milky Way. The nature of the variable sources is investigated from light-curves, X-ray spectra, energy quantiles, and optical counterparts. The purpose of this study is to discover the composition of the X-ray binary population in a young starburst environment. IC 10 provides a sharp contrast in stellar population age (<10 My) when compared to the Magellanic Clouds (40-200 My) where most of the known HMXBs reside. We find 10 strong HMXB candidates, 2 probable background Active Galactic Nuclei, 4 foreground flare-stars or active binaries, and 5 not yet classifiable sources. Complete classification of the sample requires optical spectroscopy for radial velocity analysis and deeper X-ray observations to obtain higher S/N spectra and search for pulsations. A catalog and supporting dataset are provided.
Explicit Bounds from the Alon–Boppana Theorem

The purpose of this article is to give explicit methods for bounding the number of vertices of finite k-regular graphs with given second eigenvalue. Let X be a finite k-regular graph and μ1(X) the ...
Open-Ended versus Guided Laboratory Activities: Impact on Students' Beliefs about Experimental Physics.

Students in lab courses with open-ended lab activities have more expertlike beliefs about experimental physics than student in more traditional lab courses.
Solvation of intrinsic positive charge in superfluid helium.

On the basis of electronic structure calculations, the structure of intrinsic positive charge solvated in superfluid helium is identified as triatomic He3+ ion, which is bound to the surrounding ground state helium atoms through the charge–charge induced dipole interaction in a pairwise additive manner. Bosonic density functional theory calculations show that this ion forms the well-known Atkins’ snowball solvation structure where the first rigid helium shell is effectively disconnected from the rest of the liquid. Evaluation of the total energy vs helium droplet size N shows distinct regions related to the completion of solvent shells near N = 16 and N = 47. These regions can be assigned to magic numbers observed in positively charged helium droplets appearing at N = 15 and in the range between 20 and 50 helium atoms. The calculated added mass for the positive ion in bulk superfluid helium (18 mHe) is much smaller than the previous experiments suggest (30–40 mHe), indicating that there may be yet some un...
Macro‐scale topology optimization for controlling internal shear stress in a porous scaffold bioreactor

Shear stress is an important physical factor that regulates proliferation, migration, and morphogenesis. In particular, the homeostasis of blood vessels is dependent on shear stress. To mimic this process ex vivo, efforts have been made to seed scaffolds with vascular and other cell types in the presence of growth factors and under pulsatile flow conditions. However, the resulting bioreactors lack information on shear stress and flow distributions within the scaffold. Consequently, it is difficult to interpret the effects of shear stress on cell function. Such knowledge would enable researchers to improve upon cell culture protocols. Recent work has focused on optimizing the microstructural parameters of the scaffold to fine tune the shear stress. In this study, we have adopted a different approach whereby flows are redirected throughout the bioreactor along channels patterned in the porous scaffold to yield shear stress distributions that are optimized for uniformity centered on a target value. A topology optimization algorithm coupled to computational fluid dynamics simulations was devised to this end. The channel topology in the porous scaffold was varied using a combination of genetic algorithm and fuzzy logic. The method is validated by experiments using magnetic resonance imaging readouts of the flow field. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2012; 109:1844–1854. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Oblique internal-wave chain resonance over seabed corrugations

Here we show that monochromatic long-crested corrugations on an otherwise flat seafloor can coherently scatter the energy of an oblique incident internal wave to multiple multi-directional higher-mode internal waves via a series of resonant interactions. We demonstrate that a resonance between seabed corrugations and a normally or slightly oblique incident internal wave results in a series of follow-up resonant interactions, which take place between the same corrugations and successively resonated shorter waves. A chain resonance of internal waves that carries energy to small scales is thus obtained, and we find that the Richardson number decreases by several orders of magnitude over the corrugated patch. If the incidence angle is large, and the incident wave perfectly satisfies a resonance condition with the topography, it turns out that not many higher-mode resonance or near-resonance conditions can be satisfied, such that energy stays confined within the first few modes. Nevertheless, if the incident waves are sufficiently detuned from satisfying a perfect resonance condition with the seabed corrugations, then we show that this frequency detuning may balance off the large detuning due to oblique incidence, leading to a chain resonance that again carries energy to small scales. The evolution of the incident and resonated wave amplitudes is predicted from the envelope equation for internal waves over resonant seabed topography in a three-dimensional rotating fluid, which we derive considering the Boussinesq and -plane approximations with the Coriolis frequency, linear density stratification and small-amplitude corrugations. Our results suggest that topographic features on the ocean floor with a well-defined dominant wavenumber vector, through the chain resonance mechanism elucidated here, may play a more important role than previously thought in the enhancement of diapycnal mixing and energy dissipation.
Is String Theory a Theory of Quantum Gravity

Some problems in finding a complete quantum theory incorporating gravity are discussed. One is that of giving a consistent unitary description of high-energy scattering. Another is that of giving a consistent quantum description of cosmology, with appropriate observables. While string theory addresses some problems of quantum gravity, its ability to resolve these remains unclear. Answers may require new mechanisms and constructs, whether within string theory, or in another framework.
Right-handed neutrinos and R(D (∗) )

We explore scenarios where the R(D(∗)) anomalies arise from semitauonic decays to a right-handed sterile neutrino. We perform an EFT study of all five simplified models capable of generating at tree-level the lowest dimension electroweak operators that give rise to this decay. We analyze their compatibility with current R(D(∗)) data and other relevant hadronic branching ratios, and show that one simplified model is excluded by this analysis. The remainder are compatible with collider constraints on the mediator semileptonic branching ratios, provided the mediator mass is of order TeV. We also discuss the phenomenology of the sterile neutrino itself, which includes possibilities for displaced decays at colliders and direct searches, measurable dark radiation, and gamma ray signals.
Improvements in the orbitalwise scaling down of Perdew-Zunger self-interaction correction in many-electron regions.

The Perdew–Zunger (PZ) method provides a way to remove the self-interaction (SI) error from density functional approximations on an orbital by orbital basis. The PZ method provides significant improvements for the properties such as barrier heights or dissociation energies but results in over-correcting the properties well described by SI-uncorrected semi-local functional. One cure to rectify the over-correcting tendency is to scale down the magnitude of SI-correction of each orbital in the many-electron region. We have implemented the orbitalwise scaled down SI-correction (OSIC) scheme of Vydrov et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 124, 094108 (2006)] using the Fermi–Lowdin SI-correction method. After validating the OSIC implementation with previously reported OSIC-LSDA results, we examine its performance with the most successful non-empirical SCAN meta-GGA functional. Using different forms of scaling factors to identify one-electron regions, we assess the performance of OSIC-SCAN for a wide range of properties: total energies, ionization potentials and electron affinities for atoms, atomization energies, dissociation and reaction energies, and reaction barrier heights of molecules. Our results show that OSIC-SCAN provides superior results than the previously reported OSIC-LSDA, -PBE, and -TPSS results. Furthermore, we propose selective scaling of OSIC (SOSIC) to remove its major shortcoming that destroys the −1/r asymptotic behavior of the potentials. The SOSIC method gives the highest occupied orbital eigenvalues practically identical to those in PZSIC and unlike OSIC provides bound atomic anions even with larger powers of scaling factors. SOSIC compared to PZSIC or OSIC provides a more balanced description of total energies and barrier heights.
ON THE CONSTRUCTION AND THE STRUCTURE OF OFF-SHELL SUPERMULTIPLET QUOTIENTS

Recent efforts to classify representations of supersymmetry with no central charge [C. F. Doran et al., Adv. Theor. Math. Phys.15, 1909 (2011)] have focused on supermultiplets that are aptly depicted by Adinkras, wherein every supersymmetry generator transforms each component field into precisely one other component field or its derivative. Herein, we study gauge-quotients of direct sums of Adinkras by a supersymmetric image of another Adinkra and thus solve a puzzle in the paper by Doran et al., Int. J. Mod. Phys. A22, 869 (2007): such (gauge-)quotients are not Adinkras but more general types of supermultiplets, each depicted as a connected network of Adinkras. Iterating this gauge-quotient construction then yields an indefinite sequence of ever larger supermultiplets, reminiscent of Weyl's construction that is known to produce all finite-dimensional unitary representations in Lie algebras.
A D = 4 N = 1 orbifold of type I strings

We consider the propagation of type I open superstrings on orbifolds with four non-compact dimensions and N = 1 supersymmetry. In this paper, we concentrate on a non-trivial Z2 × Z2 example. We show that consistency conditions, arising from tadpole cancellation and algebraic sources, require the existence of three sets of Dirichlet 5-branes. We discuss fully the enhancements of the spectrum when these 5-branes intersect. An amusing attribute of these models is the importance of the tree-level (in type I language) superpotential to the consistent relationship between Higgsing and the motions of 5-branes.
Tachyon condensation, open-closed duality, resolvents, and minimal bosonic and type-0 strings

Type-0A string theory in the (2,4k) superconformal minimal model backgrounds and the bosonic string in the (2,2k−1) conformal minimal models, while perturbatively identical in some regimes, may be distinguished non-perturbatively using double scaled matrix models. The resolvent of an associated Schrodinger operator plays three very important interconnected roles, which we explore perturbatively and non-perturbatively. On one hand, it acts as a source for placing D-branes and fluxes into the background, while on the other, it acts as a probe of the background, its first integral yielding the effective force on a scaled eigenvalue. We study this probe at disc, torus and annulus order in perturbation theory, in order to characterize the effects of D-branes and fluxes on the matrix eigenvalues. On a third hand, the integrated resolvent forms a representation of a twisted boson in an associated conformal field theory. The entire content of the closed string theory can be expressed in terms of Virasoro constraints on the partition function, which is realized as wavefunction in a coherent state of the boson. Remarkably, the D-brane or flux background is simply prepared by acting with a vertex operator of the twisted boson. This generates a number of sharp examples of open-closed duality, both old and new. We discuss whether the twisted boson conformal field theory can usefully be thought of as another holographic dual of the non-critical string theory.
Ultracold plasma expansion as a function of charge neutrality

Ultracold plasmas (UCPs) are created under conditions of near but not perfect neutrality. In the limit of zero electron temperature, electron screening results in non-neutrality manifesting itself as an interior region of the UCP with both electrons and ions and an exterior region composed primarily of ions. The interior region is the region of the most scientific interest for 2-component ultracold plasma physics. This work presents a theoretical model through which the time evolution of non-neutral UCPs is calculated. Despite Debye screening lengths much smaller than the characteristic plasma spatial size, model calculations predict that the expansion rate and the electron temperature of the UCP interior is sensitive to the neutrality of the UCP. The predicted UCP dependence on neutrality has implications for the correct measurement of several UCP properties, such as electron temperature, and a proper understanding of evaporative cooling of the electrons in the UCP.
Returns to effort: experimental evidence from an online language platform

While distance learning has become widespread, causal estimates regarding returns to effort in technology-assisted learning environments are scarce due to high attrition rates and endogeneity of effort. In this paper, I manipulate effort by randomly assigning students different numbers of lessons in a popular online language learning platform. Using administrative data from the platform and the instrumental variables strategy, I find that completing 9 Duolingo lessons, which corresponds to approximately 60 minutes of studying, leads to a 0.057–0.095 standard deviation increase in test scores. Comparisons to the literature and back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that distance learning can be as effective as in-person learning for college students for an introductory language course.
Variational Diffusion Autoencoders with Random Walk Sampling

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs) enjoy an intuitive connection to manifold learning: in training the decoder/generator is optimized to approximate a homeomorphism between the data distribution and the sampling space. This is a construction that strives to define the data manifold. A major obstacle to VAEs and GANs, however, is choosing a suitable prior that matches the data topology. Well-known consequences of poorly picked priors are posterior and mode collapse. To our knowledge, no existing method sidesteps this user choice. Conversely, $\textit{diffusion maps}$ automatically infer the data topology and enjoy a rigorous connection to manifold learning, but do not scale easily or provide the inverse homeomorphism (i.e. decoder/generator). We propose a method that combines these approaches into a generative model that inherits the asymptotic guarantees of $\textit{diffusion maps}$ while preserving the scalability of deep models. We prove approximation theoretic results for the dimension dependence of our proposed method. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with various real and synthetic datasets.
Theory Summary at Strangeness in Quark Matter 2019

This is the theory summary of Strangeness in Quark Matter 2019 conference. Results include the state-of-the-art updates to the Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) phase diagram with contributions both from heavy-ion collisions and nuclear astrophysics, studies on the QCD freeze-out lines, and several aspects regarding small systems including collectivity, heavy flavor dynamics, strangeness, and hard probes.
Designing Informative Rating Systems: Evidence from an Online Labor Market

Problem definition: Platforms critically rely on rating systems to learn the quality of market participants. In practice, however, ratings are often highly inflated and therefore, not very informat...
The Poverty of Monetarism

In this edited transcript of a lecture presented in Beijing in December 2019, the author provides a critique of the theory of monetarism that focuses on the difficulty of reconciling its main tenets with growing evidence, especially since the great financial crisis, of the murky relationship between growth in the money supply and rates of inflation and GDP growth. The central critique of monetarism spelled out in the lecture, which draws on Hyman Minsky's response to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's seminal article (both published in the same volume in 1965), is the theory's failure to account for how money enters and spreads throughout the economy. Drawing a novel analogy between fiat money for nations and equity for corporations, the author brings fundamental concepts from corporate finance, such as the dilution costs associated with equity issuance, to bear on monetary economics. In so doing, he shows how the classical monetarist framework can be expanded to provide a fuller account of how changes in money supply affect the economy. By keeping track of how money enters the economy—through purchases of investment goods and financial assets—and by assessing whether money is used to fund productive activities, the author shows how and why increases in the money supply need not, and often do not, lead to higher inflation. This corporate finance framing of monetary economics is also used to shed a skeptical light on claims associated with both crypto‐currencies and Modern Monetary Theory.
Exponential convergence of recursive least squares with forgetting factor for multiple-output systems

Abstract We extend results of the recursive-least-squares-with-forgetting-factor identifier for single-input-single-output systems to the multiple-output case by, under the assumption of persistence of excitation, deriving the corresponding minimized objective function and by showing exponential convergence of the estimation error.
Comparative Study of Three Stator Cooling Jackets for Electric Machine of Mild Hybrid Vehicle

Three stator cooling jacket concepts, including a new cooling jacket concept with parallel straight spiral channels, are evaluated for electric machine of mild hybrid electric car. Steady-state cooling jacket thermal flow analysis and transient-state full motor simulations with circumferential, axial, and spiral jacket concepts are carried out to predict their heat transfer performance and temperature distribution. A prototype motor has been made with the new jacket concept. Infrared thermography is performed to detect the transient temperature distribution of the motor stator windings and laminations for validation of the thermal flow analysis.
Capturing the Effects of Transportation on the Spread of COVID-19 With a Multi-Networked SEIR Model

In this letter we present a deterministic discrete-time networked SEIR model that includes a number of transportation networks, and present assumptions under which it is well defined. We analyze the limiting behavior of the model and present necessary and sufficient conditions for estimating the spreading parameters from data. We illustrate these results via simulation and with real COVID-19 data from the Northeast United States, integrating transportation data into the results.
Transcriptome-wide high-throughput mapping of protein-RNA occupancy profiles using POP-seq.

Interaction between proteins and RNA is critical for post-transcriptional regulatory processes. Existing high throughput methods based on crosslinking of the protein–RNA complexes and poly-A pull down are reported to contribute to biases and are not readily amenable for identifying interaction sites on non poly-A RNAs. We present Protein Occupancy Profile-Sequencing (POP-seq), a phase separation based method in three versions, one of which does not require crosslinking, thus providing unbiased protein occupancy profiles on whole cell transcriptome without the requirement of poly-A pulldown. Our study demonstrates that ~ 68% of the total POP-seq peaks exhibited an overlap with publicly available protein–RNA interaction profiles of 97 RNA binding proteins (RBPs) in K562 cells. We show that POP-seq variants consistently capture protein–RNA interaction sites across a broad range of genes including on transcripts encoding for transcription factors (TFs), RNA-Binding Proteins (RBPs) and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). POP-seq identified peaks exhibited a significant enrichment (p value < 2.2e−16) for GWAS SNPs, phenotypic, clinically relevant germline as well as somatic variants reported in cancer genomes, suggesting the prevalence of uncharacterized genomic variation in protein occupied sites on RNA. We demonstrate that the abundance of POP-seq peaks increases with an increase in expression of lncRNAs, suggesting that highly expressed lncRNA are likely to act as sponges for RBPs, contributing to the rewiring of protein–RNA interaction network in cancer cells. Overall, our data supports POP-seq as a robust and cost-effective method that could be applied to primary tissues for mapping global protein occupancies.
Unsupervised neural network models of the ventral visual stream

Deep neural networks currently provide the best quantitative models of the response patterns of neurons throughout the primate ventral visual stream. However, such networks have remained implausible as a model of the development of the ventral stream, in part because they are trained with supervised methods requiring many more labels than are accessible to infants during development. Here, we report that recent rapid progress in unsupervised learning has largely closed this gap. We find that neural network models learned with deep unsupervised contrastive embedding methods achieve neural prediction accuracy in multiple ventral visual cortical areas that equals or exceeds that of models derived using today's best supervised methods and that the mapping of these neural network models' hidden layers is neuroanatomically consistent across the ventral stream. Strikingly, we find that these methods produce brain-like representations even when trained solely with real human child developmental data collected from head-mounted cameras, despite the fact that these datasets are noisy and limited. We also find that semisupervised deep contrastive embeddings can leverage small numbers of labeled examples to produce representations with substantially improved error-pattern consistency to human behavior. Taken together, these results illustrate a use of unsupervised learning to provide a quantitative model of a multiarea cortical brain system and present a strong candidate for a biologically plausible computational theory of primate sensory learning.
The Lerner Index of Monopoly Power: Origins and Uses

Abba Lerner’s 1934 paper in The Review of Economic Studies is known today as the source of the Lerner Index of monopoly power. By identifying the social loss from monopoly as the diver gence between price and marginal cost, rather than the “usually accepted” (p. 161) relationship between price and average cost, Lerner redirected attention from the monopolist’s profits to the allocative inefficiency created by the pursuit of those profits. This insight is so ingrained in the mind of economists today that it is easy to over look what a significant advance it represented. In a paper commemorating Lerner’s sixtieth birthday, Paul Samuelson (1964) observed that while Lerner’s insight “may seem simple, … I can testify that no one at Chicago or Harvard could tell me in 1935 exactly why P = MC was a good thing” (p. 173). Lerner’s reasoning about the social loss from monopoly identified the “social optimum” with a Pareto optimal state of affairs and in the process offered what Tibor Scitovsky (1984) called the “first clear, rigorous and definitive statement of Pareto optimality” (p. 1,551). These encomia from titans of the discipline refer to a paper written when Lerner was a graduate student. 1 The Lerner Index, (P − MC )/P, identified the “degree of monopoly” with the differ ence between the firm’s price and its marginal cost at the profit-maximizing rate of output. For Lerner, a bigger wedge between P and MC meant greater monopoly power. A profit-maximizing firm’s monopoly power varied directly, and only with the firm’s own-price elasticity of demand. Lerner’s benchmark for measuring monopoly
Strategic Sovereign Wealth Fund Investment and the New Alliance Capitalism: A Network Mapping Investigation

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have grown rapidly in recent years both in value and in number. Despite a great deal of popular debate, very little scholarly attention has centered on the `strategic use' of SWFs by states, that is, as tools to promote national development. Using a `network mapping' approach, I investigate two case studies involving extensive strategic SWF investment: Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai's use of SWFs to promote the development of their aerospace sectors; and the deployment of the China Investment Corporation as an instrument of Chinese raw materials and energy policy. Strategically oriented SWF investment can be seen as a state-adaptive strategy under contemporary conditions of globalization and financialization. The viability of such a strategy, however, hinges on the manner in which it feeds into the strategies of firms and states at the receiving end of investment.
The Temporal and Spatial Dimensions of Price Search: Insights from Matching Household Survey and Purchase Data

Abstract Price promotions are pervasive in grocery markets. A household can respond to price promotions by effectively cherry-picking through (1) spatial price search across stores and (2) temporal price search across time. However, extant research has analyzed these two dimensions of price search only separately and therefore underestimates both the consumer response to price promotions and the impact of promotions on retail profit. In this article, the authors introduce an integrated analysis of spatial and temporal price search. They seek answers to three questions: First, what are the predictors of household decisions to perform either spatial or temporal price search? Second, how effective are the temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal price search strategies in obtaining lower prices? and Third, what is the impact of alternative price search strategies on retailer profit? The authors use a unique data collection approach that combines household surveys with observed purchase data to address these que...
Assessing inherent model bias: An application to native displacement in response to immigration

Abstract There is a long-standing debate among academics about the effect of immigration on native internal migration decisions. If immigrants displace natives this may indicate a direct cost of immigration in the form of decreased employment opportunity for native workers. Moreover, displacement would also imply that cross-region analyses of wage effects systematically underestimate the consequences of immigration. The widespread use of such area studies for the US and other countries makes it especially important to know whether a native internal response to immigration truly occurs. This paper introduces a microsimulation methodology to test for inherent bias in regression models that have been used in the literature. We show that some specifications have built biases into their models, thereby casting doubt on the validity of their results. We then provide a brief empirical analysis with a panel of observed US state-by-skill data. Together, our evidence argues against the existence of native displacement. This implies that cross-region analyses of immigration’s effect on wages are still informative.
Security bid/ask dynamics with discreteness and clustering: Simple strategies for modeling and estimation

Abstract This paper proposes a dynamic model of bid and ask quotes that incorporates a stochastic cost of market-making, discreteness (restriction of quotes to a fixed grid) and clustering (the tendency of quotes to lie on `natural' multiples of the tick size). The Gibbs sampler provides a convenient vehicle for estimation. The model is estimated for daily and intradaily US Dollar/Deutschemark Reuters quotes.
Improving the security, transparency and efficiency of California's 1% manual tally procedures

California jurisdictions have an extensive history of conducting post-election manual tallies of ballot records; they have performed this type audit since the 1960s when the use of lever and puchcard voting technologies became common statewide. We report findings from studying manual tally procedures in a handful of California counties. Through a cambination of iterative procedure development and observation of manual tally activities, we designed new procedures that better promote security, transparency and efficiency. We have since generalized these procedures for use in any Cali fornia county.
Key Human Capital

Firms whose human capital is concentrated in a few irreplaceable employees lack diversification in their human capital stock, exposing them to key human capital risk. Using disclosures of “key man life insurance” to measure this risk, we show that exposed firms are riskier. These younger, smaller, growth firms have abnormally high volatility, and following announcement of key employee departures, the most exposed firms lose 8% of their value. Key employees tend to be highly educated. They are four times more likely to hold PhD degrees than top managers, and firms with key human capital are more innovative.
Is Ecuador that wrong? Analyzing the Ecuadorian proposals concerning the special rapporteurship on freedom of expression of the Inter-American commission on Human Rights

IntroductIon In June 2011, the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS), following the instructions given during the 41st regular session of the General Assembly of the OAS, decided to create a “Special Working Group to Reflect on the Workings of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights with a View to Strengthening the Inter-American Human Rights System” (Working Group). The Permanent Council directed the Working Group to submit its final recommendations at the Council’s regular meeting in December 2011.1
The Prophylactic Remedy: Normative Principles and Definitional Parameters of Broad Injunctive Relief

This article is the first complete normative and descriptive treatment of the modern civil rights remedy - the prophylactic injunction. The prophylactic remedy is a public law injunction that uniquely restricts legal conduct that is affiliated with, but distinct from, the illegal wrong. The United States Supreme Court has utilized prophylactic remedies for over forty years, and has used the prophylactic paradigm to shape its jurisprudence on Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Prophylaxis, however, remains an ambiguous concept in the eyes of most scholars and lawyers. This article attempts to fill the academic void by exploring the doctrinal and theoretical parameters of the prophylactic remedy. By so doing, it attempts to establish a framework for the use of prophylactic remedies by the courts and to deflate the criticism of certain skeptics who mischaracterize such remedies as overly broad misuse of judicial power. Ultimately, the article has two goals. The primary purpose of the article is to provide an analytical framework that will enable judges, lawyers, and scholars to understand the contours of prophylactic relief. Accordingly, the article identifies trans-substantive remedial principles of prophylactic relief apparent in modern Supreme Court precedent regarding the appropriate character, scope, and use of prophylactic relief. The second and more ambitious goal of the paper is to dispel the myth that prophylactic relief is an overly broad remedy arising from the judge's personal political activism. A close analysis of the Supreme Court's decisions demonstrates quite the contrary - that prophylactic remedies are based upon solid doctrinal and theoretical principles legitimizing its continued use as a viable and necessary remedy.
Marriage, Parental Rights, and Public Policy: On the FMA, Its Purported Justification, and Its Likely Effects on Families

This article discusses the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, which should not be adopted for several reasons, not least of which is that its reach is ill-defined. To the extent that its reach can be anticipated, there is either surprisingly little connection between what the amendment purports to do and the justification offered for its adoption or surprisingly little discussion of the amendment's breadth and the effects that it is likely to have. The article discusses some of the possible interpretations which courts are likely to offer when interpreting the amendment and concludes that the FMA, if adopted, would undermine rather than serve the interests of America's families. This is the kind of amendment which should not even have been proposed much less adopted.
Unexpected co-benefits: Forest connectivity and property tax incentives

Abstract Forest property tax incentives were developed in the early 1900s to enhance onsite forest management and ensure predictable timber supplies, but their ongoing contributions to landscape connectivity between public and private forests are not well understood. We measured spatial connectivity between public forests and private forests enrolled in forest tax programs. We also analyzed tax program laws and agency policies to determine whether the design or implementation of the programs considered connections to public lands. We focused on one of the largest forest tax incentive programs in the United States: Wisconsin's Managed Forest Law and Forest Crop Law, which enrolled 1.1 million ha of the state's privately owned forests. We quantified patch density, mean patch size, and area-weighted mean patch size of enrolled forests in three ecologically distinct regions. A neutral landscape model analysis showed that actual enrollments were more likely to cluster near public lands than enrollments randomly distributed across the forested landscape. Yet the tax programs’ statutes and policies revealed no consideration of public lands in the programs’ planning or implementation. Although they are a voluntary, untargeted policy tool, forest tax programs provide the unintended but important benefit of connectivity with public lands. If states and stakeholders recognize forest tax programs as a means to achieve landscape planning goals, they could coordinate cross-boundary management efforts and target areas of particular conservation interest. Forest tax programs deserve greater attention as a private land conservation strategy.
Why Market Returns Favor Democrats in the White House

This study attempts to explain why the equity market earns greater returns for bearing risk when a Democrat is President in the USA versus a Republican. I look at data from 1929 through 2012. The data show that the value weighted return minus the corresponding period's risk free rate is 10.83% when a Democrat is President, versus a corresponding return of -1.20% under Republican Presidents. Two basic macroeconomic arguments exist that should affect market value between the two parties: differences in the risk free interest rates and differences in economic growth. On average the Democrats follow a policy of low interest rates. The rate of return on short-term T-bills averages 4.55% under the Republicans and a 2.48% under Democrats. Further, the Democrats overall economic policies create a higher average real growth rate with a 4.8% average versus only 1.8% under Republican administrations. Unfortunately, the growth and interest rate differences together do not explain the observed difference in equity market returns. A basic OLS approach with annual value weighted market returns minus the corresponding risk free rate as the dependent variable is run. Neither risk free interest rates nor real economic growth are significant in explaining the observed market returns though the party in power is significant predictor.
Reflections on the Decreasing Affordability of Legal Education

This Article offers two different lenses for thinking about the “affordability” of legal education. Part I discusses a historical perspective focused on aggregated data over time: average tuition in relation to average salaries of law school graduates. Part II discusses a present day perspective, estimating the percentage of Class of 2011 graduates for whom legal education might be considered affordable using a formula drawing on debt-to-income ratios associated with mortgages. Part III discusses the extent to which affordability may vary among public and private law schools, law schools in different states or regions, and for students with different LSAT and GPA profiles. Part IV concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges legal education will face as a result of legal education’s decreasing affordability.
What Is an Ecosystem? Incorporating 25 Years of Ecosystem Research

Ecosystems are increasingly recognized as crucial for the success of a firm’s innovation strategy and business model. They are also a topic attracting increasing academic interest, with more than 3...
Meta Dynamic Pricing: Learning Across Experiments.

We study the problem of learning shared structure across a sequence of dynamic pricing experiments for related products. We consider a practical formulation where the unknown demand parameters for each product come from an unknown distribution (prior) that is shared across products. We then propose a meta dynamic pricing algorithm that learns this prior online while solving a sequence of Thompson sampling pricing experiments (each with horizon T) for N different products. Our algorithm addresses two challenges: (i) balancing the need to learn the prior (meta-exploration) with the need to leverage the estimated prior to achieve good performance (meta-exploitation), and (ii) accounting for uncertainty in the estimated prior by appropriately “widening” the estimated prior as a function of its estimation error. We introduce a novel prior alignment technique to analyze the regret of Thompson sampling with a mis-specified prior, which may be of independent interest. Unlike prior-independent approaches, our algorithm’s meta regret grows sublinearly in N; an immediate consequence of our analysis is that the price of an unknown prior in Thompson sampling is negligible in experiment-rich environments with shared structure (large N). Numerical experiments on synthetic and real auto loan data demonstrate that our algorithm significantly speeds up learning compared to prior-independent algorithms.
Union Membership and Coverage Database from the Current Population Survey: Note

This note describes the construction and provision of an Internet database providing private and public sector union membership, coverage, and density estimates compiled from the Current Population Survey (CPS). Economy-wide estimates are provided beginning in 1973, estimates by state, detailed industry, and detailed occupation begin in 1983, and estimates by metropolitan area begin in 1986. The database is updated annually and can be accessed at http://www.unionstats.com/.
Extremism and Social Learning

When members of deliberating groups speak with one another, their predeliberation tendencies often become exacerbated as their views become more extreme. The resulting phenomenon -- group polarization -- has been observed in many settings, and it bears on the actions of juries, administrative tribunals, corporate boards, and other institutions. Polarization can result from rational Bayesian updating by group members, but in many contexts, this rational interpretation of polarization seems implausible. We argue that people are better seen as Credulous Bayesians, who insufficiently adjust for idiosyncratic features of particular environments and put excessive weight on the statements of others where there are 1) common sources of information; 2) highly unrepresentative group membership; 3) statements that are made to obtain approval; and 4) statements that are designed to manipulate. Credulous Bayesianism can produce extremism and significant blunders. We discuss the implications of Credulous Bayesianism for law and politics, including media policy and cognitive diversity on administrative agencies and courts.
Electoral Fraud, the Rise of Peron and Demise of Checks and Balances in Argentina

Abstract The future looked bright for Argentina in the early twentieth century. It had already achieved high levels of income per capita and was moving away from authoritarian government towards a more open democracy. Unfortunately, Argentina never finished the transition. The turning point occurred in the 1930s when to stay in power, the Conservatives in the Pampas resorted to electoral fraud, which neither the legislative, executive, or judicial branches checked. The decade of unchecked electoral fraud led to the support for Juan Peron and subsequently to political and economic instability.
The prevention of excess managerial risk taking

Abstract Executives with poor prior performance may be inclined to take excessive risk in the hope of meeting performance targets, in which case a compensation contract featuring severance pay can be optimal. While prior work has shown that severance can induce managers to take positive NPV risks, we show that it can also keep them from taking negative NPV risks. We show that severance should be contingent on results: complete failure should nullify any payments. We also show that mandating a firm size that is larger than first-best, while costly, can help screen for good managers.
Audit team time reporting: An agency theory perspective

While some research suggests that explicit incentives to meet time budgets have recently been reduced at audit firms, there is also evidence indicating that audit seniors and staff still feel at least implicit pressure to meet budgets. We examine the possibility that both of these findings tell a part of the story. Specifically, we explore whether, and under what conditions, seniors and staff are implicitly encouraged to underreport time through future engagement staffing decisions and the performance evaluation process. Further, we consider the extent to which agency theory can serve as a framework for understanding how the incentives of audit managers and partners influence how they view underreporting by their engagement staff. We place participants in a scenario in which they are responsible for evaluating an engagement senior who appears to have worked more hours than were budgeted. We manipulate the senior’s reporting accuracy (underreporting versus accurate reporting) and the desirability of the client (more versus less desirable). We find that, when managers’ agency-related incentives conflict more strongly with those of the firm (more desirable client), they tend to tacitly encourage underreporting through their evaluations of the senior’s performance. Managers are also more likely to request an underreporter on a future engagement. In contrast, partners placed in the same setting show no evidence of encouraging underreporting. Thus, our results suggest that managers’ tacit encouragement of underreporting is contrary to what the “principals” of the firm (i.e., partners) appear to want. Further, while firms may have reduced their emphasis on formal, explicit incentives to underreport, it appears likely that implicit manager incentives persist.
Modeling the evolution of expectations and uncertainty in general equilibrium

We develop methods to solve general equilibrium models in which forward-looking agents are subject to waves of pessimism, optimism, and uncertainty that turn out to critically affect macroeconomic outcomes. Agents in the model are fully rational and conduct Bayesian learning, and they know that they do not know. Therefore, agents take into account that their beliefs will evolve according to what they will observe. This framework accommodates both gradual and abrupt changes in beliefs and allows for an analytical characterization of uncertainty. We use a prototypical Real Business Cycle model to illustrate the methods.
Managing Private Fund-Based Portfolios: A Search for Rebalancing Strategies

Private fund-based portfolios present significant exposure-and liquidity-management challenges, because committing new funds and conducting secondary sales both have complex relationships to eventual exposure levels and net cash flows. This article presents a framework for evaluating candidate rebalancing strategies within the context of organizational objectives and concerns. It explicitly acknowledges the usefulness of secondary sales, and of modeling cash flows as stochastic processes. The author finds that simple commitment and sales rules that essentially depend only on distance from the target work reasonably well, but that the precise formulation of these rules depends on the specific situation. Institutions that value adherence to policy targets over other concerns will gravitate toward a rebalancing strategy that involves highly responsive commitment and sales rates, both when starting from zero and when overallocated. But for institutions that are less concerned with adherence to policy targets, optimal rebalancing strategies depend on the formulation of the initial problem. In cases of overallocation, even these patient organizations may need highly responsive sales rules to correct the overexposure within a reasonable time.
The SEC and the Financial Industry: Evidence from Enforcement against Broker-Dealers

The Securities and Exchange Commission plays a central part in the U.S. regulatory framework for the supervision of the financial industry. How has the SEC carried out this mission? Despite recurrent crises, systematic studies of SEC performance data are suprisingly scarce. As the SEC reforms itself to address the shortcomings revealed in 2007-2008, a systematic examination of the agency's past record can help identify priorities and evaluate the agency's renewed efforts. This study takes a first step in studying empirically SEC enforcement against investment banks and brokerage houses, examining the agency's record in the period right before the 2007-2008 crisis. This data suggests that defendants associated with big firms fared better in SEC enforcement actions as compared to defendants associated with smaller firms in three important dimensions. First, SEC actions against big firms were more likely to involve corporate liability exclusively, with no individuals subject to any regulatory action. Second, big-firm defendants were more likely to end up in administrative rather than court proceedings, controlling for types of violation and levels of harm to investors. Third, within administrative proceedings, big-firm employees were likely to receive lower sanctions, notably temporary or permanent bars from the industry. These patterns have important implications for major debates concerning corporate liability, regulatory capture and the public and private enforcement of securities laws.