cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Equipment Investment and Economic Growth

Using data from the United Nations Comparison Project and the Penn World Table, we find that machinery and equipment investment has a strong association with growth: over 1960-1985 each extra percent of GDP invested in equipment is associated with an increase in GDP growth of one third of a percentage point per year. This is a much stronger association than found between growth and any of the other components of investment. A variety of considerations suggest that this association is causal, that higher equipment investment drives faster growth, and that the social return to equipment investment in well-functioning market economies is on the order of 30 percent per year.
How misleading is linearization? Evaluating the dynamics of the neoclassical growth model $

This paper investigates the reliability of employing linearization to evaluate the dynamic adjustments to changes in productive government spending in a Ramsey growth model. If government expenditure is introduced as a flow and the dynamic adjustment is fast, linearization may yield a reasonably good approximation to the true dynamics, even for fairly large policy shocks. If government expenditure assumes the form of a stock, leading to more sluggish adjustment, linearization may yield misleading predictions. These errors occur at the beginning of the transition and weigh heavily in welfare calculations. The implications for temporary shocks and the speed of convergence are also considered.
When the Government Attempts to Change the Board, Investors Should Know

In 2008 and 2009, the federal government effectively hired and fired directors at American International Group and Bank of America. At AIG, the government exercised its power through the ownership of voting stock, which meant that the company’s public securities filings revealed the government influence, though at times slowly and at times only by inference. At BofA, by contrast, the government imposed its will through an unpublished bank regulatory action, and no securities filing provided even a hint of the federal role. The fact that current law allows the government to secretly reconstitute the governing bodies of multi-billion-dollar, publicly traded companies is cause for concern, for who controls the board controls the company. This article argues that, just as securities filings alert investors when private parties attempt board change, a new required filing should inform investors when the government seeks to push sitting directors out or bring new ones in.
Missing incentives for flexibility in wholesale electricity markets

Abstract In most liberalized electricity markets, flaws in short-term price formation have led to a “missing money” problem wherein average energy prices are too low to support an efficient level of capacity. Recent growth of wind and solar generation has exposed another category of flaws related to intertemporal constraints, such that energy prices are not volatile enough to support an efficient level of flexibility. In theory, electricity markets convey the value of flexibility through time-varying prices, encouraging market participants to invest in resources able to match production and consumption profiles to grid needs. Real-world market clearing procedures, however, make several simplifications that suppress volatility relative to the theoretical ideal. This paper describes five mechanisms by which current wholesale electricity market price formation may fail to provide full-strength incentives for flexible resources. Instead of restoring price volatility, market designers may choose to define flexibility products that act as a proxy for full-strength prices. However, these products cannot replicate theoretically ideal incentives precisely, with potentially important consequences for small-scale and distributed resources. The analysis could help guide ongoing efforts to ensure that systems have the capability to respond to growing variability and uncertainty in an efficient way.
Privacy, transparency, and the prisoner’s dilemma

Aside from making a few weak, and hopefully widely shared claims about the value of privacy, transparency, and accountability, we will offer an argument for the protection of privacy based on individual self-interest and prudence. In large part, this argument will parallel considerations that arise in a prisoner’s dilemma game. After briefly sketching an account of the value of privacy, transparency, and accountability, along with the salient features of a prisoner’s dilemma games, a game-theory analysis will be offered. In a game where both players want privacy and to avoid transparency and the associated accountability, the dominant action will be to foist accountability and transparency on the other player while attempting to retain one’s own privacy. Simply put, if both players have the ability or power to make the other more accountable and transparent, they will do so for the same reasons that player’s defect in a prisoner’s dilemma game. Ultimately this will lead to a sub-optimal outcome of too much accountability and transparency. While there are several plausible solutions to prisoner dilemma games, we will offer both technical, as well as, law and policy solutions. We need to change the payoffs of the game so that is it in everyone’s interest to balance privacy and accountability rather than foisting transparency on others.
The Diversity Discount: When Increasing Ethnic and Racial Diversity Prevents Tax Increases

According to recent research, racial and ethnic diversity reduces U.S. localities’ investment in public goods. Yet we remain unsure about the mechanisms behind that relationship and uncertain that the relationship is causal. This essay addresses these challenges by studying the impact of racial and ethnic demographics on property tax votes in Massachusetts and Texas. Employing novel time-series cross-sectional data, it departs from the emerging consensus by showing that diversity does not always influence local tax votes. Instead, diversity reduces localities’ willingness to raise taxes only when localities are undergoing sudden demographic changes. Theoretically, this finding points us away from the dominant understanding of diversity as divergent preferences, and towards approaches that emphasize how sudden demographic changes can destabilize residents’ expectations and influence local elites. To understand how diversity influences public good provision, we should look to those towns that are diversifyi...
Discussion--The Effect of Risk on Price Responses to Unexpected Earnings

Chambers, Freeman and Koch test to see whether earnings response coefficients (ERCs), or stock returns per unit of unexpected earnings, are increasing in total risk. They generate this prediction from a model in which the sensitivity of dividend expectations to earnings news increases in total risk. They document a strong positive relation between ERCs and total risk, after controlling for variation in systematic risk and persistence. They do not find the negative relation between ERCs and systematic risk that prior ERC research had predicted and documented.I examine in turn the two central questions that Chambers, Freeman and Koch pose: (a) Which kind of risk do ERCs reflect: systematic, idiosyncratic or both (total)? and (b) Is the relation between ERCs and risk positive, zero or negative? I argue that accounting researchers’ inability to find a relation between ERCs and systematic risk is no surprise, given that modern finance research cannot document a relation between systematic risk and stock returns. I point out recent empirical work suggesting that earnings news has both numerator and denominator effects. I argue that the many research design differences between the current paper and previous ERC papers make it difficult to evaluate how much measurement error or model misspecification contributes to the different findings. I review recent empirical and theoretical finance research on idiosyncratic risk to place the paper’s findings in a broader context. Finally, I suggest avenues for further research.
Establishment of a Peace Regime on the Korean Peninsula: Definition, Process, and Cooperation

The Korean War (“The War”) did not legally end. While the fighting stopped in 1953, the War had been on the stage of truce under the 1953 Armistice Agreement, and no formal agreement on ending the War and creating peace was adopted. On April 27, 2018 President Jae-in Moon of the Republic of Korea (“ROK”) and Chairman Jong-un Kim of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (“DPRK”) made a “Peace Declaration,” politically ending the war on the Korean Peninsula and starting a new era of peace. This political agreement between the two Koreas politically ended the Korean War, and the two Koreas agreed to establish a permanent and solid peace regime on the Korean Peninsula. Depending on how we define a peace regime, we can determine whether we have reached a peace regime on the Korean peninsula, or what and how we have to pursue to reach a peace regime. A new definition of a regime should not be too broad to admit the current balance of powers based on hegemonies and states’ patterns of behaviors, or too restrictive and formal to codify as a multi-national treaty; a simple peace treaty cannot cover everything a peace regime needs to have and reflect the complicated process of peace building, cooperation and tension-reduction. In this paper, I will attempt to find a the most-realistic definition for a peace regime to provide an ultimate peace on the Korean peninsula. Further, I will think about how to reach the newly defined peace regime on the Korean peninsula and the obstacles to overcome to reach this peace regime, including: (1) Denuclearization; and (2) How a peace regime can be transnationally supported and peacefully digested and incorporated into the domestic level processes and norms, especially considering that reaching a regime reflecting national interests is a daunting task. Lastly, I will conclude with recommendations for states surrounding the Korean peninsula in terms of “strength, organization form, scope, and allocation mode.”
Make Versus Buy in Trucking: Asset Ownership, Job Design, and Information

Explaining patterns of asset ownership in the economy is a central goal of both organizational economics and industrial organization. We develop a model of asset ownership in trucking, which we test by examining how the adoption of different classes of on-board computers (OBCs) between 1987 and 1997 influenced whether shippers use their own trucks for hauls or contract with for-hire carriers. We find that OBCs' incentive-improving features pushed hauls toward private carriage, but their resource-allocationimproving features pushed them toward for-hire carriage. We conclude that ownership patterns in trucking reflect the importance of both incomplete contracts (Grossman and Hart (1986)) and of job design and measurement issues (Holmstrom and Milgrom (1994)).
Do Firms Want to Borrow More? Testing Credit Constraints Using a Directed Lending Program

This article uses variation in access to a targeted lending program to estimate whether firms are credit constrained. While both constrained and unconstrained firms may be willing to absorb all the directed credit that they can get (because it may be cheaper than other sources of credit), constrained firms will use it to expand production, while unconstrained firms will primarily use it as a substitute for other borrowing. We apply these observations to firms in India that became eligible for directed credit as a result of a policy change in 1998, and lost eligibility as a result of the reversal of this reform in 2000, and to smaller firms that were already eligible for the preferential credit before 1998 and remained eligible in 2000. Comparing the trends in the sales and the profits of these two groups of firms, we show that there is no evidence that directed credit is being used as a substitute for other forms of credit. Instead, the credit was used to finance more productionâ€“there was a large acceleration in the rate of growth of sales and profits for these firms in 1998, and a corresponding decline in 2000. There was no change in trends around either date for the small firms. We conclude that many of the firms must have been severely credit constrained, and that the marginal rate of return to capital was very high for these firms.
Racial Equality: Old and New Strains and American Indians

First, I will set the colonial context for equality that was anchored in a narrow white male model as the principal civic actor. Second, the discussion proceeds to the political status of American Indians, the basis for the nation-to-nation relations that secured in treaties the lands and resources that benefited non-Indians. Third, this Article explores the cultural difference between indigenous and constitutional visions of individual rights and community. Fourth, is a description of the efforts to remake Indians into a race and assimilate their governments into federalism. Fifth, this Article discusses the Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez case, which demonstrates the cultural disparity between the individual rights model of the ICRA and the political right of the tribe to self-determination. The conclusion affirms that the retained power of tribal sovereigns for self-governance and self-determination is the most important right for American Indians. Though American Indians are now citizens entitled to equal protection and due process, this individualistic theory is limited in force to protect culturally distinct governments built on values of consensual relations.
Trademark Infringement, Trademark Dilution, and the Decline in Sharing of Famous Brand Names: An Introduction and Empirical Study

† Professor of Law, The George Washington University Law School. For research assistance in preparation for the empirical study, I would like to thank Brian Abramson and Nithyambika Gurukumar. For research assistance on the empirical study itself, I would like to thank Bereket Banbore, Xin Jiang, Vivek Ramachandran, Anirudh Rao, and Lu Xie. For assistance at the Library of Congress, I would like to thank Marilyn K. Parr and Ellen B. Terrell. For comments on previous drafts of this Article, I would like to thank Michael Abramowicz, David Welkowitz, and the participants in the 2009 Intellectual Property Scholars Conference at Cardozo Law School. And for generous research support, I would like to thank Dean Frederick M. Lawrence of The George Washington University Law School.
Option repricing, corporate governance, and the effect of shareholder empowerment

Abstract We use the practice of employee option repricing to investigate how shareholder involvement in firm compensation policies affects the quality of firm governance. We find that a 2003 reform that empowered shareholders to approve or reject repricing proposals led to value increases in previous repricers. The likelihood of repricing becomes less sensitive to poor manager performance, but remains similarly sensitive to bad luck, after the reform. Average post-repricing changes in firm performance are positive only after the reform. Overall, our results suggest that shareholder empowerment improves the governance of repricing and can transform repricing into a value-creating tool.
The robustness of robust implementation

We show that a mechanism that robustly implements optimal outcomes in a one-dimensional supermodular environment continues to robustly implement "-optimal outcomes in all close-by environments. Robust implementation of "-optimal outcomes is thus robust to small perturbations of the environment. This is in contrast to ex-post implementation which is not robust in this sense as only trivial social choice functions are ex-post implementable in generic environments.
Symposium: Reflections on Executive Order 13,422. Introductory Comment

This comment argues that much of the immediate controversy over the 2007 executive order expanding Office of Management and Budget review of agency rulemaking activity and guidance documents was rooted in debate over longstanding issues. These longstanding issues included: 1) the proper extent of presidential authority over the administrative process; 2) the tension between agency expertise and agency accountability; 3) the merits of imposing additional procedural requirements on the rulemaking process; and 4) the utility of cost-benefit analysis in improving policy decisions. When placed in this context, the intensity of the immediate controversy over the 2007 executive order makes greater sense.
Living Wages and Retention of Homecare Workers in San Francisco

This study records the impact on workforce retention of the nearly doubling of wages for homecare workers in San Francisco County over a 52-month period. Using descriptive statistics and logistic regression analysis the author finds that the annual retention rate of new providers rose from 39 percent to 74 percent following significant wage and benefit increases and that a $1 increase in the wage rate from $8 an hour—the national average wage for homecare—would increase retention by 17 percentage points. The author also shows that adding health insurance increases the retention rate by 21 percentage points.
Optimal entry timing

Abstract A player of privately known strength chooses when to enter a market, and an incumbent chooses whether to compete or concede. Information about the potential entrant's type is revealed publicly according to an exogenous news process and the timing of entry. I analyze stationary equilibria using the public belief as a state variable. No equilibria in pure strategies exist, and smooth-pasting conditions need not hold. Under both D1 and a novel refinement, the informed player has nondecreasing value functions and her strategy has the following structure: for high states, both types enter with certainty; for a possibly empty interval of intermediate states, no type enters; and for low states, the high type enters while the low type mixes. I obtain closed form solutions and analyze comparative statics for such equilibria. The welfare effects of the presence of news, relative to no news, depend on the starting belief; however, for a fixed equilibrium, a marginal increase in news quality always helps the informed player regardless of her type and always hurts total welfare.
Liquidity, style investing and excess comovement of exchange-traded fund returns

Abstract This study shows that exchange-traded fund (ETF) misvaluation – based on return differentials between ETFs and their net asset values (NAV) – comove excessively across ETFs. Excess comovements are positive (negative) and significant across ETFs in similar (distant) investment styles. Further tests based on return reversals suggest that misvaluation stems primarily from the ETF, rather than the NAV price. Excess comovements are greater for funds with high commonality in demand shocks and attractive liquidity characteristics. These findings are consistent with the idea that the high liquidity of ETFs attracts a clientele of short-horizon noise traders with correlated demand for investment styles.
The political motivations of the United States’ bilateral investment treaty program

ABSTRACTThe United States has signed 47 bilateral investment treaties (BITs) over the last three decades. The standard explanation for why the United States’ government signed those BITs is that it was motivated by a desire to promote the development of international investment law and to protect American capital invested abroad. An alternative explanation, however, is that the United States has largely used BITs as a foreign policy tool to improve relationships with strategically important countries in the developing world. This project uses qualitative and quantitative evidence to assess whether the United States was motivated to sign BITs based on investment considerations or political considerations. The qualitative evidence suggests that US executive branch officials viewed BITs as a potential way to cement and strengthen relationships with politically important countries. The quantitative evidence suggests that proxies for investment considerations – like trade and FDI flows – are weak predictors of...
Which Factors Matter to Investors? Evidence from Mutual Fund Flows

Which Factors Matter to Investors? Evidence from Mutual Fund Flows Brad M. Barber Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis Xing Huang Broad College of Business, Michigan State University Terrance Odean Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley May 18, 2016 We appreciate the comments of Joseph Chen, Susan Christoffersen, Richard Evans, Amit Goyal, David Hirshleifer, Petri Jylha, Jose Menchero, Stefan Nagel, Stephan Siegel, Jonathan Reuter, Zheng Sun, and seminar participants at Case Western University, Emory University, SAIF, Tulane University, UC Irvine, Vanderbilt University, the University of Stavanger, 2014 Helsinki Finance Summit, 2014 Rotterdam Behavioral Finance Conference, 2014 European Finance Association Meetings, 2014 Miami Behavioral Finance Conference, the Spring 2014 JOIM Conference, 2015 CICF, 2016 Citrus Conference, 2016 SFS Finance Cavalcade, and the Ben Graham Centre’s 4th Intelligent Investing Symposium. All errors are our own. Send correspondence to Brad M. Barber, Graduate School of Management, UC Davis, 1 Shields Avenues, Davis, CA 95616, telephone: 530-752-0512. E-mail: bmbarber@ucdavis.edu.
Trial and Error: The Supreme Court’s Philosophy of Science

Apparently equating the question of whether expert testimony is reliable with the question of whether it is genuinely scientific, in Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc (1993) the US Supreme Court ran together Karl Popper's and Carl Hempel's incompatible philosophies of science. But there can be no criterion discriminating scientific, and hence reliable, testimony from the unscientific and unreliable; for not all, and not only, scientific evidence is reliable. In subsequent rulings (General Electric Co v Joiner, 1997; Kumho Tire Co v Carmichael, 1999) the Court has backed quietly away from Daubert's confused philosophy of science, but not from federal judges' responsibilities for screening expert testimony. Efforts to educate judges scientifically, and increased use of court-appointed experts are, at best, only partial solutions to the problems with scientific testimony.
Trade Dress Rights as Instruments of Monopolistic Competition: Towards a Rejuvenation of the Misappropriation Doctrine in Unfair Competition Law and a Property Theory of Trademarks

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Marquette Law Scholarly Commons.
The Effect of Buyer‐Imposed Bidding Requirements and Bundle Structure on Purchase Performance

SUMMARY Many requests for quotation (RFQs) consist of a group of different stock-keeping units (SKUs), bundled together in a single order lot. How this lot is structured and whether suppliers are required to adhere strictly to its composition (i.e., quote on all items in the bundle versus a subset) may significantly impact the competitiveness of the bidding and the buyer's perceived performance of the purchase. To better understand bundling practices and experiences, a survey of purchasers that aggregate several SKUs into a single bundled RFQ was undertaken. Within this context, respondent replies are categorized by buyer-imposed bidding requirements according to whether suppliers are required to submit bids on all items in the bundle, merely encouraged, or free to bid on any item combination in the bundle. The resulting bundle structure is examined and its impact on purchase (bundle) performance, as perceived by the buying company, is explored. Results are discussed, with managerial insights provided for purchasing professionals.
On solutions to the nonlocal $$\overline{\partial }$$ ∂ ¯ -problem and (2+1) dimensional completely integrable systems

In this short note, we discuss a new formula for solving the nonlocal $$\overline{\partial }$$ -problem, and discuss application to the Manakov–Zakharov dressing method. We then explicitly apply this formula to solving the complex (2+1)D Kadomtsev–Petviashvili equation and complex (2+1)D completely integrable generalization of the (2+1)D Kaup–Broer (or Kaup–Boussinesq) system. We will also discuss how real (1+1)D solutions are expressed using this formalism. It is simple to express the formalism for finite gap primitive solutions from [9, 11] using the formalism of this note. We also discuss recent results on the infinite soliton limit for the (1+1)D Korteweg–de Vries equation and the (1+1)D Kaup-Broer system. In an appendix, the classical solutions to the 3D Laplace equation (2+1)D d’Alembert wave equation by Whittaker are described. This appendix is included to elucidate an analogy between the dressing method and the Whittaker solutions.
Learning with feature dependent label noise: a progressive approach

Label noise is frequently observed in real world large scale datasets. The noise is introduced due to a variety of reasons; it is heterogeneous and feature-dependent. Most existing approaches to handle noisy labels fall into two categories: they either assume an ideal feature-independent noise, or remain heuristic without theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we propose to target a new family of feature-dependent label noise. This is much more general than commonly used i.i.d.~label noise and encompasses a broad spectrum of noise patterns. Focusing on this general noise family, we propose a progressive label correction algorithm that iteratively corrects labels and refine the model. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that for a wide variety of (unknown) noise patterns, a classifier trained with this strategy will converge to be consistent with the Bayes classifier. On different datasets, our method outperforms multiple SOTA baselines and is robust to various noise types and levels.
Design of intrinsically disordered proteins that undergo phase transitions with lower critical solution temperatures

Many naturally occurring elastomers are intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) built up of repeating units, and they can demonstrate two types of thermoresponsive phase behavior. Systems characterized by lower critical solution temperatures (LCSTs) undergo phase separation above the LCST, whereas systems characterized by upper critical solution temperatures (UCSTs) undergo phase separation below the UCST. There is congruence between thermoresponsive coil–globule transitions and phase behavior, whereby the theta temperatures above or below which the IDPs transition from coils to globules serve as useful proxies for the LCST/UCST values. This implies that one can design sequences with desired values for the theta temperature with either increasing or decreasing radii of gyration above the theta temperature. Here, we show that the Monte Carlo simulations performed in the so-called intrinsic solvation (IS) limit version of the temperature dependent self-Assembly of Biomolecules Studied by an Implicit, Novel, and Tunable Hamiltonian (ABSINTH) implicit solvation model yield a useful heuristic for discriminating between sequences with known LCST and UCST phase behavior. Accordingly, we use this heuristic in a supervised approach, integrate it with a genetic algorithm, combine this with IS limit simulations, and demonstrate that novel sequences can be designed with LCST phase behavior. These calculations are aided by direct estimates of temperature dependent free energies of solvation for model compounds that are derived using the polarizable atomic multipole optimized energetics for biomolecular applications forcefield. To demonstrate the validity of our designs, we calculate coil–globule transition profiles using the full ABSINTH model and combine these with Gaussian cluster theory calculations to establish the LCST phase behavior of designed IDPs.
Pseudorandom Generators for Unbounded-Width Permutation Branching Programs.

We prove that the Impagliazzo-Nisan-Wigderson [Impagliazzo et al., 1994] pseudorandom generator (PRG) fools ordered (read-once) permutation branching programs of unbounded width with a seed length of O(log d + log n ⋅ log(1/e)), assuming the program has only one accepting vertex in the final layer. Here, n is the length of the program, d is the degree (equivalently, the alphabet size), and e is the error of the PRG. In contrast, we show that a randomly chosen generator requires seed length Ω(n log d) to fool such unbounded-width programs. Thus, this is an unusual case where an explicit construction is "better than random." Except when the program’s width w is very small, this is an improvement over prior work. For example, when w = poly(n) and d = 2, the best prior PRG for permutation branching programs was simply Nisan’s PRG [Nisan, 1992], which fools general ordered branching programs with seed length O(log(wn/e) log n). We prove a seed length lower bound of Ω(log d + log n ⋅ log(1/e)) for fooling these unbounded-width programs, showing that our seed length is near-optimal. In fact, when e ≤ 1/log n, our seed length is within a constant factor of optimal. Our analysis of the INW generator uses the connection between the PRG and the derandomized square of Rozenman and Vadhan [Rozenman and Vadhan, 2005] and the recent analysis of the latter in terms of unit-circle approximation by Ahmadinejad et al. [Ahmadinejad et al., 2020].
Pericyte-like cells undergo transcriptional reprogramming and distinct functional adaptations in acute lung injury.

We previously reported on the role of pericyte-like cells as functional sentinel immune cells in lung injury. However, much about the biological role of pericytes in lung injury remains unknown. Lung pericyte-like cells are well-positioned to sense disruption to the epithelial barrier and coordinate local inflammatory responses due to their anatomic niche within the alveoli. In this report, we characterized transcriptional responses and functional changes in pericyte-like cells following activation by alveolar components from injured and uninjured lungs in a mouse model of acute lung injury (ALI). Purified pericyte-like cells from lung digests using PDGFRβ as a selection marker were expanded in culture as previously described (1). We induced sterile acute lung injury in mice with recombinant human Fas ligand (rhFasL) instillation followed by mechanical ventilation (1). We then collected bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) from injured and uninjured mice. Purified pericyte-like cells in culture were exposed to growth media only (control), BALF from uninjured mice, and BALF from injured mice for 6 and 24 hours. RNA collected from these treatment conditions were processed for RNAseq. Targets of interest identified by pathway analysis were validated using in vitro and in vivo assays. We observed robust global transcriptional changes in pericyte-like cells following treatment with uninjured and injured BALF at 6 hours, but this response persisted for 24 hours only after exposure to injured BALF. Functional enrichment analysis of pericytes treated with injured BALF revealed the activation of pro-inflammatory, cell migration, and angiogenesis-related pathways, whereas processes associated with tissue development and cell differentiation were down-regulated. We validated select upregulated targets in the inflammatory, angiogenic, and cell migratory pathways using functional biological assays in vitro and in vivo. We conclude that lung pericyte-like cells are highly responsive to alveolar compartment content from both uninjured and injured lungs, but injured BALF elicits a more sustained response. The inflammatory, angiogenic, and migratory changes exhibited by activated pericyte-like cells underscore the phenotypic plasticity of these specialized stromal cells in the setting of acute lung injury.
Measurement and Fairness

We propose measurement modeling from the quantitative social sciences as a framework for understanding fairness in computational systems. Computational systems often involve unobservable theoretical constructs, such as socioeconomic status, teacher effectiveness, and risk of recidivism. Such constructs cannot be measured directly and must instead be inferred from measurements of observable properties (and other unobservable theoretical constructs) thought to be related to them---i.e., operationalized via a measurement model. This process, which necessarily involves making assumptions, introduces the potential for mismatches between the theoretical understanding of the construct purported to be measured and its operationalization. We argue that many of the harms discussed in the literature on fairness in computational systems are direct results of such mismatches. We show how some of these harms could have been anticipated and, in some cases, mitigated if viewed through the lens of measurement modeling. To do this, we contribute fairness-oriented conceptualizations of construct reliability and construct validity that unite traditions from political science, education, and psychology and provide a set of tools for making explicit and testing assumptions about constructs and their operationalizations. We then turn to fairness itself, an essentially contested construct that has different theoretical understandings in different contexts. We argue that this contestedness underlies recent debates about fairness definitions: although these debates appear to be about different operationalizations, they are, in fact, debates about different theoretical understandings of fairness. We show how measurement modeling can provide a framework for getting to the core of these debates.
Kidney Exchange: An Operations Perspective

Many patients in need of a kidney transplant have a willing but incompatible (or poorly matched) living donor. Kidney exchange programs arrange exchanges among such patient-donor pairs, in cycles a...
Spin Emitters beyond the Point Dipole Approximation in Nanomagnonic Cavities

Control over transition rates between spin states of emitters is crucial in a wide variety of fields ranging from quantum information science to the nanochemistry of free radicals. We present an ap...
TIME-INCONSISTENT MARKOVIAN CONTROL PROBLEMS UNDER MODEL UNCERTAINTY WITH APPLICATION TO THE MEAN-VARIANCE PORTFOLIO SELECTION

In this paper, we study a class of time-inconsistent terminal Markovian control problems in discrete time subject to model uncertainty. We combine the concept of the sub-game perfect strategies wit...
Two questions for private law theory

This article claims that private law theorists ought to bear in mind the distinction between wholesale questions about the best interpretation or justification of legal institutions, and retail que...
A Tale of Two Transcriptomic Responses in Agricultural Pests via Host Defenses and Viral Replication.

Autographa californica Multiple Nucleopolyhedrovirus (AcMNPV) is a baculovirus that causes systemic infections in many arthropod pests. The specific molecular processes underlying the biocidal activity of AcMNPV on its insect hosts are largely unknown. We describe the transcriptional responses in two major pests, Spodoptera frugiperda (fall armyworm) and Trichoplusia ni (cabbage looper), to determine the host–pathogen responses during systemic infection, concurrently with the viral response to the host. We assembled species-specific transcriptomes of the hemolymph to identify host transcriptional responses during systemic infection and assessed the viral transcript abundance in infected hemolymph from both species. We found transcriptional suppression of chitin metabolism and tracheal development in infected hosts. Synergistic transcriptional support was observed to suggest suppression of immune responses and induction of oxidative stress indicating disease progression in the host. The entire AcMNPV core genome was expressed in the infected host hemolymph with a proportional high abundance detected for viral transcripts associated with replication, structure, and movement. Interestingly, several of the host genes that were targeted by AcMNPV as revealed by our study are also targets of chemical insecticides currently used commercially to control arthropod pests. Our results reveal an extensive overlap between biological processes represented by transcriptional responses in both hosts, as well as convergence on highly abundant viral genes expressed in the two hosts, providing an overview of the host–pathogen transcriptomic landscape during systemic infection.
Abstract 1027: Inhibiting pathways predicted from a steroid hormone gene signature yields synergistic antitumor effects in lung cancer

Mounting preclinical and clinical evidence suggest an involvement of estrogen signaling in promoting non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) progression. In estrogen receptor β-positive (ERβ) cases, we previously found seven genes within the prediction analysis of microarrays 50 gene (PAM50) panel that showed strong association in predicting prognosis of NSCLC patients, with Myc, MIA, FGFR4, CXXC5, Grb-7 and FOXC1 being upregulated while PR was downregulated in highly aggressive lung tumors. These genes described one network containing ERβ and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2/3 (HER2/HER3) signaling, which suggests that these two interacting pathways define lung tumors with more aggressive biology. Here, we sought to evaluate the therapeutic potential of combining the pan-HER tyrosine kinase inhibitor, Dacomitinib, and the ER antagonist, Fulvestrant in NSCLC. Cell viability assay in three different human NSCLC cell lines 201T (EGFR wild-type), A549 (K-ras mutant) and HCC827 (EGFR exon 19 deletion) showed strong synergy between Dacomitinib and Fulvestrant, as determined by a combination index 1), and induced tumor regression in 201T and A549 xenografts, with average tumor volume significantly lower than the single treatment groups. The immunohistochemical analysis of the xenografts revealed significant downregulation in Ki67. Western blot analysis of the tumor lysates from the combination treatment groups showed an increase in cleaved caspase-3 and a decrease in both ER and HER signaling. The PAM50 gene signature was also reversed in both xenograft studies detected by real-time-qPCR. Similar effects were seen for c-Myc and PR at the protein levels detected by immunohistochemistry staining. These observations encouragingly support the use of this combination clinically in NSCLC, considering its ability to suppress tumor growth and produce a gene signature that predicts better clinical outcomes, as assessed by the PAM50 genes. Citation Format: Abdulaziz A. Almotlak, Mariya Farooqui, Jill M. Siegfried. Inhibiting pathways predicted from a steroid hormone gene signature yields synergistic antitumor effects in lung cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2019; 2019 Mar 29-Apr 3; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 1027.
Person-Centered Predictions of Psychological Constructs with Social Media Contextualized by Multimodal Sensing

Personalized predictions have shown promises in various disciplines but they are fundamentally constrained in their ability to generalize across individuals. These models are often trained on limited datasets which do not represent the fluidity of human functioning. In contrast, generalized models capture normative behaviors between individuals but lack precision in predicting individual outcomes. This paper aims to balance the tradeoff between one-for-each and one-for-all models by clustering individuals on mutable behaviors and conducting cluster-specific predictions of psychological constructs in a multimodal sensing dataset of 754 individuals. Specifically, we situate our modeling on social media that has exhibited capability in inferring psychosocial attributes. We hypothesize that complementing social media data with offline sensor data can help to personalize and improve predictions. We cluster individuals on physical behaviors captured via Bluetooth, wearables, and smartphone sensors. We build contextualized models predicting psychological constructs trained on each cluster's social media data and compare their performance against generalized models trained on all individuals' data. The comparison reveals no difference in predicting affect and a decline in predicting cognitive ability, but an improvement in predicting personality, anxiety, and sleep quality. We construe that our approach improves predicting psychological constructs sharing theoretical associations with physical behavior. We also find how social media language associates with offline behavioral contextualization. Our work bears implications in understanding the nuanced strengths and weaknesses of personalized predictions, and how the effectiveness may vary by multiple factors. This work reveals the importance of taking a critical stance on evaluating the effectiveness before investing efforts in personalization.
Adaptability and Resilience of Academic Radiation Oncology Personnel and Procedures during COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: A comprehensive response to the unprecedented SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) challenges for public health and its impact on radiation oncology patients and personnel for resilience and adaptability is presented. Methods: The general recommendations included working remotely when feasible, implementation of screening/safety and personal protective equipment (PPE) guidelines, social distancing, regular cleaning of treatment environment, and testing for high-risk patients/procedures. All teaching conferences, tumor boards, and weekly chart rounds were conducted using a virtual platform. Additionally, specific recommendations were given to each section to ensure proper patient treatments. The impact of these measures, especially adaptability and resilience, were evaluated through specific questionnaire surveys. Results: These comprehensive COVID-19-related measures resulted in most staff expressing a consistent level of satisfaction in regard to personal safety, maintaining a safe work environment, continuing quality patient care, and continuing educational activities during the pandemic. There was a significant reduction in patient treatments and on-site patient visits with an appreciable increase in the number of telemedicine e-visits. Conclusions: Survey results demonstrated substantial adaptability and resilience, including in the rapid recovery of departmental activities during the reactivation phase. In the event of a future public health emergency, the measures implemented may be adopted with good outcomes by radiation oncology departments across the globe.
Topological phase in plasma physics

Recent discoveries have demonstrated that matter can be distinguished on the basis of topological considerations, giving rise to the concept of topological phase. Introduced originally in condensed matter physics, the physics of topological phase can also be fruitfully applied to plasmas. Here, the theory of topological phase is introduced, including a discussion of Berry phase, Berry connection, Berry curvature and Chern number. One of the clear physical manifestations of topological phase is the bulk-boundary correspondence, the existence of localized unidirectional modes at the interface between topologically distinct phases. These concepts are illustrated through examples, including the simple magnetized cold plasma. An outlook is provided for future theoretical developments and possible applications.
Vortex ordering and dynamics on Santa Fe artificial ice pinning arrays

We numerically examine the ordering, pinning, and flow of superconducting vortices interacting with a Santa Fe artificial ice pinning array. We find that as a function of magnetic field and pinning density, a wide variety of vortex states occur, including ice rule obeying states and labyrinthine patterns. In contrast to square pinning arrays, we find no sharp peaks in the critical current due to the inherent frustration effect imposed by the Santa Fe ice geometry; however, there are some smoothed peaks when the number of vortices matches the number of pinning sites. For some fillings, the Santa Fe array exhibits stronger pinning than the square array due to the suppression of one-dimensional flow channels when the vortex motion in the Santa Fe lattice occurs through the formation of both longitudinal and transverse flow channels.
Scientific Discourse Tagging for Evidence Extraction.

Evidence plays a crucial role in any biomedical research narrative, providing justification for some claims and refutation for others. We seek to build models of scientific argument using information extraction methods from full-text papers. We present the capability of automatically extracting text fragments from primary research papers that describe the evidence presented in that paper’s figures, which arguably provides the raw material of any scientific argument made within the paper. We apply richly contextualized deep representation learning pre-trained on biomedical domain corpus to the analysis of scientific discourse structures and the extraction of “evidence fragments” (i.e., the text in the results section describing data presented in a specified subfigure) from a set of biomedical experimental research articles. We first demonstrate our state-of-the-art scientific discourse tagger on two scientific discourse tagging datasets and its transferability to new datasets. We then show the benefit of leveraging scientific discourse tags for downstream tasks such as claim-extraction and evidence fragment detection. Our work demonstrates the potential of using evidence fragments derived from figure spans for improving the quality of scientific claims by cataloging, indexing and reusing evidence fragments as independent documents.
BlockFLA: Accountable Federated Learning via Hybrid Blockchain Architecture

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed, and decentralized machine learning protocol. By executing FL, a set of agents can jointly train a model without sharing their datasets with each other, or a third-party. This makes FL particularly suitable for settings where data privacy is desired. At the same time, concealing training data gives attackers an opportunity to inject backdoors into the trained model. It has been shown that an attacker can inject backdoors to the trained model during FL, and then can leverage the backdoor to make the model misclassify later. Several works tried to alleviate this threat by designing robust aggregation functions. However, given more sophisticated attacks are developed over time, which by-pass the existing defenses, we approach this problem from a complementary angle in this work. Particularly, we aim to discourage backdoor attacks by detecting, and punishing the attackers, possibly after the end of training phase. To this end, we develop a hybrid blockchain-based FL framework that uses smart contracts to automatically detect, and punish the attackers via monetary penalties. Our framework is general in the sense that, any aggregation function, and any attacker detection algorithm can be plugged into it. We conduct experiments to demonstrate that our framework preserves the communication-efficient nature of FL, and provide empirical results to illustrate that it can successfully penalize attackers by leveraging our novel attacker detection algorithm.