cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Idiosyncratic Volatility, Institutional Ownership, and Investment Horizon

This paper reevaluates the cross-sectional effect of institutional ownership on idiosyncratic volatility by conditioning on institutions' investment horizon. Prior literature establishes a positive link between growing institutional ownership and idiosyncratic volatility. However, this effect may vary depending on the type of institutional ownership. We document that short-term (long-term) institutional ownership is positively (negatively) linked to idiosyncratic volatility in the cross section. These opposite effects persist after controlling for institutional preferences and information-based trading and remain qualitatively unchanged after controlling for endogeneity. This suggests that short-term (long-term) institutions exhibit higher (lower) trading activity, which increases (decreases) idiosyncratic volatility.
High performance RO membranes for desalination and wastewater reclamation and their operation results

Reverse osmosis (RO) membrane is one of the most powerful tools for solving the global water crisis, and is used in a variety of water treatment scenes such as drinking water purification, waste-water treatment, boiler feed water production, ultra pure water production for semiconductor industry, etc. The desired performance of RO membrane varies according to quality of feed water being treated, and Toray has been developing RO membranes with suitable characteristic for each operating condition. RO membranes for seawater desalination and wastewater reclamation are especially regarded as most promising targets. Recently, high boron removal and energy saving RO membrane for seawater desalination and low fouling RO membrane for wastewater reclamation have been developed. In this paper, the prospect of attaining these renovative RO membrane, and furthermore, job references will be discussed.
Economic Behaviour within Organizations

This book provides a comprehensive economic analysis of the internal working of organizations. Its attention to the role of information costs in influencing the breadth of discretion that members of an organization have, and the nature and effectiveness of the constraints that can be put upon them, leads to many important hypotheses about organizational behavior. These hypotheses are relevant to both private and public organizations, to charitable and profit-making ones, to bureaucracies and legislatures, and to organizations in free market and centrally planned economies. Stephen Hoenack proposes that managers' optimal choices of constraints in the face of information costs ordinarily leave subordinates with some latitude to use resources in pursuit of their own objectives. Employees can thus create an economy within the organization that responds to their goals as well as to the demands of external constituents.
A simple status quo that ensures participation (with application to efficient bargaining)

We consider Bayesian incentive-compatible mechanisms with independent types and either private values or interdependent values that satisfy a form of “congruence.” We show that in these settings, interim participation constraints are satisfied when the status quo is the randomized allocation that has the same distribution as the equilibrium allocation in the mechanism. Moreover, when utilities are convex in the allocation, we can instead satisfy participation constraints with the deterministic status quo equal to the expected equilibrium allocation in the mechanism. For quasilinear settings, these observations imply the possibility of efficient bargaining when the status quo specifies the expected efficient decision provided that the total surplus is convex in the decision.
Reconstruction of Ancestral Genomes in Presence of Gene Gain and Loss

Since most dramatic genomic changes are caused by genome rearrangements as well as gene duplications and gain/loss events, it becomes crucial to understand their mechanisms and reconstruct ancestral genomes of the given genomes. This problem was shown to be NP-complete even in the "simplest" case of three genomes, thus calling for heuristic rather than exact algorithmic solutions. At the same time, a larger number of input genomes may actually simplify the problem in practice as it was earlier illustrated with MGRA, a state-of-the-art software tool for reconstruction of ancestral genomes of multiple genomes. One of the key obstacles for MGRA and other similar tools is presence of breakpoint reuses when the same breakpoint region is broken by several different genome rearrangements in the course of evolution. Furthermore, such tools are often limited to genomes composed of the same genes with each gene present in a single copy in every genome. This limitation makes these tools inapplicable for many biological datasets and degrades the resolution of ancestral reconstructions in diverse datasets. We address these deficiencies by extending the MGRA algorithm to genomes with unequal gene contents. The developed next-generation tool MGRA2 can handle gene gain/loss events and shares the ability of MGRA to reconstruct ancestral genomes uniquely in the case of limited breakpoint reuse. Furthermore, MGRA2 employs a number of novel heuristics to cope with higher breakpoint reuse and process datasets inaccessible for MGRA. In practical experiments, MGRA2 shows superior performance for simulated and real genomes as compared to other ancestral genome reconstruction tools.
In-Tank Measurement of Solution Density.

This paper presents the results of an experiment which established the feasibility of in-tank determination of the density of nuclear process solutions in the field with a precision competitive with the precision claimed for laboratory determinations of the dens ity of samples taken from a tank. The in-tank de termination is made by infe rring th e density from th e differential pressure measured be tw ee n two probes immersed at differ ent he ights in th e tank. The differential pressure was measured using a null-operated quartz bourdon type elec tromanome­ t er. The work provided a calibration fa ctor, with a precision (es timate of the relative standard deviation of the mean) of 2.2 parts in 10,000, which can be used to infer density from differential pressure measurements in the particular accountability tank. The tec hnique eliminates one error in the laboratory de te rmination of de nsity and minimizes another. It al so can be used to indi cate the homogeneity of th e tank solution and thus de termine wh en a sample should be taken for determination of the concentration of nuclear material in the solutio n.
Reflection Coefficients In Attenuative Anisotropic Media

Such reservoir rocks as tar sands are characterized by significantattenuationand,insomecases,attenuationanisotropy.Most existing attenuation studies are focused on plane-wave attenuationcoefficients,whichdeterminetheamplitudedecayalongthe raypathofseismicwaves.Herewestudytheinfluenceofattenuation on PP- and PS-wave reflection coefficients for anisotropic media with the main emphasis on transversely isotropic models with a vertical symmetry axis VTI. Concise analytic solutions obtained by linearizing the exact plane-wave reflection coefficients are verified by numerical modeling.To make a substantial contribution to reflection coefficients, attenuation must be strong,withthequalityfactorQnotexceeding10.Forsuchhighly attenuative media, it is also necessary to take attenuation anisotropy into account if the magnitude of the Thomsen-style attenuation-anisotropy parameters is relatively large. In general, thelinearizedreflectioncoefficientsinattenuativemediainclude velocity-anisotropy parameters but have almost “isotropic” dependence on attenuation. Our formalism also helps evaluate the influenceoftheinhomogeneityangletheanglebetweenthereal and imaginary parts of the slowness vector on the reflection coefficients. A nonzero inhomogeneity angle of the incident wave introduces additional terms into the PP- and PS-wave reflection coefficients, which makes conventional amplitude-variationwith-offset AVO analysis inadequate for strongly attenuative media. For instance, an incident P-wave with a nonzero inhomogeneityanglegeneratesamode-convertedPS-waveatnormalincidence, even if both half-spaces have a horizontal symmetry plane.ThedevelopedlinearizedsolutionscanbeusedinAVOinversion for highly attenuative e.g., gas-sand and heavy-oil reservoirs.
Retained Vaginal Foreign Body in Minimally Invasive Gynecological Surgeries

Background: Retention of a surgical object in a patient’s body is a preventable human error that is rare but can cause serious clinical complications, lead to malpractice lawsuits, and be a devastating event both for the patient and the care provider. Although the incidence of retained foreign bodies in the abdomen tends to decrease with the rise in minimally invasive surgery, a retained surgical object in the vagina is a possible adverse outcome of which the surgical team should be aware. Cases: We describe 2 cases of minimally invasive surgeries that were complicated by a retained surgical object in the vagina and occurred within 2 consecutive years at the same institution. The first case describes a retained Asepto bulb (Xodus Medical, New Kensington, Pennsylvania) after a robot-assisted total laparoscopic hysterectomy, and the second describes a retained surgical sponge after a laparoscopic ovarian cystectomy. Both patients did well after removal of the foreign body, without major complications. Conclusion: The counting system and radiographic screening for high-risk cases are not reliable methods to prevent retained foreign objects. Communication is always important, and standardization of the language in the operating room is essential. The surgical team should be aware of a retained foreign body as a possible adverse outcome, and specific steps should be taken to ensure that all objects are removed from the patient at the completion of the surgery.
A Facile Molecular Precursor Route to Metal Phosphide Nanoparticles and Their Evaluation as Hydrodeoxygenation Catalysts

Metal phosphides have been identified as a promising class of materials for the catalytic upgrading of bio-oils, which are renewable and potentially inexpensive sources for liquid fuels. Herein, we report the facile synthesis of a series of solid, phase-pure metal phosphide nanoparticles (NPs) (Ni2P, Rh2P, and Pd3P) utilizing commercially available, air-stable metal–phosphine complexes in a one-pot reaction. This single-source molecular precursor route provides an alternative method to access metal phosphide NPs with controlled phases and without the formation of metal NP intermediates that can lead to hollow particles. The formation of the Ni2P NPs was shown to proceed through an amorphous Ni–P intermediate, leading to the desired NP morphology and metal-rich phase. This low-temperature, rapid route to well-defined metal NPs is expected to have broad applicability to a variety of readily available or easily synthesized metal–phosphine complexes with high decomposition temperatures. Hydrodeoxygenation of ...
Powering sustainability: Municipal utilities and local government policymaking

Sustainability policymaking presents numerous challenges to local governments. Municipal leaders, especially in smaller cities and towns, report that they lack the fiscal capacity and/or technical expertise to adopt many environmental protection policies. This paper investigates whether the more than 2000 municipally owned utilities in the United States have the potential to mitigate those problems. Data from two surveys of USA local governments (n = 861), modeled in a pair of negative binomial regressions, find a positive correlation between those cities with municipal power companies and those with an increased number of community-wide sustainable energy policies. Follow-up interviews with officials reveal the potential mechanisms driving sustainability by local governments that own power companies. These mechanisms are the increased capacity that publicly owned utilities provide by virtue of income generated and access to energy-specific grants as well as the local nature of their operations, which all...
ON A CONVEX MEASURE OF DRAWDOWN RISK

Maximum drawdown, the largest cumulative loss from peak to trough, is one of the most widely used indicators of risk in the fund management industry, but one of the least developed in the context of measures of risk. We formalize drawdown risk as Conditional Expected Drawdown (CED), which is the tail mean of maximum drawdown distributions. We show that CED is a degree one positive homogenous risk measure, so that it can be linearly attributed to factors; and convex, so that it can be used in quantitative optimization. We provide an ecient linear program for minimum CED optimization and empirically explore the dierences in risk attributions based on CED, Expected Shortfall (ES) and volatility. An
An 80 pc Long Massive Molecular Filament in the Galactic Mid-Plane

The ubiquity of filaments in star forming regions on a range of scales is clear, yet their role in the star formation process remains in question. We suggest that there are distinct classes of filaments which are responsible for their observed diversity in star-forming regions. An example of a massive molecular filament in the Galactic mid-plane formed at the intersection of UV-driven bubbles which displays a coherent velocity structure (< 4 km s−1) over 80 pc is presented. We classify such sources as Massive Molecular Filaments (MMFs; M \(\geq \) 104 M ⊙, length \(\geq \) 10 pc, \(\bigtriangleup \) v ≤ 5 km s−1) and suggest that MMFs are just one of the many different classes of filaments discussed in the literature today. Many MMFs are aligned with the Galactic Plane and may be akin to the dark dust lanes seen in Grand Design Spirals.
Visualization resources and strategies for remote subsea exploration

Common resources and strategies are described for graphics and imaging applications in remote subsea exploration. What is meant by resources are the hardware, software, and human assets that constitute sea-going and shore-based systems; strategies encompass the architectural, engineering, and practical aspects of making such a visualization environment operational and productive. Emphasis is placed on current applications within the oceanographic community for search/survey/mapping (towed, unmanned systems), remotely operated vehicles and submersibles (man-in-the-loop systems), and autonomous underwater robots (intelligent systems). For these applications, a common goal is the acquisition and processing of underwater remote-sensor data to create a model of the subsea terrain. Visualization tools offer an important means of conveying the information contained in such a model. Dominant requirements within this context are the management, processing, and presentation of high-bandwidth, multisensor data, including optical and acoustic imagery, laser and sonar bathymetry, and other physical data sets. Specific visualization tools are used for image processing, volumetric modeling, terrain visualization, real-time operator displays, and mapping and geographic information systems as well as for scientific and engineering research and development.
The Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome.

In 1937, Wiskott described three brothers with congenital thrombocytopenia, bloody diarrhea, eczema, and recurrent ear infections. Seventeen years later, Aldrich showed X-linked (a gene carried on the X chromosome) inheritance. Subsequently, the characteristic immune defects of Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome (WAS) were reported, including lymphopenia, lymphocyte depletion in the thymus, T-dependent pericortical areas of lymph nodes, defective delayed type hypersensitivity, and failure to produce antibodies to polysaccharides and to a variety of bacterial, protein, and viral antigens. The consistent platelet abnormalities were explained by ineffective thrombocytopoiesis. The increased risk of autoimmune diseases and malignancies was recognized. In addition to the classic WAS phenotype, a milder form designated as hereditary X-linked thrombocytopenia (XLT) has been described. The genes for both WAS and XLT have been mapped to Xp11.22 and sequence analysis has identified mutations of the same gene in both phenotypes. The gene coding for the WAS protein (WASP) is composed of 12 exons containing 1,823 base pairs and encodes a 502-amino acid protein. WASP is expressed in the cytoplasm of all hematopoietic stem cell-derived lineages. Although the precise function of WASP is unknown, several unique binding domains have been identified, and WASP appears to play a critical role in signal transduction by interacting with SH3-containing molecules and in the regulation of the cytoskeletal reorganization. The identification of the WASP gene allows the diagnosis of WAS on a molecular basis, carrier detection, and prenatal diagnosis. Treatment is largely symptomatic and includes antibiotics, prophylactic intravenous immunoglobulin (i.v.IG) and splenectomy in selected cases to reduce hemorrhages. Stem cell transplantation corrects the defect and should be considered in younger patients.
Evaluation of genetic causes of cardiomyopathy in childhood

Cardiomyopathy frequently has a genetic basis. In adults, mutations in genes encoding components of the sarcomere, cytoskeleton, or desmosome are frequent genetic causes of cardiomyopathy. Although children share these causes, ~30% of children have an underlying metabolic, syndromic, or neuromuscular condition causing their cardiomyopathy, making the aetiologies more diverse in children as compared with adults. Although some children present with obvious signs or symptoms of metabolic, syndromic, or neuromuscular disease, other cases may be quite subtle, requiring a high level of suspicion in order to diagnose them. In general, the younger the child, the more extensive the differential. Advantages of identifying the underlying genetic cause of cardiomyopathy in the paediatric population include confirming the diagnosis in ambiguous cases, facilitating appropriate surveillance and management of cardiac and extra-cardiac diseases, providing prognostic information, and establishing the genetic basis in the family, thereby allowing the identification of at-risk relatives and institution of appropriate family screening as indicated. For these reasons, genetic testing is increasingly recognised as standard of care, and guidelines for genetic counselling, testing, and incorporation of family-based risk assessment have been established. Therapies aimed at treating specific genetic aetiologies of cardiomyopathy are emerging and are exciting new developments that require increasingly sophisticated approaches to diagnosis. As genetic testing capabilities continue to expand technically, careful interpretation, knowledgeable clinical utilisation, and appropriate dissemination of genetic information are important and challenging components of clinical care.
Rehearsal: a configuration verification tool for puppet

Large-scale data centers and cloud computing have turned system configuration into a challenging problem. Several widely-publicized outages have been blamed not on software bugs, but on configuration bugs. To cope, thousands of organizations use system configuration languages to manage their computing infrastructure. Of these, Puppet is the most widely used with thousands of paying customers and many more open-source users. The heart of Puppet is a domain-specific language that describes the state of a system. Puppet already performs some basic static checks, but they only prevent a narrow range of errors. Furthermore, testing is ineffective because many errors are only triggered under specific machine states that are difficult to predict and reproduce. With several examples, we show that a key problem with Puppet is that configurations can be non-deterministic. This paper presents Rehearsal, a verification tool for Puppet configurations. Rehearsal implements a sound, complete, and scalable determinacy analysis for Puppet. To develop it, we (1) present a formal semantics for Puppet, (2) use several analyses to shrink our models to a tractable size, and (3) frame determinism-checking as decidable formulas for an SMT solver. Rehearsal then leverages the determinacy analysis to check other important properties, such as idempotency. Finally, we apply Rehearsal to several real-world Puppet configurations.
Magnetic resonance imaging of the shoulder

SUMMARY The shoulder is now accessible to MRI owing to recent technical advances. The major advantages of this modality include its noninvasive nature, lack of ionizing radiation, excellent contrast and anatomic resolution, multiplanar imaging capability, and ability as a single imaging modality to evaluate simultaneously for a wide variety of pathologic processes. It is proving its utility particularly in the evaluation of the painful shoulder and the diagnosis of glenohumeral instability, rotator cuff impingement, tendinitis, and tear. We believe that with greater experience and large comparative studies, MRI will clearly demonstrate its superiority in evaluation of the shoulder and will almost entirely replace arthrography, as has occurred with the knee.
Understanding robust control theory via stick balancing

Robust control theory studies the effect of noise, disturbances, and other uncertainty on system performance. Despite growing recognition across science and engineering that robustness and efficiency tradeoffs dominate the evolution and design of complex systems, the use of robust control theory remains limited, partly because the mathematics involved is relatively inaccessible to nonexperts, and the important concepts have been inexplicable without a fairly rich mathematics background. This paper aims to begin changing that by presenting the most essential concepts in robust control using human stick balancing, a simple case study popular in both the sensorimotor control literature and extremely familiar to engineers. With minimal and familiar models and mathematics, we can explore the impact of unstable poles and zeros, delays, and noise, which can then be easily verified with simple experiments using a standard extensible pointer. Despite its simplicity, this case study has extremes of robustness and fragility that are initially counter-intuitive but for which simple mathematics and experiments are clear and compelling. The theory used here has been well-known for many decades, and the cart-pendulum example is a standard in undergrad controls courses, yet a careful reconsidering of both leads to striking new insights that we argue are of great pedagogical value.
ENGLISH PROFICIENCY AND LABOR MARKET PERFORMANCE: EVIDENCE FROM THE ECONOMICS PROFESSION

This article investigates whether the global spread of the English language provides an inherent advantage to native English speakers. This question is studied within the context of the economics profession, where the impact of being a native English speaker on future publishing success is examined. English speakers may have an advantage because they are writing in their native language, the quality of writing is a crucial determinant of publishing success, and all the top economics journals are published in English. Using a ranking of the world's top 2.5% of economists, this article confirms that native English speakers are ranked 100 spots higher (better) than similar non-native English speakers. A variety of extensions examine and dispel many other potential explanations. (JEL A11, J44, F66)
Why Do Lithium–Oxygen Batteries Fail: Parasitic Chemical Reactions and Their Synergistic Effect

As an electrochemical energy-storage technology with the highest theoretical capacity, lithium-oxygen batteries face critical challenges in terms of poor stabilities and low charge/discharge round-trip efficiencies. It is generally recognized that these issues are connected to the parasitic chemical reactions at the anode, electrolyte, and cathode. While the detailed mechanisms of these reactions have been studied separately, the possible synergistic effects between these reactions remain poorly understood. To fill in the knowledge gap, this Minireview examines literature reports on the parasitic chemical reactions and finds the reactive oxygen species a key chemical mediator that participates in or facilitates nearly all parasitic chemical reactions. Given the ubiquitous presence of oxygen in all test cells, this finding is important. It offers new insights into how to stabilize various components of lithium-oxygen batteries for high-performance operations and how to eventually materialize the full potentials of this promising technology.
Negishi Cross-Coupling Is Compatible with a Reactive B–Cl Bond: Development of a Versatile Late-Stage Functionalization of 1,2-Azaborines and Its Application to the Synthesis of New BN Isosteres of Naphthalene and Indenyl

The compatibility of the Negishi cross-coupling reaction with the versatile B–Cl functionality has been demonstrated in the context of late-stage functionalization of 1,2-azaborines. Alkyl-, aryl-, and alkenylzinc reagents have been utilized for the functionalization of the triply orthogonal precursor 3-bromo-1-(tert-butyldimethylsilyl)-2-chloro-1,2-dihydro-1,2-azaborine (2) to furnish new 2,3-substituted monocyclic 1,2-azaborines. This methodology has enabled the synthesis of previously elusive BN-naphthalene and BN-indenyl structures from a common intermediate.
Information source detection in the SIR model: a sample-path-based approach

This paper studies the problem of detecting the information source in a network in which the spread of information follows the popular Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. We assume all nodes in the network are in the susceptible state initially, except one single information source that is in the infected state. Susceptible nodes may then be infected by infected nodes, and infected nodes may recover and will not be infected again after recovery. Given a snapshot of the network, from which we know the graph topology and all infected nodes but cannot distinguish susceptible nodes and recovered nodes, the problem is to find the information source based on the snapshot and the network topology. We develop a sample-path-based approach where the estimator of the information source is chosen to be the root node associated with the sample path that most likely leads to the observed snapshot. We prove for infinite-trees, the estimator is a node that minimizes the maximum distance to the infected nodes. A reverse-infection algorithm is proposed to find such an estimator in general graphs. We prove that for g + 1-regular trees such that gq > 1, where g + 1 is the node degree and is the infection probability, the estimator is within a constant distance from the actual source with a high probability, independent of the number of infected nodes and the time the snapshot is taken. Our simulation results show that for tree networks, the estimator produced by the reverse-infection algorithm is closer to the actual source than the one identified by the closeness centrality heuristic. We then further evaluate the performance of the reverse infection algorithm on several real-world networks.
An update on a few permanent conjectures

We review and update on a few conjectures concerning matrix permanent that are easily stated, understood, and accessible to general math audience. They are: Soules permanent-on-top conjecture${}^\dagger$, Lieb permanent dominance conjecture, Bapat and Sunder conjecture${}^\dagger$ on Hadamard product and diagonal entries, Chollet conjecture on Hadamard product, Marcus conjecture on permanent of permanents, and several other conjectures. Some of these conjectures are recently settled; some are still open. We also raise a few new questions for future study. (${}^\dagger$conjectures have been recently settled negatively.)
Joint Uplink/Downlink Optimization for Backhaul-Limited Mobile Cloud Computing With User Scheduling

Mobile cloud computing enables the offloading of computationally heavy applications, such as for gaming, object recognition or video processing, from mobile users (MUs) to cloudlet or cloud servers, which are connected to wireless access points, either directly or through finite-capacity backhaul links. In this paper, the design of a mobile cloud computing system is investigated by proposing the joint optimization of computing and communication resources with the aim of minimizing the energy required for offloading across all MUs under latency constraints at the application layer. The proposed design accounts for multiantenna uplink and downlink interfering transmissions, with or without cooperation on the downlink, along with the allocation of backhaul and computational resources and user selection. The resulting design optimization problems are nonconvex, and stationary solutions are computed by means of successive convex approximation techniques. Numerical results illustrate the advantages in terms of energy-latency tradeoff of the joint optimization of computing and communication resources, as well as the impact of system parameters, such as backhaul capacity, and of the network architecture.
Scalar Quadratic-Gaussian Soft Watermarking Games

We introduce a zero-sum game problem of soft watermarking: The hidden information watermark comes from a continuum and has a perceptual value; the receiver generates an estimate of the embedded watermark to minimize the expected estimation error unlike the conventional watermarking schemes where both the hidden information and the receiver output are from a discrete finite set. Applications include embedding a multimedia content into another. We study here the scalar Gaussian case and use expected mean-squared distortion. We formulate the problem as a zero-sum game between the encoder & receiver pair and the attacker. We show that for linear encoder, the optimal attacker is Gaussian-affine, derive the optimal system parameters in that case, and discuss the corresponding system behavior. We also provide numerical results to gain further insight and understanding of the system behavior at optimality.
Introduction to Online Convex Optimization

This monograph portrays optimization as a process. In many practical applications the environment is so complex that it is infeasible to lay out a comprehensive theoretical model and use classical algorithmic theory and mathematical optimization. It is necessary as well as beneficial to take a robust approach, by applying an optimization method that learns as one goes along, learning from experience as more aspects of the problem are observed. This view of optimization as a process has become prominent in varied fields and has led to some spectacular success in modeling and systems that are now part of our daily lives.
Inequality, democracy, and the environment: A cross-national analysis

Abstract This paper joins the debate on the relationship between inequality and the environment. Departing from the past contributions, which focused either on the theories of environmental behavior or on economic interests, this paper develops arguments about “political choice” mechanisms that help explain the linkages between inequality and national policymaking related to the establishment of protected areas. A cross-national analysis of the interactions between inequality, democracy and the legal designation of protected areas in a global sample of 137 countries shows that, ceteris paribus, the effects of inequality vary depending on the strength of democracy: in relatively democratic countries inequality is associated with less land in protected areas, whereas in relatively undemocratic countries the reverse is true. The highly significant effects of inequality undermine the democratic dividend in the arena of nature conservation.
What's the Harm of Trademark Infringement?

This Article explores the classic harm theories of trademark infringement that don't involve sales substitution and argues that courts should recognize their empirical weakness. Despite the expansion of infringement liability based on new theories of such harm, questions about what constitutes trademark harm are now being reexamined at the remedy stage. These changes are positive to the extent that they make courts rethink overly expansive models of trademark confusion.
Information-optimal genome assembly via sparse read-overlap graphs.

MOTIVATION In the context of third-generation long-read sequencing technologies, read-overlap-based approaches are expected to play a central role in the assembly step. A fundamental challenge in assembling from a read-overlap graph is that the true sequence corresponds to a Hamiltonian path on the graph, and, under most formulations, the assembly problem becomes NP-hard, restricting practical approaches to heuristics. In this work, we avoid this seemingly fundamental barrier by first setting the computational complexity issue aside, and seeking an algorithm that targets information limits In particular, we consider a basic feasibility question: when does the set of reads contain enough information to allow unambiguous reconstruction of the true sequence? RESULTS Based on insights from this information feasibility question, we present an algorithm-the Not-So-Greedy algorithm-to construct a sparse read-overlap graph. Unlike most other assembly algorithms, Not-So-Greedy comes with a performance guarantee: whenever information feasibility conditions are satisfied, the algorithm reduces the assembly problem to an Eulerian path problem on the resulting graph, and can thus be solved in linear time. In practice, this theoretical guarantee translates into assemblies of higher quality. Evaluations on both simulated reads from real genomes and a PacBio Escherichia coli K12 dataset demonstrate that Not-So-Greedy compares favorably with standard string graph approaches in terms of accuracy of the resulting read-overlap graph and contig N50. AVAILABILITY Available at github.com/samhykim/nsg CONTACT courtade@eecs.berkeley.edu or dntse@stanford.edu SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
The effect of disfluency on mind wandering during text comprehension

When reading, we frequently find ourselves thinking about something other than the text. These attentional lapses, known as mind wandering (MW), are negatively correlated with text comprehension. Previous studies have shown that more syntactically and semantically difficult texts elicit more MW, because textual difficulty impedes the construction of a mental model of the text, which makes it more difficult to suppress off-task thoughts. But is it possible to reduce MW without altering the content of the text itself? We hypothesized that reading a perceptually disfluent text might require more attentional resources, even if the content remained the same, leaving fewer resources available for MW. To test this idea, we manipulated the typefaces (fluent [Arial] or disfluent [ ]) of two instructional texts on scientific research methods (each about 1,490 words long), and found that MW was less frequent when participants read the disfluent text. There were no comprehension differences between the fluent and disfluent groups. However, we did find an indirect effect of disfluency on comprehension through MW, suggesting that disfluency influences comprehension by enhancing attention. These findings provide insights into how processing difficulty and attention interact during reading comprehension.
Selection-, age-, and exercise-dependence of skeletal muscle gene expression patterns in a rat model of metabolic fitness

Intrinsic aerobic exercise capacity can influence many complex traits including obesity and aging. To study this connection we established two rat lines by divergent selection of untrained aerobic capacity. After 32 generations the high capacity runners (HCR) and low capacity runners (LCR) differed in endurance running distance and body fat, blood glucose, other health indicators, and natural life span. To understand the interplay among genetic differences, chronological age, and acute exercise we performed microarray-based gene expression analyses in skeletal muscle with a 2×2×2 design to simultaneously compare HCR and LCR, old and young animals, and rest and exhaustion. Transcripts for mitochondrial function are expressed higher in HCRs than LCRs at both rest and exhaustion and for both age groups. Expression of cell adhesion and extracellular matrix genes tend to decrease with age. This and other age effects are more prominent in LCRs than HCRs, suggesting that HCRs have a slower aging process and this may be partly due to their better metabolic health. Strenuous exercise mainly affects transcription regulation and cellular response. The effects of any one factor often depend on the other two. For example, there are ∼140 and ∼110 line-exercise "interacting" genes for old and young animals, respectively. Many genes highlighted in our study are consistent with prior reports, but many others are novel. The gene- and pathway-level statistics for the main effects, either overall or stratified, and for all possible interactions, represent a rich reference dataset for understanding the interdependence among lines, aging, and exercise.
AVOIDING RESIDUAL FLEXION CONTRACTURES: A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH

Flexion contractures are a common finding in an end-stage arthritic knee, occurring in up to 60% of patients undergoing total knee arthroplasty. Fixed flexion deformities may result from posterior capsular scarring, osteophyte formation, and bony impingement. It is essential to correct this deformity at the time of total knee arthroplasty, as a residual flexion contracture will result in joint overload and abnormal gait mechanics. This may translate to a slower walking velocity, shorter stride length, and pain. This presentation will discuss a systematic way of dealing with flexion contractures to ensure that the total knee arthroplasty will achieve full extension. The surgical technique for treating fixed flexion deformity about the knee includes release of the posterior cruciate ligament, posterior capsular release, adequate distal femoral bone resection, and removal of osteophytes. Postoperatively, attention must be divided between obtaining maximal flexion and full extension. Should a flexion contracture be noted upon the postoperative visit, additional measures should be taken to address it.
Does Body Mass Index Modify Memory, Reasoning, and Speed of Processing Training Effects in Older Adults.

Objective To describe 10-year trajectories of cognitive performance by body mass index (BMI) class and to investigate BMI differences in response to memory, reasoning, and speed of processing training in older adults. Methods This is a secondary analysis of the multisite, randomized trial Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly. There were 701 older adults with normal weight, 1,081 with overweight, and 902 with obesity (mean age 73.6) randomized to memory training, reasoning training, speed of processing training, or no-training control group. Participants completed memory, reasoning, and speed of processing tests. Baseline sociodemographic, health, and chronic disease measures were included as covariates in analyses. Results The 10-year trajectories of memory, reasoning, or speed of processing performance did not differ by BMI status among the participants randomized to the untrained control arm. The training effect on the reasoning and speed of processing outcomes did not differ by BMI status. The training effect on the memory outcome in participants with a BMI indicating obesity, however, was just 38% of that observed in participants with normal-weight BMI. Conclusions These analyses of data from the largest trial of cognitive training ever conducted suggest that older adults with obesity may be less responsive to memory training.
Robust kernel density estimation

We propose a method for nonparametric density estimation that exhibits robustness to contamination of the training sample. This method achieves robustness by combining a traditional kernel density estimator (KDE) with ideas from classical M-estimation. We interpret the KDE based on a positive semi-definite kernel as a sample mean in the associated reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Since the sample mean is sensitive to outliers, we estimate it robustly via M-estimation, yielding a robust kernel density estimator (RKDE). An RKDE can be computed efficiently via a kernelized iteratively re-weighted least squares (IRWLS) algorithm. Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for kernelized IRWLS to converge to the global minimizer of the M-estimator objective function. The robustness of the RKDE is demonstrated with a representer theorem, the influence function, and experimental results for density estimation and anomaly detection.
Efficient feature extraction with simultaneous recurrent network for metric learning

Metric learning has been successful in distance based classification tasks. However, metric learning tends to become increasingly complex with the increase of input feature dimensionality. Therefore, application of an efficient feature extraction and dimensionality reduction technique prior to metric learning has been pursued. Conventional feature extraction and dimensionality reduction techniques used for metric learning are usually hand-crafted and may not offer the best overall performance. Contemporary methods such as deep neural networks (DNNs) along with metric learning have been used for improved feature extraction and dimensionality reduction through learning. While DNNs have exhibited excellent performance, such deep structures tend to get cumbersome with increasing complexity of the task. Consequently, this work attempts to introduce an efficient feature extraction and dimensionality reduction technique using a simultaneous recurrent network (SRN) architecture. The proposed SRN architecture with metric learning is tested on solving two complex classification tasks: facial expression and character recognition. Our results show that the proposed SRN feature extraction and metric learning classification pipeline achieves superior performance in comparison to a DNN-based feature reduction and metric learning pipeline. We also demonstrate that the proposed SRN manages to utilize far less trainable parameters than the comparable DNN model such as stacked autoencoders (SAEs) for the same set of tasks.
Caching in Wireless Networks

We consider the problem of delivering content cached in a wireless network of n nodes randomly located on a square of area n. The network performance is described by the 2n × n-dimensional caching capacity region of the wireless network. We provide an inner bound on this caching capacity region, and, in the high path-loss regime, a matching (in the scaling sense) outer bound. For large path-loss exponent, this provides an information-theoretic scaling characterization of the entire caching capacity region. The proposed communication scheme achieving the inner bound shows that the problems of cache selection and channel coding can be solved separately without loss of order-optimality. On the other hand, our results show that the common architecture of nearest-neighbor cache selection can be arbitrarily bad, implying that cache selection and load balancing need to be performed jointly.
Two-stage method for optimal operation of a distributed energy system

In this paper, a gas turbine-based distributed energy system (DES) model is developed for the design of operation planning. An operation mode aimed to optimize the operation of this DES is proposed. A multi-objective cost function considering the total system efficiency and operational cost is formulated for the optimal design of DES operation and control. A two-stage approach combining the particle swarm algorithm (PSO) with the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method is employed to solve the nonlinear programming problem. Optimal operation strategies for the DES are investigated using the proposed two-stage method under three different demand loads in terms of weather conditions. The simulation results are compared with those using traditional rule-based operation methods. It is found that under the proposed operation mode, the DES is capable of achieving an improved performance in terms of thermal efficiency and operational cost.
SCET for jet physics in the vacuum and the medium

Abstract In this plenary talk I discuss soft-collinear effective theory (SCET) as a framework for precision QCD phenomenology. Emphasis is placed on jet and heavy flavor observables accessible at current and future collider facilities. One of the principal challenges that calculations of hard probes in heavy ion reactions face is the ambiguity associated with the implementation of medium-induced radiative effects. I demonstrate how extension of SCET to describe parton propagation in QCD matter has helped quantify and reduce the theoretical uncertainty in jet quenching calculations.
Twofold Symmetries of the Pure Gravity Action

We recast the action of pure gravity into a form that is invariant under a twofold Lorentz symmetry. To derive this representation, we construct a general parameterization of all theories equivalent to the Einstein-Hilbert action up to a local field redefinition and gauge fixing. We then exploit this freedom to eliminate all interactions except those exhibiting two sets of independently contracted Lorentz indices. The resulting action is local, remarkably simple, and naturally expressed in a field basis analogous to the exponential parameterization of the nonlinear sigma model. The space of twofold Lorentz invariant field redefinitions then generates an infinite class of equivalent representations. By construction, all off-shell Feynman diagrams are twofold Lorentz invariant while all on-shell tree amplitudes are automatically twofold gauge invariant. We extend our results to curved spacetime and calculate the analogue of the Einstein equations. While these twofold invariances are hidden in the canonical approach of graviton perturbation theory, they are naturally expected given the double copy relations for scattering amplitudes in gauge theory and gravity.
Ideas Versus Resources: Explaining the Flat Tax and Pension Privatization Revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

This article examines the rapid spread of pension privatization and the flat tax in former communist countries to understand why new policy ideas take hold and to elucidate the role played by mater...
Design of the telescope truss and gondola for the balloon-borne X-ray polarimeter X-Calibur

X-ray polarimetry has seen a growing interest in recent years. Improvements in detector technology and focusing X-ray optics now enable sensitive astrophysical X-ray polarization measurements. These measurements will provide new insights into the processes at work in accreting black holes, the emission of X-rays from neutron stars and magnetars, and the structure of AGN jets. X-Calibur is a balloon-borne hard X-ray scattering polarimeter. An X-ray mirror with a focal length of 8m focuses X-rays onto the detector, which consists of a plastic scattering element surrounded by Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride detectors, which absorb and record the scattered X-rays. Since X-rays preferentially scatter perpendicular to their polarization direction, the polarization properties of an X-ray beam can be inferred from the azimuthal distribution of scattered X-rays. A close alignment of the X-ray focal spot with the center of the detector is required in order to reduce systematic uncertainties and to maintain a high photon det...