cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Freedom of Information Act Trial

This Article examines the paucity of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) cases that go to trial and courts’ preference for resolving these disputes at the summary judgment stage. Using traditional legal analysis and empirical evidence, this Article explores whether we should expect FOIA cases to go to trial and how the scarcity of FOIA trials compares to the trial rate in civil litigation generally. It concludes that the unusual use of summary judgment in FOIA cases has unjustifiably all but eliminated FOIA trials, which occur in less than 1% of FOIA cases. It further examines how conducting FOIA trials in appropriate cases might increase the frequency of protransparency case outcomes as intended under the Act, using both empirical analysis and qualitative conclusions from interviews with attorneys who have litigated FOIA trials. This article is available in American University Law Review: http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/aulr/vol61/iss2/6 KWOKA.OFF.TO.PRINTER (DO NOT DELETE) 3/26/2012 8:06 PM
Aggregate volatility risk: Explaining the small growth anomaly and the new issues puzzle ☆

Abstract The paper shows that new issues earn low expected returns because they are a hedge against increases in expected aggregate volatility. Consistent with that, the ICAPM with the aggregate volatility risk factor can explain the new issues puzzle, as well as the small growth anomaly and the cumulative issuance puzzle. The key mechanism is that, all else equal, growth options become less sensitive to the underlying asset value and more valuable as idiosyncratic volatility goes up. Idiosyncratic volatility usually increases together with aggregate volatility, that is, in recessions.
A Geopolitical Perspective into the Opposition to Globalizing State-Owned Enterprises in Target States

Plain language summary Geopolitical concerns are one of the important factors influencing multinational enterprise (MNE) location choices. This is particularly true for globalizing state-owned enterprises (SOEs) because of their direct ties with governments. Because of geopolitical concerns, SOEs may face a strong level of opposition in foreign countries which neighbor SOEs’ home countries, have different religious beliefs and political regimes from SOEs’ home countries or countries do not lack resources that SOEs can provide. Such opposition is particularly strong in countries where domestic politicians find it in their interests to arouse nationalistic feelings and oppose foreign SOEs’ investments. This study highlights the importance of considering geopolitical factors in MNE location choices. Technical summary The emergence of globalizing state-owned enterprises (SOEs) requires revisiting the assumption that multinational enterprises (MNEs) are focused on economic not political objectives because SOEs tend to be perceived as political entities as well. We develop a geopolitical perspective into how geographic distance, religious similarity, and political regime similarity between two nation states, as well as resource complementarity between globalizing SOEs and target states, explain the level of opposition that globalizing SOEs face in target states. We also investigate how the salience of nationalist politics moderates the influence of these geopolitical factors on the level of opposition that globalizing SOEs face. This theoretical model developed in this study sheds new light on understanding the role of geopolitics in affecting MNEs’ location choices. Copyright © 2016 Strategic Management Society.
Cellular Telephone, New Products and the CPI

Since their introduction in 1983, cellular telephones' adoption has grown at 25%–35% per year. At year end 1997, about 55 million cellular telephones were in use in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) did not know that cellular telephones existed, at least in terms of calculating the Consumer Price Index (CPI), until 1998 when they were finally included in the CPI. Omitting cellular telephones from the CPI created a significant bias. I estimate a bias in the BLS estimate of the telecommunications-services index of between .8%–1.9% per year because of the omission of the cellular telephone. Rather than telecommunications-service prices increasing at about 1.1% per year, the correct calculation has them decreasing at about .8% per year. Omission of new goods from the CPI, for significant periods of time, leads to important bias in the calculation of the CPI.
Diaspora-owned firms and social responsibility

ABSTRACTA causal relationship between diaspora populations and bilateral foreign direct investment has been established empirically, but the question of which elements of diaspora difference are responsible for this relationship, and what this implies for development, remains unanswered. A growing literature in economic sociology and business suggests that diaspora investors are motivated by patriotism and other social and emotional factors, endowing them with unique potential as a force for international development. This literature argues that diaspora-owned firms are more socially responsible than other foreign firms, and engage in a range of economic development-promoting behaviors when investing in the homeland: hiring more local labor, paying higher wages, and making more contributions to charity. I argue that diaspora-owned firms enjoy competitive advantages in the homeland based on access and attention to information. I evaluate these theories at the firm level, using data from an original survey ...
The Lessons of Franz Boas

Abstract Franz Boas, who emigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century from Germany, ultimately became known as the “father of American anthropology.” Soon after arrival, he began efforts on the most vexing issue in the country at that time (and many would say it remains an important issue to this day), the “Negro question.” How did he become so widely known, both in his adopted country and around the world? What alerted him to the fraught question of race relations in the United States? How did he come to have such influence? At one point, most of the departments of anthropology in the country were headed by his students.
Neighborhood Effects and Compensation for Property Value Diminution

This paper analyzes the legal issues surrounding defendants’ liability for property value diminution caused by stigma from environmental contamination. The courts, law review articles, and public policy analyses are in disagreement over how to handle stigma damages. This paper argues that a reasonable risk of contamination is not required for a nuisance claim if community effects, which were caused by the contamination, are present. The authors then turn to issues regarding the level of damages and propose a methodology for measuring compensation that is based on a guaranteed sales price. This methodology is applied to the RSR smelter in Dallas, Texas.
Without a Prayer?: Spirituality and Performance in Law School--A Reply to Professor Taylor

Professor Scott Taylor’s Spirituality and Academic Performance at a Catholic Law School: An Empirical Study was disheartening to Catholics and fellow travelers because it reported finding no relationship between the spirituality of law students and their academic performance at a prominent Catholic law school committed to its religious identity. In this essay, I explain how Professor Taylor’s study – the first and only one of its kind – is so methodologically flawed it leaves us unable to conclude anything about whether spirituality is related to academic performance. After a review of the few prior research studies on spirituality and performance, I explain the methodological problems with the Taylor study that make its results unreliable. The Taylor study serves as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of empirical research conducted by law school professors, and my explication of the flaws in the study will point the way for how such studies should be conducted in the future. I conclude with observations on the value of empiricism in the legal academy and advice on how law professors could best undertake empirical studies in ways that will ensure their scientific validity and reliability.
Do Term Limits Restrain State Fiscal Policy? Approaches for Causal Inference in Assessing the Effects of Legislative Institutions

Scholars of state politics are often interested in the causal effects of legislative institutions on policy outcomes. For example, during the 1990s a number of states adopted term limits for state legislators. Advocates of term limits argued that this institutional reform would alter state policy in a number of ways, including limiting state expenditures. We highlight a number of research design issues that complicate attempts to estimate the effect of institutions on state outcomes by addressing the question of term limits and spending. In particular, we focus on (1) treatment effect heterogeneity and (2) the suitability of nonterm-limit states as good counterfactuals for term-limit states. We compare two different identification strategies to deal with these issues: differences-in-differences (DID) estimation and conditioning on prior outcomes with an emphasis on synthetic case control. Using more rigorous methods of causal inference, we find little evidence that term limits affect state spending. Our analysis and results are informative for researchers seeking to assess the causal effects of state-level institutions.
The Last Rites of Public Campaign Financing

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Arizona Free Enterprise v. Bennett, this Article asserts the current predicament of public campaign financing is such that options that are still on the table under the Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence are, with only rare and idiosyncratic exceptions, fiscal and political non-starters. Conversely, options that would be, and indeed previously had been, fiscally and politically viable, are now, even after years of their routine practice in varied jurisdictions, no longer constitutional. It is, in short, simultaneously a legal and practical dilemma. Short of highly unlikely swings of the Supreme Court pendulum, and absent an even more unlikely constitutional amendment, cities, states, and federal government actors, who might otherwise consider allowing candidates for office to opt for voluntary public financing, now find themselves between a legal rock and a fiscal hard place: unless a jurisdiction adopts, via extraordinarily high initial lump sum funding that grossly overspends the people’s money to the point of fiscal ruin, any candidate opting in is effectively volunteering only to play the role of a sitting duck. On the more promising side, this Article asserts that systems that operate based on offering funding as a multiple for small-donor donations offer one potential solution to the dilemma. However, the Article ultimately contends that such systems are particularly vulnerable in jurisdictions with small populations insofar as moneyed interest groups from outside the jurisdiction can easily overwhelm, for example, even the multiplied donations of the citizens of largely rural states or jurisdictions.
Private Conscience, Public Duties: The Unavoidable Conflicts Facing a Catholic Justice

When questioned about the relationship between their faith and their decision making, Catholic judges typically invoke a model of detachment, pursuant to which their governmental role and responsibilities are not directly governed by, and thus do not readily conflict with, their potential duties as a faithful Catholic. This position of detachment has been expressed both during confirmation hearings and in situations where judges are asked to remove themselves from a case due to their religious beliefs or affiliation. This article addresses the possibility that this position is potentially at odds with Catholic Church doctrine regarding the obligations of civil officials. In particular, the article advances three arguments. First, it contends that the potential for conflicts between one's judicial and religious obligations will always exist and that trying to avoid it either by strategic ignorance or by attempted detachment is an inadequate avenue of resolution. Second, especially given a general lack of direct and authoritative Church teaching on the matter, each judge is individually obligated, by exercising the prerogative of a well-formed conscience, to resolve the conflict as it may arise from case to case. In so doing, the judge should ideally reach an outcome - even if this occasionally means recusal - that is consistent both with the Church's teachings and their natural implications, and with the professional responsibilities attending the judicial role. Third, if the result is recusal or anything else extraordinary, and if court rules or customs so require, the judge should be willing to explain the basis for his or her decision, assuming that the judge also employs an appropriate level of prudence.
Assessing the World Bank Report Keeping the Promise

A new report of the World Bank released in 2004 evaluates the performance of structural pension reforms in several Latin American countries, ratifying some fundamental issues of the Bank's previous report of 1994 but contesting others, acknowledging serious problems and recommending new policies. In the light of available data from ten countries with structural reforms in the region, as well as the author's own research, this article discusses nine key elements of the new report: coverage, compliance, competition among administrators, managerial costs, capital accumulation, effects on capital and financial markets, fiscal costs, general and gender equity, and isolation from politics.
Somalia’s “Pirate Cycle”: The Three Phases of Somali Piracy

This article provides a theoretical framework for examining Somali piracy from its origins in the 1990s to the present. This analysis provides both a detailed description of the changing nature of piracy, as well as explanations for why these changes have occurred. The increase in pirate activity off Somalia from 1991 to 2011 did not occur in a steady linear progression, but took place in three separate phases. These three phases can be viewed in terms of a “cycle of piracy,” based on a theory developed by the pirate historian Philip Gosse in 1932. By employing this framework, policy-makers in the U.S. and elsewhere would be better able to judge when counter-piracy intervention is necessary. By preventing piracy from developing into large-scale professionalized operations, as witnessed in Somalia since 2007, the international community will be able carryout more efficient and effective piracy suppression operations in future. This article is available in Journal of Strategic Security: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol6/iss1/8
InfoBERT: Improving Robustness of Language Models from An Information Theoretic Perspective

Large-scale language models such as BERT have achieved state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. Recent studies, however, show that such BERT-based models are vulnerable facing the threats of textual adversarial attacks. We aim to address this problem from an information-theoretic perspective, and propose InfoBERT, a novel learning framework for robust ﬁne-tuning of pre-trained language models. InfoBERT contains two mutual-information-based regularizers for model training: (i) an Information Bottleneck regularizer, which suppresses noisy mutual information between the input and the feature representation; and (ii) a Robust Feature regularizer, which increases the mutual information between local robust features and global features. We provide a principled way to theoretically analyze and improve the robustness of representation learning for language models in both standard and adversarial training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InfoBERT achieves state-of-the-art robust accuracy over several adversarial datasets on Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Question Answering (QA) tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/AI-secure/InfoBERT.
On Privatizing Equilibrium Computation in Aggregate Games over Networks

Abstract We propose a distributed algorithm to compute an equilibrium in aggregate games where players communicate over a fixed undirected network. Our algorithm exploits correlated perturbation to obfuscate information shared over the network. We prove that our algorithm does not reveal private information of players to an honest-but-curious adversary who monitors several nodes in the network. In contrast with differential privacy based algorithms, our method does not sacrifice accuracy of equilibrium computation to provide privacy guarantees.
Entanglement Phase Transitions in Measurement-Only Dynamics

Unitary circuits subject to repeated projective measurements can undergo an entanglement phase transition (EPT) as a function of the measurement rate. This transition is generally understood in terms of a competition between the scrambling effects of unitary dynamics and the disentangling effects of measurements. We find that, surprisingly, EPTs are possible even in the absence of scrambling unitary dynamics, where they are best understood as arising from measurements alone. This finding motivates us to introduce measurement-only models, in which the “scrambling” and “unscrambling” effects driving the EPT are fundamentally intertwined and cannot be attributed to physically distinct processes. These models represent a novel form of an EPT, conceptually distinct from that in hybrid unitary-projective circuits. We explore the entanglement phase diagrams, critical points, and quantum code properties of some of these measurement-only models. We find that the principle driving the EPTs in these models is frustration, or mutual incompatibility, of the measurements. Surprisingly, an entangling (volume-law) phase is the generic outcome when measuring sufficiently long but still local (≳3-body) operators. We identify a class of exceptions to this behavior (“bipartite ensembles”) which cannot sustain an entangling phase but display dual area-law phases, possibly with different kinds of quantum order, separated by self-dual critical points. Finally, we introduce a measure of information spreading in dynamics with measurements and use it to demonstrate the emergence of a statistical light cone, despite the nonlocality inherent to quantum measurements.
Ensemble Node Embeddings using Tensor Decomposition: A Case-Study on DeepWalk

Node embeddings have been attracting increasing attention during the past years. In this context, we propose a new ensemble node embedding approach, called TenSemble2Vec, by first generating multiple embeddings using the existing techniques and taking them as multiview data input of the state-of-art tensor decomposition model namely PARAFAC2 to learn the shared lower-dimensional representations of the nodes. Contrary to other embedding methods, our TenSemble2Vec takes advantage of the complementary information from different methods or the same method with different hyper-parameters, which bypasses the challenge of choosing models. Extensive tests using real-world data validates the efficiency of the proposed method.
Special cases of power decay in multilinear oscillatory integrals

We use tools from the multilinear oscillatory integral program developed by Christ, Li, Thiele, and Tao to treat special cases which are not covered by existing theory. Consideration of special cas...
Ubiquity of entropies of intermediate factors

We consider topological dynamical systems $(X,T)$, where $X$ is a compact metrizable space and $T$ denotes an action of a countable amenable group $G$ on $X$ by homeomorphisms. For two such systems $(X,T)$ and $(Y,S)$ and a factor map $\pi : X \rightarrow Y$, an intermediate factor is a topological dynamical system $(Z,R)$ for which $\pi$ can be written as a composition of factor maps $\psi : X \rightarrow Z$ and $\varphi : Z \rightarrow Y$. In this paper we show that for any countable amenable group $G$, for any $G$-subshifts $(X,T)$ and $(Y,S)$, and for any factor map $ \pi :X \rightarrow Y$, the set of entropies of intermediate subshift factors is dense in the interval $[h(Y,S), h(X,T)]$. As a corollary, we also prove that if $(X,T)$ and $(Y,S)$ are zero-dimensional $G$-systems, then the set of entropies of intermediate zero-dimensional factors is equal to the interval $[h(Y,S), h(X,T)]$. Our proofs rely on a generalized Marker Lemma that may be of independent interest.
MIMC-VINS: A Versatile and Resilient Multi-IMU Multi-Camera Visual-Inertial Navigation System

As cameras and inertial sensors are becoming ubiquitous in mobile devices and robots, it holds great potential to design visual-inertial navigation systems (VINS) for efficient versatile 3-D motion tracking, which utilize any (multiple) available cameras and inertial measurement units (IMUs) and are resilient to sensor failures or measurement depletion. To this end, rather than the standard VINS paradigm using a minimal sensing suite of a single camera and IMU, in this article, we design a real-time consistent multi-IMU multi-camera (MIMC) VINS estimator that is able to seamlessly fuse multimodal information from an arbitrary number of uncalibrated cameras and IMUs. Within an efficient multi-state constraint Kalman filter framework, the proposed MIMC-VINS algorithm optimally fuses asynchronous measurements from all sensors while providing smooth, uninterrupted, and accurate 3-D motion tracking even if some sensors fail. The key idea of the proposed MIMC-VINS is to perform high-order on-manifold state interpolation to efficiently process all available visual measurements without increasing the computational burden due to estimating additional sensors’ poses at asynchronous imaging times. In order to fuse the information from multiple IMUs, we propagate a joint system consisting of all IMU states while enforcing rigid-body constraints between the IMUs during the filter update stage. Finally, we estimate online both spatiotemporal extrinsic and visual intrinsic parameters to make our system robust to errors in prior sensor calibration. The proposed system is extensively validated in both Monte Carlo simulations and real-world experiments.
Water Infrastructure and Health in U.S. Cities

Abstract Between 1900 and 1930 typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases were largely eradicated from U.S. cities. This achievement required a mix of technological, scientific, economic, and bureaucratic innovations. This article examines how the interaction of those forces influenced water and sanitary infrastructure provision during the 19th and early 20th centuries. I document a sharp link between infrastructure investments and declines in waterborne disease and discuss how that relationship informs the methodological approaches one should use to assess the impact of sanitary investments on urban development. Finally, I review the literature on the social returns to eliminating the threat of waterborne disease. The evidence suggests the benefits of infrastructure investment far exceeded the costs.
Ordering effects on deformation substructures and strain hardening behavior of a CrCoNi based medium entropy alloy

Abstract A CrCoNi based medium entropy alloy with small additions of Ti, Al and Nb (denoted as (CrCoNi)93Al4Ti2Nb) in the as-quenched condition, exhibits tensile properties comparable to those of the equiatomic CrCoNi alloy at room temperature. Dark field transmission electron microscopy (TEM), atomic resolution high-angle annular dark-field scanning transmission electron microscopy (HAADF-STEM) together with atom probe tomography (APT) show that spatially-localized long range ordering (LRO) L12 domains exist in this alloy. The evolution of deformation substructure with plastic deformation in this alloy was characterized using electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), electron channeling contrast imaging (ECCI) and STEM based techniques including the recently developed weak beam dark field STEM imaging. Plastic deformation occurs by the slip of a/2 dislocations, which are narrowly dissociated into Shockley partial dislocations on {111} slip planes. Their dissociation distances in the (CrCoNi)93Al4Ti2Nb alloy are much smaller than the widths of the corresponding partials in the equiatomic CrCoNi alloy due to one or more of the minor alloying elements (Al, Ti, Nb). Dislocation slip in this alloy has a pronounced planar character. The leading dislocations in slip bands glide as pairs due to the existence of LRO domains. Multipoles were formed through the slip of dislocations with opposite signs on adjacent {111} slip planes. Those multipoles serve as building blocks for the formation of subgrain structures consisting of fine slip bands. The distances between slip bands were continuously refined during plastic deformation and dynamic refinement of slip bands plays a crucial role in strain hardening. The effects of LRO domains on planar dislocation slip, the deactivation of deformation twinning and strain hardening of this alloy are discussed.
If You Play in the Mud, You Get Dirty: The Appropriation of Amish Group Identity during a Negative Campaign

Using an original online experiment, we test whether the appropriation of Amish group identity influences voter behavior. We do not find that the appropriation of Amish group identity influences intended vote choice. However, there is evidence that associating the Amish with a candidate who was subjected to negative advertisements resulted in a reduction in approval rating for the Amish as a group. In addition, we find that the attitudes toward the Amish vary by respondent ideology and, consistent with the contact hypothesis, those individuals who interact regularly with the Amish reported more favorable ratings toward the Amish. The results raise important questions regarding the appropriation of a group's image in the course of a political campaign.
A Rationale for Imperfect Reporting Standards

The aim of general purpose financial reporting is to provide information that is useful to investors, lenders, and other creditors. With this goal, regulators have tended to mandate increased discl...
Proteus: a reconfigurable computational network for computer vision

The Proteus architecture is a highly parallel, multiple instruction, multiple data machine (MIMD) optimized for large granularity tasks such as machine vision and image processing. The system can achieve 20 gigaflops (80 gigaflops peak). It accepts data via multiple serial links at a rate of up to 640 MB/S. The system employs a hierarchical reconfigurable interconnection network with the highest level being a circuit-switchedenhanced hypercube, serial interconnection network for internal data transfers. The system is designed to use 256 to 1024 RISC processors. The processors use 1-MB externalread/write allocating caches for reduced multiprocessor contention. The system detects, locates, and replaces faulty subsystems using redundant hardware to facilitatefault tolerance. The parallelism is directly controllable through an advanced software system for partitioning, scheduling, and development. System software includes a translator for the INSIGHT language, a parallel debugger, lowand high-level simulators, and a message-passing system for all control needs. Image-processing application software includes a variety of point operators, neighborhood operators, convolution, and the mathematical morphology operations of binary and gray-scale dilation, erosion, opening, and closing.
Effect of sink strength on coherency loss of precipitates in dilute Cu-base alloys during in situ ion irradiation

Abstract In situ irradiations with 1 MeV Kr ions at 50~613 K up to a fluence of 6.25 × 1014 ions/cm2 (~1.25 displacements per atom, dpa) have been performed on pre-aged dilute Cu-0.9%Co, Cu-0.9%Fe and Cu-0.8%Cr alloys containing uniform matrix dispersions of coherent precipitates in order to study the effects of initial precipitate sink strength, damage dose and irradiation temperature on radiation-induced coherency loss of precipitates. Coherent precipitates with different point defect sink strengths (2πNd, where N and d are the precipitate density and diameter) were used in this work to examine potential differences in atomic relaxation during absorption of point defects. In all cases, irradiation to low doses (
DEAM: adaptive momentum with discriminative weight for stochastic optimization

Optimization algorithms with momentum, e.g., (ADAM) helps accelerate SGD in parameter updating, which can minify the oscillations of parameters update route. However, the fixed momentum weight (e.g., $\beta_{1}$ in ADAM) will propagate errors in momentum computing. Besides, such a hyperparameter can be extremely hard to tune in applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel optimization algorithm, namely Discriminative wEight on Adaptive Momentum (DEAM). DEAM proposes to compute the momentum weight automatically based on the discriminative angle. The momentum term weight will be assigned with an appropriate value which configures the influence of momentum in the current step. In addition, DEAM also contains a novel backtrack term, which restricts redundant updates when the correction of the last step is needed. The backtrack term can effectively adapt the learning rate and achieve the anticipatory update as well. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DEAM can achieve a faster convergence rate than the existing optimization algorithms in training various models. A full version of this paper can be accessed in [1].
Limiting empirical spectral distribution for products of rectangular matrices

Abstract In this paper, we consider m independent random rectangular matrices whose entries are independent and identically distributed standard complex Gaussian random variables and assume the product of the m rectangular matrices is an n by n square matrix. We study the limiting empirical spectral distributions of the product where the dimension of the product matrix goes to infinity, and m may change with the dimension of the product matrix and diverge. We give a complete description for the limiting distribution of the empirical spectral distributions for the product matrix and illustrate some examples.
Gravitomagnetic Stern–Gerlach Force

A heuristic description of the spin-rotation-gravity coupling is presented and the implications of the corresponding gravitomagnetic Stern–Gerlach force are briefly mentioned. It is shown, within the framework of linearized general relativity, that the gravitomagnetic Stern–Gerlach force reduces in the appropriate correspondence limit to the classical Mathisson spin-curvature force.
Health uncertainty among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic

Objective: Health uncertainty among healthcare workers has yet to be examined as a contributor to the psychological toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to (1) characterize health uncertainty levels among healthcare workers in a large, U.S. hospital system during the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) examine associations between health uncertainty and psychological outcomes. Methods: From March to June 2020, healthcare workers in a large, urban U.S. healthcare system were invited to complete an online questionnaire. Self-report measures assessed sociodemographic characteristics and job roles, health uncertainty, and emotional wellbeing variables (anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-compassion, and coping confidence). Health uncertainty (categorical and continuous scores) was compared across each variable using correlations and ANOVAs. Results: Healthcare workers (N = 440) were on average 44.5 years of age, 88.9% female, and 84.5% non-Hispanic white. Over half (52%) endorsed experiencing health uncertainty “sometimes” to “all the time”. While unrelated to sociodemographic characteristics ( ps > .05), health uncertainty was highest among pharmacists and technicians, with levels significantly higher than other roles including physicians ( p < .05) and mental health and spiritual counselors ( p < .05). Higher health uncertainty was associated with higher anxiety ( p < .001), depression ( p < .001), and loneliness ( p < .001), higher self-compassion ( p = .02), and lower coping confidence ( p < .001). Conclusions: Health uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic is common among healthcare workers, with higher levels related to poorer emotional wellbeing and less confidence in their coping abilities. Further research is needed to understand the relationships between healthcare workers’ health uncertainties and associated factors (i.e., job roles) and to identify whether health uncertainty may be a modifiable target for future interventions.
Prayer and the Soul: Dialogues that Heal

Prayer is more than a bowed head and folded hands. It is the deep longing that is expressed by mute bodies and by our souls, the center of being that connects us to God. Chaplains engage in dialogues that heal, as they risk the encounter with another—soul to soul—discerning the heart of another's concern to find the healing required.
Towards Content Provider Aware Recommender Systems: A Simulation Study on the Interplay between User and Provider Utilities

Most existing recommender systems focus primarily on matching users (content consumers) to content which maximizes user satisfaction on the platform. It is increasingly obvious, however, that content providers have a critical influence on user satisfaction through content creation, largely determining the content pool available for recommendation. A natural question thus arises: can we design recommenders taking into account the long-term utility of both users and content providers? By doing so, we hope to sustain more content providers and a more diverse content pool for long-term user satisfaction. Understanding the full impact of recommendations on both user and content provider groups is challenging. This paper aims to serve as a research investigation of one approach toward building a content provider aware recommender, and evaluating its impact in a simulated setup. To characterize the user-recommender-provider interdependence, we complement user modeling by formalizing provider dynamics as well. The resulting joint dynamical system gives rise to a weakly-coupled partially observable Markov decision process driven by recommender actions and user feedback to providers. We then build a REINFORCE recommender agent, coined EcoAgent, to optimize a joint objective of user utility and the counterfactual utility lift of the content provider associated with the recommended content, which we show to be equivalent to maximizing overall user utility and the utilities of all content providers on the platform under some mild assumptions. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a simulation environment capturing the key interactions among users, providers, and the recommender. We offer a number of simulated experiments that shed light on both the benefits and the limitations of our approach. These results help understand how and when a content provider aware recommender agent is of benefit in building multi-stakeholder recommender systems.
Tractable contextual bandits beyond realizability.

Tractable contextual bandit algorithms often rely on the realizability assumption--i.e., that the true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. We investigate issues that arise in the absence of realizability and note that the dynamics of adaptive data collection can lead commonly used bandit algorithms to learn a suboptimal policy. In this work, we present a tractable bandit algorithm that is not sensitive to the realizability assumption and computationally reduces to solving a constrained regression problem in every epoch. When realizability does not hold, our algorithm ensures the same guarantees on regret achieved by realizability-based algorithms under realizability, up to an additive term that accounts for the misspecification error. This extra term is proportional to T times the 2â „5-root of the mean squared error between the best model in the class and the true model, where T is the total number of time-steps. Our work sheds light on the bias-variance trade-off for tractable contextual bandits. This trade-off is not captured by algorithms that assume realizability, since under this assumption there exists an estimator in the class that attains zero bias.
Functional Programming of Behavior-Based Systems

In this paper, I describe a simple functional programming language, GRL, in which most of the characteristic features of the popular behavior-based robot architectures can be concisely written as reusable software abstractions. This makes it easier to write clear, modular code, to “mix and match” arbitration mechanisms, and to experiment with variations on existing mechanisms. I describe the compilation process for the language, our experiences with it, and issues of efficiency, expressiveness, and code size relative to other languages.
Transfer Learning with Graph Neural Networks for Short-Term Highway Traffic Forecasting

Large-scale highway traffic forecasting approaches are critical for intelligent transportation systems. Recently, deep- learning-based traffic forecasting methods have emerged as promising approaches for a wide range of traffic forecasting tasks. These methods are specific to a given traffic network, however, and consequently they cannot be used for forecasting traffic on an unseen traffic network. Previous work has identified diffusion convolutional recurrent neural networks, (DCRNN), as a state-of- the-art method for highway traffic forecasting. It models the complex spatial and temporal dynamics of a highway network using a graph-based diffusion convolution operation within a recurrent neural network. Currently, DCRNN cannot perform transfer learning because it learns location-specific traffic patterns, which cannot be used for unseen regions of a network or new geographic locations. To that end, we develop TL-DCRNN, a new transfer learning approach for DCRNN, where a single model trained on a highway network can be used to forecast traffic on unseen highway networks. Given a traffic network with a large amount of traffic data, our approach consists of partitioning the traffic network into a number of subgraphs and using a new training scheme that utilizes subgraphs to marginalize the location-specific information, thus learning the traffic as a function of network connectivity and temporal patterns alone. The resulting trained model can be used to forecast traffic on unseen networks. We demonstrate that TL-DCRNN can learn from San Francisco regional traffic data and can forecast traffic on the Los Angeles region and vice versa.
Efficient Trainability of Linear Optical Modules in Quantum Optical Neural Networks

The existence of “barren plateau landscapes” for generic discrete-variable quantum neural networks, which obstructs efficient gradient-based optimization of cost functions defined by global measurements, would be surprising in the case of generic linear optical modules in quantum optical neural networks due to the tunability of the intensity of continuous variable states and the relevant unitary group having exponentially smaller dimension. We demonstrate that coherent light in m modes can be generically compiled efficiently if the total intensity scales sublinearly with m, and extend this result to cost functions based on homodyne, heterodyne, or photon detection measurement statistics, and to noisy cost functions in the presence of attenuation. We further demonstrate efficient trainability of m mode linear optical quantum circuits for variational mean field energy estimation of positive quadratic Hamiltonians for input states that do not have energy exponentially vanishing with m.
Hidden Software and Veiled Value Creation: Illustrations from Server Software Usage

Abstract How do you measure the value of a commodity that transacts at a price of zero from an economic standpoint? This study examines the potential for and extent of omission and misattribution in standard approaches to economic accounting with regards to open source software, an unpriced commodity in the digital economy. The study is the first to follow usage and upgrading of unpriced software over a long period of time. It finds evidence that software updates mislead analyses of sources of firm productivity and identifies several mechanisms that create issues for mismeasurement. To illustrate these mechanisms, this study closely examines one asset that plays a critical role in the digital economic activity, web server software. We analyze the largest dataset ever compiled on web server use in the United States and link it to disaggregated information on over 200,000 medium to large organizations in the United States between 2001 and 2018. In our sample, we find that the omission of economic value created by web server software is substantial and that this omission indicates there is over $4.5 billion dollars of mismeasurement of server software across organizations in the United States. This mismeasurement varies by organization age, geography, industry and size. We also find that dynamic behavior, such as improvements of server technology and entry of new products, further exacerbates economic mismeasurement.
Covert Embodied Choice: Decision-Making and the Limits of Privacy Under Biometric Surveillance

Algorithms engineered to leverage rich behavioral and biometric data to predict individual attributes and actions continue to permeate public and private life. A fundamental risk may emerge from misconceptions about the sensitivity of such data, as well as the agency of individuals to protect their privacy when fine-grained (and possibly involuntary) behavior is tracked. In this work, we examine how individuals adjust their behavior when incentivized to avoid the algorithmic prediction of their intent. We present results from a virtual reality task in which gaze, movement, and other physiological signals are tracked. Participants are asked to decide which card to select without an algorithmic adversary anticipating their choice. We find that while participants use a variety of strategies, data collected remains highly predictive of choice (80% accuracy). Additionally, a significant portion of participants became more predictable despite efforts to obfuscate, possibly indicating mistaken priors about the dynamics of algorithmic prediction.
Modest asteroid or comet flyby mission trajectories

The paper discusses modest comet or asteroid missions which require a launch energy of 20 sq km/sq s or less and allow only navigational post launch delta-V's. Objects with perihelia of 2.0 AU are available directly after an earth launch; this distance is extended to 2.4 AU by a Mars gravity assist and the flyby speeds can be reduced. Twenty-one asteroid targets have been identified for Mars gravity assist trajectories using the 1986 Mars opportunity. Two asteroids on direct trajectories with low asteroid flyby speeds and four Mars gravity assist targets are identified as possible rendezvous targets for launches with capability of carrying the rendezvous delta-V engines.
A novel measure to evaluate generative adversarial networks based on direct analysis of generated images

The generative adversarial network (GAN) is a state-of-the-art technique in the field of deep learning. A number of recent papers address the theory and applications of GANs in various fields of image processing. Fewer studies, however, have directly evaluated GAN outputs. Those that have been conducted focused on using classification performance, e.g., inception score (IS) and statistical metrics, e.g., Frechet inception distance (FID). Here, we consider a fundamental way to evaluate GANs by directly analyzing the images they generate, instead of using them as inputs to other classifiers. We characterize the performance of a GAN as an image generator according to three aspects: 1) creativity: non-duplication of the real images; 2) inheritance: generated images should have the same style, which retains key features of the real images; and 3) diversity: generated images are different from each other. A GAN should not generate a few different images repeatedly. Based on the three aspects of ideal GANs, we have designed the likeness score (LS) to evaluate GAN performance and have applied it to evaluate several typical GANs. We compared our proposed measure with two commonly used GAN evaluation methods: IS and FID, and four additional measures. Furthermore, we discuss how these evaluations could help us deepen our understanding of GANs and improve their performance. The code can be found in author’s website linked up with the ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3779-9368 .
Childcare Matters: Female Business Owners and the Baby-Profit Gap

The previous literature documents that female-owned businesses are less profitable than male-owned businesses, including microenterprises that make up the majority of firms in developing countries....
Nesting strategy shapes territorial aggression but not testosterone: A comparative approach in female and male birds

Our understanding of the proximate and ultimate mechanisms shaping competitive reproductive phenotypes primarily stems from research on male-male competition for mates, even though competition is widespread in both sexes. We evaluate the hypothesis that the restricted nature of a resource required for reproduction, i.e. nest site, is a key variable driving territorial competition and testosterone secretion in female and male birds. Obligate secondary cavity-nesting has evolved repeatedly across avian lineages, providing a useful comparative context to explore how competition over limited nest cavities shapes aggression and its underlying mechanisms across species. Although evidence from one or another cavity-nesting species suggests that territorial aggression is adaptive in both females and males, this has not yet been tested in a comparative framework. We predicted that cavity-nesting generates more robust territorial aggression, in comparison to close relatives with less restrictive nesting strategies. Our focal species were two obligate secondary cavity-nesting species and two related species with more flexible nesting strategies in the same avian family: tree swallow (Tachycineta bicolor) vs. barn swallow (Hirundo rustica); Eastern bluebird (Sialia sialis) vs. American robin (Turdus migratorius). We assayed conspecific aggression using simulated territorial intrusion and found that cavity-nesting species displayed greater territorial aggression than their close relatives. This pattern held for both females and males. Because territorial aggression is often associated with elevated testosterone, we also hypothesized that cavity-nesting species would exhibit higher testosterone levels in circulation. However, cavity-nesting species did not have higher testosterone in circulation for either sex, despite some correlative evidence that testosterone is associated with higher rates of physical attack in female tree swallows. Our focus on a context that is relevant to both sexes - competition over essential breeding resources - provides a useful framework for co-consideration of proximate and ultimate drivers of reproductive competition in females and males.