cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Compressive Summarization with Plausibility and Salience Modeling

Compressive summarization systems typically rely on a seed set of syntactic rules to determine under what circumstances deleting a span is permissible, then learn which compressions to actually apply by optimizing for ROUGE. In this work, we propose to relax these explicit syntactic constraints on candidate spans, and instead leave the decision about what to delete to two data-driven criteria: plausibility and salience. Deleting a span is plausible if removing it maintains the grammaticality and factuality of a sentence, and it is salient if it removes important information from the summary. Each of these is judged by a pre-trained Transformer model, and only deletions that are both plausible and not salient can be applied. When integrated into a simple extraction-compression pipeline, our method achieves strong in-domain results on benchmark datasets, and human evaluation shows that the plausibility model generally selects for grammatical and factual deletions. Furthermore, the flexibility of our approach allows it to generalize cross-domain, and we show that our system fine-tuned on only 500 samples from a new domain can match or exceed a strong in-domain extractive model.
PDoT: private DNS-over-TLS with TEE support

Security and privacy of the Internet Domain Name System (DNS) have been longstanding concerns. Recently, there is a trend to protect DNS traffic using Transport Layer Security (TLS). However, at least two major issues remain: (1) how do clients authenticate DNS-over-TLS endpoints in a scalable and extensible manner; and (2) how can clients trust endpoints to behave as expected? In this paper, we propose a novel Private DNS-over-TLS (PDoT) architecture. PDoT includes a DNS Recursive Resolver (RecRes) that operates within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Using Remote Attestation, DNS clients can authenticate, and receive strong assurance of trustworthiness of PDoT RecRes. We provide an open-source proof-of-concept implementation of PDoT and use it to experimentally demonstrate that its latency and throughput match that of the popular Unbound DNS-over-TLS resolver.
Walking droplets through the lens of dynamical systems

Over the past decade the study of fluidic droplets bouncing and skipping (or “walking”) on a vibrating fluid bath has gone from an interesting experiment to a vibrant research field. The field exhi...
The shape of Thurston's Master Teapot

Abstract We establish basic geometric and topological properties of Thurston's Master Teapot and the Thurston set for superattracting unimodal continuous self-maps of intervals. In particular, the Master Teapot is connected, contains the unit cylinder, and its intersection with a set D × { c } grows monotonically with c. We show that the Thurston set described above is not equal to the Thurston set for postcritically finite tent maps, and we provide an arithmetic explanation for why certain gaps appear in plots of finite approximations of the Thurston set.
Proofreading through spatial gradients.

Key enzymatic processes in biology use the nonequilibrium error correction mechanism called kinetic proofreading to enhance their specificity. Kinetic proofreading typically requires several dedicated structural features in the enzyme, such as a nucleotide hydrolysis site and multiple enzyme–substrate conformations that delay product formation. Such requirements limit the applicability and the adaptability of traditional proofreading schemes. Here, we explore an alternative conceptual mechanism of error correction that achieves delays between substrate binding and subsequent product formation by having these events occur at distinct physical locations. The time taken by the enzyme–substrate complex to diffuse from one location to another is leveraged to discard wrong substrates. This mechanism does not require dedicated structural elements on the enzyme, making it easier to overlook in experiments but also making proofreading tunable on the fly. We discuss how tuning the length scales of enzyme or substrate concentration gradients changes the fidelity, speed and energy dissipation, and quantify the performance limitations imposed by realistic diffusion and reaction rates in the cell. Our work broadens the applicability of kinetic proofreading and sets the stage for the study of spatial gradients as a possible route to specificity.
Deep Learning based NAS Score and Fibrosis Stage Prediction from CT and Pathology Data

Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is becoming increasingly prevalent in the world population. Without diagnosis at the right time, NAFLD can lead to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and subsequent liver damage. The diagnosis and treatment of NAFLD depend on the NAFLD activity score (NAS) and the liver fibrosis stage, which are usually evaluated from liver biopsies by pathologists. In this work, we propose a novel method to automatically predict NAS score and fibrosis stage from CT data that is non-invasive and inexpensive to obtain compared with liver biopsy. We also present a method to combine the information from CT and H&E stained pathology data to improve the performance of NAS score and fibrosis stage prediction, when both types of data are available. This is of great value to assist the pathologists in computer-aided diagnosis process. Experiments on a 30-patient dataset illustrate the effectiveness of our method.
Reinforcement Learning in Non-Stationary Discrete-Time Linear-Quadratic Mean-Field Games

In this paper, we study large population multiagent reinforcement learning (RL) in the context of discretetime linear-quadratic mean-field games (LQ-MFGs). Our setting differs from most existing work on RL for MFGs, in that we consider a non-stationary MFG over an infinite horizon. We propose an actor-critic algorithm to iteratively compute the mean-field equilibrium (MFE) of the LQ-MFG. There are two primary challenges: i) the non-stationarity of the MFG induces a linear-quadratic tracking problem, which requires solving a backwards-in-time (non-causal) equation that cannot be solved by standard (causal) RL algorithms; ii) Many RL algorithms assume that the states are sampled from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain (MC), that is, the chain is already mixed, an assumption that is not satisfied for real data sources. We first identify that the mean-field trajectory follows linear dynamics, allowing the problem to be reformulated as a linear quadratic Gaussian problem. Under this reformulation, we propose an actor-critic algorithm that allows samples to be drawn from an unmixed MC. Finite-sample convergence guarantees for the algorithm are then provided. To characterize the performance of our algorithm in multi-agent RL, we have developed an error bound with respect to the Nash equilibrium of the finite- population game.
Wertheim's thermodynamic perturbation theory with double-bond association and its application to colloid-linker mixtures.

We extend Wertheim’s thermodynamic perturbation theory to derive the association free energy of a multicomponent mixture for which double bonds can form between any two pairs of the molecules’ arbitrary number of bonding sites. This generalization reduces in limiting cases to prior theories that restrict double bonding to at most one pair of sites per molecule. We apply the new theory to an associating mixture of colloidal particles (“colloids”) and flexible chain molecules (“linkers”). The linkers have two functional end groups, each of which may bond to one of several sites on the colloids. Due to their flexibility, a significant fraction of linkers can “loop” with both ends bonding to sites on the same colloid instead of bridging sites on different colloids. We use the theory to show that the fraction of linkers in loops depends sensitively on the linker end-to-end distance relative to the colloid bonding-site distance, which suggests strategies for mitigating the loop formation that may otherwise hinder linker-mediated colloidal assembly.
Joint Spatial-Propagation Modeling of Cellular Networks Based on the Directional Radii of Poisson Voronoi Cells

In coverage-oriented networks, base stations (BSs) are deployed in a way such that users at the cell boundaries achieve sufficient signal strength. The shape and size of cells vary from BS to BS, since the large-scale signal propagation conditions differ in different geographical regions. This work proposes and studies a joint spatial-propagation (JSP) model, which considers the correlation between cell radii and the large-scale signal propagation (captured by shadowing). We first introduce the notion of the directional radius of Voronoi cells, which has applications in cellular networks and beyond. The directional radius of a cell is defined as the distance from the nucleus to the cell boundary at an angle relative to the direction of a uniformly random location in the cell. We study the distribution of the radii in two types of cells in the Poisson Voronoi tessellations: the zero-cell, which contains the origin, and the typical cell. The results are applied to analyze the JSP model. We show that, even though the Poisson point process (PPP) is often considered as a pessimistic spatial model for BS locations, the JSP model with the PPP achieves coverage performance close to the most optimistic one—the standard triangular lattice model. Further, we show that the network performance depends critically on the variance of the large-scale path loss along the cell boundary.
THE CONNECTION between the HOST HALO and the SATELLITE GALAXIES of the MILKY WAY

Many properties of the Milky Way's (MW) dark matter halo, including its mass-assembly history, concentration, and subhalo population, remain poorly constrained. We explore the connection between these properties of the MW and its satellite galaxy population, especially the implication of the presence of the Magellanic Clouds for the properties of the MW halo. Using a suite of high-resolution N-body simulations of MW-mass halos with a fixed final M_(vir) ~ 10^(12.1),M_⊙, we find that the presence of Magellanic Cloud-like satellites strongly correlates with the assembly history, concentration, and subhalo population of the host halo, such that MW-mass systems with Magellanic Clouds have lower concentration, more rapid recent accretion, and more massive subhalos than typical halos of the same mass. Using a flexible semi-analytic galaxy formation model that is tuned to reproduce the stellar mass function of the classical dwarf galaxies of the MW with Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo, we show that adopting host halos with different mass-assembly histories and concentrations can lead to different best-fit models for galaxy-formation physics, especially for the strength of feedback. These biases arise because the presence of the Magellanic Clouds boosts the overall population of high-mass subhalos, thus requiring a different stellar-mass-to-halo-mass ratio to match the data. These biases also lead to significant differences in the mass–metallicity relation, the kinematics of low-mass satellites, the number counts of small satellites associated with the Magellanic Clouds, and the stellar mass of MW itself. Observations of these galaxy properties can thus provide useful constraints on the properties of the MW halo.
Disentangling Disparate Impact and Disparate Treatment: Adapting the Canadian Approach

The legal framework for alleging disparate impact and disparate treatment claims in cases involving discriminatory employment standards has long been confused. The uncertainty of how to proceed in these cases has created analytical problems for both the federal courts and the litigants. There is a fine line between intentional and unintentional discrimination claims when it comes to employment standards, and that line is often blurred. A uniform approach for analyzing these cases is therefore needed. This article looks to the Canadian approach of analyzing discrimination claims in the employment standards context, and, borrowing from that model, proposes a three-part analytical framework for evaluating these types of claims in the U.S. The article then explores the implications of adopting this proposed approach, and applies the test to a federal appellate court decision on the issue. The article further explains how the model could be adopted without disturbing the current statutory structure.
Individual or Collective Liability for Corporate Directors

Fiduciary duty is one of the most litigated areas in corporate law and the subject of much academic attention, yet one important question has been ignored: Should fiduciary liability be assessed individually, where directors are examined one-by-one for compliance, or collectively, where the board's compliance as a whole is all that matters? The choice between individual and collective assessment may be the difference between a director's liability and her exoneration, may affect how boards function, and informs the broader fiduciary duty literature in important ways. This Article is the first to explore the individual/collective question and suggest a systematic way to approach it. This Article offers both a descriptive examination of how some courts have answered this question (often implicitly), and a normative analysis asking whether the courts' tentative answer makes for good corporate governance policy.
Diversity Science: Who Needs It?

What is diversity science and who needs it? This response addresses these and other themes and challenges raised by 11 excellent commentaries. Others include: What are the assumptions of diversity science regarding difference? Is diversity science constrained to the study of multiculturalism and colorblindness? Are race and ethnicity the only dimensions of difference worth studying? At which level of analysis should diversity scientists work and with which types of variables? Should diversity science address the experiences of both majority and minority groups? Should diversity science reside solely on U.S. soil? Is diversity science already in motion (i.e., has the train already left the station)? and Is social psychology a particularly useful site for diversity science?
Characteristics of a Full-Disclosure, Transaction-Based Index of Commercial Real Estate

Executive Summary. This study addresses the characteristics of a transaction-based index of commercial real estate as reported in a full-disclosure market. Prior research on transaction-based indic...
A Search for OH Megamasers at Z>0.1. II. Further Results

We present current results of an ongoing survey for OH megamasers in luminous infrared galaxies at the Arecibo Observatory.1 The survey is now two-thirds complete, and has resulted in the discovery of 35 new OH megamasers at z > 0.1, 24 of which are presented in this paper. We discuss the properties of each source in detail, including an exhaustive survey of the literature. We also place upper limits on the OH emission from 107 nondetections and list their IR, radio, and optical properties. The survey detection rate is one OH megamaser for every six candidates overall, but is a strong function of the far-IR luminosity of candidates and may depend on merger stage or on the central engine responsible for the IR luminosity in the merging galaxy pair. We also report the detection of IRAS 12032+1707, a new OH gigamaser.
Shareholders’ Say on Pay: Does It Create Value?

Congress and activists recently proposed giving shareholders a say (vote) on executive pay. We find that when the House passed the Say-on-Pay Bill, the market reaction was significantly positive for firms with high abnormal chief executive officer (CEO) compensation, with low pay-for-performance sensitivity, and responsive to shareholder pressure. However, activist-sponsored say-on-pay proposals target large firms, not those with excessive CEO pay, poor governance, or poor performance. The market reacts negatively to labor-sponsored proposal announcements and positively when these proposals are defeated. Our findings suggest that say-on-pay creates value for companies with inefficient compensation but can destroy value for others.
Theoretical Developments in SUSY

I am proud that I was personally acquainted with Julius Wess. We first met in 1999 when I was working on the Yuri Golfand Memorial Volume (The Many Faces of the Superworld, World Scientific, Singapore, 2000). I invited him to contribute, and he accepted this invitation with enthusiasm. After that, we met many times, mostly at various conferences in Germany and elsewhere. I was lucky to discuss with Julius questions of theoretical physics, and hear his recollections on how supersymmetry was born. In physics Julius was a visionary, who paved the way to generations of followers. In everyday life he was a kind and modest person, always ready to extend a helping hand to people who were in need of his help. I remember him telling me how concerned he was about the fate of theoretical physicists in Eastern Europe after the demise of communism. His ties with Israeli physicists bore a special character. I am honored by the opportunity to contribute an article to the Julius Wess Memorial Volume. I will review theoretical developments of the recent years in non-perturbative supersymmetry.
The Euro and Corporate Valuations

In this paper, we study the changes in corporate valuations induced by the adoption of the euro as the common currency in Europe. We use corporate-level data from seventeen European countries, of which eleven adopted the euro. We show that the introduction of the euro has increased Tobin's Q-ratios by 17.1% in the {euro-area} countries that previously had weak currencies. Part of the increase in corporate valuations is explained by the decrease in interest rates and by the decrease in the cost of equity. The increases in Tobin's Q are larger for firms that would be harmed by currency devaluations. The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org., Oxford University Press.
Going the Way of the Dodo: De-Extinction, Dualisms, and Reframing Conservation

De-extinction, a suite of selective breeding or biotechnological processes for reviving and releasing into the environment members or facsimiles of an extinct species, has been the subject of a recent surge of analysis in popular, scientific, and legal literature. Yet de-extinction raises more fundamental questions about the relationship between humans and nature and about the more and less useful ways that the law serves to navigate that relationship. Unfortunately, the endangered species,...
Biblical biopolitics: judicial process, religious rhetoric, Terri Schiavo and beyond

This Article begins by reviewing the application of the autonomy principle in persistent vegetative state (PVS) cases as it has become solidified over the last thirty years in both legal precedent and bioethical theory. The Article then moves from this doctrinal foundation to a close and comprehensive examination of the judicial proceedings in the Terri Schiavo case, including how the autonomy principle operated in this instance. In addition to this judicial process analysis, the Article also empirically documents the religiously conservative activism that brought this case international attention and unprecedented involvement by all three branches of government at both the federal and state level. In response to widespread confusion, even among the legal community, and outright hostility by some towards the judiciary, this Article concludes that the law did not fail Mrs. Schiavo, and on the contrary, the judicial process in this instance worked remarkably well. This Article, however, moves beyond a mere description of the intricacies of the Schiavo case to examine the larger culture war context. These later sections of the Article normatively analyze the irresponsible and inappropriate use of abortion-politics rhetoric, as well as the misguided post-Schiavo legislative agenda that constitute what this Article coins Biblical BioPolitics. Ultimately, this Article concludes that the actions of certain politicized religious organizations, which the Article identifies and describes, portend destructive, long-term implications for both public discourse and public policy in a pluralistic society facing increasingly complex dilemmas at the intersection of law, medicine and ethics. A clear understanding of the current legal regime vis-a-vis end-of-life/PVS situations and an analysis of the Biblical BioPolitics that threaten this regime is, therefore, crucial for legal and health care professionals and all of us who may one day find ourselves as patients.
When Life Depends on It: Supplementary Guidelines for the Mitigation Function of Defense Teams in Death Penalty Cases

The Supplementary Guidelines for the Mitigation Function of Defense Teams in Death Penalty Cases (“Supplementary Guidelines”) are the culmination of three years of work coordinated by the Public Interest Litigation Clinic (“PILC”) and the University of MissouriKansas City School of Law in cooperation with seasoned capital litigators and mitigation specialists across the United States. This Article describes the Supplementary Guidelines and the process by which they were researched and developed. Part II discusses the reasons for undertaking this project. Part III describes the process of investigating, researching, and drafting the Supplementary Guidelines. Part IV identifies the scope and goals of the Supplementary Guidelines,
Some Doubts About Argument by Hypothetical

In his paper, Why the Successful Assassin Is More Wicked than the Unsuccessful One,' Leo Katz "pick[s] up the gauntlet [Sandy] Kadish throws down" to offer a nonconsequentialist justification for giving significance to resulting harm and, in particular, to justify the common practice of punishing attempts less than the completed offense.2 In one sense, I may not be the ideal person to serve as critic. I am not one of those who, like Kadish and others, does not believe in the significance of resulting harm in assessing blameworthiness (people whom Katz calls the "luck-skeptics" but to whom I will refer as the "nonbelievers" in the significance of resulting harm).3 I will try to perform the mental gymnastics of pretending to be a nonbeliever as I evaluate Professor Katz's arguments. As Part I explains, I fear the nonbeliever will be unpersuaded. Whatever the outcome of the debate as Professor Katz presents it, the method of his argument raises issues that I think are just as interesting as its outcome. My social science work, as limited as it is, gives me pause when assessing the argument-by-hypothetical method that Professor Katz uses so ingeniously here (and elsewhere).4 Relatedly, I have some doubts about using our intuitions in the way Professor Katz would have us use them here (and elsewhere), or at least doubts about whether we can draw from them the kind of conclusions about moral desert that Professor Katz would have us draw. Setting aside these two concerns for a moment, let me consider Professor Katz's arguments on their own terms.
Fiscal policy and economic reconstruction in Latin America

Abstract This paper surveys the fiscal landscape of Latin America. It analyzes external and domestic factors that over the years have led to the deterioration of the fiscal accounts. It also discusses difficulties that are encountered in pursuing a sound fiscal policy under inflationary conditions. Issues such as the connection between external debt and fiscal policy, and the role of public investment are also discussed. General guidelines are provided for a fiscal policy for the economic reconstruction of Latin America.
Tainted: Food, Identity, and the Search for Dignitary Redress

The law recognizes a right to legal redress for exposure to food that is tainted in the sense of being toxic or poisonous; but what about exposure to food products individuals find socially, morally or religiously repugnant? Jews eating “Kosher” hot dogs containing standard non-kosher meats. Vegetarians fed beef. Muslims ingesting vitamins containing pork. Aren’t these food products also “tainted”? Despite the fact that the American legal system has long recognized the need to protect individual dignitary rights, the law provides little meaningful redress in these situations or other instances of offensive food taint. So why has food autonomy, an intuitive manifestation of personal dignity and central expression of individual identity, fallen outside of what the law recognizes as harm? Ultimately, is this a situation where facially neutral law is itself tainted by imbedded food assumptions? This article defines the problem of failing to recognize offensive food taint, outlines the current state of the law regarding such exposures, and then lays out potential solutions for providing redress moving forward. In doing so, the paper concludes that the intentional tort of battery may play a significant role in empowering injured parties in the most egregious cases of offensive taint.
Beyond angels and demons? The past, present, and future of drug abuse liability assessment

The process by which new drugs are scheduled and existing drugs rescheduled is among the most critical elements in the modern system of drug control. For all of its importance, it remains a deeply flawed process, poorly understood by scholars. This essay examines a core element in this process – drug abuse liability assessment – from an historical perspective. The review argues that the role of law and corporations in the sorting process must be better understood, and concludes with an overview of three critical issues that have frustrated drug abuse liability assessment in the past.
Preventive Pre-trial Detention without Punishment

The pre-trial detention of individuals charged with crimes is viewed by many legal scholars as problematic. Standard arguments against it are that it constitutes legal punishment of individuals not yet convicted of crimes, violates the presumption of innocence, and rests on dubious predictions of future crime. I defend modified and restrained forms of pre-trial detention. I argue that pre-trial detention could be made very different than imprisonment, should be governed by strict criteria, and is warranted, when the evidence of danger is convincing. I contend that the presumption of innocence does not preclude us from doing many other things to criminal suspects and defendants that imply their guilt. Finally, I dispute arguments designed to show that pre-trial detention can be justified to prevent absconding or interferences with the course of justice, but not to prevent other, and sometimes much more serious, offenses.
Elusive Equality: The Armenian Genocide and the Failure of Ottoman Legal Reform

This essay, prepared for a symposium on legal aspects of the Armenian Genocide, addresses the treatment of the Armenian community in Ottoman law. For most of its history, the Ottoman Empire adhered to classical Islamic law, which viewed Armenians and other Christians as dhimmis – formally protected, but legally subordinate, minority communities. The nineteenth-century Ottoman reform movement known as the Tanzimat granted dhimmis legal equality for the first time. Equality for dhimmis subverted the traditional social hierarchy and sparked a religious backlash, including the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896, which killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians and other Christians. The Hamidian massacres in turn initiated a cycle of violence that led eventually to genocide. Although the Tanzimat did not itself cause the Armenian Genocide, the failure of legal reform, and the resentment that equality for religious minorities created in Ottoman society, were important contributing factors.
Race, class, and Katrina : human rights and (un)natural disaster.

Addressing the newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm X called for African-Americans to “internationalize our problem.”1 He hoped to take racism and its progeny—discrimination, poverty, unemployment, lack of access to quality education, housing, health care, and attempted cultural genocide—to the United Nations.2
Continuous Health Interface Event Retrieval

Knowing the state of our health at every moment in time is critical for advances in health science. Using data obtained outside an episodic clinical setting is the first step towards building a continuous health estimation system. In this paper, we explore a system that allows users to combine events and data streams from different sources and retrieve complex biological events, such as cardiovascular volume overload, using measured lifestyle events. These complex events, which have been explored in biomedical literature and which we call interface events, have a direct causal impact on the relevant biological systems; they are the interface through which the lifestyle events influence our health. We retrieve the interface events from existing events and data streams by encoding domain knowledge using the event operator language. The interface events can then be utilized to provide a continuous estimate of the biological variables relevant to the user's health state. The event-based framework also makes it easier to estimate which event is causally responsible for a particular change in the individual's health state.
The impact of environmental factors on accounting development: an Egyptian longitudinal study

Abstract Using a 37-year Egyptian data set, which covers the period from 1961–1997, this study empirically investigates the directional and size effects of the environmental factors on the development of accounting. Additionally, the study tests the relationship between accounting and its business environment over time. The development of accounting is captured through factor analysing several accounting dimensions. Four environmental factors are used to explain the variation observed over time in accounting development. These factors are (1) the economic environment, (2) the political environment, (3) the development of the stock market, and (4) privatization of state owned corporations. The overall results obtained from the time-series regression and other statistical tests indicate that there is a strong relationship between the environmental factors and accounting development in Egypt and that this relation varies with time. The empirical findings indicate that the level of the economy and the political environment are positively correlated to the accounting development in Egypt. Moreover, the results of the t -test, Z -test , and the Voung’s non-nested test show that the effect of the environmental factors on accounting development differs over time reflecting the different stages of democracy and economic reform. This study should provide international investors and researchers with a better understanding of the environmental factors that affect accounting in emerging markets.
Market Timing Strategies That Worked

There is evidence that a few simple market timing strategies appear to have outperformed a buy-and-hold strategy in the 1970–2000 period. The example here is based on spreads between the E/P ratio of the S&P 500 index and interest rates. Extremely narrow spreads compared to historical ranges appear to predict more frequent market downturns to come. A switching strategy based on extremely narrow spreads and the market index calls for investing in the stock market index unless spreads are narrower than some predefined threshold. Switching strategies like this outperformed the market index in terms of higher mean returns and lower variances. A strategy based on the spread between the E/P ratio and a short-term interest rate comfortably beat the market index in this period, even considering transaction costs.
Does regulatory supervision curtail microfinance profitability and outreach

Regulation allows microfinance institutions to evolve more fully into banks, particularly for institutions aiming to take deposits. But there are potential trade-offs. Complying with regulation and supervision can be costly. The authors examine the implications for the institutions profitability and their outreach to small-scale borrowers and women. The tests draw on a new database that combines high-quality financial data on 245 of the worlds largest microfinance institutions with newly-constructed data on their prudential supervision. Ordinary least squares regressions show that supervision is negatively associated with profitability. Controlling for the non-random assignment of supervision via treatment effects and instrumental variables regressions, the analysis finds that supervision is associated with substantially larger average loan sizes and less lending to women than in ordinary least squares regressions, although it is not significantly associated with profitability. The pattern is consistent with the notion that profit-oriented microfinance institutions absorb the cost of supervision by curtailing outreach to market segments that tend to be more costly per dollar lent. By contrast, microfinance institutions that rely on non-commercial sources of funding (for example, donations), and thus are less profit-oriented, do not adjust loan sizes or lend less to women when supervised, but their profitability is significantly reduced.
Pulling Punches: Congressional Constraints on the Supreme Court’s Constitutional Rulings, 1987–2000

To date, no study has found evidence that the U.S. Supreme Court is constrained by Congress in its constitutional decisions. We addressed the selection bias inherent in previous studies with a statute-centered, rather than a case-centered, analysis, following all congressional laws enacted between 1987 and 2000. We uncovered considerable congressional constraint in the Court's constitutional rulings. In particular, we found that the probability that the Rehnquist Court would strike a liberal congressional law rose between 47% and 288% as a result of the 1994 congressional elections, depending on the legislative model used.
Advanced Electrical Conductors: An Overview and Prospects of Metal Nanocomposite and Nanocarbon Based Conductors

Advanced electrical conductors that outperform copper and aluminum can revolutionize our lives, enabling billions of dollars in energy savings and facilitating a transition to an electric mobility future. Nanocarbons (carbon nanotubes and graphene) present a unique opportunity for developing advanced conductors for electrical power, communications, electronics, and electric machines for the aerospace, marine, and automotive industries. This paper compiles the major research progress in the field of advanced nanocarbon-based and metal-nanocarbon conductors. It also elucidates the competitiveness and implications of advanced conductors with respect to conventional ones and describes their materials science, properties, and characterization. Finally, several areas of future research for advanced electrical conductors are proposed.
Identifying Expectation Errors in Value/Glamour Strategies: A Fundamental Analysis Approach

It is well established that value stocks outperform glamour stocks, yet considerable debate exists about whether the return differential reflects compensation for risk or mispricing. Under mispricing explanations, prices of glamour (value) firms reflect systematically optimistic (pessimistic) expectations; thus, the value/glamour effect should be concentrated (absent) among firms with (without) ex ante identifiable expectation errors. Classifying firms based upon whether expectations implied by current pricing multiples are congruent with the strength of their fundamentals, we document that value/glamour returns and ex post revisions to market expectations are predictably concentrated (absent) among firms with ex ante biased (unbiased) market expectations. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.
Planting Houses in Shenzhen: A Real Estate Market without Legal Titles

Can a real estate market operate without legal titles? The answer has conventionally been no. But in Shenzhen, the iconic city of China’s market economy, an opposite phenomenon exists: half of the buildings within the city, which has 1,993 square kilometers of land and over 10 million people, have no legal titles and have been rented or sold to millions of people illegally. These illegal buildings are called small properties, because their property rights are “smaller” (weaker) than legal properties. Based on my one-year fieldwork, this paper is a first step toward explaining the small-property market. It reveals that legitimate organizations and professionals have developed a network to facilitate impersonal transactions of illegal small properties. Set against the backdrop and context of China’s transition, this paper presents a feasible plan for building a market economy in transitional countries, where property laws are often less than ideal. Resume: Est-ce qu’un marche immobilier peut fonctionner sans titres juridiques ? La reponse a traditionnellement ete non. Mais a Shenzhen, la ville symbole de l’economie de marche de la Chine, le phenomene inverse existe: la moitie des edifices situes a l’interieur des limites de la ville, qui s’etend sur 1 993 kilometres carres et compte plus de 10 millions d’habitants, ne possedent aucun titre juridique et ont ete loues ou vendus a des millions d’individus illegalement. Ces bâtiments illegaux sont denommes « petites proprietes », puisque leurs droits de propriete sont « plus petits » (plus faibles) que ceux des proprietes legales. Fonde sur mon experience d’un an sur le terrain, cet article cherche d’abord a expliquer le marche des petites proprietes. Ce texte precise comment des organismes et des professionnels legitimes ont developpe des reseaux afin de faciliter les transactions impersonnelles de petites proprietes illegales. Avec pour toile de fond la transition de la Chine, cet article propose une option viable pour bâtir une economie de marche dans les pays en transition, la ou une legislation sur la propriete est souvent moins qu’ideale.
Coups and Democracy

This study uses new data on coups d’etat and elections to document a striking development: whereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1991 installed durable rules, the majority of coups after that have been followed by competitive elections. The article argues that after the Cold War, international pressure influenced the consequences of coups. In the post-Cold War era, countries that were most dependent on Western aid were the first to embrace competitive elections after their coups. This theory also helps explain the pronounced decline in the number of coups since 1991. While the coup d’etat has been (and still is) the single most important factor leading to the downfall of democratic governments, these findings indicate that the new generation of coups has been far less harmful for democracy than their historical predecessors.
McTorts: The Social and Legal Impact of McDonald's Role in Tort Suits

This article looks at McDonald’s, impact on public policy, and tort law from historical and social psychology perspectives, following McDonald’s from its beginnings in the mid-1950’s through today. By examining McDonald’s Corp. v. Steel and Morris (McLibel), Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants (Hot Coffee), and Pelman v. McDonald’s Corp. (Childhood Obesity), I demonstrate that certain tort cases involving McDonald’s have had particularly important social and legal consequences that I attribute to McDonald’s special influence over the human psyche, beginning in childhood. In explaining McDonald’s extraordinary power over the public imagination and how this affects lawsuits involving it, I rely on the social psychology approach called situationism that recognizes the strong effect that environmental influences can have on individual decision-making. I conclude that lawsuits involving McDonald’s have had and will continue to have important social and legal consequences because of the unique role this corporation plays in our lives.
Optimal Executive Compensation when Firm Size Follows Geometric Brownian Motion

This paper studies a continuous-time agency model in which the agent controls the drift of the geometric Brownian motion firm size. The changing firm size generates partial incentives, analogous to awarding the agent equity shares according to her continuation payoff. When the agent is as patient as investors, performance-based stock grants implement the optimal contract. Our model generates a leverage effect on the equity returns, and implies that the agency problem is more severe for smaller firms. That the empirical evidence shows that grants compensation are largely based on the CEO's historical performance—rather than current performance—lends support to our model.
Extra-Role Behavior among Mexican Employees: The Impact of LMX, Group Acceptance, and Job Attitudes

The current field study took place within a Mexican work setting, consisting of 100 white-collar employees representing a variety of professional job categories. The study investigated the direct effect of the supervisor–employee relationship (leader–member exchange) quality and group acceptance on employees' propensity to engage in activities beyond their formal work roles (extra-role behavior). The mediating influences of the employees' job satisfaction level and organizational commitment were also taken into consideration when accounting for extra-role behavior. Results suggest that relationships Mexican employees share with their supervisor have a direct impact on their extra-role behavior. Social exchange, key to both extra-role behavior and leader–member exchange, is proposed as the operating mechanism associating the two constructs. Results also indicate that organizational commitment plays a partial mediating role between leader–member exchange and extra-role behavior.
Common Ground Between Free-Traders and Environmentalists

We use a North–South model with property right differences and resource dynamics to study the effects of trade on resource use and welfare. Autarky is likely to Pareto-dominate free trade in the long run when the environment is quite fragile, and the result is reversed when the environment is quite resilient. Trade may cause an environmentally poor country to “drag down” its richer trading partner, when they degrade their stocks which would be preserved under autarky. It may enable the environmentally richer country to “pull up” its partner, when they preserve their stocks which would be degraded under autarky.
Does Rudeness Really Matter? The Effects of Rudeness on Task Performance and Helpfulness

In three experimental studies, we provided an empirical test of how rudeness affects task performance and helpfulness. Different forms of rudeness—rudeness instigated by a direct authority figure, ...
Structural Recombination and Innovation: Unlocking Intraorganizational Knowledge Synergy Through Structural Change

This paper examines how structural recombination of business units within a firm impacts subsequent firm innovation. We argue that structural recombination is both a means for firms to unlock the potential for intraorganizational knowledge recombination and a source of disruption to the firm's existing knowledge resources, so that the overall effect of structural recombination on innovation will depend on the balance between these two effects. Structural recombination will have a positive effect on innovation where there are substantial intraorganizational knowledge synergies, where path dependence is low, and where knowledge resources are of high quality, limiting disruption. Results from a 20-year panel of 71 firms operating in the U.S. medical sector confirm these arguments. The study thus provides a contingent view of the effects of structural recombination on firm innovation while highlighting the role of structural recombination in realizing untapped knowledge synergies within the firm.
Access to Legal Remedies: The Crisis in Family Law

Lack of access to the courts to resolve domestic disputes is a national problem which deserves the attention of both family law scholars and practitioners. Family law scholars have exhaustively critiqued both the substantive and procedural law governing dissolution proceedings. This analysis of rules and standards, however, is rarely conducted with the explicit goal of maximizing access to the courts for people of low and moderate income. This paper begins by assessing the dimensions of the problem through an explanation of the existing domestic legal needs studies. This paper also presents a case study of a typical multi-issue domestic case to provide a context within which to explore procedural and other innovations aimed at both reducing formal requirements on simple domestic cases and replacing discretionary standards with structured, predictable rules. Procedural reforms identified in the paper include providing alternatives to full adversarial hearings in some domestic proceedings; relaxing barriers to non-attorney advice and representation; identifying the appropriate categories of cases for such procedural innovations; and designing appropriate mechanisms for informed pro se representation, including education programs and wider use of standardized forms.
Jim Cramer’s Mad Money Charitable Trust Performance and Factor Attribution

This article analyzes the complete historical performance of Jim Cramer’s Action Alerts PLUS portfolio from 2001 through 2017, which includes many of the stock recommendations made on Cramer’s TV show, Mad Money . Both since inception of the portfolio and since the start of Mad Money in 2005 (when the portfolio was converted into a charitable trust), Cramer’s portfolio has underperformed the S&P 500 total return index both on an overall returns basis and in Sharpe ratio. Being the first to analyze Cramer’s post-crisis return history, these findings contrast with previous studies, which analyzed Cramer’s outperformance in short windows before the 2008 financial crisis. Using factor analysis, we find that Cramer’s portfolio returns are primarily driven by underleveraged exposure to market returns and, in some specifications, tilting toward small-cap stocks, growth stocks, and stocks with poor earnings quality.
Lessons in Federalism from the 1960s Class Action Rule and the 2005 Class Action Fairness Act: “The Political Safeguards” of Aggregate Translocal Actions

i Arthur Liman Professor of Law, Yale Law School. All rights reserved 2008. This Article is part of a series exploring facets of federalism. See Judith Resnik, Joshua Civin & Joseph Frueh, Don 't Sign Kyoto; Don 't Cite Foreign Law: Sovereigntism, Federalism, and Translocal Organizations of Government Actors (TOGAs), 50 ARIZ. L. REV. (forthcoming 2008); Judith Resnik, Foreign as Domestic Affairs: Rethinking Horizontal Federalism and Foreign Affairs Preemption in Light of Translocal Internationalism, 57 EMORY LJ. 31 (2007); Judith Resnik, The Internationalism of American Federalism, 73 MO. L. REV. (forthcoming 2008). My thanks to Stephen Burbank, Tobias Wolff, and the other participants in the Symposium, to the Law Review, and to Dennis Curtis, Owen Fiss, Vicki Jackson, Reva Siegel, Deborah Hensler, and Stephen Subrin, with whom I have explored federalism, procedure, aggregation, and much else, as well as to Linda Silberman who, along with Andreas Lowenfeld, introduced e to procedure when I was a law student at NYU. Energetic, talented, and able students Joseph Frueh, Michelle Morin, and Vasudha Talla have been important contributors to this project. Finally, my use in the title of the phrase the "Political Safeguards" reflects an obvious debt to Herbert Wechsler as well as one to Joshua Civin who in his third year at Yale Law School in 2001 wrote an unpublished essay, Public Official Associations: Legal Federalism in Theory and Practice, that also considered the relationship of subnational organizations of government officials to discussions of federalism.