cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Low threshold anti-Stokes Raman laser on-chip

Raman lasers based on integrated silica whispering gallery mode resonant cavities have enabled numerous applications from telecommunications to biodetection. To overcome the intrinsically low Raman gain value of silica, these devices leverage their ultrahigh quality factors (Q), allowing submilliwatt stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) lasing thresholds to be achieved. A closely related nonlinear behavior to SRS is stimulated anti-Stokes Raman scattering (SARS). This nonlinear optical process combines the pump photon with the SRS photon to generate an upconverted photon. Therefore, in order to achieve SARS, the efficiency of the SRS process must be high. As a result, achieving SARS in on-chip resonant cavities has been challenging due to the low lasing efficiencies of these devices. In the present work, metal-doped ultrahigh Q (Q>107) silica microcavity arrays are fabricated on-chip. The metal-dopant plays multiple roles in improving the device performance. It increases the Raman gain of the cavity material, and it decreases the optical mode area, thus increasing the circulating intensity. As a result, these devices have SRS lasing efficiencies that are over 10× larger than conventional silica microcavities while maintaining low lasing thresholds. This combination enables SARS to be generated with submilliwatt input powers and significantly improved anti-Stokes Raman lasing efficiency.
Pions as gluons in higher dimensions

We derive the nonlinear sigma model as a peculiar dimensional reduction of Yang-Mills theory. In this framework, pions are reformulated as higher-dimensional gluons arranged in a kinematic configuration that only probes cubic interactions. This procedure yields a purely cubic action for the nonlinear sigma model that exhibits a symmetry enforcing color-kinematics duality. Remarkably, the associated kinematic algebra originates directly from the Poincare algebra in higher dimensions. Applying the same construction to gravity yields a new quartic action for Born-Infeld theory and, applied once more, a cubic action for the special Galileon theory. Since the nonlinear sigma model and special Galileon are subtly encoded in the cubic sectors of Yang-Mills theory and gravity, respectively, their double copy relationship is automatic.
Corpus Conversion Service: A Machine Learning Platform to Ingest Documents at Scale

Over the past few decades, the amount of scientific articles and technical literature has increased exponentially in size. Consequently, there is a great need for systems that can ingest these documents at scale and make the contained knowledge discoverable. Unfortunately, both the format of these documents (e.g. the PDF format or bitmap images) as well as the presentation of the data (e.g. complex tables) make the extraction of qualitative and quantitive data extremely challenging. In this paper, we present a modular, cloud-based platform to ingest documents at scale. This platform, called the Corpus Conversion Service (CCS), implements a pipeline which allows users to parse and annotate documents (i.e. collect ground-truth), train machine-learning classification algorithms and ultimately convert any type of PDF or bitmap-documents to a structured content representation format. We will show that each of the modules is scalable due to an asynchronous microservice architecture and can therefore handle massive amounts of documents. Furthermore, we will show that our capability to gather groundtruth is accelerated by machine-learning algorithms by at least one order of magnitude. This allows us to both gather large amounts of ground-truth in very little time and obtain very good precision/recall metrics in the range of 99% with regard to content conversion to structured output. The CCS platform is currently deployed on IBM internal infrastructure and serving more than 250 active users for knowledge-engineering project engagements.
Thermal conductivity of ternary III-V semiconductor alloys: The role of mass difference and long-range order

Thermal transport in bulk ternary III-V arsenide (III-As) semiconductor alloys was investigated using equilibrium molecular dynamics with optimized Albe-Tersoff empirical interatomic potentials. Existing potentials for binary AlAs, GaAs, and InAs were optimized to match experimentally obtained acoustic-phonon dispersions and temperature-dependent thermal conductivity. Calculations of thermal transport in ternary III-Vs commonly employ the virtual-crystal approximation (VCA), where the structure is assumed to be a random alloy and all group-III atoms (cations) are treated as if they have an effective weighted-average mass. Here, we showed that it is critical to treat atomic masses explicitly and that the thermal conductivity obtained with explicit atomic masses differs considerably from the value obtained with the average VCA cation mass. The larger the difference between the cation masses, the poorer the VCA prediction for thermal conductivity. The random-alloy assumption in the VCA is also challenged because X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy show order in InGaAs, InAlAs, and GaAlAs epilayers. We calculated thermal conductivity for three common types of order (CuPt-B, CuAu-I, and triple-period-A) and showed that the experimental results for In0.53Ga0.47As and In0.52Al0.48As, which are lattice matched to the InP substrate, can be reproduced in molecular dynamics simulation with 2% and 8% of random disorder, respectively. Based on our results, thermal transport in ternary III-As alloys appears to be governed by the competition between mass-difference scattering, which is much more pronounced than the VCA suggests, and the long-range order that these alloys support.
Method of Green’s Potentials for Elliptic PDEs in Domains with Random Apertures

Problems with topological uncertainties appear in many fields ranging from nano-device engineering to the design of bridges. In many of such problems, a part of the domains boundaries is subjected to random perturbations making inefficient conventional schemes that rely on discretization of the whole domain. In this paper, we study elliptic PDEs in domains with boundaries comprised of a deterministic part and random apertures, and apply the method of modified potentials with Green’s kernels defined on the deterministic part of the domain. This approach allows to reduce the dimension of the original differential problem by reformulating it as a boundary integral equation posed on the random apertures only. The multilevel Monte Carlo method is then applied to this modified integral equation and its optimal $$\epsilon ^{-2}$$ asymptotical complexity is shown. Finally, we provide the qualitative analysis of the proposed technique and support it with numerical results.
Inverse anisotropic diffusion from power density measurements in two dimensions

This paper concerns the reconstruction of an anisotropic diffusion tensor γ = (γij)1 ⩽ i, j ⩽ 2 from knowledge of internal functionals of the form γ∇ui · ∇uj with ui for 1 ⩽ i ⩽ I solutions of the elliptic equation ∇ · γ∇ui = 0 on a two-dimensional bounded domain with appropriate boundary conditions. We show that for I = 4 and appropriately chosen boundary conditions, γ may uniquely and stably be reconstructed from such internal functionals, which appear in coupled-physics inverse problems involving the ultrasound modulation of electrical or optical coefficients. Explicit reconstruction procedures for the diffusion tensor are presented and implemented numerically.
Classification with high-dimensional sparse samples

The task of the binary classification problem is to determine which of two distributions has generated a length-n test sequence. The two distributions are unknown; two training sequences of length TV, one from each distribution, are observed. The distributions share an alphabet of size m, which is significantly larger than n and N. How does Ν,η,ηι affect the probability of classification error? We characterize the achievable error rate in a high-dimensional setting in which Ν,η,ηι all tend to infinity, under the assumption that probability of any symbol is Ο(m−1). The results are: 1) There exists an asymptotically consistent classifier if and only if m = o(min{N2, Nn}). This extends the previous consistency result in [1] to the case N ≠ n. 2) For the sparse sample case where max{n, N} = o(m), finer results are obtained: The best achievable probability of error decays as — log(P e ) = J min {N2, Nn}(l +o(l))/m with J > 0. 3) A weighted coincidence-based classifier has non-zero generalized error exponent J. 4) The l 2 -norm based classifier has J = 0.
Spectral Hardness Decay with Respect to Fluence in BATSE Gamma-Ray Bursts

We have analyzed the evolution of the spectral hardness parameter Epk (the maximum of the νFν spectrum) as a function of fluence in gamma-ray bursts. We fit 41 pulses within 26 bursts with the trend reported by Liang & Kargatis, which found that Epk decays exponentially with respect to photon fluence Φ(t). We also fit these pulses with a slight modification of this trend, where Epk decays linearly with energy fluence. In both cases, we found the set of 41 pulses to be consistent with the trend. For the latter trend, which we believe to be more physical, the distribution of the decay constant Φ0 is roughly lognormal, where the mean of log10 Φ0 is 1.75 ± 0.07 and the FWHM of log10 Φ0 is 1.0 ± 0.1. Regarding an earlier reported invariance in Φ0 among different pulses in a single burst, we found probabilities of 0.49-0.84 (depending on the test used) that such invariance would occur by coincidence, most likely because of the narrow distribution of Φ0 values among pulses.
Evolution of internal granular structure at the flow-arrest transition

The evolution of the internal granular structure in shear-arrested and shear-flowing states of granular materials is characterized using fabric tensors as descriptors of the internal contact and force networks. When a dilute system of frictional grains is subjected to a constant pressure and shear stress, the bulk stress ratio is well-predicted from the anisotropy of its contact and force networks during transient flow prior to steady shear flow or shear arrest. Although the onset of shear arrest is a stochastic process, the fabric tensors upon arrest are distributed around nearly equal contributions of force and contact network anisotropy to the bulk stress ratio. The distribution becomes seemingly narrower with increasing system size. The anisotropy of the contact network in shear-arrested states is reminiscent of the fabric anisotropy observed in shear-jammed packings.
Interfacial ion solvation: Obtaining the thermodynamic limit from molecular simulations

Inferring properties of macroscopic solutions from molecular simulations is complicated by the limited size of systems that can be feasibly examined with a computer. When long-ranged electrostatic interactions are involved, the resulting finite size effects can be substantial and may attenuate very slowly with increasing system size, as shown by previous work on dilute ions in bulk aqueous solution. Here we examine corrections for such effects, with an emphasis on solvation near interfaces. Our central assumption follows the perspective of Hunenberger and McCammon [J. Chem. Phys. 110, 1856 (1999)]: Long-wavelength solvent response underlying finite size effects should be well described by reduced models like dielectric continuum theory, whose size dependence can be calculated straightforwardly. Applied to an ion in a periodic slab of liquid coexisting with vapor, this approach yields a finite size correction for solvation free energies that differs in important ways from results previously derived for bulk solution. For a model polar solvent, we show that this new correction quantitatively accounts for the variation of solvation free energy with volume and aspect ratio of the simulation cell. Correcting periodic slab results for an aqueous system requires an additional accounting for the solvent’s intrinsic charge asymmetry, which shifts electric potentials in a size-dependent manner. The accuracy of these finite size corrections establishes a simple method for a posteriori extrapolation to the thermodynamic limit and also underscores the realism of dielectric continuum theory down to the nanometer scale.Inferring properties of macroscopic solutions from molecular simulations is complicated by the limited size of systems that can be feasibly examined with a computer. When long-ranged electrostatic interactions are involved, the resulting finite size effects can be substantial and may attenuate very slowly with increasing system size, as shown by previous work on dilute ions in bulk aqueous solution. Here we examine corrections for such effects, with an emphasis on solvation near interfaces. Our central assumption follows the perspective of Hunenberger and McCammon [J. Chem. Phys. 110, 1856 (1999)]: Long-wavelength solvent response underlying finite size effects should be well described by reduced models like dielectric continuum theory, whose size dependence can be calculated straightforwardly. Applied to an ion in a periodic slab of liquid coexisting with vapor, this approach yields a finite size correction for solvation free energies that differs in important ways from results previously derived for bul...
Surpassing the ratios conjecture in the 1-level density of Dirichlet L-functions

We study the $1$-level density of low-lying zeros of Dirichlet $L$-functions in the family of all characters modulo $q$, with $Q/2 < q\leq Q$. For test functions whose Fourier transform is supported in $(-3/2, 3/2)$, we calculate this quantity beyond the square-root cancellation expansion arising from the $L$-function Ratios Conjecture of Conrey, Farmer and Zirnbauer. We discover the existence of a new lower-order term which is not predicted by this powerful conjecture. This is the first family where the 1-level density is determined well enough to see a term which is not predicted by the Ratios Conjecture, and proves that the exponent of the error term $Q^{-\frac 12 +\epsilon}$ in the Ratios Conjecture is best possible. We also give more precise results when the support of the Fourier Transform of the test function is restricted to the interval $[-1,1]$. Finally we show how natural conjectures on the distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions allow one to extend the support. The most powerful conjecture is Montgomery's, which implies that the Ratios Conjecture's prediction holds for any finite support up to an error $Q^{-\frac 12 +\epsilon}$.
Facilitating Follow-up of LIGO–Virgo Events Using Rapid Sky Localization

We discuss an algorithm for accurate and very low-latency (<1 s) localization of gravitational-wave (GW) sources using only the relative times of arrival, relative phases, and relative signal-to-noise ratios for pairs of detectors. The algorithm is independent of distances and masses to leading order, and can be generalized to all discrete (as opposed to stochastic and continuous) sources detected by ground-based detector networks. Our approach is similar to that of BAYESTAR with a few modifications, which result in increased computational efficiency. For the LIGO two-detector configuration (Hanford+Livingston) operating in O1 we find a median 50% (90%) localization of 143 deg2 (558 deg2) for binary neutron stars. We use our algorithm to explore the improvement in localization resulting from loud events, finding that the loudest out of the first 4 (or 10) events reduces the median sky-localization area by a factor of 1.9 (3.0) for the case of two GW detectors, and 2.2 (4.0) for three detectors. We also consider the case of multi-messenger joint detections in both the gravitational and the electromagnetic radiation, and show that joint localization can offer significant improvements (e.g., in the case of LIGO and Fermi/GBM joint detections). We show that a prior on the binary inclination, potentially arising from GRB observations, has a negligible effect on GW localization. Our algorithm is simple, fast, and accurate, and may be of particular utility in the development of multi-messenger astronomy.
The Penrose Inequality and Positive Mass Theorem with Charge for Manifolds with Asymptotically Cylindrical Ends

We establish the charged Penrose inequality $$\begin{aligned} m\ge \frac{1}{2}\left( \rho + \frac{q^2}{\rho } \right) \end{aligned}$$ for time-symmetric initial data sets having an outermost minimal surface boundary and finitely many asymptotically cylindrical ends, with an appropriate rigidity statement. This is accomplished by a doubling argument based on the work of Weinstein and Yamada (Commun Math Phys 257:703–723, 2005). arXiv:math/0405602 ) and a subsequent application of the ordinary charged Penrose inequality as established by Khuri et al. (Contemp Math 653:219–226, 2015. arXiv:1308.3771 ; J Differ Geom 106:451–498, 2017. arXiv:1409.3271 ). Furthermore, the techniques used in the aforementioned proof allow for an alternative proof of the positive mass theorem with charge for such manifolds, a result originally obtained in Bartnik and Chrusciel (Journal fur die reine und angewandte Mathematik 579:13–73, 2005).
Collective modes and terahertz near-field response of superconductors

This paper shows how to visualize collective modes of superconductors using near field optical techniques
Discriminating Uranium Isotopes Based on Fission Signatures Induced by Delayed Neutrons

The use of active interrogation to induce delayed neutron emission is a well-established technique for the characterization of special nuclear materials. Delayed neutrons have isotope-characteristic spectral and temporal signatures, which provide the basis for isotope identification. However, in bulk materials that contain an appreciable fissile (e.g., ${}^{235}\mathrm{U}$ or ${}^{233}\mathrm{U}$) fraction, such as highly enriched uranium (HEU), delayed neutrons have a high probability of inducing additional fissions. As a result, the overall delayed neutron signature consists of two distinct components: the ``primary'' delayed neutrons (emitted directly by fission fragments) and the ``secondary prompt'' fission neutrons produced in fission induced by primary delayed neutrons. These prompt products differ from ``primary'' delayed neutrons both in their energy spectra and in the presence of coincident radiation released by the parent fission event. The presence and relative quantity of prompt products from delayed fission depend on the cross section of the material in the energy range of delayed neutrons, which may differ significantly between isotopes, thus providing an exploitable means for isotope differentiation. In this work, we demonstrate two experimental approaches for discriminating between ${}^{235}\mathrm{U}$ and ${}^{238}\mathrm{U}$ isotopes based on the measurement of delayed neutron-induced fission products. First, HEU and depleted uranium objects are differentiated through the detection of high-energy prompt neutrons from delayed fission using both recoil-based organic liquid scintillators and thermalization spectra from a custom-built capture-gated composite detector. Secondly, coincident radiation measurements are used as the basis for discrimination by comparing the overall rates and time evolution of fission events when delayed neutrons are present.
Thick Branes in Extra Dimensions and Suppressed Dark Couplings

The nature of dark matter (DM) and how it may interact with the various fields of the Standard Model (SM) remains a mystery. In this paper we show that the interaction between new light dark matter mediators and the SM particles can be naturally suppressed if one employs a single, flat extra dimension (ED). In this setup, the SM fields are localized in a finite width ‘fat’ brane, similar to models of Universal Extra Dimensions (UED), while DM, in turn, is confined to a thin brane at the opposite end of the ED interval. Including brane localized kinetic terms on the fat brane for the mediator fields, the resulting coupling between the SM and these light mediators can be several orders of magnitude smaller than the corresponding ones between the mediators and DM which we assume to be a typical gauge coupling. We investigate the implications of this scenario for both vector (i.e, dark photon, DP) and scalar mediator fields in the 5-D bulk. In this setup kinetic mixing, which is usually employed to suppress light mediator couplings, is not required. Here we assume that the SM particles couple to the DP via their B − L charges while the DP couples to the DM via a dark charge. Both the vector DP couplings and the corresponding Higgs portal couplings with the SM are shown to be natural small in magnitude with a size dependent on ratio of the 5-D compactification radius, R−1 ∼ 0.1-1 GeV, and the SM brane thickness, L−1 ∼ 2-10 TeV, a range chosen to avoid LHC and other experimental constraints. In this framework one can obtain the observed value of the DM relic abundance for a wide range of parameter choices, while the constrains due to direct DM detection and the invisible width of the Higgs do not impose significant challenges to the model. Finally, this mechanism can lead to distinct signatures in both present and upcoming experiments as it combines some common features of UED and DP models in a single ED setup.
On Diffusive 2D Fokker-Planck-Navier-Stokes Systems

We study kinetic models of polymeric fluids. We introduce a notion of solutions which is based on moments of polymeric distributions. We prove the global existence and uniqueness of a large class of initial data for diffusive systems of kinetic equations coupled to fluid equations. It seems that this is the first result proving large data global well-posedness of strong solutions of such systems. As a corollary, we obtain a rigorous derivation of Oldroyd-B closure. We also prove the decay of free energy for all the systems considered.
Case study: coordinating among multiple semiotic resources to solve complex physics problems

This work examines student meaning-making in undergraduate physics problem-solving. We use a social semiotic perspective to sketch a theoretical framework. The social semiotic approach focuses on all types of meaning-making practices that are accomplished through different semiotic modes that include visual, verbal (or aural), written and gestural modes and language, text, algebra, diagrams, sketches, graphs, body movements, signs, and gestures are examples for semiotic resources. We use the developed theoretical framework to investigate how semiotic resources might be combined to solve physics problems. Data for this study are drawn from an upper-division Electromagnetism I course and a student ("Larry") who is engaged in an individual oral exam. We identify the semiotic and conceptual resources that Larry uses. We use a resource graph representation to show Larry's coordination of resources in his problem solving activity. Larry's case exemplifies coordination between multiple semiotic resources with different disciplinary affordances to build up compound representations. Our analysis of this case illustrates a novel way of thinking about what it means to solve physics problems using semiotic resources.
Planet-driven Spiral Arms in Protoplanetary Disks. II. Implications

We examine whether various characteristics of planet-driven spiral arms can be used to constrain the masses of unseen planets and their positions within their disks. By carrying out two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations varying planet mass and disk gas temperature, we find that a larger number of spiral arms form with a smaller planet mass and a lower disk temperature. A planet excites two or more spiral arms interior to its orbit for a range of disk temperatures characterized by the disk aspect ratio , whereas exterior to a planet's orbit multiple spiral arms can form only in cold disks with . Constraining the planet mass with the pitch angle of spiral arms requires accurate disk temperature measurements that might be challenging even with ALMA. However, the property that the pitch angle of planet-driven spiral arms decreases away from the planet can be a powerful diagnostic to determine whether the planet is located interior or exterior to the observed spirals. The arm-to-arm separations increase as a function of planet mass, consistent with previous studies; however, the exact slope depends on disk temperature as well as the radial location where the arm-to-arm separations are measured. We apply these diagnostics to the spiral arms seen in MWC 758 and Elias 2–27. As shown in Bae et al., planet-driven spiral arms can create concentric rings and gaps, which can produce a more dominant observable signature than spiral arms under certain circumstances. We discuss the observability of planet-driven spiral arms versus rings and gaps.
Understanding Neural Abstractive Summarization Models via Uncertainty

An advantage of seq2seq abstractive summarization models is that they generate text in a free-form manner, but this flexibility makes it difficult to interpret model behavior. In this work, we analyze summarization decoders in both blackbox and whitebox ways by studying on the entropy, or uncertainty, of the model’s token-level predictions. For two strong pre-trained models, PEGASUS and BART on two summarization datasets, we find a strong correlation between low prediction entropy and where the model copies tokens rather than generating novel text. The decoder’s uncertainty also connects to factors like sentence position and syntactic distance between adjacent pairs of tokens, giving a sense of what factors make a context particularly selective for the model’s next output token. Finally, we study the relationship of decoder uncertainty and attention behavior to understand how attention gives rise to these observed effects in the model. We show that uncertainty is a useful perspective for analyzing summarization and text generation models more broadly.
AGGREGATION OF SiC-X GRAINS IN SUPERNOVA EJECTA

We present a model for the formation of silicon carbide aggregates within the expanding and cooling supernova remnant. SiC type-X (SiC-X) grains measured in the laboratory at a high spatial resolution have been found to be aggregates of smaller crystals which are isotopically homogenous. The initial condensation of SiC in the ejecta occurs within an interior dense shell of material which is created by a reverse shock which rebounds from the core-envelope interface. A subsequent reverse shock accelerates the grains forward, but the gas drag from the ejecta on the rapidly moving particles limits their travel distance. By observing the effects of gas drag on the travel distance of grains, we propose that supernova grain aggregates form from material that condensed in a highly localized region, which satisfies the observational evidence of isotopic homogeneity in SiC-X grains.
MutualNet: Adaptive ConvNet via Mutual Learning from Network Width and Resolution

We propose the width-resolution mutual learning method (MutualNet) to train a network that is executable at dynamic resource constraints to achieve adaptive accuracy-efficiency trade-offs at runtime. Our method trains a cohort of sub-networks with different widths (i.e., number of channels in a layer) using different input resolutions to mutually learn multi-scale representations for each sub-network. It achieves consistently better ImageNet top-1 accuracy over the state-of-the-art adaptive network US-Net under different computation constraints, and outperforms the best compound scaled MobileNet in EfficientNet by 1.5%. The superiority of our method is also validated on COCO object detection and instance segmentation as well as transfer learning. Surprisingly, the training strategy of MutualNet can also boost the performance of a single network, which substantially outperforms the powerful AutoAugmentation in both efficiency (GPU search hours: 15000 vs. 0) and accuracy (ImageNet: 77.6% vs. 78.6%). Code is available at https://github.com/taoyang1122/MutualNet.
The Planet as Exoplanet Analog Spectrograph (PEAS): design and first-light

Exoplanets are abundant in our galaxy and yet characterizing them remains a technical challenge. Solar System planets provide an opportunity to test the practical limitations of exoplanet observations with high signal-to-noise data that we cannot access for exoplanets. However, data on Solar System planets differ from exoplanets in that Solar System planets are spatially resolved while exoplanets are unresolved point-sources. We present a novel instrument designed to observe Solar System planets as though they are exoplanets, the Planet as Exoplanet Analog Spectrograph (PEAS). PEAS consists of a dedicated 0.5-m telescope and off-the-shelf optics, located at Lick Observatory. PEAS uses an integrating sphere to disk-integrate light from the Solar System planets, producing spatially mixed light more similar to the spectra we can obtain from exoplanets. This paper describes the general system design and early results of the PEAS instrument.
Moderating Effects of Retail Operations and Hard-Sell Sales Techniques on Salesperson’s Interpersonal Skills and Customer Repurchase Intention

Salesperson’s interpersonal skills have always played an important role in influencing various stages of customer’s purchase decision. With the increase in retail outlets and merchandisers, retail operations have taken a pivotal role in influencing the salesperson’s sales practices and customer’s purchase decisions. This study tries to examine the influence of retail operations and hard-selling strategies on the relationship between salesperson’s interpersonal skills and customer repurchase intention. Salesperson’s interpersonal skills are the trained and tacit competencies that a salesperson employs to improve customer relationship and sales performance. Many organizations prefer skill training as a strategic approach to increase sales. Though successful in its objective, salesperson’s skill training fails to attract repetitive purchases due to unavoidable extraneous factors. It has become a necessity to understand the role of extraneous factors like retail operations and hard-selling sales strategies on sales performance . This study examines the negative influence of retail operations on the relationship between salesperson’s interpersonal skills and customer repurchase intention. The findings suggest that retail operations significantly moderate the relationship between salesperson’s interpersonal skills and customer repurchase intention. We also find that hard-sell sales techniques play a significant moderating role in negatively influencing customer repurchase intention. This study has important implications for retailers and sales managers.
A class of functional inequalities and their applications to fourth-order nonlinear parabolic equations

We study a class of fourth order nonlinear parabolic equations which include the thin-film equation and the quantum drift-diffusion model as special cases. We investigate these equations by first developing functional inequalities of the type $ \int_\Omega u^{2\gamma-\alpha-\beta}\Delta u^\alpha\Delta u^\beta dx \geq c\int_\Omega|\Delta u^\gamma |^2dx $, which seem to be of interest on their own right.
SRACARE: Secure Remote Attestation with Code Authentication and Resilience Engine

Recent technological advancements have enabled proliferated use of small embedded and IoT devices for collecting, processing, and transferring the security-critical information and user data. This exponential use has acted as a catalyst in the recent growth of sophisticated attacks such as the replay, man-in-the-middle, and malicious code modification to slink, leak, tweak or exploit the security-critical information in malevolent activities. Therefore, secure communication and software state assurance (at run-time and boot-time) of the device has emerged as open security problems. Furthermore, these devices need to have an appropriate recovery mechanism to bring them back to the known-good operational state. Previous researchers have demonstrated independent methods for attack detection and safeguard. However, the majority of them lack in providing onboard system recovery and secure communication techniques. To bridge this gap, this manuscript proposes SRACARE - a framework that utilizes the custom lightweight, secure communication protocol that performs remote/local attestation, and secure boot with an onboard resilience recovery mechanism to protect the devices from the above-mentioned attacks. The prototype employs an efficient lightweight, low-power 32-bit RISC-V processor, secure communication protocol, code authentication, and resilience engine running on the Artix 7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board. This work presents the performance evaluation and state-of-the-art comparison results, which shows promising resilience to attacks and demonstrate the novel protection mechanism with onboard recovery. The framework achieves these with only 8% performance overhead and a very small increase in hardware-software footprint.
Viewing communities as coupled oscillators: elementary forms from Lotka and Volterra to Kuramoto

Ecosystems and their embedded ecological communities are almost always by definition collections of oscillating populations. This is apparent given the qualitative reality that oscillations emerge from consumer-resource interactions, which are the elementary building blocks for ecological communities. It is also likely always the case that oscillatory consumer-resource pairs will be connected to one another via trophic cross-feeding with shared resources or via competitive interactions among resources. Thus, one approach to understanding the dynamics of communities conceptualizes them as collections of oscillators coupled in various arrangements. Here we look to the pioneering work of Kuramoto on coupled oscillators and ask to what extent can his insights and approaches be translated to ecological systems. We explore the four ecologically significant coupling arrangements of the simple case of three oscillator systems with both the Kuramoto model and with the classical Lotka-Volterra equations. Our results show that the six-dimensional Lotka-Volterra systems behave strikingly similarly to that of the corresponding Kuramoto systems across all coupling combinations. This qualitative similarity in the results between these two approaches suggests that a vast literature on coupled oscillators may be relevant in furthering our understanding of ecosystem and community organization.
The Jeffords Effect

Abstract In May 2001, Senator James Jeffords left the Republican Party and tipped control of the U.S. Senate to the Democrats. This paper uses the surprise event to demonstrate what I term the “Jeffords effect”: changes in the political landscape have large effects on the market value of firms. I use a firm’s soft‐money donations to the national parties as the measure of how the firm aligns itself politically. In this event study, a firm lost .8 percent of market capitalization the week of Jeffords’s switch for every $250,000 it gave to the Republicans in the previous election cycle. On the basis of the point estimates, the stock price gain associated with Democratic donations is smaller than the loss associated with Republican donations, but the estimates are consistent with the effects being equal and opposite. The results withstand several robustness checks, and the effects appear to persist over time.
What is Information Ethics

This paper put forwards a theory of information ethics based on the concept of an 'information access state'; an information access state is a relation between a person or persons and some information. I argue that this framework is preferable to those theories put forward by Luciano Floridi (2002) and Joroen van den Hoven (1995), because it focuses on the importance of information to persons and it allows for the positive ethical value of both access to information and the denial of access to information. This “information access account” allows us to capture a broader range of practical ethical issues with regard to information than either of these rival theories.
The Principal's Moral Hazard: Constraints on the Use of Incentives in Hierarchy

Pure incentive schemes rely on the agent’s self-interest, rather than more coercive control, to motivate subordinates. Yet most organizations, and in particular public agencies, rely very little on pure incentive contracts and instead use coercive mechanisms of monitoring and sanctioning that many theorists find objectionable. We use principal-agency theory to investigate the problem. Principal-agency theory has tacitly assumed throughout that it is in the principal’s interests to find a set of incentives that induce efficient levels of effort from the agent. We show that this is not necessarily the case. We identify a problem we denote as ‘‘the principal’s moral hazard constraint’’ in which bonuses large enough to produce the efficient incentive effect are prohibitively expensive for the principal. Potential solutions to this problem—involving penalization or joint ownership—are unavailable in the public sphere. This means that for a large class of control problems in agencies, the principal’s self-interest will result in the inefficient use of monitoring and oversight rather than outcome-contingent incentives. Although monitoring is often thought of as resulting from the agent’s moral hazard, it can just as reasonably be seen as resulting from the principal’s moral hazard.
Information Content of Insider Trades before and after the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act

ABSTRACT: This study examines the information content of Form 4 filings under the more timely disclosure regime introduced by Section 403 of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). Abnormal returns and trading volumes around filings of insider stock purchases are significantly greater after SOX than before. Abnormal trading volumes around filings of insider sales are also greater post‐SOX, on average, but stock returns are not more negative. However, once controlling for pre‐planned transactions, reporting lag, litigation risk, and news following insider trades, I find a negative association between returns around filings of insider sales and SOX. Overall, the evidence suggests that the prompt public disclosures about insider transactions mandated by the new rule are relevant to the pricing of securities. The results are also consistent with SOX and regulatory actions reducing the incentives to sell ahead of privately known negative news.
R&D policy with layers of economic integration

Abstract This paper examines whether the optimal unilateral R&D policy for an open economy is a subsidy or a tax. It constructs a general equilibrium model with three successive layers of international integration: (a) trade in goods, (b) trade in technologies with international R&D spillovers and (c) internationally-coordinated R&D policy. Trade in technologies introduces the possibility that an R&D subsidy will have such strong, negative terms-of-trade effects that it harms domestic welfare. Numerical simulations of the OECD show this is a possibility for the US and Japan. With international R&D spillovers a domestic R&D subsidy may reduce domestic innovation.
Transnational corporations: international citizens or new sovereigns?

The expanding public roles of transnational corporations in private foreign aid, in self-regulation and private certification of business practices, not to mention helping shape public policy, can be viewed as evidence of corporate citizenship and social responsibility or as a threat to democratic decision making and national sovereignty. Dennis A Rondinelli suggests that new systems of countervailing power may be needed to encourage further corporate citizenship while preventing potential abuses of political and economic power.
Externalities and Taxation of Supplemental Insurance: A Study of Medicare and Medigap

Most health insurance policies use cost-sharing to reduce excess utilization. The purchase of supplemental insurance can blunt the impact of this cost-sharing, potentially increasing utilization and exerting a negative externality on the primary insurance provider. This paper estimates the effect of private Medigap supplemental insurance on public Medicare spending using Medigap premium discontinuities in local medical markets that span state boundaries. Using administrative data on the universe of Medicare beneficiaries, we estimate that Medigap increases an individual’s Medicare spending by 22.2%. We find that the take-up of Medigap is price sensitive with an estimated demand elasticity of -1.8. Using these estimates, we calculate that a 15% tax on Medigap premiums would generate combined tax revenue and cost savings of $12.9 billion annually. A Pigouvian tax would generate combined annual savings of $31.6 billion.
Simultaneous Auctions with Synergies

Abstract Motivated by recent auctions of licenses for the radio-frequency spectrum, we consider situations where multiple objects are auctioned simultaneously by means of a second-price, sealed-bid auction. For some buyers, called global bidders, the value of multiple objects exceeds the sum of the objects' values separately. Others, called local bidders, are interested in only one object. In a simple independent private values setting, we characterize an equilibrium that is symmetric among the global bidders and derive some comparative statics results. In particular, the addition of global bidders leads to less aggressive bidding. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: D44.
Semi-Supervised Learning with GANs for Device-Free Fingerprinting Indoor Localization

Device-free wireless indoor localization is a key enabling technology for the Internet of Things (IoT). Fingerprint-based indoor localization techniques are a commonly used solution. This paper proposes a semi-supervised, generative adversarial network (GAN)-based device-free fingerprinting indoor localization system. The proposed system uses a small amount of labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data (i.e., semi-supervised), thus considerably reducing the expensive data labeling effort. Experimental results show that, as compared to the state-of-the-art supervised scheme, the proposed semi-supervised system achieves comparable performance with equal, sufficient amount of labeled data, and significantly superior performance with equal, highly limited amount of labeled data. Besides, the proposed semi-supervised system retains its performance over a broad range of the amount of labeled data. The interactions between the generator, discriminator, and classifier models of the proposed GAN-based system are visually examined and discussed. A mathematical description of the proposed system is also presented.
Strategic Government Spending in South Korea and Taiwan: Lessons for Emergent Democracies

Objectives. How is government spending used strategically in South Korea and Taiwan? As nations generally considered to have weathered democratization, government allocations in South Korea and Taiwan are instructive on how spending may be used strategically without undermining democratization. Methods. The similar sociocultural, historical, political, and economic experiences of the two nations underlie a most-similar-systems approach to study how their differences influence diversity in strategic spending and, correspondingly, political outcomes such as size of the government party in the legislature. This article evaluates defense and civilian expenditures for South Korea and Taiwan from 1975 to 2006. Results. Three results are interesting. First, different elections—legislative elections in South Korea, presidential elections in Taiwan—lead to increases in spending. Second, in both nations, defense spending increases in election years but not social spending; however, defense spending benefits the government-party in the legislature in South Korea but not in Taiwan. Third, when the strategic uses of spending are accounted for, democratization does not directly affect allocations. Conclusions. These results explicate that government spending is a viable resource for party building in new democracies; however, the results also underscore that governing parties in new democracies benefit from spending only insofar as it is used to build the nation's or party's strengths—not undermine the opposition—under competitive elections.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Moral Agency and the Role of Victims in Reparations Programs

Despite the growing interest in reparations, at the domestic and international level, little attention has been given to the role of victims in the design and implementation of reparations programs. Instead, most programs and commentators place emphasis upon the apology, recompense, or restitution required by former wrongdoers rather than the restoration and recovery of victims. This prevailing approach neglects the critical role that communities and individuals suffering from past abuses should play in order to reestablish their personal well being and societal standing. This methodology replicates the past subordination of victims by rendering them the passive recipients of government actions that they have little or no control over. Over the past fifty years, reparations programs have varied in their overall quality and in their attention to this issue. This article examines some of the most well known domestic and international reparations programs and evaluates them based on how well they facilitate victims’ participation in their own recovery. The analysis concludes that programs that enable victims to play a part in critical societal institutions offer a more thorough remedy to past harms by fostering victims’ moral agency. Moral Agency And The Role of Victims in Reparations Programs 3
The Same NEPA Proposal or Connected NEPA Actions?: Why the Bureau of Land Management's New Oil Shale Rules and Regulations Should be Set Aside

In November 2008, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) finalized a rule opening public land in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming for oil shale leasing and finalized regulations creating policies and procedures for that leasing. The rule and regulations are the BLM’s attempt to fulfill their mandate under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to create a commercial oil shale leasing program in the western United States. As federal actions significantly affecting the environment, both the rule and regulations, are subject to the procedural requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The purpose of this Note is to point to two possible errors by the BLM in fulfilling NEPA’s procedural requirements. These procedural errors are fodder for citizen-plaintiffs hoping to have the Bush-era rule and regulations judicially set aside and subsequently abandoned by the Obama Administration.
Density of generalized Verhulst process and Bessel process with constant drift

In this paper, we derive exact closed-form density functions of the generalized Verhulst process and the Bessel process with constant drift, which have applications in mathematical biology and queueing theory. We propose a generic probabilistic method for deriving exact closed-form density functions for these two diffusion processes based on a novel application of the exponential measure change in [T. Hurd and A. Kuznetsov, Explicit formulas for Laplace transforms of stochastic integrals, Markov Process. Relat. Fields, 14(2):277–290, 2008], together with formulae in [A. Borodin and P. Salminen, Handbook of Brownian Motion – Facts and Formulae, Birkhauser, Basel, 2015]. Our study generalizes several known results in the literature.
Recognition as a Measure of Learning from Television Commercials.

Recognition has not received extensive acceptance by practitioners as a response variable for learning of television commercials. The authors review some of the distinctions between recall and reco...