cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Atomic Layer Deposition Niobium Nitride Films for High- Q Resonators

Niobium nitride (NbN) is a useful material for fabricating detectors because of its high critical temperature and relatively high kinetic inductance. In particular, NbN can be used to fabricate nanowire detectors and mm-wave transmission lines. When deposited, NbN is usually sputtered, leaving room for concern about uniformity at small thicknesses. We present atomic layer deposition niobium nitride (ALD NbN) as an alternative technique that allows for precision control of deposition parameters such as film thickness, stage temperature, and nitrogen composition. Atomic-scale control over film thickness admits a high degree of uniformity for films 4–30 nm thick; control over deposition temperature gives rise to growth rate changes, which can be used to optimize film thickness and critical temperature. In order to characterize ALD NbN in the radio-frequency regime, we construct single-layer microwave resonators and test their performance as a function of stage temperature and input power. ALD processes can admit high resonator quality factors, with $$\ge 43\%$$ of resonators above $$Q_{\mathrm{i}} = 10^6,$$ which in turn increase detector multiplexing capabilities. Furthermore, we find critical temperatures in the range of 7.5–10.9 K that vary as a function of cycle count and deposition temperature.
Machine learning in the string landscape

We utilize machine learning to study the string landscape. Deep data dives and conjecture generation are proposed as useful frameworks for utilizing machine learning in the landscape, and examples of each are presented. A decision tree accurately predicts the number of weak Fano toric threefolds arising from reflexive polytopes, each of which determines a smooth F-theory compactification, and linear regression generates a previously proven conjecture for the gauge group rank in an ensemble of $$ \frac{4}{3}\times 2.96\times {10}^{755} $$ F-theory compactifications. Logistic regression generates a new conjecture for when E 6 arises in the large ensemble of F-theory compactifications, which is then rigorously proven. This result may be relevant for the appearance of visible sectors in the ensemble. Through conjecture generation, machine learning is useful not only for numerics, but also for rigorous results.
The Distribution of Burst Energy and Shock Parameters for Gamma-Ray Bursts

We calculate the luminosity function for gamma-ray burst afterglows in some fixed observed frequency band and at some fixed elapsed time in observer frame (tobs) in two models—one in which the explosion takes place in a uniform density medium and another in which the density falls off as inverse square (expected for stellar winds). For photon energies greater than about 500 eV and tobs 103 s, the afterglow flux is independent of interstellar medium (ISM) density and luminosity functions for wind and uniform ISM are identical. We deduce from the width of the observed X-ray afterglow distribution, 5 hr after the burst, that the FWHM of the distribution for isotropic energy in explosion and the fractional energy in electrons (e) are each less than about 1 order of magnitude and the FWHM for the electron energy index is 0.6 or less.
Photoinduced magnetism in the ferromagnetic semiconductors

We study the enhancement of the magnetic transition temperature Tc due to incident light in ferromagnetic semiconductors such as EuS. The photoexcited carriers mediate an extra ferromagnetic interaction due to the coupling with the localized magnetic moments increasing the Tc. The Hamiltonian consists of a Heisenberg model for the localized moments and an interaction term between the photoexcited carriers and the localized moments. The model predicts a small enhancement of the transition temperature, about a fraction of a degree K, in semi-quantitative agreement with the experiments.
MULTI-VIEW STEREO WITH SEMANTIC PRIORS

Abstract. Patch-based stereo is nowadays a commonly used image-based technique for dense 3D reconstruction in large scale multi-view applications. The typical steps of such a pipeline can be summarized in stereo pair selection, depth map computation, depth map refinement and, finally, fusion in order to generate a complete and accurate representation of the scene in 3D. In this study, we aim to support the standard dense 3D reconstruction of scenes as implemented in the open source library OpenMVS by using semantic priors. To this end, during the depth map fusion step, along with the depth consistency check between depth maps of neighbouring views referring to the same part of the 3D scene, we impose extra semantic constraints in order to remove possible errors and selectively obtain segmented point clouds per label, boosting automation towards this direction. In order to reassure semantic coherence between neighbouring views, additional semantic criterions can be considered, aiming to eliminate mismatches of pixels belonging in different classes.
On the nature of the purported common proper motion companions to the exoplanet host star 51 Peg

Greaves (2006) proposed that three red, high proper motion stars within 10° of 51 Peg (NLTT 54007, 54064, and 55547) are co-moving companions to this famous exoplanet host star. While the stars clearly have proper motions similar to 51 Peg, the inferred kinematic parallaxes for these stars produce extremely inconsistent color-magnitude positions 2 to 4 magnitudes below the main sequence. All three stars are likely to be background stars unrelated to 51 Peg (© 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Identifying Microlensing by Binaries

The microlensing monitoring programs have studied large numbers of standard light curves that seem to be due to lensing by a dark point mass. Theory predicts that many microlensing events should display significant deviations from the standard form. Lens binarity, in particular, is expected to be common. So far, however, only a handful of light curves exhibit evidence that the lens is a binary; all of these display dramatic deviations from the standard light curve, exhibiting pronounced multiple peaks, caustic crossings, or both. Binary lens events in which the light curve is less dramatically perturbed should also exist in the data set. Why, then, have we not detected them? The answer may lie in the fact that the perturbations, though often significant, tend to be less distinctive than those associated with caustic crossings. It is therefore possible that some of these more gently perturbed events have been misclassified, and that others have simply been missed. Reliable estimates of the overall detection efficiency, and hence derivation of the fraction of the Galactic halo mass that may be in MACHOs, rely on resolving this issue. Microlensing can also be used to determine the form of the initial mass function (IMF) beyond the solar neighborhood; accurate determination of the IMF also relies on the ability to correctly identify binary light curves. We present a method to determine whether a light curve is due to lensing by a binary. The method works for both gently and dramatically perturbed binary-lens light curves. Our method identifies all degenerate solutions—i.e., all possible lensing events that might have given rise to the observed light curve. It also enables us to eliminate from consideration large ranges of possible false positive identifications associated with light curves that might mimic microlensing by a binary. This method, or a generalization of it, can also be applied to the analysis of light curves that deviate from the standard point-mass lens form because of astronomical effects other than lens binarity.
Stochastic single flux quantum neuromorphic computing using magnetically tunable Josephson junctions

Single flux quantum (SFQ) circuits form a natural neuromorphic technology with SFQ pulses and superconducting transmission lines simulating action potentials and axons, respectively. Here we present a new component, magnetic Josephson junctions, that have a tunablility and re-configurability that was lacking from previous SFQ neuromorphic circuits. The nanoscale magnetic structure acts as a tunable synaptic constituent that modifies the junction critical current. These circuits can operate near the thermal limit where stochastic firing of the neurons is an essential component of the technology. This technology has the ability to create complex neural systems with greater than 1021 neural firings per second with approximately 1 W dissipation.
Variability in Tidal Disruption Events: Gravitationally Unstable Streams

We present simulations of the tidal disruption of a solar mass star by a black hole. These, for the first time, cover the full time evolution of the tidal disruption event, starting well before the initial encounter and continuing until more than 90% of the bound material has returned to the vicinity of the hole. Our results are compared to the analytical prediction for the rate at which tidally stripped gas falls back. We find that, for our chosen parameters, the overall scaling of the fallback rate, , closely follows the canonical power-law. However, our simulations also show that the self-gravity of the tidal stream, which dominates the tidal gravity of the hole at large distances, causes some of the debris to recollapse into bound fragments before returning to the hole. This causes to vary significantly around the average. We discuss the implications of our findings in the context of the event Swift J1644+57.
The intersection between dual potential and sl(2) algebraic spectral problems

The relation between certain Hamiltonians, known as dual, or partner Hamiltonians, under the transformation x →xα has long been used as a method of simplifying spectral problems in quantum mechan...
Inter-Firm Connections, Alliance Formation and the Value Created by Alliances

We investigate the impact of inter-firm connections on alliances. We find that both professional connections and social connections, borne out of board interlocks, employment ties and educational t...
Open‐source molecular modeling software in chemical engineering focusing on the Molecular Simulation Design Framework

Molecular simulation has emerged as an important sub-field of chemical engineering, due in no small part to the leadership of Keith Gubbins. A characteristic of the chemical engineering molecular simulation community is the commitment to freely share simulation codes and other key software components required to perform a molecular simulation under open-source licenses and distribution on public repositories such as GitHub. Here we provide an overview of open-source molecular modeling software in Chemical Engineering, with focus on the Molecular Simulation Design Framework (MoSDeF). MoSDeF is an open-source Python software stack that enables facile use of multiple open-source molecular simulation engines, while at the same time ensuring maximum reproducibility.
LTIatCMU at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Incorporating Multi-Level Features for Multi-Granular Propaganda Span Identification.

In this paper we describe our submission for the task of Propaganda Span Identification in news articles. We introduce a BERT-BiLSTM based span-level propaganda classification model that identifies which token spans within the sentence are indicative of propaganda. The ”multi-granular” model incorporates linguistic knowledge at various levels of text granularity, including word, sentence and document level syntactic, semantic and pragmatic affect features, which significantly improve model performance, compared to its language-agnostic variant. To facilitate better representation learning, we also collect a corpus of 10k news articles, and use it for fine-tuning the model. The final model is a majority-voting ensemble which learns different propaganda class boundaries by leveraging different subsets of incorporated knowledge.
On the parity of the number of partitions with odd multiplicities

Recently, Hirschhorn and the first author considered the parity of the function a(n) which counts the number of integer partitions of n wherein each part appears with odd multiplicity. They derived...
The Bloom Clock for Causality Testing

Testing for causality between events in distributed executions is a fundamental problem. Vector clocks solve this problem but do not scale well. The probabilistic Bloom clock can determine causality between events with lower space, time, and message-space overhead than vector clock; however, predictions suffer from false positives. We give the protocol for the Bloom clock based on Counting Bloom filters and study its properties including the probabilities of a positive outcome and a false positive. We show the results of extensive experiments to determine how these above probabilities vary as a function of the Bloom timestamps of the two events being tested, and to determine the accuracy, precision, and false positive rate of a slice of the execution containing events in the temporal proximity of each other. Based on these experiments, we make recommendations for the setting of the Bloom clock parameters. We postulate the causality spread hypothesis from the application’s perspective to indicate whether Bloom clocks will be suitable for correct predictions with high confidence. The Bloom clock design can serve as a viable space-, time-, and message-space-efficient alternative to vector clocks if false positives can be tolerated by an application.
Explicit Distributed and Localized Model Predictive Control via System Level Synthesis

An explicit Model Predictive Control algorithm for large-scale structured linear systems is presented. We base our results on Distributed and Localized Model Predictive Control (DLMPC), a closed loop model predictive control scheme based on the System Level Synthesis (SLS) framework wherein only local state and model information needs to be exchanged between subsystems for the computation and implementation of control actions. We provide an explicit solution for each of the subproblems resulting from the distributed MPC scheme. We show that given the separability of the problem, the explicit solution is only divided into three regions per state and input instantiation, making the point location problem very efficient. Moreover, given the locality constraints, the subproblems are of much smaller dimension than the full problem, which consequently significantly reduces the computational overhead of explicit solutions. We conclude with numerical simulations to demonstrate the computational advantages of our method, in which we show a large improvement in runtime per MPC iteration as compared with the results of computing the optimization with a solver online.
A System for Interleaving Discussion and Summarization in Online Collaboration

In many instances of online collaboration, ideation and deliberation about what to write happen separately from the synthesis of the deliberation into a cohesive document. However, this may result in a final document that has little connection to the discussion that came before. In this work, we present interleaved discussion and summarization, a process where discussion and summarization are woven together in a single space, and collaborators can switch back and forth between discussing ideas and summarizing discussion until it results in a final document that incorporates and references all discussion points. We implement this process into a tool called Wikum+ that allows groups working together on a project to create living summaries-artifacts that can grow as new collaborators, ideas, and feedback arise and shrink as collaborators come to consensus. We conducted studies where groups of six people each collaboratively wrote a proposal using Wikum+ and a proposal using a messaging platform along with Google Docs. We found that Wikum+'s integration of discussion and summarization helped users be more organized, allowing for light-weight coordination and iterative improvements throughout the collaboration process. A second study demonstrated that in larger groups, Wikum+ is more inclusive of all participants and more comprehensive in the final document compared to traditional tools.
Detecting Anomalous Time Series by GAMLSS-Akaike-Weights-Scoring

An extensible statistical framework for detecting anomalous time series including those with heavy-tailed distributions and nonstationarity in higher-order moments is introduced based on penalized ...
Trends in private land conservation: Increasing complexity, shifting conservation purposes and allowable private land uses

The terrain of private-land conservation dealmaking is shifting. As the area of private land protected for conservation increases, it is time to understand trends in private-land conservation agreements. We examined 269 conservation easements and conducted 73 interviews with land conservation organizations to investigate changes in private-land conservation in the United States. We hypothesized that since 2000, conservation easements have become more complex but less restrictive. Our analysis reveals shifts in what it means for private land to be “conserved.” We found that conservation easements have indeed become more complex, with more purposes and terms after 2000 compared to conservation easements recorded before 2000. However, changes in restrictiveness of conservation easements varied by land use. Mining and waste dumping were less likely to be allowed after 2000, but new residences and structures were twice as likely to be allowed. We found a shift toward allowing some bounded timber harvest and grazing and a decline in terms that entirely allow or prohibit these working land uses. Interviews revealed staff perceptions of reasons for these changes. Our analysis suggests that “used” landscapes are increasingly important for conservation but that conserving these properties stretches the limits of simple, perpetual policy tools and requires increasingly complex and contingent agreements.
Adultery, Criminality, and the Myth of English Sovereignty

This article argues that in England over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the understanding of adultery as a tort was complicated by an accompanying discourse of what I will c...
Rethinking Employment Discrimination Harms

While the effect of implicit bias on the mental state of potential discriminators is well-worn territory within employment discrimination scholarship, this Article examines the applicability of a previously underexplored psychological phenomenon: stereotype threat. More than a decade’s worth of social psychology research indicates that when a person is conscious of her membership in a particular group and the group is the subject of a widely recognized stereotype, that awareness can directly affect her performance of stereotype-related tasks, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, a common gender stereotype holds that women are not as good at math as their male counterparts. Thus, when asked to indicate sex before a math test, women tend to perform worse. As a result, if an employer draws attention to an employee’s protected status, that seemingly harmless act could impact the employee’s mental state and, in turn, her job performance. Despite the well-known effects of stereotype threat, this Article is the first to systematically apply that science to employment discrimination law. In so doing, it urges the law to adopt a more expansive notion of harm to better reflect the cognitive functions of the individuals who face discrimination.
Uncertainty, investment, and managerial incentives

Abstract This study provides evidence that managerial incentives, shaped by compensation contracts, help to explain the empirical relationship between uncertainty and investment. We develop a model in which the manager, compensated with an equity-based contract, makes investment decisions for a firm that faces time-varying volatility. The contract creates incentives that affect both the sign and magnitude of a manager׳s optimal response to volatility shocks. The model is calibrated using compensation data to quantify this predicted investment response for a large panel of firms. Our estimates help explain the variation in firm-level investment responses to volatility shocks observed in the data.
Debt, Information Acquisition, and the Takeover Threat

In this paper we formalize the information acquisition process by a potential bidder and its relationship with the target firm's capital structure. We show that debt increases prior to an acquisition are negatively related to the precision of the bidder's information. Incumbent managers, by means of leverage, offset shareholders' losses derived from information acquisition about the firm's prospects by potential acquirors. This explanation for the use of capital structure to deter rivals for control complements the ones provided by the literature. We test our model with a sample of 739 U.S. targets of hostile tender offers, and show that informational variables (such as toehold size and nature of target and bidder industries) are significant determinants of the decision to adjust leverage. The paper shows that target firms display slightly higher debt levels than their industry peers, and that target firms significantly reduce leverage in the year prior to the tender offer announcement. The latter result indicates t
Neutrality and the Good of Religious Freedom: An Appreciative Response to Professor Koppelman

This paper is a short response to an address, “And I Don’t Care What It Is: Religious Neutrality in American Law,” delivered by Prof. Andrew Koppelman at a conference, “The Competing Claims of Law and Religion: Who Should Influence Whom?”, which was held at Pepperdine University in February of 2012. In this response, it is suggested – among other things – that “American religious neutrality” is, as Koppelman argues, “coherent and attractive” because and to the extent that it is not neutral with respect to the goal and good of religious freedom. Religious freedom, in the American tradition, is not what results from the operationalization in law of hostility toward religion. It is not (only) what results from a program of conflict-avoidance or division-dampening. It is not merely the product of those compromises that were necessary to secure the ratification of the original Constitution. It is, instead, a valuable and necessary feature of any attractive legal regime, because it reflects, promotes, and helps to constitute human flourishing. So, and again, the state should remain “neutral” with respect to most religious questions – primarily because the resolution of such questions is outside the jurisdiction, and not just the competence, of civil authorities – but it may and should affirm enthusiastically that religious freedom is a good thing that should be protected and nurtured in law and policy.
Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades

In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time within the United States. We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, using a variety of definitions for leisure, we show that leisure for men increased by roughly six to nine hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by roughly four to eight hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). Lastly, we document a growing inequality in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures, making welfare calculation based solely on the latter series incomplete.
Co‐Op Advertising in Dynamic Retail Oligopolies

We study a supply chain in which a consumer goods manufacturer sells its product through a retailer. The retailer undertakes promotional expenditures, such as advertising, to increase sales and to compete against other retailer(s). The manufacturer supports the retailer’s promotional expenditure through a cooperative advertising program by reimbursing a portion (called the subsidy rate) of the retailer’s promotional expenditure. To determine the subsidy rate, we formulate a Stackelberg differential game between the manufacturer and the retailer, and a Nash differential subgame between the retailer and the competing retailer(s). We derive the optimal feedback promotional expenditures of the retailers and the optimal feedback subsidy rate of the manufacturer, and show how they are influenced by market parameters. An important finding is that the manufacturer should support its retailer only when a subsidy threshold is crossed. The impact of competition on this threshold is nonmonotone. Specifically, the manufacturer offers more support when its retailer competes with one other retailer but its support starts decreasing with the presence of additional retailers. In the case where the manufacturer sells through all retailers, we show under certain assumptions that it should support only one dominant retailer. We also describe how we can incorporate retail price competition into the model. [Submitted: September 6, 2010. Revisions received: February 17, 2011; April 26, 2011. Accepted: April 27, 2011.]
Can bilateral trade agreements help induce free trade

There has been growing debate about whether bilateral trade agreements are damaging multilateral efforts to eliminate barriers to international trade. This paper develops a model in which trading blocs always charge optimal tariffs and make trade agreements based on strategic considerations. We ask a very simple question. Does the fact that trading blocs can form bilateral trade agreements make Free trade less likely to occur? The answer is that it depends on the size distribution of the trading blocs. If there is one large trading bloc along with some smaller ones then bilateral trade agreements allow the smaller trading blocs to coalesce and block the monopoly power of large trading blocs. In this case, bilateral trade agreements facilitate the attainment of free trade. Not allowing customs unions leads to more not less protection. If trading blocs are of roughly equivalent size then bilateral trade agreements allow groups of trading blocs to more effectively monopolize world trade in which case they may make free trade less likely. These results suggest that a policy that inhibits the formation of trading blocs may be harmful. We also compute the welfare effects of trade agreements to get some idea of how empirically important these issues are.
Closing the Gap: When Do Cues Eliminate Differences between Sophisticated and Unsophisticated Citizens?

Relatively few scholars assess the conditions under which cues improve citizens’ decisions. I analyze experimentally the conditions under which one cue (the statements of an endorser) enables both sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens to improve their decisions. My results demonstrate that the effectiveness of this cue depends upon the endorser's incentives and citizens’ levels of sophistication. Specifically, I find that under idealized conditions (i.e., when the endorser always has an incentive to make truthful statements), this cue dramatically improves the decisions of (and closes the gap between) sophisticated and unsophisticated subjects. When the endorser's incentives are more realistic (i.e., the endorser may have an incentive to lie), this cue affects sophisticated versus unsophisticated subjects differently: sophisticated subjects do not improve their decisions, whereas unsophisticated subjects typically improve their decisions enough to make them comparable to sophisticated subjects. Thus,...
Hybrid Advertising Auctions

Facebook and Google offer hybrid advertising auctions that allow advertisers to bid on a per-impression or a per-click basis for the same advertising space. This paper studies the properties of equilibrium and considers how to increase efficiency in this new auction format. Rational expectations require the publisher to consider past bid types to prevent revenue losses to strategic advertiser behavior. The equilibrium results contradict publisher statements and suggest that, conditional on setting rational expectations, publishers should consider offering multiple bid types to advertisers. For a special case of the model, we provide a payment scheme that achieves the socially optimal allocation of advertisers to slots and maximizes publisher revenues within the class of socially optimal payment schemes. When this special case does not hold, no payment scheme will always achieve the social optimum.
A decision framework for successful private participation in the airport sector

Abstract As private participation in public airports becomes a global trend, there are a number of concerns and debates over the conflicting interests of the private and public sectors. For instance, the private sector's interest in maximizing profits often opposes the public sector's interest in protecting the public interest and social welfare. In this paper, we reframe the conflict in terms of principal-agent theory, and inform policymakers to understand public-private management problems in a broader context. Firstly, we demonstrate how various ownership and governance structures shape the private participation based on (1) ownership-type, (2) mode of ownership shift, and (3) ex-post government control. Secondly, we then highlight that this process should be context-based, and examine the recent case of Incheon International Airport (IIA) in South Korea to illustrate the importance of contextual factors. Lastly, we provide comprehensive recommendations to policymakers involved in bringing private partners into the airport sector, which include setting a clear agenda, exercising a reasonable level of control, understanding the sharing of risk and responsibility under different structures, and assessing technical, economic and political factors that may affect the policy outcome.
The Declining Significance of POW Status

What is the significance of prisoner-of-war (POW) status? 1 Drawing on the substance, universal acceptance, broad-based institutionalization, and enforcement *368 machinery of the Geneva Convention for the Protection of Prisoners of War (“POW Convention”), conventional wisdom maintains that denial of POW status to combatants has drastic protective and policy consequences. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, this Article argues that denial of POW status carries few protective or policy consequences, and that the gap in protection for those classified as POWs and those not so classified (e.g., those designated “unlawful combatants”) is closing. The only gaps that persist are: (1) that POWs are “assimilated” into the legal regime governing the armed forces of the detaining state; and (2) that POWs enjoy “combatant immunity.” The scope and significance of these gaps are, however, also diminishing--from both a protection and policy perspective. The Article further argues that this emerging “protective parity” has important implications for humanitarian law and policy: (1) it clarifies and consolidates debates about coverage gaps in the Geneva law; (2) it recasts debates about the proper procedure for determining “status” in humanitarian law (procedurally, POW status might be understood only as an affirmative defense to any prosecution for simple participation in hostilities); and (3) it underscores the escalating inefficiencies of approaches that calibrate treatment based on complex status determinations (and, in doing so, provides an explanation of why some states-including the United States--expressly incorporate elements of “protective parity” into their military policy). Finally, the Article offers a normative defense of “protective parity”--emphasizing whether it can be reconciled with the principle of distinction. 2
Which International Institutions Promote International Trade

This paper estimates the effect on international trade of three multilateral organizations intended to increase trade: (1) the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); (2) the International Monetary Fund (IMF); and (3) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and its predecessor the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). I use a standard “gravity” model of bilateral merchandise trade and a large panel dataset covering over 50 years and 175 countries. My results indicate that OECD membership has had a consistently large positive effect on trade, while accession to the GATT/WTO also increases trade.
The Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth

"Much truth is spoken, that more may be concealed," wrote Mr. Justice Darling in 1879. Opening with an articulation of the distinction between truth (the concept) and truths (particular true propositions), this paper is largely devoted to: (1) developing an account of the dual meaning of "partially true" - "true-in-part" vs. "part of the truth"; and (2) understanding the reasons for, and the dangers of, the very common tendency to tell only part of the relevant truth.
Time for Children: Trends in the Employment Patterns of Parents, 1967–2009

Using data from the 1967–2009 years of the March Current Population Surveys (CPS), we examine two important resources for children’s well-being: time and money. We document trends in parental employment, from the perspective of children, and show what underlies these trends. We find that increases in family work hours mainly reflect movements into jobs by parents—particularly mothers, who in prior decades would have remained at home. This increase in market work has raised incomes for children in the typical two-parent family but not for those in lone-parent households. Time use data from 1975 and 2003–2008 reveal that working parents spend less time engaged in primary childcare than their counterparts without jobs but more than employed peers in previous cohorts. Analysis of 2004 work schedule data suggests that non-daytime work provides an alternative method of coordinating employment schedules for some dual-earner families.
Human capital, capital structure, and employee pay: An empirical analysis

Abstract We test the predictions of Titman (1984) and Berk, Stanton, and Zechner (2010) by examining the effect of leverage on labor costs. Leverage has a significantly positive impact on cash, equity-based, and total compensation of chief executive officers (CEOs). Compensation of new CEOs hired from outside the firm is positively related to prior-year firm leverage. In addition, leverage has a positive and significant impact on average employee pay. The incremental total labor expenses associated with an increase in leverage are large enough to offset the incremental tax benefits of debt. The empirical evidence supports the theoretical prediction that labor costs limit the use of debt.
The Predictive Content of Commodity Futures

This study examines the predictive content of futures prices for energy, agricultural, precious and base metal commodities. In particular, we examine whether futures prices are (1) unbiased and/or (2) accurate predictors of subsequent prices. We document significant differences both across and within commodity groups. Precious and base metals fail most tests of unbiasedness and are poor predictors of subsequent price changes but energy and agricultural futures fare much better. We find little evidence that these differences reflect liquidity conditions across markets. In addition, we document a broad decline in the predictive content of commodity futures prices since the early 2000s. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 34:607–636, 2014
Funding Conditions and Free Speech for HIV/AIDS NGOs: He Who Pays the Piper Cannot Always Call the Tune

The United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act pledges billions of dollars to fund NGOs combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic but requires recipients to adopt a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking. A possible recipient NGO confronts a tough decision: adopt an affirmative statement against prostitution and sex trafficking to accept the funds, alienating a vital partner in its efforts to eradicate HIV/AIDS; or deny the funds to speak its own message, though without the benefit of government assistance. Courts are split on whether the Leadership Act’s policy requirement places an unconstitutional condition on federal funds that requires grant recipients to surrender their First Amendment right to freedom of speech by compelling speech and impermissibly discriminating on the basis of viewpoint. This Note addresses the circuit split that has resulted from differing conceptions of what constitutes compelled speech, what conditions act as a penalty, and what conditions suppress alternate viewpoints. To resolve this split, this Note adopts the framework of analysis used by dissenting Judge Chester Straub in the Second Circuit and applies his framework to assert that the Leadership Act’s policy requirement unconstitutionally denies NGOs the ability to express alternate messages with nonfederal funds.
Deviance, Due Process, and the False Promise of Federal Rule of Evidence 403

In a significant break with traditional evidence rules and policies, Federal Rules of Evidence 413 and 414 (concerning rape and child abuse, respectively) allow jurors to use the accused's prior sexual misconduct as evidence of character and propensity. Courts have rejected due process challenges to the new rules, holding that Federal Rule of Evidence 403 serves as a check on any fairness concerns. However, courts' application of Rule 403 in cases involving these sexual propensity rules is troubling. Relying on the legislative history of the new rules and announcing a presumption of admissibility, courts have forsaken the traditional operation of Rule 403. Thus, while touting Rule 403 as the guarantor of due process, these courts have limited - and, in some cases, abandoned - their essential role as gatekeepers. The article rejects what it dubs 403-lite, an uncritical, acontextual and rote application of the Rule 403 standard. It proposes new ways for courts to apply Rule 403 in the context of Rules 413 and 414, permitting them to follow the new and dubious course charted by Congress without abandoning the basic guarantees of fairness or derogating the vital discretionary powers of the trial judge to determine admissibility on a case-by-case basis. Courts can limit the dangers these rules present by carefully monitoring the emotional aspects of the evidence, the methods of proof and the time spent on such uncharged offenses, all with an eye to diminishing jury confusion and distraction. Rules 413 and 414 raise significant issues concerning the integrity and power of the courts. In legislating new rules of evidence, Congress cannot pre-balance prejudice and probative value in individual cases. By retaining the crucial judicial functions of weighing evidence and exercising discretion, courts can achieve a balance between the Congressional mandate to admit particular evidence and the judicial role of ensuring a fair trial.
Priority and Novelty Under the AIA

A. The Grace Period: A Complex Exception to the Prior Art Rule 1030 B. Disclosure and Public Disclosure Under the AIA Grace Period 1033 1. Confidential Sales and Non-informing Public Uses 1034 2. Aside: On "Secret Disclosures" 1036 a) Prior-Filed Patent Applications as Secret Disclosures 1037 3. 'Public Disclosure": Meaning and Rationale 1038 a) Explaining "Public Disclosure" and the Grace Period: Policy Rationale 1042 b) Prior-filed Applications and Public Disclosures 1044
Fiscal deficits and current account deficits

Abstract Recent fiscal stimulus packages depend for their effectiveness on the assumption of non-Ricardian savings behavior. We show that, under the same assumption, higher fiscal deficits can have problematic implications if they turn out to be permanent. First, if they occur in large countries they significantly raise the world real interest rate. Second, they cause a short run current account deterioration equal to around 50% of the fiscal deficit deterioration. Third, the longer run current account deterioration equals almost 75% for a large economy such as the United States, and almost 100% for a small open economy.
Asset pricing with a factor-arch covariance structure : Empirical estimates for treasury bills

Abstract In this paper we suggest using the FACTOR-ARCH model as a parsimonious structure for the conditional covariance matrix of asset excess returns. This structure allows us to study the dynamic relationship between asset risk premia and volatilities in a multivariate system. One and two FACTOR-ARCH models are successfully applied to pricing of Treasury bills. The results show stability over time, pass a variety of diagnostic tests, and compare favorably with previous empirical findings.
Lonely Highways: The Role of Social Capital in Rural Traffic Safety

Pursuant to earlier findings that social capital reduces traffic fatality risks, we explore here whether the same protective effects of social capital exist on rural roads as urban roads and what might explain differential effects. Our estimation of simultaneous equation systems of complementary traffic incident types on a panel of US states reveals a significantly lower protective effect on rural roads. Potentially relevant differentials in crash-type/context exposure do not mediate this outcome. Rather it appears the relative prevalence of certain risk behaviors (e.g., speeding) skew rural environments toward crash situations where the critical safety factors are orthogonal to social capital influence.
Space/time non-commutativity and causality

Field theories based on non-commutative spacetimes exhibit very distinctive non-local effects which mix the ultraviolet with the infrared in bizarre ways. In particular if the time coordinate is involved in the non-commutativity the theory seems to be seriously acausal and inconsistent with conventional hamiltonian evolution. To illustrate these effects we study the scattering of wave packets in a field theory with space/time non-commutativity. In this theory we find effects which seem to precede their causes and rigid rods which grow instead of Lorentz contract as they are boosted. These field theories are evidently inconsistent and violate causality and unitarity. On the other hand open string theory in a background electric field is expected to exhibit space/time non-commutativity. This raises the question of whether they also lead to acausal behavior. We show that this is not the case. Stringy effects conspire to cancel the acausal effects that are present for the non-commutative field theory.
Litigating Together: Social, Moral, and Legal Obligations

In a post-Class Action Fairness Act world, the modern mass-tort class action is disappearing. Indeed, multi-district litigation and private aggregation through contracts with plaintiffs’ law firms are the new mass-tort frontier. But something’s amiss with this “nonclass aggregation.” These new procedures involve a fundamentally different dynamic than class actions: plaintiffs have names, faces, and something deeply personal at stake. Their claims are independently economically viable, which gives them autonomy expectations about being able to control the course of their litigation. Yet, they participate in a familiar, collective effort to establish the defendant’s liability. They litigate from both a personal and a collective standpoint. Current scholarship overlooks this inter-personal dimension. It focuses instead on either touting the virtues of individual autonomy or streamlining mass litigation to maximize social welfare. Both approaches fail to solve the unique problems caused by these personal dimensions: temptations for plaintiffs to hold out and thus derail settlements demanding near unanimity, outliers who remain disengaged from the group but free-ride off of its efforts, and subgroups within the litigation whose members compete for resources and litigation dominance to the group’s detriment. Accordingly, this Article has two principal objectives: one diagnostic, one prescriptive. The diagnosis is this: current procedures for handling nonclass aggregation miss the mark. Process isn’t just an exercise in autonomy or a handy crutch for enforcing substantive laws. Procedures can serve as a means for bringing plaintiffs together, plugging their individual stories into a collective narrative, making sense of that narrative as a community, reasoning together about the right thing to do, and pursuing that end collectively. Thus, the prescription is litigating together. • Assistant Professor, Florida State University College of Law. For comments and conversations on this nonclass aggregation project as a whole as well as this particular aspect of it, I thank Curtis Bridgeman, Thomas Burch, Kathy Cerminara, Robin Craig, Brannon Denning, Sam Issacharoff, Dan Markel, Linda Mullenix, Richard Nagareda, David Marcus, Gregg Polsky, J.B. Ruhl, Peggy Torrey, and Judge Jack B. Weinstein. This paper has benefitted enormously from audiences at Florida State University College of Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law, the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting (upcoming), and the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) New Scholars panel. Comments welcome (eburch@law.fsu.edu). 23-Mar-10] LITIGATING TOGETHER 2
It’s Not Easy Being Green: Reflections on the American Carbon Offset Market

Over the past few years, the U.S. carbon offset market has experienced tremendous growth. This expansion can be attributed to several factors, including the creation of regional greenhouse gas (“GHG”) initiatives, the anticipation of federal regulation, and growing public concern regarding climate change. In the absence of a national system of carbon offset standards, a confusing myriad of methodologies governs the creation of offsets. The media has repeatedly questioned the credibility of carbon offsets, likening them to papal indulgences for environmental sins committed. Indeed, the emphasis on offsets to mitigate climate change has distorted their appropriate role in any future national framework to address climate change and may distract from the more fundamental changes needed to address climate change. Likewise, the ease at which some offsets are acquired to reduce emissions serves to over-simplify the comprehensive, national response that is necessary to address climate change.