cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Setting the X Factor in Price Cap Regulation Plans

Despite the popularity of price-cap regulation in practice, the economic literature provides limited guidance on how to determine the X factor, which is the rate at which inflation-adjusted output prices must fall under price-cap plans. We review the relevant basic principles, and then determine how to set the X factor: (1) when only a subset of the firm's products are subject to price-cap regulation, and when product-specific costs and productivity cannot be measured; (2) when changes in regulated prices affect the economy-wide inflation rate; and (3) in the presence of such structural changes as strengthened competitive forces.
Twining's Complaint

William Twining thinks that analytic legal philosophers need to pay closer attention to the sociological contexts of law. In this article, I explain that at least some analytic philosophers have already been doing that. These "Philosophical naturalists" are ahead of Twining in rethinking the relationship between concepts and contexts. I detail how this is being done and describe the implications for legal theory.
Adverse Selection in Insurance Markets: An Exaggerated Threat

The phrase “adverse selection” was originally coined by insurers to describe the process by which insureds utilize private knowledge of their own riskiness when deciding to buy or forgo insurance. If A knows he will die tomorrow (but his insurer does not), life insurance that is priced to reflect the average risk of death in the population as a whole will look like a very good deal to him. Conversely, if B knows she will live for much longer than the average person with her observable characteristics (age, gender, medical condition), insurance that is priced to reflect the average risk of death will seem like a bad deal to her, and she will be unlikely to buy it.
The accounting and market consequences of accelerated share repurchases

We evaluate the representational faithfulness of the accounting treatment of a recent and well-established type of structured transaction—accelerated share repurchases (ASRs). ASRs are popular because accretive earnings per share benefits are recognized immediately, while any gains or losses on the forward contract used to execute an ASR bypass income, and are reported directly in equity. We document lower value relevance for the liabilities of ASR companies compared with a size- and industry-matched sample. ERC tests also indicate a market discount for the earnings of ASR companies compared with the control sample. Finally, we document significant abnormal returns to a trading strategy based on unrealized gains or losses on ASR transactions. Our results indicate that the current accounting for ASRs does not result in representative reporting of these transactions. As a result, financial statement users might benefit from recognition of ASR elements in financial statements.
The Cost Of Being Black: White Americans' Perceptions and the Question of Reparations

White Americans have long resisted the idea of reparations to the descendants of slaves. We examine the psychological basis of such resistance, primarily testing the possibility that resistance may be a function of Whites’ perception of the ongoing cost of being Black. White participants (n = 958) across twelve independent samples (varying in age, student status, and geographic location) were asked variations of the question: How much should you be paid to continue to live the remainder of your life as a Black person? Participants generally required low median amounts, less than $10,000, to make the race change, whereas they requested high amounts, $1,000,000, to give up television. To the extent that larger amounts were requested, support for reparations also increased. Attempts to educate participants about Black cost0White privilege had negligible effects on assessments of the cost of being Black and support for reparations. Together, these results suggest that White resistance to reparations for Black Americans stems from fundamental biases in estimating the true cost of being Black. The implications of our findings for color-blind and multiculturalist conceptual approaches are discussed.
The impact of manager philosophy on knowledge management systems

This paper analyses how information about managers and technology can be used to provide those managers with a system that is congruent with their needs. In particular, using McGregor's Theories X and Y philosophies, managerial needs are elicited and then contemporary knowledge management technologies, including intelligent agents, and the way they are implemented, are analysed to determine how they meet those manager needs. Different knowledge management technologies are found to be important to manifesting the requirements of particular management philosophies. For example, ‘Theory X’ appears consistent with use of intelligent agents to ‘monitor’ behaviour. This leads to the concept of ‘technology congruence’, where the choice of the technology ultimately is tied to which view of the world the manager employs. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Relational Contracts and the Theory of the Firm

Relational contracts—informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships—are prevalent within and between firms. We develop repeated-game models showing why and how relational contracts within firms (vertical integration) differ from those between (nonintegration). We show that integration affects the parties' temptations to renege on a given relational contract, and hence affects the best relational contract the parties can sustain. In this sense, the integration decision can be an instrument in the service of the parties' relationship. Our approach also has implications for joint ventures, alliances, and networks, and for the role of management within and between firms.
Hybrid Tail Risk and Expected Stock Returns: When Does the Tail Wag the Dog?

This paper introduces a new, hybrid measure of covariance risk in the lower tail of the stock return distribution, motivated by the under-diversified portfolio holdings of individual investors, and investigates its performance in predicting the cross-sectional variation in stock returns over the sample period July 1963-December 2009. Our key innovation is that the covariance is measured across the states of the world in which the individual stock return is in its left tail, not across the corresponding tail states for the market return as in standard systematic risk measures. The results indicate a positive and significant relation between what we label hybrid tail covariance risk (HTCR) and expected stock returns, in contrast to the insignificant or negative results for purely stock-specific or standard systematic tail risk measures. A trading strategy that goes long stocks in the highest H-TCR decile and shorts stocks in the lowest H-TCR decile produces average raw and risk-adjusted returns of 6% to 8% per annum, consistent with results from a cross-sectional regression analysis that controls for a battery of known predictors.
Methodological Challenges in Comparative Constitutional Law

My talk today, Methodological Challenges in Comparative Constitutional Law, has two parts. The first part focuses on the relationship between the purposes of comparison and the methodological challenges of comparison. The second part asks whether there are particular methodological challenges in comparative constitutional law as compared with other comparative legal studies.
Voltage-Tunable Superconducting Resonators: A Platform for Random Access Quantum Memory

In computing architectures, one important factor is the tradeoff between the need to couple bits of information (quantum or classical) to each other and to an external drive and the need to isolate them well enough in order to protect the information for an extended period of time. In the case of superconducting quantum circuits, one approach is to utilize fixed frequency qubits coupled to coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonators such that the system can be kept in a configuration that is relatively insensitive to noise. Here, we propose a scalable voltage-tunable quantum memory design concept compatible with superconducting qubit platforms. Our design builds on the recent progress in fabrication of Josephson field effect transistors (JJ-FETs) which, use indium arsenide (InAs) quantum wells. The JJ-FET is incorporated into a tunable coupler between a transmission line and a high-quality resonator in order to control the overall inductance of the coupler. A full isolation of the high-quality resonator can be achieved by turning off the JJ-FET. This could allow for long coherence times and protection of the quantum information inside the storage cavity. The proposed design would facilitate the implementation of random access memory for storage of quantum information in between computational gate operations.
Dynamics of international financial networks with risk management

In this paper, we develop an international financialnetwork model in which the sources of funds and the intermediaries are multicriteria decision-makers and are concerned with both net revenue maximization and risk minimization. The model allows for both physical as well as electronic transactions and considers three tiers of decision-makers who may be located in distinct countries and may conduct their transactions in different currencies. We describe the behaviour of the various decision-makers, along with their optimality conditions, and derive the variational inequality formulation of the governing equilibrium conditions. We then propose a dynamic adjustment process which yields the evolution of the financial flows and prices and demonstrate that it can be formulated as a projected dynamical system. We also provide qualitative properties including stability analysis results. Finally, we discuss a discrete-time algorithm which can be applied to track the dynamic trajectories and yields the equilibrium ...
Reforming the Taxation and Regulation of Mutual Funds: A Comparative Legal and Economic Analysis

Most Americans invest through mutual funds. A comparison of US tax and securities law governing mutual funds with laws governing other collective investments, in both the US and in the EU, shows: (a) the US fund industry continues to be the world leader, but now lags domestic and foreign competitors, primarily because of US tax and securities law; (b) mutual funds are taxed less favorably and regulated more extensively in the US than direct investments or other collective investments, including alternatives available only to wealthy investors; (c) the structure of US regulation – numerous proscriptive bright-line rules written nearly 70 years ago, subject to SEC exemptions – makes success of US mutual funds dependent on the resources, responsiveness and flexibility of the SEC; (d) while the high-level formal framework for mutual funds in the EU is as or more restrictive and inflexible in most respects than the Investment Company Act, competitive pressures in the EU constrain supervisors in EU countries to be more flexible in adopting implementing regulations, and EU regulators have greater resources and are more responsive than the SEC, which could achieve the same flexibility and responsiveness through exemptive orders but has been unwilling or unable to do so in a timely fashion. The paper discusses a number of reforms to improve the treatment of middle class investments, including improvements in mutual fund taxation, ways to enhance the flexibility and resources of US fund regulators, modifications of the existing ban on asymmetric advisor compensation and the exclusion of foreign funds, and unjustified disparities in the treatment of mutual funds and mutual fund substitutes.
Institutional Sources of Practice Variation: Staffing College and University Recycling Programs:

In this paper, I examine how variation arises in the staffing of recycling programs at colleges and universities. Through initial fieldwork, I identified two basic recycling program forms. Some sch...
Setting interest rates in the modern money era

Financial innovations have reduced banks' reserve holdings significantly. Some argue the Fed's ability to set interest rates might eventually be compromised as a result. This concern arises from a misunderstanding of Fed operations. Regardless of the quantity of reserve balances, the Fed can always set its federal funds rate target. The quantity of reserve balances circulating, or the relative size of the Fed's operations, is also unrelated to its influence on other interest rates. That banks must settle their customers' tax liabilities using reserve balances is sufficient for the Fed's interest rate target to influence other interest rates.
Indeterminacy, Justification and Truth in Constitutional Theory

In this Article, Professor Lipkin continues the debate over the nature of indeterminacy in constitutional theory, arguing that epistemic indeterminacy is most relevant to the law, because epistemic indeterminacy is more closely tied to practical reasoning than is metaphysical indeterminacy.Professor Lipkin further argues that the controversy over metaphysical or epistemic indeterminacy is really a controversy over truth or justification as the primary form of validating constitutional rules. In Professor Lipkin's view, the search for constitutional truth should be abandoned or, at best, should be treated as a trivial result of the best justification.Finally, Professor Lipkin proposes a new constitutional paradigm, integrating a revised version of Rawls's conception of wide reflective equilibrium with a modified account of Kuhn's theory of scientific change that takes into account the distinction between normal and revolutionary adjudication. Such a paradigm, Professor Lipkin argues, provides an interesting and complete account of constitutional adjudication and change, and therefore is an especially appropriate vehicle to transport constitutional theory into the twenty-first century.
The Criminology of Wrongful Conviction: A Decade Later

This article reflects on the author’s 2005 article, “Rethinking the Study of Miscarriages of Justice,” which sought to describe what scholars empirically knew at that time about the phenomenon, cau...
Reconstructing family privacy

In the past decade, numerous state and local agencies have adopted policies of removing children from their mothers' custody because the children witnessed or could have witnessed their mothers being abused by husbands, boyfriends, or other intimates. In the Eastern District of New York class action lawsuit Nicholson v. Williams, domestic violence victims and their children sought injunctive relief from such a policy of New York's child protection agency. The court preliminarily enjoined such custody removals on, among other bases, Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process grounds predicated on a robust notion of "family privacy" protecting the mothers and their children. This Article attempts to broaden the discourse surrounding the case by situating the district court's conception of family privacy in the context of active debates within feminist legal theory about the proper role of privacy norms in regulating domestic spheres. While many feminist legal theorists have critiqued the allocation of legal power based on "formalist" divisions of society into "public" and "private" spheres, in part for the legal cover such assumptions have given to violence in the home, the case presents a unique opportunity to reconsider the instrumental and normative value of the "public-private" distinction and norms of privacy. I defend privacy's value for women and argue that Nicholson presents one possibility for bridging skepticism of and commitment to privacy norms in the domestic context. I argue, however, that while this reconstructed view of privacy is not necessarily gender-subordinating, it might not protect children's welfare as fully as possible. The approach may under-serve children when the contest between parental control and children's protection is closer than in Nicholson. The case thus raises concerns that the public-private distinction - no matter how drawn - inherently poses problems of coercion for those with less power within so-called private spheres.
Gendered Science in the 21st Century: Productivity Puzzle 2.0?

The notion of the ‘productivity puzzle’, referring particularly to gender disparities in science and technology publication rates, raises a variety of critical issues for understanding related workforce development and capacity. However, such issues typically are framed relative to an increasingly outdated cultural and technological landscape in which scientific productivity is viewed principally as an outcome. We argue instead that characterizing scientific productivity as a multifaceted, dynamic, highly networked, and interactive process, rather than just an outcome, might provide greater insight into the gendered nature of science and lead to a re-framing of the genderdifferentiated productivity puzzle. By rethinking how we engage related questions, we might gain ground on explaining and unraveling the productivity puzzle in ways that will benefit the scientific enterprise and society in general.
A Time Series Analysis of Representative Agent Models of Consumption andLeisure Choice Under Uncertainty

This paper investigates empirically a model of aggregate consumption and leisure decisions in which utility from goods and leisure is nontime-separable. The nonseparability of preferences accommodates intertemporal substitution or complementarity of leisure and thereby affects the comovements in aggregate compensation and hours worked. These cross-relations are examined empirically using postwar monthly U. S. data on quantities, real wages, and the real return on the one-month Treasury bill. The estimated values of the parameters governing preferences differ significantly from the values assumed in several studies of real business models. Several possible explanations of these discrepancies are discussed.
Regulation of Global Financial Firms After Morrison v. National Australia Bank

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., which rewrote the law of extraterritoriality, shattering decades of precedent. After Morrison was decided, Congress, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and commentators have focused on the case's enforcement implications. This Article is different. This Article focuses not on enforcement but rather on the regulatory implications of the decision, arguing that Morrison calls into question the SEC’s ability to regulate and require registration of non-U.S. domiciled firms. By asserting a strong presumption against extraterritorial application of the securities laws and invalidating the conduct and effects test, the Court overturned doctrines the SEC has relied on for many years when regulating non-U.S. domiciled broker-dealers and investment advisers. These regulatory implications are of paramount importance to the SEC’s regulatory program and to investor protection, but they have gone largely unnoticed in Morrison’s aftermath. The goal of this symposium contribution is to identify the regulatory implications and the challenges they pose.
Post-Racial Racism: Racial Stratification and Mass Incarceration in the Age of Obama

What does the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the United States presidency portend for race in America? This Essay uses the tremendous racial disparities in the American crime control system to assess race and racism as key features of contemporary society. The Essay begins by considering a compelling thesis that racialized mass incarceration stems from backlash to the civil rights movement. If true, this raises the possibility that Obama’s election, potentially marking the end of backlash politics, also represents a likely turning point in the war on crime. The Essay then reconsiders mass imprisonment from the perspective of “racial stratification,” a structural theory that emphasizes the simultaneous formation of racial categories and the misallocation of resources between races. A stratification approach leaves one less sanguine about rapid change in American race relations, though without disparaging either the historic nature of Obama’s inauguration or the possibility of incremental improvements in racial justice. Reflecting the continued need to push for positive racial change, the Essay concludes by arguing morally and politically for a renewed focus on racism, in particular on “post-racial racism.”
When Two Rights Make a Wrong: Searching Too Much in Ordered Environments

Abstract In electronic shopping, screening tools are used to sort through many options, assess their fit with a consumer's utility function, and recommend options in a list ordered from predicted best to worst. When the most promising options are at the beginning of the list, even seemingly advantageous factors (e.g., lower search cost, greater selection) that prompt consideration of more options degrade choice quality by (1) lowering the average quality of considered options and (2) lowering customers' selectivity in focusing attention on the more mediocre rather than the better options from the actively considered set. Study 1 shows that lowering search costs diminishes choice quality in an ordered environment. Study 2 shows that presenting consumers with the top 50 rather than the top 15 recommendations has the same effect. Study 3 shows that greater accuracy motivation in combination with lower search cost diminishes choice quality because consumers are encouraged to consider a wider range of options ...
Do Not Cite or Circulate

This short essay ponders why legal scholars attach formulations such as "Do Not Cite or Circulate" to draft works. It argues against the practice in most circumstances, particularly for work posted on the internet.
Is Positive Sentiment in Corporate Annual Reports Informative? Evidence from Deep Learning

We use a novel text classification approach from deep learning to more accurately measure sentiment in a large sample of 10-Ks. In contrast to most prior literature, we find that positive, and negative, sentiment predicts abnormal return and abnormal trading volume around 10-K filing date and future firm fundamentals and policies. Our results suggest that the qualitative information contained in corporate annual reports is richer than previously found. Both positive and negative sentiments are informative when measured accurately, but they do not have symmetric implications, suggesting that a net sentiment measure advocated by prior studies would be less informative.
Bias‐Corrected Estimates of GED Returns

Using three sources of data, this article examines the direct economic return to General Educational Development (GED) certification for both native and immigrant high school dropouts. One data source—the Current Population Survey (CPS)—is plagued by nonresponse and allocation bias from the hot deck procedure that biases the estimated return to the GED upward. Correcting for allocation bias and ability bias, there is no direct economic return to GED certification. An apparent return to GED certification with age found in the raw CPS data is due to dropouts becoming more skilled over time. These results apply to both native‐born and immigrant populations.
The Political Economy of Green Industrial Warehouses

Empirical research into the effects of environmental certification on commercial real estate properties routinely finds evidence of both significant rental rate and occupancy rate premiums accruing...
Whatever Happened to the Best Interests Analysis in New York Relocation Cases? A Response

This response will first discuss the competing interests and expectations of the parties to a relocation dispute, and briefly outline the national view or views. In fact, there is no national standard, or anything approaching a consensus among the states. The New York experience under the exceptional circumstances standard will then be analyzed and appraised. My conclusion is that the standard should be maintained, although I believe that the Court of Appeals should revisit the issue to clarify the factors and criteria relevant to a determination.
When do firms undertake R&D by investing in new ventures?

We explore the conditionsunder which firms are likely to pursue equity investment in new ventures as a way to source innovative ideas. We find that firms invest more in new ventures—commonly referred to as ‘corporate venture capital’—in industries with weak intellectual property protection and, to some extent, in industries with high technological ferment and where complementary distribution capability is important. Furthermore, we find that the greater a firm’s cash flow and absorptive capacity, the more likely it is to invest. Our results suggest that in Schumpeterian environments incumbents may supplement their innovative efforts by tapping into the knowledge generated by new ventures. Copyright  2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Liquidity shocks and stock market reactions

We find that the stock market underreacts to stock-level liquidity shocks: liquidity shocks are not only positively associated with contemporaneous returns, but they also predict future return continuations for up to six months. Long-short portfolios sorted on liquidity shocks generate significant returns of 0.70% to 1.20% per month that are robust across alternative shock measures and after controlling for risk factors and stock characteristics. Furthermore, we show that investor inattention and illiquidity contribute to the underreaction: while both are significant in explaining short-term return predictability of liquidity shocks, the inattention-based mechanism is more powerful for the longer-term return predictability.
Racial Justice at Home: The Case for Opportunity-Housing Vouchers

This Note suggests that we import affirmative action principles into housing law. It lays out both a normative theory and a national vouchers program to accomplish that task. On the normative side, the piece argues that the rationales behind our housing laws today – the remediation rationale of the Equal Protection Clause and the anti-disparate impact rational of the Federal Housing Act – are insufficient. Instead, it suggests a new theory of justice for housing law called “anti-ghettoization.” On the policy side, this Note suggests an “opportunity-housing vouchers” component within Section 8, to provide black families in ghetto neighborhoods a subsidy to move to the suburbs. In Hills v. Gautreaux, the Supreme Court held that a race-conscious voucher program was a valid instrument for remedying discrimination in the housing market. Gautreax spawned numerous lawsuits and deconcentration orders in the 1970s and 80s. This Note argues that we stop relying on the vehicle of the Equal Protection Clause or FHA lawsuit to dismantle the ghetto and instead use a comprehensive administrative program. In outlining what such a program might look like, this Note draws heavily on the mobility remedy requested by the plaintiffs in the Thompson v. HUD lawsuit in Baltimore. Finally, this Note argues that importing affirmative action principles into housing law – through a race-conscious mobility program – would in fact be consistent with the Supreme Court's governing jurisprudence under the Equal Protection Clause.
A General Framework for Adversarial Examples with Objectives

Images perturbed subtly to be misclassified by neural networks, called adversarial examples, have emerged as a technically deep challenge and an important concern for several application domains. Most research on adversarial examples takes as its only constraint that the perturbed images are similar to the originals. However, real-world application of these ideas often requires the examples to satisfy additional objectives, which are typically enforced through custom modifications of the perturbation process. In this article, we propose adversarial generative nets (AGNs), a general methodology to train a generator neural network to emit adversarial examples satisfying desired objectives. We demonstrate the ability of AGNs to accommodate a wide range of objectives, including imprecise ones difficult to model, in two application domains. In particular, we demonstrate physical adversarial examples—eyeglass frames designed to fool face recognition—with better robustness, inconspicuousness, and scalability than previous approaches, as well as a new attack to fool a handwritten-digit classifier.
The ABC's of ACB: Unveiling a clear and present danger in the sales force

Abstract While anti-citizenship behavior (ACB) is under-researched across all academic domains, sales and marketing researchers have not done any work in the area. This oversight is significant given recent survey data that suggests sales representatives are misbehaving at an alarming rate; 60% of sales managers have caught their reps cheating on expense reports (an example of ACB) and 36% believe such behavior has gotten worse over the past several years. Directed towards the goal of understanding salesperson ACB, this research provides the first conceptual model of ACB in the sales force. The model contends that characteristics of the organization (justice and intra-firm competition) and contextual factors (fit and job stress) directly affect the performance of ACB while individual level factors (locus of control, self-monitoring and introversion) moderate the performance of these behaviors. In addition, this research explains the intra- and inter-organizational consequences of salesperson ACB and suggests several ways by which managers can address this issue.
Technology, agglomeration, and regional competition for investment

Competition for firms by region has a long-standing history, and the academic literature has debated whether such competition is efficient. We develop a model that explores technology development by firms facing regional competition for their invest- ment and examine the endogenous determination of region policy, firm technology, and agglomeration externalities. We find a new source of inefficiency - regional competition leads firms to inefficiently distort their development and selection of production tech- nology to improve their standing in the regional competition for their investment. We show that these inefficient firm decisions on technology and location can also weaken agglomeration externalities. JEL classification: H71, L2
Estimates from a consumer demand system: implications for the incidence of environmental taxes

Abstract Most studies suggest that environmental taxes are regressive, making them less attractive policy options. We consider the distributional effects of a gasoline tax increase using four incidence measures and under three scenarios for gas tax revenue use. To incorporate behavioral responses we use Consumer Expenditure Survey data to estimate a consumer demand system that includes gasoline, other goods, and leisure. Our estimates confirm that when revenues are not recycled, a gasoline tax is regressive. Use of incidence measures that ignore demand responses, however, will substantially overstate this regressivity. In contrast, the differences between the equivalent variation and easier-to-implement consumer surplus measures are relatively small. In addition, our results suggest that using the additional gas tax revenue to fund labor tax cuts makes the policy substantially less regressive while using the revenue to fund lump-sum transfers actually makes it progressive.
Analyzing Risks And Returns In Emerging Equity Markets

This study applies an operations research technique, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) on emerging equity market returns. Sharpe and Treynor measures focus only one risk aspect of portfolio return and in reality investors consider several alternative risk measures outside the traditional mean-variance framework. DEA is a multivariate approach that can incorporate multiple risk characteristics that may be equally important for the investor’s decision to allocate assets to emerging markets, the risk and performance relationships are explored in a multivariate framework.
Does Regulatory Certification Affect the Information Content of Credit Ratings

We exploit an investor-paid rating agency's designation as a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization NRSRO to test whether this certification affects the agency's information production. We use a certified issuer-paid agency as a benchmark and find robust evidence that the investor-paid agency's ratings policy-both timelier and more symmetric with respect to positive and negative information-persists after it became certified for regulatory compliance. Our results suggest that ratings policy is more a function of rating agency compensation structure than the NRSRO certification by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.
Mostly) against exceptionalism.

This Essay delves into issues surrounding the relationship between technology and the patent law. Responding to Dan Burk and Mark Lemley's Biotechnology's Uncertainty Principle, the piece notes that the basic question posed by that article - whether the patent law is "technology-specific" - is a relatively easy question, given the several doctrines that explicitly link the subject matter context of an invention to the validity and scope of related patents. This sort of technological exceptionalism (which the Essay refers to as TYPE I exceptionalism) is both extant and easily justifiable for a legal regime directed to technology policy. It is a broader sort of exceptionalism (TYPE II) that is far more troublesome, implying a role for the patent law in quite detailed policy judgments, such as the optimal breadth for biotechnological patents (as Burk and Lemley suggest). The Essay offers a variety of reasons that TYPE II exceptionalism is unwarranted, and indeed, notes that a primary claim of Burk and Lemley's - that the Federal Circuit has grossly missed the mark in its (purportedly) exceptionalist approach - previews the sort of problems created by pursuing technological exceptionalism in the patent law.
INFERENCE IN TIME SERIES REGRESSION WHEN THE ORDER OF INTEGRATION OF A REGRESSOR IS UNKNOWN

The distribution of statistics testing restrictions on the coefficients in time series regressions can depend on the order of integration of the regressors. In practice, the order of integration is rarely known. We examine two conventional approaches to this problem — simply to ignore unit root problems or to use unit root pretests to determine the critical values for second-stage inference—and show that both exhibit substantial size distortions in empirically plausible situations. We then propose an alternative approach in which the second-stage critical values depend continuously on a first-stage statistic that is informative about the order of integration of the regressor. This procedure has the correct size asymptotically and good local asymptotic power.
Duty Issues in the Ever-Changing World of Payments Processing: Is It Time for New Rules?

The marketplace of retail payments is evolving faster than statutory law and government regulations are accommodating changes. This phenomenon creates gaps that facilitate new types of payments fraud including, for example, duplicate presentments of the same obligation, new-age alterations, and counterfeits. They also introduce new system and counter-party risks that the legal regime does not allocate as precisely as it has in the past.Theoretical choices for allocating duties range from open-ended systems that relied on assessments of "good faith" and the exercise of "ordinary care" as the Uniform Commercial Code does and more defined systems such as the bright-line eligibility and warranty standards in system rules such as ECCHO. This article looks at issues such as how duty obligations may be adjusting to new processing realities, how one demonstrates compliance or non-compliance with duties, and what barriers prevent some participants from benefitting from duties others should have fulfilled. The analysis centers on four principles drawn from the past: transparency, consistency, privity, and proof - to explore duties in the context of hypotheticals. It concludes that we should devote more attention to important economic and fairness concerns in payments, giving some examples.
Dynamic Multi-level Privilege Control in Behavior-based Implicit Authentication Systems Leveraging Mobile Devices

Implicit authentication (IA) is gaining popularity over recent years due to its use of user behavior as the main input, relieving users from explicit actions such as remembering and entering passwords. However, such convenience comes with a cost of authentication accuracy and delay which we propose to improve in this paper. Authentication accuracy deteriorates as users’ behaviors change as a result of mood, age, a change of routine, etc. Current authentication systems handle failed authentication attempts by locking the users out of their mobile devices. It is unsuitable for IA whose accuracy deterioration induces a high false reject rate, rendering the IA system unusable. Furthermore, existing IA systems leverage computationally expensive machine learning, which can introduce a large authentication delay. It is challenging to improve the authentication accuracy of these systems without sacrificing authentication delay. In this paper, we propose a multi-level privilege control (MPC) scheme that dynamically adjusts users’ access privilege based on their behavior change. MPC increases the system’s confidence in users’ legitimacy even when their behaviors deviate from historical data, thus improving authentication accuracy. It is a lightweight feature added to the existing IA schemes that helps avoid frequent and expensive retraining of machine learning models, thus improving authentication delay. We demonstrate that MPC increases authentication accuracy by 18.63% and reduces authentication delay by 7.02 minutes on average, using a public dataset that contains comprehensive user behavior data.
Filtering, averaging, and scale dependency in homogeneous variable density turbulence

We investigate relationships between statistics obtained from filtering and from ensemble or Reynolds-averaging turbulence flow fields as a function of length scale. Generalized central moments in the filtering approach are expressed as inner products of generalized fluctuating quantities, q ′ ( ξ , x ) = q ( ξ ) − q ¯ ( x ), representing fluctuations of a field q ( ξ ), at any point ξ, with respect to its filtered value at x. For positive-definite filter kernels, these expressions provide a scale-resolving framework, with statistics and realizability conditions at any length scale. In the small-scale limit, scale-resolving statistics become zero. In the large-scale limit, scale-resolving statistics and realizability conditions are the same as in the Reynolds-averaged description. Using direct numerical simulations (DNS) of homogeneous variable density turbulence, we diagnose Reynolds stresses, T i j, resolved kinetic energy, kr, turbulent mass-flux velocity, ai, and density-specific volume covariance, b, defined in the scale-resolving framework. These variables, and terms in their governing equations, vary smoothly between zero and their Reynolds-averaged definitions at the small and large scale limits, respectively. At intermediate scales, the governing equations exhibit interactions between terms that are not active in the Reynolds-averaged limit. For example, in the Reynolds-averaged limit, b follows a decaying process driven by a destruction term; at intermediate length scales, it is a balance between production, redistribution, destruction, and transport, where b grows as the density spectrum develops and then decays when mixing becomes strong enough. This work supports the notion of a generalized, length-scale adaptive model that converges to DNS at high resolutions and to Reynolds-averaged statistics at coarse resolutions.
Tell me what this is: Few-Shot Incremental Object Learning by a Robot

For many applications, robots will need to be incrementally trained to recognize the specific objects needed for an application. This paper presents a practical system for incrementally training a robot to recognize different object categories using only a small set of visual examples provided by a human. The paper uses a recently developed state-of-the-art method for few-shot incremental learning of objects. After learning the object classes incrementally, the robot performs a table cleaning task organizing objects into categories specified by the human. We also demonstrate the system’s ability to learn arrangements of objects and predict missing or incorrectly placed objects. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves nearly the same performance as a system trained with all examples at one time (batch training), which constitutes a theoretical upper bound.
A Hierarchical Model for Fast Distributed Consensus in Dynamic Networks

State machine replication is a foundational tool that is used to provide availability and fault tolerance in distributed systems. Safe replication requires a consensus algorithm as a method to achieve agreement on the order of system updates. Designing algorithms that are safe while retaining high throughput is imperative for today’s systems. Two of the most widely adopted consensus algorithms, Paxos [1] and Raft [2] , have received much attention and use in industry. While both Paxos and Raft provide safe specification for maintaining a replicated log of system updates, Raft aims for ease of understandability and implementation.
Weyl covariance, and proposals for superconformal prepotentials in 10D superspaces

Proposals are made to describe the Weyl scaling transformation laws of supercovariant derivatives ∇A, the torsion supertensors TABC, and curvature supertensors RABcd in 10D superspaces. Starting from the proposal that an unconstrained supergravity prepotential for the 11D, $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 1 theory is described by a scalar superfield, considerations for supergravity prepotentials in the 10D theories are enumerated. We derive infinitesimal 10D superspace Weyl transformation laws and discover ten possible 10D, $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 1 superfield supergravity prepotentials. The first identification of all off-shell ten dimensional supergeometrical Weyl field strength tensors, constructed from respective torsions, is presented.
Peridynamics-based discrete element method (PeriDEM) model of granular systems involving breakage of arbitrarily shaped particles

Abstract Usage, manipulation, transport, delivery, and mixing of granular or particulate media, comprised of spherical or polyhedral particles, is commonly encountered in industrial sectors of construction (cement and rock fragments), pharmaceutics (tablets), and transportation (ballast). Elucidating particulate media’s behavior in concert with particle attrition (i.e., particle wear and subsequent particle fragmentation) is essential for predicting the performance and increasing the efficiency of engineering systems using such media. Discrete element method (DEM) based techniques can describe the interaction between particles but cannot model intra-particle deformation, especially intra-particle fracture. On the other hand, peridynamics provides the means to account for intra-particle deformation and fracture due to contact forces between particles. The present study proposes a hybrid model referred to as PeriDEM that combines the advantages of peridynamics and DEM. The model parameters can be tuned to achieve desired DEM contact forces, damping effects, and intra-particle stiffness. Two particle impacts and compressive behavior of multi-particle systems are thoroughly investigated. The model can account for any arbitrarily shaped particle in general. Spherical, hexagonal, and non-convex particle shapes are simulated in the present study. The effect of mesh resolution on intra-particle peridynamics is explicitly studied. The proposed hybrid model opens a new avenue to explore the complicated interactions encountered in discrete particle dynamics that involve the formation of force chains, particle interlocking, particle attrition, wear, and the eventual breakage.
Social Transformation and Violence: Evidence from U.S. Reconstruction:

How do political actors create and institutionalize revolutionary social transformation, and what are the consequences of their efforts? In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding the ...
Photorefractivity in polymer-stabilized nematic liquid crystals

Polymer-stabilized liquid crystals, consisting of low concentrations of a polymeric electron acceptor, are shown to exhibit significantly enhanced photorefractive properties. The charge generation and transport properties of these composite systems are strongly modified from nematic liquid crystals doped with electron donors and acceptors. The new composites are produced by polymerizing a small quantity of a 1,4:5,8-naphthalenediimide electron acceptor functionalized with an acrylate group in an aligned nematic liquid crystal. Photopolymerization creates an anisotropic gel-like medium in which the liquid crystal is free to reorient in the presence of a space charge field, while maintaining charge trapping sites in the polymerized regions of the material. The presence of these trapping sites results in the observation of longer lived, higher resolution holographic gratings in the polymer-stabilized liquid crystals than observed in nematic liquid crystals alone. These gratings display Bragg regime diffraction. Asymmetric beam coupling, photo-conductivity, and four-wave mixing experiments are performed to characterize the photophysics of these novel materials.
Air-stable, earth-abundant molten chlorides and corrosion-resistant containment for chemically-robust, high-temperature thermal energy storage for concentrated solar power

Abstract A dramatic reduction in man-made CO2 emissions could be achieved if the cost of electricity generated from concentrated solar power (CSP) plants could become competitive with fossil-fuel-derived electricity. The solar heat-to-electricity conversion efficiency of CSP plants may be significantly increased (and the associated electricity cost decreased) by operating CSP turbines with inlet temperatures ≥750 °C instead of ≤550 °C, and by using thermal energy storage (TES) at ≥750 °C to allow for rapidly dispatchable and/or continuous electricity production. Unfortunately, earth-abundant MgCl2–KCl-based liquids currently being considered as low-cost media for large-scale, high-temperature TES are susceptible to oxidation in ambient air, with associated undesired changes in liquid composition and enhanced corrosion of metal alloys in pipes and tanks containing such liquids. In this paper, alternative high-temperature, earth-abundant molten chlorides that are resistant to oxidation in ambient air are identified via thermodynamic calculations. The oxidation resistance, and corrosion-resistant containment, of such molten chlorides at 750 °C are then demonstrated. Such an air-tolerant strategy, involving chemically-robust, low-cost TES media paired with effective containment materials, provides a critical advance towards the higher-temperature operation of, and lower-cost electricity generation from, CSP plants.