cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Tools and Levers of Access to Patented Health Related Genetic Invention in Canada

This Article argues that there is a prevailing problem of access to genetic invention in Canada caused by disputes over intellectual property (“IP”) rights arising from conflicting normative orders. A variety of tools have been suggested and developed to remedy blockages to genetic invention caused by IP rights, including proposals for legislative reform, open source licensing initiatives, international standard setting, and information aggregation projects. I argue that determining which tool will work in the context of the disputes that have arisen requires comprehending how the tool will interact with the characteristics of the local legal order. I draw on legal pluralist insights that regard state law as merely one form of legal regulation; thus the local legal order is comprised of formal and informal rules developed by communities of practice. I also proceed from the premise that a one-size-fits-all approach to enabling access through IP rights is likely to be as unsuccessful as one-size-fits-all approaches have been to regulating IP rights more generally.
The threatening nature of "rap" music

Author(s): Dunbar, A; Kubrin, CE; Scurich, N | Abstract: Rap music has had a contentious relationship with the legal system, including censorship, regulation, and artists being arrested for lewd and profane performances. More recently, rap lyrics have been introduced by prosecutors to establish guilt in criminal trials. Some fear this form of artistic expression will be inappropriately interpreted as literal and threatening, perhaps because of stereotypes. Only a handful of studies have examined whether rap lyrics are evaluated using stereotypes, yet these studies were conducted in the 1990s-a period of heightened scrutiny for rap-and used nonoptimal methods. This study presents 3 experiments that examine the impact of genre-specific stereotypes on the evaluation of violent song lyrics by manipulating the musical genre (rap vs. country) while holding constant the actual lyrics. Study 1, a direct replication of previous research, found that participants deemed identical lyrics more literal, offensive, and in greater need of regulation when they were characterized as rap compared with country. Study 2 was a conceptual replication (i.e., same design but different stimuli), and again detected this effect. Study 3 used the same approach but experimentally manipulated the race of the author of the lyrics. A main effect was detected for the genre, with rap evaluated more negatively than country or a control condition with no label. However, no effects were found for the race of the lyrics' author nor were interactions were detected. Collectively, these findings highlight the possibility that rap lyrics could inappropriately impact jurors when admitted as evidence to prove guilt.
Do hubris and the information environment explain the effect of acquirers’ size on their gains from acquisitions?

We examine the negative relation between abnormal returns at acquisition announcements and the size of acquiring firms. This so-called size effect was first documented and investigated by Moeller et al. (J Financ Econ 73:201–228, 2004), who conclude that hubris on the part of large acquirers most likely explains the size effect. Our study is a further investigation of this size effect and makes the following contributions. First, we document that the effect exists monotonically across firm size deciles, not just in a comparison of “small” and “large” firms. Second, using a different methodology than Moeller et al. (J Financ Econ 73:201–228, 2004), we corroborate their finding that acquisitions made by large firms reflect more hubris than those made by small firms, but we also document that acquisitions made by small firms create more synergies than those made by large firms. In addition, we find that the size effect is significantly stronger for the smallest acquirers—who make value-creating acquisitions, on average—than it is for the largest acquirers. Taken together, therefore, our evidence indicates that the size effect is at least as much driven by small firms making superior, synergistic acquisitions as it is driven by large firms making inferior, hubristic acquisitions. Finally, we document that differences in the information environment between small and large firms do not explain the size effect.
The cost of innovation: R&D and high cash holdings in U.S. firms

Abstract We show that R&D investment explains a significant portion of the increase in the average cash-to-assets ratio of U.S. firms, which more than doubled between 1980 and 2012. In 1980, an average firm held $0.04 in cash for $1.00 of R&D spending, but this had increased to $0.60 by 2012. The increasing sensitivity of cash holdings to R&D investment and the increase in R&D spending of the typical firm explain over 20% of the increase in aggregate cash holdings. Intensified domestic and global competition appears to be an important explanation for the increased propensity of R&D-intensive firms to hoard cash.
SPROUSE'S WHAT-YOU-MAY-CALL-ITS: FUNDAMENTAL INSIGHT OR MONUMENTAL MISTAKE?

We critically evaluate Sprouse's 1966 Journal of Accountancy article, which prodded the FASB towards a balance-sheet approach. We highlight three errors in this article. First, Sprouse confuses necessary and sufficient conditions by arguing that good accounting systems must satisfy the balance-sheet equation. Second, Sprouse's insinuation that financial analysts rely on balance-sheet analysis is contradicted by contemporary and current security-analysis textbooks, analysts' written reports, and interviews with analysts. Third, and most crucially, Sprouse does not recognize that the primary role of accounting systems is to help managers discover and exploit profitable exchange opportunities, without which firms cannot survive.
The Siren Is Calling: Economic and Ideological Trends Toward Privatization of Public Police Forces

The landmark Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United has opened the floodgates to allow unlimited corporate campaign donations, and Supreme Court doctrine is shifting back to the Lochner-era’s focus on economic rights. At the same time, there are efforts underway across the United States to privatize public services in order to alleviate what proponents claim is a shortfall in revenue due to the recession. Within those privatization efforts, public policing has become a new front, with outsourcing and wholesale privatization of the police underway. This Article adds to the existing scholarship a political analysis of privatization efforts, including how lobbying and campaign financing are making wholesale privatization in the area of policing a very real possibility. This Article looks at the example of Camden, New Jersey, where the city’s entire police force was fired and replaced with a county-wide force in order to shed pension and wage obligations, as an incubator for future wholesale privatization of the police. Considering the trend of corporate lobbying through groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council that write model legislation and deliver it to lawmakers, as well as unlimited campaign donations, this Article traces the current trend toward police privatization. It argues that without more transparency and some limitations on such expenditures, the public cannot fully and fairly participate in decisions about whether to relinquish force-protection to private corporations. Understanding the potential consequences for both public safety and democratic principles requires systemic, legislative and electoral transparency that currently remains deficient.
SUBSIDIZATION AND CHOICE IN THE GROUP HEALTH INSURANCE MARKET

This study investigates the effect of group health insurance plan choice on insurance unit price. The empirical findings suggest that the unit price of insurance, as measured by the ratio of the premium to expected indemnity benefits, is lower in group plans that offer employees a choice of different insurance options and require a premium contribution than it is in plans lacking at least one of these two features. The analyses suggest that lower unit prices are related to an increase in indemnity benefits and that the reduction in the unit price is greater for lower risks. The findings indicate that although subsidization of high risks by low risks occurs with group health insurance, the degree of subsidization is less when employees are offered a choice of health insurance plans.
The Agency Problems of Hedging and Earnings Management

This paper uses a principal-agent model to study the interaction between hedging and earnings management. Hedging makes earnings management more difficult and they appear to be strategic substitutes in this model, which is both consistent with existing empirical evidence and provides a new explanation for that evidence. If hedging decision is contractible, hedging is efficient since it reduces both the risk premium and the equilibrium amount of earnings management. If hedging decision is not contractible, however, hedging does not always alleviate the agency problem. Surprisingly, sometimes a scenario of no hedging but allowing earnings management is efficient. The reason is that motivating hedging may require a more costly compensation scheme to mitigate the appeal of earnings management. In addition, this paper shows that tolerating some earnings management is always efficient when there is no hedge option, since it is costly to eliminate earnings management. Sometimes it is inefficient to take any action against earnings management. However, with the encouraged hedge option, the cost to eliminate earnings management can be reduced significantly and zero tolerance of earnings management may be efficient.
Debt and taxes: Evidence from the real estate industry

Abstract Compelling empirical evidence documenting a material effect of corporate taxes on leverage decisions is limited, in part because of difficulties in constructing an effective proxy for the firm's tax benefit of debt. We examine leverage decisions across taxable and nontaxable real estate firms—firms for which we can measure the relative tax benefit of debt with little error. The tax hypothesis implies that for firms with similar asset portfolios, taxable firms should have more debt than their nontaxable counterparts. Consistent with this, leverage ratios of taxable real estate firms are higher than their nontaxable counterparts, but the magnitude of this difference is at most one-half of that implied by studies that employ simulated marginal tax rates.
Four Easy Pieces to Balance Privacy and Accountability in Public Higher Education: A Response to Wrongdoing Ranging from Petty Corruption to the Sandusky and Penn State Tragedy

This Article offers four legislative solutions — four easy pieces — to properly balance confidentiality and accountability in publicly financed higher education. It presents (1) a fix to the Federal Student Privacy Act that will prevent it from being misapplied as a defense to proper freedom of information act requests, (2) a bill to require the affirmative disclosure of admission practices at public schools receiving federal funding, (3) a bill that imposes direct costs, through the bankruptcy code, on schools that misrepresent their data regarding graduation and post-graduation opportunities, and (4) a revision of the federal freedom of information act to have it apply to those public schools that receive federal funding.
The Transnational Regime Complex for Climate Change

In climate change, as in other areas, recent years have produced a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of transnational institutions, standards, financing arrangements, and programs. As a result, climate governan...
Risk preferences and changes in background risk

We present two theorems that yield necessary and sufficient conditions for first- and second-degree stochastic dominance deteriorations of background risk to increase risk aversion with respect to foreground risk. We require that any change in a foreground risk that is undesirable remains so after a background risk changes in a way that is either unfair, undesirable in the sense of reducing expected utility, or undesirable in the sense of increasing expected marginal utility. Our results thus characterize utility functions that are, respectively, vulnerable, proper, or standard with respect to changes in background risk.
Pulling the Trigger on Public Campaign Finance: The Contextual Approach to Analyzing Trigger Funds

The unpredictable nature of electoral politics makes it difficult for public campaign financing programs to be both efficient and effective. Programs that award too much money to publicly funded candidates risk insolvency, while miserly systems cannot attract participants. Moreover, the competitiveness of any given race changes with each election cycle—what was a landslide one year might be the closest of contests next November. Several states have tried to address this dilemma by enacting “trigger” provisions that disburse extra money to publicly funded candidates only after their opponents raise or spend beyond a certain amount. These laws have faced legal challenges from political committees and candidates who argue that trigger funds provisions flout the First Amendment’s protection of political speech by aiding the speaker’s opponent. Supporters of campaign finance regulation counter that trigger funds facilitate political speech rather than chilling it. This Note examines the widely divergent federal court rulings on these challenges, both before and after the U.S. Supreme Court’s important Davis v. FEC opinion, with a focus on the U.S Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s recent McComish v. Bennett decision. It finds that none of the trigger funds jurisprudence has fully analyzed both the state interest in the provisions and in trigger funds’ burdensome effects. The Note then recommends a contextual approach to understanding the state interest in public finance legislation. It asserts that courts should not scrutinize a state’s trigger provision in isolation from the rest of its public finance regime. The Note concludes that because typical trigger funds provisions encourage participation in public financing, which in turn reduces corruption, trigger funds survive First Amendment scrutiny.
Business Activity and the Boston Stock Market, 1835–1869

Abstract Using annual data, this paper develops new indexes of price performance, dividend yields, and total returns for bank stocks and industrial equities traded on the Boston stock market between 1835 and 1869, a time when it was the nation's premier market for industrials. Using these new series and a set of vector autoregressive models, we conclude that disturbances in the banking sector, as manifested by declines in total returns to bank stockholders, led to increases in short-term lending rates which in turn led to declines in the price performance of traded industrial firms. There is no evidence of feedback from industrial stock returns to bank stock prices via lending rates. The findings are consistent with a key role for banks in 19th-century business fluctuations.
Innate and adaptive immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 in humans: relevance to acquired immunity and vaccine responses.

The factors responsible for the spectrum of coronavirus 19 (COVID-19) disease severity and the genesis and nature of protective immunity against COVID-19 remain elusive. Multiple studies have investigated the immune responses to COVID-19 in various populations, including those without evidence of COVID-19 infection. Information regarding innate and adaptive immune responses to the novel severe respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has evolved rapidly. Data are accumulating defining disease phenotypes that aid in rational and informed development of new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 and the development of novel vaccines. In this paper, data on important innate immune responses are summarized, including cytokines, specifically interleukin (IL)-6 and complement, and potential treatments are explored. Adaptive immune responses and derivative therapeutics such as monoclonal antibodies directed at spike proteins are also examined. Finally, data on real-time assessments of adaptive immune responses are explored, which include CD4+ /CD8+ T cells, natural killer (NK) T cells, memory B cells and T follicular cells with specificities for COVID-19 peptides in infected and normal individuals. Data of two novel vaccines have been released, both showing > 95% efficacy in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection. Analysis of humoral and cellular responses to the vaccines will determine the robustness and durability of protection. In addition, long-term assessment of SARS-CoV-2 memory B and T cell-mediated immune responses in patients recovering from an infection or those with cross-reactive immunological memory will help to define risk for future SARS-CoV infections. Finally, patients recovering from SARS-CoV-2 infection may experience prolonged immune activation probably due to T cell exhaustion. This will be an important new frontier for study.
Radium: Improving Dynamic PoW Targeting.

Most PoW blockchain protocols operate with a simple mechanism whereby a threshold is set for each block and miners generate block hashes until one of those values falls below the threshold. Although largely effective, this mechanism produces blocks at a highly variable rate and also leaves a blockchain susceptible to chain death, i.e. abandonment in the event that the threshold is set too high to attract any miners. A recent innovation called real-time block rate targeting, or RTT, fixes these problems by reducing the target throughout the mining interval. RTT exhibits much less variable block times and even features the ability to fully adjust the target after each block. However, as we show in this paper, RTT also suffers from a critical vulnerability whereby miners deviate from the protocol to increase their profits. We introduce the Radium protocol, which mitigates this vulnerability in RTT while retaining lower variance block times, responsive target adjustment, and lowering the risk of chain death. We also show that Radium’s susceptibility to the doublespend attack and orphaned blocks remains similar to Bitcoin.
Optimizing Hospital Room Layout to Reduce the Risk of Patient Falls.

Despite years of research into patient falls in hospital rooms, falls and related injuries remain a serious concern to patient safety. In this work, we formulate a gradient-free constrained optimization problem to generate and reconfigure the hospital room interior layout to minimize the risk of falls. We define a cost function built on a hospital room fall model that takes into account the supportive or hazardous effect of the patient's surrounding objects, as well as simulated patient trajectories inside the room. We define a constraint set that ensures the functionality of the generated room layouts in addition to conforming to architectural guidelines. We solve this problem efficiently using a variant of simulated annealing. We present results for two real-world hospital room types and demonstrate a significant improvement of 18% on average in patient fall risk when compared with a traditional hospital room layout and 41% when compared with randomly generated layouts.
Stability Conditions for Coupled Autonomous Vehicles Formations

In this article, we give necessary conditions for the stability of coupled autonomous vehicles in $\mathbb {R}$ . We focus on linear arrays with decentralized vehicles, where each vehicle interacts with only a few of its neighbors. We obtain explicit expressions for necessary conditions for stability in the cases where a system consists of a periodic arrangement of two or three different types of vehicles, i.e., configurations as follows:... 2-1-2-1 or... 3-2-1-3-2-1. Previous literature indicated that the (necessary) condition for stability in the case of a single vehicle type (...1-1-1) held that the first moment of certain coefficients of the interactions between vehicles has to be zero. Here, we show that this does not generalize. Instead, the condition (necessary) in the cases considered is that the first moment plus a nonlinear correction term must be zero.
Nernst–Planck–Navier–Stokes Systems far from Equilibrium

We consider ionic electrodiffusion in fluids, described by the Nernst–Planck–Navier–Stokes system. We prove that the system has global smooth solutions for arbitrary smooth data in bounded domains with a smooth boundary in three space dimensions, in the following situations. We consider: a arbitrary positive Dirichlet boundary conditions for the ionic concentrations, arbitrary Dirichlet boundary conditions for the potential, arbitrary positive initial concentrations, and arbitrary regular divergence-free initial velocities. Global regularity holds for any positive, possibly different diffusivities of the ions, in the case of two ionic species, coupled to Stokes equations for the fluid. The result also holds in the case of Navier–Stokes coupling, if the velocity is regular. The same global smoothness of solutions is proved to hold for arbitrarily many ionic species as well, but in that case we require all their diffusivities to be the same.
A white noise approach to evolutionary ecology.

Abstract Although the evolutionary response to random genetic drift is classically modelled as a sampling process for populations with fixed abundance, the abundances of populations in the wild fluctuate over time. Furthermore, since wild populations exhibit demographic stochasticity and since random genetic drift is in part due to demographic stochasticity, theoretical approaches are needed to understand the role of demographic stochasticity in eco-evolutionary dynamics. Here we close this gap for quantitative characters evolving in continuously reproducing populations by providing a framework to track the stochastic dynamics of abundance density across phenotypic space using stochastic partial differential equations. In the process we develop a set of heuristics to operationalize the powerful, but abstract theory of white noise and diffusion-limits of individual-based models. Applying these heuristics, we obtain stochastic ordinary differential equations that generalize classical expressions of ecological quantitative genetics. In particular, by supplying growth rate and reproductive variance as functions of abundance densities and trait values, these equations track population size, mean trait and additive genetic variance responding to mutation, demographic stochasticity, random genetic drift, deterministic selection and noise-induced selection. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by formulating a model of diffuse coevolution mediated by exploitative competition for a continuum of resources. In addition to trait and abundance distributions, this model predicts interaction networks defined by niche-overlap, competition coefficients, or selection gradients. Using a high-richness approximation, we find linear selection gradients and competition coefficients are uncorrelated, but magnitudes of linear selection gradients and quadratic selection gradients are both positively correlated with competition coefficients. Hence, competing species that strongly affect each other’s abundance tend to also impose selection on one another, but the directionality is not predicted. This approach contributes to the development of a synthetic theory of evolutionary ecology by formalizing first principle derivations of stochastic models tracking feedbacks of biological processes and the patterns of diversity they produce.
Vertical mergers with input substitution: Double marginalization, foreclosure and welfare

Abstract We consider differentiated duopolists that face symmetric linear demands and produce using Cobb–Douglas technologies with a monopolized input and a competitively supplied input. A merger between the input monopolist and either firm eliminates double marginalization but – unlike​ with fixed-proportions technologies – can lead to foreclosure and reduce welfare. The same can occur under a CES technology with greater input substitutability than Cobb–Douglas. With identical Cobb–Douglas technologies, the merged firm raises the rival’s cost by more, and the welfare effects are worse, when the input it controls constitutes a low rather than high share of input costs. With different technologies, the welfare effects can be non-monotonic in that input’s share of costs.
Coupling of spliceosome complexity to intron diversity.

Summary We determined that over 40 spliceosomal proteins are conserved between many fungal species and humans but were lost during the evolution of S. cerevisiae, an intron-poor yeast with unusually rigid splicing signals. We analyzed null mutations in a subset of these factors, most of which had not been investigated previously, in the intron-rich yeast Cryptococcus neoformans. We found they govern splicing efficiency of introns with divergent spacing between intron elements. Importantly, most of these factors also suppress usage of weak nearby cryptic/alternative splice sites. Among these, orthologs of GPATCH1 and the helicase DHX35 display correlated functional signatures and copurify with each other as well as components of catalytically active spliceosomes, identifying a conserved G patch/helicase pair that promotes splicing fidelity. We propose that a significant fraction of spliceosomal proteins in humans and most eukaryotes are involved in limiting splicing errors, potentially through kinetic proofreading mechanisms, thereby enabling greater intron diversity.
Too Much Skin-in-the-Game? The Effect of Mortgage Market Concentration on Credit and House Prices

During the housing boom, mortgage markets became increasingly concentrated with the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) being exposed to over 40 percent of U.S. mortgages in the 2000s. Research on the causes of the pre-crisis rise in risky lending has largely overlooked this trend. I develop a theory where this concentration in mortgage holdings can explain key features of the housing boom and bust. In the model, large lenders with many outstanding mortgages have incentives to extend risky credit to prop up house prices. An increase in concentration can lead to a credit boom with worsening credit quality and a subsequent bust with widespread defaults. The model can generate a negative correlation between credit and income growth across areas (such as ZIP codes) while maintaining a positive correlation between them across borrowers reconciling empirical evidence that has previously seemed contradictory.
Schulze and ranked-pairs voting are fixed-parameter tractable to bribe, manipulate, and control

Schulze and ranked-pairs elections have received much attention recently, and the former has quickly become a quite widely used election system. For many cases these systems have been proven resistant to bribery, control, or manipulation, with ranked pairs being particularly praised for being NP-hard for all three of those. Nonetheless, the present paper shows that with respect to the number of candidates, Schulze and ranked-pairs elections are fixed-parameter tractable to bribe, control, and manipulate: we obtain uniform, polynomial-time algorithms whose running times' degrees do not depend on the number of candidates. We also provide such algorithms for some weighted variants of these problems.
Antibiotics and Animal Agriculture: The Need for Global Collective Action

The use of antibiotics in animal agriculture is steadily increasing, especially in developing countries. The European Union and a handful of developed countries have implemented policies to scale back the use of antibiotics, recognizing its role in the global rise of antibiotic resistance. But many farmers who raise animals live in poor countries without public health regulations, or work for large corporate entities that can move their operations to places with weak regulations. To minimize the careless use of antibiotics around the world, we need multi-lateral coordination between states on some common standards for the use of antibiotics in animals.
How do you spell M-U-R-K-O-W-S-K-I? Part I: The Question of Assistance to the Voter

The 2010 race for the Alaska Senate now seems to be over. After losing in the Republican Party Primary to Tea Party-backed candidate Joe Miller, Senator Lisa Murkowski staged a write-in candidacy and, bucking both U.S. and Alaska history, won the general election. Although much attention has been paid to Miller’s post-election challenges to Murkowski write-in ballots, a major election law question was at issue prior to the election: to what extent can poll workers assist voters who need help in voting for a write-in candidate? After Murkowski declared her write-in candidacy, the Alaska Division of Elections distributed a list of eligible write-in candidates to polling places, in case voters had questions about how to properly spell the name of a write-in candidate. Both parties, sensing this would benefit Murkowski, cried foul, and challenged the new policy in Alaska state court as a violation of the Division’s own regulations prohibiting the distribution of “information” about write-in candidates at polling places. This essay examines four issues regarding voter assistance in the Murkowski litigation: (1) how to interpret statutes and regulations regarding voter assistance; (2) what kind of assistance is permissible and what kind is not; (3) whether the state can legitimately handicap the ability of voters to write-in the name of a candidate; and (4) how decisions on assistance to voters before the election might affect a court’s disposition on cases that arise after the election. * Assistant Professor of Law, Saint Louis University School of Law and former law clerk to Justice Warren Matthews, Alaska Supreme Court, 2007-2008. Member, Alaska Bar (inactive).
Refined Description and Stability for Singular Solutions of the 2D Keller-Segel System

We construct solutions to the two dimensional parabolic-elliptic Keller-Segel model for chemotaxis that blow up in finite time $T$. The solution is decomposed as the sum of a stationary state concentrated at scale $\lambda$ and of a perturbation. We rely on a detailed spectral analysis for the linearized dynamics in the parabolic neighbourhood of the singularity performed by the authors, providing a refined expansion of the perturbation. Our main result is the construction of a stable dynamics in the full nonradial setting for which the stationary state collapses with the universal law $\lambda \sim 2e^{-\frac{2+\gamma}{2}}\sqrt{T-t}e^{-\sqrt{\frac{|\ln (T-t)|}{2}}}$ where $\gamma$ is the Euler constant. This improves on the earlier result by Raphael and Schweyer 2014 and gives a new robust approach to so-called type II singularities for critical parabolic problems. A by-product of the spectral analysis we developed is the existence of unstable blowup dynamics with speed $\lambda_\ell \sim C_0(T-t)^{\frac{\ell}{2}} |\ln(T-t)|^{-\frac{\ell}{2(\ell - 1)}}$ for $\ell \geq 2$ integer.
Multi-frequency coherent emission from superstructure thermal emitters

Long-range spatial coherence can be induced in incoherent thermal emitters by embedding a periodic grating within a material supporting propagating polaritons or dielectric modes. However, only a single spatially coherent mode is supported by purely periodic thermal emitters. While various designs have been proposed for the purpose of allowing arbitrary emission profiles, the limitations associated with the partial spatial coherence of thermal emitters are not known. Here, we explore superstructure gratings (SSGs) to control the spatial and spectral properties of thermal emitters. SSGs have long-range periodicity but employ a unit cell that provides multiple Bragg vectors to interact with light. These Bragg vectors allow simultaneous launching of polaritons with different frequencies/wavevectors in a single grating, manifesting as additional spatial and spectral modes in the thermal emission profile. However, SSGs still have a well-defined period, which allows us to assess the role that finite spatial coherence plays in thermal emitters. We find that the spatial coherence length defines the maximum possible SSG period that can be used. This provides a fundamental limit on the degree of spatial coherence that can be induced in a thermal emitter and has broader implications for the use of techniques such as inverse design for structure optimization.
Confidence intervals for policy evaluation in adaptive experiments.

Adaptive experimental designs can dramatically improve efficiency in randomized trials. But with adaptively collected data, common estimators based on sample means and inverse propensity-weighted means can be biased or heavy-tailed. This poses statistical challenges, in particular when the experimenter would like to test hypotheses about parameters that were not targeted by the data-collection mechanism. In this paper, we present a class of test statistics that can handle these challenges. Our approach is to adaptively reweight the terms of an augmented inverse propensity-weighting estimator to control the contribution of each term to the estimator’s variance. This scheme reduces overall variance and yields an asymptotically normal test statistic. We validate the accuracy of the resulting estimates and their CIs in numerical experiments and show that our methods compare favorably to existing alternatives in terms of mean squared error, coverage, and CI size.
Progressive Property Moving Forward

In his thought-provoking recent article, “The Ambition and Transformative Potential of Progressive Property,” Ezra Rosser contends that, in the course of laying the foundations of a theory grounded in property’s social nature, scholars who participated in the renowned 2009 Cornell symposium on progressive property have “glossed over” property law’s continuing conquest of American Indian lands and the inheritance of privileges that stem from property-based discrimination against African Americans. I fully share Rosser’s concerns regarding past and continuing racialized acquisition and distribution, if not always his characterization of the select progressive works he critiques. Where I focus in this essay, though, is on the fact that, in the course of articulating his claim that these select progressive works have failed to attend sufficiently to matters of acquisition and distribution, Rosser wavers on whether a system of private property has the very capacity to play even a small part in fostering meaningful progressive change. After setting forth my understanding of Rosser’s contribution in the first part of the essay, I use the remaining pages to express slightly more confidence than does Rosser in property’s potential to serve a role in furthering a progressive society. If property is to serve in this role, however, I suggest that it seems important to redesign and reinterpret it in accord with three themes — transparency about property rules’ value-dependence, humility about the reach of human knowledge and the mutability of our normative positions, and a concern for the socioeconomic identities of those affected by resource disputes — themes that underlie a broader set of writings than Rosser considers within the contours of “progressive property scholarship” and on which I offer some very preliminary impressions.
Unsupervised extractive summarization using pointwise mutual information

Unsupervised approaches to extractive summarization usually rely on a notion of sentence importance defined by the semantic similarity between a sentence and the document. We propose new metrics of relevance and redundancy using pointwise mutual information (PMI) between sentences, which can be easily computed by a pre-trained language model. Intuitively, a relevant sentence allows readers to infer the document content (high PMI with the document), and a redundant sentence can be inferred from the summary (high PMI with the summary). We then develop a greedy sentence selection algorithm to maximize relevance and minimize redundancy of extracted sentences. We show that our method outperforms similarity-based methods on datasets in a range of domains including news, medical journal articles, and personal anecdotes.
Buying gifts for multiple recipients: How culture affects whose desires are prioritized

Abstract Gift purchasing is an important factor driving the retail industry around the world, and yet, many gift selections do not match recipient preferences. Three studies examine how consumers from different cultures select gifts for multiple recipients and when gifts deviate from recipients’ preferences. Both U.S. and Chinese consumers who are shopping for multiple recipients tend to pass up recipients’ preferred gifts in favor of getting distinct gifts for each recipient, and Chinese givers are more likely than U.S. givers to choose gifts that deviate from recipients’ preferences overall. The criteria that consumers use to decide whose preferences to prioritize differ across cultures. U.S. givers prioritize recipients they like better, but Chinese givers prioritize better-liked recipients less consistently. Chinese prioritize higher-status recipients, but U.S. givers do not. We further show that these national cultural differences in prioritizing higher-status recipients are paralleled by differences in power distance belief.
On the Edge Crossings of the Greedy Spanner

$t$-spanners are used to approximate the pairwise distances between a set of points in a metric space. They have only a few edges compared to the total number of pairs and they provide a $t$-approximation on the distance of any two arbitrary points. There are many ways to construct such graphs and one of the most efficient ones, in terms of weight and the number of edges of the resulting graph, is the greedy spanner. In this paper, we study the edge crossings of the greedy spanner for points in the Euclidean plane. We prove a constant upper bound for the number of intersections with larger edges that only depends on the stretch factor of the spanner, $t$, and we show there can be more than a bounded number of intersections with smaller edges. Our results imply that greedy spanners for points in the plane have separators of size $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt n)$, that their planarizations have linear size, and that a separator hierarchy for these graphs can be constructed from their planarizations in linear time.
Cooperative Criticism: When Criticism Enhances Creativity in Brainstorming and Negotiation

Long-standing wisdom holds that criticism is antithetical to effective brainstorming because it incites intragroup conflict. However, a number of recent studies have challenged this assumption, sug...
Transformer-Transducers for Code-Switched Speech Recognition

We live in a world where 60% of the population can speak two or more languages fluently. Members of these communities constantly switch between languages when having a conversation. As automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are being deployed to the real-world, there is a need for practical systems that can handle multiple languages both within an utterance or across utterances. In this paper, we present an end-to-end ASR system using a transformer-transducer model architecture for code-switched speech recognition. We propose three modifications over the vanilla model in order to handle various aspects of code-switching. First, we introduce two auxiliary loss functions to handle the low-resource scenario of code-switching. Second, we propose a novel mask-based training strategy with language ID information to improve the label encoder training towards intra-sentential code-switching. Finally, we propose a multi-label/multi-audio encoder structure to leverage the vast monolingual speech corpora towards code-switching. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approaches on the SEAME dataset, a public Mandarin-English code-switching corpus, achieving a mixed error rate of 18.5% and 26.3% on test man and test sge sets respectively.
Impacts of Earthquakes on Electrical Grid Resilience

One of the most complex and devastating disaster scenarios that the U.S. Pacific Northwest region and the state of Oregon faces is a large magnitude Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake event. The region's electrical grid lacks in resilience against the destruction of a megathrust earthquake, a powerful tsunami, hundreds of aftershocks and increased volcanic activity, all of which are highly probable components of this hazard. This research seeks to catalyze further understanding and improvement of resilience. By systematizing power system related experiences of historical earthquakes, and collecting practical and innovative ideas from other regions on how to enhance network design, construction, and operation, important steps are being taken toward a more resilient, earthquake-resistant grid. This paper presents relevant findings in an effort to be an overview and a useful guideline for those who are also working towards greater electrical grid resilience.
On 2-Parameter Estimation of Lomax Distribution

Preference among the three methods which are (Moment Method, Maximum Likelihood Method, Term Omission Method) that selected to estimate parameters of Lomax distribution is the purpose of this paper, where we using simulation of different sample sizes (n=25, 150, 250) and different values of parameters using Mean Square Error and Total Deviation criterions.
Impact network analysis and the ina r package: Decision support for regional management interventions

Abstract The success of intervention projects in ecological systems depends not only on the quality of management technologies, but also patterns of adoption among land managers. Impact network analysis (INA) is a new framework for evaluating the likely success of regional interventions before, during, and after projects, for project implementers, policy makers, and funders. INA integrates across three key system components in a multilayer network analysis: (a) the quality of a management technology and the quality of research supporting it, (b) the socioeconomic networks through which managers learn about management technologies and decide whether to use them, and (c) the linked biophysical network for target species success or failure in the management landscape that results from managers’ decisions. The specific objectives of this paper are (1) to introduce the INA framework and INA R package, (2) to illustrate identification of key nodes for smart surveillance, for networks where the likelihood of invasive species entry into the biophysical network at a given node may be based on information available to the corresponding node in the socioeconomic network, (3) to illustrate application of the INA framework for evaluating the likely degree of success of a project in intervention ecology, before, during and after an intervention, and (4) to illustrate the use of INA for evaluating adaptation strategies under global change scenarios with pulse and press stressors, introducing ‘adaptation functions’ for sustainability and resilience. Examples of use of the INA package show one of the key outcomes of analyses: identifying when systems may be non-responsive to the system components that are readily changed through management decisions, to explore what additional adaptations may be necessary for intervention success. The broader goal for the development of impact network analysis and the INA package is to provide a common framework that integrates across intervention ecology, to enhance opportunities for lessons learned across systems and scientific disciplines, to support the development of a community of practice, and to create a general platform for analysis of sustainability, resilience, and economic viability in intervention ecology applications.
Inflammatory cells and cytokines in the Olfactory Bulb of a rat model of neuroinflammation; Insights into neurodegeneration?

This study examined inflammatory cell and cytokine production in brain tissue from a lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-treated rat model that mimics many of the neuropathologic changes associated with neurodegenerative diseases We also monitored the appearance of a glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) and circulating nitric oxide (NO) levels, as well as an immune system-associated cells in a selected area of the brain, the olfactory lobe. The studies were based on the hypothesis that LPS treatment stimulates temporal changes within the brain and that these responses include immune cell recruitment, increased tissue levels of immune modulating cytokines and NO, as well as greater glial cell activation resulting in increased production of GDNF. As previously reported by other investigators, our animal model of systemic LPS treatment leads to an increase in the concentrations of circulating cytokines, including TNF-α, IL-Iβ, and IL-6, with a maximum response 6 h post LPS administration. Concomitant with cytokine elevations, circulating NO levels were elevated for several hours post LPS administration. The brain content of the GDNF was also elevated over a similar time frame. Lymphocytes, neutrophils, macrophages, plasma cells, and cytokines were all seen in various areas of LPS-treated brains, often around blood vessels associated with the meninges, with these localizations possibly indicating involvement of both the blood-brain and blood-cerebral spinal fluid barriers in these inflammatory episodes. Our results suggest an involvement of both the peripheral and the central nervous system immune components in response to inflammation and inflammatory episodes. This leads us to propose that inflammation initiates an immune response by activating both microglia and astrocytes and that the presence of continuing and increasing proinflammatory mechanisms results in a situation, where cellular protective mechanisms are overcome and the more susceptible cells enter into cell death pathways, initiating a train of events that is a major part of neurodegeneration.
Asymptotic theory for the detection of mixing in anomalous diffusion

In this paper, we develop asymptotic theory for the mixing detection methodology proposed by Magdziarz and Weron [Phys. Rev. E 84, 051138 (2011)]. The assumptions cover a broad family of Gaussian stochastic processes, including fractional Gaussian noise and the fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. We show that the asymptotic distribution and convergence rates of the detection statistic may be, respectively, Gaussian or non-Gaussian and standard or nonstandard depending on the diffusion exponent. The results pave the way for mixing detection based on a single observed sample path and by means of robust hypothesis testing.
Spectrum-flexible secure broadcast ranging

Secure ranging is poised to play a critical role in several emerging applications such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial systems, wireless IoT devices, and augmented reality. In this paper, we propose a design of a secure broadcast ranging system with unique features and techniques. Its spectral-flexibility, and low-power short ranging bursts enable co-existence with existing systems such as in the 2.4GHz ISM band. We exploit a set of RF techniques such as upsampling and successive interference cancellation to achieve high accuracy and scalability to tens of reflectors even when operating over narrow bands of spectrum. We demonstrate that it can be implemented on popular SDR platforms FPGA and/or hosts (with minimal FPGA modifications). The protocol design, and cryptographically generated/detected signals, and randomized timing of transmissions, provide stealth and security against denial of service, sniffing, and distance manipulation attacks. Through extensive experimental evaluations (and simulations for scalability to over 100 reflectors) we demonstrate an accuracy below 20cm on a wide range of SNR (as low as 0dB), spectrum 25MHz-100MHz, with bursts as short as 5us.