cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Unpacking the Household: Informal Property Rights Around the Hearth

As Aristotle recognized in The Politics, the household is an indispensable building block of social, economic, and political life. A liberal society grants its citizens far wider berth to arrange their households than to choose their familial and marital relationships. Legal commentators, however, have devoted far more attention to the family and to marriage than to the household as such. To unpack the household, this Article applies transaction cost economics and sociological theory to interactions among household participants. It explores questions such as the structure of ownership of dwelling units, the scope of household production, and the governance of activities around the hearth. Drawing on a wide variety of historical and statistical sources, the Article contrasts conventional family-based households with arrangements in, among others, medieval English castles, Benedictine monasteries, and Israeli kibbutzim. A household is likely to involve several participants and as many as three distinct relationships—that among occupants, that among owners, and that between these two groups (the landlord-tenant relationship). Individuals, when structuring these home relationships, typically pursue a strategy of consorting with intimates. This facilitates informal coordination and greatly reduces the transaction costs of domestic interactions. Utopian critics, however, have sought to enlarge the scale of households, and some legal advocates have urged household members to write formal contracts and take disputes into court. These commentators fail to appreciate the great advantages, in the home setting, of informally associating with a few trustworthy intimates. author. Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law, Yale Law School. I am grateful for comments from participants in the Cornell University Social Science Seminar; the Harvard-MIT Organizational Economics Seminar; a conference on Norms and the Law hosted by the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Washington University School of Law; and law and economics workshops at Harvard Law School, University of Southern California Law School, and Yale Law School. I thank, for their suggestions, Anne Alstott, Scott Altman, Jennifer Arlen, Stephen Bainbridge, Yochai Benkler, Hanoch Dagan, Eric Fleisig-Greene, Robert Gibbons, Oliver Hart, Jill Hasday, Joni Hersch, John Langbein, Amnon Lehavi, Avital Margalit, Daniel Markovits, Steven Nock, Eric Rasmusen, Roberta Romano, Martha Roth, Scott Shapiro, Reva Siegel, Brian Simpson, Katherine Stone, Lynn Stout, Jay Weiser, James Whitman, and especially Margaret Brinig, Henry Hansmann, Richard McAdams, Robert Pollak, and Henry Smith. William Baude, YiLing Chen-Josephson, and John Eisenberg provided able research assistance. ELLICKSON – PRE-OP 11/6/2006 5:37:59 PM unpacking the household 227 article contents
Unintended Consequences of Linking Tax Return Disclosures to Financial Reporting for Income Taxes: Evidence from Schedule UTP

ABSTRACT: This study exploits the implementation of IRS Schedule UTP to examine how linking tax return disclosures to financial reporting for income taxes affects firms' reporting decisions. Using ...
International Environmental Disputes and the Need for Court-Commissioned Independent Experts

In complex environmental disputes the International Court of Justice should utilize its investigatory powers to identify long-term environmental impacts before reaching legal conclusions. Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay highlights the ICJ’s current reluctance to utilize its investigatory powers—instead, the court relies on the parties’ contentious scientific submissions and fails to verify all potential environmental harms. In so doing, the court fails to conform to the international principle of sustainable development. This Comment identifies the Rules of Court and past cases that demonstrate that justices have the power to question expert witnesses and request independent investigation when evaluating questionable or incomplete scientific evidence. Additionally, this Comment argues that such ICJ-ordered independent investigations will bolster growing international support for the principle of sustainable development.
Derivation of positive from natural law revisited

This piece is a response to some arguments presented by John Finnis in "Natural Law Theory: its Past and its Present" (American Journal of Jurisprudence 57 (1): 8 1-101 (2012)). First, I question Finnis’s interpretation of an example of Thomas Aquinas’s regarding the derivation of positive from natural law by way of conclusion. Second, I question Finnis’s terminology insofar as he calls ‘natural law’ something that in reality is part of positive law i.e., the so-called conclusiones. Third, I question Finnis’s apparent rejection of the coexisting of normative orders (natural and positive). Overall my three challenges are on minor points and of a friendly nature in that their starting point is sympathetic with Finnis’s natural law project. His rejoinder can be found in “Coexisting Normative Orders? Yes, but No” (American Journal of Jurisprudence 57 (1):111-117 (2012)).
Institutional Foundations for Economic Legal Reform Transition Economies: The Case of Competition Policy and Antitrust Enforcement

Since the 1970’s, there has been a progression toward market processes in nations once committed to comprehensive central economic planning. Multinational donors and individual Western countries have expended substantial resources to advise these nations about legal reforms designed to promote this progression. Despite enormous uncertainty and upheaval in the transition from planning to markets, economic liberalization remains the strategy of choice for boosting growth. Competition policy laws prohibiting various restraints of trade and creating public or private rights of action to enforce such prohibitions are common elements in the transition environment. This article examines questions about the proper scope of form of competition policy in transitional markets and about the design of legal reforms in emerging markets generally. While the proper approach to economic development in emerging markets requires analysis of a number of issues, such as identifying priorities in conditions of scarcity, developing supporting institutions, performing a careful initial assessment of existing condition, and determining the rate of change, the first issue to consider is whether competition policy — which encompasses the policy instruments by which a nation can promote business rivalry — deserves a high priority. This requires defining “competition policy.” Most agree that transition economies should take affirmative measures to increase business rivalry as a tool for promoting growth and that the creation of an institution to advocate pro-market solutions, including antitrust enforcement, is appropriate. However, there is disagreement over whether competition policy in emerging markets should involve the full panoply of antitrust commands found in mature competition policy systems. Careful pre-reform analysis of existing conditions in the host country and rigorous attention to how the host country will implement nominal competition policy commands is necessary for competition policy law reform to be effective. Where statutes in transition countries dictate enforcement of mature competition policy systems, there is a significant mismatch between national implementation capabilities and the demands of new competition laws. This mismatch must be confronted to decide about the correct measure of completeness and complexity in transition economy competition policy systems.Emphasis on institutional capability has significant implications for technical assistance. The successful development of competition policy institutions in transition environments requires close attention to enhancing the capacity of a wide variety of institutions, such as universities, research institutions, professional societies, and courts. Extensive, sustained contributions from foreign governments in the form of human and physical capital is the key to setting the proper institutional foundation and encouraging sensible application of new laws.
Multi-Robot Target Search using Probabilistic Consensus on Discrete Markov Chains

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic consensus-based multi-robot search strategy that is robust to communication link failures, and thus is suitable for disaster affected areas. The robots, capable of only local communication, explore a bounded environment according to a random walk modeled by a discrete-time discrete-state (DTDS) Markov chain and exchange information with neighboring robots, resulting in a time-varying communication network topology. The proposed strategy is proved to achieve consensus, here defined as agreement on the presence of a static target, with no assumptions on the connectivity of the communication network. Using numerical simulations, we investigate the effect of the robot population size, domain size, and information uncertainty on the consensus time statistics under this scheme. We also validate our theoretical results with 3D physics-based simulations in Gazebo. The simulations demonstrate that all robots achieve consensus in finite time with the proposed search strategy over a range of robot densities in the environment.
The Alaska Permanent Fund: Politics and Trust

Trust funds are a particular way of governing resource flows. Governments use trust funds to bind policy decisions of future actors and remove resource flows from budget competition. The state of Alaska removed a portion of its oil revenues from political competition through the creation of the Alaska Permanent Fund. A unique feature of the Fund is that it pays annual dividends to Alaskan citizens, thus creating a citizen stake in the management of the Fund. Through this framework Alaskans have successfully protected a significant stream of revenue ($21 billion) from political demands.
Risk Equity: A New Proposal

What does distributive justice require of risk regulators? Various executive orders enjoin health and safety regulators to take account of "distributive impacts," "equity," or "environmental justice," and many scholars endorse these requirements. But concrete methodologies for evaluating the equity effects of risk regulation policies remain undeveloped. The contrast with cost-benefit analysis - now a very well developed set of techniques - is stark. Equity analysis by governmental agencies that regulate health and safety risks, at least in the United States, lacks rigor and structure.This Article proposes a rigorous framework for risk-equity analysis, which I term "probabilistic population profile analysis" (PPPA). PPPA is both novel, yet firmly grounded in the social-welfare-function tradition in welfare economics. The PPPA framework conceptualizes both the status quo, and possible policies, as probability distributions across population profiles - where each population profile is, in turn, a concatenation of lifetime health-longevity-income histories, one for each member of the population. A utility function transforms each such profile into a utility vector. An equity-regarding social welfare function (SWF) is then specified. Policy analysts can employ the equity-regarding SWF both (1) to determine how policies compare purely as a matter of equality; and (2) to determine how they compare all-things-considered, considering both equality and overall welfare. The proposal may seem utopian, but is not. Scholars in the field of optimal tax policy already use SWFs to evaluate policies. Characterizing policies as distributions across population health-longevity-income profiles builds on existing risk assessment and general-equilibrium-modeling techniques. Utility functions can be specified through survey research and, in the interim, by building on standard functional forms. Plausible normative axioms considerably narrow the possible forms of the SWF, and survey research or thought experiments narrow the field further. Part I of the Article describes and criticizes existing approaches to risk equity that have been proposed in the scholarly literature: the environmental justice conception of risk equity; "individual risk" approaches; QALY-based equity analysis; incidence analysis; inclusive equality measurement; and cost-benefit analysis with distributive weights. Part II describes and defends PPPA. PPPA has many virtues. It recognizes that well-being is multidimensional, a function of both income and health/longevity; furnishes a metric for inequality; provides a framework for making tradeoffs between equality and overall well-being; and understands that distributive justice includes (but is not limited to) inequalities between high and low-status social groups.
Governance and Performance of Microfinance Institutions in Central and Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States

Summary This paper presents the first evidence on the impact of governance on outreach and sustainability of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Central and Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States. The results indicate that performance-based compensation of managers is not associated with better-performing MFIs; lower wages suggested for mission-driven organizations worsen outreach, while managers’ experience improves performance. The results also identify tradeoffs between MFI outreach and sustainability depending on stakeholders’ representation on the board and provide strong support for independent boards with limited employee participation. In the study region, external governance mechanisms seemed to play a limited role.
Building on Custom: Land Tenure Policy and Economic Development in Ghana

This Note addresses the intersection of customary and statutory land law in the land tenure policy of Ghana. It argues that improving the current land tenure policy demands integration of customary land law and customary authorities into the statutory system. After describing why and how customary property practices are central to the economic viability of any property system, the Note gives a brief overview of Ghana’s customary and statutory land law. The Note concludes with specific policy suggestions about how Ghana could better draw on the strength of its customary land sector.
The option to stock volume ratio and future returns

Abstract We examine the information content of option and equity volumes when trade direction is unobserved. In a multimarket asymmetric information model, equity short-sale costs result in a negative relation between relative option volume and future firm value. In our empirical tests, firms in the lowest decile of the option to stock volume ratio (O/S) outperform the highest decile by 0.34% per week (19.3% annualized). Our model and empirics both indicate that O/S is a stronger signal when short-sale costs are high or option leverage is low. O/S also predicts future firm-specific earnings news, consistent with O/S reflecting private information.
Studying the Accuracy of Managers' Perceptions: A Research Odyssey

Much organizational activity and academic research relies on the accuracy of managers' perceptions. However, few studies have assessed the accuracy of managerial perceptions, and these studies indicate that managers' perceptions are often very inaccurate. This article discusses an odyssey into the study of managerial perceptions spanning two decades and two empirical studies. It depicts the evolution of research questions, samples, study designs, problems with such research and inferences drawn. It also identifies some errors that tend to be especially large and suggests some corrective actions. These corrective actions include using education and training to inform managers about organizational and environmental properties, exploiting improved technology, helping organizations to identify and correct misperceptions and designing robust organizations that can tolerate misperceptions.
Textualism and the Executive Branch

143 INTRODUCTION 144 I. THE NEW TEXTUALISM IN STATUTORY INTERPRETATION 147 II. TEXTUALIST THEORY AND THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH ...... ...... 151 III. TEXTUALISTS AND THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH 154 IV. RECENT ATTEMPTS TO SQUARE THE CIRCLE ........ 168 A. The Unwarranted Shift in Focus (An Internal Critique) 168 B. The Problematic Resort to Formalism (An External Critique).... 174 CONCLUSION ........ 182
Design of Smart Antibody Mimetics with Photosensitive Switches

As two prominent examples of intracellular single-domain antibodies or antibody mimetics derived from synthetic protein scaffolds, monobodies and nanobodies are gaining wide applications in cell biology, structural biology, synthetic immunology, and theranostics. Herein, a generally applicable method to engineer light-controllable monobodies and nanobodies, designated as moonbody and sunbody, respectively, is introduced. These engineered antibody-like modular domains enable rapid and reversible antibody-antigen recognition by utilizing light. By the paralleled insertion of two light-oxygen-voltage domain 2 modules into a single sunbody and the use of bivalent sunbodies, the range of dynamic changes of photoswitchable sunbodies is substantially enhanced. Furthermore, the use of moonbodies or sunbodies to precisely control protein degradation, gene transcription, and base editing by harnessing the power of light is demonstrated.
Trapping Electrons in a Room-Temperature Microwave Paul Trap

Long-time trapping of a single electron could allow the particle to be used as an efficient quantum bit.
Unsupervised Audiovisual Synthesis via Exemplar Autoencoders

We present an unsupervised approach that converts the input speech of any individual into audiovisual streams of potentially-infinitely many output speakers. Our approach builds on simple autoencoders that project out-of-sample data onto the distribution of the training set. We use exemplar autoencoders to learn the voice, stylistic prosody (emotions and ambiance), and visual appearance of a specific target exemplar speech. In contrast to existing methods, the proposed approach can be easily extended to an arbitrarily large number of speakers and styles using only 3 minutes of target audio-video data, without requiring any training data for the input speaker. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first work to demonstrate audiovisual synthesis from an audio signal. To do so, we learn audiovisual bottleneck representations that capture the structured linguistic content of speech. We outperform prior approaches on both audio and video synthesis, and present extensive qualitative analysis in supplementary material.
GEOlimma: differential expression analysis and feature selection using pre-existing microarray data.

Differential expression and feature selection analyses are essential steps for the development of accurate diagnostic/prognostic classifiers of complicated human diseases using transcriptomics data. These steps are particularly challenging due to the curse of dimensionality and the presence of technical and biological noise. A promising strategy for overcoming these challenges is the incorporation of pre-existing transcriptomics data in the identification of differentially expressed (DE) genes. This approach has the potential to improve the quality of selected genes, increase classification performance, and enhance biological interpretability. While a number of methods have been developed that use pre-existing data for differential expression analysis, existing methods do not leverage the identities of experimental conditions to create a robust metric for identifying DE genes. In this study, we propose a novel differential expression and feature selection method—GEOlimma—which combines pre-existing microarray data from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) with the widely-applied Limma method for differential expression analysis. We first quantify differential gene expression across 2481 pairwise comparisons from 602 curated GEO Datasets, and we convert differential expression frequencies to DE prior probabilities. Genes with high DE prior probabilities show enrichment in cell growth and death, signal transduction, and cancer-related biological pathways, while genes with low prior probabilities were enriched in sensory system pathways. We then applied GEOlimma to four differential expression comparisons within two human disease datasets and performed differential expression, feature selection, and supervised classification analyses. Our results suggest that use of GEOlimma provides greater experimental power to detect DE genes compared to Limma, due to its increased effective sample size. Furthermore, in a supervised classification analysis using GEOlimma as a feature selection method, we observed similar or better classification performance than Limma given small, noisy subsets of an asthma dataset. Our results demonstrate that GEOlimma is a more effective method for differential gene expression and feature selection analyses compared to the standard Limma method. Due to its focus on gene-level differential expression, GEOlimma also has the potential to be applied to other high-throughput biological datasets.
Use Internet search data to accurately track state level influenza epidemics

For epidemics control and prevention, timely insights of potential hot spots are invaluable. Alternative to traditional epidemic surveillance, which often lags behind real time by weeks, big data from the Internet provide important information of the current epidemic trends. Here we present a methodology, ARGOX (Augmented Regression with GOogle data CROSS space), for accurate real-time tracking of state-level influenza epidemics in the United States. ARGOX combines Internet search data at the national, regional and state levels with traditional influenza surveillance data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and accounts for both the spatial correlation structure of state-level influenza activities and the evolution of people's Internet search pattern. ARGOX achieves on average 28% error reduction over the best alternative for real-time state-level influenza estimation for 2014 to 2020. ARGOX is robust and reliable and can be potentially applied to track county- and city-level influenza activity and other infectious diseases.
Clustering and expected seat-share for district maps

In the context of modern sampling methods for redistricting, we define a natural measurement of the clustering of a political party, and we study how clustering affects the expected election outcom...
CQ-VAE: Coordinate Quantized VAE for Uncertainty Estimation with Application to Disk Shape Analysis from Lumbar Spine MRI Images

Ambiguity is inevitable in medical images, which often results in different image interpretations (e.g. object boundaries or segmentation maps) from different human experts. Thus, a model that learns the ambiguity and outputs a probability distribution of the target, would be valuable for medical applications to assess the uncertainty of diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a powerful generative model to learn a representation of ambiguity and to generate probabilistic outputs. Our model, named Coordinate Quantization Variational Autoencoder (CQ-VAE) employs a discrete latent space with an internal discrete probability distribution by quantizing the coordinates of a continuous latent space. As a result, the output distribution from CQ-VAE is discrete. During training, Gumbel-Softmax sampling is used to enable backpropagation through the discrete latent space. A matching algorithm is used to establish the correspondence between model-generated samples and "ground-truth" samples, which makes a trade-off between the ability to generate new samples and the ability to represent training samples. Besides these probabilistic components to generate possible outputs, our model has a deterministic path to output the best estimation. We demonstrated our method on a lumbar disk image dataset, and the results show that our CQ-VAE can learn lumbar disk shape variation and uncertainty.
Understanding the Heterogeneity of Human Pericyte Subsets in Blood–Brain Barrier Homeostasis and Neurological Diseases

Pericytes are increasingly recognized as being important in the control of blood–brain barrier permeability and vascular flow. Research on this important cell type has been hindered by widespread confusion regarding the phenotypic identity and nomenclature of pericytes and other perivascular cell types. In addition, pericyte heterogeneity and mouse–human species differences have contributed to confusion. Herein we summarize our present knowledge on the identification of pericytes and pericyte subsets in humans, primarily focusing on recent findings in humans and nonhuman primates. Precise identification and definition of pericytes and pericyte subsets in humans may help us to better understand pericyte biology and develop new therapeutic approaches specifically targeting disease-associated pericyte subsets.
Parabrachial opioidergic projections to preoptic hypothalamus mediate behavioral and physiological thermal defenses

Maintaining stable body temperature through environmental thermal stressors requires detection of temperature changes, relay of information, and coordination of physiological and behavioral responses. Studies have implicated areas in the preoptic area of the hypothalamus (POA) and the parabrachial nucleus (PBN) as nodes in the thermosensory neural circuitry and indicate that the opioid system within the POA is vital in regulating body temperature. In the present study we identify neurons projecting to the POA from PBN expressing the opioid peptides dynorphin and enkephalin. Using mouse models, we determine that warm-activated PBN neuronal populations overlap with both prodynorphin (Pdyn) and proenkephalin (Penk) expressing PBN populations. Here we report that in the PBN Prodynorphin (Pdyn) and Proenkephalin (Penk) mRNA expressing neurons are partially overlapping subsets of a glutamatergic population expressing Solute carrier family 17 (Slc17a6) (VGLUT2). Using optogenetic approaches we selectively activate projections in the POA from PBN Pdyn, Penk, and VGLUT2 expressing neurons. Our findings demonstrate that Pdyn, Penk, and VGLUT2 expressing PBN neurons are critical for physiological and behavioral heat defense.
Archaeal chromatin ‘slinkies’ are inherently dynamic complexes with deflected DNA wrapping pathways

All animals, plants and fungi belong to a group of living organisms called eukaryotes. The two other groups are bacteria and archaea, which include unicellular, microscopic organisms. All three groups have genes, which are typically stored on long strands of DNA. Eukaryotes have so much DNA that they use proteins called histones to help package and organize it inside each cell. Archaea also have simplified histones that help store their DNA, and studying these proteins could reveal how eukaryotic histones first evolved. In eukaryotes, groups of eight histones form a short cylinder that organizes a small section of DNA into a structure called a nucleosome. Each cell needs hundreds of thousands of nucleosomes to arrange its DNA. Eukaryotic cells also contain other proteins that release pieces of DNA from histones so that their genetic information can be used. The histones in Archaea don’t form discrete nucleosomes, instead, they coil DNA into ‘slinky-like’ shapes. It’s still unclear how DNA packing in archaea works and how it differs from eukaryotes. Bowerman, Wereszczynski and Luger used computer simulations, biochemistry and cryo-electron microscopy to study the histones from archaea. The archaeal ‘slinky-like’ histone structures are more flexible than nucleosomes, and can open and close like clamshells. This flexibility allows the information in the genomes of Archaea to be easily accessed, so, unlike in eukaryotes, archaeal cells may not need other proteins to release the DNA from the histones. The ability to package DNA allows cells to contain many more genes, so evolving histones was a vital step in the evolution of eukaryotic life, including the appearance of animals. Archaeal histones may reflect early versions of histones in eukaryotes, and can be used to understand how DNA packing has evolved. Furthermore, a greater understanding of Archaea may help better explain their role in health and global ecosystems, and allow their use in industrial applications.
Bali-Phy version 3: Model-based co-estimation of alignment and phylogeny.

SUMMARY We describe improvements to BAli-Phy, a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) program that jointly estimates phylogeny, alignment, and other parameters from unaligned sequence data. Version 3 is substantially faster for large trees, and implements covarion models, additional codon models, and other new models. It implements ancestral state reconstruction, allows prior selection for all model parameters, and can also analyze multiple genes simultaneously. AVAILABILITY Software is available for download at http://www.bali-phy.org. C++ source code is freely available on Github under the GPL2 License.
Stack-sorting with consecutive-pattern-avoiding stacks

Abstract We introduce consecutive-pattern-avoiding stack-sorting maps SC σ , which are natural generalizations of West's stack-sorting map s and natural analogues of the classical-pattern-avoiding stack-sorting maps s σ recently introduced by Cerbai, Claesson, and Ferrari. We characterize the patterns σ such that Sort ( SC σ ) , the set of permutations that are sortable via the map s ∘ SC σ , is a permutation class, and we enumerate the sets Sort ( SC σ ) for σ ∈ { 123 , 132 , 321 } . We also study the maps SC σ from a dynamical point of view, characterizing the periodic points of SC σ for all σ ∈ S 3 and computing max π ∈ S n ⁡ | SC σ − 1 ( π ) | for all σ ∈ { 132 , 213 , 231 , 312 } . In addition, we characterize the periodic points of the classical-pattern-avoiding stack-sorting map s 132 , and we show that the maximum number of iterations of s 132 needed to send a permutation in S n to a periodic point is n − 1 . The paper ends with numerous open problems and conjectures.
Essential self-adjointness of perturbed quadharmonic operators on Riemannian manifolds with an application to the separation problem

We consider perturbed quadharmonic operators, Δ4+V, acting on sections of a Hermitian vector bundle over a complete Riemannian manifold, with the potential V satisfying a bound from below by a non‐positive function depending on the distance from a point. Under a bounded geometry assumption on the Hermitian vector bundle and the underlying Riemannian manifold, we give a sufficient condition for the essential self‐adjointness of such operators. We then apply this to prove the separation property in L2 when the perturbed operator acts on functions.
Neuroskeletal Effects of Chronic Bioelectric Nerve Stimulation in Health and Diabetes.

Background/aims Bioelectric nerve stimulation (eStim) is an emerging clinical paradigm that can promote nerve regeneration after trauma, including within the context of diabetes. However, its ability to prevent the onset of diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN) has not yet been evaluated. Beyond the nerve itself, DPN has emerged as a potential contributor to sarcopenia and bone disease; thus, we hypothesized that eStim could serve as a strategy to simultaneously promote neural and musculoskeletal health in diabetes. Methods To address this question, an eStim paradigm pre-optimized to promote nerve regeneration was applied to the sciatic nerve, which directly innervates the tibia and lower limb, for 8 weeks in control and streptozotocin-induced type 1 diabetic (T1D) rats. Metabolic, gait, nerve and bone assessments were used to evaluate the progression of diabetes and the effect of sciatic nerve eStim on neuropathy and musculoskeletal disease, while also considering the effects of cuff placement and chronic eStim in otherwise healthy animals. Results Rats with T1D exhibited increased mechanical allodynia in the hindpaw, reduced muscle mass, decreased cortical and cancellous bone volume fraction (BVF), reduced cortical bone tissue mineral density (TMD), and decreased bone marrow adiposity. Type 1 diabetes also had an independent effect on gait. Placement of the cuff electrode alone resulted in altered gait patterns and unilateral reductions in tibia length, cortical BVF, and bone marrow adiposity. Alterations in gait patterns were restored by eStim and tibial lengthening was favored unilaterally; however, eStim did not prevent T1D-induced changes in muscle, bone, marrow adiposity or mechanical sensitivity. Beyond this, chronic eStim resulted in an independent, bilateral reduction in cortical TMD. Conclusion Overall, these results provide new insight into the pathogenesis of diabetic neuroskeletal disease and its regulation by eStim. Though eStim did not prevent neural or musculoskeletal complications in T1D, our results demonstrate that clinical applications of peripheral neuromodulation ought to consider the impact of device placement and eStim on long-term skeletal health in both healthy individuals and those with metabolic disease. This includes monitoring for compounded bone loss to prevent unintended consequences including decreased bone mineral density and increased fracture risk.
Thermodynamics and Free Energy Landscape of BAR-Domain Dimerization from Molecular Simulations.

Proteins with BAR domains function to bind to and remodel biological membranes, where the dimerization of BAR domains is a key step in this function. These domains can dimerize in solution or after...
Excitation of zonal flow by intermediate-scale toroidal electron temperature gradient turbulence

We show that zonal flow can be preferentially excited by intermediate-scale toroidal electron temperature gradient (ETG) turbulence in tokamak plasmas. Previous theoretical studies that yielded an opposite conclusion assumed a fluid approximation for ETG modes. Here, we carry out a gyrokinetic analysis which ultimately yields a nonlinear Schrodinger equation for the ETG dynamics with a Navier-Stokes type nonlinearity. For typical tokamak parameters, it is found that zonal flow generation plays an important role in the intermediate-scale ETG turbulence. This finding offers an explanation for recent multi-scale gyrokinetic simulations.
Comparative optic disc analysis in normal pressure glaucoma, primary open angle glaucoma and ocular hypertension

Purpose: The authors wished to determine whether characteristics of optic disc and parapapillary atrophy differ between eyes with ocular hypertension, primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) and those with normal-pressure glaucoma, including a subset of patients with normal-pressure glaucoma with evidence of serum abnormalities of humoral autoimmunity. Methods: Three hundred ninety-two eyes of 196 patients with ocular hypertension, 394 eyes of 197 patients with POAG, and 135 eyes of 68 patients with normal-pressure glaucoma were analyzed. Nerve fiber layer hemorrhage in the optic disc region, retinal arteriolar narrowing, and morphometric parameters of optic disc and parapapillary atrophy were investigated in these groups. Parapapillary atrophy was differentiated in two different zones (α and β). Results: Nerve fiber layer hemorrhage and arteriolar narrowing were found more frequently in patients with normal-pressure glaucoma than in patients with POAG ( P = 0.014, P = 0.004) and ocular hypertension ( P P P P = 0.013). Although patients with normal-pressure glaucoma had more advanced neural rim loss and larger parapapillary atrophy, there were similar correlations between neural rim area and the area and extension of parapapillary atrophy in patients with normal-pressure glaucoma and POAG. Parapapillary atrophy parameters also were similar in different stages of neural rim damage in patients with normal-pressure glaucoma and POAG ( P > 0.05). Optic disc characteristics were not different ( P > 0.05) between the subgroups of patients with normal-pressure glaucoma. Conclusion: The authors' findings support the idea that besides the enlargement of the area and extension of parapapillary atrophy that accompanies neural damage in glaucoma, the severity of the parapapillary atrophy also increases as assessed by the increase in zone ,(3 in more damaged eyes. Furthermore, the final clinical appearance of optic nerve damage is similar among patients with POAG, normal-pressure glaucoma, and the subgroups of normal-pressure glaucoma, regardless of their possibly different mechanisms of neuropathy.
Estimation of health and demographic indicators with incomplete geographic information.

Abstract In low and middle income countries, household surveys are a valuable source of information for a range of health and demographic indicators. Increasingly, subnational estimates are required for targeting interventions and evaluating progress towards targets. In the majority of cases, stratified cluster sampling is used, with clusters corresponding to enumeration areas. The reported geographical information varies. A common procedure, to preserve confidentiality, is to give a jittered location with the true centroid of the cluster being displaced via a known algorithm. An alternative situation, which was used for older surveys in particular, is to report the geographical region within the cluster lies. In this paper, we describe a spatial hierarchical model in which we account for inaccuracies in the cluster locations. The computational algorithm we develop is fast and avoids the heavy computation of a pure MCMC approach. We illustrate by simulation the benefits of the model, over naive alternatives.
Confronting Totalitarianism at Home: The Roots of European Privacy Protections

In the last several years, a consensus has developed that a wide gulf exists between European and American privacy law, although division still exists on whether European law is “more protective” or simply “home to different intuitive sensibilities” than American law. Existing research on the development of European privacy law has focused on two areas: nineteenth-century traditions of honor and dueling, which gave rise to a concept of privacy linked to dignity, and the totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century, in reaction to which privacy protected liberty. This Article offers a contrasting view by showing that European privacy law in the post-World War II era was intended to defend a particular aspect of the “private sphere” — marriage, reproduction, and the family — from the type of omnipresent scrutiny that had been a core aspect of the racial state under the Nazi regime. Although both European and American concepts of privacy have undoubtedly changed over time, understanding the original intent embedded in European privacy law shows that divergence between the two systems has been largely misunderstood.
Parameter Identifiability for a Profile Mixture Model of Protein Evolution.

A profile mixture (PM) model is a model of protein evolution, describing sequence data in which sites are assumed to follow many related substitution processes on a single evolutionary tree. The pr...
A refinement of the binomial distribution using the quantum binomial theorem

q-analogs of special functions, including hypergeometric functions, play a central role in mathematics and have numerous applications in physics. In the theory of probability, q-analogs of various ...
Deep Learning with Heterogeneous Graph Embeddings for Mortality Prediction from Electronic Health Records

Computational prediction of in-hospital mortality in the setting of an intensive care unit can help clinical practitioners to guide care and make early decisions for interventions. As clinical data are complex and varied in their structure and components, continued innovation of modeling strategies is required to identify architectures that can best model outcomes. In this work, we train a Heterogeneous Graph Model (HGM) on Electronic Health Record data and use the resulting embedding vector as additional information added to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model for predicting in-hospital mortality. We show that the additional information provided by including time as a vector in the embedding captures the relationships between medical concepts, lab tests, and diagnoses, which enhances predictive performance. We find that adding HGM to a CNN model increases the mortality prediction accuracy up to 4\%. This framework serves as a foundation for future experiments involving different EHR data types on important healthcare prediction tasks.
Communication-Cost Aware Microphone Selection for Neural Speech Enhancement with Ad-Hoc Microphone Arrays

In this paper, we present a method for jointly-learning a microphone selection mechanism and a speech enhancement network for multi-channel speech enhancement with an ad-hoc microphone array. The attention-based microphone selection mechanism is trained to reduce communication-costs through a penalty term which represents a task-performance/ communication-cost trade-off. While working within the trade-off, our method can intelligently stream from more microphones in lower SNR scenes and fewer microphones in higher SNR scenes. We evaluate the model in complex echoic acoustic scenes with moving sources and show that it matches the performance of models that stream from a fixed number of microphones while reducing communication costs.
Deriving the dark matter-dark energy interaction term in the continuity equation from the Boltzmann equation

Dark energy and dark matter are two of the biggest mysteries of modern cosmology, and our understanding of their fundamental nature is incomplete. Many parametrizations of couplings between the two...
Diffuse optics for glaciology.

Optical probing of glaciers has the potential for tremendous impact on environmental science. However, glacier ice is turbid, which prohibits the use of most established optical measurements for determining a glacier’s interior structure. Here, we propose a method for determining the depth, scattering and absorption length based upon diffuse propagation of short optical pulses. Our model allows us to extract several characteristics of the glacier. Performing Monte Carlo simulations implementing Mie scattering and mixed boundary conditions, we show that the proposed approach should be feasible with current technology. The results suggest that the optical properties and geometry of the glacier can be extracted from realistic measurements, which could be implemented with a low cost and small footprint.
Analysis of Pilot Feedback Regarding the Use of State Awareness Technologies During Complex Situations

A flight simulation study was conducted at NASA Langley Research Center to evaluate flight deck systems that (1) predict aircraft energy state and/or autoflight configuration, (2) present the current state and expected future state of automated systems, and/or (3) show the state of flight-critical data systems in use by automated systems and primary flight instruments. Four new technology concepts were evaluated vis-a-vis current state-of-the-art flight deck systems and indicators. This human-in-the-loop study was conducted using commercial airline crews. Scenarios spanned a range of complex conditions and several emulated causal factors and complexity in recent accidents involving loss of state awareness by pilots (e.g. energy state, automation state, and/or system state). Data were collected via questionnaires administered after each flight, audio/video recordings, physiological data, head and eye tracking data, pilot control inputs, and researcher observations. This paper strictly focuses on findings derived from the questionnaire responses. It includes analysis of pilot subjective measures of complexity, decision making, workload, situation awareness, usability, and acceptability.
Log Symplectic Manifolds and [Q,R]=0

We show, under an orientation hypothesis, that a log symplectic manifold with simple normal crossing singularities has a stable almost complex structure, and hence is Spin$_c$. In the compact Hamiltonian case we prove that the index of the Spin$_c$ Dirac operator twisted by a prequantum line bundle satisfies a $[Q,R]=0$ theorem.
Infect while the iron is scarce: nutrient-explicit phage-bacteria games

Marine microbial primary production is influenced by the availability and uptake of essential nutrients, including iron. Although marine microbes have evolved mechanisms to scavenge sub-nanomolar concentrations of iron, recent observations suggest that viruses may co-opt these very same mechanisms to facilitate infection. The “Ferrojan Horse Hypothesis” proposes that viruses incorporate iron atoms into their tail fiber proteins to adsorb to target host receptors. Here, we propose an evolutionary game theoretic approach to consider the joint strategies of hosts and viruses in environments with limited nutrients (like iron). We analyze the bimatrix game and find that evolutionarily stable strategies depend on the stability and quality of nutrient conditions. For example, in highly stable iron conditions, virus pressure does not change host uptake strategies. However, when iron levels are dynamic, virus pressure can lead to fluctuations in the extent to which hosts invest in metabolic machinery that increases both iron uptake and susceptibility to viral infection. Altogether, this evolutionary game model provides further evidence that viral infection and nutrient dynamics jointly shape the fate of microbial populations.
A series approximation to the Kirchhoff integral for Gaussian and exponential roughness covariance functions.

The Kirchhoff integral is a fundamental integral in scattering theory, appearing in both the Kirchhoff approximation and the small slope approximation. In this work, a functional Taylor series approximation to the Kirchhoff integral is presented, under the condition that the roughness covariance function follows either an exponential or Gaussian form—in both the one-dimensional and two-dimensional cases. Previous approximations to the Kirchhoff integral [Gragg, Wurmser, and Gauss (2001) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 110(6), 2878–2901; Drumheller and Gragg (2001) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 110(5), 2270–2275] assumed that the outer scale of the roughness was very large compared to the wavelength, whereas the proposed method can treat arbitrary outer scales. Assuming an infinite outer scale implies that the root mean square (rms) roughness is infinite. The proposed method can efficiently treat surfaces with finite outer scale and therefore finite rms height. This series is shown to converge independently of roughness or acoustic parameters and converges to within roundoff error with a reasonable number of terms for a wide variety of dimensionless roughness parameters. The series converges quickly when the dimensionless rms height is small and slowly when it is large.
The warped disk of Centaurus A in the near-infrared

We present infrared images of Cen A (NGC 5128) in the J, H, and K bands. The infrared morphology is primarily determined by the presence of a thin absorptive warped disk. By integrating the light of the underlying prolate galaxy through such a disk, we construct models which we compare with infrared and X-ray data. The geometry of the warped disk needed to fit the IR data is consistent with a warped disk which has evolved as a result of differential precession in a prolate potential. The disk has an inclination, with respect to the principal axis of the underlying elliptical galaxy, that is higher at larger radii than in the inner region. A scenario is proposed where a small gas-rich galaxy infalling under the force of dynamical friction is tidally stripped. Stripping occurs at different times during its infall. The orientation of the resulting gas disk depends upon the angular momentum of the infalling galaxy. We find that the resulting precession angle of the disk is well described by the precession model, but that the inclination angle may vary as a function of radius. We propose an orbit for the infalling galaxy that is consistent with the geometry of the warped disk needed to fit our infrared data, and rotation observed in the outer part of the galaxy.