cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Stability of Maritime Boundary Agreements

The stability of maritime sovereignty arrangements is increasingly in question as rising sea levels exacerbate the extent and speed at which coastlines are shifting. Despite the import of offshore resource concessions and the widespread awareness of, albeit less systemic, sources of geographic instability, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is silent as to whether the baselines from which maritime zones are measured are ambulatory. Several authors have called for permanently fixing maritime limits. This paper first proposes that any such analysis must contemplate the inherent stability of boundary agreements that largely govern contested zones. Both the travaux preparatoires of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and the limited writings of international tribunals support the exception of maritime boundaries from treaty termination by operation of law due to a fundamental change in circumstances. This paper then questions the merit of proposals to fix limits in light of the implications for third state rights under the pacta tertiis doctrine, examining several paradigms for coastline shifts. Most critically, international straits may expand, presumably generating zones with complete freedom of navigation for all foreign ships.
E-Health Hazards: Provider Liability and Electronic Health Record Systems

In the foreseeable future, electronic health record (EHR) systems are likely to become a fixture in medical settings. The potential benefits of computerization could be substantial, but EHR systems also give rise to new liability risks for health care providers that have received little attention in the legal literature. This Article features a first of its kind, comprehensive analysis of the liability risks associated with use of this complex and important technology. In addition, it develops recommendations to address these liability concerns. Appropriate measures include federal regulations designed to ensure the quality and safety of EHR systems along with agency guidance and well crafted clinical practice guidelines for EHR system users. In formulating its recommendations, the Article proposes a novel, uniform process for developing authoritative clinical practice guidelines and explores how EHR technology itself can enable experts to gather evidence of best practices. The authors argue that without thoughtful interventions and sound guidance from government and medical organizations, this promising technology may encumber rather than support clinicians and may hinder rather than promote health outcome improvements.
Strategic Statutory Interpretation by Administrative Agencies

Many statutes are administered by administrative agencies. This paper shows that, when interpreting an ambiguous statute, administrative agencies choose between two strategies of statutory interpretation: the risky strategy, a relatively aggressive interpretation that provokes an appeal by the firm; and the safe strategy, a relatively nonaggressive interpretation that the firm complies with. The paper also shows that a change in the level of judicial deference may result in a shift from the risky strategy to the safe one, or vice versa. Therefore, contrary to the commonly held view, an increase in the level of judicial deference may result in agencies choosing a less aggressive statutory interpretation, and in more court decisions reversing agencies’ statutory interpretation.
Crime and the Timing of Work

Abstract Two striking facts describe work timing in the United States: A lower propensity to work evenings and nights in large metropolitan areas, and a secular decline in such work since 1973. One explanation is higher and possibly increasing crime in large areas. I link Current Population Survey data on work timing to FBI crime reports. Neither fact is explained by changes in nor inter-area differences in crime rates; but higher homicide rates do reduce such work. This reduction implicitly costs the economy between $4 and $10 billion. This negative externality illustrates a larger class of previously unmeasured costs of social pathologies.
Establishing a Stabilisation Fund in Russia

The situation that developed in 1999-2001 on world commodity markets has imposed certain constraints on economic policy in Russia. Relatively high oil prices resulting in a high current account surplus caused the rouble to appreciate in real terms, which adversely affected national industries producing tradables, thus hampering sustainable growth. The lack of open market instruments for sterilisation of rouble emission resulting from mandatory sale of a part of dollar export earnings has made it very difficult for the Central Bank to pursue monetary and exchange rate policies, leading to a threat of inflation. Sharp fluctuations of prices for oil and other commodities on world markets result in wide variations in tax revenues from the relevant industries, which has a serious impact on the budgetary system. In this context the establishment of a stabilisation fund as a mechanism to accumulate additional revenues and to smooth budget expenditures would be a rational and timely solution. A stabilisation fund could also compensate undesirable effects of the current account surplus by investing revenues of the fund on world capital markets or by repaying external debt. The fund could thus partly address problems associated with real appreciation of the rouble.
Crafting the Law: How Opinion Content Influences Legal Development

Why are some opinions widely discussed while others remain obscure? We theorize that opinions that can be understood efficiently are discussed, expanded, and contracted more frequently. Additionall...
The economic effects of special purpose entities on corporate tax avoidance

This study provides the first large‐sample evidence on the economic tax effects of special purpose entities (SPEs). These increasingly common organizational structures facilitate corporate tax savings by enabling sponsor firms to increase tax‐advantaged activities and/or enhance their tax efficiency (i.e., relative tax savings of a given activity). Using path analysis, we find that SPEs facilitate greater tax avoidance such that an economically large amount of cash tax savings from research and development (R&D), depreciable assets, net operating loss carryforwards, intangible assets, foreign operations, and tax havens occur in conjunction with SPE use. We estimate that SPEs help generate over $330 billion of incremental cash tax savings, or roughly 6 percent of total U.S. federal corporate income tax collections during the sample period. Interaction analyses reveal that SPEs enhance the tax efficiency of intangibles and R&D by 61.5 percent to 87.5 percent. Overall, these findings provide economic insight into complex organizational structures supporting corporate tax avoidance. Les repercussions economiques des entites ad hoc sur l’evitement fiscal Les auteurs exposent les conclusions d'une premiere etude portant sur un vaste echantillon, relative a l'aspect economique des repercussions fiscales des entites ad hoc, structures organisationnelles dont l'utilisation est de plus en plus courante. Les entites ad hoc facilitent la realisation d'economies d'impot sur les benefices en permettant a leurs promoteurs d'accroitre leurs activites donnant droit a un traitement fiscal avantageux et (ou) en ameliorant leur efficience fiscale (c'est‐a‐dire les economies d'impot marginales liees a une activite donnee). En procedant a une analyse causale, les auteurs constatent que les entites ad hoc multiplient les possibilites d'evitement fiscal, si bien que le recours a ces entites engendre un montant en tresorerie d'economies d'impot economiquement substantiel se rapportant aux activites de recherche et de developpement (R‐D), aux actifs amortissables, aux reports prospectifs de pertes nettes d'exploitation, aux actifs incorporels, aux activites a l'etranger et aux paradis fiscaux. Selon l'estimation des auteurs, les entites ad hoc contribuent a generer plus de 330 milliards de dollars d'economies d'impot en tresorerie marginales, soit environ 6 % du total des impots federaux percus par les Etats‐Unis sur les benefices des societes au cours de la periode visee par l'etude. Des analyses des interactions revelent que l'amelioration de l'efficience fiscale attribuable aux entites ad hoc se situe entre 61,5 % et 87,5 % en ce qui a trait aux actifs incorporels et aux activites de R‐D. Dans l'ensemble, ces resultats nous renseignent sur les aspects economiques de structures organisationnelles complexes auxquelles les entreprises ont recours dans leurs strategies d'evitement fiscal.
Adaptive Management as an Information Problem

Enthusiasm for adaptive management has outrun evaluation of its usefulness as a natural resource management tool. Policymakers routinely endorse, and frequently require, it. Managers and academic observers alike have tended to assume that adaptive management is the best strategy. Little has been said, particularly in the policy literature, about how to decide whether an adaptive management approach makes sense. Looking at adaptive management as an information problem, this paper argues that adaptive management should be used only when it promises to improve management outcomes sufficiently to justify the additional costs it imposes. An explicit formal analysis of the prospects for learning and the value of learning for management should precede any decision to engage in adaptive management. For large-scale, long-term, or high-profile adaptive management programs, that analysis should be reviewed by outside experts and periodically re-examined. The type of analysis recommended here would help limit the use of adaptive management to appropriate circumstances, improve implementation when adaptive management is adopted, and enhance accountability. It would also highlight situations in which learning would be valuable for managers but appears too costly or difficult. In some cases, systematic barriers to learning can be reduced through targeted or general policy measures.
When Immigration Borders Move

With recent immigration enforcement efforts, we have created a completely new paradigm of moving borders: laws enacted at all levels of government that require proof of legal immigration status in order to obtain a driver’s license, a job, rental housing, government need-based assistance, and numerous other essential benefits. Unlike the fixed physical border, these laws require proof of immigration status at multiple, moving points in the country’s interior and are triggered through everyday transactions. A person who is unable to prove legal status is denied the restricted benefit; if a person is denied access to multiple essential benefits, then she is effectively denied the ability to live in the United States. What is the significance of the moving border paradigm? Why are these laws being enacted by federal, state, and local governments, in so many different parts of the country? Looking first for explanations, this Article explores the policies driving the growth of moving border laws: to reinforce our physical borders, to preserve resources (particularly government-funded resources) for those lawfully present, and to communicate symbolic messages of frustration with federal immigration policies and, in some instances, to communicate prejudice toward immigrants and certain ethnic groups identified as immigrants. Yet to truly understand the significance of moving border laws, we also need to understand how they have influenced our notions of national membership. Now more than ever, legal immigration status has become the threshold characteristic in defining our national community. As a result, undocumented immigrants have been pushed from the periphery, where they once exercised limited but real rights, to outside the boundaries of our national membership. But in trying to elevate lawful immigration status, moving border laws have had the ironic and unintended effect of devaluing all forms of legal status. Stated simply, the enforcement of moving border laws will increase racial and ethnic profiling against Latinos and others who don’t “look American,” even if they have legal status or even citizenship. For them, the laws create permanent borders of discrimination. ∗ Professor of Law, Texas Wesleyan University School of Law; A.B., 1992 Harvard College; J.D., 1996 Harvard Law School. I had the opportunity to present this paper in several forums and would like to acknowledge the helpful comments I received from participants at the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, University at Buffalo Law School; the Fourth Annual Gloucester Summer Legal Conference in Gloucester, England; the Law & Society Association International Meeting in Berlin, Germany; and Stetson University College of Law. I want to offer special thanks to Jennifer Chacon, Jason Gillmer, Keith Hirokawa, Hiroshi Motomura, Van Pham, and Carla Pratt for their thoughtful feedback and to Melissa Jaffar for her excellent research assistance. Abstract
How to get banks to take less risk and disclose bad news

Abstract There is wide agreement that before the recent financial crisis, financial institutions took excessive risk in their investment strategies. At the same time, regulators complained that banks did not reveal the extent of their difficulties in a timely fashion thus reducing the effectiveness of government intervention to prevent or mitigate the deleterious effects of the financial crisis. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how regulators can best use certain tools at their disposal to motivate banks to take less risk and to provide adverse information to regulators early. We argue that two tools, namely (i) allowing bank payouts to equity holders even when banks report they are in trouble and (ii) constraining banks’ future investment strategy when they are in trouble can achieve both goals. We show that, in some cases, it is optimal to use both of these tools in combination. That is, in such cases it is optimal to allow equity payouts when banks report they are in trouble, even though such payouts increase the incentive for banks to take excessive risk and even though these payments are financed by taxpayers. We also show that the more socially costly is constraining the bank’s portfolio selection or the more complex are the bank’s assets, the more likely it is that allowing larger payouts and fewer constraints is optimal. Finally we discuss how changes in bank capital requirements interact with inducing disclosure and preventing excessive risk taking.
Is Publication of the Reputation Quotient (RQ) Sufficient to Move Stock Prices

Research has shown that a firm's reputation influences the amount investors are willing to pay for that firm's securities. Therefore, securities of firms with a good reputation should be valued higher than firms with a poor reputation, ceteris paribus. In this study, we use event study methodology to assess whether the public disclosure of the Reputation Quotient (RQSM) list, an index of corporate reputation, induces a change in the security prices (shareholder returns) of the firms included on that list. The results show that disclosure of the RQ does not affect firm shareholder returns. We explore reasons for this finding, suggest possible explanations and offer implications.
Intruders in the Boardroom: The Case of Constituency Directors

Under current fiduciary rules, directors who fail to maintain an undivided loyalty to common shareholders are essentially “intruders,” exposed to shareholder retribution and liability for breach of fiduciary duty. This Article argues that the increasing appointment of “constituency directors” has made the fiduciary principle of undivided loyalty to the common shareholders both outdated and normatively undesirable. A “constituency director” is a director designated to the board by a particular constituency (or “sponsor”). These constituency directors are generally appointed to advocate for investors who are not common shareholders, such as preferred shareholders, creditors, unions, and even the federal government. Contrary to conventional scholarly accounts, these kinds of investors (non-common equity, or “NCE,” investors) cannot always fully protect their interests through contracting alone. Thus, constituency directors are appointed to gain access to the added safeguards that only direct board advocacy can provide. By remedying this condition of “contractual failure,” constituency directors make NCE investments worth undertaking where they otherwise might not be. This analysis suggests that the liability constituency directors face under current fiduciary rules may reduce a corporation’s access to important sources of capital. Hence, there is a normative case to be made for turning a director’s obligation of undivided loyalty to the common shareholders into a default rule. This reform would allow constituency directors to properly advocate for their sponsors, bridging the gap between corporate practice and corporate law, to the benefit of all involved parties and society as a whole.  J.S.D.Ph.D., Associate Professor of Law and Finance, The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law; Institute for Advanced Study in ToulouseFondation Jean-Jacques LaffontToulouse School of Economics. E-mail: simone.sepe@law.arizona.edu. I would like to thank Bob Mundheim for prompting me to research this Article’s topic. For helpful discussions and suggestions, I would also like to thank Patrick Bolton, Jacques Cremer, Christine Clarke, Henry Hansmann, Saura Masconale, Marc Miller, Rob Rhee, Alan Schwartz, Billy Sjostrom, Jean Tirole, and Chuck Whitehead. All errors are mine. Washington University Open Scholarship 310 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [VOL. 91:309
Computer-Assisted Reading and Discovery for Student Generated Text in Massive Open Online Courses

Dealing with the vast quantities of text that students generate in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other large-scale online learning environments is a daunting challenge. Computational tools are needed to help instructional teams uncover themes and patterns as students write in forums, assignments, and surveys. This paper introduces to the learning analytics community the Structural Topic Model, an approach to language processing that can 1) ﬁnd syntactic patterns with semantic meaning in unstructured text, 2) identify variation in those patterns across covariates, and 3) uncover archetypal texts that exemplify the documents within a topical pattern. We show examples of computationally aided discovery and reading in three MOOC settings: mapping students’ self-reported motivations, identifying themes in discussion forums, and uncovering patterns of feedback in course evaluations.
Taking Conservatives Seriously: A Moral Justification for Affirmative Action and Reparations

Underlying the debate over affirmative action and reparations for black Americans is a dispute about the extent to which American society is responsible for present effects of past racial discrimination. Although much has been written on the subject, the scholarship too often sheds more heat than light, and tends to be dominated by extreme positions incapable of taking opposing claims seriously. This Article weighs in on this debate in a novel and constructive manner. The Article defends a societal obligation to remedy past discrimination by accepting, rather than dismissing, principles of conservatives who oppose affirmative action and reparations. Taking conservatives seriously reveals two moral principles that support a societal obligation to remedy past discrimination. The first principle is that racial discrimination is unjust. The second principle is corrective justice: that one who wrongfully harms another is obligated to make amends. Applied to affirmative action, these principles support conservative claims that a state is obligated to make amends to white victims of racial preferences. These principles, however, also support America's responsibility for past societal discrimination against blacks. To the extent society participated in wrongful discrimination, society is obligated, as a matter of corrective justice, to make amends to its black victims. A potential moral conflict thus exists between society's obligation to refrain from “reverse” discrimination and its obligation to remedy past discrimination. That is, the moral case against affirmative action also supports a moral case in its favor.The Article responds to the most serious objections to a societal obligation to remedy past discrimination. These include that America as a whole is not responsible for discrimination practiced by only some states and private actors, that it is unfair to hold current society responsible for discrimination by past society, and that blacks today ought not be viewed as victims of past discrimination, given the passage of time and the extent to which black people's choices have perpetuated their own disadvantage. This Article concludes that these objections fail to defeat America's responsibility for the consequences of her discriminatory history. America as a nation was responsible for protecting slavery and discrimination, a responsibility that belongs to the nation as a nation and therefore continues over time despite changeover in the American citizenry. American society is also responsible for black people's choices that may perpetuate their disadvantage because those choices reflect a foreseeable reaction to conditions created by societal discrimination. The moral imperative to remedy past discrimination, moreover, outweighs the risk of imprecision in doing so. Ultimately, conservative opposition to remedial policies is based on principles that counsel in favor of such policies as much as and arguably more than they counsel against them.
Misreading Oliver Wendell Holmes on Efficient Breach and Tortious Interference

Oliver Wendell Holmes' most notorious statement about contract law was that "the duty to keep a contract at common law means a prediction that you must pay damages if you do not keep it,-and nothing else." This has generally been interpreted to mean that a contracting party has a lawful option to perform or not. Holmes, however, was speaking of remedial limitations and did not espouse the belief that a contracting party had a right to breach. In other writings he equated a contractual breach with the commission of a tort. As a judge he labeled contract breaches as "wrongs." The misreading of Holmes has given comfort to theorists who espouse the notion of "efficient breach." The paper demonstrates that, whatever the merits the theory of efficient breach may have as an economic model, it has none as a legal postulate. Moreover, theorists who espouse the efficient breach theory, have difficulty in explaining why the law regards interference with a contract as a tort. Holmes, however, was one of the prime architects of the modern law of tortious interference.
Federalism in Action: FDA Regulatory Preemption in Pharmaceutical Cases in State Versus Federal Courts

This Essay focuses on an illustration of "federalism in action" - namely, the divergent approaches of state and federal courts in deciding whether the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA), and accompanying regulations promulgated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), preempt state failure-to-warn claims brought against pharmaceutical companies. The Essay explores two salient factors that might affect state and federal courts' respective approaches to the FDA drug labeling preemption analysis: (1) the radical shift in the debate from regulatory compliance to preemption; and (2) the role and influence of the FDA. First, the recurrent debate - in the academy and the courts - regarding the interplay between federal regulations and state common law tort actions has, in less than a decade, radically shifted from regulatory compliance to federal preemption. If state courts have an institutional interest in preserving the autonomy of state common law from broad federal overrides, then presumably one should expect the same resistance to claims of outright preemption. Second, a myopic institutional focus on the courts alone misses the critical role and influence of federal agencies. Thus far largely overlooked is the extent to which federal agencies' role and influence may be a driving force behind the state-federal disparity in preemption determinations. In the realm of FDA prescription drug preemption, not only are federal courts more likely to defer to federal agencies, but - equally important in terms of explaining the decision-making process of courts - federal courts are more likely than state courts to solicit the views of the FDA and the FDA is more apt to intervene on its own in federal court cases. The Essay concludes with some thoughts regarding the federalism implications of state-federal court differences in approach to the preemption inquiry.
The Dehn twist on a sum of two $K3$ surfaces

Ruberman gave the first examples of self-diffeomorphisms of four-manifolds that are isotopic to the identity in the topological category but not smoothly so. We give another example of this phenomenon, using the Dehn twist along a 3-sphere in the connected sum of two K3 surfaces.
Mid-infrared photodetector based on 2D material metamaterial with negative index properties for a wide range of angles near vertical illumination

We present the vertically illuminated Si compatible mid-infrared photodetectors based on graphene that forms negative-index metamaterial. The coupling into a 2D layer at the angles near normal to the surface is negligible without the help of a metamaterial. We propose a low loss metamaterial, the dielectric structure with the nano/microholes through 2D materials that supports a resonance and enhances quantum efficiency in a wide range of incident angles.
The other loving: Uncovering the federal government's racial regulation of marriage

This Article seeks to fill a gap in legal history. The traditional narrative of the history of the American racial regulation of marriage typically focuses on state laws as the only sources of marriage inequality. Overlooked in the narrative are the ways in which federal laws also restricted racially mixed marriages in the decades before 1967 (when the Supreme Court invalidated antimiscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia). Specifically, during the American occupation of Japan after World War II, a combination of immigration, citizenship, and military laws and regulations led to restrictions on marriages along racial lines. These laws also converged to prevent married couples, many of whom were White American soldiers and local Japanese women, from living in the United States together. Accordingly, this Article claims that the confluence of immigration, citizenship, and military laws functioned as a collective counterpart to state antimiscegenation laws.
No reliance on guidance: counter-signaling in management forecasts

This study presents and provides an explanation for a novel stylized fact: both high‐performing and troubled companies withhold issuing earnings guidance. We assume that the manager's ability affects the level of earnings and the accuracy of guidance, but issuing a forecast is costless for all manager types. Managers are thus able to signal their ability through accuracy in their forecasts. While high ability managers would seem to benefit the most from issuing guidance, in equilibrium we find that both high and low ability managers withhold issuing guidance, while intermediate types forecast. Hence, high ability managers counter‐signal in equilibrium, which does not result in a subsequent “punishment” by the market.
Spatio-Temporal Visualization of Interdependent Battery Bus Transit and Power Distribution Systems

The high penetration of transportation electrifi- cation and its associated charging requrimements magnify the interdependency of the transportation and power distribution systems. The emergent interdependency requires that system operators fully understand the status of both systems. To this end, a visualization tool is presented to illustrate the interdependency of battery bus transit and power distribution systems and the associated components. The tool aims at monitoring components from both systems, such as locations of electric buses, the state of charge of batteries, the price of electricity, voltage, current, and active/reactive power flow. The results showcase the success of the visualization tool in monitoring the bus transit and power distribution components to determine a reliable cost-effective scheme for spatio-temporal charging of electric buses.
The Political Economy of Famine: The Ukrainian Famine of 1933

The 1933 Ukrainian famine killed as many as 2.6 million people out of a population of 32 million. Historians offer three main explanations: weather, economic policies, genocide. This paper documents that (1) available data do not support weather as the main explanation: 1931 and 1932 weather predicts harvest roughly equal to the 1924–1929 average; weather explains up to 8.1 percent of excess deaths. (2) Policies (collectivization of agriculture and the lack of favored industries) significantly increased famine mortality; collectivization explains up to 52 percent of excess deaths. (3) There is some evidence that ethnic Ukrainians and Germans were discriminated against.
Inverse Designed THz Spectral Splitters

This letter reports proof-of-principle demonstration of 3-D printable, low-cost, and compact terahertz (THz) spectral splitters based on diffractive optical elements (DOEs) designed to disperse incident collimated broadband THz radiation (0.5–0.7 THz) at a prespecified distance. Via inverse design, we show that it is possible to design a diffractive optic that can split broadband incident spectrum in any desired fashion, as is evidenced from both finite-difference time domain (FDTD) simulations and measured intensity profiles using a 500–750-GHz vector network analyzer (VNA). Due to its straightforward as well as simple construction without the usage of movable parts, our approach, in principle, can have various applications such as in portable, low-cost spectroscopy as well as in wireless THz communication systems as a THz demultiplexer.
The State of Industrial Robotics: Emerging Technologies, Challenges, and Key Research Directions

The State of Industrial Robotics: Emerging Technologies, Challenges, and Key Research Directions
Information, civil liberties, and the political economy of witch-hunts

Drawing from an extensive literature on the European witch-hunt, McCarthyism, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, this article studies how differences in the level of civil liberties protection and the extent to which the leader has better information about the level of the alleged menace than the populace, together with other variables, jointly determine the incidence of witch-hunts. I develop a model showing that at any level of civil liberties protection, the incidence of illegitimate witch-hunts is higher when the leader enjoys an informational advantage than when he does not. This difference, however, is decreasing in the level of civil liberties protection. However, no amount of civil liberties protection is sufficient to prevent the occurrence of illegitimate witch-hunts, so long as the citizen has a concern for the menace, and the leader enjoys an informational advantage and finds the benefit from conducting a witch-hunt to be larger than his reputational loss. Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press.
Can Automatic Retention Improve Health Insurance Market Outcomes

There is growing interest in market design using default rules and other "choice architecture" principles to steer consumers toward desirable outcomes. Using data from Massachusetts's health insurance exchange, we study an "automatic retention" policy intended to prevent coverage interruptions among low-income enrollees. Rather than disenroll people who lapse in paying premiums, the policy automatically switches them to an available free plan until they actively cancel or lose eligibility. We find that automatic retention has a sizable impact, switching 14 percent of consumers annually and differentially retaining healthy, low-cost individuals. The results illustrate the power of defaults to shape insurance coverage outcomes.
The Law School Firm

This Article introduces the concept of the law school firm. The concept calls for law schools to establish affiliated law firms. The affiliation would provide opportunities for students, faculty, and attorneys to collaborate and share resources to teach, research, write, serve clients, and influence the development of law and policy. Based loosely on the medical school model, the law school firm will help bridge the gap between law schools and the practice of law.
Gender and Racial Fairness in Depression Research using Social Media

Multiple studies have demonstrated that behaviors expressed on online social media platforms can indicate the mental health state of an individual. The widespread availability of such data has spurred interest in mental health research, using several datasets where individuals are labeled with mental health conditions. While previous research has raised concerns about possible biases in models produced from this data, no study has investigated how these biases manifest themselves with regards to demographic groups in data, such as gender and racial/ethnic groups. Here, we analyze the fairness of depression classifiers trained on Twitter data with respect to gender and racial demographic groups. We find that model performance differs for underrepresented groups, and we investigate sources of these biases beyond data representation. Our study results in recommendations on how to avoid these biases in future research.
Partial GVZ-groups

Abstract Following the literature, a group G is called a group of central type if G has an irreducible character that vanishes on G ∖ Z ( G ) . Motivated by this definition, we say that a character χ ∈ Irr ( G ) has central type if χ vanishes on G ∖ Z ( χ ) , where Z ( χ ) is the center of χ. Groups where every irreducible character has central type have been studied previously under the name GVZ-groups (and several other names) in the literature. In this paper, we study the groups G that possess a nontrivial, normal subgroup N such that every character of G either contains N in its kernel or has central type. The structure of these groups is surprisingly limited and has many aspects in common with both central type groups and GVZ-groups.
Intraday arbitrage between ETFs and their underlying portfolios

Abstract Prior research suggests that nonfundamental exchange-traded fund (ETF) price shocks are transmitted to their portfolios through an arbitrage mechanism. We test this proposition by examining minute-by-minute returns and order imbalances but find little evidence that ETF trading impacts underlying returns. Specifically, panel vector autoregression shows that ETF returns do not lead portfolio prices. Instead, arbitrage opportunities arise from order imbalances and price movements in the underlying securities and are subsequently eliminated by ETF quote adjustments, rather than arbitrage trading. We extend our analysis to a daily frequency but still find little relation between ETF trading and constituent security prices.
From deconfined spinons to coherent magnons in an antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain with long range interactions

We study the spectrum and the nature of the excitations of an antiferromagnetic (AFM) Heisenberg chain with staggered long range interactions, both numerically using the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group (tDMRG) method and by means of a multi-spinon approximation that qualitatively explains its main features. The unfrustrated long-range nature of the exchange effectively increases the dimensionality of the system and the chain is able to undergo true symmetry breaking and develop long range order, transitioning from a gapless spin liquid to a gapless ordered AFM phase. We calculated the momentum resolved spin dynamical structure factor and found that for weakly decaying interactions the emergence of Neel order can be associated to the formation of bound states of spinons that become coherent magnons. The quasiparticle band leaks out from the two-spinon continuum that is pushed up to higher energies. Our physical picture is also supported by an analysis of the behavior of the excitations in real-time.
Deep Learning based Vulnerability Detection: Are We There Yet

Automated detection of software vulnerabilities is a fundamental problem in software security. Existing program analysis techniques either suffer from high false positives or false negatives. Recent progress in Deep Learning (DL) has resulted in a surge of interest in applying DL for automated vulnerability detection. Several recent studies have demonstrated promising results achieving an accuracy of up to 95% at detecting vulnerabilities. In this paper, we ask, "how well do the state-of-the-art DL-based techniques perform in a real-world vulnerability prediction scenario". To our surprise, we find that their performance drops by more than 50%. A systematic investigation of what causes such precipitous performance drop reveals that existing DL-based vulnerability prediction approaches suffer from challenges with the training data (e.g., data duplication, unrealistic distribution of vulnerable classes, etc.) and with the model choices (e.g., simple token-based models). As a result, these approaches often do not learn features related to the actual cause of the vulnerabilities. Instead, they learn unrelated artifacts from the dataset (e.g., specific variable/function names, etc.). Leveraging these empirical findings, we demonstrate how a more principled approach to data collection and model design, based on realistic settings of vulnerability prediction, can lead to better solutions. The resulting tools perform significantly better than the studied baseline up to 33.57% boost in precision and 128.38% boost in recall compared to the best performing model in the literature. Overall, this paper elucidates existing DL-based vulnerability prediction systems' potential issues and draws a roadmap for future DL-based vulnerability prediction research. In that spirit, we make available all the artifacts supporting our results: https://git.io/Jf6IA.
Murine deficiency of peroxisomal l-bifunctional protein (EHHADH) causes medium-chain 3-hydroxydicarboxylic aciduria and perturbs hepatic cholesterol homeostasis

Peroxisomes play an essential role in the β-oxidation of dicarboxylic acids (DCAs), which are metabolites formed upon ω-oxidation of fatty acids. Genetic evidence linking transporters and enzymes to specific DCA β-oxidation steps is generally lacking. Moreover, the physiological functions of DCA metabolism remain largely unknown. In this study, we aimed to characterize the DCA β-oxidation pathway in human cells, and to evaluate the biological role of DCA metabolism using mice deficient in the peroxisomal L-bifunctional protein (Ehhadh KO mice). In vitro experiments using HEK-293 KO cell lines demonstrate that ABCD3 and ACOX1 are essential in DCA β-oxidation, whereas both the bifunctional proteins (EHHADH and HSD17B4) and the thiolases (ACAA1 and SCPx) have overlapping functions and their contribution may depend on expression level. We also show that medium-chain 3-hydroxydicarboxylic aciduria is a prominent feature of EHHADH deficiency in mice most notably upon inhibition of mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation. Using stable isotope tracing methodology, we confirmed that products of peroxisomal DCA β-oxidation can be transported to mitochondria for further metabolism. Finally, we show that, in liver, Ehhadh KO mice have increased mRNA and protein expression of cholesterol biosynthesis enzymes with decreased (in females) or similar (in males) rate of cholesterol synthesis. We conclude that EHHADH plays an essential role in the metabolism of medium-chain DCAs and postulate that peroxisomal DCA β-oxidation is a regulator of hepatic cholesterol biosynthesis.
Robust linear regression: optimal rates in polynomial time

We obtain robust and computationally efficient estimators for learning several linear models that achieve statistically optimal convergence rate under minimal distributional assumptions. Concretely, we assume our data is drawn from a k-hypercontractive distribution and an є-fraction is adversarially corrupted. We then describe an estimator that converges to the optimal least-squares minimizer for the true distribution at a rate proportional to є2−2/k, when the noise is independent of the covariates. We note that no such estimator was known prior to our work, even with access to unbounded computation. The rate we achieve is information-theoretically optimal and thus we resolve the main open question in Klivans, Kothari and Meka [COLT’18]. Our key insight is to identify an analytic condition that serves as a polynomial relaxation of independence of random variables. In particular, we show that when the moments of the noise and covariates are negatively-correlated, we obtain the same rate as independent noise. Further, when the condition is not satisfied, we obtain a rate proportional to є2−4/k, and again match the information-theoretic lower bound. Our central technical contribution is to algorithmically exploit independence of random variables in the ”sum-of-squares” framework by formulating it as the aforementioned polynomial inequality.
Neue Hormontherapien beim metastasierten Prostatakarzinom

Die Androgendeprivationstherapie ist seit den 1970er Jahren die Standardtherapie des fortgeschrittenen oder metastasierten Prostatakarzinoms. Nach einiger Zeit unter Androgenentzug lernt das Prostatakarzinom jedoch, unter diesen Umstanden zu leben und wird kastrationsresistent. In diesem Stadium der Erkrankung nutzt das Prostatakarzinom die androgene Signalkaskade weiterhin, sodass zu deren Unterbrechung neue Hormontherapien der zweiten Generation entwickelt wurden. Es handelt sich dabei um die Wirkstoffe Abirateron, Enzalutamid, Apalutamid und Darolutamid. Diese setzen an verschiedenen Stellen der androgenen Signalkaskade an, mit dem Ziel, verschiedene androgene Resistenzmechanismen des Prostatakarzinoms zu unterbinden. Die neuen Hormontherapien werden in Kombination mit der Standardandrogendeprivationstherapie verabreicht. Initial fur das metastasierte kastrationsresistente Prostatakarzinom etabliert, veranderten die neuen Hormontherapien auch die Therapie des nichtmetastasierten kastrationsresistenten und des metastasierten hormonsensitiven Prostatakarzinoms grundlegend. Die Erkenntnis, dass ausserst niedrige Testosteronspiegel wahrend des initialen Androgenentzugs mit einer verzogerten Progression der Erkrankung und schlussendlich einem verbesserten Uberleben assoziiert sind, fuhrte zu verschiedenen Kombinationstherapien bereits im metastasierten hormonsensitiven Stadium. In diesem fruhen Krankheitsstadium zeigten die Hormontherapien der neuen Generation die grosste Wirkung und fuhrten zu einer Verbesserung des Gesamtuberlebens von ca. 30–40 % gegenuber der alleinigen Androgendeprivationstherapie.
Proctor: A Semi-Supervised Performance Anomaly Diagnosis Framework for Production HPC Systems

Performance variation diagnosis in High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems is a challenging problem due to the size and complexity of the systems. Application performance variation leads to premature termination of jobs, decreased energy efficiency, or wasted computing resources. Manual root-cause analysis of performance variation based on system telemetry has become an increasingly time-intensive process as it relies on human experts and the size of telemetry data has grown. Recent methods use supervised machine learning models to automatically diagnose previously encountered performance anomalies in compute nodes. However, supervised machine learning models require large labeled data sets for training. This labeled data requirement is restrictive for many real-world application domains, including HPC systems, because collecting labeled data is challenging and time-consuming, especially considering anomalies that sparsely occur.
Grounding ‘Grounding’ in NLP

The NLP community has seen substantial recent interest in grounding to facilitate interaction between language technologies and the world. However, as a community, we use the term broadly to reference any linking of text to data or non-textual modality. In contrast, Cognitive Science more formally defines "grounding" as the process of establishing what mutual information is required for successful communication between two interlocutors -- a definition which might implicitly capture the NLP usage but differs in intent and scope. We investigate the gap between these definitions and seek answers to the following questions: (1) What aspects of grounding are missing from NLP tasks? Here we present the dimensions of coordination, purviews and constraints. (2) How is the term "grounding" used in the current research? We study the trends in datasets, domains, and tasks introduced in recent NLP conferences. And finally, (3) How to advance our current definition to bridge the gap with Cognitive Science? We present ways to both create new tasks or repurpose existing ones to make advancements towards achieving a more complete sense of grounding.
Cautiously Optimistic Policy Optimization and Exploration with Linear Function Approximation

Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, because their incremental and on-policy nature makes them more stable than the value-based counterparts. However, the same properties also make them slow to converge and sample inefficient, as the on-policy nature is not amenable to data reuse and the incremental updates result in a large iteration complexity before a near optimal policy is discovered. These empirical findings are mirrored in theory in the recent work of~\citet{agarwal2020pc}, which provides a policy optimization method PC-PG that provably finds near optimal policies in the linear MDP model and is robust to model misspecification, but suffers from an extremely poor sample complexity compared with value-based techniques. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, COPOE, that overcomes the poor sample complexity of PC-PG while retaining the robustness to model misspecification. COPOE makes several important algorithmic enhancements of PC-PG, such as enabling data reuse, and uses more refined analysis techniques, which we expect to be more broadly applicable to designing new RL algorithms. The result is an improvement in sample complexity from $\widetilde{O}(1/\epsilon^{11})$ for PC-PG to $\widetilde{O}(1/\epsilon^3)$ for COPOE, nearly bridging the gap with value-based techniques.
Direct Numerical Simulation of Flows over an NACA-0012 Airfoil at Low and Moderate Reynolds Numbers

Direct numerical simulations (DNS) of flow over an NACA-0012 airfoil are performed at a low and a moderate Reynolds numbers of Re(sub c)=50 times10(exp 3) and 1times 10(exp 6). The angles of attack are 5 and 15 degrees at the low and the moderate Reynolds number cases respectively. The three-dimensional unsteady compressible Navier-Stokes equations are solved using higher order compact schemes. The flow field in the low Reynolds number case consists of a long separation bubble near the leading-edge region and an attached boundary layer on the aft part of the airfoil. The shear layer that formed in the separated region persisted up to the end of the airfoil. The roles of the turbulent diffusion, advection, and dissipation terms in the turbulent kinetic-energy balance equation change as the boundary layer evolves over the airfoil. In the higher Reynolds number case, the leading-edge separation bubble is very small in length and in height. A fully developed turbulent boundary layer is observed in a short distance downstream of the reattachment point. The boundary layer velocity near the wall gradually decreases along the airfoil. Eventually, the boundary layer separates near the trailing edge. The Reynolds stresses peak in the outer part of the boundary layer and the maximum amplitude also gradually increases along the chord.