cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Lawyers Without Borders

Professional regulation of attorneys is still attempting to catch up with the burgeoning international legal profession, which until recently has been wholly unregulated. The primary effort has been through revisions to Model Rule 8.5 to extend the reach of the Rule to international cases and professional activities in foreign countries. Because Rule 8.5 was drafted for domestic multi-jurisdiction practice, however, it is based on assumptions about territoriality and the historical relationship between the jurisdiction of tribunals and the licensing of attorneys that are simply inapposite in international settings. As a result, applying Rule 8.5 to international tribunals and international advocacy produces anomalous and often problematic results. A more careful examination of how the Rule would operate in various practical settlings reveals not only shortcomings in the Rule, but the need for a new conception of what it means to be an "international lawyer" or a "global advocate," and the need for a new approach to regulating these individuals. For the short and medium term, I propose a series of proposals for rewriting the Rule to provide for interim management of these issues. While Rule 8.5 is a meaningful attempt to respond to an obvious need to regulate international law practice, I argue that it causes more problems than it resolves and must be completely rewritten as applied to international legal practice. Ultimately, however, resolving the problems with Rule 8.5 is only a first step in the ominous but important task of developing a coherent regulatory regime for international legal practice. In a related forthcoming article entitled The Global Advocate, I will take up these challenges.
Reconsidering the Mythical Advantages of Cohabitation: Why Marriage Is More Efficient Than Cohabitation

This Article applies Becker's Home Economics Model (where households produce and consume "home goods," such as child rearing, cleaning, and cooking) to determine which relationship -- marriage or cohabitation -- is more efficient. The Article concludes that marriage is more efficient at producing home goods than cohabitation. This Article then proposes that the welfare and tax laws should be changed to promote marriage, which is the more efficient relationship. Alternatively, at a minimum, those laws should be marriage neutral (that is, they should not promote cohabitation).
Layering, Kludgeocracy and Disability Rights: The Limited Influence of the Social Model in American Disability Policy

The United States has been a leader in the creation of disability rights law, providing a policy template for other nations. Yet the social model, the animating philosophy behind the disability rights movement, has had little effect on the wide range of welfare programs that serve people with disabilities. These programs, whose creation preceded the modern disability rights movement, reflect a medical model of disability that is at odds with the social model. Analysing the Americans with Disabilities Act (which embodies the social model) and Social Security Disability Insurance (the largest welfare program for people with disabilities), we explore how and why this layering of contradictory disability rights and welfare programs developed and how it has been maintained. We argue that the tension between these policies engendered a series of patches, or ‘kludges’, that allow the policies to coexist without meaningful synthesis. We contend that the United States is particularly prone to this layering of ‘tense policies’, but that it is likely characteristic of disability policy in many nations. Finally we argue that accurate benchmarking of disability rights regimes across nations requires analysts to dig through all the layers of disability policy.
Do small schools improve performance in large, urban districts? Causal evidence from New York City

We evaluate the effectiveness of small high school reform in the country’s largest school district, New York City. Using a rich administrative dataset for multiple cohorts of students and distance between student residence and school to instrument for endogenous school selection, we find substantial heterogeneity in school effects: newly created small schools have positive effects on graduation and some other education outcomes while older small schools do not. Importantly, we show that ignoring this source of treatment effect heterogeneity by assuming a common small school effect yields a misleading zero effect of small school attendance.
Does Licensing Induce Technological Spillovers to Domestic Firms

Productivity differences can explain differences in economic growth across countries, it has been demonstrated that foreign presence of a Multinational Enterprise (MNE) in a developing country is one of the most important methods through which technology transfer occurs. This presence could be in the form of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), licensing, and imports from the developing country. However, the way and the effectiveness in which each type of foreign presence affects domestic productivity is still unclear. In this paper, I study licensing as one of the channels through which foreign technology is transferred to domestic plants. This technology transfer can occur in the same industry and in related industries, which result in technology spillovers that can affect both intraindustry and inter-industry productivity. Moreover, the institutional framework of the country can affect the type of foreign presence adopted by MNE’s in the host country. Therefore, it is important to analyze the effect of a change in the institutional framework on technology spillovers. This can be achieved by analyzing a set of new - stronger Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Using Chilean plant level data for the 2001-2007 period I find that there are positive inter-industry spillover effects when licensing is done in downstream sectors which result in higher productivity for domestic plants in upstream sectors (backward linkages). Moreover, stronger IPR measures increases intra-sector spillover effects while it decreases the productivity of domestic firms in inter-industry sectors. I also find that there are greater spillover effects in plants with higher productivity.
Spillover effects of continuous forbearance mortgages

Abstract This paper examines the potential market impacts of continuous forbearance mortgages (CFM). This mortgage design embeds an insurance contract at origination that reduces the interest bearing balance to the smaller of the unpaid balance and an estimate of the current home value in exchange for an additional premium in the mortgage note rate. Thus the CFM mortgage payment is reduced in periods in which the estimated home value falls below the unpaid balance and is reduced fractionally based on the ratio of home value to loan balance. We consider a counterfactual in which all U.S. mortgages had this CFM feature at the start of 2006 and estimate the mortgage payment savings to borrowers at a loan level. Estimated mortgage payment savings are then used to estimate the effect on mortgage default. At the aggregate level, the sum of the mortgage payment savings at the state level is used to estimate potential impacts to regional employment.
What’s Missing From Foster Care Reform? The Need for Comprehensive, Realistic, and Compassionate Removal Standards

Class action litigations, media commentary, and statistical data have time and again laid bare the tragically poor quality of foster care in this country. In response to the extensive nature of these problems, federal and state commissions have been established to study what ails the foster care system, to issue reports on their findings, and to make recommendations for reform. But a critical component of reform has been missing. In order truly to protect children from the perils of the foster care system, we must examine the out-dated and short-sighted standards nearly every state currently uses to justify initially removing children from their parents and placing them in foster care in the first place. The reformulation of these standards so they require more comprehensive and balanced assessments before removing a child from her home and placing her in foster care is essential. Even if there exists some risk to a child in her home, moving her into a new living situation without first assessing the risks in that placement is, at best, irresponsible. This paper explains how and why current standards developed such a limited and ultimately perilous focus; describes an innovative approach recently introduced by the social services field and the legal system to more accurately, comprehensively, and compassionately determine the risks to a child before removing her, even temporarily, from her home; and proposes how this new approach can be used by attorneys, judges, and policy makers to institute removal standards which ensure children are no longer placed in harmful settings under the guise of protection.
The Problem of Religious Learning

The problem of religious learning is that religion-including the teaching about religion-must be separated from liberal public education, but that the two cannot be entirely separated if the aims of liberal public education are to be realized. It is a problem that has gone largely unexamined by courts, constitutional scholars, and other legal theorists. Though the U.S. Supreme Court has offered a few terse statements about the permissibility of teaching about religion in its Establishment Clause jurisprudence, and scholars frequently urge policies for or against such controversial subjects as Intelligent Design or graduation prayers, insufficient attention has been paid to the nature and depth of the problem itself. As a result, discussion about religion's place in public schools often exhibits a haphazard and under-theorized quality. But in an area so fraught with constitutional complexity and high emotion, no edifying policy solutions are likely without a deeper understanding of the relationship between religious learning and liberal public education. This Article aims to fill that gap by giving the problem of religious learning its due. It offers a detailed theoretical account of the relationship between religious learning and the cultivation of the civic and moral ideals of liberal democracies. It then draws on that account to develop a unique model of religious learning within liberal learning which takes its cue from the historic purpose of the public school. Since even today it is widely supposed and insisted that public schools still serve a vital role in developing civic and moral ideals in young people, this Article's comprehensive examination of the problem of religious learning is both timely and necessary if the seemingly intractable skirmishes over religion, education policy, and constitutional law are capable of even a modest reconciliation. * Visiting Assistant Professor and Scholar in Residence, The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law. J.S.D. Candidate, LL.M., Columbia Law School; J.D., Boston University School of Law, M.A., Harvard University; B.A., Duke University. I am deeply indebted to Kent Greenawalt and Philip Hamburger for their guidance. Thanks also to Mark Barenberg, Vince Blasi, Michael Dorf, Elizabeth Emens, Robert Ferguson, Paul Horwitz, Mark Lilla, Patricia Seith, Ken Simons, George Smith, Winnifred Sullivan, and Robert Vischer for valuable comments and discussions, and thanks to the staff of the Boston College Law Review for their careful and diligent work. This paper benefited greatly from presentations at The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law, and at the Associates-in-Law workshop at Columbia Law School.
How to open the doors of the court - lessons on access to justice from Indian PIL

Indian Public Interest Litigation (PIL) is a creative and widely-noted model for broadening access to justice and facilitating the proper hearing of important issues even if they are not backed by resources. The model holds obvious appeal for South Africa, where these are pressing concerns. PIL has, however, enjoyed distinctly mixed success in India. This article draws on the model and the Indian experience of it to propose a PIL model for South Africa, more modest than India's, but designed to be resistant to the problems India has experienced and to be a practical proposal that both the government and the judiciary could support. The paper seeks to show how such a model can expand the number and diversity of people who can access the courts, improve the ability of the courts to remedy constitutional violations, and potentially bolster judicial status and independence.
Does Intrinsic Habit Formation Actually Resolve the Equity Premium Puzzle

Abstract G. M. Constantinides (1990, Journal of Political Economy98, 519–543) describes a simple model of intrinsic habit formation that appears to resolve the “equity premium puzzle” of R. Mehra and E. C. Prescott (1985, Journal of Monetary Economics15, 145–161). This finding is particularly important, since it has motivated a broader consideration of the implications of habit formation preferences in dynamic equilibrium models. However, consumption growth actually behaves very differently pre- and post-1948, and the explanatory power of the habit formation model is driven by the pre-1948 data. Using data from 1949 to 2000, constructed in a manner comparable to R. Mehra and E. C. Prescott, I demonstrate that intrinsic habit cannot rationalize the unconditional moments of discrete consumption and real asset returns with values of the risk aversion coefficient that are less than four times larger than the values found by G. M. Constantinides for any feasible calibration of the model. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E21, G12.
Empirical tax research in accounting: A discussion

Abstract This discussion reflects on the state and future of empirical tax research in accounting, complementing and extending the work of Shackelford and Shevlin ( J. Acc. Econom. 31/32 (2001)). Specifically, this discussion (1) examines the scope of Shackelford and Shevlin (J. Acc. Econom. 31/32 (2001)), (2) discusses what I view to be the main contributions and limitations in the extant tax research, and (3) charts several directions for future research.
The Judicial Cadre Evaluation System in China: From Quantification to Intra-state Legibility

Performance evaluation systems fundamentally shape the behaviour of Chinese judges, but scholarship on the concrete implementation of these institutions is scarce. Relying on nearly 15 months of fieldwork in six cities in China, we explain how the judicial cadre evaluation system, as unified by the 2011 “Guiding opinion of the Supreme People's Court,” has been implemented. Over 30 indices quantitatively measure Chinese courts’ “fairness” (gongzheng 公正), “efficiency” (xiaolu 效率) and “impact” (xiaoguo 效果), incentivizing court leaders to pressure their subordinate judges to resolve disputes as quickly as possible without unduly angering litigants or other actors. Under the hyper-quantified conditions of cadre evaluation, systemic praising and shaming bring about what we call “intra-state legibility,” which leads to a variety of informal worker reactions to these tactics. This study not only uses interviews and new documentary evidence to add necessary detail to our understanding of cadre evaluation systems, it also engages debates in comparative law and politics regarding bureaucratic influence on authoritarian judicial behaviour.
Interpreting the Sixteenth Amendment (by Way of the Direct-Tax Clauses)

The Sixteenth Amendment and the direct-tax clauses have become subjects of interest in the legal academy and, as proposals for new forms of national taxation emerge on a seemingly daily basis, they could become subjects of more general interest as well. Under the direct-tax clauses, a direct tax must be apportioned among the states on the basis of population, making such a tax difficult, although not impossible, to implement. Following the Supreme Court decisions in the 1895 Income Tax Cases, which held that an 1894 income tax was a direct tax that had not been properly apportioned, the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, exempted "taxes on incomes" from the apportionment requirement. The Amendment made the modern, unapportioned income tax become possible. This article, part of the author's ongoing debate with Professor Calvin Johnson, defends the following propositions, among others: The direct-tax clauses were understood from the founding to have real effect, such as deterring enactment of taxes with decidedly sectional impact; the Supreme Court's decisions in the Income Tax Cases were defensible interpretations of the clauses; and, if the U.S. was going to have a national (yet unapportioned) income tax, the Sixteenth Amendment was an essential modification of the clauses. However, the Amendment, which removes only "taxes on incomes" from the apportionment rule, was not intended to repeal the direct-tax clauses: not all direct taxes were understood by proponents and ratifiers of the Amendment as "taxes on incomes." The article examines the meaning of these key terms and concludes that it is still possible for a tax to be direct but not a tax on incomes. If Congress were to enact such a tax (a wealth tax is a good example), the tax would have to be apportioned. Along the way, the article also discusses related points, including how the direct-tax clauses' connection with slavery should affect our interpretation of the clauses; whether the Supreme Court's 1796 decision in Hylton v. United States accurately reflected the original understanding of the clauses; and, more generally, whether actions of Federalists-in-power provide us with incontrovertible evidence of original understanding. On the last point, the article discusses a 1797 revenue act to demonstrate that founders-in-power could act in decidedly unconstitutional ways.
Cecelia Goetz, Woman at Nuremberg

Among the creators of international criminal law were the many women who participated in the post-World War II trials of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. This essay profiles one of those women: Cecelia Goetz, a thirty-year-old American who was the only woman to deliver an opening statement at Nuremberg. The essay not only details how and why Goetz became a prosecutor in the Krupp trial, but also relates a life story marked by many "first women" events, on law review, at the U.S. Department of Justice, and, after Nuremberg, in the federal judiciary.
Thinking and Doing—the regulation of workers' human capital in the United States

The ownership of human capital has become a hotly contested issue in the United States. Covenants not to compete are widely used in the American workplace and the source of an enormous volume of litigation. Trade secret disputes are also widespread. The issues raised by these cases are not new, but they are arising with increasing frequency and are posed in a new way. The new focus on workers' human capital is a result of the fact that, in the past two decades, the employment relationship has changed from one in which workers' knowledge about production was devalued to one in which it is highly prized. This change in the nature of the employment relationship has many far-reaching implications for many aspects of employment regulation, of which the ownership of human capital is high on the list. This article examines the current disputes and legal trends concerning the issue of who owns the workers' human capital from an historical perspective. It begins with a review of the regulation of employee human capital in earlier employment systems and a description of the new employment relationship. It then discusses the current controversies and changing legal framework governing the ownership of human capital to show that the law is out of step with the changes in the nature of work. Part III proposes an approach that is consistent with the implicit promises and understandings that underlie the new employment relationship.
Using Business Games in Teaching DSS

In this study a business game is used as a vehicle for implementing decision support systems (DSS). Eighteen companies, consisting of ninety graduating M.B.A. students, participating in a business game were required to develop DSS and to report on the systems developed. Each of the eighteen companies developed a system of their own choosing, without external guidance. Individual questionnaires were later used to evaluate a number of relevant variables: use of systems, contribution of systems, association with systems and user satisfaction. Findings, compared with reported results of previous empirical study, exhibit differentiations in success of DSS between companies. This indicates the potential of using business games as an educational tool for teaching management information systems (MIS) and DSS.
Decentralization and regional convergence: Evidence from night‐time lights data

The proponents of decentralization argue that it improves economic growth, while critics say it increases regional inequality. The empirical evidence is mixed and based mostly on developed countries due to a lack of income data for lower administrative regions. We combine night‐lights data captured by satellites with a new database on decentralization derived from actual laws that are institutionalized and circumscribed from a global sample of countries. We then analyze the impact of decentralization on regional convergence using income data from the first and second administrative regions. We find that decentralization hinders within‐country regional convergence, especially in the developing countries.
Mechanistic Inferences From Analysis of Measurements of Protein Phase Transitions in Live Cells.

The combination of phase separation and disorder-to-order transitions can give rise to ordered, semi-crystalline fibrillar assemblies that underlie prion phenomena namely, the non-Mendelian transfer of information across cells. Recently, a method known as Distributed Amphifluoric Forster Resonance Energy Transfer (DAmFRET) was developed to study the convolution of phase separation and disorder-to-order transitions in live cells. In this assay, a protein of interest is expressed to a broad range of concentrations and the acquisition of local density and order, measured by changes in FRET, is used to map phase transitions for different proteins. The high-throughput nature of this assay affords the promise of uncovering sequence-to-phase behavior relationships in live cells. Here, we report the development of a supervised method to obtain automated and accurate classifications of phase transitions quantified using the DAmFRET assay. Systems that we classify as undergoing two-state discontinuous transitions are consistent with prion-like behaviors, although the converse is not always true. We uncover well-established and surprising new sequence features that contribute to two-state phase behavior of prion-like domains. Additionally, our method enables quantitative, comparative assessments of sequence-specific driving forces for phase transitions in live cells. Finally, we demonstrate that a modest augmentation of DAmFRET measurements, specifically time-dependent protein expression profiles, can allow one to apply classical nucleation theory to extract sequence-specific lower bounds on the probability of nucleating ordered assemblies. Taken together, our approaches lead to a useful analysis pipeline that enables the extraction of mechanistic inferences regarding phase transitions in live cells.
Propaganda, Presumed Influence, and Collective Protest

Political propaganda can reduce citizens’ inclinations to protest by directly influencing their preferences or beliefs about the government. However, given that protest is risky in authoritarian societies and requires collective participation, propaganda can also reduce citizens’ inclination to protest by making them think that other citizens, rather than themselves, may have been influenced by propaganda and are, as a result, unwilling to protest. We test this indirect mechanism of propaganda using a survey experiment with Chinese internet users from diverse backgrounds and find that they do believe propaganda affects other citizens’ support for and beliefs about the government more than their own support and beliefs. Moreover, they believe that propaganda reduces other citizens’ willingness to protest, which in turn reduces their own willingness to protest. Therefore, the power of propaganda may sometimes lie more in the social perceptions and uncertainty it creates than in its direct individual effects.
Learning Visuomotor Policies for Aerial Navigation Using Cross-Modal Representations

Machines are a long way from robustly solving open-world perception-control tasks, such as first-person view (FPV) aerial navigation. While recent advances in end-to- end Machine Learning, especially Imitation Learning and Reinforcement appear promising, they are constrained by the need of large amounts of difficult-to-collect labeled real- world data. Simulated data, on the other hand, is easy to generate, but generally does not render safe behaviors in diverse real-life scenarios. In this work we propose a novel method for learning robust visuomotor policies for real-world deployment which can be trained purely with simulated data. We develop rich state representations that combine supervised and unsupervised environment data. Our approach takes a cross-modal perspective, where separate modalities correspond to the raw camera data and the system states relevant to the task, such as the relative pose of gates to the drone in the case of drone racing. We feed both data modalities into a novel factored architecture, which learns a joint lowdimensional embedding via Variational Auto Encoders. This compact representation is then fed into a control policy, which we trained using imitation learning with expert trajectories in a simulator. We analyze the rich latent spaces learned with our proposed representations, and show that the use of our cross-modal architecture significantly improves control policy performance as compared to end-to-end learning or purely unsupervised feature extractors. We also present real-world results for drone navigation through gates in different track configurations and environmental conditions. Our proposed method, which runs fully onboard, can successfully generalize the learned representations and policies across simulation and reality, significantly outperforming baseline approaches.
Multiscale Score Matching for Out-of-Distribution Detection

We present a new methodology for detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) images by utilizing norms of the score estimates at multiple noise scales. A score is defined to be the gradient of the log density with respect to the input data. Our methodology is completely unsupervised and follows a straight forward training scheme. First, we train a deep network to estimate scores for L levels of noise. Once trained, we calculate the noisy score estimates for N in-distribution samples and take the L2-norms across the input dimensions (resulting in an NxL matrix). Then we train an auxiliary model (such as a Gaussian Mixture Model) to learn the in-distribution spatial regions in this L-dimensional space. This auxiliary model can now be used to identify points that reside outside the learned space. Despite its simplicity, our experiments show that this methodology significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in detecting out-of-distribution images. For example, our method can effectively separate CIFAR-10 (inlier) and SVHN (OOD) images, a setting which has been previously shown to be difficult for deep likelihood models.
Towards Obfuscated Malware Detection for Low Powered IoT Devices

With the increased deployment of IoT and edge devices into commercial and user networks, these devices have become a new threat vector for malware authors. It is imperative to protect these devices as they become more prevalent in commercial and personal networks. However, due to their limited computational power and storage space, especially in the case of battery-powered devices, it is infeasible to deploy state-of-the-art malware detectors onto these systems. In this work, we propose using and extracting features from Markov matrices constructed from opcode traces as a low cost feature for unobfuscated and obfuscated malware detection. We empirically show that our approach maintains a high detection rate while consuming less power than similar work.
Revising the Cosmic Story

The essay argues that the standard cosmological model is one-sided and incomplete. Its recognition of the primacy of radiant energy has no rational justification and empirical verification and, therefore, is arbitrary and subjective. The subjective and arbitrary choice of this foundational “self-evident truth” renders the entire standard model subjective and arbitrary. Numerous paradoxes and inconsistencies plague the standard model. As a result, from the perspective of the standard cosmological model the universe appears, as some cosmologists argue, “absurd” and many of its parts seem inaccessible to our understanding. The essay attempts to provide a more balanced approach. It argues that the recognition of equal importance of both radiant and non-radiant forms of energy and matter is essential for a comprehensive and objective understanding of how the universe works. The essay also tries to outline the new cosmological model that recognizes the equal importance of both types of energy and matter and of their complementary relationship.
A combinatorial approach to Donkin-Koppinen filtrations of general linear supergroups

For a general linear supergroup G=GL(m|n), we consider a natural isomorphism ϕ:G→U−×Gev×U+, where Gev is the even subsupergroup of G, and U–, U+ are appropriate odd unipotent subsupergroups of G. W...
Nonuniform Sampling, Reproducing Kernels, and the Associated Hilbert Spaces

In a general context of positive definite kernels k, we develop tools and algorithms for sampling in reproducing kernel Hilbert space ℋ (RKHS). With reference to these RKHSs, our results allow inference from samples; more precisely, reconstruction of an “entire” (or global) signal, a function f from ℋ, via generalized interpolation of f from partial information obtained from carefully chosen distributions of sample points. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for configurations of point-masses δx of sample-points x to have finite norm relative to the particular RKHS ℋ considered. When this is the case, and the kernel k is given, we obtain an induced positive definite kernel ℋ. We perform a comparison, and we study when this induced positive definite kernel has l2 rows and columns. The latter task is accomplished with the use of certain symmetric pairs of operators in the two Hilbert spaces, l2 on one side, and the RKHS ℋ on the other. A number of applications are given, including to infinite network systems, to graph Laplacians, to resistance metrics, and to sampling of Gaussian fields.
Switchbacks Explained: Super-Parker Fields—The Other Side of the Sub-Parker Spiral

We provide a simple geometric explanation for the source of switchbacks and associated large and one-sided transverse flows in the solar wind observed by Parker Solar Probe. The more radial, Sub-Parker Spiral structure of the heliospheric magnetic field observed previously by Ulysses, ACE, and STEREO is created within rarefaction regions where footpoint motion from the source of fast into slow wind at the Sun creates a magnetic field line connection across solar wind speed shear. Conversely, when foot-points move from the source of slow wind into faster wind, a Super-Parker Spiral field structure is formed: below the Alfven critical point, one-sided transverse field-aligned flows develop; above the Alfven critical point, the field structure contracts between adjacent solar wind flows, and the radial field component decreases in magnitude with distance from the Sun, eventually reversing into a switchback. The Sub-Parker and Super-Parker Spirals behave functionally as opposites. Observations from Parker Solar Probe confirm the paucity of switchbacks within rarefaction regions and immediately outside these rarefaction regions, we observe numerous switchbacks in the magnetic field that are directly associated with abrupt transients in solar wind speed. The radial component of the magnetic field, the speed gradients, radial Alfven speed, and the ratio of the sound speed to the radial Alfven speed all conform to predictions based on the Sub-Parker and Super-Parker Spirals within rarefaction regions and solar wind speed enhancements (spikes or jets), respectively. Critically, the predictions associated with the Super- Parker Spiral naturally explain the observations of switchbacks being associated with unexpectedly large and one-sided tangential flows.
Momentum‐based Accelerated Mirror Descent Stochastic Approximation for Robust Topology Optimization under Stochastic Loads

Robust topology optimization (RTO) improves the robustness of designs with respect to random sources in real-world structures, yet an accurate sensitivity analysis requires the solution of many systems of equations at each optimization step, leading to a high computational cost. To open up the full potential of RTO under a variety of random sources, this paper presents a momentum-based accelerated mirror descent stochastic approximation (AC-MDSA) approach to efficiently solve RTO problems involving various types of load uncertainties. The proposed framework can perform high-quality design updates with highly noisy stochastic gradients. We reduce the sample size to two (minimum for unbiased variance estimation) and show only two samples are sufficient for evaluating stochastic gradients to obtain robust designs, thus drastically reducing the computational cost. We derive the AC-MDSA update formula based on $\ell_1$-norm with entropy function, which is tailored to the geometry of the feasible domain. To accelerate and stabilize the algorithm, we integrate a momentum-based acceleration scheme, which also alleviates the step size sensitivity. Several 2D and 3D examples with various sizes are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed AC-MDSA framework to handle RTO involving various types of loading uncertainties.
FedCluster: Boosting the Convergence of Federated Learning via Cluster-Cycling

We develop FedCluster – a novel federated learning framework with improved optimization efficiency, and investigate its theoretical convergence properties. The FedCluster groups the devices into multiple clusters that perform federated learning cyclically in each learning round. Therefore, each learning round of FedCluster consists of multiple cycles of meta-update that boost the overall convergence. In nonconvex optimization, we show that FedCluster with the devices implementing the local stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm achieves a faster convergence rate than the conventional federated averaging (Fe-dAvg) algorithm in the presence of device-level data heterogeneity. We conduct experiments on deep learning applications and demonstrate that FedCluster converges significantly faster than the conventional federated learning under diverse levels of device-level data heterogeneity for a variety of local optimizers.
Efficient Identification of Bus Split Events Using Synchrophasor Data

Accurate grid topology information is of paramount importance for routine power system operations, while the growing availability of synchrophasor data offers the opportunity to identify topology changes in real time. Identification of bus split events, where the substation becomes electrically disconnected, is becoming increasingly important for maintaining the security of power systems. This paper aims to provide an efficient modeling and monitoring framework for bus split events by using a concise bus-branch representation. The linear sensitivity analysis is first performed to quickly evaluate the grid-wide impact of such events. Furthermore, the synchrophasor data enabled identification problem is formulated by matching the changes in bus phase angles (and possibly line flows). To address the resultant bilinear multiplication involving the binary connectivity variables, the McCormick relaxation technique is leveraged to attain an equivalent mixed-integer linear program reformulation that is efficiently solvable. Numerical studies on the IEEE 14-bus and 300-bus systems demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed identification algorithm towards real-time implementation.
CP symmetry violation—the search for its origin

The author presents a brief review of the progress which has been made in understanding CP violation since its discovery. Experiments in Kaon systems and the measurement of parameters associated with long-lived neutral kaon decay are described. Theoretical ideas about CP violation are briefly considered. Forty eight references are given.
Identify, Align, and Integrate: Matching Knowledge Graphs to Commonsense Reasoning Tasks

Integrating external knowledge into commonsense reasoning tasks has shown progress in resolving some, but not all, knowledge gaps in these tasks. For knowledge integration to yield peak performance, it is critical to select a knowledge graph (KG) that is well-aligned with the given task’s objective. We present an approach to assess how well a candidate KG can correctly identify and accurately fill in gaps of reasoning for a task, which we call KG-to-task match. We show this KG-to-task match in 3 phases: knowledge-task identification, knowledge-task alignment, and knowledge-task integration. We also analyze our transformer-based KG-to-task models via commonsense probes to measure how much knowledge is captured in these models before and after KG integration. Empirically, we investigate KG matches for the SocialIQA (SIQA) (Sap et al., 2019b), Physical IQA (PIQA) (Bisk et al., 2020), and MCScript2.0 (Ostermann et al., 2019) datasets with 3 diverse KGs: ATOMIC (Sap et al., 2019a), ConceptNet (Speer et al., 2017), and an automatically constructed instructional KG based on WikiHow (Koupaee and Wang, 2018). With our methods we are able to demonstrate that ATOMIC, an event-inference focused KG, is the best match for SIQA and MCScript2.0, and that the taxonomic ConceptNet and WikiHow-based KGs are the best match for PIQA across all 3 analysis phases. We verify our methods and findings with human evaluation.
The Novikov conjecture, the group of volume preserving diffeomorphisms and Hilbert-Hadamard spaces

We prove that the Novikov conjecture holds for any discrete group admitting an isometric and metrically proper action on an admissible Hilbert-Hadamard space. Admissible Hilbert-Hadamard spaces are a class of (possibly infinite-dimensional) non-positively curved metric spaces that contain dense sequences of closed convex subsets isometric to Riemannian manifolds. Examples of admissible Hilbert-Hadamard spaces include Hilbert spaces, certain simply connected and non-positively curved Riemannian-Hilbertian manifolds and infinite-dimensional symmetric spaces. Thus our main theorem can be considered as an infinite-dimensional analogue of Kasparov’s theorem on the Novikov conjecture for groups acting properly and isometrically on complete, simply connected and non-positively curved manifolds. As a consequence, we show that the Novikov conjecture holds for geometrically discrete subgroups of the group of volume preserving diffeomorphisms of a closed smooth manifold. This result is inspired by Connes’ theorem that the Novikov conjecture holds for higher signatures associated to the Gelfand-Fuchs classes of groups of diffeormorphisms.
Deterministic Random Number Generator Attack Against the Kirchhoff-Law-Johnson-Noise Secure Key Exchange Protocol

This paper demonstrates the vulnerability of the Kirchhoff-Law-Johnson-Noise (KLJN) secure key exchanger to compromised random number generator(s) even if these random numbers are used solely to ge...
The Macroeconomics of Financial Speculation

I review the literature on financial speculation driven by belief disagreements from a macroeconomics perspective. To highlight unifying themes, I develop a stylized macroeconomic model that embeds...
Full Level Structure On Some Group Schemes

We give a definition of full level structure on group schemes of the form $$G\times G$$ , where G is a finite flat commutative group scheme of rank p over a $${\mathbb {Z}}_p$$ -scheme S or, more generally, a truncated p-divisible group of height 1. We show that there is no natural notion of full level structure over the stack of all finite flat commutative group schemes.
Changes in Overall Survival over Time for Patients with de novo Metastatic Breast Cancer.

The purpose of this study was to determine the change in overall survival (OS) for patients with de novo metastatic breast cancer (dnMBC) over time. We conducted a retrospective cohort study with 1981 patients with dnMBC diagnosed between January 1995 and December 2017 at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. OS was measured from the date of diagnosis of dnMBC. OS was compared between patients diagnosed during different time periods: 5-year periods and periods defined according to when key agents were approved for clinical use. The median OS was 3.4 years. The 5- and 10-year OS rates improved over time across both types of time periods. A subgroup analysis showed that OS improved significantly over time for the estrogen-receptor-positive/HER2-positive (ER+/HER2+) subtype and exhibited a tendency toward improvement over time for the ER-negative (ER−)/HER2+ subtype. In addition, median OS was significantly longer in patients with non-inflammatory breast cancer (p = 0.02) and patients with ER+ disease, progesterone-receptor-positive disease, HER2+ disease, lower nuclear grade, locoregional therapy, and metastasis to a single organ (all p < 0.0001). These findings showed that OS at 5 and 10 years after diagnosis in patients with dnMBC improved over time. The significant improvements in OS over time for the ER+/HER2+ subtype and the tendency toward improvement for the ER−/HER2+ subtype suggest the contribution of HER2-targeted therapy to survival.
Developmental plasticity of texture discrimination following early vision loss in the marsupial Monodelphis domestica

ABSTRACT Behavioral strategies that depend on sensory information are not immutable; rather they can be shaped by the specific sensory context in which animals develop. This behavioral plasticity depends on the remarkable capacity for the brain to reorganize in response to alterations in the sensory environment, particularly when changes in sensory input occur at an early age. To study this phenomenon, we utilize the short-tailed opossum, a marsupial that has been a valuable animal model to study developmental plasticity due to the extremely immature state of its nervous system at birth. Previous studies in opossums have demonstrated that removal of retinal inputs early in development results in profound alterations to cortical connectivity and functional organization of visual and somatosensory cortex; however, behavioral consequences of this plasticity are not well understood. We trained early blind (EB) and sighted control (SC) opossums to perform a two-alternative forced choice texture discrimination task. Whisker trimming caused an acute deficit in discrimination accuracy for both EB and SC animals indicating that they primarily used a whisker-based strategy to guide choices based on tactile cues – though performance recovered in days, suggesting a shift to the use of other body parts when whiskers were absent. Mystacial whiskers were important for performance in both groups; however, genal whiskers only contributed to performance in EB animals. EB opossums significantly outperformed SC opossums in discrimination accuracy, being more sensitive to textural differences by ~75 μm smaller. Our results support behavioral compensation following early blindness using tactile inputs, especially the whisker system.
Modeling and Leveraging Analytic Focus During Exploratory Visual Analysis

Visual analytics systems enable highly interactive exploratory data analysis. Across a range of fields, these technologies have been successfully employed to help users learn from complex data. However, these same exploratory visualization techniques make it easy for users to discover spurious findings. This paper proposes new methods to monitor a user’s analytic focus during visual analysis of structured datasets and use it to surface relevant articles that contextualize the visualized findings. Motivated by interactive analyses of electronic health data, this paper introduces a formal model of analytic focus, a computational approach to dynamically update the focus model at the time of user interaction, and a prototype application that leverages this model to surface relevant medical publications to users during visual analysis of a large corpus of medical records. Evaluation results with 24 users show that the modeling approach has high levels of accuracy and is able to surface highly relevant medical abstracts.
Revisiting the Water Quality Sensor Placement Problem: Optimizing Network Observability and State Estimation Metrics

AbstractReal-time water quality (WQ) sensors in water distribution networks (WDN) have the potential to enable network-wide observability of water quality indicators, contamination event detection,...
Fractonic gauge theory of smectics

Abstract Motivated by striped correlated quantum matter, and the recently developed duality between elasticity of a two-dimensional (2D) crystal and a gauge theory, we derive a dual coupled U(1) vector gauge theory for a two-dimensional (2D) quantum smectic, where the disclination is mapped onto the fractonic charge, that we demonstrate can only move transversely to smectic layers. This smectic gauge theory dual also emerges from a gauge dual of a quantum crystal through a Higgs transition corresponding to a single flavor of its dipole condensation, an anisotropic quantum melting via dislocation proliferation. A condensation of the second flavor of dislocations a corresponds to another Higgs transition describing the smectic-to-nematic melting. We also utilize the electrostatic limit of this duality to formulate a melting of a 2D classical smectic in terms of a higher derivative sine–Gordon model, demonstrating its instability to a nematic at any nonzero temperature. Generalizing this classical duality to a 3D smectic, gives formulation of a 3D nematic-to-smectic transition in terms of an anisotropic Abelian-Higgs model.
An approximate analytic solution to the coupled problems of coronal heating and solar-wind acceleration

Between the base of the solar corona at . Analytic and numerical solutions to the model equations match a number of observations.
Stochastic functional Kolmogorov equations II: Extinction

Abstract This work, Part II, together with its companion-Part I develops a new framework for stochastic functional Kolmogorov equations, which are nonlinear stochastic differential equations depending on the current as well as the past states. Because of the complexity of the problems, it is natural to divide our contributions into two parts to answer a long-standing question in biology and ecology. What are the minimal conditions for long-term persistence and extinction of a population? Part I of our work provides characterization of persistence, whereas in this part, extinction is the main focus. The techniques used in this paper are combination of the newly developed functional Ito formula and a dynamic system approach. Compared to the study of stochastic Kolmogorov systems without delays, the main difficulty is that infinite dimensional systems have to be treated. The extinction is characterized after investigating random occupation measures and examining behavior of functional systems around boundaries. Our characterizations of long-term behavior of the systems reduce to that of Kolmogorov systems without delay when there is no past dependence. A number of applications are also examined.