cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Misallocation and Productivity Effects of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff

Article history: Using a newly created microeconomic archive of US imports at the tariff line level for 1930-1933, we construct industry-level tariff wedges incorporating the input-output structure of US economy and the heterogeneous role of imports across sectors of the economy. We use these wedges to show that the average tariff rate of 46% in 1933 substantially understated the true impact of the Smoot-Hawley (SH) tariff structure, which we estimate to be equivalent to a uniform tariff rate of 70%. We use these wedges to calculate the impact of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs on total factor productivity and welfare. In our benchmark parameterization, we find that tariff protection reduced TFP by 1.2% relative to free trade prior to the Smoot-Hawley legislation. TFP fell by an additional 0.5% between 1930 and 1933 due to Smoot-Hawley. We also conduct counterfactual policy exercises and examine the sensitivity of our results to changes in the elasticity of substitution and the import share. A doubling of the substitution elasticities yields a TFP decline of almost 5% relative to free trade, with an additional reduction due to SH of 0.4%.
Social Security: A New Paradigm for Reducing American Poverty

Although not characterized as a program designed to address the problems of poverty, Social Security, the linchpin of America’s social welfare enterprise, impacts poverty more significantly than most of the usually identified anti-poverty programs. For examples, more children receive Social Security benefits than those on welfare, and Social Security payments are modified to provide low income earners with proportionately higher benefits than their higher earning counterparts. Affirming the validity of Social Security the recent National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform represents a changed environment for Social Security policy development, and it has proposed several Social Security initiatives that would expand its reach more deeply into the jungle of poverty. Recognizing the limitations of existing social welfare anti-poverty programs, collapsing the cash assistance functions of these programs into Social Security would contribute significantly to reducing poverty in the United States. Such an endeavor, however, would not only require a realignment of America’s social welfare programs, but would increase the fiscal burdens born by Social Security. Such proposals could reduce the poverty rate by 3 percent or more, but they also call further attention to the failure of the payroll tax to sustain not only current Social Security commitments, let alone satisfy any further obligations Social Security might assume by virtue of its expanded role. This paper provides the gateway for further study of the poverty reducing potential of Social Security.
An empirical analysis of pricing in patent licensing contracts

We empirically examine the determinants of the price of patent licensing. We find factors affecting the profitability of patents and bargaining power of licensors and licensees are good predictors of the royalty rate of patent licensing, while proxies for the reservation price of licensors are less informative. Our findings suggest large licensors' adverse selection to license only small and unprofitable inventions. Large, technology-intensive licensees appear to have greater bargaining power, whereas research organizations exercise weak bargaining power. More appropriable patents command higher prices. Copyright 2010 The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.
Ability and Employer Learning: Evidence from the Economist Labor Market

I study the human capital development and firm-worker matching processes for PhD economists. This group is useful for this purpose because the types of jobs they hold can be easily categorized and they have an observable productivity measure (that is, publications). I derive a two-period model to motivate an empirical analysis of economist job matching upon graduation, matching ten years later, and productivity in the first ten years. I show that matching to a higher ranked institution affects productivity. I present evidence that employers improve their estimates of economists' ability early in their career in a way that determines longer-term job placement. I also find that the initial placement of economists to institutions does not show much evidence of systematic misallocation along observable characteristics. J. Japanese Int. Economies 22 (2) (2008) 268–289.
How Do Bank Regulators Determine Capital Adequacy Requirements

Regulators require banks to maintain capital above a certain level in order to correct the incentives to make excessively risky loans. However, it has never been clear how regulators determine how high or low the minimum capital–asset ratio should be. An examination of US regulators’ justifications for five regulations issued over more than thirty years reveals that regulators have never performed a serious economic analysis that would justify the levels that they have chosen. Instead, regulators appear to have followed a practice of incremental change designed to weed out a handful of outlier banks. This approach resulted in significant regulatory failures leading up to the financial crisis of 2007–2008.
Law and Religion: The Challenges of Christian Jurisprudence

This article is both an apologia and agenda for the interdisciplinary study of law and religion, especially the Christian religion. Briefly tracing the rise of the contemporary interdisciplinary legal studies movement against the backdrop of legal positivism, the article argues that legal studies must take full account of the religious sources and dimensions of law. Law and religion are two great interlocking systems of values and belief with their own sources and structures of normativity and authority, their own methods and measures of enforcement and amendment, and their own rituals and habits of conceptualization and celebration of values. Yet, they share many elements, many concepts, and many methods. They balance each other by counterpoising justice and mercy, rule and equity, orthodoxy and liberty, discipline and love. Though Christian jurists, theologians, and ethicists have made monumental contributions to this burgeoning field of law and religion study, this article addresses several challenges that lie before them in this new century, including the need to look to neglected traditions and times and to engender a more ecumenical and concrete Christian jurisprudence.
Scott v. Harris and the Future of Summary Judgment

The Supreme Court’s decision in Scott v. Harris has quickly become a staple in many Civil Procedure courses, and small wonder. The cinematic high-speed car chase complete with dash-cam video and the Court’s controversial treatment of that video evidence seem tailor-made for classroom discussion. As is often true with instant classics, however, splashy first impressions can mask a more complex state of affairs. At the heart of Scott v. Harris lies the potential for a radical doctrinal reformation: a shift in the core summary judgment standard undertaken to justify a massive expansion of interlocutory appellate jurisdiction in qualified immunity cases. Scott is about much more than perceptions of video evidence. The case marks an inflection point in summary judgment practice for all qualified immunity cases, a new direction in the collateral order doctrine, and a potential change of course in the core summary judgment standard that could erode the pathway to trial for plaintiffs in all settings.
The determinants of corporate board size and composition: An empirical analysis

Abstract Using a unique panel dataset that tracks corporate board development from a firm's IPO through 10 years later, we find that: (i) board size and independence increase as firms grow and diversify over time; (ii) board size—but not board independence—reflects a tradeoff between the firm-specific benefits and costs of monitoring; and (iii) board independence is negatively related to the manager's influence and positively related to constraints on that influence. These results indicate that economic considerations—in particular, the specific nature of the firm's competitive environment and managerial team—help explain cross-sectional variation in corporate board size and composition. Nonetheless, much of the variation in board structures remains unexplained, suggesting that idiosyncratic factors affect many individual boards’ characteristics.
How Does Mixup Help With Robustness and Generalization

Mixup is a popular data augmentation technique based on on convex combinations of pairs of examples and their labels. This simple technique has shown to substantially improve both the model's robustness as well as the generalization of the trained model. However, it is not well-understood why such improvement occurs. In this paper, we provide theoretical analysis to demonstrate how using Mixup in training helps model robustness and generalization. For robustness, we show that minimizing the Mixup loss corresponds to approximately minimizing an upper bound of the adversarial loss. This explains why models obtained by Mixup training exhibits robustness to several kinds of adversarial attacks such as Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM). For generalization, we prove that Mixup augmentation corresponds to a specific type of data-adaptive regularization which reduces overfitting. Our analysis provides new insights and a framework to understand Mixup.
A copula approach to test asymmetric information with applications to predictive modeling

Abstract In this article, we present a copula regression model for testing asymmetric information as well as for predictive modeling applications in automobile insurance market. We use the Frank copula to jointly model the type of coverage and the number of accidents, with the dependence parameter providing for evidence of the relationship between the choice of coverage and the frequency of accidents. This dependence therefore provides an indication of the presence (or absence) of asymmetric information. The type of coverage is in some sense ordered so that coverage with higher ordinals indicate the most comprehensive coverage. Henceforth, a positive relationship would indicate that more coverage is chosen by high risk policyholders, and vice versa. This presence of asymmetric information could be due to either adverse selection or moral hazard, a distinction often made in the economics or insurance literature, or both. We calibrated our copula model using a one-year cross-sectional observation of claims arising from a major automobile insurer in Singapore. Our estimation results indicate a significant positive coverage–risk relationship. However, when we correct for the bias resulting from possible underreporting of accidents, we find that the positive association vanishes. We further used our estimated model for other possible actuarial applications. In particular, we are able to demonstrate the effect of coverage choice on the incidence of accidents, and based on which, the pure premium is derived. In general, a positive margin is observed when compared with the gross premium available in our empirical database.
Can You Talk Like a Lawyer and Still Think Like a Human Being? Mertz's The Language of Law School

The last thirty years in anthropology, as well as in linguistics and in many of the other social sciences, have been characterized by a shift in theoretical focus from structure to practice. In The Language of Law School: Learning to “Think Like a Lawyer” (2007), linguistic anthropologist and law professor Elizabeth Mertz has brought this practice perspective to bear on the extraordinary linguistic and cultural venue that is the first-year law school classroom. In revealing the linguistic realities of teaching new students to “think like a lawyer,” she raises fascinating questions about the relationship between language and thought, the subtle effects of legal education, and the nature of law itself.
Explaining variation in risk across insurance companies

The purpose of this study is to determine what firm-specific factors affect the risk of insurance companies. Traditional methods used to identify potential failures have been severely criticized. Thus, alternative approaches to risk assessment should be of interest to investors and managers of these companies. Models for measuring the impact of factors on risk are developed and empirically tested. The models employed explain a high proportion of variation in risk levels across companies. The sensitivity of insurance company risk to financial characteristics vary with the variable used as a proxy for risk and the type of insurance company assessed. Given the strong relationships between firm-specific characteristics and company risk, it appears that the risk of insurance companies can be effectively controlled with proper management.
Enterprise Risk Management and the Financial Reporting Process: The Experiences of Audit Committee Members, CFOs, and External Auditors

The recent financial crisis has brought to the forefront the need for companies to effectively manage their risks. In this regard, one approach that has gained prominence is enterprise risk management (ERM). Importantly, little is known about the link between ERM and the financial reporting process. This link is critical, because it is imperative that financial reporting adequately depicts the financial status (e.g., valuations, estimates) and associated risks of a company as revealed by ERM. Additionally, from an auditing perspective, ERM affects the risks of misstatement, which should impact audit planning. Accordingly, the objective of this study is to examine the experiences of audit partners, CFOs, and audit committee (AC) members (“the governance triad”) on the link between ERM and the financial reporting process. To determine whether members of the governance triad focus on monitoring, strategy, or both, we also examine their definition of and experiences with ERM with respect to agency and/or resource dependence theory. To address these issues, we conduct semistructured interviews of experienced individuals that form the governance triads from 11 public companies. There are three major findings from our study. First, importantly, all three types of participants see a strong link between ERM and the financial reporting process. Second, despite recognition of the broad nature of ERM, the predominant experiences of the actual roles played by triad members center on agency theory, while resource dependence may be relatively underemphasized by all triad members. Finally, CFOs and AC members indicate that auditors may be especially underutilizing ERM in the audit process, suggesting an “expectations gap.” This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Embedding projects in multiple contexts – a structuration perspective

Projects are embedded in multiple systemic contexts, e.g. organizations, interorganizational networks and organizational fields, which jointly facilitate and constrain project organizing. As projects partly evolve in idiosyncratic ways as temporary systems, embedding needs to be understood as a continuous process linking projects to their environments. Using structuration theory, this paper argues that projects get embedded in multiple systemic contexts through the constitution of the very structural properties – tasks, times, and teams – that guide project activities. This implies that project constitution and embedding are inseparable systemic processes. This perspective on project constitution and embedding further elaborates a practice-theoretical understanding of temporary organizing.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Quest for Consumer Comprehension

To ensure that consumers understand financial products’ “costs, benefits, and risks,” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been redesigning mandated disclosures, primarily through iterative lab testing. But no matter how well these disclosures perform in experiments, firms will run circles around the disclosures when studies end and marketing begins. To meet the challenge of the dynamic twenty-first-century consumer financial marketplace, the bureau should require firms to demonstrate that a good proportion of their customers understand key pertinent facts about the financial products they buy. Comprehension rules would induce firms to inform consumers and simplify products, tasks that firms are better equipped than the bureau to perform.
The Beginning of the End for Life Without Parole

Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 1–9, ISSN 1053-9867 electronic ISSN 1533-8363. ©2010 Vera Institute of Justice. All rights reserved. Please direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/fsr.2010.23.1.1. The beginning of the End for Life Without Parole?
Offshore Detainees and the Role of Courts after Rasul v. Bush: The Underappreciated Virtues of Deferential Review

In Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court held that federal courts have jurisdiction over habeas corpus petitions aled by detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, but was silent on the standards and procedures to be applied to the petitions, and on whether habeas jurisdiction covers detainees at other foreign locations. To foster application of habeas at other military sites for longer-term detainees but maintain military effectiveness against terrorism, this Article sketches a regime for considering detention challenges that builds on a structure emerging in the wake of Rasul and its companion case, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Such claims would be heard by military tribunals, subject to narrow and deferential federal habeas review. Having military tribunals conduct the primary factanding honors key military needs while affording procedural safeguards. Although such deference might disappoint some advocates, this approach carries several underappreciated advantages, because of the real-world dynamics of such review, principally to stimulate better internal checks and balances. Though deferring to military factanding, courts would retain authority to consider de novo the validity of tribunal procedures, and would remain the ultimate arbiters of the substantive standards governing “enemy combatant” classiacations.
Meeting the Demands of Workers Into the Twenty-First Century: The Future of Labor and Employment Law

In this essay, Professor Dau-Schmidt undertakes a comparative institutional analysis of the four basic means of regulating the employment relationship: individual bargaining, collective bargaining, protective legislation and the common law. He briefly examines the history of America's reliance first on the common law and individual bargaining and later on collective bargaining and protective legislation to meet the demands of workers. Professor Dau-Schmidt also discusses the probable future implementation of these institutions in governing the employment relationship in the Twenty-First Century.
Privatization of Public Water Services: The States' Role in Ensuring Public Accountability

The privatization of public water services in the United States has grown dramatically in recent years in response to political and ideological interest in privatizing public services, arguments about economic efficiencies, and the realities of overwhelming public costs related to water quality standards, infrastructure upgrade needs, and operational complexities. Many states have expressly enacted statutes authorizing municipalities to transfer services, operation and management, and even ownership of public water systems to private firms. This article systematically evaluates the status of water privatization in the U.S., the legal authority for privatization and its limits, and the most common and significant issues in water privatization. These issues include: 1) the unique characteristics of water services; 2) operational efficiency and capital cost savings; 3) rates; 4) service quality and reliability, and water quality; 5) take-or-pay contracts; 6) long-term capital investment, maintenance, and public agency capacity; 7) environmental protection and impact; 8) global commerce in water; 9) security of water supplies and terrorism; 10) equity; 11) public employees; 12) public opinion; and 13) the limited authority of regional public water institutions. The article makes a case for a state legislation to protect the public and ensure accountability to the public when public water systems are considering privatization. It identifies specific model elements of a comprehensive state statute governing water privatization, including considerations when evaluating privatization proposals and conditions that should be imposed on private water firms. The article takes the position that the term "privatization" can mean any number of different arrangements, which are neither inherently good nor bad. The desirability of privatization arrangements depends on the context, the need, the nature of the arrangement, and legal controls imposed to ensure accountability to the public.
Reinventing Appellate Jurisdiction

Appellate jurisdiction in the federal system has been properly criticized for both its doctrinal incoherence and its procedural complexity. Although these critiques are well-founded, this Article reveals that, as applied in practice, federal courts have drawn sensible lines between interlocutory orders that are immediately appealable and those that are not. A limited category of interlocutory orders, primarily those rejecting immunities from suit, are immediately appealable as of right. All other interlocutory orders are potentially eligible for discretionary appellate review. The doctrinal morass of the present framework, however, has obscured this basically sensible structure and has led to inefficient procedures for seeking appellate review of interlocutory orders. This Article proposes two new theories of appellate jurisdiction that preserve the current regime’s pragmatic structure without its procedural problems. First, this Article argues that the All Writs Act authorizes discretionary appeals (not just writs of mandamus), and that such appeals are a superior vehicle for discretionary review of interlocutory orders. Second, this Article argues that for the limited category of interlocutory orders over which appellate jurisdiction is mandatory, 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a) provides a more coherent doctrinal foundation than the collateral order doctrine’s awkward interpretation of the term “final decision” under 28 U.S.C. § 1291.
The Cult of Finality: Rethinking Collateral Estoppel in the Postmodern Age

What is a fact, and who gets to say what a fact is? These questions lurk beneath and animate the doctrine of collateral estoppel, or (as we modem types say) issue preclusion, in the law of civil procedure. But neither courts nor scholars have faced these basic questions head-on in considering the efficacy of a doctrine that literally exports findings of fact from one case to other unrelated cases. Instead, discussions about collateral estoppel have focused on the "fairness" of applying the doctrine, particularly in terms of the party to be bound by the predetermined fact and whether it had a "full and fair" opportunity to litigate the issue in the former suit. Somehow, amazingly, this area of the law has remained analytically untouched by the epistemological upheaval that has revolutionized (some might say scandalized) 20th century philosophy, literary criticism and, to a great extent, jurisprudence-postmodernism.
Hypergraph $k$ -cut for fixed $k$ in deterministic polynomial time

We consider the Hypergraph- $k$ -Cut problem. The input consists of a hypergraph $G= (V,\ E)$ with nonnegative hyperedge-costs $c:E\rightarrow \mathbb{R}+$ and a positive integer $k$ . The objective is to find a least-cost subset $F\subseteq E$ such that the number of connected components in $G-F$ is at least $k$ . An alternative formulation of the objective is to find a partition of $V$ into $k$ non-empty sets $V_{1}, V_{2}, \ldots, V_{k}$ so as to minimize the cost of the hyperedges that cross the partition. Graph- $k$ -Cut, the special case of Hypergraph- $k$ -Cut obtained by restricting to graph inputs, has received considerable attention. Several different approaches lead to a polynomial-time algorithm for Graph- $k$ -Cut when $k$ is fixed, starting with the work of Goldschmidt and Hochbaum (1988) [1], [2]. In contrast, it is only recently that a randomized polynomial time algorithm for Hypergraph- $k$ -Cut was developed [3] via a subtle generalization of Karger's random contraction approach for graphs. In this work, we develop the first deterministic polynomial time algorithm for Hypergraph- $k$ -Cut for all fixed $k$ . We describe two algorithms both of which are based on a divide and conquer approach. The first algorithm is simpler and runs in $n^{O(k^{2})}$ time while the second one runs in $n^{O(k)}$ time. Our proof relies on new structural results that allow for efficient recovery of the parts of an optimum $k$ -partition by solving minimum ( $S,\ T$ ) -terminal cuts. Our techniques give new insights even for Graph- $k$ -Cut.
Integrated Task and Motion Planning

The problem of planning for a robot that operates in environments containing a large number of objects, taking actions to move itself through the world as well as to change the state of the objects...
Multi-Time Attention Networks for Irregularly Sampled Time Series

Irregular sampling occurs in many time series modeling applications where it presents a significant challenge to standard deep learning models. This work is motivated by the analysis of physiological time series data in electronic health records, which are sparse, irregularly sampled, and multivariate. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning framework for this setting that we call Multi-Time Attention Networks. Multi-Time Attention Networks learn an embedding of continuous time values and use an attention mechanism to produce a fixed-length representation of a time series containing a variable number of observations. We investigate the performance of our framework on interpolation and classification tasks using multiple datasets. Our results show that our approach performs as well or better than a range of baseline and recently proposed models while offering significantly faster training times than current state-of-the-art methods.
Strategic Complementarities in Bank Branching Decisions

Deregulation in the banking industry in the early 1990s stimulated banks to expand the size of their branch networks. This paper studies how complementarities between the branching decisions of rival banks, impacted the effects of deregulation. I use an instrumental variables approach to separately identify banks’ strategic response to rivals’ branching decisions, from common market factors. The results indicate that a bank is 74% more likely to open an additional branch if every one of their market rivals has also expanded their local network by one branch. I then estimate a model of consumer demand for banking services and bank branch network choices, to quantify the importance of accounting for this response when assessing the impact of deregulation. I find that the response to a rival merger or expansion is significant, and that strategic complementarities in the branching decision have contributed to banking markets being over-branched.
Residence time analysis of RNA polymerase transcription dynamics: A Bayesian sticky HMM approach

The time spent by a single RNA polymerase (RNAP) at specific locations along the DNA, termed "residence time," reports on the initiation, elongation, and termination stages of transcription. At the single-molecule level, this information can be obtained from dual ultrastable optical trapping experiments, revealing a transcriptional elongation of RNAP interspersed with residence times of variable duration. Successfully discriminating between long and short residence times was used by previous approaches to learn about RNAP's transcription elongation dynamics. Here, we propose an approach based on the Bayesian sticky hidden Markov model that treats all residence times for an Escherichia coli RNAP on an equal footing without a priori discriminating between long and short residence times. Furthermore, our method has two additional advantages: we provide full distributions around key point statistics and directly treat the sequence dependence of RNAP's elongation rate. By applying our approach to experimental data, we find assigned relative probabilities on long versus short residence times, force-dependent average residence time transcription elongation dynamics, ∼10% drop in the average backtracking durations in the presence of GreB, and ∼20% drop in the average residence time as a function of applied force in the presence of RNaseA.
Effects of hydroxyurea on brain function in children with sickle cell anemia.

INTRODUCTION Sickle cell anemia (SCA) results in numerous adverse effects on the brain, including neurocognitive dysfunction. Hydroxyurea has been utilized extensively for management of SCA, but its effects on brain function have not been established. METHODS We examined prospectively the effects of 1 year of treatment with hydroxyurea on brain function in children with SCA (HbSS/HbSβ0 -thalassemia) by baseline and exit evaluations, including comprehensive neurocognitive testing, transcranial Doppler ultrasound (TCD), and brain MRI (silent cerebral infarcts [SCI], gray matter cerebral blood flow [GM-CBF], and blood oxygen level-dependent [BOLD] signal from visual stimulation). RESULTS Nineteen patients with SCA, mean age 12.4 years (range 7.2-17.8), were evaluated. At baseline, subjects had these mean values: full-scale IQ (FSIQ) 82.8, TCD velocity 133 cm/s, GM-CBF 64.4 ml/100 g/min, BOLD signal 2.34% increase, and frequency of SCI 47%. After 1 year of hydroxyurea, there were increases in FSIQ (+2, p = .059) and reading passage comprehension (+4, p = .033), a significant decrease in TCD velocity (-11 cm/s, p = .007), and no significant changes in GM-CBF, BOLD, or SCI frequency. Hemoglobin F (HbF) was associated with passage comprehension, hemoglobin with lower TCD velocity, and lower GM-CBF with greater working memory. Higher BOLD signal was associated with higher processing speed and lower TCD velocity with higher math fluency. DISCUSSION Improvements in neurocognition and decreased TCD velocity following 1 year of treatment support hydroxyurea use for improving neurocognitive outcomes in SCA. Understanding the mechanisms of benefit, as indicated by relationships of neurocognitive function with HbF, hemoglobin, and CBF, requires further evaluation.
Smart "Predict, then Optimize"

Many real-world analytics problems involve two significant challenges: prediction and optimization. Because of the typically complex nature of each challenge, the standard paradigm is predict-then-...
Drugs, Bugs, and the ECMO Unplugged: A Case of a 61-year-old with Cardiogenic Shock and Utility of Palliative Bedside ECMO De-Escalation

Introduction Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is used in the setting of cardiogenic shock for cardio-pulmonary support as a bridge to recovery, advanced therapies, or decision. However, palliation remains when other options have failed. ECMO de-cannulation is often performed in the operating room. We describe the case of a patient with palliative bedside ECMO de-escalation of care. Case Report A 61-year-old male with a history of chronic heart failure with reduced ejection fraction presented to an outside hospital for worsening fatigue and dyspnea. He was diagnosed with cardiogenic shock, started on dobutamine, and transferred to our hospital for consideration of advanced therapies. On arrival, he was hypotensive with multi-organ failure and he underwent urgent bedside VA ECMO, followed by Impella CP placement for venting, as a bridge to advanced therapies. However, post-implant, the pulmonary artery pressures remained elevated and the spouse revealed that he was an active polysubstance user. His family felt that he was unable to stay away from methamphetamines. He was subsequently denied for possible transplant and LVAD. Maximization of medical therapy with hope for recovery was unsuccessful. The patient progressed to renal failure and bacteremia. With an intact neurological status, the patient and his family, assisted by palliative care and the entire medical team, decided to pursue comfort measures. Since decannulation in the OR would require intubation, the decision to wean off ECMO bedside was made. The ECMO was dialed down to 1 LPM of flow and the patient remained alert. Impella support was dialed off and then withdrawn into descending aorta, thus avoiding aortic regurgitation, pulmonary edema, and patient distress. Finally, we clamped the ECMO cannulas and turned off the machine. He spent time with loved ones for a few hours, laughing with family and friends prior to expiration with ongoing comfort drips. Summary The art of palliation for ECMO patients should be further evaluated when advanced treatments are contraindicated, especially in patients with an intact neurological status. Weaning off ECMO at the bedside can be done humanely and allow maximal time with family.
Extensible Data Skipping

Data skipping reduces I/O for SQL queries by skipping over irrelevant data objects (files) based on their metadata. We extend this notion by allowing developers to define their own data s kipping metadata types and indexes using a flexible A PI. Our framework i s t he first to natively support data skipping for arbitrary data types (e.g. geospatial, logs) and queries with User Defined Functions ( UDFs). We integrated our framework with Apache Spark and it is now deployed across multiple products/services at IBM. We present our extensible data skipping APIs, discuss index design, and implement various metadata indexes, requiring only around 30 lines of additional code per index. In particular we implement data skipping for a third party library with geospatial UDFs and demonstrate speedups of two orders of magnitude. Our centralized metadata approach provides a x3.6 speed up even when compared to queries which are rewritten to exploit Parquet min/max metadata. We demonstrate that extensible data skipping is applicable to broad class of applications, where user defined indexes achieve significant speedups and cost savings with very low development cost.
Performance comparison of the CRAY-2 and CRAY X-MP/416 supercomputers

The serial and parallel performance of one of the world's fastest general purpose computers, the CRAY-2, is analyzed using the standard Los Alamos Benchmark Set plus codes adapted for parallel processing. For comparison, architectural and performance data are also given for the CRAY X-MP/416. Factors affecting performance, such as memory bandwidth, size and access speed of memory, and software exploitation of hardware, are examined. The parallel processing environments of both machines are evaluated, and speedup measurements for the parallel codes are given.
A lower bound on critical points of the electric potential of a knot

Consider a knot K in S3 with charge uniformly distributed on it. From the standpoint of both physics and knot theory, it is natural to try to understand the critical points of the potential and the...
When Incentives Matter Too Much: Explaining Significant Responses to Irrelevant Information

When agents observe a continuous variable and a discrete signal based on that variable, theory suggests that the signal should not impact behavior conditional on the variable. Numerous empirical st...
A Two-Stage Cascade Model with Variational Autoencoders and Attention Gates for MRI Brain Tumor Segmentation

Automatic MRI brain tumor segmentation is of vital importance for the disease diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment planning. In this paper, we propose a two-stage encoder-decoder based model for brain tumor subregional segmentation. Variational autoencoder regularization is utilized in both stages to prevent the overfitting issue. The second-stage network adopts attention gates and is trained additionally using an expanded dataset formed by the first-stage outputs. On the BraTS 2020 validation dataset, the proposed method achieves the mean Dice score of 0.9041, 0.8350, and 0.7958, and Hausdorff distance (95%) of 4.953, 6.299, 23.608 for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively. The corresponding results on the BraTS 2020 testing dataset are 0.8729, 0.8357, and 0.8205 for Dice score, and 11.4288, 19.9690, and 15.6711 for Hausdorff distance. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/shu-hai/two-stage-VAE-Attention-gate-BraTS2020.
Crystal structure of N-acetylgalactosamine-6-sulfatase: The molecular basis for Mucopolysaccharidosis IVA

Lysosomal enzymes catalyze the degradation of macromolecules in the cell. In humans, a deficiency of a single lysosomal enzyme leads to a metabolic defect known as a lysosomal storage disease. Over fifty lysosomal storage diseases are known and have a collective incidence of approximately 1 in 7700 live births. Mucopolysaccharidosis IV A (also known as MPS IV A and Morquio A) is a lysosomal storage disease caused by a deficiency in the human lysosomal enzyme galactosamine-6-sulfatase (GALNS, also known as N-acetylgalactosamine-6-sulfatase and GalN6S; E.C. 3.1.6.4). To elucidate the molecular mechanism of this disease, we determined the three-dimensional structure of human GALNS, by x-ray crystallography at 2.2 A resolution. Enzymatic assays on the insect cell-expressed human GALNS indicate activity against synthetic substrates and inhibition by both substrate and product. Mapping 120 MPS IV A missense mutations onto the structure illustrates that a majority of mutations affect the hydrophobic core of the structure, indicating that most MPS IV A cases result from misfolding of GALNS. Comparison of the structure of GALNS to other human sulfatases shows a wide variety of active site geometries in the family, but strict conservation of the catalytic machinery. Overall, the structure and the known mutations establish the molecular basis for MPS IV A and for the larger MPS family of diseases.
Manifest Disregard and the Imperfect Procedural Justice of Arbitration

Arbitration is an efficient dispute-resolution system that respects parties’ right to an accurate award. But because arbitration is designed to be efficient, accuracy is not guaranteed. This presents a challenge when courts are asked to confirm or vacate arbitrators’ decisions. Judges dislike approving inaccurate awards, especially in cases where parties have unequal bargaining power. Yet, judges also recognize arbitration’s limited-review principle. So they are forced to balance their desire for accuracy against arbitration’s efficiency policy. Efficiency typically wins at the expense of accurate outcomes. This Article contends that courts place too much emphasis on the efficiency policy in mandatory arbitration. Consider the narrow manifest disregard standard that most courts apply. It is virtually impossible to vacate an award under this standard because the court must have proof that the arbitrator consciously disregarded known, applicable law. Consequently, parties subjected to mandatory arbitration have little chance of overturning inaccurate awards, which is problematic from a procedural justice standpoint because parties like decision control. This Article proposes giving parties greater decision control by allowing them to appeal arbitrators’ awards for legal error. This expanded standard creates a procedural mechanism for correcting arbitrators’ mistakes, thereby enhancing mandatory arbitration’s procedural justice. * Assistant Visiting Professor in Law, Florida State University. Many thanks to Beth Burch and Brannon Denning for thoughts and comments on previous drafts. All errors, of course, are my own.
A Spatial-Epistemic Logic for Reasoning about Security Protocols

Reasoning about security properties involves reasoning about where the information of a system is located, and how it evolves over time. While most security analysis techniques need to cope with some notions of information locality and knowledge propagation, usually they do not provide a general language for expressing arbitrary properties involving local knowledge and knowledge transfer. Building on this observation, we introduce a framework for security protocol analysis based on dynamic spatial logic specifications. Our computational model is a variant of existing pi-calculi, while specifications are expressed in a dynamic spatial logic extended with an epistemic operator. We present the syntax and semantics of the model and logic, and discuss the expressiveness of the approach, showing it complete for passive attackers. We also prove that generic Dolev-Yao attackers may be mechanically determined for any deterministic finite protocol, and discuss how this result may be used to reason about security properties of open systems. We also present a model-checking algorithm for our logic, which has been implemented as an extension to the SLMC system.
MUSICNTWRK: Data Tools for Music Theory, Analysis and Composition

We present the API for MUSICNTWRK, a python library for pitch class set and rhythmic sequences classification and manipulation, the generation of networks in generalized music and sound spaces, deep learning algorithms for timbre recognition, and the sonification of arbitrary data. The software is freely available under GPL 3.0 and can be downloaded at www.musicntwrk.com or installed as a PyPi project (pip install musicntwrk).
The arc-topology

We study a Grothendieck topology on schemes which we call the arc-topology. This topology is a refinement of the v-topology (the pro-version of Voevodsky’s h-topology), where covers are tested via rank ≤1 valuation rings. Functors which are arc-sheaves are forced to satisfy a variety of gluing conditions such as excision in the sense of algebraic K-theory. We show that etale cohomology is an arc-sheaf, and we deduce various pullback squares in etale cohomology. Using arc-descent, we re-prove the Gabber–Huber affine analogue of proper base change (in a large class of examples), as well as the Fujiwara–Gabber base change theorem on the etale cohomology of the complement of a Henselian pair. As a final application, we prove a rigid analytic version of the Artin–Grothendieck vanishing theorem, extending results of Hansen.
Retrieving Complex Tables with Multi-Granular Graph Representation Learning

The task of natural language table retrieval (NLTR) seeks to retrieve semantically relevant tables based on natural language queries. Existing learning systems for this task often treat tables as plain text based on the assumption that tables are structured as dataframes. However, tables can have complex layouts which indicate diverse dependencies between subtable structures, such as nested headers. As a result, queries may refer to different spans of relevant content that is distributed across these structures. Moreover, such systems fail to generalize to novel scenarios beyond those seen in the training set. Prior methods are still distant from a generalizable solution to the NLTR problem, as they fall short in handling complex table layouts or queries over multiple granularities. To address these issues, we propose Graph-based Table Retrieval (GTR), a generalizable NLTR framework with multi-granular graph representation learning. In our framework, a table is first converted into a tabular graph, with cell nodes, row nodes and column nodes to capture content at different granularities. Then the tabular graph is input to a Graph Transformer model that can capture both table cell content and the layout structures. To enhance the robustness and generalizability of the model, we further incorporate a self-supervised pre-training task based on graph-context matching. Experimental results on two benchmarks show that our method leads to significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art systems. Further experiments demonstrate promising performance of our method on cross-dataset generalization, and enhanced capability of handling complex tables and fulfilling diverse query intents.
Radar human motion classification using multi-antenna system

This paper considers human activity classification for an indoor radar system. Human motions generate nonstationary radar returns which represent Doppler and micro-Doppler signals. The time-frequency (TF) analysis of micro-Doppler signals can discern subtle variations on the motion by precisely revealing velocity components of various moving body parts. We consider radar for activity monitoring using TF-based machine learning approach exploiting both temporal and spatial degrees of freedom. The proposed approach captures different human motion representations more vividly in joint-variable data domains achieved through beamforming at the receiver. The radar data is collected using real time measurements at 77 GHz using four receive antennas, and subsequently micro-Doppler signatures are analyzed through machine learning algorithm for classifications of human walking motions. We present the performance of the proposed multi antenna approach in separating and classifying two closely walking persons moving in opposite directions.
Laparoscopic management of a primary posterior cul-de-sac abdominal ectopic pregnancy

Objective To report a case of laparoscopic management of a primary posterior cul-de-sac abdominal ectopic pregnancy (AEP). Design Video article. Setting Academic medical center. Patient(s) A 40-year-old G5P3013 woman at approximately 7 weeks of pregnancy was referred to our emergency department because of abnormally rising β-human chorionic gonadotropin levels. Transvaginal ultrasonography revealed a cystic structure measuring 2.8 × 1.6 ×1.9 cm in the posterior cul-de-sac distinct from the cervix. The mass was noted to have peripheral hypervascularity and a thickened wall. A moderate amount of complex free fluid was noted adjacent to the mass. The patient's baseline β-human chorionic gonadotropin level and hematocrit were 6,810.7 mIU/mL and 42.4%, respectively. Intervention(s) Laparoscopy for suspected AEP. Main outcome measure(s) Laparoscopic excision of a primary AEP. Result(s) Diagnostic laparoscopy revealed a normal uterus, normal right ovary, normal left ovary with a corpus luteal cyst, and normal bilateral fallopian tubes without dilatation or hemorrhage. The AEP was noted in the right posterior cul-de-sac and was excised from the underlying peritoneum. The left lateral aspect of the AEP extended into the posterior vaginal wall. The patient was admitted for overnight observation, and her postoperative hematocrit was 35.1%. Conclusion(s) AEPs are extremely rare and account for 1% of all ectopic pregnancies. Approximately 90% of AEPs require surgical management. Historically, AEPs were treated with laparotomy because of the high risk of hemorrhage and hemodynamic instability. However, as exemplified by the current case, laparoscopy is a safe and feasible option for surgical management of AEPs.
The artist as entrepreneur

We develop a theory of the supply side of art markets building on Kirzner’s understanding of entrepreneurship as alertness to profit opportunities. Whereas Kirzner’s entrepreneur is alert to the existence of resource misallocation, the artistic genius is alert to the opportunity of producing aesthetic value out of mundane objects and resources with no such value of their own. Our theory produces an important empirical implication: when market conditions are such that most art is “high art,” the artist will perform both functions, alertness to artistic value and alertness to profit opportunities. Instead, when most art is “low art,” the two functions will belong to distinct individuals. To substantiate our theoretical arguments, we discuss their relevance to the markets for paintings in Renaissance Italy and contemporary visual art.