cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Constitutional Structure and the Jurisprudence of Justice Scalia

Commentators generally regard federalism and separation of powers as distinct features of the constitutional structure. In reality, these doctrines were designed to work together to further the same goals: to avoid tyranny and to preserve individual liberty. Professor Thomas Merrill overlooks this connection in a recent attempt to explain the Supreme Court's decision making process under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Professor Merrill maintains that there have been two Rehnquist Courts: one from 1986 to 1994, and another from 1994 to the present. In Professor Merrill's view, the first Rehnquist Court focused on social issues - such as abortion, affirmative action, and school prayer - with relatively few important doctrinal innovations in these areas. The second Rehnquist Court, by contrast, focused on constitutional federalism, including the scope of federal power under the Commerce Clause and Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, Tenth Amendment limitations on federal power, and state sovereign immunity from private lawsuits reflected in the Eleventh Amendment. Unlike the first Rehnquist Court, the second has generated a number of important innovations. Professor Merrill also suggests that Justice Antonin Scalia made a strategic choice to shift his priorities from social issues to constitutional federalism circa 1994. This hypothesis is unpersuasive. As Professor Merrill acknowledges, Justice Scalia had little occasion to consider questions of constitutional federalism before he was appointed to the Supreme Court. Thus, it is not surprising that Justice Scalia did not arrive on the Court with a full-fledged federalism agenda or that he preferred to wait for briefing and argument before reaffirming an important precedent like Hans v. Louisiana. From the beginning, however, Justice Scalia has been a strong proponent of constitutional federalism. In fact, with only one arguable exception, Justice Scalia has voted to uphold the constitutional prerogatives of the states in every major federalism case decided since he joined the Court. Justice Scalia does appear to have an agenda of sorts in federalism cases, although not the one that Professor Merrill suggests. Justice Scalia's goal in these cases is to uphold the original constitutional structure in order to respect the Founders' constitutional design and to protect individual liberty. Professor Merrill acknowledges Justice Scalia's interest in the constitutional separation of powers, but fails to recognize the connection between separation of powers and federalism. Neither feature of the constitutional structure was meant to be an end in itself. Rather, both separation of powers and federalism were designed to check government power and to secure individual liberty. Thus, even though Justice Scalia had little occasion to consider questions of constitutional federalism before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, it is not surprising that he quickly came to regard federalism - like separation of powers - as an essential element of the Founders' constitutional design.
A Century of Nonprofit Studies: Scaling the Knowledge of the Field

This empirical study examines knowledge production between 1925 and 2015 in nonprofit and philanthropic studies from quantitative and thematic perspectives. Quantitative results suggest that scholars in this field have been actively generating a considerable amount of literature and a solid intellectual base for developing this field toward a new discipline. Thematic analyses suggest that knowledge production in this field is also growing in cohesion—several main themes have been formed and actively advanced since 1980s, and the study of volunteering can be identified as a unique core theme of this field. The lack of geographic and cultural diversity is a critical challenge for advancing nonprofit studies. New paradigms are needed for developing this research field and mitigating the tension between academia and practice. Methodological and pedagogical implications, limitations, and future studies are discussed.
Reducing Government Spending with Privatization Competitions: A Study of the Department of Defense Experience

In a privatization competition, private contractors bid against an in-house team to perform a governmental function that is currently performed by the in-house team. The Department of Defense initiated 3,500 privatization competitions from 1978 to 1994, generating estimated annual savings of $1.46 billion. We estimate a reduced-form model of the savings from these competitions that takes into account the premature cancellation of some competitions and the censoring of the in-house bid at current cost. The Department of Defense maintains a list of candidates for future privatization competitions. Using our model, we forecast annual savings of $5.74 billion if privatization competitions were completed for all functions on this list.
Trade Union Decline and Union Wage Effects in Australia

Union density in Australia fell precipitously in the 1990s. This study investigates how union wage effects may have changed as a result. The findings from 1993 data suggest that union/nonunion wage differentials were very small, especially among workers in high-density industries. By 2001 the overall union wage effect had increased significantly; however, the union/nonunion wage differential was no longer correlated with union density at the industry level.
From International Law to Law and Globalization

International law's traditional emphasis on state practice has long been questioned, as scholars have paid increasing attention to other important - though sometimes inchoate - processes of international norm development. Yet, the more recent focus on transnational law, governmental and non-governmental networks, and judicial influence and cooperation across borders, while a step in the right direction, still seems insufficient to describe the complexities of law in an era of globalization. Accordingly, it is becoming clear that "international law" is itself an overly constraining rubric and that we need an expanded framework, one that situates cross-border norm development at the intersection of legal scholarship on comparative law, conflict of laws, civil procedure, cyberlaw, and the cultural analysis of law, as well as traditional international law. Moreover, this new scholarship must be truly interdisciplinary, drawing on insights not only of international relations theorists, but also of anthropologists, sociologists, critical geographers, and cultural studies scholars. Such insights afford a more nuanced idea of how people actually form affiliations, construct communities, and receive and develop legal norms, often with little regard for the fixed geographical boundaries of the nation-state system. This Article refers to such a broader frame of analysis as "law and globalization." Although "globalization" is, of course, a controversial term, the idea of law and globalization nevertheless provides a useful lens for viewing the plural ways in which legal norms are disseminated in the Twenty-first Century. This Article sketches the contours of what it might mean to emphasize law and globalization, rather than simply international law. It suggests four important ways in which the study of law and globalization enlarges the traditional focus of international law and then identifies ten areas of conceptual inquiry that are already coalescing within the scholarly literature to form the core of a study of law and globalization.
A Diversity Theory of Charitable Tax Exemption -- Beyond Efficiency, Through Critical Race Theory, Toward Diversity

A Diversity Theory of Charitable Tax Exemption is an initial attempt at understanding the charitable tax exemption beyond the borders of the law and economics vision of efficiency. Efficiency is the hallmark of many of the existing theories of charitable tax exemption. This is especially true of theories promulgated prior to 1990 by such notable scholars as Boris Bittker and Henry Hansmann. A Diversity Theory of Charitable Tax Exemption articulates a rationale for the charitable tax exemption which is based, not on efficiency, but on notions of diversity and creativity. This alternate theory is called contextual diversity. Contextual diversity theory posits that the charitable tax exemption is a means of diversifying the market and, thus, allowing for more creative and wealth producing opportunities. Further, the exemption is subject to contextual constraints that act to limit the scope of charitable activity. Thus, the article explains how the law and economics concept of efficiency fails to fully rationalize many aspects of the charitable tax exemption that are not amenable to an efficiency analysis. Using an alternate theory of law termed Law and Market Economy Theory, the article moves beyond efficiency analysis and uses a variety of interpretive frameworks to more fully explain the charitable tax exemption. As an example, the article uses Critical Race Theory as a means for understanding certain aspects of the charitable tax exemption from a different perspective, such as the public policy doctrine. The public policy doctrine prohibits charitable activity which is inconsistent with established public policy. Among the implications of contextual diversity is that the public policy doctrine be eliminated and replaced by a rule that explicitly prohibits invidious racial discrimination by charities while still permitting charities to engage in race-based affirmative action.
Civil Procedure in Public Interest Litigation: Tradition, Collaboration and the Managerial Judge

Public interest litigation has been the site of considerable change and creativity in the last forty or fifty years. It must be ranked, over that period, among the most important innovations in the way in which individuals participate in domestic legal systems. This paper seeks to advance the argument that too little attention has been paid in the context of public interest litigation to civil procedure as a positive, sympathetic project. Procedure was traditionally the device that regulated the role played by individuals in their legal systems. Since this role of individuals has been transformed by public interest litigation, by implication we should also think about a corresponding transformation in procedure. But this is seldom the focus of writing on the topic. Most discussion is concerned with rights and with remedies. When civil procedure is mentioned, it is usually as the target of criticism. It is cast as stale adversarialism, inappropriate in public interest contexts, and as the formal shackles from which litigation seeking substantive justice must break free. Form is supposed to give way to substance; worrying about form, accordingly, is at best pettifogging, at worst a moral abdication, a betrayal. This paper argues against that grain. One can believe that substance should trump form without necessarily wanting to minimize procedure, because
JURISDICTION AND THE INTERNET: RETURNING TO TRADITIONAL PRINCIPLES TO ANALYZE NETWORK-MEDIATED CONTACTS

Courts have been evaluating the issue of personal jurisdiction based on Internet or “network-mediated” contacts for some time. The U.S. Supreme Court has remained silent on this issue, permitting the federal appeals courts to develop standards for determining when personal jurisdiction based on network-mediated contacts is appropriate. Unfortunately, the circuit approaches—which emphasize a Web site’s “interactivity” and “target audience”—are flawed because they are premised on an outdated view of Internet activity as uncontrollably ubiquitous. This view has led courts to depart from traditional jurisdictional analysis and impose elevated and misguided jurisdictional standards. This article argues that courts should reinstitute traditional principles to analyze jurisdiction based on network-mediated contacts in light of current technology that enables Internet actors to restrict the geographical reach of their virtual conduct. Such a return will be fairer for plaintiffs while recognizing the legitimate due process rights of defendants.
What is Wrong with American Telecommunications

For more than sixty years, voice telephony was provided by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) as the franchised and regulated monopoly. Divested of its local operating companies in the 1984 landmark antitrust case, AT&T has become the dominant of three voice and data long distance providers while its former operating companies have become dominant single providers of local service. After nearly three years of telecommunications explicit “deregulation” in the United States, centering on the Telecommunication Act of 1996, there is little to which regulatory officials in charge of such deregulation can point in terms of benefits in the form of lower prices or innovative services. The prospects for rapid improvement are bleak. Whether or not America’s defectively designed regulatory institutions are reparable, it is critical that other nations recognize the American mistakes in telecommunications and strive to avoid repeating them.
Playing It Safe with Low Conditional Fees versus Being Insured by High Contingent Fees

Under contingent fees the attorney gets a share of the judgment; under conditional fees he gets an upscale premium if the case is won, a premium unrelated, however, to the adjudicated amount. This article compares conditional and contingent fees in a framework where lawyers choose between a safe and a risky litigation strategy. Under conditional fees lawyers prefer the safe strategy; under contingent fess, the risky one. Risk-averse plaintiffs prefer conditional fees over contingent fees when lawyering costs are low and vice-versa for high lawyering costs.
Actions speak louder than images: the use of neuroscientific evidence in criminal cases

This invited commentary for Journal of Law & the Biosciences considers four empirical studies previously published in the journal of the reception of neuroscientific evidence in criminal cases in the United States, Canada, England and Wales, and the Netherlands. There are conceded methodological problems with all, but the data are nonetheless instructive and suggestive. The thesis of the comment is that the courts are committing the same errors that have bedeviled the reception of psychiatric and psychological evidence. There is insufficient caution about the state of the science, and more importantly, there is insufficient understanding of the relevance of the neuroscientific evidence to the precise legal question being addressed. These studies demonstrate yet again that in virtually all cases, actions speak louder than images and that when the behavioral evidence is unclear, the neuroscientific evidence is scarcely helpful in resolving the legal issue.
Some results for the comparative statics of steady states of higher-order discrete dynamic systems

Abstract Higher-order discrete dynamic systems arise naturally in many economic models in which the problem at hand requires an explicit treatment of dynamics involving lags of more than one period. In studying such models, one type of analysis that economists are often interested in is the assessment of the signs and the magnitudes of the effects of a change in the parameters of the dynamic system on the stable steady states of the system. This paper presents some results for such comparative statics analysis. Brief remarks explain the results and illustrate their potential economic usefulness.
Intermediary Risk in a Global Economy

Worldwide financial markets increasingly depend on structures that reduce risk by interposing intermediaries between investors and the companies obligated to pay them. This reduction of risk may be offset, however, by the risk that an intermediary will fail, and its creditors then will claim against assets held by the intermediary for the benefit of investors. If the intermediary holds assets solely in a custodial capacity, this risk traditionally is addressed by agency and trust law. What is novel, however, is that intermediaries in a wide range of domestic and international dealings—including the trading of investment securities, the sale of loan participations, and securitization transactions—now hold assets in which they, as well as investors, share beneficial rights. The sharing of these rights creates significant uncertainty as to whether the intermediary’s creditors can look to all Copyright © 2001 by Steven L. Schwarcz. † Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law; Faculty Director, Duke University Global Capital Markets Center; and Professor of Business Administration, Fuqua School of Business (by courtesy). E-mail: schwarcz@law.duke.edu. The author thanks Joanna Benjamin, Carl S. Bjerre, Michael Byers, Deborah DeMott, Francisco Garcimartin, Roy Goode, Kenneth C. Kettering, Kon Sik Kim, Eva Micheler, Richard Potok, James Steven Rogers, Paul M. Shupack, Joseph Sommer, and Todd J. Zywicki, and the participants in faculty workshops at the George Mason University and Washington and Lee University Schools of Law, for helpful comments on drafts of this Article. The Article also benefitted from discussions with Eric Bergsten and Ian F. Fletcher. Finally, the author thanks Amy S. June, Youngmin Kim, Adam D. Munson, Mark D. Rambler, and Don Suh for research assistance and Kristi Bowman for editorial assistance. SCHWARCZ.DOC 06/08/01 1:46 PM 1542 DUKE LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 50:1541 those assets, or merely to the intermediary’s interest therein, for repayment. This “intermediary risk” not only affects individual investors and increases transaction costs but also can be systemic: the failure of an intermediary may trigger a chain reaction of failures of investing institutions that contract with the intermediary. Moreover, the problem of intermediary risk raises innovative legal issues that blur the boundaries between commercial law and property. This Article analyzes how legal systems worldwide should respond to this risk. It concludes that a uniform rule is needed to regulate intermediary risk in cross-border commercial and financial transactions, and it examines how such a rule should be implemented in an international law context.
Macroeconomic Effects of Regulation and Deregulation in Goods and Labor Markets

Product and labor market deregulation are fundamentally about reducing and redistributing rents, leading economic players to adjust in turn to this new distribution. Thus, even if deregulation eventually proves beneficial, it comes with strong distribution and dynamic effects. The transition may imply the decline of incumbent firms. Unemployment may increase for a while. Real wages may decrease before recovering, and so on. To study these issues, we build a model based on two central assumptions: Monopolistic competition in the goods market, which determines the size of rents; and bargaining in the labor market, which determines the distribution of rents between workers and firms. We then think of product market regulation as determining both the entry costs faced by firms, and the degree of competition between firms. We think of labor market regulation as determining the bargaining power of workers. Having characterized the effects of labor and product market deregulation, we then use our results to study two specific issues. First, to shed light on macroeconomic evolutions in Europe over the last twenty years, in particular on the behavior of the labor share. Second, to look at political economy interactions between product and labor market deregulation.
The Politics of Grace: On the Moral Justification of Executive Clemency

† Attorney-Advisor, Office of the Pardon Attorney, United States Department of Justice. J.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1991); M.A., Philosophy and Social Policy, American University (2003). The views expressed in this essay are solely my own opinions and do not reflect the official position of the Justice Department or the Office of the Pardon Attorney. I would like to thank Deirdre Golash, Lucinda Peach, Jeffrey Reiman, and Jason Specht for their many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own. 1. Ex parte Wells, 59 U.S. (18 How.) 307, 310 (1856). 2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 237 (1958). 3. According to Andrew Brien, “[t]he earliest recorded instance of an institution permitting an authority to forbear from acting against another’s interests appears in the law code of Hammurabi.” Andrew Brien, Mercy Within Legal Justice, 24 Soc. Theory & Prac. 83, 83 n.2 (1998), citing G. R. Driver & J. C. Miles, 1 The Babylonian Laws xxiv-xxv, 281-82, 348-49 (1955); see also 3 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Attorney General’s Survey of Release Procedures: Pardons 1-53 (1939).
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young or Old Innovator: Measuring the Careers of Modern Novelists

Abstract. Some important novelists have written a great novel early in their careers and have produced lesser works thereafter, whereas others have improved their work gradually over long periods and have made their major contributions late in their lives. Which of these patterns a novelist follows appears to be systematically related to the nature of his work. Conceptual writers typically have specific goals for their books, and they produce novels that emphasize plot; experimental writers' intentions are often uncertain, and their novels more often stress characterization. By examining the careers of 12 important modern novelists, the author demonstrates that conceptual novelists—including Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway—are generally those who have declined after writing landmark early novels, while, in contrast, experimental novelists—including Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf—have typically arrived at their most important work later in their careers. As is th...
The Freedom of Information Act and the Ecology of Transparency

The Framers' approbation of a unitary executive rested in important part on the belief that the unitary executive's actions were apt to be more "narrowly watched and readily suspected" by an informed public opinion than those of a plural executive. Yet the body of the Constitution provides no right to public information. What the Constitutional text omits, the last generation has embedded as a part of modern constitutional practice in the Freedom of Information Act. Some critics have deplored FOIA as a "romantic" effort at "self help oversight", superfluous in light of the checks and balances of divided government. Others voice complementary critiques: that FOIA is inefficient in producing important information, ineffective in checking abuses disclosed, and wasteful in squandering resources on rent-seekers instead of the task of effecting accountability.This article assesses these criticisms in the context of case studies from the "Global War on Terror" (GWOT). I argue that each group of critics misconceives important normative and practical issues. FOIA must be understood as functioning within a broader ecology of transparency beyond the checks and balances of divided government. That ecology includes the permanent infrastructure of federal civil servants, internal watchdogs, reasonably open opportunities to publish and share information and a set of civil society actors that can pursue prolonged campaigns for disclosure. The successes of FOIA in calling the GWOT to account have thus been predicated upon and facilitated by institutions beyond the statute itself in ways that have gone unexamined by prior critics.FOIA's role has been both to authenticate prior disclosures, easing their way into public discourse, and to potentiate subsequent disclosures in ways that the critical literature has failed to appreciate. FOIA disclosures have functioned to leverage the checking functions of other institutions, and the cumulative impact of disclosures over time has begun to catalyze effective resistance to abuse. The breadth of the FOIA regime gives it robustness, and its situation in a resilient ecology of transparency provides a failsafe mechanism adapted to the task of bringing the popular conscience to bear against tyranny and barbarism.
The Fog of War Reform: Change and Structure in the Law of Armed Conflict After September 11

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the law of armed conflict (LOAC) has been locked in a bitter conflict between utilitarians, who generally defer to state power, and protective theorists, who seek to shield civilians by curbing official discretion. Consider Salim Hamdan’s conviction in a military commission for material support of Al Qaeda, recently upheld by the Court of Military Commission Review. Utilitarians view military commissions as efficient means for trying suspected terrorists. Protective theorists, in contrast, criticize the amorphous nature of material support charges. The clash between utilitarians and protective theorists colors other issues, including “enhanced” interrogation and limits on targeting. Protective theorists merit praise for their scrutiny of interrogation, while utilitarians have trivialized interrogation abuses. However, protective theorists’ scrutiny of states is burdened by hindsight bias. Failing to recognize the challenges faced by states, protective theorists have ignored the risk to civilians posed by violent non-state actors such as terrorist networks. Because of this blind spot, protective theorists have embraced changes such as the ICRC’s Guidance on Direct Participation in Hostilities that exacerbate LOAC’s asymmetries, creating a “revolving door” that shields terrorist bomb makers while permitting continuous targeting of state forces. To move beyond the utilitarian/protective debate, this piece advances a structural approach informed by two values: a linear time horizon and holistic signaling. Drawing on cognitive studies of humans’ flawed temporal judgment and the Framers’ work on institutional design, a linear time horizon curbs both myopia that infects officials and hindsight bias that plagues the protective model. Holistic signaling requires the United States to support the law of armed conflict, even when adversaries such as Al Qaeda reject that framework. Applying the structural test, a state can use a sliding scale of imminence and necessity to justify targeting Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists in states unwilling or unable to apprehend those operatives. However, the material support charges against Hamdan signal a troubling turn to victors’ justice that will ultimately harm counterterrorism efforts. Stressing a linear time horizon and holistic signaling defuses rhetoric and sharpens deliberation about post-9/11 LOAC changes.
Takeovers and the Cross-Section of Returns

This paper considers the impact of the takeover likelihood on firm valuation. If firms are more likely to acquire when there is more free cash or lower required rates of return, the targets become more sensitive to shocks to cash flows or the price of risk. Ceteris paribus, firms exposed to takeovers have different rates of return than protected firms. Using takeover likelihood estimates, we create a "takeover factor," buying (selling) firms with a high (low) takeover likelihood, which generates "abnormal" returns. Several tests confirm that the takeover factor helps explaining cross-sectional differences in equity returns and is related to takeover activity. The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
Is Murder Bad for Business? Evidence from Colombia

Abstract This paper studies the effects of violent crime on market prices and size using plant-level panel data in Colombia. To estimate causal effects, I exploit reductions in violence driven by i...
Age, demographics, and the demand for housing, revisited

Abstract The United States is aging, and many baby boomers are reaching or will soon reach the retirement age of sixty-five. At the same time, Millennials—the largest generation in U.S. history—have faced problems of high rents relative to incomes, and volatility in housing markets. These shifts are reigniting debates about how changes in age structure will affect housing and labor markets. To address some of these concerns, we revisit Green and Hendershott (1996) and analyze the links between the willingness to pay for a constant-quality house and demographics using microdata from the 1990 and 2000 Censuses and from the 2006, 2010, and 2014 American Community Surveys. The results generally reconfirm what Green and Hendershott (1996) found; The massive demographic shift will not result in another housing crisis on its own. This is because the education and income levels of current and future seniors are still relatively high, leading them to consume more than previous generations. Also, the size of the Millennial generation will drive the growth of aggregate housing demand, although the growth of per household housing demand may be relatively modest.
The American Model Penal Code: A Brief Overview

If there can be said to be an "American criminal code," the Model Penal Code is it. Nonetheless, there remains an enormous diversity among the fifty-two American penal codes, including some that have never adopted a modern code format or structure. Yet, even within the minority of states without a modern code, the Model Penal Code has great influence, as courts regularly rely upon it to fashion the law that the state9s criminal code fails to provide. In this essay we provide a brief introduction to this historic document, its origins, and its content.
Multicellular Spheroids as In Vitro Models of Oxygen Depletion During FLASH Irradiation.

Purpose The differential response of normal and tumor tissues to ultrahigh-dose-rate radiation (FLASH) has raised new hope for treating solid tumors but, to date, the mechanism remains elusive. One leading hypothesis is that FLASH radiochemically depletes oxygen from irradiated tissues faster than it is replenished through diffusion. The purpose of this study was to investigate these effects within hypoxic multicellular tumor spheroids through simulations and experiments. Methods and Materials Physicobiological equations were derived to model (1) the diffusion and metabolism of oxygen within spheroids; (2) its depletion through reactions involving radiation-induced radicals; and (3) the increase in radioresistance of spheroids, modeled according to the classical oxygen enhancement ratio and linear-quadratic response. These predictions were then tested experimentally in A549 spheroids exposed to electron irradiation at conventional (0.075 Gy/s) or FLASH (90 Gy/s) dose rates. Clonogenic survival, cell viability, and spheroid growth were scored postradiation. Clonogenic survival of 2 other cell lines was also investigated. Results The existence of a hypoxic core in unirradiated tumor spheroids is predicted by simulations and visualized by fluorescence microscopy. Upon FLASH irradiation, this hypoxic core transiently expands, engulfing a large number of well-oxygenated cells. In contrast, oxygen is steadily replenished during slower conventional irradiation. Experimentally, clonogenic survival was around 3-fold higher in FLASH-irradiated spheroids compared with conventional irradiation, but no significant difference was observed for well-oxygenated 2-dimensional cultured cells. This differential survival is consistent with the predictions of the computational model. FLASH irradiation of spheroids resulted in a dose-modifying factor of around 1.3 for doses above 10 Gy. Conclusions Tumor spheroids can be used as a model to study FLASH irradiation in vitro. The improved survival of tumor spheroids receiving FLASH radiation confirms that ultrafast radiochemical oxygen depletion and its slow replenishment are critical components of the FLASH effect.
Marrying Stochastic Gradient Descent with Bandits: Learning Algorithms for Inventory Systems with Fixed Costs

We consider a periodic-review single-product inventory system with fixed cost under censored demand. Under full demand distributional information, it is well known that the celebrated (s, S) policy...
Fixation probabilities in evolutionary dynamics under weak selection

In evolutionary dynamics, a key measure of a mutant trait’s success is the probability that it takes over the population given some initial mutant-appearance distribution. This “fixation probability” is difficult to compute in general, as it depends on the mutation’s effect on the organism as well as the population’s spatial structure, mating patterns, and other factors. In this study, we consider weak selection, which means that the mutation’s effect on the organism is small. We obtain a weak-selection perturbation expansion of a mutant’s fixation probability, from an arbitrary initial configuration of mutant and resident types. Our results apply to a broad class of stochastic evolutionary models, in which the size and spatial structure are arbitrary (but fixed). The problem of whether selection favors a given trait is thereby reduced from exponential to polynomial complexity in the population size, when selection is weak. We conclude by applying these methods to obtain new results for evolutionary dynamics on graphs.
An FSOC for Continuous Public Investment: The National Reconstruction and Development Council

The crisis our nation now faces does not stem from Covid alone. That is the ‘match.’ The kindling is simply our having forgotten for decades that ‘national development’ both (a) is perpetual, and (b) requires national action to guide it, facilitate it, and keep it inclusive. Hamilton and Gallatin, Wilson and Hoover and Roosevelt, … all ‘got’ this. They built institutions to operationalize it – imperfectly operated, but soundly conceived and designed. Our having abandoned these truths and these institutions these past fifty years has enabled not only our public health, but also our nation’s industrial and infrastructural muscle, to degenerate to a critical point. The same now increasingly holds of our social fabric. Full national regeneration – ‘Reconstruction’ in both the post- Civil War and the mid-20th century senses of the word – has thus become a matter of urgent, even ‘existential,’ necessity. And continuous ‘National Development,’ in the ‘perpetual renewal’ sense of the phrase, must follow that Reconstruction. This is what ‘Building Back Better’ must mean. Key to any such national project is how it is organized and then orchestrated. This Paper proposes means of both organizing and orchestrating. These means are simultaneously ‘incrementalist’ in their reliance upon existing institutions, while also ‘regenerative’ in enabling new synergies among those same institutions – much as our Financial Stability Oversight Council is meant to enable our post-Lehman financial regulators to develop. An FSOC for national reconstruction and development will better use what we already have, and augment it with a financing arm linked to the Fed and the Treasury. I call the resulting synthesis a National Reconstruction and Development Council (NRDC) and National Investment Council (NIC), which will both rebuild capacity now, and perpetually renew such capacity going forward, as knowledge and technology progress as they always do. ‘Building Back Better’ means Building Back Now and Forever.
Sorting it Out: The Effects of Charter Expansion on Teacher and Student Composition at Traditional Public Schools

Abstract Since their introduction in the 1990s, charter schools have grown from a small-scale experiment to a ubiquitous feature of the public education landscape. The current study uses the legislative removal of a cap on the maximum number of charters in North Carolina as a natural experiment to assess the impacts of charter school growth on teacher quality and student composition in traditional public schools (TPS) at different levels of local market penetration. Using an instrumental variable difference-in-differences approach to account for endogenous charter demand, we find that intensive local charter entry reduces the inflow of new teachers at nearby TPS, leading to a more experienced and credentialed teaching workforce on average. However, we find that the entry of charters serving predominantly White students leads to reductions in average teacher experience, effectiveness, and credentials at nearby TPS. Overall these findings suggest that the composition of the teacher workforce in TPS will continue to change as charter schools further expand, and that the spillover effects of future charter expansion will vary by the types of students served by charters.
Health perception and commuting choice: a survey experiment measuring behavioral trade-offs between physical activity benefits and pollution exposure risks

Previous literature suggests that active commuting has substantial health benefits. Yet, in polluted regions, it can also cause additional health risks by increasing riders' pollution exposure and raising their inhalation rate. We examine the effect of perceived air pollution on stated commuting choices using an on-site survey experiment for 2,285 non-automobile commuters in Zhengzhou, a heavily polluted city in central China. We integrate a sequential randomized controlled trial (RCT) in a survey where individuals in the treatment group received tailored information on their commuting-related pollution exposure, based on our two-week peak-hour pollution monitoring campaign across transportation modes in the city. We find that travelers in Zhengzhou have already adopted pollution prevention actions by favoring indoor commuting modes on polluted days. Individuals receiving personalized pollution exposure information by mode further decrease active commuting by 8.4 percentage points (95% CI: 5.1, 11.6), accompanied by a 14.7 percentage points (95% CI: 10.7, 18.3) increase in automobile commuting. Travellers make sub-optimal, overly risk averse choices by reducing active commuting even for trips where epidemiological research suggests the exercise benefits outweigh pollution exposure risks. This pollution avoidance tendency significantly attenuates the effect of policies encouraging active commuting. Our findings show the intricately intertwined relationships between the public health targets of promoting active lifestyles and reducing pollution exposure, and between individual pollution avoidance and societal pollution mitigation.
IDE-Net: Interactive Driving Event and Pattern Extraction From Human Data

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) need to share the road with multiple, heterogeneous road users in a variety of driving scenarios. It is overwhelming and unnecessary to carefully interact with all observed agents, and AVs need to determine whether and when to interact with each surrounding agent. In order to facilitate the design and testing of prediction and planning modules of AVs, in-depth understanding of interactive behavior is expected with proper representation, and events in behavior data need to be extracted and categorized automatically. Answers to what are the essential patterns of interactions are also crucial for these motivations in addition to answering whether and when . Thus, learning to extract interactive driving events and patterns from human data for tackling the whether-when-what tasks is of critical importance for AVs. There is, however, no clear definition and taxonomy of interactive behavior, and most of the existing works are based on either manual labelling or hand-crafted rules and features. In this letter, we propose the I nteractive D riving event and pattern E xtraction Net work (IDE-Net), which is a deep learning framework to automatically extract interaction events and patterns directly from vehicle trajectories. In IDE-Net, we leverage the power of multi-task learning and proposed three auxiliary tasks to assist the pattern extraction in an unsupervised fashion. We also design a unique spatial-temporal block to encode the trajectory data. Experimental results on the INTERACTION dataset verified the effectiveness of such designs in terms of better generalizability and effective pattern extraction. We find three interpretable patterns of interactions, bringing insights for driver behavior representation, modeling and comprehension. Both objective and subjective evaluation metrics are adopted in our analysis of the learned patterns.
Intersection of motor volumes predicts the outcome of ambush predation of larval zebrafish

ABSTRACT Escape maneuvers are key determinants of animal survival and are under intense selection pressure. A number of escape maneuver parameters contribute to survival, including response latency, escape speed and direction. However, the relative importance of these parameters is context dependent, suggesting that interactions between parameters and predatory context determine the likelihood of escape success. To better understand how escape maneuver parameters interact and contribute to survival, we analyzed the responses of larval zebrafish (Danio rerio) to the attacks of dragonfly nymphs (Sympetrum vicinum). We found that no single parameter explains the outcome. Instead, the relative intersection of the swept volume of the nymph9s grasping organs with the volume containing all possible escape trajectories of the fish is the strongest predictor of escape success. In cases where the prey9s motor volume exceeds that of the predator, the prey survives. By analyzing the intersection of these volumes, we compute the survival benefit of recruiting the Mauthner cell, a neuron in anamniotes devoted to producing escapes. We discuss how the intersection of motor volume approach provides a framework that unifies the influence of many escape maneuver parameters on the likelihood of survival.
Single-Blind and Double-Blind Peer Review: Effects on National Representation.

Purpose: To assess whether the type of peer-review (single-blinded vs double-blinded) has an impact on nationality representation in journals.Methods: A cross-sectional study analyzing the top 10 n...
Low regularity primal-dual weak galerkin finite element methods for convection-diffusion equations

Abstract We consider finite element discretizations for convection–diffusion problems under low regularity assumptions. The derivation and analysis use the primal–dual weak Galerkin (PDWG) finite element framework. The Euler–Lagrange formulation resulting from the PDWG scheme yields a system of equations involving not only the equation for the primal variable but also its adjoint for the dual variable. We show that the proposed PDWG method is stable and convergent. We also derive a priori error estimates for the primal variable in the H ϵ -norm for ϵ ∈ [ 0 , 1 2 ) . A series of numerical tests that validate the theory is presented as well.
TAPsolver: A Python package for the simulation and analysis of TAP reactor experiments

Abstract An open-source, Python-based Temporal Analysis of Products (TAP) reactor simulation and processing program is introduced. TAPsolver utilizes algorithmic differentiation for the calculation of highly accurate derivatives, which are used to perform sensitivity analyses and PDE-constrained optimization. The tool supports constraints to ensure thermodynamic consistency, which can lead to more accurate descriptions of microkinetic models. The mathematical and structural details of TAPsolver are outlined, as well as validation of the forward and inverse problems against well-defined prototype problems. Benchmarks of the code are presented, and a case study for extracting kinetic parameters that do not violate thermodynamics from experimental TAP measurements of CO oxidation on supported platinum particles is presented. TAPsolver will act as a foundation for future development and dissemination of TAP data processing techniques.
Effective Field Theory for Top and Weak Boson Physics

Effective field theory is the ideal framework for discussing top and weak boson properties. We discuss the application of this framework to top physics at both tree level and one loop. We consider weak boson pair production within an effective field theory framework, and argue that one need not be concerned with the violation of unitarity bounds at energies beyond the region where there are data.
Construction of identities for sums of squares

From sum-of-squares formulas of sizes [r, s, n] and $$[r', s', n']$$ we construct a formula of size $$[r+r',\; 2ss', \;2nn']$$ .
Parabolic Frequency on Manifolds

We prove monotonicity of a parabolic frequency on manifolds. This is a parabolic analog of Almgren's frequency function. Remarkably we get monotonicity on all manifolds and no curvature assumption is needed. When the manifold is Euclidean space and the drift operator is the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operator this can been seen to imply Poon's frequency monotonicity for the ordinary heat equation. Monotonicity of frequency is a parabolic analog of the 19th century Hadamard three circles theorem about log convexity of holomorphic functions on $\CC$. From the monotonicity, we get parabolic unique continuation and backward uniqueness.
DARE-SLAM: Degeneracy-Aware and Resilient Loop Closing in Perceptually-Degraded Environments

Enabling fully autonomous robots capable of navigating and exploring large-scale, unknown and complex environments has been at the core of robotics research for several decades. A key requirement in autonomous exploration is building accurate and consistent maps that can be used for reliable navigation. In this paper, we present a degeneracy-aware and drift-resilient loop closing method to improve place recognition and resolve 3D location ambiguities for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in large-scale GPS-denied and perceptually-degraded environments such as lava tubes, caves, and mines, where current methods have inadequate performance. The first contribution of this paper is a degeneracy-aware lidar-based SLAM front-end to determine the level of geometric degeneracy in an unknown environment. Using this crucial capability, unobservable areas in the environment are determined and excluded from the search for loop closures to avoid spurious loop closures that can lead to distortions of the map. The second contribution of this paper is a drift-resilient loop closing pipeline that exploits the salient 2D and 3D features extracted from lidar point cloud data to enable a robust multi-stage loop closing capability. A key advantage of proposed method is that it is pose-invariant, and thus, it is unaffected by drift and accumulation of errors in the estimated robot trajectory. We present extensive evaluation and analysis of performance and robustness, and provide comparison of localization and mapping results with the state-of-the-art methods in a variety of extreme and perceptually-degraded underground mines across the United States.
Sensitive quantitative detection of SARS-CoV-2 in clinical samples using digital warm-start CRISPR assay.

Abstract Quantifying severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in clinical samples is crucial for early diagnosis and timely medical treatment of coronavirus disease 2019. Here, we describe a digital warm-start CRISPR (dWS-CRISPR) assay for sensitive quantitative detection of SARS-CoV-2 in clinical samples. The dWS-CRISPR assay is initiated at above 50 °C and overcomes undesired premature target amplification at room temperature, enabling accurate and reliable digital quantification of SARS-CoV-2. By targeting SARS-CoV-2's nucleoprotein gene, the dWS-CRISPR assay is able to detect down to 5 copies/μl SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the chip. It is clinically validated by quantitatively determining 32 clinical swab samples and three clinical saliva samples. Moreover, it has been demonstrated to directly detect SARS-CoV-2 in heat-treated saliva samples without RNA extraction. Thus, the dWS-CRISPR method, as a sensitive and reliable CRISPR assay, facilitates accurate SARS-CoV-2 detection toward digitized quantification.