cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Identifying Conditional Conservatism

Abstract This paper provides guidance for empiricists interested in measuring conditional conservatism and in interpreting associations of those measures with variables of interest. I begin by discussing the nature and importance of conditional conservatism and surveying the literature identifying conditional conservatism. I then describe and comment on the various limitations of asymmetric timeliness identified in the literature. Despite these limitations, I argue that asymmetric timeliness is the most direct implication of conditional conservatism, and that alternative measures that have been proposed need not capture any type of conservatism. Finally, I provide four specific suggestions for estimating asymmetric timeliness and for interpreting it as a measure of conditional conservatism.
The W Visa: A legislative Proposal for Female and Child Refugees Trapped in a Post - 9/11 World

This article addresses an urgent humanitarian crisis affecting unaccompanied or abused refugee children and widowed, divorced, abandoned or abused female heads of refugee households. Such women and children suffer the consequences of the post-9/11 U.S. refugee resettlement backlog more severely than the general refugee population. They are far more at risk of life-threatening harm such as trafficking, sexual exploitation and rape. Moreover, they are far less likely to present a threat to U.S. national security than many people who are able to secure visas to the United States quickly and with fewer background checks. Despite their vulnerability and lack of security threat, however, they continue to languish in extremely dangerous refugee camps. This article proposes a solution that would allow such women and children to avoid the resettlement delays and enter the United States through an expedited visa system. The expedited visa system would reduce the refugee backlog and do so in a way that ensures that the most vulnerable refugees receive protection at the earliest possible opportunity. THE W VISA: A LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL FOR FEMALE AND CHILD REFUGEES TRAPPED IN A POST-9/11 WORLD MARISA SILENZI CIANCIARULO [Abstract: This article addresses an urgent humanitarian crisis affecting unaccompanied or abused refugee children and widowed, divorced, abandoned or abused female heads of refugee households. Such women and children suffer the consequences of the post-9/11 U.S. refugee resettlement backlog more severely than the general refugee population. They are far more at risk of life-threatening harm such as trafficking, sexual exploitation and rape. Moreover, they are far less likely to present a threat to U.S. national security than many people who are able to secure visas to the United States quickly and with fewer background checks. Despite their vulnerability and lack of security threat, however, they continue to languish in extremely dangerous refugee camps. This article proposes a solution that would allow such women and children to avoid the resettlement delays and enter the United States through an expedited visa system. The expedited visa system would reduce the refugee backlog and do so in a way that ensures that the most vulnerable refugees receive protection at the earliest possible opportunity.]
How Necessity May Preclude State Responsibility for Compulsory Licensing Under the TRIPS Agreement

This article argues that a rule based on rules of State responsibility under international law might provide an equally persuasive basis for improving access to affordable and essential medicines. Ordinarily, the problem of accessibility and affordability of essential medication for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis is viewed as humanitarian in nature and as a permissible exception to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Here, however, the article proposes the use of targeted licensing of essential medicines to facilitate access for citizens of those countries with major health pandemics without bearing State responsibility for departing from the TRIPS Agreement. This argument is based on necessity as a customary international legal principle to relieve State responsibility at a time of grave and imminent peril. While this is not the first argument for nations breaking from international law, it is, nevertheless, a necessary consideration in the access to medicine debate in order to remedy such problems.
Investments in Modernization, Innovation and Gains in Productivity: Evidence from Firms in the Global Paper Industry

Abstract This paper examines the impact of investments in modernization and innovation on productivity in a sample of firms in the global pulp and paper industry. This industry has traditionally accounted for significant amounts of employment and capital investment in North America and Europe. In contrast to much of the existing literature which focuses on the impact of R&D and patents on firms’ performance and productivity, we examine data on actual investment transactions in four main areas: (i) mechanical, (ii) chemicals, (iii) monitoring devices and (iv) information technology. We find that firms that implemented a greater number of investment transactions in modernization achieved higher productivity, and these estimated quantitative effects are greater than the impact of standard innovation variables such as patents and R&D. Investment transactions in the information technology and digital monitoring devices imparted a particularly noticeable boost to productivity. These results are obtained after controlling for other firm-specific variables such as capital intensity or mergers and acquisitions. Thus, firms’ decisions to undertake investments in modernization and incremental innovations appear to be critical for achieving gains in productivity, compounding to form meaningful differences in performance, productivity and competitive position across firms in the longer run. For some of the traditional industries like pulp and paper, R&D and patents seem to be particularly poor indicators of innovation and, more generally, how firms go about achieving gains in productivity.
Copyrights as Incentives: Did We Just Imagine That?

The most widely accepted explanation of why we need copyright is that it provides authors with the necessary economic incentive to create. This incentive story has largely gone unchallenged, and has been used to justify lengthening and strengthening the legal protections for expressive works. This Article points out, however, that the empirical foundation for the copyright-as-incentive story is seriously suspect. It fails to account for the economic conditions under which most art, literature and other expressive works are produced, and it contravenes the insights provided over the last forty years or so by psychologists interested in creativity and by behavioral economists. Empirical research has shown that intrinsic factors are much more important determinants of participation in creative work than such extrinsic ones as monetary reward. In fact, evidence exists that the promise of extrinsic rewards such as money can actually be detrimental to the creative impulse. This is not to say that concern with economic rewards should play no role in a legal regime designed to encourage the creative process. But, at a minimum, this Article suggests both that copyright scholars (and possibly patent ones as well) need to develop a far more nuanced understanding of why people produce what they do, and that a satisfactory legal regime to promote intellectual property creation and dissemination can afford to be far less concerned than it presently is with ensuring that authors and copyright owners can extract every bit of available profit from their works.
Proxies for Loyalty in Constitutional Immigration Law: Citizenship and Race after September 11

The purpose of this article is to share some thoughts about using citizenship and race as proxies for loyalty in constitutional immigration discourse within two contexts: one historical and one current. The current context is the profiling of Muslim and Arab immigrants post-September 11, and the historical context is the distinction the Constitution draws between birthright and naturalized citizens in the Presidential Eligibility Clause.
Teaching and Learning from the Mediations in Barry Werth's Damages

This essay is based primarily on materials the author developed for courses taught at the University of Missouri-Columbia, School of Law, in the winter 2002 and 2003 semesters, based on Barry Werth's book, "Damages."
Toward Equality: Nonmarital Children and the Uniform Probate Code

This Article traces the evolution of the Uniform Probate Code’s (UPC) broad equality framework for inheritance by nonmarital children in the context of the wider movement for legal equality for such children in society. It concludes that the UPC is to be lauded for its efforts to provide equal treatment to all nonmarital children. The UPC’s commitment to such equality serves an expressive function for state legislatures and courts to follow its lead. The UPC has fulfilled its promise that all children regardless of marital status shall be equal for purposes of inheritance from or through parents, with one exception: its adoption of an agency approach to the inclusion of such children in class gifts from nonparent transferors. The Article analyzes this one exception and evaluates the systemic costs and constitutional concerns surrounding the use of an agency theory in this context. The Article concludes that a previous default rule under the UPC was the more equitable approach and suggests a return to that rule as it existed from 1975 to 1990. This approach was recently embraced by the Massachusetts legislature in its new probate code.
Inequality and Optimal Redistributive Tax and Transfer Policies

This article argues that the validity of the increasingly fashionable policy advice—maximizing neutrality in taxation and addressing the distributive objective primarily through expenditure policy—is questionablebecause it ignores the revenue-raising aspect of progressive taxation. On the basis of a simple model in which the tax revenue is used exclusively to finance (perfectly) targeted transfers to the poor, the article shows that not only would it be optimal to finance the targeted transfers with progressive taxation, but the optimal progressivity increases unambiguously with growing income inequality. This conclusion holds up under different assumptions about the efficiency cost of taxation and society’s aversion to inequality.
Information spillovers and performance persistence for hedge funds

Abstract We present a simple model that rationalizes performance persistence in hedge fund limited partnerships. In contrast to the model for mutual funds of Berk and Green (2004) , the learning in our model pertains to profitability associated with an innovative trading strategy or emerging sector, rather than ability specific to the fund manager. As a result of potential information spillovers, which would increase competition if informed investors were to partner with non-incumbent managers, incumbent managers will let informed investors benefit from increases in estimated profitability following high returns realized with the trading strategy or in the sector.
The Shaping of Higher Education: The Formative Years in the United States, 1890 to 1940

The authors trace the origins of the key features of U.S. higher education today--the coexistence of small liberal arts colleges and large research universities; the substantial share of enrollment in the public sector; and varying levels of support provided by the states. These features began to materialize soon after 1890 when the 'knowledge industry' was subjected to 'technological shocks' that increased the value of research to industry and government and led to the proliferation of academic disciplines. The consequence was an increase in the scale and scope of institutions of higher education and a relative expansion of public-sector institutions.
The differential calculus of consent

Existing treatments of the choice of an optimal voting rule ignore the effects of the rule on political bargaining. Specifically, more stringent majority requirements reduce intra-coalitional free riding in political compromise, leading to greater gains from political trade. Once this benefit of increasing the vote share necessary to enact a proposal is recognized, we suggest that the optimal voting rule in the presence of transactions costs will actually be closer to unanimity than the optimal majority derived by Buchanan and Tullock (1962).
Instrument Choice in Environmental Policy

AbstractThe choice of pollution control instrument is a crucial environmental policy decision. We examine the extent to which various environmental policy instruments meet major evaluation criteria...
Unintended regulatory consequences: Evidence from the Korean IPOs

Abstract We examine IPOs in Korea during the period August 2000–January 2002. We conclude that the high level of underpricing in Korean IPOs is the unintended consequence of regulations designed to promote fairness. Two aspects of the regulations distort the process — an “essential price” formula that severely understates the value of the firm; and, bid exclusion rules that give investors a strong incentive to cluster their bids so as to avoid being excluded from the offering. During our sample period the rules were changed somewhat. The result was a change to gaming behavior and somewhat less underpricing.
Deciding When to Decide: How Appellate Procedure Distributes the Costs of Legal Change

Legal change is a fact of life, and the need to deal with it has spawned a number of complicated bodies of doctrine. Some aspects of the problem of legal change have been studied extensively, such as doctrines concerning the retroactivity of new law and the question whether inferior courts can anticipatorily overrule a moribund superior court precedent. How such questions are answered affects the size and the distribution of the costs of legal change. Less appreciated is the way that heretofore almost invisible matters of appellate procedure and case handling also allocate the costs of legal transitions. In particular, this Article focuses on lower courts’ discretionary decisions about when to decide the cases that come before them: Should lower courts continue to decide cases in the regular course, even when a change in law is in the offing? Or should they delay adjudication until after the dust has settled? The Article has both positive and normative aspects. It begins by drawing together several bodies of doctrine in order to present a unified account of what we can call our system’s “law of legal change.” The Article then presents a case study of the six-month interval between Blakely v. Washington, which invalidated a state sentencing scheme and cast substantial doubt on federal sentencing guidelines, and United States v. Booker, which held Blakely applicable to the federal system. A majority of the federal courts of appeals that addressed the question upheld the federal guidelines during this transitional interval. Beneath the surface, however, the various courts upholding the guidelines managed cases very differently, particularly when it came to questions of timing. As a result, some circuits bore much of the cost of legal change themselves, while others shifted some of the cost to litigants and other courts. Although that episode is unusual in terms of the size and salience of the case-management problem, the same general phenomena routinely manifest themselves on a smaller scale. Having described what courts actually do, I then suggest a framework for evaluating and perhaps improving how courts process cases during transitional periods. Case-management
Sounds of Silence on the Civil Jury

Juries are hallowed institutions in our constitutional system. They are mentioned not once, but three times in the Bill of Rights, and had been earlier enshrined in Article III. At the heart of our exalted vision of the jury trial is the sense that juries should be reflective of the community which they are supposed to represent in the courtroom. Of course, many members of the relevant community have routinely been excluded from jury service, including women who comprise more than half of the population. Historically, the exclusion of women from civil jury service was a systematic and system-wide practice. Only in the last few decades has it become clear that systematic exclusion of women from jury pools is unconstitutional. Now the exclusion of women is accomplished more surreptitiously, through the use of peremptory challenges to members of the jury pool.
GROWTH, BETA AND AGENCY COSTS AS DETERMINANTS OF DIVIDEND PAYOUT RATIOS

A model of optimal dividend payout is presented in which increased dividends lower agency costs but raise the transactions cost of external financing. The optimal dividend payout minimizes the sum of these two costs. A cross-sectional test of the model relates dividend payout to the fraction of equity held by insiders, the past and expected future revenue growth of the firm, the firm's beta coefficient, and the number of common stockholders. The coefficients of all variables are significant in the predicted directions. The results indicate that investment policy influences dividend policy.
Do Shareholder Tender Agreements inform or expropriate shareholders

Abstract By signing a Shareholder Tender Agreement (STA) a shareholder pre-commits to tender her shares to a particular bidder, forsaking the right to tender to any subsequent bidder. In a representative sample of tender offers between 1995 and 2010, 60% of the offers contain an STA. STA deals are associated with lower premiums, greater ownership concentration, greater management ownership, and greater information asymmetry. The results support the hypothesis that STAs certify value to uninformed shareholders, thereby increasing the efficiency of the tender offer process. The evidence does not support the view that STAs expropriate value from shareholders of target companies.
The joint determination of the number and the type of structural changes

Abstract This note suggests the use of information criteria to jointly determine the number and the type of multiple structural changes. The simulation evidence shows that the Bayesian information criterion is consistent and has good finite sample performance for various model specifications.
Competing Retailers and Inventory: An Empirical Investigation of General Motors' Dealerships in Isolated U.S. Markets

We study the following question: How does competition influence the inventory holdings of General Motors' dealerships operating in isolated U.S. markets? We wish to disentangle two mechanisms by which local competition influences a dealer's inventory: (1) the entry or exit of a competitor can change a retailer's demand (a sales effect); and (2) the entry or exit of a competitor can change the amount of buffer stock a retailer holds, which influences the probability that a consumer finds a desired product in stock (a service-level effect). Theory is clear on the sales effect---an increase in sales leads to an increase in inventory (albeit a less than proportional increase). However, theoretical models of inventory competition are ambiguous on the expected sign of the service-level effect. Via a Web crawler, we obtained data on inventory and sales for more than 200 dealerships over a six-month period. Using cross-sectional variation, we estimated the effect of the number and type of local competitors on inventory holdings. We used several instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of market entry decisions. Our results suggest that the service-level effect is strong, nonlinear, and positive. Hence, we observe that dealers carry more inventory (controlling for sales) when they face additional competition.
The Trouble with Trolls: Innovation, Rent-Seeking, and Patent Law Reform

This Article analyzes the secondary market for patent rights. It defines a patent troll as a participant in this market that does not contribute to the social goal the patent system was meant to serve: technological innovation. The legitimate secondary market, in which patent rights are bought and sold in ways that compensate real innovators (and also often involve the transfer of information and/or technology, in addition to the legal right), is distinguished from the more questionable market for the settlement of lawsuits involving weak, outdated or irrelevant patents. The presence of willing buyers and willing sellers does not necessarily imply that social welfare is being served; at times, the legal system must shut down markets when the things being exchanged have no social value-as in the case of blackmail. The Article reviews the prospects for corrective policies to reign in some activities in the current patent system. Political economy considerations make Congress a long shot to fix the problem, which leaves the courts, and in particular the Federal Circuit. Recent caselaw on damages is presented as a case study of a desirable Federal Circuit course correction involving the secondary market for patents. Economically rational valuation techniques applied to the question of appropriate damages for patent infringement can help to undermine the incentives to litigate, and hence the market for, patents on minor features that can be used strategically to demand large damage awards under some readings of damages doctrine. © 2009 Robert P. Merges. t Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Professor of Law and Technology, U.C. Berkeley School of Law; Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. The author thanks Joe Siino, Alex Cohen, Steve Horowitz and Lisa Mcfall, all of Ovidian LLC of Berkeley, California, for help understanding the secondary market for patents; the editors of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal for editing help; and participants in the Searle Center Research Symposium on Property Rights Economics and Innovation, Northwestern Law School, Nov. 13, 2008, at which I presented an early draft of this Article. HeinOnline -24 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1583 2009 BERKELEY TECHNOLOGY LAW JOURNAL
An alternative interpretation of random noise in rank-order tournaments

Abstract We propose an alternative interpretation of additive random noise from the canonical framework of Lazear and Rosen (1981) amenable to applications where players do observe their final outputs at the time when inputs are chosen. This interpretation is suitable to model situations where participants do not know the precise distribution of the population from which their opponents are drawn. The variant of the model that we define is strategically equivalent to that in Lazear and Rosen (1981) .
The Legal Origins Theory in Crisis

I. INTRODUCTION 1571 II. THE LEGAL ORIGINS THEORY 1575 III. FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE GOVERNMENT'S RESPONSE.... 1578 A. A Financial Crisis and Recession 1579 B. The Government Response 1590 1. Early legislative responses 1590 2. TARP and economic reinvestment 1591 3. Some key initiatives from the Federal Reserve ....... 1598 4. The automaker bailout 1600 C. Concluding Assessments 1603 IV. ATHEORY THROUGH THE PRISM OF CRISIS 1603 A. The Wrong Tool Kit? 1603 1. Over-reliance on legislation 1603 2. An emergent administrative and executive state .... 1606 3. Government intervention and the ideology of crisis legislation 1608 4.The marginalization of judicial review 1612 B. A Second Look at the Kit and Tools 1613 1. Nationalization by any other name 1613 2. Paved with good intentions? 1614 3. Ideology reconsidered 1616 V. CONCLUSION 1617 I. INTRODUCTION Economists describe the current global financial crisis as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.1 Moreover, the U.S. government's response has been almost as unprecedented as the crisis it is aimed to forestall and correct. Scholars have debated at length not only the cause of the crisis,2 but also about whether the crisis and its severity could have been predicted.3 By contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to whether we could have predicted America's response to the crisis. Because the legal origins theory purports to predict how countries respond to economic and social problems, it has the potential to fill this void.4 In that regard, this Article seeks to test that theory's predictive value with respect to America's crisis response, and thereby shed some light on the strength of, and limits to, the theory. Beginning in 1997, four authors published a series of articles based on a theory that the historical origins of a country's laws shape its legal rules and regulations, as well as its fundamental approach to problem-solving.5 This theory, known as the legal origins theory or LLSV,6 predicts that a country's legal origin influences its laws and regulations. As a result, the theory asserts that common law countries and civil law countries will differ with respect to their laws and regulations because of their legal origins. Moreover, the theory suggests that a country's legal origins will dictate how a country responds to social and economic problems. That is, a country's legal origins shape the manner in which it confronts new economic and political challenges.7 As a result, countries in the civil law tradition will not only respond to problems differently than countries in a common law tradition, but will also respond to such problems in a particular way that is unique and consistent with their legal tradition. In this respect, the theory not only explains the differences in the development of institutions, but also reflects a "mode of thought" or attitude about how best to deal with problems.8 Moreover, the theory contends that a country's legal tradition tends to better predict its institutions and rules than other cultural, political, social or economic factors. …
The finite basis property and exact aggregation

Abstract An individual demand function is said to satisfy the finite basis property when its set of Engel curves has a finite spanning subset. In the present letter we discuss why this property underlies the theory of exact aggregation.
Immigrant Education and the Promise of Integrative Egalitarianism

Although not an equal protection case, Martinez v. Regents of the University of California challenges us to grapple with the Supreme Court’s post-Brown commitment to equal opportunity within the context of immigrant higher education. Sadly, Brown’s progeny from Bakke to Parents Involved reveals the cost of embracing a color-blind constitutionalism unmoored from a fundamental commitment to vigilantly combat subordination and dismantle unearned privilege. More optimistically, the Supreme Court’s gay rights jurisprudence developed in Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas provides insights into how a conservative court can accurately distinguish irrational discrimination from democratic deliberation, a lesson that might help us better understand how the immigrant education case, Plyler v. Doe, is a true heir to the legacy of Brown and its promise of integrative egalitarianism – that society should invest in the education of all, noncitizens included.
Construct measurement and validation procedures in MIS and behavioral research: integrating new and existing techniques

Despite the fact that validating the measures of constructs is critical to building cumulative knowledge in MIS and the behavioral sciences, the process of scale development and validation continues to be a challenging activity. Undoubtedly, part of the problem is that many of the scale development procedures advocated in the literature are limited by the fact that they (1) fail to adequately discuss how to develop appropriate conceptual definitions of the focal construct, (2) often fail to properly specify the measurement model that relates the latent construct to its indicators, and (3) underutilize techniques that provide evidence that the set of items used to represent the focal construct actually measures what it purports to measure. Therefore, the purpose of the present paper is to integrate new and existing techniques into a comprehensive set of recommendations that can be used to give researchers in MIS and the behavioral sciences a framework for developing valid measures. First, we briefly elaborate upon some of the limitations of current scale development practices. Following this, we discuss each of the steps in the scale development process while paying particular attention to the differences that are required when one is attempting to develop scales for constructs with formative indicators as opposed to constructs with reflective indicators. Finally, we discuss several things that should be done after the initial development of a scale to examine its generalizability and to enhance its usefulness.
Intellectual Property Bundle (IPB) theory: Managing transaction costs in technology development through network governance

Technology is a bundle of inventions, which are increasingly protected by intellectual property rights. Typically, these rights are owned by multiple different entities, operating in different industries and countries. Moreover, once an invention protected by intellectual property right is incorporated in a product, it becomes very difficult to substitute it with an alternative technology, especially when the product has been widely adopted. Thus, technology creators must coordinate the disparate interests of various intellectual property owners in order to create useful technology. In this paper we introduce a new theory as an extension of transaction cost economics to explain the relative merits of different governance forms vis-a-vis the creation of technology that is a bundle of inventions. From this theoretical extension, we derive a number of testable hypotheses.
Patent Law's Parsimony Principle

discoveries with consternation because of their broad field of use, unencumbered by limitations to specific applications, threatens to hinder all subsequent applications of those basic scientific discoveries. The transaction costs involved in licensing fundamental principles to myriad users may be large, but to reject patent protection on this basis is to do so solely on the ground that the excluded discoveries are unusually valuable. It is easy to forget that transaction costs are what translate into a monetary reward for the deserving inventor (or discoverer). It is thus not satisfactory to draw a distinction, as the Court has attempted to do, between "invention" and "discovery.""' The U.S. Constitution explicitly envisions the patent eligibility
Deep ensemble learning-based approach to real-time power system state estimation

Abstract Power system state estimation (PSSE) is commonly formulated as weighted least-square (WLS) algorithm and solved using iterative methods such as Gauss-Newton methods. However, iterative methods have become more sensitive to system operating conditions than ever before due to the deployment of intermittent renewable energy sources, zero emission technologies (e.g., electric vehicles), and demand response programs. Appropriate PSSE approaches are required to avoid pitfalls of the WLS-based PSSE computations for accurate prediction of operating conditions. This paper proposes a data-driven real-time PSSE using a deep ensemble learning algorithm. In the proposed approach, the ensemble learning setup is formulated with dense residual neural networks as base-learners and multivariate-linear regressor as meta-learner. Historical measurements and states are utilised to train and test the model. The trained model can be used in real-time to estimate power system states (voltage magnitudes and phase angles) using real-time measurements. Most of current data-driven PSSE methods assume the availability of a complete set of measurements, which may not be the case in real power system data-acquisition. This paper adopts multivariate linear regression to forecast system states for instants of missing measurements to assist the proposed PSSE technique. Case studies are performed on various IEEE standard benchmark systems to validate the proposed approach. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing data-driven PSSE techniques. The developed source code of the proposed solution is publicly available at https://github.com/nbhusal/Power-System-State-Estimation .
Revealing the Nanostructure of Mesoporous Fuel Cell Catalyst Supports for Durable, High-Power Performance

Achieving high power performance and durability with low Pt loadings are critical challenges for proton exchange membrane fuel cells. PtCo catalysts developed on new carbon black supports show promise by simultaneously providing good oxygen reduction kinetics and local oxygen transport. We investigate the role of nanoscale morphology in the performance of these catalysts supported on accessible (HSC-e and HSC-f) and conventional (Ketjen Black) porous carbons using 3D electron tomography, nitrogen sorption, and electrochemical performance measurements. We find that the accessible porous carbons have hollow interiors with mesopores that are larger and more numerous than conventional porous carbons. However, mesopore-sized openings (>2nm width) are too rare to account for significant oxygen transport. Instead we propose the primary oxygen transport pathway into the interior is through 1-2nm microporous channels permeating the carbon. The increased mesoporosity in the accessible porous carbons results in a shorter diffusion pathlength through constrictive, tortuous micropores in the support shell leading to lower local oxygen transport resistance. In durability testing, the accessible porous carbons show faster rates of electrochemical surface area loss, likely from fewer constrictive pores that would mitigate coarsening, but maintain superior high current density performance at end of life from the improved local oxygen transport.
On the Forced Surface Quasi-Geostrophic Equation: Existence of Steady States and Sharp Relaxation Rates

We consider the asymptotic behavior of the surface quasi-geostrophic equation, subject to a small external force. Under suitable assumptions on the forcing, we first construct the steady states and we provide a number of useful a posteriori estimates for them. Importantly, to do so, we only impose minimal cancellation conditions on the forcing function. Our main result is that all $$L^1\cap L^\infty $$ localized initial data produces global solutions of the forced SQG, which converge to the steady states in $$L^p({\mathbf {R}}^2), 1<p\le 2$$ as time goes to infinity. This establishes that the steady states serve as one point attracting set. Moreover, by employing the method of scaling variables, we compute the sharp relaxation rates, by requiring slightly more localized initial data.
Robust decomposition of cell type mixtures in spatial transcriptomics

A limitation of spatial transcriptomics technologies is that individual measurements may contain contributions from multiple cells, hindering the discovery of cell-type-specific spatial patterns of localization and expression. Here, we develop robust cell type decomposition (RCTD), a computational method that leverages cell type profiles learned from single-cell RNA-seq to decompose cell type mixtures while correcting for differences across sequencing technologies. We demonstrate the ability of RCTD to detect mixtures and identify cell types on simulated datasets. Furthermore, RCTD accurately reproduces known cell type and subtype localization patterns in Slide-seq and Visium datasets of the mouse brain. Finally, we show how RCTD's recovery of cell type localization enables the discovery of genes within a cell type whose expression depends on spatial environment. Spatial mapping of cell types with RCTD enables the spatial components of cellular identity to be defined, uncovering new principles of cellular organization in biological tissue. RCTD is publicly available as an open-source R package at https://github.com/dmcable/RCTD .
Thermoelectric Study of Hydrogen Storage in Carbon Nanotubes

In situ resistivity and thermoelectric power (S) have been used to study the nature of the adsorption of hydrogen in bundles of single-walled carbon nanotubes for H2 pressure P <1 atm and temperatures 77 K<T<500 K. Isothermal plots of S vs. Δρ/ρ0 are found to exhibit linear behavior as a function of gas coverage, consistent with a physisorption process. Studies of S, ρ at T = 500 K as a function of pressure exhibit a plateau at a pressure P~40 Torr, the same pressure where the H % measurements suggest the highest binding energy sites are being saturated. The effects of H2 exposure at 500 K on the thermoelectric transport properties are fully reversible.
Reinforcement Learning for Accident Risk-Adaptive V2X Networking

The significance of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications has been ever increased as connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) get more emergent in practice. The key challenge is the dynamicity: each vehicle needs to recognize the frequent changes of the surroundings and apply them to its networking behavior. This is the point where the need for machine learning is raised. However, the learning itself is extremely complicated due to the dynamicity as well, which necessitates that the learning framework itself must be resilient and flexible according to the environment. As such, this paper proposes a V2X networking framework integrating reinforcement learning (RL) into scheduling of multiple access. Specifically, the learning mechanism is formulated as a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, which enables a vehicle, without any assistance from external infrastructure, to (i) learn the environment, (ii) quantify the accident risk, and (iii) adapt its backoff counter according to the risk. The results of this paper show that the proposed learning protocol is able to (i) evaluate an accident risk close to optimal and, as a result, (ii) yield a higher chance of transmission for a dangerous vehicle.
LAP: A Linearize and Project Method for Solving Inverse Problems with Coupled Variables

Many inverse problems involve two or more sets of variables that represent different physical quantities but are tightly coupled with each other. For example, image super-resolution requires joint estimation of the image and motion parameters from noisy measurements. Exploiting this structure is key for efficiently solving these large-scale optimization problems, which are often ill-conditioned. In this paper, we present a new method called Linearize And Project (LAP) that offers a flexible framework for solving inverse problems with coupled variables. LAP is most promising for cases when the subproblem corresponding to one of the variables is considerably easier to solve than the other. LAP is based on a Gauss–Newton method, and thus after linearizing the residual, it eliminates one block of variables through projection. Due to the linearization, this block can be chosen freely. Further, LAP supports direct, iterative, and hybrid regularization as well as constraints. Therefore LAP is attractive, e.g., for ill-posed imaging problems. These traits differentiate LAP from common alternatives for this type of problem such as variable projection (VarPro) and block coordinate descent (BCD). Our numerical experiments compare the performance of LAP to BCD and VarPro using three coupled problems whose forward operators are linear with respect to one block and nonlinear for the other set of variables.
Student Learning in Online College Programs

We draw on administrative data from the country of Colombia to assess differences in student learning in online and traditional on-campus college programs. The Colombian context is uniquely suited ...
Temporal Tensor Transformation Network for Multivariate Time Series Prediction

Multivariate time series prediction has applications in a wide variety of domains and is considered to be a very challenging task, especially when the variables have correlations and exhibit complex temporal patterns, such as seasonality and trend. Many existing methods suffer from strong statistical assumptions, numerical issues with high dimensionality, manual feature engineering efforts, and scalability. In this work, we present a novel deep learning architecture, known as Temporal Tensor Transformation Network, which transforms the original multivariate time series into a higher order of tensor through the proposed Temporal-Slicing Stack Transformation. This yields a new representation of the original multivariate time series, which enables the convolution kernel to extract complex and non-linear features as well as variable interactional signals from a relatively large temporal region. Experimental results show that Temporal Tensor Transformation Network outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on window-based predictions across various tasks. The proposed architecture also demonstrates robust prediction performance through an extensive sensitivity analysis.
Beam image-shift accelerated data acquisition for near-atomic resolution single-particle cryo-electron tomography.

Tomographic reconstruction of cryopreserved specimens imaged in an electron microscope followed by extraction and averaging of sub-volumes has been successfully used to derive atomic models of macromolecules in their biological environment. Eliminating biochemical isolation steps required by other techniques, this method opens up the cell to in-situ structural studies. However, the need to compensate for errors in targeting introduced during mechanical navigation of the specimen significantly slows down tomographic data collection thus limiting its practical value. Here, we introduce protocols for tilt-series acquisition and processing that accelerate data collection speed by up to an order of magnitude and improve map resolution compared to existing approaches. We achieve this by using beam-image shift to multiply the number of areas imaged at each stage position, by integrating geometrical constraints during imaging to achieve high precision targeting, and by performing per-tilt astigmatic CTF estimation and data-driven exposure weighting to improve final map resolution. We validated our beam image-shift electron cryo-tomography (BISECT) approach by determining the structure of a low molecular weight target (~300 kDa) at 3.6 A resolution where density for individual side chains is clearly resolved. Tomographic reconstructions of cryopreserved specimens enable in-situ structural studies. Here, the authors present the beam image-shift electron cryo-tomography (BISECT) approach that accelerates data collection speed and improves the map resolution compared to earlier approaches and present the in vitro structure of a 300 kDa protein complex that was solved at 3.6 A resolution as a test case.
Time-uniform, nonparametric, nonasymptotic confidence sequences

A confidence sequence is a sequence of confidence intervals that is uniformly valid over an unbounded time horizon. Our work develops confidence sequences whose widths go to zero, with nonasymptotic coverage guarantees under nonparametric conditions. We draw connections between the Cramer–Chernoff method for exponential concentration, the law of the iterated logarithm (LIL) and the sequential probability ratio test—our confidence sequences are time-uniform extensions of the first; provide tight, nonasymptotic characterizations of the second; and generalize the third to nonparametric settings, including sub-Gaussian and Bernstein conditions, self-normalized processes and matrix martingales. We illustrate the generality of our proof techniques by deriving an empirical-Bernstein bound growing at a LIL rate, as well as a novel upper LIL for the maximum eigenvalue of a sum of random matrices. Finally, we apply our methods to covariance matrix estimation and to estimation of sample average treatment effect under the Neyman–Rubin potential outcomes model.
Organic thin film transistors

Summary form only given. Organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) have made rapid progress and now have performance comparable to amorphous silicon devices. This talk will consider OTFT status, and prospects for use in organic emissive display active backplanes and other broad area electronic applications.
Location Data and COVID-19 Contact Tracing: How Data Privacy Regulations and Cell Service Providers Work In Tandem

Governments, Healthcare, and Private Organizations in the global scale have been using digital tracking to keep COVID-19 outbreaks under control. Although this method could limit pandemic contagion, it raises significant concerns about user privacy. Known as “Contact Tracing Apps”, these mobile applications are facilitated by Cellphone Service Providers (CSPs), who enable the spatial and temporal realtime user tracking. Accordingly, it might be speculated that CSPs collect information violating the privacy policies such as GDPR, CCPA, and others. To further clarify, we conducted an in-depth analysis comparing privacy legislations with the real world practices adapted by CSPs. We found that three of the regulations (GDPR, COPPA, and CCPA) analyzed defined mobile location data as private information, and two (T-Mobile US, Boost Mobile) of the five CSPs that were analyzed did not comply with the COPPA regulation. Our results are crucial in view of the threat these violations represent, especially when it comes to children’s data. As such proper security and privacy auditing is necessary to curtail such violations. We conclude by providing actionable recommendations to address concerns and provide privacy-preserving monitoring of the COVID-19 spread through the contact tracing applications.
Local classical MAX-CUT algorithm outperforms $p=2$ QAOA on high-girth regular graphs

The $p$-stage Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA$_p$) is a promising approach for combinatorial optimization on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, but its theoretical behavior is not well understood beyond $p=1$. We analyze QAOA$_2$ for the maximum cut problem (MAX-CUT), deriving a graph-size-independent expression for the expected cut fraction on any $D$-regular graph of girth $> 5$ (i.e. without triangles, squares, or pentagons). We show that for all degrees $D \ge 2$ and every $D$-regular graph $G$ of girth $> 5$, QAOA$_2$ has a larger expected cut fraction than QAOA$_1$ on $G$. However, we also show that there exists a $2$-local randomized classical algorithm $A$ such that $A$ has a larger expected cut fraction than QAOA$_2$ on all $G$. This supports our conjecture that for every constant $p$, there exists a local classical MAX-CUT algorithm that performs as well as QAOA$_p$ on all graphs.
Learning Infinite-horizon Average-reward MDPs with Linear Function Approximation

We develop several new algorithms for learning Markov Decision Processes in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation. Using the optimism principle and assuming that the MDP has a linear structure, we first propose a computationally inefficient algorithm with optimal $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret and another computationally efficient variant with $\widetilde{O}(T^{3/4})$ regret, where $T$ is the number of interactions. Next, taking inspiration from adversarial linear bandits, we develop yet another efficient algorithm with $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret under a different set of assumptions, improving the best existing result by Hao et al. (2020) with $\widetilde{O}(T^{2/3})$ regret. Moreover, we draw a connection between this algorithm and the Natural Policy Gradient algorithm proposed by Kakade (2002), and show that our analysis improves the sample complexity bound recently given by Agarwal et al. (2020).