cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
SDF-SRN: Learning Signed Distance 3D Object Reconstruction from Static Images

Dense 3D object reconstruction from a single image has recently witnessed remarkable advances, but supervising neural networks with ground-truth 3D shapes is impractical due to the laborious process of creating paired image-shape datasets. Recent efforts have turned to learning 3D reconstruction without 3D supervision from RGB images with annotated 2D silhouettes, dramatically reducing the cost and effort of annotation. These techniques, however, remain impractical as they still require multi-view annotations of the same object instance during training. As a result, most experimental efforts to date have been limited to synthetic datasets. In this paper, we address this issue and propose SDF-SRN, an approach that requires only a single view of objects at training time, offering greater utility for real-world scenarios. SDF-SRN learns implicit 3D shape representations to handle arbitrary shape topologies that may exist in the datasets. To this end, we derive a novel differentiable rendering formulation for learning signed distance functions (SDF) from 2D silhouettes. Our method outperforms the state of the art under challenging single-view supervision settings on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Correlation Imputation in Single cell RNA-seq using Auxiliary Information and Ensemble Learning

Single cell RNA sequencing is a powerful technique that measures the gene expression of individual cells in a high throughput fashion. However, due to sequencing inefficiency, the data is unreliable due to dropout events, or technical artifacts where genes erroneously appear to have zero expression. Many data imputation methods have been proposed to alleviate this issue. Yet, effective imputation can be difficult and biased because the data is sparse and high-dimensional, resulting in major distortions in downstream analyses. In this paper, we propose a completely novel approach that imputes the gene-by-gene correlations rather than the data itself. We call this method SCENA: Single cell RNA-seq Correlation completion by ENsemble learning and Auxiliary information. The SCENA gene-by-gene correlation matrix estimate is obtained by model stacking of multiple imputed correlation matrices based on known auxiliary information about gene connections. In an extensive simulation study based on real scRNA-seq data, we demonstrate that SCENA not only accurately imputes gene correlations but also outperforms existing imputation approaches in downstream analyses such as dimension reduction, cell clustering, graphical model estimation.
Sparse Tree Search Optimality Guarantees in POMDPs with Continuous Observation Spaces.

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces have powerful flexibility for representing real-world decision and control problems but are notoriously difficult to solve. Recent online sampling-based algorithms that use observation likelihood weighting have shown unprecedented effectiveness in domains with continuous observation spaces. However there has been no formal theoretical justification for this technique. This work offers such a justification, proving that a simplified algorithm, partially observable weighted sparse sampling (POWSS), will estimate Q-values accurately with high probability and can be made to perform arbitrarily near the optimal solution by increasing computational power.
Influence of geochemistry on toughening behavior of organic-rich shale

Our research objective is to understand the influence of geochemistry on the fracture behavior of organic-rich shale at multiple length-scales. Despite an increasing focus on the fracture behavior of organic-rich shale, the relationships between geochemistry and fracture behavior remain unclear and there is a scarcity of experimental data available. To this end, we carry out 59 mesoscale scratch-based fracture tests on 14 specimens extracted from 7 major gas shale plays both in the USA and in France. Post-scratch testing imaging reveals fractures with a small crack width of about 411–660 nm. The fracture toughness is evaluated using the energetic size effect law, which is extended to generic axisymmetric probes. A nonlinear anisotropic and multiscale fracture behavior is observed. In addition, a positive correlation is found between the fracture toughness and the presence of kerogen, clay and calcite. Moreover, the geochemistry is found to influence the timescale and the regime of propagation of the hydraulic fracture at the macroscopic length-scale. In particular, shale systems rich in total organic content, clay and calcite are more likely to exhibit high values of the fluid lag and a low hydraulic crack width. Our findings highlight the need for advanced constitutive models for organic-rich shale systems and advanced hydraulic fracturing solutions that can fully integrate the complex fracture response of organic-rich shale materials.
Dynamic nuclear polarization and spin-diffusion in non-conducting solids

There has been much renewed interest in dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP), particularly in the context of solid-state biomolecular nuclear magnetic resonance and more recently dissolution DNP techniques for liquids. This paper reviews the role of spin diffusion in polarizing nuclear spins and discusses the role of the spin diffusion barrier, before going on to discuss some recent results.
Permutation and Grouping Methods for Sharpening Gaussian Process Approximations

ABSTRACTVecchia’s approximate likelihood for Gaussian process parameters depends on how the observations are ordered, which has been cited as a deficiency. This article takes the alternative standpoint that the ordering can be tuned to sharpen the approximations. Indeed, the first part of the article includes a systematic study of how ordering affects the accuracy of Vecchia’s approximation. We demonstrate the surprising result that random orderings can give dramatically sharper approximations than default coordinate-based orderings. Additional ordering schemes are described and analyzed numerically, including orderings capable of improving on random orderings. The second contribution of this article is a new automatic method for grouping calculations of components of the approximation. The grouping methods simultaneously improve approximation accuracy and reduce computational burden. In common settings, reordering combined with grouping reduces Kullback–Leibler divergence from the target model by more th...
THE X-RAY LUMINOSITY FUNCTION OF LOW MASS X-RAY BINARIES IN EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES, THEIR METAL-RICH, AND METAL-POOR GLOBULAR CLUSTERS

We present the X-ray luminosity function (XLF) of low mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) in the globular clusters (GCs) and fields of seven early-types galaxies. These galaxies are selected to have both deep Chandra observations, which allow their LMXB populations to be observed to X-ray luminosities of $10^{37}-10^{38}$ erg/s, and HST optical mosaics which enable the X-ray sources to be separated into field LMXBs, GC LMXBs, and contaminating background and foreground sources. We find that at all luminosities the number of field LMXBs per stellar mass is similar in these galaxies. This suggests that the field LMXB populations in these galaxies are not effected by the GC specific frequency, and that properties such as binary fraction and the stellar initial mass function are either similar across the sample, or change in a way that does not effect the number of LMXBs. We compare the XLF of the field LMXBs to that of the GC LMXBs and find that they are significantly different with a p-value of $3\times10^{-6}$ (equivalent to 4.7$\sigma$ for a normal distribution). The difference is such that the XLF of the GC LMXBs is flatter than that of the field LMXBs, with the GCs hosting relatively more bright sources and fewer faint sources. A comparison of the XLF of the metal-rich and metal-poor GCs hints that the metal-poor GCs may have more bright LMXBs, but the difference is not statistically significant.
A technique for plasma velocity-space cross-correlation

An advance in experimental plasma diagnostics is presented and used to make the first measurement of a plasma velocity-space cross-correlation matrix. The velocity space correlation function can detect collective fluctuations of plasmas through a localized measurement. An empirical decomposition, singular value decomposition, is applied to this Hermitian matrix in order to obtain the plasma fluctuation eigenmode structure on the ion distribution function. A basic theory is introduced and compared to the modes obtained by the experiment. A full characterization of these modes is left for future work, but an outline of this endeavor is provided. Finally, the requirements for this experimental technique in other plasma regimes are discussed.
Classical Optimizers for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Devices

We present a collection of optimizers tuned for usage on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Optimizers have a range of applications in quantum computing, including the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) and Quantum Approximate Optimization (QAOA) algorithms. They are also used for calibration tasks, hyperparameter tuning, in machine learning, etc. We analyze the efficiency and effectiveness of different optimizers in a VQE case study. VQE is a hybrid algorithm, with a classical minimizer step driving the next evaluation on the quantum processor. While most results to date concentrated on tuning the quantum VQE circuit, we show that, in the presence of quantum noise, the classical minimizer step needs to be carefully chosen to obtain correct results. We explore state-of-the-art gradient-free optimizers capable of handling noisy, black-box, cost functions and stress-test them using a quantum circuit simulation environment with noise injection capabilities on individual gates. Our results indicate that specifically tuned optimizers are crucial to obtaining valid science results on NISQ hardware, and will likely remain necessary even for future fault tolerant circuits.
Risk awareness and adverse selection in catastrophe insurance: Evidence from California’s residential earthquake insurance market

How does catastrophe-risk awareness affect purchase decisions and selection patterns in the insurance market? I study this issue using data on take-up rates of earthquake insurance among homeowners in California, where a semi-public insurer coexists with private insurers. The public insurance policy charges cross-subsidized premiums and is offered through specific homeowners insurance agents. I find that for those offered the public earthquake policy, a positive demand-risk correlation exists within the insurer’s pricing territory, suggesting that people have some meaningful awareness of their risk and act on it in ways consistent with adverse selection. However, despite private insurers having the opportunity to select the lower risks by pricing at a finer level, the positive demand-risk correlation persists for them. I interpret this as a result of market friction that limits homeowners’ ability to comparison shop, and their relative insensitivity to price as compared to risk.
Difficulties Applying Recent Blind Source Separation Techniques to EEG and MEG

High temporal resolution measurements of human brain activity can be performed by recording the electric potentials on the scalp surface (electroencephalography, EEG), or by recording the magnetic fields near the surface of the head (magnetoencephalography, MEG). The analysis of the data is problematic due to the fact that multiple neural generators may be simultaneously active and the potentials and magnetic fields from these sources are superimposed on the detectors. It is highly desirable to un-mix the data into signals representing the behaviors of the original individual generators. This general problem is called blind source separation and several recent techniques utilizing maximum entropy, minimum mutual information, and maximum likelihood estimation have been applied. These techniques have had much success in separating signals such as natural sounds or speech, but appear to be ineffective when applied to EEG or MEG signals. Many of these techniques implicitly assume that the source distributions have a large kurtosis, whereas an analysis of EEG/MEG signals reveals that the distributions are multimodal. This suggests that more effective separation techniques could be designed for EEG and MEG signals.
Learning-Accelerated ADMM for Distributed DC Optimal Power Flow

We propose a novel data-driven method to accelerate the convergence of Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) for solving distributed DC optimal power flow (DC-OPF) where lines are shared between independent network partitions. Using previous observations of ADMM trajectories for a given system under varying load, the method trains a recurrent neural network (RNN) to predict the converged values of dual and consensus variables. Given a new realization of system load, a small number of initial ADMM iterations is taken as input to infer the converged values and directly inject them into the iteration. We empirically demonstrate that the online injection of these values into the ADMM iteration accelerates convergence by a significant factor for partitioned 14-, 118- and 2848-bus test systems under differing load scenarios. The proposed method has several advantages: it maintains the security of private decision variables inherent in consensus ADMM; inference is fast and so may be used in online settings; RNN-generated predictions can dramatically improve time to convergence but, by construction, can never result in infeasible ADMM subproblems; it can be easily integrated into existing software implementations. While we focus on the ADMM formulation of distributed DC-OPF in this letter, the ideas presented are naturally extended to other distributed optimization problems.
Modeling High-Dimensional Time Series: A Factor Model With Dynamically Dependent Factors and Diverging Eigenvalues

This article proposes a new approach to modeling high-dimensional time series by treating a p-dimensional time series as a nonsingular linear transformation of certain common factors and idiosyncra...
The political economy of Vermont’s abortion bill

Public choice literature divides the rationality of voting between instrumental and expressive. In this paper, we take the Vermont legislature in passing the H. 57 bill as a case to explain some of...
A Unified Framework of Surrogate Loss by Refactoring and Interpolation.

We introduce UniLoss, a unified framework to generate surrogate losses for training deep networks with gradient descent, reducing the amount of manual design of task-specific surrogate losses. Our key observation is that in many cases, evaluating a model with a performance metric on a batch of examples can be refactored into four steps: from input to real-valued scores, from scores to comparisons of pairs of scores, from comparisons to binary variables, and from binary variables to the final performance metric. Using this refactoring we generate differentiable approximations for each non-differentiable step through interpolation. Using UniLoss, we can optimize for different tasks and metrics using one unified framework, achieving comparable performance compared with task-specific losses. We validate the effectiveness of UniLoss on three tasks and four datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/uniloss.
What It Will Take to Equitably Distribute a COVID-19 Vaccine.

• The national vaccine allocation strategy should prioritize healthcare workers across settings. • It should prioritize access for high-risk populations. • It should avoid using age as a criterion.
The Capacity of Multi-user Private Information Retrieval for Computationally Limited Databases

We present a private information retrieval (PIR) scheme that allows a user to retrieve a single message from an arbitrary number of databases by colluding with other users while hiding the desired message index. This scheme is of particular significance when there is only one accessible database-a special case that turns out to be more challenging for PIR in the multi-database case. The upper bound for privacy-preserving capacity for these scenarios is $C = {\left( {1 + \frac{1}{S} + \cdots + \frac{1}{{{S^{K - 1}}}}} \right)^{ - 1}}$, where K is the number of messages and S represents the quantity of information sources such as S = N + U − 1 for U users and N databases. We show that the proposed information retrieval scheme attains the capacity bound even when only one database is present, which differs from most existing works that hinge on the access to multiple databases in order to hide user privacy. Unlike the multi-database case, this scheme capitalizes on the inability for a database to cross-reference queries made by multiple users due to computational complexity.
Pattern formation of the three-layer Saffman-Taylor problem in a radial Hele-Shaw cell

Nonlinear simulations are utilized to investigate the viscous fingering formation in a three-layer radial Hele-Shaw cell. The two interfaces of this system are coupled, and the initial distance between them has a great impact on the interfacial morphologies. This work supplements previous studies, which examined the system via linear and weakly nonlinear analyses.
Cognitive Preadaptation for Resilient Adaptive Control

In this paper, we investigate a novel control architecture and algorithm for incorporating preadaption functions. We propose a preadaptation mechanism that can augment any adaptive control scheme and improve its resilience. Through simulations of a flight control system we illustrate the effectiveness of the preadaptation mechanism in improving the adaptation. We show that the preadaptation mechanism we propose can reduce the peak of the response by as much as $50\%$. The scenarios we present also show that the preadaptation mechanism is effective across a wide range of scenarios suggesting that the mechanism is reliable.
Is the OWASP Top 10 List Comprehensive Enough for Writing Secure Code

The OWASP Top 10 is a list that is published by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). The general purpose is to serve as a watchlist for bugs to avoid while writing code. This paper compares how many of those weakness as described in the top ten list are actually reported in vulnerabilities listed in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). That way it makes it possible to empirically show whether the OWASP Top 10 list is comprehensive enough or not, for code weaknesses that have been found in the past decade.
A Stackelberg Security Investment Game for Voltage Stability of Power Systems

We formulate a Stackelberg game between an attacker and a defender of a power system. The attacker attempts to alter the load setpoints of the power system covertly and intelligently, so that the voltage stability margin of the grid is reduced, driving the entire system towards a voltage collapse. The defender, or the system operator, aims to compensate for this reduction by retuning the reactive power injection to the grid by switching on control devices, such as a bank of shunt capacitors. A modified Backward Induction method is proposed to find a cost-based Stackelberg equilibrium (CBSE) of the game, which saves the players’ costs while providing the optimal allocation of both players’ investment resources under budget and covertness constraints. We analyze the proposed game extensively for the IEEE 9-bus power system model and present an example of its performance for the IEEE 39-bus power system model. It is demonstrated that the defender is able to maintain system stability unless its security budget is much lower than the attacker’s budget.
Politics, informality and clientelism – exploring a pro-poor urban politics

This paper explores what we have learnt about how to instigate, negotiate or otherwise secure pro-poor government in towns and cities of the global South. With competition for scarce resources, the processes of urban development, and specifically the acquisition of land and basic services, are intensely political. While the nature of urban poverty differs, there is a consistent set of needs related to residency in informal settlements; tenure is insecure and there is a lack of access to basic services, infrastructure, and sometimes other entitlements. Households and communities have to negotiate these collective consumption goods in a context in which political relations are primarily informal, with negotiations that take place away from the transparent and accountable systems of ?modern? government. Clientelist bargaining prevails. Much of the existing literature is polarised, either critiquing clientelism for its consequences, or arguing that it has been dismissed without any grounded assessment of what might take its place and any considered analysis of what it has managed to deliver.In this paper I explore how networks and federations of the urban poor seeking to access secure tenure and basic services have sought to advance their cause and the interests of their members. These organised collectives recognise that they have to challenge clientelist practice; however leaders also recognise that, given existing power relations, they have to work from within to change the realities of clientelism. Their own relative powerlessness means that confrontation is not an effective strategy. To strengthen their influence, they have to make common cause with those in need across the city building a unified and aware movement, and they have to establish their own legitimacy as agencies operating in the public interest and towards the common good. As and when they gain an increased influence, they seek greater flexibility from the city bureaucracy and to reduce the hierarchical highly vertical relations between the urban poor and the political elite. To maintain and extend their advances towards a pro-poor politics, they act to strengthen public accountabilities.
Eyewitness Identifications: One More Lesson on the Costs of Excluding Relevant Evidence.

Recent research has revealed that sequential lineup eyewitness identifications are less likely to falsely identify an innocent suspect as the culprit than are traditional simultaneous lineups. This has led numerous reformers to advocate (and many jurisdictions to accept) that the latter procedure should be replaced by the former. Clark has rightly pointed out that mis-identification data has another twist that almost everyone else has ignored; to wit, sequential lineups are much more likely to lead to false negatives than are simultaneous lineups. If, as we have every reason to believe, both types of lineups are more likely to include a guilty party than to include only innocent suspects, there are powerful reasons to say, as Clark does, that sequential lineups are apt to have higher aggregate error rates than simultaneous lineups do. That should give pause to the growing movement to replace the latter by the former.
Volatility Forecasting Using Financial Statement Information

ABSTRACT: This paper examines whether financial statement information can predict future realized equity volatility incremental to market-based equity volatility forecasts. I use an analytical framework to identify accounting-based drivers of realized volatility. My main hypothesis is that accounting-based drivers can be used to forecast future realized volatility incremental to either past realized volatility or option-implied volatility. I confirm this empirically and document abnormal returns to an option-based trading strategy that takes a long (short) position in firms with financial statement information indicative of high (low) future realized volatility. These results suggest that accounting-based volatility drivers may serve as useful indicators of variance risk. Finally, I demonstrate that the incorporation of accounting-based fundamental information into forecasting models yields lower forecast errors relative to models based solely on past realized volatility.
An Old-Fashioned View of the Nature of Law

The law is a not an abstract system or scheme of rules, as we often speak of it, but an inherently unstable structure of thought and expression. It is built upon a distinct set of dynamic and dialogic tensions, which include: tensions between ordinary language and legal language; between legal language and the specialized discourses of other fields; between language itself and the mute world that lies beneath it; between opposing lawyers; between conflicting but justifiable ways of giving meaning to the rules and principles of law; between substantive and procedural lines of thought; between law and justice; between the past, the present, and the future. Each of these tensions is present whenever a lawyer or judge goes to work. None of them can be resolved by resort to a rule or other directive, but must be addressed anew by the lawyer and judge in each case as it arises, by the exercise of an art of language and mind that is defined by the nature of these tensions themselves.
The market reaction to corporate governance regulation

This paper investigates the market reaction to recent legislative and regulatory actions pertaining to corporate governance. The managerial power view of governance suggests that executive pay, the existing process of proxy access, and various governance provisions [e.g., staggered boards and Chief Executive Officer (CEO)-chairman duality] are associated with managerial rent extraction. This perspective predicts that broad government actions that reduce executive pay, increase proxy access, and ban such governance provisions are value-enhancing. In contrast, another view of governance suggests that observed governance choices are the result of value-maximizing contracts between shareholders and management. This perspective predicts that broad government actions that regulate such governance choices are value destroying. Consistent with the latter view, we find that the abnormal returns to recent events relating to corporate governance regulations are, on average, decreasing in CEO pay, decreasing in the number of large blockholders, decreasing in the ease by which small institutional investors can access the proxy process, and decreasing in the presence of a staggered board.
Two Dimensions of Responsibility in Crime, Tort, and Moral Luck

Parallel moral luck problems exist in three different normative domains: criminal law, tort law, and conventional moral thinking. In all three, the normative status of an actor’s conduct seems to depend on matters beyond the actor’s control. Criminal law has historically imposed greater punishment on the murderer who kills his intended victim than on the identically behaved would-be murderer whose shot fortuitously misses. Tort law imposes liability on the negligent driver who injures someone, but no liability if, through good fortune, the negligence injures no one. And, as BernardWilliams and Thomas Nagel have famously argued, conventional moral thinking often attributes greater blame to an actor for wrongful conduct if that conduct ripens into a terrible event than if it fortuitously causes no harm at all. This Article distinguishes two different dimensions of responsibility and then uses this distinction to explain the problem in all three areas. One dimension is called "fault-expressing responsibility": it is a matter of the degree to which one’s acts constitute conduct that can express one’s character or faultiness. A second dimension of responsibility is called "agency-linking responsibility." In this dimension, the degree to which a person is responsible for some event is dependent upon whether that event is an action of that person. Responsibility can differ in the agency-linking dimension even if it remains the same in the fault-expressing dimension.
Genre-dependent metonymy in Norse skaldic poetry

This article describes a metonymic process which is common in skaldic verse, but rare in everyday language. This process allows one member of a category to stand for another (for example, SEA is re...
Workers' Trust Funds and the Logic of Wage Profiles

This paper defines a concept, a worker's trust fund, which is useful in analyzing optimal age-earnings profiles. The trust fund represents what a worker loses if dismissed from a job for shirking. In considering whether to work or shirk, a worker weighs the potential loss due to forfeiture of the trust fund if caught shirking against the benefits from reduced effort. This concept is used to show that the implicit bonding in upward sloping age-earnings profiles is not a perfect substitute for an explicit up-front performance bond (or employment fee). It is also shown that the second-best optimal earnings profile in the absence of an up-front employment fee pays total compensation in excess of market clearing in a variety of stylized cases.
Aligning or Maligning? Getting Inside a New Idea, Getting Behind No Child Left Behind and Getting Outside of It All

In this article, I briefly review the background for the latest iteration of federal special education policy, the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education (Improvement) Act or IDEA. With a slight apology to ardent advocates for parents and children with disabilities, I then suggest ways that they and their clients can set aside their concerns about a diluted statute and learn to live with a changed legal landscape — and perhaps even flourish in an educational system that aims to raise the standards for all students. With each cycle of program review, policy revisitation and legislative revision, those who speak for students and their families must adapt to new language and concepts. Some of the adaptations are cosmetic or pragmatic, and other revisions are genuinely intended to affect positive change for students. In navigating the legal process, I urge that advocates: (1) embrace some of IDEA's new provisions and make the best of others; (2) aggressively monitor the Administration's other major educational reform — The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001; and (3) effectively use interest group organizational strategies. After waging a vigorous battle in Congress to keep the IDEA intact, it is the task of advocates to shape the remaining legal text in ways that ultimately enhance the learning and lives of student clients. Advocates must engage in new tactics to mitigate what we see as damaging changes, and yet be open to honest and critical reflection on changes that may actually be harmless or even beneficial.
The Criminal Defense of Duress: A Justification, Not an Excuse——And Why It Matters

The defense of duress arises rarely in court, and yet for scholars it remains both “the most difficult defense to conceptualize and justify” and among “the most controversial and philosophically interesting of all the criminal law defenses.” The central challenge is to explain why defenses of duress, including Model Penal Code section 2.09, typically provide actors with greater protection against manmade threats than defenses of necessity provide against natural threats. The challenge persists because, while the distinction between manmade and natural threats is deeply embedded in the law, scholars regard it as illogical and unjustified. Scholars respond in various ways to what they regard as this “apparently spurious distinction” in the law. Some
Do managers credibly use accruals to signal private information? Evidence from the pricing of discretionary accruals around stock splits

Abstract Prior studies suggest that managers use their reporting discretion to signal private information. However, because managers are often assumed to use their discretion to mislead investors, discretionary accruals might be regarded as opportunistic. We posit that combining the accrual signal with other signals may be an effective means of communicating private information. One such signal is stock splits. The stock split signal lends credibility to the accrual signal whereas the accrual signal reinforces the split signal. Accordingly, we find that, at the split announcement, the market construes the pre-split abnormal accrual as a signal of managerial optimism rather than managerial opportunism.
Internal Control Material Weaknesses and CFO Compensation

Boards of directors and compensation committees predominantly use financial measures reflecting executive managerial duties as inputs to executive compensation decisions. Yet, despite the fact that Holmstrom (1979) suggests that any readily available performance measure should be considered in executive compensation decisions, there is little research on the link between executive compensation and non-financial performance measures. We develop and test a model of chief financial officer (CFO) compensation with specific emphasis on the link between the disclosure of internal control material weaknesses (ICMW), a non-financial performance measure reflecting CFO fiduciary duties, and CFO compensation. Since internal controls are under the direct responsibility of the CFO, the disclosure of an ICMW reflects poorly on his/her performance. As a baseline, we find that ICMW disclosures lead to decreases in CFO compensation (bonus, equity, and total). Of greater interest, we find that CFOs at firms with stronger governance experience larger compensation decreases upon ICMW disclosures compared to CFOs at firms with weaker governance. In addition, CFOs at firms with greater costs of financial statement misreporting experience larger compensation decreases upon ICMW disclosures compared to CFOs at firms with lower costs of misreporting. Taken together, these results contribute to the relatively sparse literature on CFOs by illustrating the importance of CFO fiduciary duties and the interaction of those duties, in terms of firm governance and misreporting costs, with changes in CFO compensation.
Not Your Father's Police Department: Making Sense of the New Demographics of Law Enforcement

Several decades ago, when social scientists were discovering the police, and the Supreme Court was beginning to construct the modern law of criminal procedure, American law enforcement was structured roughly the same way it is today. Policing was largely a local responsibility. Departments were organized hierarchically and quasi-militarily. Line officers exercised wide discretion. Patrol and detective functions were separated, and most officers were assigned to patrol. Detectives, like supervisors, started out as patrol officers and were promoted from within. The critical operational unit was the squad: a handful of line officers supervised by a sergeant, or in the case of detectives, by a lieutenant. Officers generally began police work when young and made it their career. All of this remains true today. "As a legal and organizational entity," David Garland is right to observe, "the public police look much the same today as they did thirty years ago."1
Alien Tort Claims and the Status of Customary International Law

Much of the recent debate about the status of customary international law in the U.S. legal system has revolved around the alien tort provision of the Judiciary Act of 1789, currently section 1350 of Title 28. In Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, the decision that launched modern human rights litigation in the United States, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit relied on the view that customary international law has the status of federal common law in upholding section 1350’s grant of federal jurisdiction over a suit between aliens. The court’s position that customary international law was federal law was the prevailing view at the time—a view that has subsequently been dubbed the “modern position.” It was the view set forth in the black letter of the Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law. Filartiga triggered a revisionist challenge to the modern position, with revisionists arguing that customary international law has the status of federal law only if given that status through statute or treaty, or perhaps through sole executive action; in the absence of such incorporation, customary international law has, at best, the status of State law in our legal system.
Social Irresponsibility in Management

Abstract Previously published research suggested that the typical manager may be expected to harm others in his role as a manager. Further support for this was drawn from the Panalba role-playing case. None of the 57 control groups in this case were willing to remove a dangerous drug from the market. In fact, 79% of these groups took active steps to prevent its removal. This decision was classified as irresponsible by 97% of the respondents to a questionnaire. Because the role exerts such powerful effects, an attempt was made to modify subjects' perceptions of their role so that managers would feel responsible to all of the firm's interest groups. Some subjects were told that board members should represent all interest groups; other subjects were placed on boards of directors where the different groups were represented. Subjects in both groups also received information on the impact of the decisions upon stockholders, employees, and customers. The percentage of irresponsible decisions was reduced under these conditions as only 22% of the 116 groups selected the highly irresponsible decision.
Privatization of public enterprises in Bangladesh: problems and prospects.

The performance of the public enterprise sector in Bangladesh is poor. The inefficiency of public enterprises places a fiscal burden, diverts limited resources from growth-enhancing public spending to unproductive subsidies, and affects the country’s industrial competitiveness. This paper identifies the prospects, problems, and pitfalls of privatization program and policies in Bangladesh. Firstly, the stylized facts about public enterprises are provided and the basic issues in privatization policy as it relates to Bangladesh are discussed. Secondly, the preconditions for efficiency gains arising from privatization are evaluated. Thirdly, the role of public enterprises in the labor market in Bangladesh is examined. Finally, the political and the economic factors that can offset the potential efficiency gains from privatization in Bangladesh are critically analyzed. (JEL L33)
The story of Katrina: New Orleans and the political economy of catastrophe

This paper analyzes the public policies that lead to ‘`Katrina,’' paying particular attention to political decisions that created unusual risks in the New Orleans area. Most of the deaths from hurricane Katrina were concentrated in one place, New Orleans, and those losses arose in large part from its location in combination with its three century long effort to ‘`manage’' the risks associated with that location. Crisis management is inherently more error prone than ordinary policy making, because surprise implies the existence of significant information problems and urgency implies that time does not exist to completely address those problems (Congleton, 2005). In New Orleans the unavoidable mistakes of crisis management were compounded by policy choices made well before Katrina made landfall, as well as federalism, partisan politics, corruption, and incompetence.
Mitigation and the Americans with Disabilities Act

INTRODUCTION 217 I. THE CASE FOR IMPOSING A DUTY TO MITIGATE ON PLAINTIFFS SEEKING THE PROTECTION OF TITLE I'S REASONABLE ACCOMMODATION PROVISION 228 II. THE DUTY OF REASONABLE MITIGATION 237 A. Core Cases 240 B. Two Hard Categories of Cases 257 III. PROTECTION FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE MITIGATED 266 IV. THE DUTY TO MITIGATE AND AN IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TITLE I AND TITLE VII 271 CONCLUSION 277
Who Misvotes? The Effect of Differential Cognition Costs on Election Outcomes

- ing using quasi-random variation in candidate name placement on ballots from the 2003 California recall election. We find that minor candidates' vote shares almost double when their names are adjacent to the names of major candidates. All else equal, vote share gains are larger in precincts with higher percentages of poorly educated, poor, or third-party voters. A major candidate that disproportionally attracts voters from such precincts faces an electoral disadvantage. We also explore which voting technology platforms and brands miti - gate misvoting. (
The Information Content of Loan Growth in Banks

I empirically evaluate the information content of a change in the size of a bank’s loan portfolio. I find a positive (negative) stock market reaction to loan portfolio growth in high (low) earnings banks. I also find that the information content of loan growth depends on features of the bank, the loan, and the macroeconomic state. In particular, loan growth, in conjunction with earnings, conveys meaningful information about bank value for small banks only, for commercial loans, and during normal times. Further, I posit that if the market reaction conveys meaningful information about a bank’s value, then loan portfolio growth should predict future performance measures of the bank. In fact, I find that loan portfolio growth, when interacted with earnings, predicts future non-performing loans.
Noncognitivism, Normativity and Belief: A Reply to Jackson

L'A. defend la these non-cognitiviste contre les objections normativistes de F. Jackson. Distinguant les notions de necessite normative et de necessite conceptuelle, l'A. montre que le non-cognitivisme resiste a l'argument de la reduction de la croyance a la normativite.
The New Business Significance of Branding

Understanding of the future for media industries can benefit from a look backwards. In the era before radio and television, print media alone were highly successful in creating new consumer visions and aspirations, building national brands, and establishing significant brand equity. The advent of radio and television did not change total advertising spending as a share of total economic output, nor did it change significantly total advertising spending per adult media hour. Even rudimentary media technologies are sufficient to support highly salient brands, and constraints on the extent of advertising revenue do not appear to be linked to media technology. In order for media industries as a whole to grow relatively rapidly, branding efforts must shift toward collaborative market-building to develop user routines, comfort, and trust in new types of media interactions and transactions.
Biological Evaluations: Blood, Genes, and Family

This article addresses a striking contrast at the center of contemporary social and legal views of family. The traditional family, forged in the early years of the Industrial Revolution to support the interests of the marketplace, has largely collapsed. In its place, the law and society have increasingly recognized the significance of autonomous individuality in the construction of family relationships. At the same time, however, society has become obsessed with the apparent significance of DNA in determining individual and familial identity. As options for creating and defining families have multiplied, society and the law have struggled to construct a variety of frames within which to shape and regulate contemporary families. The article analyzes four social responses. The first, referred to as the flesh and blood family, harmonizes most closely with understandings of the traditional family. The second, referred to as the reprogenetic family, most closely resembles contemporary families of choice. The third, referred to as families of shared DNA, imbues genes with the power to encompass both tradition and choice. And the fourth, the medicalized family, depends centrally on presumptive biological (genetic) facts. Each of these responses to family may seem disconcerting insofar as forms of family that have emerged in the last several decades are generally seen as having discarded or downplayed the notion that biological relationship is or should be central to definitions of family.
Fatal (Fiscal) Attraction: Spendthrifts and Tightwads in Marriage:

Abstract Although much research has found that “birds of a feather flock together,” the authors suggest that opposites tend to attract when it comes to certain spending tendencies; that is, tightwads, who generally spend less than they would ideally like to spend, and spendthrifts, who generally spend more than they would ideally like to spend, tend to marry each other, consistent with the notion that people are attracted to mates who possess characteristics dissimilar to those they deplore in themselves. Despite this complementary attraction, tightwad–spendthrift differences within a marriage predict conflict over finances, which in turn predicts diminished marital well-being. These relationships persist when controlling for important financial outcomes (household-level savings and credit card debt). These findings underscore the importance of studying the relationships among money, consumption, and happiness at an interpersonal level.
Are oil, gold and the euro inter-related? time series and neural network analysis

This paper investigates inter-relationships among the price behavior of oil, gold and the euro using time series and neural network methodologies. Traditionally gold is a leading indicator of future inflation. Both the demand and supply of oil as a key global commodity are impacted by inflationary expectations and such expectations determine current spot prices. Inflation influences both short and long-term interest rates that in turn influence the value of the dollar measured in terms of the euro. Certain hypotheses are formulated in this paper and time series and neural network methodologies are employed to test these hypotheses. We find that the markets for oil, gold and the euro are efficient but have limited inter-relationships among themselves.
Property and Relative Status

Property does many things - it incentivizes productive activity, facilitates exchange, forms an integral part of individual identity, and shapes communities. But property does something equally fundamental: it communicates. And perhaps the most ubiquitous and important messages that property communicates have to do with relative status, with the material world defining and reinforcing a variety of economic, social, and cultural hierarchies. This status - signaling function of property - with property serving as an important locus for symbolic meaning through which people compare themselves to others - complicates premises underlying central discourses in contemporary property theory. In particular, status signaling can skew property's incentive and allocative benefits, leading people to over-invest in status - enhancing property and undermining welfare gains associated with trades around property. Similarly, status signaling risks warping the link between property and personhood, investing that connection with a potentially dysfunctional regard for the property of others. And status signaling is magnified by and can undermine property's communitarian links. From a doctrinal perspective, ground-level property law intersects with the problem of relative status across an array of areas of intellectual property, real property, and personal property. At times law gives formal sanction to property's hierarchical signaling and at times it tempers this tendency, breaking up fixed hierarchies. Sensitivity to these dynamics holds important lessons for both the ongoing development of property law and for the continuing interdisciplinary exploration of this core aspect of property.
THE BRITISH BANK NATIONALIZATIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL LAW PERSPECTIVE

The British Government's nationalization of the shares of Northern Rock plc and Bradford & Bingley plc in 2008 raises important issues about the standard of protection owed to the banks' non-UK investors and the manner in which compensation should be calculated. The United Kingdom is party to numerous bilateral investment treaties as well as the European Convention on Human Rights, which adopt an international standard of protection for foreign investors and require the payment of ‘market value’ compensation for the property taken. As the analysis in this article shows, the compensation scheme established by the British Government appears to fall short of these obligations.