cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
MAGNETIC EFFECTS AND OVERSIZED M DWARFS IN THE YOUNG OPEN CLUSTER NGC 2516

By combining rotation periods with spectroscopic determinations of projected rotation velocity, Jackson et al. have found that the mean radii for low-mass M-dwarfs in the young, open cluster NGC 2516 are larger than model predictions at a given absolute I magnitude or I – K color and also larger than measured radii of magnetically inactive M-dwarfs. The relative radius difference is correlated with magnitude, increasing from a few percent at MI = 7 to greater than 50% for the lowest luminosity stars in their sample at MI ~ 9.5. Jackson et al. have suggested that a two-temperature star spot model is capable of explaining the observations, but their model requires spot coverage fractions of at least 50% in rapidly rotating M-dwarfs. Here we examine these results in terms of stellar models that include the inhibiting effects of magnetic fields on convective energy transport, with and without the effects of star spots. We find that a pure spot model is inconsistent with the color-magnitude diagram. The observations of radii versus color and radii versus absolute magnitude in NGC 2516 are consistent with models which include only magnetic inhibition or a combination of magnetic inhibition and spots. At a given mass we find a large dispersion in the strength of the vertical component of the magnetic field in the stellar photosphere but the general trend is that the vertical field increases with decreasing mass from a few hundred Gauss at 0.65 M ☉ to 600-900 G, depending on spot coverage, in the lowest mass stars in the sample at 0.25 M ☉.
A CNOT gate between multiphoton qubits encoded in two cavities

Entangling gates between qubits are a crucial component for performing algorithms in quantum computers. However, any quantum algorithm must ultimately operate on error-protected logical qubits encoded in high-dimensional systems. Typically, logical qubits are encoded in multiple two-level systems, but entangling gates operating on such qubits are highly complex and have not yet been demonstrated. Here we realize a controlled NOT (CNOT) gate between two multiphoton qubits in two microwave cavities. In this approach, we encode a qubit in the high-dimensional space of a single cavity mode, rather than in multiple two-level systems. We couple two such encoded qubits together through a transmon, which is driven by an RF pump to apply the gate within 190 ns. This is two orders of magnitude shorter than the decoherence time of the transmon, enabling a high-fidelity gate operation. These results are an important step towards universal algorithms on error-corrected logical qubits. Quantum computing platforms allowing quantum error correction usually rely on complex redundant encoding within multiple two-level systems. Here, instead, the authors realize a CNOT gate between two qubits encoded in the multiphoton states of two microwave cavities nonlinearly coupled by a transmon.
Contribution of top barrier materials to high mobility in near-surface InAs quantum wells grown on GaSb(001)

Near-surface InAs two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) systems have great potential for realizing networks of multiple Majorana zero modes towards a scalable topological quantum computer. Improving mobility in the near-surface 2DEGs is beneficial for stable topological superconducting states as well as for correlation of multiple Majorana zero modes in a complex network. Here, we investigate near-surface InAs 2DEGs (13 nm away from the surface) grown on GaSb(001) substrates, whose lattice constant is closely matched to InAs, by molecular beam epitaxy. The effect of a 10-nm-thick top barrier to the mobility is studied by comparing $\mathrm{A}{\mathrm{l}}_{0.9}\mathrm{G}{\mathrm{a}}_{0.1}\mathrm{Sb}$ and $\mathrm{I}{\mathrm{n}}_{0.75}\mathrm{G}{\mathrm{a}}_{0.25}\mathrm{As}$ as a top barrier on otherwise identical InAs quantum wells grown with identical bottom barrier and buffer layers. A 3-nm-thick capping layer on an $\mathrm{A}{\mathrm{l}}_{0.9}\mathrm{G}{\mathrm{a}}_{0.1}\mathrm{Sb}$ top barrier also affects the 2DEG electronic transport properties by modifying scattering from 2D remote ionized impurities at the surface. The highest transport mobility of $650\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}000\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\mathrm{c}{\mathrm{m}}^{2}/\mathrm{V}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\mathrm{s}$ with an electron density of $3.81\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{11}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\mathrm{c}{\mathrm{m}}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$ was observed in an InAs 2DEG with an $\mathrm{A}{\mathrm{l}}_{0.9}\mathrm{G}{\mathrm{a}}_{0.1}\mathrm{Sb}$ top barrier and an $\mathrm{I}{\mathrm{n}}_{0.75}\mathrm{G}{\mathrm{a}}_{0.25}\mathrm{As}$ capping layer. Analysis of Shubnikov--de Haas oscillations in the high-mobility sample suggests that long-range scattering, such as remote ionized impurity scattering, is the dominant scattering mechanism in the InAs 2DEGs grown on GaSb(001) substrates. In comparison to InAs quantum wells grown on lattice-mismatched InP, the ones grown on GaSb show smoother surface morphology and higher quantum mobility. However, the $\mathrm{I}{\mathrm{n}}_{0.75}\mathrm{G}{\mathrm{a}}_{0.25}\mathrm{As}$ top barrier in the InAs quantum well grown on GaSb limits the transport mobility by charged dislocations formed in it, in addition to the major contribution to scattering from the alloy scattering.
HERSCHEL FAR-INFRARED PHOTOMETRIC MONITORING OF PROTOSTARS IN THE ORION NEBULA CLUSTER

We have obtained time series observations of the Orion Nebula Cluster at 70 μm and 160 μm from the Herschel/PACS Photometer. This represents the first wide-field far-infrared photometric monitoring of a young star-forming region. The acquired 35' × 35' maps show complex extended structures, with unprecedented detail, that trace the interaction between the molecular gas and the young hot stars. We detect 43 protostars, most of which are situated along the integral-shaped filament extending from the Orion nebula, through OMC 2 and OMC 3. We present high-reliability light curves for some of these objects using the first six epochs of our observing program spread over 6 weeks. We find amplitude variations in excess of 20% for a fraction of the detected protostars over periods as short as a few weeks. This is inconsistent with the dynamical timescales of cool far-IR emitting material that orbits at hundreds of AU from the protostar, and it suggests that the mechanism(s) responsible for the observed variability originates from the inner region of the protostars, likely driven by variable mass accretion.
PATH INTEGRATION IN RELATIVISTIC QUANTUM MECHANICS

The simple physics of a free particle reveals important features of the path-integral formulation of relativistic quantum theories. The exact quantum-mechanical propagator is calculated here for a particle described by the simple relativistic action proportional to its proper time. This propagator is nonvanishing outside the light cone, implying that spacelike trajectories must be included in the path integral. The propagator matches the WKB approximation to the corresponding configuration-space path integral far from the light cone; outside the light cone that approximation consists of the contribution from a single spacelike geodesic. This propagator also has the unusual property that its short-time limit does not coincide with the WKB approximation, making the construction of a concrete skeletonized version of the path integral more complicated than in nonrelativistic theory.
Quantum Measures and Integrals

We show that quantum measures and integrals appear naturally in any L 2 -Hilbert space H . We begin by defining a decoherence operator D ( A, B ) and its associated q -measure operator μ( A ) = D ( A, A ) on H . We show that these operators have certain positivity, additivity and continuity properties. If ρ is a state on H , then D ρ( A, B ) = tr[ρ D ( A , B )] and μ ρ ( A )= D ρ ( A , A ) have the usual properties of a decoherence functional and q -measure, respectively. The quantization of a random variable f is defined to be a certain self-adjoint operator f ˆ on H . Continuity and additivity properties of the map f ↦ f ˆ are discussed. It is shown that if f is nonnegative, then f ˆ is a positive operator. A quantum integral is defined by ∫ f d μ ρ = tr ( ρ f ˆ ) . A tail-sum formula is proved for the quantum integral. The paper closes with an example that illustrates some of the theory.
Bound on asymptotics of magnitude of three point coefficients in 2D CFT

We use methods inspired from complex Tauberian theorems to make progress in understanding the asymptotic behavior of the magnitude of heavy-light-heavy three point coefficients rigorously. The conditions and the precise sense of averaging, which can lead to exponential suppression of such coefficients are investigated. We derive various bounds for the typical average value of the magnitude of heavy-light-heavy three point coefficients and verify them numerically.
ASTROMETRIC REVERBERATION MAPPING

Spatially extended emission regions of active galactic nuclei respond to continuum variations, if such emission regions are powered by energy reprocessing of the continuum. The response from different parts of the reverberating region arrives at different times lagging behind the continuum variation. The lags can be used to map the geometry and kinematics of the emission region (i.e., reverberation mapping, RM). If the extended emission region is not spherically symmetric in configuration and velocity space, reverberation may produce astrometric offsets in the emission region photocenter as a function of time delay and velocity, detectable with future {mu}as to tens of {mu}as astrometry. Such astrometric responses provide independent constraints on the geometric and kinematic structure of the extended emission region, complementary to traditional RM. In addition, astrometric RM is more sensitive to infer the inclination of a flattened geometry and the rotation angle of the extended emission region.
Massive star evolution: luminous blue variables as unexpected supernova progenitors

Stars more massive than about 8 M ⊙ end their lives as a supernova (SN), an event of fundamental importance Universe-wide. Theoretically, these stars have been expected to be either at the red supergiant, blue supergiant, or Wolf-Rayet stage before the explosion. We performed coupled stellar evolution and atmospheric modeling of stars with initial masses between 20 M ⊙ and 120 M ⊙ . We found that the 20 M ⊙ and 25 M ⊙ rotating models, before exploding as SN, have spectra that do not resemble any of the aforementioned classes of massive stars. Rather, they have remarkable similarities with rare, unstable massive stars known as luminous blue variables (LBV). While observations show that some SNe seem to have had LBVs as progenitors, no theoretical model had yet predicted that a star could explode at this stage. Our models provide theoretical support for relatively low-luminosity LBVs exploding as SN in the framework of single stellar evolution. This is a significant shift in paradigm, meaning that a fraction of LBVs could be the end stage of massive star evolution, rather than a transitory evolutionary phase. We suggest that type IIb SN could have LBV as progenitors, and a prime example could be SN 2008ax.
Inferring morphology and strength of magnetic fields from proton radiographs

Proton radiography is an important diagnostic method for laser plasma experiments and is particularly important in the analysis of magnetized plasmas. The theory of radiographic image analysis has heretofore only permitted somewhat limited analysis of the radiographs of such plasmas. We furnish here a theory that remedies this deficiency. We show that to linear order in magnetic field gradients, proton radiographs are projection images of the MHD current along the proton trajectories. We demonstrate that in the linear regime (i.e., the small image contrast regime), the full structure of the projected perpendicular magnetic field can be reconstructed by solving a steady-state inhomogeneous 2-dimensional diffusion equation sourced by the radiograph fluence contrast data. We explore the validity of the scheme with increasing image contrast, as well as limitations of the inversion method due to the Poisson noise, discretization errors, radiograph edge effects, and obstruction by laser target structures. We also provide a separate analysis that is suited to the inference of isotropic-homogeneous magnetic turbulence spectra. Finally, we discuss extension of these results to the nonlinear regime (i.e., the order unity image contrast regime).
Ontology of Card Sleights

We present a machine-readable movement writing for sleight-of-hand moves with cards—a “Labanotation of card magic.” This scheme of movement writing contains 440 categories of motion, and appears to taxonomize all card sleights that have appeared in over 1500 publications. The movement writing is axiomatized in SROIQ(D) Description Logic, and collected formally as an Ontology of Card Sleights, a computational ontology that extends the Basic Formal Ontology and the Information Artifact Ontology. The Ontology of Card Sleights is implemented in OWL DL, a Description Logic fragment of the Web Ontology Language. While ontologies have historically been used to classify at a less granular level, the algorithmic nature of card tricks allows us to transcribe a performer's actions step by step. We conclude by discussing design criteria we have used to ensure the ontology can be accessed and modified with a simple click-and-drag interface. This may allow database searches and performance transcriptions by users with card magic knowledge, but no ontology background.
TagSeq for gene expression in non‐model plants: A pilot study at the Santa Rita Experimental Range NEON core site

Premise TagSeq is a cost-effective approach for gene expression studies requiring a large number of samples. To date, TagSeq studies in plants have been limited to those with a high-quality reference genome. We tested the suitability of reference transcriptomes for TagSeq in non-model plants, as part of a study of natural gene expression variation at the Santa Rita Experimental Range National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) core site. Methods Tissue for TagSeq was sampled from multiple individuals of four species (Bouteloua aristidoides and Eragrostis lehmanniana [Poaceae], Tidestromia lanuginosa [Amaranthaceae], and Parkinsonia florida [Fabaceae]) at two locations on three dates (56 samples total). One sample per species was used to create a reference transcriptome via standard RNA-seq. TagSeq performance was assessed by recovery of reference loci, specificity of tag alignments, and variation among samples. Results A high fraction of tags aligned to each reference and mapped uniquely. Expression patterns were quantifiable for tens of thousands of loci, which revealed consistent spatial differentiation in expression for all species. Discussion TagSeq using de novo reference transcriptomes was an effective approach to quantifying gene expression in this study. Tags were highly locus specific and generated biologically informative profiles for four non-model plant species.
Comment on ‘Review of sparse sufficient dimension reduction’

We congratulate the authors on a very interesting overview of sparse sufficient dimension reduction (SDR). Sparse SDR methods are discussed in both the classical n>p setting as well as the high-dim...
MDPV self-administration in female rats: influence of reinforcement history.

A subset of male rats that self-administer 3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) have unusually high levels of drug intake; however, factor(s) that influence this behavior (e.g., reinforcement history and sex) are unknown. Characterize the reinforcing potency and effectiveness of MDPV in female rats to determine whether (1) a subset of females also develop high levels of MDPV self-administration (i.e., a high-responder phenotype) and (2) the degree to which the high-responder phenotype is influenced by various reinforcement histories (i.e., responding for cocaine or food). Female Sprague Dawley rats initially responded for MDPV (0.032 mg/kg/infusion), cocaine (0.32 mg/kg/infusion), or food (45-mg grain pellet) under fixed ratio (FR) 1 and FR5 schedules of reinforcement. After 20 sessions, the cocaine- and food-history rats responded for MDPV for 20 additional sessions. Dose-response curves for MDPV were generated under FR5 and progressive ratio (PR) schedules of reinforcement. A subset of rats responding for MDPV developed high levels of MDPV intake. A history of responding for cocaine, but not food, inhibited the development of high levels of MDPV intake. Large individual differences were observed in the level of self-administration when MDPV was available under an FR5, but not PR, schedule of reinforcement. MDPV functions as a powerful reinforcer in female rats, as has been previously reported in male rats. The substantial variability in MDPV self-administration between subjects may be related to individual differences in human drug-taking behavior.
A review of the experience with pediatric written requests issued for oncology drug products.

Background Pediatric anticancer drug development has numerous challenges. The Pediatric Research Equity Act (PREA) and the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (BPCA) were passed to address pediatric drug development deficiencies in general. Until recently, the requirements for pediatric evaluation of most oncology products developed for adult cancers have been waived. Because children typically do not have the same type of cancers, which occur commonly in adults, or the indication or drug had been granted an orphan designation, PREA therefore has had no impact. Pediatric studies for labeling updates are largely done through BPCA by a written request (WR) issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Because the cancers that occur in pediatric and adult populations do not share the same etiology or natural history, there are limited opportunities to extrapolate adult efficacy and safety to the pediatric population. The characteristics of individual pediatric studies included in WRs have varied greatly over time. Procedure In this study, we searched WRs that were issued by the FDA since 2001. We found 40 such requests issued for oncology drugs and biologics, which had been accepted by sponsors. Results Clinical trials included in 23 of the WRs have been concluded, 19 have resulted in exclusivity, and three drugs that were studied have been approved for use in pediatric populations. Herein, we present the spectrum of WRs from a regulatory, study design, dosing, formulation, analysis plan, evidentiary standard of efficacy, and safety perspective. Conclusions This provides information on requests issued in the past nearly 20 years and studies that are completed. As WRs have provided the only regulatory mechanism to assure pediatric cancer drug development, this can potentially provide insight on how pediatric cancer drug development may change in the future.
Normal observers show no evidence for blindsight in facial emotion perception.

Some researchers have argued that normal human observers can exhibit "blindsight-like" behavior: the ability to discriminate or identify a stimulus without being aware of it. However, we recently used a bias-free task to show that what looks like blindsight may in fact be an artifact of typical experimental paradigms' susceptibility to response bias. While those findings challenge previous reports of blindsight in normal observers, they do not rule out the possibility that different stimuli or techniques could still reveal perception without awareness. One intriguing candidate is emotion processing, since processing of emotional stimuli (e.g. fearful/happy faces) has been reported to potentially bypass conscious visual circuits. Here we used the bias-free blindsight paradigm to investigate whether emotion processing might reveal "featural blindsight," i.e. ability to identify a face's emotion without introspective access to the task-relevant features that led to the discrimination decision. However, we saw no evidence for emotion processing "featural blindsight": as before, whenever participants could identify a face's emotion they displayed introspective access to the task-relevant features, matching predictions of a Bayesian ideal observer. These results add to the growing body of evidence that perceptual discrimination ability without introspective access may not be possible for neurologically intact observers.
A whole blood thrombus mimic: Constitutive behavior under simple shear

Deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism affect 300,000-600,000 patients each year in the US. To better understand the highly mechanical pathophysiology of pulmonary embolism, we set out to develop an in-vitro thrombus mimic and to test this mimic under large deformation simple shear. In addition to reporting on the mechanics of our mimics under simple shear, we explore the sensitivity of their mechanics to coagulation conditions and blood storage time, and compare three hyperelastic material models for their ability to fit our data. We found that thrombus mimics made from whole blood demonstrate strain-stiffening, a negative Poynting effect, and hysteresis when tested quasi-statically to 50% strain under simple shear. Additionally, we found that the stiffness of these mimics does not significantly vary with coagulation conditions or blood storage times. Of the three hyperelastic constitutive models that we tested, the Ogden model provided the best fits to both shear stress and normal stress. In conclusion, we developed a robust protocol to generate regularly-shaped, homogeneous thrombus mimics that lend themselves to simple shear testing under large deformation. Future studies will extend our model to include the effect of maturation and explore its fracture properties toward a better understanding of embolization.
InterLock: an intercorrelated logic and routing locking

In this paper, we propose a canonical prune-and-SAT (CP&SAT) attack for breaking state-of-the-art routing-based obfuscation techniques. In the CP&SAT attack, we first encode the key-programmable routing blocks (keyRBs) based on an efficient SAT encoding mechanism suited for detailed routing constraints, and then efficiently re-encode and reduce the CNF corresponded to the keyRB using a bounded variable addition (BVA) algorithm. In the CP&SAT attack, this is done before subjecting the circuit to the SAT attack. We illustrate that this encoding and BVA-based pre-processing significantly reduces the size of the CNF corresponded to the routing-based obfuscated circuit, in the result of which we observe 100% success rate for breaking prior art routing-based obfuscation techniques. Further, we propose a new intercorrelated logic and routing locking technique, or in short InterLock, as a countermeasure to mitigate the CP&SAT attack. In Interlock, in addition to hiding the connectivity, a part of the logic (gates) in the selected timing paths are also implemented in the keyRB(s). We illustrate that when the logic gates are twisted with keyRBs, the BVA could not provide any advantage as a pre-processing step. Our experimental results show that, by using InterLock, with only three 8×8 or only two 16×16 keyRBs (twisted with actual logic gates), the resilience against existing attacks as well as our new proposed CP&SAT attack would be guaranteed while, on average, the delay/area overhead is less than 10% for even medium-size benchmark circuits.
Biased TextRank: Unsupervised Graph-Based Content Extraction

We introduce Biased TextRank, a graph-based content extraction method inspired by the popular TextRank algorithm that ranks text spans according to their importance for language processing tasks and according to their relevance to an input “focus.” Biased TextRank enables focused content extraction for text by modifying the random restarts in the execution of TextRank. The random restart probabilities are assigned based on the relevance of the graph nodes to the focus of the task. We present two applications of Biased TextRank: focused summarization and explanation extraction, and show that our algorithm leads to improved performance on two different datasets by significant ROUGE-N score margins. Much like its predecessor, Biased TextRank is unsupervised, easy to implement and orders of magnitude faster and lighter than current state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing methods for similar tasks.
The school to prison pipeline: quantitative evidence to guide school counselor advocacy

The school to prison pipeline begins with disciplinary incidents which result in suspensions, expulsions, and referrals to law enforcement. We analyzed 230,988 disciplinary infractions from one yea...
Analysis and prediction of shock formation in acoustic energy transfer systems

Losses associated with nonlinear wave propagation and exhibited by acoustic wave distortion and shock formation compromise the efficiency of contactless acoustic energy transfer systems. As such, predicting the shock formation distance and its dependence on the amplitude of the excitation is essential for their efficiency, design, and operation. We present an analytical approach capable of predicting the shock formation distance of acoustic waves generated by a baffled disk with arbitrary deformation in a weakly viscous fluid medium. The lossless Westervelt equation, used to model the nonlinear wave propagation, is asymptotically expanded based on the amplitude of the excitation. Because the solutions of the first- and second-order equations decay at different rates, we implement the method of renormalization and introduce a coordinate transformation to identify and eliminate the secular terms. The approach yields two partial differential equations that can be solved to predict the formation distance either analytically or numerically much faster than time-domain numerical simulations. The analysis and results are validated with solutions obtained from a nonlinear finite element simulation and previous experimental measurements.
Distance measures in gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology

We present quantities which characterize the sensitivity of gravitational-wave observatories to sources at cosmological distances. In particular, we introduce and generalize the horizon, range, response, and reach distances. These quantities incorporate a number of important effects, including cosmologically well-defined distances and volumes, cosmological redshift, cosmological time dilation, and rate density evolution. In addition, these quantities incorporate unique aspects of gravitational wave detectors, such as the variable sky sensitivity of the detectors and the scaling of the sensitivity with inverse distance. An online calculator (this https URL) and python notebook (this https URL) to determine GW distances are available. We provide answers to the question: "How far can gravitational-wave detectors hear?"
Mapping the dynamic transfer functions of epigenome editing

Biological information can be encoded in the dynamics of signaling components which has been implicated in a broad range of physiological processes including stress response, oncogenesis, and stem cell differentiation. To study the complexity of information transfer across the eukaryotic promoter, we screened 119 dynamic conditions-modulating the frequency, intensity, and pulse width of light-regulating the binding of an epigenome editor to a fluorescent reporter. This system revealed highly tunable gene expression and filtering behaviors and provided the most comprehensive quantification to date of the maximum amount of information that can be reliably transferred across a promoter as ~1.7 bits. Using a library of over 100 orthogonal epigenome editors, we further determined that chromatin state could be used to tune mutual information and expression levels, as well as completely alter the input-output transfer function of the promoter. This system unlocks the information-rich content of eukaryotic epigenome editing.
Computing Robustly Forward Invariant Sets for Mixed-Monotone Systems

This work presents new tools for studying reachability and set invariance for continuous-time mixed-monotone dynamical systems subject to a disturbance input. The vector field of a mixed-monotone system is decomposable via a decomposition function into increasing and decreasing components, and this decomposition enables embedding the original dynamics in a higher-dimensional embedding system. While the original system is subject to an unknown disturbance input, the embedding system has no disturbances and its trajectories provide bounds for finite-time reachable sets of the original dynamics. Our main contribution is to show how one can efficiently identify robustly forward invariant and attractive sets for mixed-monotone systems by studying certain equilibria of this embedding system. We show also how this approach, when applied to the backward-time dynamics, establishes different robustly forward invariant sets for the original dynamics. Lastly, we present an independent result for computing decomposition functions for systems with polynomial dynamics. These tools and results are demonstrated through several examples and a case study.
Anti-Semitism and opposition to Israeli government policies: the roles of prejudice and information

Past research on the link between anti-Semitism and criticism of the Israeli government has revealed a partial correlation between the two. However, among the political arguments that have inspired...
Time-consistent policy and persistent changes in inflation☆

Abstract This paper presents a model of dynamically consistent monetary policy that explains changes in inflation over time. In the model — as in the postwar United States — adverse supply shocks trigger increases in inflation. High inflation persists until a tough policymaker causes a recession to disinflate. The paper also proposes an approach to selecting a unique equilibrium in infinite-horizon models of monetary policy.
Stock returns and output growth in emerging and advanced economies

Abstract This paper studies the correlation between output growth and lagged stock returns in a panel of emerging market economies and advanced economies. It finds that the proportion of countries in which this correlation is significant is the same for emerging market economies as it is for advanced economies using yearly data, and somewhat lower using quarterly data. Asset prices therefore seem to contain valuable information to forecast output also in emerging market economies. Moreover, the paper finds that the strength of the correlation between output growth and lagged stock returns is significantly related to a number of stock market characteristics, such as a high market capitalization to GDP ratio and, less robustly, English legal origin and the number of listed domestic companies and initial public offerings.
Managerial Disclosures and Shareholder Litigation

This paper explores the link between shareholder lawsuits brought under Rule 10b-5 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and managerial disclosures of prospective information. When the manager's information is such that there is no affirmative duty to disclose under Rule 10b-5, previous research has shown that the manager will withhold his information if it is sufficiently unfavorable and will disclose it otherwise. When the manager's information is such that there exists an affirmative duty to disclose under Rule 10b-5, it is shown here that the manager will release either good news or news that is sufficiently bad. Further, the good news disclosures are expected to be more precise than those that reflect unfavorable information. It is also demonstrated that the probability of a disclosure will increase with both the precision of the manager's information and the variability of his firm's earnings.
The Crisis Exposed by Pari Passu

To this practitioner, The Three and a Half Minute Transaction by Mitu Gulati and Robert E. Scott describes a “crisis” in the Chinese sense of a situation that presents a danger and an opportunity. The danger is that the clients’ demands for lower legal fees, the mechanized contractproduction process, and the unwillingness to subsidize research will lead to offshoring of this contract drafting service in the same way that much of the American manufacturing capacity has moved abroad. If the contracts are produced in “three and a half minutes” by rote usage, as the title suggests, and no innovative thinking is going into producing the contracts, it would seem that this task is ripe for outsourcing. In fact, law firms and legal departments are now outsourcing (including offshoring) more and more of their document preparation to legal-process outsourcing firms. The logic for outsourcing these contracts seems unassailable. Perhaps the outsourcing will only start with the most standard documents, and would always involve review by a senior lawyer in the United States. But it could present a tremendous blow to young associates and to the future of this—and every other—contract drafting practice in the United States. How law firms deal with this challenge will depend on how creative and far-sighted they are. Their response is a topic for someone else to study. I would like to consider the opportunity that The Three and a Half Minute Transaction presents for legal education.
Coherent control of injection currents in high-quality films of Bi2Se3

Films of the topological insulator Bi2Se3 are grown by molecular beam epitaxy with in-situ reflection high-energy electron diffraction. The films are shown to be high-quality by X-ray reflectivity and diffraction and atomic-force microscopy. Quantum interference control of photocurrents is observed by excitation with harmonically related pulses and detected by terahertz radiation. The injection current obeys the expected excitation irradiance dependence, showing linear dependence on the fundamental pulse irradiance and square-root irradiance dependence of the frequency-doubled optical pulses. The injection current also follows a sinusoidal relative-phase dependence between the two excitation pulses. These results confirm the third-order nonlinear optical origins of the coherently controlled injection current. Experiments are compared to a tight-binding band structure to illustrate the possible optical transitions that occur in creating the injection current.
Reconsideration of the Markov Chain Evidence on Unemployment Rate Asymmetry

Using 15 years worth of additional data, a study is carried out to explore the extent to which the results in Rothman (1991) still hold. Using raw unflltered data, the aggregate unemployment rate appears to be a Neftci-type symmetric process. But use of two detrending procedures produces strong evidence in favor of asymmetry for this series. The most robust result is that the manufacturing sector unemployment rate is strongly asymmetric across use of both the unflltered and detrended data. The analysis also shows that reliance on the asymptotic distribution of the underlying test statistics can often lead to spurious inference.
Optimal Tax Treatment of the Family: Married Couples

Abstract This paper examines the appropriate tax treatment of the family in a series of analytical models and numerical examples. For a population of taxpaying couples which differ in earning capacity, we drive the optimal tax rates for each potential earner. These rates depend crucially upon own and cross labor supply elasticities and the joint distribution of wage rates. Our results suggest that the current system of income splitting in the United States, under which husbands and wives face equal marginal tax rates, is nonoptimal. Using results from recent econometric studies, and allowing for a sensitivity analysis, the optimal tax rates on secondary workers in the family are much lower than those on primary earners. Indeed, our best estimate is that the secondary earner would face tax rates only one-half as high as primary earners.
Age Discrimination Legislation in the United States

Legislation prohibiting age discrimination in the United States dates back to the 1960s, when along with the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act barring discrimination against women and minorities, Congress passed the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Questions regarding the rationale for and effectiveness of age discrimination legislation are likely to become increasingly important in light of a rapidly aging population in the United States (and other industrialized countries). This article provides a summary, critical review, and synthesis of what we know about age discrimination legislation. It first traces out the legislative history and the evolving case law and discusses implementation of the law. It then reviews the existing research on age discrimination legislation—research that addresses the rationale for the legislation, its effectiveness, and criticisms. (JEL J1, J7, L3) I. INTRODUCTION Legislation prohibiting age discrimination in the United States dates back to the decade of the 1960s, when along with the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act barring discrimination against women and minorities, Congress passed the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Gender and race discrimination per se, along with the impact of the Equal Pay Act and Civil Rights Act, have been the primary focus of researchers studying discrimination and by far the more vociferously debated. But a thorough analysis and understanding of age discrimination legislation is critical. The U.S. Census Bureau’s ‘‘middle series’’ projections indicate that by 2025 the share of the U.S. population aged 65 and over will grow from about 13% to 19%, and the share aged 55 and over will grow from 21% to 30% (see www. census. gov/population/projections/nation/summary). A rapidly aging population in the United States (and a similar phenomenon in other industrialized countries) threatens to vastly increase the social costs of any discriminatory barriers to older workers’ employment or, alternatively, to magnify any costs or distortions caused by age discrimination legislation. The goal of this article is to provide a summary, critical review, and synthesis of what we know about age discrimination legislation. In so doing, the article first traces out the legislative history and the evolving case law and discusses implementation of the law. It then moves on to review the existing research on age discrimination legislation—research that addresses the rationale for the legislation, its effectiveness, and criticisms.
The dynamic nature of survival determinants in e-commerce

The dynamic effects of survival determinants in e-commerce are tested using longitudinal data on 460 e-tailers. This is achieved through the incorporation of both time-varying covariates and coefficients in a discrete hazard rate model. The model includes elements of competitive strategy, industry structure, firm and product characteristics, and the macro environment. The study demonstrates the changing effect over time of factors affecting survival. For example, order of entry advantages are observed, but they are short-lived. This finding shows that e-tailers cannot rely on early entry as a strategic move in the long run. E-tailers with more media presence seem to survive longer. Being publicly traded and selling products with digital characteristics present advantages for e-tailers only in the beginning years, but they are not sustainable over long time periods. Survival chances decrease with higher competitive density, market growth rate, and equity market level at the time of entry. Conversely, economic growth tends to increase survival chances. The study also finds an inverted-U relationship between the hazard of exit and firm age. The conclusion section discusses the implications of the time-varying nature of survival determinants.
Financial Markets and Firm Dynamics

Recent studies have shown that the dynamics of firms (growth, job reallocation, and exit) are negatively correlated with the initial size of the firm and its age. In this paper we analyze whether financial factors, in addition to technological differences, are important in generating these dynamics. We introduce financial-market frictions in a basic model of industry dynamics with persistent shocks and show that the combination of persistent shocks and financial frictions can account for the simultaneous dependence of firm dynamics on size (once we control for age) and on age (once we control for size).
Optimal inflation policy

Abstract This paper considers the problem of optimal long-run monetary policy. It shows that optimal inflation policy involves trading off two quite different considerations. First, increases in the rate of inflation tax the holding of many balances, leading to a deadweight loss as excessive resources are devoted to economizing on cash balances. Second, increases in the rate of inflation raise capital intensity. As long as the economy has a capital stock short of the golden rule level, increases in capital intensity raise the level of consumption. Ignoring the second consideration leads to the common recommendation that the money growth rate be set so that the nominal interest rate is zero. Taking it into account can lead to significant modifications in the ‘full liquidity rule’. Interactions of inflation policy with financial intermediation and taxation are also considered. The results taken together suggest that inflation can have important welfare effects, and that optimal inflation policy is an empirical question, which depends on the structure of the economy.
Using forecast evaluation to improve the accuracy of the Greenbook forecast

Abstract Recently, Patton and Timmermann (2012) proposed a more powerful kind of forecast efficiency regression at multiple horizons, and showed that it provides evidence against the efficiency of the Fed’s Greenbook forecasts. I use their forecast efficiency evaluation to propose a method for adjusting the Greenbook forecasts. Using this method in a real-time out-of-sample forecasting exercise, I find that it provides modest improvements in the accuracies of the forecasts for the GDP deflator and CPI, but not for other variables. The improvements are statistically significant in some cases, with magnitudes of up to 18% in root mean square prediction error.
What is the NBA

The National Basketball Association's (NBA) organizational structure is curious. While courts at times refer to the NBA as a joint venture, and at other times as a single entity, their analyses are conducted not for state organization law purposes, but to assess the NBA’s compliance with federal antitrust law. Commentators, too, consistently address the NBA’s organizational structure only under antitrust law and not state organization law. As I argue, given the different purposes of these two legal regimes—antitrust law to protect consumers through preserving competition, and state organization law to ensure managers are faithful to the business purpose and to create a default structure among owners and managers—conclusions about the NBA’s organizational structure for purposes of compliance with antitrust law do not control the analysis of the NBA’s structure for purposes of state organization law. To fill the gap in case law and commentary, this article analyzes the NBA’s organizational form under state organization law. This analysis is important because the NBA’s organizational form impacts the rights and duties of the member team-owners of the NBA. If, for example, the NBA is a joint venture partnership under state organization law—that is, an association of team owners who have come together to pursue a limited scope business for profit—then, by default, its members would owe fiduciary duties to the other members and any member could seek judicial expulsion of a recalcitrant member. * Associate Professor of Law, Marquette University Law School. Any mistakes are my own. GROSSMAN FINAL FORMATTED 1/23/2015 11:20 AM 102 MARQUETTE SPORTS LAW REVIEW [Vol. 25:1
Security Theory in the “New Regionalism”

The relevance of regional security theories has grown in the wake of the Cold War. The global system has more participants—is less Eurocentric with Third World states having greater autonomy and involvement—and clearly unipolar, shifting the locus of conflict down from the global level. A new wave of regionalist scholarship has arisen in response. This review identifies this literature’s central themes and suggested new variables. Its foundational and most contested challenge to international relations (IR) theory revolves around the autonomy of a regional level of analysis between the state and the globe. Accepting such autonomy, the literature broadly settles on three variables specific to regional structures. First, regional subsystems are porous. Intervention from above can overlay local dynamics. Second, proximity qualifies the security dilemma dramatically. Most states only threaten their neighbors, thus creating meaningful and distinct regional dynamics. Third, weak state-dominant regional complexes generate a shared internal security dilemma that trumps the external one. Regional organizations serve to repress shared centrifugal threats through pooled rather than ceded sovereignty.
Hearing the Voice of the People: Human Rights as if People Mattered

When we study human rights empirically, what do we mean to study? The existence of institutions that enable the realization of rights or the enjoyment of those rights? The absence of flagrant violations of some of the basic individual rights or the sense that one's rights will not be flagrantly violated? What theory of human rights should we use? Most positive theory of human rights—for example, empirical theories about the correlation between political institutions or economic conditions on human rights recognition—are based on the first kind of normative human rights theory, the one that defines rights outside of the struggle for them. This article puts forward a methodology for the empirical study of human rights from the inside: do people enjoy their human rights? Using the Latin American Public Opinion Project democracy survey database, the authors propose a new way to measure human rights.