cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Pretrial Detention and the Right to Be Monitored

The typical academic concern with respect to advancing criminal justice technology, be it wiretaps or surveillance drones, is that there will be too much of it. In the context of pretrial justice, however, we have the opposite problem. Although detention for dangerousness has received far more attention in recent years, a significant number of non-dangerous but impecunious defendants are jailed to ensure their presence at trial due to continued, widespread reliance on a money bail system. Increasingly sophisticated forms of electronic monitoring have the potential to mitigate flight risk at least as well as money bail at a cost to defendants and the state lower than money bail’s necessary concomitant, pretrial detention. But the long, mostly sad history of bail reform efforts suggests that, unlike wiretaps, electronic monitoring in lieu of detention will not be adopted through the political process in many jurisdictions.This paper develops two related claims. First, in the near term, electronic monitoring will present a superior alternative to money bail for addressing flight risk. In contrast to previous proposals for reducing pretrial detention rates, including increased use of personal recognizance bonds and varying forms of supervision by pretrial services agencies, electronic monitoring has the potential to both reduce fugitive rates (by allowing the defendant to be easily located) and government expenditures (by reducing the number of defendants detained at state expense). Moreover, the usual objections to government monitoring – the intrusion on individual privacy and the threat of surveillance extending to new segments of society – have relatively little force in the pretrial context, where detention currently all but extinguishes privacy interests, and the number of criminal defendants is largely independent of the means of preventing flight.Secondly, despite the potential benefits to defendants and governments, electronic monitoring is not likely to be adopted by legislative or executive action. The commercial bail industry has a significant financial incentive to maintain the status quo, and it has repeatedly blunted previous reform efforts. Thus, although there is a lively debate over the institutions best suited to respond to advances in investigative technology, here the best prospect for meaningful change is clearly the judiciary generally, and the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of Excessive Bail more specifically. To achieve this goal, however, the courts will, for the first time, have to develop a meaningful jurisprudence of excessiveness to test the fit between the government’s pretrial goals and the means employed to accomplish them. The paper begins this inquiry, arguing that the text, purpose, and history of the Amendment all support the requirement that the chosen means be, at minimum, not substantially more burdensome than necessary. Under this standard, a money bail system that leads to widespread detention without a corresponding increase in performance or savings cannot survive in the face of a less restrictive technological alternative.
Designing quality into products: The use of accounting data in new product development

Accountants have developed tools to evaluate firms' quality performance; however, a focus on evaluating one aspect of quality ?? conformance to pre-established specifications ?? has limited unnecessarily accountants' contribution to quality improvement. Product and process design are the most effective levers in quality improvement and cost reduction; yet, product designers often base decisions on cost estimates that do not reflect the experience of the firm. This paper presents a quality management framework that spans product design, production and consumption or use by end users. We describe and identify shortcomings of cost estimation methods used by product design engineers and propose a framework for new accounting information that focuses on achieving "design quality." The framework incorporates data from the relatively new practices of target costing and activity-based costing and identifies opportunities to develop accounting data that promotes quality being designed into, rather than inspected into, products.
Gideon and the Effective Assistance of Counsel: The Rhetoric and the Reality

There is general agreement that the “promise” of Gideon has been systematically denied to large numbers of criminal defendants. In some cases, no counsel is provided; in many others, excessive caseloads and lack of resources prevent appointed counsel from providing effective assistance. Public defenders are forced to violate their ethical obligations by excessive case assignments that make it impossible for them to practice law in accordance with professional standards, to say nothing of Sixth Amendment commands. This worsening situation is caused by the failure of governmental bodies to properly fund indigent defense services and by the refusal of courts to provide adequate remedial measures to ensure that appointed counsel have the time and resources necessary to meet their constitutional obligations. I propose a litigation strategy as a means of confronting the issues of funding and resources that incorporates both Sixth Amendment and professional responsibility standards to enable courts to order structural relief in cases of systemic deficiencies. The Supreme Courts of Florida and Missouri have recently applied these principles in permitting public defenders to withdraw from cases where excessive caseloads and under-funding have interfered with their ethical obligations to their clients. Recognizing that the Strickland post-conviction test was not the sole means of enforcing Sixth Amendment rights, these courts permitted pre-trial challenges that did not depend on a showing of sub-standard performance or actual prejudice in an individual case. Other courts have permitted pre-trial challenges as well and the United States Supreme Court has recognized the significance of a lawyer’s professional judgments and obligations in fulfilling their ethical and constitutional duties. The article concludes by discussing three cases from Pennsylvania that show both the promise and the difficulties of litigation in achieving systemic reform.
Domestic Violence Against Latinas by Latino Males: An Analysis of Race, National Origin, and Gender Differentials

Cultural and racial differences must be central considerations to any strategy in the domestic violence movement. Latinas face multiple barriers because of their race, national origin, and gender, affecting how they experience and respond to domestic violence. This Article examines the various factors that are unique to the political, social an economic status of Latinas, drawing on statistics, demographic data, common representations and caricatures of Latinas and Latinos, and Latinas' own descriptions of violence. The Article employs critical race feminism to critique the most significant efforts currently within the legal and social service sectors to assist battered women. It challenges legislators and law enforcement officials to consider the different experiences and realities of women of color when designing effective law enforcement for violence between intimate partners, and to implement social service programs that meet the specific needs of battered Latina women. Language barriers and the historical experiences of Latinos and Latinas in the United States and recent immigrants' experiences in their countries of national origin, are also discussed as important considerations for designing legislative and judicial responses to interpersonal violence in the Latino community.
Occupational Upgrading and the Business Cycle

Many economics theories suggest that the assignment of workers to occupations changes over the business cycle: expansions allow workers to upgrade to occupations that pay higher wages and require more skill. This paper provides some empirical evidence from the USA that such upgrading does occur and that, as predicted, it has greater effects on less-skilled individuals. Furthermore, the skill composition of new hires changes over the business cycle, even within occupations. Consistent with a job competition model, the education levels of new hires within occupations are higher when the unemployment rate is high and this effect is more pronounced in lower-paying occupations. The changes in assignment imply that low-skilled individuals suffer most from recessions in terms of occupation quality and unemployment. The results are consistent with employers responding to a greater supply of educated workers by increasing hiring standards, and so imply that the social return to education may be lower than the private return. However, the results are also consistent with more neo-classical models of the labor market.
Towards Online Steering of Flame Spray Pyrolysis Nanoparticle Synthesis

Flame Spray Pyrolysis (FSP) is a manufacturing technique to mass produce engineered nanoparticles for applications in catalysis, energy materials, composites, and more. FSP instruments are highly dependent on a number of adjustable parameters, including fuel injection rate, fuel-oxygen mixtures, and temperature, which can greatly affect the quality, quantity, and properties of the yielded nanoparticles. Optimizing FSP synthesis requires monitoring, analyzing, characterizing, and modifying experimental conditions. Here, we propose a hybrid CPU-GPU Difference of Gaussians (DoG) method for characterizing the volume distribution of unburnt solution, so as to enable near-real-time optimization and steering of FSP experiments. Comparisons against standard implementations show our method to be an order of magnitude more efficient. This surrogate signal can be deployed as a component of an online end-to-end pipeline that maximizes the synthesis yield.
Teaching a New Negotiation Skills Paradigm

Negotiation labels -- of styles or approaches -- can hide or overshadow the real focus of negotiation skills training. We need to categorize in order to convey a significant amount of complex information. We also know that style labels are pithy and easy to understand. At the same time, we need to teach the weaknesses of labels and be sure that our students are not over reliant on the simplification that labels provide. Students need to struggle with the nuances of skills -- the fact that skills can seem contradictory or counterintuitive leads us to want to oversimplify (e.g. all competitive negotiators are jerks, all accommodators are nice) rather than more effectively parsing each skill to stand on its own. This is particularly important in the areas of social intuition and ethicality which have, up to this point, been subsumed in discussions of style without holding their own style label.When we focus on skills -- assertiveness, empathy, flexibility, social intuition, and ethicality -- we can provide students clear goals for improving in all areas while making them more aware of their particular strengths and weaknesses. Further, we can highlight the choices that they must make along the course of negotiation in terms of using each skill rather than sending them off with guidance only at the style level. Finally, we can give students a different construct -- negotiation origami -- on how to choose among the skills based on client, counterpart, and context that will give them a more sophisticated understanding of the evolving and nuanced process of negotiation.
Corporate Dystopia The Ethics of Corporate Political Spending

This article is concerned with the moral permissibility of corporate political activities under the existing legal framework in the United States. The author unpacks and examines the standard case ...
Stock price clustering on option expiration dates

Abstract This paper presents striking evidence that option trading changes the prices of underlying stocks. In particular, we show that on expiration dates the closing prices of stocks with listed options cluster at option strike prices. On each expiration date, the returns of optionable stocks are altered by an average of at least 16.5 basis points, which translates into aggregate market capitalization shifts on the order of $9 billion. We provide evidence that hedge rebalancing by option market makers and stock price manipulation by firm proprietary traders contribute to the clustering.
Corporate bond returns and the financial crisis

Abstract We examine effects of government actions and related accounting policies on the corporate bond market implied by changes in relations between aggregate bond returns and cash flow and discount rate news. We capture the influence of risk by partitioning bonds into investment and speculative grades. We use earnings changes as a proxy for cash flow news and T-Bill rate changes as a proxy for discount rate news. As expected, during non-crisis periods, we observe a positive relation between earnings changes and bond returns and a negative relation for T-Bill rate changes. A combination of government bailouts of large financial institutions and mark-to-market accounting preserves the positive relation for earnings changes during the crisis for investment grade bonds, while absence of these factors leads to an insignificant relation for speculative grade. Intervention by the Federal Reserve to induce lower interest rates as earnings were declining, a flight to safety shifting demand from corporate bonds to T-Bills, and low cost funds invested in risk free investments explain a reversal of the relation between bond returns and T-Bill rate changes for both grades.
Elections as poorer reflections of preferences under compulsory voting

Compulsory voting is known to increase electoral participation, but its second-order effects are not well established. In this paper, I argue that vote choices are a relatively poor reflection of individuals' preferences under compulsory voting, as it boosts participation among those who are unlikely to cast well-reasoned ballots—the politically disinterested and unknowledgeable and those who see elections as flawed or pointless. I test this expectation with cross-national survey data, and I conduct supplementary tests with regional survey data from Switzerland, which employs compulsory voting in select cantons. Results from both sets of analyses support my expectations, suggesting that elections conducted under compulsory rules are relatively unlikely to signal the preferences of the voting population.
Constitutional home rule and judicial scrutiny

This Article was prepared in connection with the Symposium on “Home Rule,” co-sponsored by The Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado Law School, and the Denver University Law Review. The distribution of powers between levels of government in the state system presents a puzzle for constitutional theory, likewise, it presents a puzzle - actually, more of a ubiquitous governance dilemma - for modem policy making. The specter of Hunter v. Pittsburgh and its injunction that municipalities are best understood as creatures of state government and, therefore, as fundamentally subordinate entities, haunts modern local government law At the same time, constitutional home rule conceivably upends the standard view by according a sphere of authority - indeed, a sovereignty of sorts - to municipalities in the state’s structure of governance and its constitutional theory. How constitutional home rule can be reconciled with the Hunter principle is an enduring puzzle in American local government law. While home rule is the creation of legislatures acting within constitutional conventions or through other mechanisms, the contours and content of home rule have been developed by the courts through adjudication Home rule doctrine reflects a far-flung effort over more than a century’s time to find meaning in the ambiguous phrases “local affairs” and “matters of statewide concern.” The result of these efforts has been a highly developed, and still developing, case law,. one that involves drawing lines between what is properly the domain of state government and those powers which may be exercised by municipalities free of state preemption. In this Article we ask: What are courts essentially doing when they review state/local conflicts under the rubric of constitutional home rule? And what insights into larger matters of judicial capability and doctrinal efficacy are afforded by a close examination of this work of the state courts? In Part I, we frame the home rule inquiry by describing in broad outlines the constitutional structure of municipal home rule In Part II, we undertake some field archeology, involving a close look at how state courts currently decide home rule cases. A better understanding of how the courts approach the potentially difficult task of defining and drawing lines between ‘local affairs” and “matters of statewide concern” will usefully illuminate both the larger conundrum of imperium in imperio home rule and the enterprise of line-drawing in structural constitutional law cases more generally. In Part III, we consider whether and to what extent the work of the state courts described in Part II can be deemed a success. Such an assessment, we believe, has implications not only for home rule and state constitutionalism, but also for the appropriate role of the courts in demarcating and enforcing federal constitutional boundaries of state regulatory immunity.
The Relative Bargaining Power of Employers and Unions in the Global Information Age: A Comparative Analysis of the United States and Japan

In this paper, we examine and compare the impact of American and Japanese labor law on the relative bargaining power of the labor and management within the context of the new global economy based on information technology. We begin by providing a simple economic definition of bargaining power and examining how it can be influenced by economic and legal factors. Next we discuss the impact of the new information technology and global economy on the employment relationship and how this has decreased union bargaining power relative to management bargaining power. Finally, we compare various facets of American and Japanese labor law that have a significant impact on the parties’ relative bargaining power and discuss how one might expect American and Japanese unions to fare in their negotiations with management in the new economic environment. ∗ Willard and Margaret Carr Professor of Labor and Employment Law, Indiana University—Bloomington. JD (1981), University of Michigan—Ann Arbor; PhD (economics, 1984), University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. This article was first presented July 15, 2008 in Tokyo Japan as part of the RIETI project on “‘Enterprise Law’ as an Infrastructure of an Incentive Mechanism.” My thanks to Professors Zenichi Shishido and Gillian Lester for inviting me to make this presentation. ∗∗ Law Clerk & Peggy Browning Fund Summer Fellow, International Union, UAW Legal Department, Solidarity House, Detroit Michigan. JD / MPA Candidate (Expected 2009), Indiana University—Bloomington.
A Practical Approach to Testing Calibration Strategies

A calibration strategy tries to match target moments using a model’s parameters. We propose tests for determining whether this is possible. The tests use moments at random parameter draws to assess whether the target moments are similar to the computed ones (evidence of existence) or appear to be outliers (evidence of non-existence). Our experiments show the tests are effective at detecting both existence and non-existence in a non-linear model. Multiple calibration strategies can be quickly tested using just one set of simulated data. Applying our approach to indirect inference allows for the testing of many auxiliary model specifications simultaneously. Code is provided.
The Distributional Heterogeneity of Growth Effects: Some Evidence

This paper applies quantile regression and non-parametric density estimation techniques to international data on long-run economic growth. The approach reveals that previously identified drivers of growth vary in their impact across the conditional distribution of international growth. Specifically, these factors display disparate effects in conditional low-growth and high-growth contexts. The results suggest that there is a general bias underlying prior research. The incumbent drivers of growth exhibit relatively larger coefficients, in absolute value, on the upper tail of the conditional growth distribution. This set of stylized facts identifies factors that might alter the international distribution of growth.
Identification of Asymmetric Prediction Intervals through Causal Forces

When causal forces are specified, the expected direction of the trend can be compared with the trend based on extrapolation. Series in which the expected trend conflicts with the extrapolated trend are called contrary series. We hypothesized that contrary series would have asymmetric forecast errors, with larger errors in the direction of the expected trend. Using annual series that contained minimal information about causality, we examined 671 contrary forecasts. As expected, most (81%) of the errors were in the direction of the causal forces. Also as expected, the asymmetries were more likely for longer forecast horizons; for six-year-ahead forecasts, 89% of the forecasts were in the expected direction. The asymmetries were often substantial. Contrary series should be flagged and treated separately when prediction intervals are estimated, perhaps by shifting the interval in the direction of the causal forces.
Bailouts, the incentive to manage risk, and financial crises

A firm's termination leads to bankruptcy costs. This may create an incentive for outside stakeholders or the firm's debtholders to bail out the firm as bankruptcy looms. Because of this implicit guarantee, firm shareholders have an incentive to increase volatility in order to exploit the implicit protection. However, if they increase volatility too much they may induce the guarantee-extending parties to “walk away.” I derive the optimal risk management rule in such a framework and show that it allows high volatility choices, while net worth is high. However, risk limits tighten abruptly when the firm's net worth declines below an endogenously determined threshold. Hence, the model reproduces the qualitative features of existing risk management rules, and can account for phenomena such as “flight to quality.”
Bank executive compensation structure, risk taking and the financial crisis

This paper investigates (1) how the composition of executive compensation is related to a bank’s incentive to take excessive risk, (2) whether executive compensation in larger banks, especially the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) banks, induces more severe moral hazard behavior, and (3) how the relation between bank executive compensation and risk taking changes before and during the recent financial crisis. We find that bank risk measured by the Z-score and the volatility of stock returns increases with both the percentages of short-term and long-term incentive compensation. However, greater proportion of incentive pay decreases the likelihood for a bank to become a problem or failed institution. This result holds for the periods before and during the recent financial crisis. The distress-mitigating effects of incentive compensation are further confirmed by our finding that both the proportions of bonus and long-term incentives are positively related to bank valuation and performance. Interestingly, we find that TBTF banks experience greater risk taking (lower Z-score) and are more likely to be in financial distress than smaller banks. However, greater incentive compensation in TBTF banks helps reduce their insolvency risk relative to smaller institutions.
The Twin Perils of the al-Aulaqi Case: The Treason Clause and the Equal Protection Clause

During March 2013, the U.S. news cycle was dominated by a legal question: "Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American . . . on American soil?" This represents the paramount question in American constitutional balancing: the total deprivation of a citizen’s life, liberty, and property by secret, unreviewable executive order weighted against the presidential duty and power to defend the people from warlike assault. In responding to this question, Attorney General Eric Holder, while denying that the President had this authority, added the seemingly innocuous qualifier, "[the American must] not [be] engaged in combat." Moreover, on March 4, 2013 Holder affirmed that in response to circumstances like the Pearl Harbor or September 11 attacks, the President may "authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without trial." Further, the distinction between when the President may and may not so deprive a citizen’s liberty appears to come down to if the citizen is or is not conducting a war or engaging in combat against the United States.In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a plurality of the Supreme Court addressed the liberty of Guantanamo detainees and held that citizen-terrorists (even those termed enemy combatants in the War on Terror) are entitled to due process: the actions considered by the Supreme Court, if committed by citizens, would be punishable as treason. Thus, there are twin perils confronting any court adjudicating a modern terrorism case where the defendant is a U.S. citizen. First, a court must avoid the temptation to draw immaterial distinctions between the constitutional definition of treason, on the one hand, and modern statutes criminalizing terrorism, on the other, or else risk ignoring the prohibition against constructive treasons. Then, it must take care to avoid the second peril, one that has yet to be confronted because every court to consider the interplay between the Treason Clause and citizen-terrorists to date has faltered at the first peril. Namely, courts must ensure that any differential treatment of a citizen-terrorist and a traitor does not violate the Equal Protection Clause. Therefore, based on citizenship alone, the execution of a U.S. citizen without judicial process — for those same terrorist acts — violates the prohibitions of both the Treason Clause and the Equal Protection Clause.
Free to Move? A Network Analytic Approach for Learning the Limits to Job Mobility

Abstract Job mobility has many overlapping determinants that are hard to characterize solely on the basis of industry or occupation transitions. Workers may match with, and move to, particular jobs on the basis of match quality, preferences, human capital, andmobility costs. This paper implements a novel method based on complex network analysis to describe how workers move from job to job. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), I find first that the labor market is composed of four distinct segments between which job mobility is relatively unlikely. Second, these segments are not well-described on the basis of industry, occupation, demographic characteristics, or education. Third, mobility segments are associated with earnings heterogeneity, and there is evidence of positive assortative matching across segments. Fourth, the boundaries to job mobility are counter-cyclical: workers move more freely when unemployment is low.
Dysautonomia in hypermobile Ehlers–Danlos syndrome and hypermobility spectrum disorders is associated with exercise intolerance and cardiac atrophy

Dysautonomia is a recognized manifestation in patients with joint hypermobility (JH) disorders. Symptoms can be highly debilitating and commonly include physical deconditioning and poor aerobic fitness. In this study, the prevalence of dysautonomia, range of associated symptoms, patient-reported physical activity levels, and echocardiographic features were assessed retrospectively in a cohort of 144 patients (94% female) with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) or hypermobility spectrum disorder (HSD). Echocardiographic parameters of left ventricular size and function were compared between patients with and without dysautonomia as well as to reported values from healthy controls. Dysautonomia was identified in 65% of female and 44% of male subjects and was associated with a high burden of symptomatology, most commonly exercise intolerance (78%). Exercise capacity was limited by dysautonomia, often postural symptoms, in half of all patients. We observed a reduction in physical activity following the onset or significant flare of hEDS/HSD, most strikingly noting the proportion of dysautonomic patients with sedentary lifestyle, which increased from 44% to 85%. JH-related dysautonomia was associated with smaller cardiac chamber sizes, consistent with the previous reports in positional orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. Dysautonomia is prevalent in patients with hEDS/HSD, and exercise intolerance is a key feature and leads to drastic decline in physical activity. Unfavorable cardiac geometry may underlie dysautonomia symptoms and may be due to cardiac atrophy in the setting of aerobic deconditioning.
Use of the inverse solution guidance algorithm method for RF ablation catheter guidance

INTRODUCTION We previously introduced the inverse solution guidance algorithm (ISGA) methodology using a Single Equivalent Moving Dipole model of cardiac electrical activity to localize both the exit site of a re-entrant circuit and the tip of a radiofrequency (RF) ablation catheter. The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of ISGA for ablation catheter guidance in an animal model. METHODS Ventricular tachycardia (VT) was simulated by rapid ventricular pacing at a target site in eleven Yorkshire swine. The ablation target was established using three different techniques: a pacing lead placed into the ventricular wall at the mid-myocardial level (Type-1), an intracardiac mapping catheter (Type-2), and an RF ablation catheter placed at a random position on the endocardial surface (Type-3). In each experiment, one operator placed the catheter/pacing lead at the target location, while another used the ISGA system to manipulate the RF ablation catheter starting from a random ventricular location to locate the target. RESULTS The average localization error of the RF ablation catheter tip was 0.31 ± 0.08 cm. After analyzing approximately 35 cardiac cycles of simulated VT, the ISGA system's accuracy in locating the target was 0.4 cm after four catheter movements in the Type-1 experiment, 0.48 cm after six movements in the Type-2 experiment, and 0.67 cm after seven movements in the Type-3 experiment. CONCLUSION We demonstrated the feasibility of using the ISGA method to guide an ablation catheter to the origin of a VT focus by analyzing a few beats of body surface potentials without electro-anatomic mapping.
Alternating current poling on sliver-mode rhombohedral Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-PbTiO3 single crystals

Abstract Sliver-mode 0.73Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-0.27PbTiO3 single crystals were poled by the alternating current electric field (ACP) along the [001] direction for low-frequency transducer applications. Under ACP with optimized conditions (2.89 kVrms, 0.1 Hz, 10 cycles), the free dielectric constant (eT33/e0) was enhanced from 5300 to 7220 and piezoelectric coefficient (d33) was improved from 1410 to 1920 pC/N, both are about 36% higher than those under traditional direct current poling. The piezoresponse force microscopy observation and phase-field simulation show the similar domain morphologies evolution. During the ACP process, the domain morphology first changes from ‘4R’ to ‘2R’ configuration, and then the length of the 109° domain wall keeps increasing, which leads to a longer range of ordering and a stable lamellar domain structure in the end. The correlation between the domain morphology and the coercive field is also found in both the experiment and simulation. These findings on the effect and mechanism of ACP will help develop advanced low-frequency single crystal transducer arrays.
Structural basis for peptide substrate specificities of glycosyltransferase GalNAc-T2.

The polypeptide N-acetylgalactosaminyl transferase (GalNAc-T) enzyme family initiates O-linked mucin-type glycosylation. The family constitutes 20 isoenzymes in humans. GalNAc-Ts exhibit both redun...
Why Did You Become a Police Officer? Entry-Related Motives and Concerns of Women and Men in Policing:

As police agencies in the United States suffer declining applications and struggle to recruit women, the National Institute of Justice has identified workforce development as a priority research ar...
Towards Transparent Robotic Planning via Contrastive Explanations

Providing explanations of chosen robotic actions can help to increase the transparency of robotic planning and improve users’ trust. Social sciences suggest that the best explanations are contrastive, explaining not just why one action is taken, but why one action is taken instead of another. We formalize the notion of contrastive explanations for robotic planning policies based on Markov decision processes, drawing on insights from the social sciences. We present methods for the automated generation of contrastive explanations with three key factors: selectiveness, constrictiveness and responsibility. The results of a user study with 100 participants on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform show that our generated contrastive explanations can help to increase users’ understanding and trust of robotic planning policies, while reducing users’ cognitive burden.
Stability and folding pathways of tetra-nucleosome from six-dimensional free energy surface

The three-dimensional organization of chromatin is expected to play critical roles in regulating genome functions. High-resolution characterization of its structure and dynamics could improve our understanding of gene regulation mechanisms but has remained challenging. Using a near-atomistic model that preserves the chemical specificity of protein-DNA interactions at residue and base-pair resolution, we studied the stability and folding pathways of a tetra-nucleosome. Dynamical simulations performed with an advanced sampling technique uncovered multiple pathways that connect open chromatin configurations with the zigzag crystal structure. Intermediate states along the simulated folding pathways resemble chromatin configurations reported from in situ experiments. We further determined a six-dimensional free energy surface as a function of the inter-nucleosome distances via a deep learning approach. The zigzag structure can indeed be seen as the global minimum of the surface. However, it is not favored by a significant amount relative to the partially unfolded, in situ configurations. Chemical perturbations such as histone H4 tail acetylation and thermal fluctuations can further tilt the energetic balance to stabilize intermediate states. Our study provides insight into the connection between various reported chromatin configurations and has implications on the in situ relevance of the 30 nm fiber.
Clinical and Radiological Characteristics of E-cigarette or Vaping Product Use Associated Lung Injury

Purpose: E-cigarette or Vaping product use Associated Lung Injury (EVALI) has received national attention as an epidemic resulting in cases of significant morbidity and mortality. We aim to present the clinical and imaging findings in adolescents with pulmonary symptoms from suspected EVALI. Methods: Chest radiographs and CTs of adolescents (<19 years) with acute pulmonary symptoms and history of vaping was reviewed by two radiologists …
The cyclic graph (deleted enhanced power graph) of a direct product

Let $G$ be a finite group. Define a graph on the set $G^{\#} = G \setminus \{ 1 \}$ by declaring distinct elements $x,y\in G^{\#}$ to be adjacent if and only if $\langle x,y\rangle$ is cyclic. Denote this graph by $\Delta(G)$. The graph $\Delta(G)$ has appeared in the literature under the names cyclic graph and deleted enhanced power graph. If $G$ and $H$ are nontrivial groups, then $\Delta(G\times H)$ is completely characterized. In particular, if $\Delta(G\times H)$ is connected, then a diameter bound is obtained, along with an example meeting this bound. Also, necessary and sufficient conditions for the disconnectedness of $\Delta(G\times H)$ are established.
Dynamic estimation of epidemiological parameters of COVID-19 outbreak and effects of interventions on its spread.

BACKGROUND A key challenge in estimating epidemiological parameters for a pandemic such as the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan is the discrepancy between the officially reported number of infections and the true number of infections. A common approach to tackling the challenge is to use the number of infections exported from the originating city to infer the true number. This approach can only provide a static estimate of the epidemiological parameters before city lockdown because there are almost no exported cases thereafter. METHODS We propose a Bayesian estimation method that dynamically estimates the epidemiological parameters by recovering true numbers of infections from day-to-day official numbers. To illustrate the use of this method, we provide a comprehensive retrospection on how the COVID-19 had progressed in Wuhan from January 19 to March 5, 2020. Particularly, we estimate that the outbreak sizes by January 23 and March 5 were 11,239 [95% CI 4,794-22,372] and 124,506 [95% CI 69,526-265,113], respectively. RESULTS The effective reproduction number attained its maximum on January 24 (3.42 [95% CI 3.34-3.50]) and became less than 1 from February 7 (0.76 [95% CI 0.65-0.92]). We also estimate the effects of two major government interventions on the spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan. CONCLUSIONS This case study by our proposed method affirms the believed importance and effectiveness of imposing tight non-essential travel restrictions and affirm the importance and effectiveness of government interventions (e.g., transportation suspension and large scale hospitalization) for effective mitigation of COVID-19 community spread.
High-resolution in vivo optical-sectioning widefield microendoscopy

Microendoscopy incorporating a gradient index (GRIN) lens has emerged as a powerful tool for in vivo imaging. The lack of optical sectioning capability of widefield microendoscopy and the intrinsic optical aberrations of the GRIN lens itself, however, limit the achievable image contrast and resolution in three-dimensional (3D) tissues. In this study, we applied HiLo to widefield microendoscopy for optical sectioning. We also utilized adaptive optics (AO) to measure and correct GRIN lens aberrations. Together, HiLo and AO enabled subcellular-resolution microendoscopy imaging with optical sectioning and allowed us to image fine neuronal processes and synapses in the mouse brain in vivo.
More on complex Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev eternal wormholes

In this work, we study a generalization of the coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model with U(1) charge conservations. The model contains two copies of the complex SYK model at different chemical potentials, coupled by a direct hopping term. In the zero-temperature and small coupling limit with small averaged chemical potential, the ground state is an eternal wormhole connecting two sides, with a specific charge Q = 0, which is equivalent to a thermofield double state. We derive the conformal Green’s functions and determine corresponding IR parameters. At higher chemical potential, the system transit into the black hole phase. We further derive the Schwarzian effective action and study its quench dynamics. Finally, we compare numerical results with the analytical predictions.
Citations versus expert opinions: citation analysis of featured reviews of the American Mathematical Society

Peer review and citation metrics are two means of gauging the value of scientific research, but the lack of publicly available peer review data makes the comparison of these methods difficult. Mathematics can serve as a useful laboratory for considering these questions because as an exact science, there is a narrow range of reasons for citations. In mathematics, virtually all published articles are post-publication reviewed by mathematicians in Mathematical Reviews (MathSciNet) and so the data set was essentially the Web of Science mathematics publications from 1993 to 2004. For a decade, especially important articles were singled out in Mathematical Reviews for featured reviews. In this study, we analyze the bibliometrics of elite articles selected by peer review and by citation count. We conclude that the two notions of significance described by being a featured review article and being highly cited are distinct. This indicates that peer review and citation counts give largely independent determinations of highly distinguished articles. We also consider whether hiring patterns of subfields and mathematicians’ interest in subfields reflect subfields of featured review or highly cited articles. We re-examine data from two earlier studies in light of our methods for implications on the peer review/citation count relationship to a diversity of disciplines.
Simple-like independence relations in abstract elementary classes

Abstract We introduce and study simple and supersimple independence relations in the context of AECs with a monster model. Theorem 0.1 Let K be an AEC with a monster model. • If K has a simple independence relation, then K does not have the 2-tree property. • If K has a simple independence relation with the ( ℵ 0 ) -witness property for singletons, then K does not have the tree property. The proof of both facts is done by finding cardinal bounds to classes of small Galois-types over a fixed model that are inconsistent for large subsets. We think that this finer way of counting types is an interesting notion in itself. We characterize supersimple independence relations by finiteness of the Lascar rank under locality assumptions on the independence relation.
Machine Learning on the COVID-19 Pandemic, Human Mobility and Air Quality: A Review

The ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic is touching every facet of human lives (e.g., public health, education, economy, transportation, and the environment). This novel pandemic and non-pharmaceutical interventions of lockdown and confinement implemented citywide, regionally or nationally are affecting virus transmission, people’s travel patterns, and air quality. Many studies have been conducted to predict the diffusion of the COVID-19 disease, assess the impacts of the pandemic on human mobility and on air quality, and assess the impacts of lockdown measures on viral spread with a range of Machine Learning (ML) techniques. This literature review aims to analyze the results from past research to understand the interactions among the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown measures, human mobility, and air quality. The critical review of prior studies indicates that urban form, people’s socioeconomic and physical conditions, social cohesion, and social distancing measures significantly affect human mobility and COVID-19 viral transmission. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are inclined to use private transportation for necessary travel to mitigate coronavirus-related health problems. This review study also noticed that COVID-19 related lockdown measures significantly improve air quality by reducing the concentration of air pollutants, which in turn improves the COVID-19 situation by reducing respiratory-related sickness and deaths. It is argued that ML is a powerful, effective, and robust analytic paradigm to handle complex and wicked problems such as a global pandemic. This study also explores the spatio-temporal aspects of lockdown and confinement measures on coronavirus diffusion, human mobility, and air quality. Additionally, we discuss policy implications, which will be helpful for policy makers to take prompt actions to moderate the severity of the pandemic and improve urban environments by adopting data-driven analytic methods.
Mechanosensitive remodeling of the bacterial flagellar motor is independent of direction of rotation

Motility is important for the survival and dispersal of many bacteria, and it often plays a role during infections. Regulation of bacterial motility by chemical stimuli is well studied, but recent work has added a new dimension to the problem of motility control. The bidirectional flagellar motor of the bacterium Escherichia coli recruits or releases torque-generating units (stator units) in response to changes in load. Here, we show that this mechanosensitive remodeling of the flagellar motor is independent of direction of rotation. Remodeling rate constants in clockwise rotating motors and in counterclockwise rotating motors, measured previously, fall on the same curve if plotted against torque. Increased torque decreases the off rate of stator units from the motor, thereby increasing the number of active stator units at steady state. A simple mathematical model based on observed dynamics provides quantitative insight into the underlying molecular interactions. The torque-dependent remodeling mechanism represents a robust strategy to quickly regulate output (torque) in response to changes in demand (load).
Debt and Monetary Policy: The Policy Issues

This paper explores issues in the relation of debt and monetary policy. Deficits are large, debts are rising absolutely and relative to GDP, unfunded liabilities greatly add to the explicit stock of debt. Debt (and deficits) play a special role at present, in the run up to Maastricht: the membership hurdle in terms of debts and deficits is hardly met by anyone. Debt is important in this context because large debts are seen as a threat to the integrity of the new European money or, at least, a serious complication and potential political pressure point in the exercise of sound monetary policy. But debt is also of interest in a less dramatic context from the simple question of what role it plays in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy.
Unfolding WMMSE Using Graph Neural Networks for Efficient Power Allocation

We study the problem of optimal power allocation in a single-hop ad hoc wireless network. In solving this problem, we depart from classical purely model-based approaches and propose a hybrid method that retains key modeling elements in conjunction with data-driven components. More precisely, we put forth a neural network architecture inspired by the algorithmic unfolding of the iterative weighted minimum mean squared error (WMMSE) method, that we denote by unfolded WMMSE (UWMMSE). The learnable weights within UWMMSE are parameterized using graph neural networks (GNNs), where the time-varying underlying graphs are given by the fading interference coefficients in the wireless network. These GNNs are trained through a gradient descent approach based on multiple instances of the power allocation problem. We show that the proposed architecture is permutation equivariant, thus facilitating generalizability across network topologies. Comprehensive numerical experiments illustrate the performance attained by UWMMSE along with its robustness to hyper-parameter selection and generalizability to unseen scenarios such as different network densities and network sizes.
On the long-time behavior of immortal Ricci flows

For an immortal Ricci flow on an m-dimensional $$(m\ge 3)$$ closed manifold, we show the following convergence results: (1) if the curvature and diameter are uniformly bounded, then any unbounded sequence of time slices sub-converges to a Riemannian orbifold; (2) if the flow is type-III with diameter growth controlled by $$t^{\frac{1}{2}}$$ , then any blowdown limit is an m-dimensional negative Einstein manifold, provided that Feldman–Ilmanen–Ni’s $$\varvec{\mu }_+$$ -functional satisfies $$\lim _{t\rightarrow \infty } t\varvec{\mu }_+'(t)=0$$ .