cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Forgotten Role of Consent in Defamation and Employment Reference Cases

As has been well documented, the fear of defamation suits and related claims leads many employers to refuse to provide meaningful employment references. However, an employer who provides a negative reference concerning an employee enjoys a privilege in an ensuing defamation action if the employee has consented to the release of information concerning the employee’s job performance. Thus, many attorneys now advise prospective employers to have applicants sign consent agreements, permitting the prospective employer to conduct an investigation into the applicant’s work history and releasing from liability anyone who provides information about the employee’s work history. The Restatement (Second) of Torts has been highly influential in shaping the development of the defense of consent in the defamation context. This article looks at the consent defense within the context of employment reference cases. Specifically, the article examines the consent defense as described in the Restatement from an historical perspective and argues that the authors fundamentally misstated the law in a manner that has had negative consequence for employees who have been the victims of defamatory references.
Shifting institutional roles in biomedical innovation in a learning healthcare system

The use of information technology in healthcare has accelerated progress toward the long-term goal of a learning healthcare system, in which data from prior clinical experience provides an ever-expanding resource to guide continuous improvements in health care. Although still in its early stages, the use of data from clinical experience to supplement data from premarket testing is changing the roles of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and public and private health insurers in healthcare innovation and technology assessment. It could change who decides what research questions to pursue, whose evidentiary standards decide what counts as actionable knowledge, and who pays the costs of research. The shape and direction of resulting changes will depend on which actors and institutions decide to step forward and claim a larger role in healthcare innovation in response to technological and regulatory change.
Empowering The Collaborative Citizen In The Administrative State: A Case Study Of The Federal Communications Commission

Among the rhetorical themes of the Obama Presidency, none has been more prominent than the call for open, participatory, and collaborative government. The Federal Communication, although not formally bound by the Administration's "Open Government Directive," pledged "to comply voluntarily with its terms and, when possible, to exceed its targets." This article provides a case study of the FCC's first seven months under Chairman Julius Genachowski, chronicling the issues facing "an agency in the early throes of institutionalizing open, participatory, and collaborative government." After reviewing the agency's challenges and initiatives in communicating its message, sharing records and data, and facilitating public input, the article briefly speculates on the political conditions necessary to sustain efforts of this intensity.
The Lost "Art" of the Patent System

Patent systems emerged in the early modern period of the West to incentivize development and dissemination of skills-based artisanal innovations. This approach appears to have been adopted by the Framers in drafting the Intellectual Property Clause. Only later, in the Industrial Revolution, did ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘technology’’ begin to displace ‘‘art’’ as the perceived object of the U.S. patent system. This was in large part because of the emergence of the concept of ‘‘technology’’ itself as science-based innovation in artisanal and mechanized production. The loss of an ‘‘art’’-based concept of the patent system is arguably causing some of the confusion over the proper scope and nature of the patent system, especially with regard to upstream patenting. I argue that this loss is leading to overand underinclusive senses of patent eligible subject matter as well as amnesia as to the long-standing importance of method patents. I offer suggestions on how to reorient the patent system back to a focus on (useful) ‘‘art.’’
Political Ideology as a Religion: The Idolatry of Democracy

In contemporary international law and politics, the invocation of the term "democracy" transcends both objective description and ritual symbolism. Normatively, it is deployed to delineate the good society from the pariah state. Prescriptively, it is employed to shun and coerce foes into preferred policies. In this article, I reflect on the ways in which contemporary liberalism's faith and commitment to "democracy" have become akin to those that classically are associated with religion. By tracing the roots, rise and spread of democracy to the demands of an essentially European middle-class engaged in industrialization, commerce and colonization, and by relating that history to its current unquestioning deployment in legal and political centers of power as an universal dogma that confers benediction or absolution to friends and damnation to enemies, the essay seeks to spur some reflection on the power and force of the concept. The preliminary reflections undertaken in this essay suggests that, as is often the case with most sociological concepts, democracy's sphere of authority, if it is to be sustained and made relevant, ultimately must be constantly revised and limited by the needs of the society over which it is intended to preside.
Limits on Space Weapons: Incorporating the Law of War into the Corpus Juris Spatialis

Article III of the Outer Space Treaty applies the principles of international law to the territory of outer space. This paper investigates international law sources for limits on “space weaponization” found in the laws of war. Through analysis of both customary and treaty made limitations on space weapons, the paper presents a more unified theory of the corpus juris spatialis as called for by Article III. Furthermore, definition of these limits allows for a more focused debate on “space weaponisation.”
The Economics of the Bill of Rights

We elucidate, connect, and synthesize the literature that employs economics to study the individual rights and freedoms protected by the constitutional amendments comprising the Bill of Rights, especially as they relate to crime. Economics is uniquely suited to studying decisions involving tradeoffs, and each of the amendments requires tradeoffs. Emphasizing these tradeoffs allows us to discuss the constitutional rights in terms of "more or less," as opposed to taking an absolutist approach. We find that the economic literature on the amendments of the Bill of Rights is vibrant and growing, and that viewing the amendments within the framework of economics is highly useful.
Migration and Trade Policies: Symmetry or Paradox?

In this paper, I discuss the relationship between trade and migration policies on a number of levels and drawn upon several disciplines. Contrary to assumptions often made by writers and scholars (including those in the law) increased trade liberalization does not have predictable effects upon international migration which is a far broader and more complex phenomenon. Nations should (as has the United States) pursue independent policies with respect to international trade and migration. There need not be any hand wringing over the "missed opportunities" for migration reform in the US during trade accords such as the NAFTA because of any necessary linkage between trade and migration. Some of the questions addressed in this paper include the following: What is the relationship between international migration and trade? Is liberalized trade likely to create or diminish incentives for additional migration and conversely? Have policy makers and governments acted as though trade and migration policies were really different sides of the same economic coin? Are governments in more democratic societies more likely to be pro-immigration and pro-trade or conversely compared with less liberal democracies? Are the preferences (to the extent that meaningful franchise exists) of voters between trade and migration symmetrical, i.e. does being pro-trade normally imply that the voter in question is also likely to be pro-migration? What has been the impact of interest groups or coalitions of voters on articulated trade and migration policies historically?
Sequential Product Development and Introduction by Cash-Constrained Start-Ups

Problem definition: Firms developing novel and innovative products regularly face a canonical product development and introduction problem: introduce a proven and immediately available product or d...
Ensuring a Right of Access to the Courts for Bias Crime Victims: A Section 5 Defense of the Matthew Shepard Act

Congress recently invoked its power under the Commerce Clause to pass the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007 (The Matthew Shepard Act). On December 6, 2007, Congressional Democrats dropped the Matthew Shepard Act from the U.S. Department of Defense authorization bill. With Democrats now in control of Congress and the election of President Barack Obama, there is renewed hope that the Matthew Shepard Act will be passed and enacted during a subsequent session.
Rethinking the Future of Self-Regulation in the Financial Industry

This article seeks to broaden the scope of the ongoing debate on financial regulation reform by making a case for reinventing industry self-regulation on a fundamentally new normative basis. The article argues that, in the face of the increasing complexity and globalization of financial markets and activities, it is critically important to seriously consider the potential role of industry self-regulation as one of the key mechanisms of controlling and minimizing systemic risk – a task that is not adequately performed by the existing financial industry self-regulatory organizations (SROs). The article suggests a new normative approach to self-regulation in the financial services sector – “embedded self-regulation” – which focuses explicitly on prevention of systemic failure and is firmly embedded in the broader public interests and policy goals. This new self-regulatory model will seek to redefine the broader social role of the private financial sector and to impose the primary responsibility for safeguarding financial stability directly on the financial services industry whose activities threaten such stability.
The Impact of Minimum Wages on Wage Inequality and Employment in the Formal and Informal Sector in Costa Rica

Minimum wage policies have always been controversial among economists and policy-makers and the debate has become more heated following the publication of the book by Card and Krueger (1995) and related papers (e.g. Katz and Krueger (1992), Card and Krueger (1994)). Supporters of minimum wages justify them as a way of improving the living conditions of the poor, unskilled, and unorganized workers. Critics emphasize the efficiency losses associated with their use, and disqualify them as an adequate way of affecting inequality. They argue that in developing countries minimum wages are the principal source of labour market segmentation and unemployment.
Expectations-Based Reference-Dependent Life-Cycle Consumption

This study incorporates a recent preference specification of expectations-based loss aversion, which has been applied broadly in microeconomics, into a classic macro model to offer a unified explanation for three empirical observations about life-cycle consumption. First, loss aversion explains excess smoothness and sensitivity—that is, the empirical observation that consumption responds to income shocks with a lag. Intuitively, such lagged responses allow the agent to delay painful losses in consumption until his expectations have adjusted. Secondly, the preferences generate a hump-shaped consumption profile. Early in life, consumption is low due to a first-order precautionary-savings motive. However, as uncertainty resolves over time, this motive is dominated by time-inconsistent overconsumption that eventually leads to declining consumption towards the end of life. Thirdly, consumption drops at retirement. Prior to retirement, the agent wants to overconsume his uncertain income before his expectations catch up. Post-retirement, however, income is no longer uncertain, and overconsumption is associated with a sure loss in future consumption. As an empirical contribution, I structurally estimate the preference parameters using life-cycle consumption data. My estimates match those obtained in experiments and other micro studies, and generate the degree of excess smoothness observed in macro consumption data.
State-dependent exchange rate pass-through behavior

Abstract We estimate a Bayesian threshold vector autoregression (TVAR) to study the relationship between exchange rate pass-through and economic activity in Canada and Mexico. Both the model comparison and the analysis of impulse–response functions provide strong evidence of a nonlinear relationship and suggest that the exchange rate pass-through is dependent on the state of the economy. In particular, the pass-through coefficient is higher when the growth rate of output is large, and this difference is statistically significant across regimes for both countries. Furthermore, the results show that the degree of pass-through is complete in the case of import prices and that it falls along the distribution chain of goods.
Removal as a Political Question

When should courts be responsible for designing federal administrative agencies? In Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the Supreme Court invalidated one specific mechanism that Congress employs to insulate agencies from presidential control. Lower federal courts have discerned wider implications in the decision’s linkage of presidential power to remove agency officials with democratic accountability. Applied robustly, the Free Enterprise Fund principle casts doubt on many agencies’ organic statutes. As the judiciary starts exploring those implications, this Article evaluates the effects of judicial intervention in administrative agency design in light of recent political science work on bureaucratic behavior, historical studies of state development, and comparative analyses of other countries’ civil services. Judicial intervention in agency design, I conclude, will not generate consistent and predictable outcomes and instead risks diluting majoritarian control and fostering policy uncertainty. In light of the tenuous correlation between changes in presidential removal power and the underlying constitutional good of democratic accountability, I argue, removal power questions should be ranked as “political questions” beyond federal court competence.
Inventory Auditing and Replenishment Using Point‐of‐Sales Data

Spoilage, expiration, damage due to employee/customer handling, employee theft, and customer shoplifting usually are not reflected in inventory records. As a result, records often report phantom inventory, that is, units of good not available for sale. We derive an optimal polynomial‐time algorithm for the auditing and replenishment problem with phantom inventory, under the assumption that inventory is known immediately after replenishment. Moreover, we numerically show that a service‐level threshold policy performs comparably to the optimal.
A unified treatment of finite and infinite economies: limited arbitrage is necessary and sufficient for the existence of equilibrium and the core

A single condition, limited arbitrage, is shown to be necessary and sufficient for the existence of a competitive equilibrium and the core in economies with any number of markets, finite or infinite, with or without short sales. This extends earlier results of Chichilnisky [8] for finite economies. This unification of finite and infinite economies is achieved by proving that in Hilbert spaces limited arbitrage is necessary and sufficient for the compactness of the Pareto frontier. Limited arbitrage has also been shown to be necessary and sufficient for a resolution of the social choice paradox [9], [10], [12], [13], [14].
Offshore Outsourcing: Implications for International Business and Strategic Management Theory and Practice

abstract In this essay, I discuss the implications of the debate over offshoring for our collective understanding of international business and management theories. I review several core theories in international business expansion and management strategy to assess which elements of these theories may need to be re-specified in light of the offshoring phenomenon and which aspects remain relevant. I then present normative implications and recommendations for public policy and corporate strategy, drawing from emerging insights regarding the global responsibilities of corporations. I suggest that international labour and environmental standards and corporate codes of conduct could mitigate some of the most intense concerns raised about offshoring but conclude that offshoring is likely to present challenges to societies, corporations, and stakeholders for many decades.
The effectiveness of post-release movie advertising

Frequent new product introductions and short product life cycles lead to unusually high levels of advertising in the movie industry. We study the effectiveness of television advertisements aired after the theatrical opening of a motion picture (‘post-release advertising’). We estimate an instrumental variables, lagged effects model using a novel dataset constructed to obviate simultaneity concerns and temporal aggregation biases. We find that post-release movie advertising exhibits a high degree of heterogeneity across films, but generates substantial returns for some movies. Our findings suggest that studios may find it beneficial to experiment with higher post-release advertising budgets. Further, exhibitors may benefit from extended movie life cycles if they share post-release advertising responsibility with studios.
Drivers Behind the Monitoring Effectiveness of Global Institutional Investors: Evidence from Earnings Management

Abstract This paper studies the drivers behind the monitoring effectiveness of institutional investors in curbing earnings management in an international setting. We identify three distinct drivers and propose two competing hypotheses: the hometown advantage hypothesis predicts that because of proximity to monitoring information, domestic institutions have a comparative advantage over foreign institutions in deterring earnings management, whereas the global investor hypothesis predicts that foreign institutions have a comparative advantage because of their proclivity toward activism and ability to deploy superior monitoring technologies. Consistent with the hometown advantage hypothesis, in aggregate, domestic, but not foreign, institutional ownership is associated with less earnings management; the monitoring effectiveness of foreign institutions improves as they gain proximity to monitoring information. Consistent with the global investor hypothesis, the monitoring effectiveness of foreign institutions improves in environments of greater agency conflicts or weaker governance controls or when the gap in monitoring technology between foreign and domestic institutions widens.
Saving Toby: Extortion, Blackmail, and the Right To Destroy

In the Spring of 2005, on the website savetoby.com, one could find many endearing pictures of Toby, "the cutest little bunny on the planet." Unfortunately, Toby's owner announced, on June 30 "Toby will die. I am going to eat him. I am going to take Toby to a butcher to have him slaughter this cute bunny." Unless, that is, the website's readers sent $50,000 to spare Toby's life.1 By early May, Toby's owner (using the name "James McEahly") claimed to have raised more than $28,000,2 and the bunny's plight had attracted substantial news coverage.3 When the fateful day arrived, Toby was apparently spared, but with a new price upon his furry head 100,000 purchases of McEahly's book4 by November 6, 2006.5 Regardless of Toby's actual fate, the website raises a fascinating issue of law. The threat to kill Toby will strike many readers as a form of extortion.6 Current extortion statutes, however, generally do not prohibit the threatened
The medium run effects of educational expansion: evidence from a large school construction program in Indonesia

This paper studies the medium run consequences of an increase in the rate of accumulation of human capital in a developing country. From 1974 to 1978, the Indonesian government built over 61,000 primary schools. The school construction program led to an increase in education among individuals who were young enough to attend primary school after 1974, but not among the older cohorts. 2SLS estimates suggest that an increase of 10 percentage points in the proportion of primary school graduates in the labor force reduced the wages of the older cohorts by 3.8–10% and increased their formal labor force participation by 4–7%. I propose a two-sector model as a framework to interpret these findings. The results suggest that physical capital did not adjust to the faster increase in human capital.
Religious liberty and the moral structure of constitutional rights

In 1990, in Department of Employment Services v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990). the Supreme Court announced a new standard to govern Free Exercise claims. The Court held that “the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a ‘valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).’” Id. at 879 (quoting United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. 252, 263 n.3 (1982) (Stevens concurring)). Prior to Smith, the Court had applied a test drawn from Sherbert v. Verner. 374 U.S. 398 (1963). In Sherbert, the Court had indicated that religiously motivated persons were constitutionally exempt from otherwise valid laws unless the imposition of those laws was necessary to secure “a compelling state interest.” Id. at 403 (internal quotation marks omitted). Although the Court rejected almost every Free Exercise claim raised under Sherbert, the Sherbert standard was—in theory if not in practice—remarkably generous to religiously motivated persons, granting them a presumptive right to disobey laws that thwarted their religious commitments.
Equality of Educational Opportunity and Attitudes toward Income Inequality: Evidence from China

Equality of Educational Opportunity and Attitudes toward Income Inequality: Evidence from China
Fairness as a source of hysteresis in employment and relative wages

Abstract This paper analyses the influence of norms of fairness on wage formation. Fairness is defined by ‘real-wage’ and ‘relative-wage’ norms that relate wage offers to workers’ own current wage and to the wages of other groups of workers, and, to avoid shirking, firms pay fair wages. The wage norms change endogenously, and the result is hysteresis with respect to both employment and the distribution of wages. An extension of the model that allows ‘induced overeducation’ may help explain trends in wage inequality.
Team-Oriented Leadership and Auditors' Willingness to Raise Audit Issues

ABSTRACT: This paper reports five studies examining audit team members' willingness to raise audit issues. The first study is a survey of interacting audit teams that provides evidence that team me...
Certainty, Fence Building, and the Useful Arts

In "Certainty, Fence Building, and the Useful Arts," 74 Ind. L.J. 759-800 (1999), the author, based upon contract theory, economic theory, and an empirical survey of federal district court judges, proposes that the United States adopt a patent opposition proceeding. Whereas United States trademark law allows for the publication of and third-party opposition to the issuance of a federal trademark, American patent law, unlike European and Asian patent systems, allows for no such proceeding regarding the patentability of a claimed invention before issuance.
A greener company makes for happier employees more so than does a more valuable one: a regression analysis of employee satisfaction, perceived environmental performance and firm financial value

This paper tests two hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that employee satisfaction is positively impacted when a company is perceived as performing well environmentally. The second hypothesis is that employee satisfaction is positively impacted by firm financial performance. To test these hypotheses, the relationships between perceived environmental performance, financial performance and employee satisfaction were tested using regression analysis. The results indicate a significant positive relationship between employee satisfaction and level of perceived environmental performance. This study does not find a significant relationship between employee satisfaction and firm financial value. The practical implication for managers is that investments in environmental performance and related communications are important for reasons beyond those that are more commonly discussed, such as external stakeholder relations. This study suggests that environmental performance and related communications should be an integral part of human resources management strategies to recruit, motivate and retain the best talent.
Fourth Amendment Codification and Professor Kerr's Misguided Call for Judicial Deference

This essay critiques Professor Orin Kerr's provocative article, The Fourth Amendment and New Technologies: Constitutional Myths and the Case for Caution, 102 Mich. L. Rev. 801 (2004). Increasingly, Fourth Amendment protection is receding from a litany of law enforcement activities, and it is being replaced by federal statutes. Kerr notes these developments and argues that courts should place a thumb on the scale in favor of judicial caution when technology is in flux, and should consider allowing legislatures to provide the primary rules governing law enforcement investigations involving new technologies. Kerr's key contentions are that (1) legislatures create rules that are more comprehensive, balanced, clear, and flexible; (2) legislatures are better able to keep up with technological change; and (3) legislatures are more adept at understanding complex new technologies. I take issue with each of these arguments. Regarding Kerr's first contention, I argue that Congress has created an uneven fabric of protections that is riddled with holes and weak safeguards. Kerr's second contention - that legislatures are better able to update rules quickly as technology shifts - is belied by the historical record, which suggests Congress is actually far worse than the courts in reacting to new technologies. As for Kerr's third contention, shifting to a statutory regime will not eliminate Kerr's concern with judges misunderstanding technology. In fact, many judicial misunderstandings stem from courts trying to fit new technologies into an old statutory regime that is built around old technologies. Therefore, while Kerr is right that our attention must focus more on the statutes, he is wrong in urging for a deferential judicial approach to the Fourth Amendment.
Federalism and the net metering alternative

Abstract There is nothing in federal law that supports the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission extending the reach of its jurisdiction to dictate net metering terms for the hundreds of thousands of retail customers that deploy generation resources in compliance with state or utility net metering programs. Instead, FERC jurisdiction over compensation for retail customer resources exists only when a customer explicitly chooses to participate in FERC jurisdictional markets or programs. At the end of the day, net metering is the type of policy that FERC should encourage states to experiment with and improve.
Tariffs with Private Information and Reputation

Abstract Several tariff games are examined in which the home country has private information about whether its government is a low or high tariff type. If the foreign government is uncertain about this type in a one-shot game, its Nash equilibrium tariff will be lower (higher) than if it knew the home government were a low (high) tariff type. In two multistage games misleading behavior by the home government is an equilibrium strategy for sufficiently high discount factors. Whether or not uncertainty is persistent is important for welfare results. Tariff rules do not necessarily dominate discretionary policy in these models.
Building Bridges: Bringing International Human Rights Home

This commentary on "Building Bridges" was prepared in connection with a panel presentation addressing the same theme by Latina/o law professors during the 1995 Hispanic National Bar Association's annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It urges that we globalize our domestic legal practice by integrating international human rights norms as a means of developing, expanding and transforming the content and meaning of our human/civil rights jurisprudence. This piece contends that we have a wealth of human rights laws to which we have denied ourselves access in the past and of which we should make greater and better use in the future. To be sure, the current political-social climate favors isolationism and Congress has loudly articulated its misdirected "stay within the lines" (i.e., borders) policy which is not likely to comport with the perspective of this piece. Nonetheless, the benefits to be reaped from the incorporation of accepted human rights principles into our domestic rights discourse merits careful attention.The aim of this bridge-building proposal is to provide a blueprint for co-existence in this diverse world of ours, comprised of myriad boiling, not melting pots. Although a diversity perspective certainly informs that there are many bridges to build, this essay concentrates on joining philosophical and international forces to build one grand structure-a bridge that can transport all individuals regardless of sex, race, national or social origin, class, religion, sexuality, color or political beliefs comfortably into the twenty-first century.
An integrated and collaborative framework for business design: a knowledge engineering approach

Many large-scale endeavors, especially the ones that need to be performed on an occasional basis, are performed on a de novo basis. Whether one is designing a spacecraft or a dam, or launching a sales campaign, each endeavor tends to have a life of its own. Very little knowledge, if any, is transferred from one business or engineering design endeavor to a successive one. This paper describes an approach that involves the acquisition of raw information from the keystrokes entered by the user while performing the primary activity. Such information is distilled to produce knowledge for future use, without imposing additional burden on human users involved in the first endeavor or the succeeding endeavors. The paper also describes a complementary approach that significantly reduces the time and effort spent by human beings in articulating their requirements, and specifically, in terms of delineating the indifference points among a set of feasible alternatives. Both these approaches have been validated in a complex multi-organizational situation related to spacecrafts. The approaches can be applied, either singly or jointly, to a broad class of business and engineering scenarios. They incorporate the notion of automated knowledge acquisition, discovery, management, and dissemination. The proposed approach is discussed in the context of supporting workteams that are distributed both on geographic and temporal basis, thereby creating a "24-Hour Knowledge Factory" environment.
Icy Exomoons Evidenced by Spallogenic Nuclides in Polluted White Dwarfs

We present evidence that excesses in Be in polluted white dwarfs (WDs) are the result of accretion of icy exomoons that formed in the radiation belts of giant exoplanets. Here we use excess Be in the white dwarf GALEX J2339-0424 as an example. We constrain the parent body abundances of rock-forming elements in GALEX J2339-0424 and show that the overabundance of beryllium in this WD cannot be accounted for by differences in diffusive fluxes through the WD outer envelope nor by chemical fractionations during typical rock-forming processes. We argue instead that the Be was produced by energetic proton irradiation of ice mixed with rock. We demonstrate that the MeV proton fluence required to form the high Be/O ratio in the accreted parent body is consistent with irradiation of ice in the rings of a giant planet within its radiation belt, followed by accretion of the ices to form a moon that is later accreted by the WD. The icy moons of Saturn serve as useful analogs. Our results provide an estimate of spallogenic nuclide excesses in icy moons formed by rings around giant planets in general, including those in the solar system. While excesses in Be have been detected in two polluted WDs to date, including the WD described here, we predict that excesses in the other spallogenic elements Li and B, although more difficult to detect, should also be observed, and that such detections would also indicate pollution by icy exomoons formed in the ring systems of giant planets.
HiCRep.py : Fast comparison of Hi-C contact matrices in Python.

Motivation Hi-C is the most widely used assay for investigating genome-wide 3D organization of chromatin. When working with Hi-C data, it is often useful to calculate the similarity between contact matrices in order to asses experimental reproducibility or to quantify relationships among Hi-C data from related samples. The HiCRep algorithm has been widely adopted for this task, but the existing R implementation suffers from run time limitations on high resolution Hi-C data or on large single-cell Hi-C datasets. Results We introduce a Python implementation of HiCRep and demonstrate that it is much faster and consume much less memory than the existing R implementation. Furthermore, we give examples of HiCRep's ability to accurately distinguish replicates from non-replicates and to reveal cell type structure among collections of Hi-C data. Availability HiCRep.py and its documentation are available with a GPL license at https://github.com/Noble-Lab/hicrep. The software may be installed automatically using the pip package installer. Supplementary information Supplementary methods and results are included in an appendix at Bioinformatics online.
Foulweather Friends: Violence and Third Party Support in Self-Determination Conflicts:

This paper investigates how violence in self-determination conflicts influences bilateral foreign policy. I argue that a general preference for international stability causes third parties to suppo...
Graphon Games: A Statistical Framework for Network Games and Interventions

In this paper, we present a unifying framework for analyzing equilibria and designing interventions for large network games sampled from a stochastic network formation process represented by a graphon. We first introduce a new class of infinite population games, termed graphon games, where a continuum of heterogeneous agents interact according to a graphon. After studying properties of equilibria in graphon games, we show that graphon equilibria can approximate equilibria of large network games sampled from the graphon. We next show that, under some regularity assumptions, the graphon approach enables the design of asymptotically optimal interventions via the solution of an optimization problem with much lower dimension than the one based on the entire network structure. We illustrate our framework on a synthetic dataset of rural villages and show that the graphon intervention can be computed efficiently and based solely on aggregated relational data.
Memory-Efficient Quantum Circuit Simulation by Using Lossy Data Compression,

In order to evaluate, validate, and refine the design of new quantum algorithms or quantum computers, researchers and developers need methods to assess their correctness and fidelity. This requires the capabilities of quantum circuit simulations. However, the number of quantum state amplitudes increases exponentially with the number of qubits, leading to the exponential growth of the memory requirement for the simulations. In this work, we present our memory-efficient quantum circuit simulation by using lossy data compression. Our empirical data shows that we reduce the memory requirement to 16.5% and 2.24E-06 of the original requirement for QFT and Grover's search, respectively. This finding further suggests that we can simulate deep quantum circuits up to 63 qubits with 0.8 petabytes memory.
Predicting Supreme Court Behavior in Indian Law Cases

This piece builds upon Matthew Fletcher’s call for additional empirical work in Indian law by creating a new dataset of Indian law opinions. The piece takes every Indian law case decided by the Supreme Court from the beginning of the Warren Court until the end of the 2019-2020 term. The scholarship first produces an Indian law scorecard that measures how often each Justice voted for the “pro-Indian” outcome. It then compares those results to the Justice’s political ideology to suggest that while there is a general trend that a more “liberal” justice is more likely to favor the pro-Indian interest, that trend is generally weak with considerable variance from justice to justice. Finally, the article then creates a logistic regression model in order to try to predict whether a pro-Indian outcome is likely to prevail at the Court. It finds six potential variables to be statistically significant. It uses quantitative analysis to prove that the Indian interest is more likely to prevail when the Tribe is the appellant, when the issue is framed as a jurisdictional contest, and when the case arises from certain regions of the country. It suggests that Indian law advocates may use these insights to help influence litigation strategies in the future.
Regarding the Euler–Plateau problem with elastic modulus

We study equilibrium configurations for the Euler–Plateau energy with elastic modulus, which couples an energy functional of Euler–Plateau type with a total curvature term often present in models for the free energy of biomembranes. It is shown that the potential minimizers of this energy are highly dependent on the choice of physical rigidity parameters, and that the area of critical surfaces can be computed entirely from their boundary data. When the elastic modulus does not vanish, it is shown that axially symmetric critical immersions and critical immersions of disk type are necessarily planar domains bounded by area-constrained elasticae. The cases of topological genus zero with multiple boundary components and unrestricted genus with control on the geodesic torsion are also discussed, and sufficient conditions are given which establish the same conclusion in these cases.
Reduced-order modeling of advection-dominated systems with recurrent neural networks and convolutional autoencoders

A common strategy for the dimensionality reduction of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) relies on the use of the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) to identify a reduced subspace and the Galerkin projection for evolving dynamics in this reduced space. However, advection-dominated PDEs are represented poorly by this methodology since the process of truncation discards important interactions between higher-order modes during time evolution. In this study, we demonstrate that encoding using convolutional autoencoders (CAEs) followed by a reduced-space time evolution by recurrent neural networks overcomes this limitation effectively. We demonstrate that a truncated system of only two latent space dimensions can reproduce a sharp advecting shock profile for the viscous Burgers equation with very low viscosities, and a six-dimensional latent space can recreate the evolution of the inviscid shallow water equations. Additionally, the proposed framework is extended to a parametric reduced-order model by directly embedding parametric information into the latent space to detect trends in system evolution. Our results show that these advection-dominated systems are more amenable to low-dimensional encoding and time evolution by a CAE and recurrent neural network combination than the POD-Galerkin technique.
Pragmatic Reconstruction in Jurisprudence: Features of a Realistic Legal Theory

A century ago the pragmatists called for reconstruction in philosophy. Philosophy at the time was occupied with conceptual analysis, abstractions, a priori analysis, and the pursuit of necessary, universal truths. Pragmatists argued that philosophy instead should center on the pressing problems of the day, which requires theorists to pay attention to social complexity, variation, change, power, consequences, and other concrete aspects of social life. The parallels between philosophy then and jurisprudence today are striking, as I show, calling for a pragmatism-informed theory of law within contemporary jurisprudence. In the wake of H.L.A. Hart’s mid-century turn to conceptual analysis, “during the course of the twentieth century, the boundaries of jurisprudential inquiry were progressively narrowed.”1 Jurisprudence today is dominated by legal philosophers engaged in conceptual analysis built on intuitions, seeking to identify essential features and timeless truths about law. In the pursuit of these objectives, they detach law from its social and historical moorings, they ignore variation and change, they drastically reduce law to a singular phenomenon—like a coercive planning system for difficult moral problems2—and they deny that coercive force is a universal feature of law, among other ways in which they depart from the reality of law; a few prominent jurisprudents even proffer arguments that invoke aliens or societies of angels.
A Formal Proof of the Lax Equivalence Theorem for Finite Difference Schemes

The behavior of physical systems is typically modeled using differential equations which are too complex to solve analytically. In practical problems, these equations are discretized on a computational domain, and numerical solutions are computed. A numerical scheme is called convergent, if in the limit of infinitesimal discretization, the bounds on the discretization error is also infinitesimally small. The approximate solution converges to the “true solution” in this limit. The Lax equivalence theorem enables a proof of convergence given consistency and stability of the method.
Short Time Large Deviations of the KPZ Equation

We establish the Freidlin–Wentzell Large Deviation Principle (LDP) for the Stochastic Heat Equation with multiplicative noise in one spatial dimension. That is, we introduce a small parameter $$ \sqrt{\varepsilon } $$ to the noise, and establish an LDP for the trajectory of the solution. Such a Freidlin–Wentzell LDP gives the short-time, one-point LDP for the KPZ equation in terms of a variational problem. Analyzing this variational problem under the narrow wedge initial data, we prove a quadratic law for the near-center tail and a $$ \frac{5}{2} $$ law for the deep lower tail. These power laws confirm existing physics predictions (Kolokolov and Korshunov in Phys Rev B 75(14):140201, 2007, Phys Rev E 80(3):031107, 2009; Meerson et al. in Phys Rev Lett 116(7):070601, 2016; Le Doussal et al. in Phys Rev Lett 117(7):070403, 2016; Kamenev et al. in Phys Rev E 94(3):032108, 2016).
Competency based residency training: the next advance in graduate medical education.

The goal of all graduate medical education is to provide competency to practice in the chosen field of medicine. The evaluation of competency to practice, however, has never been clearly defined. Traditionally, resident competency has been measured by the certifying opinion of the program director that the trainee is ready to practice independently, after a specified number of years-in-training. This opinion may be supplemented by required examinations during training, and is expected to be supported by successful completion of a specialty board examination. However, there is no date available which verifies the ability of any of the three methods to predict competent, ethical practice. Whereas it is axiomatic that physicians should be skilled in the procedures they perform, how to ensure mastery of procedural skills is still a matter of much discussion. Even in specialities like surgery, where a number of required procedures can be specified, the evaluation of how well these procedures are performed, and perhaps even more important, whether the trainee can apply the skills learned in the overall treatment of individual patients, remain unresolved. In this report I suggest that the next major advance in graduate medical education should be the transition from the current years-in-training to competency-based training, in which each trainee has been shown to have acquired the skills and knowledge needed for his/her specialty, and can apply these skills independently and competently to individual patients. Certification of competency should replace the yearsin-place measure of residency training [8, 9].
Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea remains an important public health problem because of its neurocognitive sequelae. This review covers the epidemiology, clinical presentation, and diagnosis of obstructive s...
Pricing the COVID-19 Vaccine: A Mathematical Approach.

Abstract According to the World Health Organization, development of the COVID-19 vaccine is occurring in record time. Administration of the vaccine has started the same year as the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic. The United Nations emphasized the importance of providing COVID-19 vaccines as a global public good, which is accessible and affordable world-wide. Pricing the COVID-19 vaccines is a controversial topic. We use optimization and game theoretic approaches to model the COVID-19 U.S. vaccine market as a duopoly with two manufacturers Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. The results suggest that even in the context of very high production and distribution costs, the government can negotiate prices with the manufacturers to keep public sector prices as low as possible while meeting demand and ensuring each manufacturer earns a target profit. Furthermore, these prices are consistent with those currently predicted in the media.
Price mediated contagion through capital ratio requirements with VWAP liquidation prices

Abstract We develop a framework for price-mediated contagion in financial systems where banks are forced to liquidate assets to satisfy a risk-weight based capital adequacy requirement. In constructing this modeling framework, we introduce a two-tier pricing structure: the volume weighted average price that is obtained by any bank liquidating assets and the terminal mark-to-market price used to account for all assets held at the end of the clearing process. We consider the case of multiple illiquid assets and develop conditions for the existence and uniqueness of clearing prices. We provide a closed-form representation for the sensitivity of these clearing prices to the system parameters, and use this result to quantify: (1) the cost of regulation, in stress scenarios, faced by the system as a whole and the individual banks, and (2) the value of providing bailouts to consider when such notions are financially advisable. Numerical case studies are provided to study the application of this model to data.
Towards Meta-Reasoning in the Concurrent Logical Framework CLF

The concurrent logical framework CLF is an extension of the logical framework LF designed to specify concurrent and distributed languages. While it can be used to define a variety of formalisms, reasoning about such languages within CLF has proved elusive. In this paper, we propose an extension of LF that allows us to express properties of CLF specifications. We illustrate the approach with a proof of safety for a small language with a parallel semantics.
Literature Mapper: A QGIS Plugin for Georeferencing Citations in Zotero:

Many studies in air, soil, and water research involve observations and sampling of a specific location. Knowing where studies have been previously undertaken can be a valuable addition to future re...