cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Verdugo in Cyberspace: Boundaries of Fourth Amendment Rights for Foreign Nationals in Cybercrime Cases

This Article examines the current legal framework governing Fourth Amendment rights for foreign nationals accused of committing crimes within the United States. Over the past two years, federal courts have tried several cases relating to foreign nationals committing crimes through the use of the Internet, and the standard for warrant requirements for these searches is not clear. Utilizing these cases, this Article creates a hypothetical case that presents the issues of Fourth Amendment rights for foreign nationals and seeks to determine how such a question should be answered. It advocates the clear application of United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez to remote cross-border searches conducted by law enforcement officials against foreign nationals. It concludes by introducing several thoughts on clarifying the standard implemented by Verdugo for non-remote cross-border searches of foreign nationals. In addition, this Article adds a critical view to the rights that should be accorded foreign nationals when accused of committing crimes through the Internet.
Bad Girls of Art and Law: Abjection, Power, and Sexuality Exceptionalism in (Kara Walker’s) Art and (Janet Halley’s) Law

This Article draws some connections between legal theorist Janet Halley and contemporary artist Kara Walker. It compares their recent oeuvre to show how both reject understandings of the interplay of sex, power, and subordination proffered by conventional "justice projects"-specifically civil rights' and feminism's articulations of bodily violence and violation as key modes of racial and gender injury and subordination. Neither of these two is the first to dispute such accounts; what distinguishes them is that both attempt to ground their indictments in the notion of abjection, or the liberatory potential of suffering, degradation, and shame, particularly in sexual contexts. This Article disputes abjection as a conceptual grounding for Walker and Halley's political and theoretical indictments. Abjection is classically associated with Julia Kristeva's work in psychoanalysis, but gained political traction in queer theorist Leo Bersani's call for a subversive sex-based queer identity. I contend that Halley's theoretical invocation of Bersani's abjection is misplaced, and that Walker's aesthetic claims fall victim to similar misreadings. In fact, the theoretical innovations of both versions of abjection lie in their engagements with power and identity; Bersani's notion of subversive abjection in particular is embedded in the very sorts of justice projects, 1. Adrienne D. Davis, Vice Provost and William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law. I'd like to thank Maggi Carfield, Mary Anne Case, Kevin Haynes, Emily Hughes, Benjy Kahan, Michael Murphy, Jeff Redding, Kerry Rittich, Darren Rosenblum, Laura Rosenbury, and Susan Stiritz for invaluable suggestions and comments on this Article. In particular, Susan Appleton, Marc Spindelman, and Rebecca Wanzo not only were excellent readers, but, even more, engaged and encouraged this project. Helpful comments also came from participants at Brenda Cossman's University of Toronto Feminist Legal Theory Workshop; Robyn Wiegman and Janet Halley's Taking a Break from Feminism Conference at Harvard Law School; Kevin Haynes and Karla Holloway's Women's Studies seminar at Duke University; the Conversations for Change Women's Studies Seminar at University of California, Santa Barbara; the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Colloquium at Washington University (hereinafter Colloquium]; and a roundtable discussion at the Modem Museum of Fort Worth exhibit, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, in which my co-panelists, Jason Gillmer and Robert Storr, offered invaluable engagement. Bemita Washington provided her standard outstanding and enthusiastic research assistance. Dean Kent Syverud and Washington University School of Law provided financial support. Finally, this Article has benefited from Janet Halley's own immeasurable intellectual and personal generosity. Copyright
Alternatives to Inflation Targeting Monetary Policy for Stable and Egalitarian Growth: A Brief Research Summary

Many countries in the developing world have adopted an approach to monetary policy that focuses on maintaining a low level of inflation, to the exclusion of other important objectives such as employment generation, increasing investment or reducing poverty, despite the widespread evidence that moderate levels of inflation have few or no costs. Some have even adopted formal “inflation targeting”, an approach which commits the central bank to hitting a fairly rigid inflation target, often as low as 2%. However, this focus has led to slower economic growth and lower employment growth, without succeeding in lowering inflation at a smaller economic cost than traditional methods of inflation fighting. Clearly, it is time to find an alternative to inflation targeting. This paper presents the real targeting approach to monetary policy, which I argue is superior alternative to the costly and ineffective inflation targeting approach. Under this real targeting approach, central banks are given a country appropriate target such as employment growth, unemployment, real GDP or investment, usually subject to an inflation constraint. Given these two targets – the real target and the constraint – the central bank will find multiple tools to reach these targets, designing new tools and rediscovering old tools such as asset based reserve requirements and other credit allocation techniques. The real targeting approach might also be complemented by other policies, such as capital management techniques to deal with possible capital flight. The real targeting approach has the potential to make central bank policy more transparent, more accountable, and more socially useful than most currently existing central bank structures.
Engines of Liberation

Electricity was born at the dawn of the last century. Households were inundated with a flood of new consumer durables. What was the impact of this consumer durable goods revolution? It is argued here that the consumer goods revolution was conducive to liberating women from the home. To analyse this hypothesis, a Beckerian model of household production is developed. Households must decide whether or not to adopt the new technologies, and whether a married woman should work. Can such a model help to explain the rise in married female labour-force participation that occurred in the last century? Yes. The housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge. She will give less attention to the home, because the home will need less; she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic labourer, with the greatest of all handmaidens, electricity, at her service. This and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman’s world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman’s energy will be conserved for use in broader, more constructive fields. Thomas Alva Edison, as interviewed in Good Housekeeping Magazine , LV, no. 4 (October 1912, p. 436)
State Revenue Forecasts and Political Acceptance: The Value of Consensus Forecasting in the Budget Process

Concerns about political biases in state revenue forecasts, as well as insufficient evidence that complex forecasts outperform naive algorithms, have resulted in a nearly universal call for depoliticization of forecasting. This article discusses revenue forecasting in the broader context of the political budget process and highlights the importance of a forecast that is politically accepted—forecast accuracy is irrelevant if the budget process does not respect the forecast as a resource constraint. The authors provide a case illustration in Indiana by showing how the politicized process contributed to forecast acceptance in the state budget over several decades. They also present a counterfactual history of forecast errors that would have been produced by naive algorithms. In addition to showing that the Indiana process would have outperformed the naive approaches, the authors demonstrate that the path of naive forecast errors during recessions would be easily ignored by political actors.
War and the Constitutional Text

This Essay, written as a response to a pro-Congress view in the war powers debate, presents a complete textual and structural theory of a flexible approach to war powers. Under this system, the President possesses the power to initiate and conduct hostilities as commander-in-chief and chief executive under Article II of the Constitution, checked by Congress's power of the purse. The Declare War Clause simply confers on Congress juridical power to both define the United States's legal relations with other countries and trigger domestic constitutional authorities during wartime. How the nation goes to war will result form the interaction of the political branches using these plenary constitutional powers. The Response critiques the most recent pro-Congress account, offered by Professor Ramsey, for not addressing the full context of the framing, and next argues that constitutional text and structure actually support the flexible war powers system. Critics of this approach fail to appreciate the textual significance of the authority independently granted to the President by the Commander-in-Chief and Executive Power Clauses and the engage in war language of Article I, Section 10. In addition, they do not appreciate the manner in which the Constitution structures the interaction of the executive and legislative branches by creating strict processes with carefully defined roles for the President and Congress, as with the enactment of legislation, in contrast to areas where it does not, as with warmaking. A more comprehensive reading of the text and structure demonstrates that the Constitution does not mandate a specific, legalistic process for waging war. Instead, the Constitution vests the executive and legislative branches with different powers involving war, which the president and Congress may use to cooperate or to compete for control over warmaking.
Bank liquidity creation and real economic output

Abstract We find that bank liquidity creation ( LC ) is statistically and economically significantly positively related to real economic output ( GDP ). This is robust to using instrumental variables and many robustness checks. LC also beats bank assets in “horse races.” On-balance sheet LC matters more for small banks and off-balance sheet LC matters more for large banks. Small bank LC generates more GDP per dollar than large bank LC , but large bank LC matters more overall because large banks provide much more LC than small banks. The LC -output relation is strongest in bank-dependent industries, consistent with the hypothesized transmission mechanism.
The Dynamics of Earnings Forecast Management

The authors analyze how companies manage earnings— particularly, “talking down” earnings forecasts immediately prior to announcement. Downward revisions in consensus forecasts appear to be a key determinant of whether companies succeed at generating positive earnings surprises. Although downward forecast revisions immediately prior to earnings announcements produce postannouncement incremental returns, downward forecast management is not advantageous. These incremental returns do not offset the declines in returns that occur as earnings expectations are being managed downward.
The Expectation of Continuity Effect and Franchise Termination Laws: A Behavioral Perspective

The Expectation of Continuity Effect and Franchise Termination Laws: A Behavioral Perspective.
Connecting book rate of return to risk and return: the information conveyed by conservative accounting

This paper revises the standard interpretation of the book rate of return as a measure of profitability. Rather, due to conservative accounting, the book rate of return informs about risk and the expected return to the investor. In contrast to asset pricing research, where the book rate of return is viewed as positively associated with risk and expected stock returns, the paper demonstrates the opposite: with the effect of conservative accounting, the book rate of return is negatively associated with risk and expected return. The empirical analysis indicates that the market prices equities accordingly. It also shows how the previously documented positive correlation is due to a misunderstanding of accounting and how the book rate of return enters into asset pricing in a way that is consistent with the accounting.
Contracting Mediation: The Impact of Different Statutory Regimes

The United States is commited to increasing institutionalized use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR), most often based on the claim that it is superior to and different from traditional litigation. Mediation in particular is supposed in the popular view to be user-friendly, nonadversarial, and conducive to optimal, wholistic resolutions. Litigation, in contrast, is supposed to be slow, costly to all, impersonal, formal, legalistic, and incapable of giving complete or satisfactory resolutions. This implicitly assumes that ADR and litigation are discrete processes, each with uniform and intrinsic natures. This, in turn suggests an assumption that they retain these qualities under all circumstances. In this popularized, Manichean, and romanticized view, ADR and, in particular mediation, possesses uniformly positive qualities and litigation uniformly negative ones. This paradigm has come to infuse our current system of justice, including the courts, the legislature, and even legal education. The pervasive acceptance of this viewpoint has serious consequences for how justice is to be administered in the United States for the foreseeable future. This article uses a case study in which a mediation procedure remained the same while the substantive law was changed. It examines whether, although the mediation procedures have remained the same, the experience of mediation has altered.
An Informational Approach to the Mass Imprisonment Problem

The United States is plagued by the problem of mass imprisonment, with its prison population having risen by 500 percent in the last three decades. Because the overwhelming majority of criminal cases are resolved through plea bargaining, there is room for prosecutors to reduce mass imprisonment by exercising their wide discretion. At present, prosecutors likely do not give much consideration to the overcrowding of America's jails and prisons when making their plea bargain offers. However, if prosecutors were regularly advised of such overcrowding they might offer marginally lower sentences across the board. For instance, a prosecutor who typically offers a first-time drug offender a twenty-month sentence might instead agree to an eighteen-month plea bargain if she were aware that prisons were overcrowded and incarceration rates were on the rise. A rich body of social psychology literature supports the view that informing prosecutors about mass imprisonment might cause them to offer lower sentences. Legislatures have an incentive to enact such a proposal because a reduction in incarceration would reduce the already huge and escalating costs of criminal corrections. At the same time, because legislatures would simply be instructing that prosecutors be advised of the scale of imprisonment, and not specifically advocating lower sentences, there would be no danger of legislators appearing "soft on crime."
Evolution in Child Abuse Litigation: The Theoretical Void where Evidentiary and Procedural Worlds Collide

This article analyses the many evidentiary dilemmas that arise when an allegation of child abuse is litigated concurrently in a number of different courts and on different legal theories, each of which has its own evidentiary standards. For instance, an allegation of child abuse can be litigated simultaneously for criminal prosecution, child dependency protection, family custody and dissolution, mental health treatment or commitment, special education decisions, and for tort damages. Since evidentiary decisions in one of the parallel proceedings may have an impact on the other causes of action, especially in terms of discovery, the article suggests that we need a system for deciding inter-system evidentiary questions.
The Bankruptcy Exchange

The bankruptcy forum has become a marketplace for claims. Those who made the loans are far removed from the players that sit at the negotiating table in the modern corporate reorganization. Instead of stock being traded on the floor of an exchange, claims are traded in bankruptcy court. Investors become residual owners of firms outside of bankruptcy by buying stock. Inside of bankruptcy they do it by buying debt. In both cases, it is a world of professional traders, arbitrageurs, and corporate raiders. Long passed is the time when we could usefully debate whether claims-trading in bankruptcy was a good or a bad thing. We should accept that it has become a fundamental feature of bankruptcy. But it is naive to think that this new market, the bankruptcy exchange, should be unregulated. All markets are regulated. Whether one is a merchant who seeks to sell wool in the twelfth century or a farmer who wants to sell grain in the nineteenth, being subject to regulation is inevitable. Simply providing that the market is open on Wednesdays, but not Saturdays, is a form of regulation that works to the advantage of some and to the disadvantage of others. Regulation of the bankruptcy exchange is similarly inescapable. Every decision in the bankruptcy case affects the bankruptcy exchange, for better or worse. Scheduling a date for a cramdown hearing has the effect of putting an exercise date on an option contract. Every decision a bankruptcy judge affects trading on the bankruptcy exchange - whether she wants it to or not. The question is never whether there should be regulation, but rather what form it should take. This paper reviews the principles that should be at work in regulating the bankruptcy exchange.
The Effects of Campaign Spending in State Supreme Court Elections

Electoral competition has been an important subject of political science research over the past several decades. This article examines the effects of campaign spending on electoral competition in state supreme court elections. Specifically, the author addresses the question, How do campaign expenditures affect the performance of incumbents in supreme court elections? The author finds that, just like elections to Congress and state legislatures, electoral competition in state supreme court elections can be understood by looking at characteristics of the candidates, the state and electoral context, and institutional arrangements.
Losing Money on Arbitrage: Optimal Dynamic Portfolio Choice in Markets with Arbitrage Opportunities

In theory, an investor can make infinite profits by taking unlimited positions in an arbitrage. In reality, however, investors must satisfy margin requirements which completely change the economics of arbitrage. We derive the optimal investment policy for a risk-averse investor in a market where there are arbitrage opportunities. We show that it is often optimal to underinvest in the arbitrage by taking a smaller position than margin constraints allow. In some cases, it is actually optimal for an investor to walk away from a pure arbitrage opportunity. Even when the optimal policy is followed, the arbitrage strategy may underperform the riskless asset or have an unimpressive Sharpe ratio. Furthermore, the arbitrage portfolio typically experiences losses at some point before the final convergence date. These results have important implications for the role of arbitrageurs in financial markets.
Smooth Monotone Contribution Games

A monotone game is a multistage game in which no player can lower her action in any period below its previous level. A motivation for the monotone games of this paper is dynamic voluntary contribution to a public project. Each player's utility is a strictly concave function of the public good, and quasilinear in the private good. The main result is a description of the limit points of (subgame perfect) equilibrium paths as the period length shrinks. The limiting set of such profiles is equal to the undercore of the underlying static game - the set of profiles that cannot be blocked by a coalition using a smaller profile. A corollary is that the limiting set of achievable profiles does not depend on whether the players can move simultaneously or only in a round-robin fashion. The familiar core is the efficient subset of the undercore; hence, some but not all profiles that are efficient and individually rational can be nearly achieved when the period length is small. As the period length shrinks, any core profile can be achieved in a “twinkling of the eye” - neither real-time gradualism nor inefficiency are necessary.
Easterbrook on Academic Freedom

Does the First Amendment to the US Constitution protect a distinct notion of “academic freedom”? Of late, courts and commentators have cast doubt on an individual First Amendment right of academic freedom. When federal courts have directed friendly attention to the matter, the result has been bromidic endorsement with scant analytic heft. The goal of this Essay is to identify an organizing principle for a constitutional jurisprudence of academic freedom. For unlike Holmes’s “law of the churn,”1 an independent constitutional doctrine of academic freedom is plausible. It could find inspiration in recent jurisprudence of Judge Frank Easterbrook, who has penned four opinions touching on the scope of academic freedom in the university setting.2 At first blush, these cases seem unlikely tributaries to follow to academic freedom’s reinvigoration. Unlike other Seventh Circuit case law on academic speech,3 Easterbrook’s opinions leverage academic freedom against individual rights claimants. It is the (state-run) educational institution that benefits from a gloss of academic freedom to sanction speakers based on their speech.4 The opinions’ claims about academic freedom, moreover, are not framed in constitutional terms. Nevertheless, the cases provide a basis for an imaginative reformulation of academic freedom as a constitutional concept despite, or even because of, their counterintuitive results. They invite a strategy of judicial protection of academic freedom by ensuring that legal or governmental action neither displaces, nor excessively burdens, the professo-
Resource allocation: A hayekian paradigm for maritime conglomerates

This article provides a new synthesis between the strategic management literature and Austrian capital theory. The resource allocation process plays out in the context of differing subunit preferences, potentially resulting in tension and periodic conflict that may lead to dysfunctional relationships over time. Absent clearly understood and effective operational rules, the potential for heightened dysfunctional internal relationships will lead a conglomerate organization to have a diminished resource base for achieving its future strategic goals. This article presents a set of resource-allocation rules based on the Hayekian theory of production. By developing an effective resource-allocation paradigm based on economic theory, the organization can gain market share resulting in increased profitability and continued success in the marketplace. The Hayekian triangle offers firms an objective measure reflecting environmental shifts by tracking interest-rate changes that affect consumer and production demand. Organizations can gain “first-mover advantages” essential to provide the competitive advantage vis-a-vis their rivals while maintaining harmonious relationships among subunits. Entrepreneurial innovation can also be exercised by “second movers” who imitate the “first movers,” perhaps taking advantage of lessons learned. This kind of innovative imitation may well provide the greatest scope for entrepreneurial activity.
Phantom Torts and Forum Non Conveniens Blocking Statutes: Irony and Metonym in Nicaraguan Special Law 364

Numerous Latin American countries have enacted statutes to block the forum non conveniens dismissals from U.S. courts of their citizens' tort claims. This article applies two of the master tropes from rhetorician Kenneth Burke to one particular blocking statute, Nicaraguan Special Law 364, and how two U.S. courts have interpreted it. In litigation in California, the court concluded that Special Law 364 was an impetus for a fraudulent scheme and dismissed with prejudice. In an attempt to have a Nicaraguan judgment recognized and enforced in Florida, the court concluded that Special Law 364 suffers from a number of defects, including that it does not afford due process. The rhetorical analysis reveals ways in which equating justice with a U.S. trial was a metonymic reduction that failed to account for numerous practical and legal factors, so the ironic result of Special Law 364 was to ensure that there would be no meaningful resolution of the claims.
Fair Value Exposure, Auditor Specialization, and Banks’ Discretionary Use of the Loan Loss Provision:

In this study, we examine whether banks’ use of the loan loss provision (LLP) to manage earnings is associated with (a) the extent to which banks hold assets subject to fair value reporting and (b) the use of an industry specialist auditor. We find that banks with a greater proportion of assets subject to fair value reporting (i.e., higher fair value exposure) use less LLP-based earnings management but more transaction-based earnings management (i.e., earnings management achieved by timing the realization of gains/losses). We also find that banks engaging industry specialist auditors use less LLP-based earnings management. Our findings suggest that banks’ use of the LLP to manage earnings is more limited when they have access to alternative earnings management tools and when they engage an auditor with more industry knowledge. Our results should be informative to regulators, members of the banking industry, and academics interested in the earnings management behavior of banks.
Fotohistorias: Participatory Photography as a Methodology to Elicit the Life Experiences of Migrants

This paper presents the rationale and deployment for a participatory photography approach to elicit the life experiences and worldviews of a community -- in our case, undocumented Hispanic migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Fotohistorias participatory technique involves conducting interviews with potential participants, giving them digital cameras and asking them to take photos of their lives, followed by conversations with the participants about their photos and the experience of taking them. While offering a space for reflection, Fotohistorias explores how undocumented migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border express their identities and the reality of their everyday lives through the photos they take and the stories they tell. The project doesn't just create an avenue for personal stories, it provides a framework for the elicitation and representation of cultural knowledge that might otherwise remain submerged in the narrative of migration from the perspective of the dominant culture.
Gandhi and Copyright Pragmatism

Mahatma Gandhi is revered the world over for his views on freedom and nonviolence—ideas that he deployed with great success during India’s freedom struggle. As a thinker, he is commonly considered to have been a moral idealist: anti-utilitarian in mindset and deeply skeptical of market mechanisms. Yet, when he engaged with copyright law—as a writer, editor, and publisher—he routinely abjured the idealism of his abstract thinking in favor of a lawyerly pragmatism. Characterized by a nuanced understanding of copyright law and its conflicting normative goals, Gandhi’s thinking on copyright law reveals a reasoned, contextual, and incremental transformation over time, as the economic and political circumstances surrounding his engagement with copyright changed. In it we see a dimension of Gandhi’s thinking, emanating from his training in the common law, which has thus far been ignored. This Essay traces the development of Gandhi’s views on copyright to show how he anticipated several of the central debates that are the staple of today’s copyright wars, and developed an approach to dealing with copyright’s various problems—best described as “copyright pragmatism.” Revealing distinct similarities to both legal and philosophical pragmatism, copyright pragmatism critically engages with copyright as a legal institution on its own terms, examining its working contextually with an eye toward its various costs, benefits, and normative goals. The Essay then unpacks the analytical moves that copyright pragmatism entails to show how it holds important lessons for the future of copyright thinking and reform.
The mirroring hypothesis: theory, evidence, and exceptions

The mirroring hypothesis predicts that organizational ties within a project, firm, or group of firms (e.g., communication, collocation, employment) will correspond to the technical dependencies in the work being performed. This article presents a unified picture of mirroring in terms of theory, evidence, and exceptions. First, we formally define mirroring and argue that it is an approach to technical problem-solving that conserves scarce cognitive resources. We then review 142 empirical studies, divided by organizational form into (i) industry studies, (ii) firm studies, and (iii) studies of open collaborative projects. The industry and firm studies indicate that mirroring is a prevalent pattern but not universal. However, in technologically dynamic industries, partial mirroring, where knowledge boundaries are drawn more broadly than operational boundaries, is likely to be a superior strategy. Firms can also strategically ‘break the mirror’ by implementing modular partitions within their boundaries, or by building relational contracts across their boundaries. Finally, studies of open collaborative projects, most of which focused on software, were not supportive of the hypothesis. We argue that digital technologies make possible new modes of coordination that enable groups to deviate from classical mirroring as seen in firms.
Reading the Stars

Following the global financial crisis, significant uncertainty has existed around the U.S. economy's steady state equilibrium. This paper uses a factor model to provide a new approach to estimating 'the stars' (i.e. the neutral interest rate, maximum employment, and the level and growth rate of potential output) that are most consistent with a medium-term equilibrium where inflation converges to the FOMC's two percent target. It is applicable to any country with an inflation targeting central bank. It also explicitly incorporates estimates of the extensive margin of slack in the labor market, which has proven to be an important factor in describing the post-financial crisis landscape.
Evaluating Tree Explanation Methods for Anomaly Reasoning: A Case Study of SHAP TreeExplainer and TreeInterpreter

Understanding predictions made by Machine Learning models is critical in many applications. In this work, we investigate the performance of two methods for explaining tree-based models: ‘Tree Interpreter (TI)’ and ‘SHapley Additive exPlanations TreeExplainer (SHAP-TE)’. Using a case study on detecting anomalies in job runtimes of applications that utilize cloud-computing platforms, we compare these approaches using a variety of metrics, including computation time, significance of attribution value, and explanation accuracy. We find that, although the SHAP-TE offers consistency guarantees over TI, at the cost of increased computation, consistency does not necessarily improve the explanation performance in our case study.
MaskNet: A Fully-Convolutional Network to Estimate Inlier Points

Point clouds have grown in importance in the way computers perceive the world. From LIDAR sensors in autonomous cars and drones to the time of flight and stereo vision systems in our phones, point clouds are everywhere. Despite their ubiquity, point clouds in the real world are often missing points because of sensor limitations or occlusions, or contain extraneous points from sensor noise or artifacts. These problems challenge algorithms that require computing correspondences between a pair of point clouds. Therefore, this paper presents a fully-convolutional neural network that identifies which points in one point cloud are most similar (inliers) to the points in another. We show improvements in learning-based and classical point cloud registration approaches when retrofitted with our network. We demonstrate these improvements on synthetic and real-world datasets. Finally, our network produces impressive results on test datasets that were unseen during training, thus exhibiting generalizability. Code and videos are available at https://github.com/vinits5/masknet
Dichotomy for Graph Homomorphisms with Complex Values on Bounded Degree Graphs

The complexity of graph homomorphisms has been a subject of intense study [1]–[8]. The partition function $Z_{\mathrm{A}}(\cdot)$ of graph homomorphism is defined by a symmetric matrix A over $\mathbb{C}$ . We prove that the complexity dichotomy of [7] extends to bounded degree graphs. More precisely, we prove that either $G\rightarrow Z_{\mathrm{A}}(G)$ is computable in polynomial-time for every $G$ , or for some $\Delta > 0$ it is #P-hard over (simple) graphs $G$ with maximum degree $\Delta (G)\leq\Delta$ . The tractability criterion on A for this dichotomy is explicit, and can be decided in polynomial-time in the size of A. We also show that the dichotomy is effective in that either a P-time algorithm for, or a reduction from #SAT to, $Z_{\mathrm{A}}(\cdot)$ can be constructed from A, in the respective cases.
Entity Structure and Taxes: An Analysis of Embedded Pass-Through Entities

We examine the effect of pass-through entities embedded in corporate structures on tax avoidance, tax uncertainty, and tax noncompliance using unique, confidential tax return data that link corporations and pass-through entities together through Schedules K-1. We develop measures of the use of pass-through entities such as the number and “connectedness” of pass-throughs within the structure, the presence of loss pass-throughs or asymmetric allocations of such losses, and connections to entities external to the firm. We predict and find that these features are associated with lower effective tax rates, higher current year additions to tax reserves, and larger amounts of proposed IRS audit adjustments, controlling for probability of audit selection. This large-sample evidence could help the IRS understand how pass-throughs affect compliance and financial statements users anticipate the tax effects related to entity structure.
On the Optimality of Affine Policies for Budgeted Uncertainty Sets

In this paper, we study the performance of affine policies for a two-stage, adjustable, robust optimization problem with a fixed recourse and an uncertain right-hand side belonging to a budgeted un...
Exponential-Family Embedding With Application to Cell Developmental Trajectories for Single-Cell RNA-Seq Data

Scientists often embed cells into a lower-dimensional space when studying single-cell RNA-seq data for improved downstream analyses such as developmental trajectory analyses, but the statistical properties of such nonlinear embedding methods are often not well understood. In this article, we develop the exponential-family SVD (eSVD), a nonlinear embedding method for both cells and genes jointly with respect to a random dot product model using exponential-family distributions. Our estimator uses alternating minimization, which enables us to have a computationally efficient method, prove the identifiability conditions and consistency of our method, and provide statistically principled procedures to tune our method. All these qualities help advance the single-cell embedding literature, and we provide extensive simulations to demonstrate that the eSVD is competitive compared to other embedding methods. We apply the eSVD via Gaussian distributions where the standard deviations are proportional to the means to analyze a single-cell dataset of oligodendrocytes in mouse brains. Using the eSVD estimated embedding, we then investigate the cell developmental trajectories of the oligodendrocytes. While previous results are not able to distinguish the trajectories among the mature oligodendrocyte cell types, our diagnostics and results demonstrate there are two major developmental trajectories that diverge at mature oligodendrocytes. Supplementary materials for this article, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work, are available as an online supplementary materials.
Investigating Electronic Nicotine Delivery System Use Habits and Contexts: Habits, Locations, and Situations

Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS), any device that uses aerosolized nicotine for purposes of inhalation, are becoming popular and ubiquitous. As these systems deliver an addictive substance, consumers face a danger of becoming addicted. To understand the motivations and habits surrounding electronic nicotine consumption to aid consumers manage their vaping behavior, we conducted a literature review (N=72) and collected data using an online survey (N = 15). Our specific aim is to identify any triggering factors including physical or physiological states, habits, and contexts associated with ENDS use. Our survey identified several important insights related to e-cigarette consumption: i) contrary to traditional cigarette consumption habits, most participants did not report that there were any habits or contexts associated with their use, ii) most of our participants did not measure vaping in discrete sessions, which is very different from traditional cigarettes, and iii) stress is not a powerful trigger for vaping urges, contrary to traditional cigarettes where stress is considered as one of the key triggering factors. Additionally, we found that the vaping device itself can be used as the most useful device for collecting data on vaping behavior, especially since consumers keep their vaping device on their person or within reach and chest band and wristbands are considered burdensome by the users. These findings have critical implications for the computing community as they indicate that vaping practices and associated habits are significantly different than traditional smoking and warrants developing computational models that would be able to identify vaping triggers, design interventions specific to vaping practices and identify opportune moments to deliver intervention to assist consumers manage their vaping behavior.
Multimodal Material Classification for Robots using Spectroscopy and High Resolution Texture Imaging

Material recognition can help inform robots about how to properly interact with and manipulate real-world objects. In this paper, we present a multimodal sensing technique, leveraging near-infrared spectroscopy and close-range high resolution texture imaging, that enables robots to estimate the materials of household objects. We release a dataset of high resolution texture images and spectral measurements collected from a mobile manipulator that interacted with 144 house-hold objects. We then present a neural network architecture that learns a compact multimodal representation of spectral measurements and texture images. When generalizing material classification to new objects, we show that this multimodal representation enables a robot to recognize materials with greater performance as compared to prior state-of-the-art approaches. Finally, we present how a robot can combine this high resolution local sensing with images from the robot’s head-mounted camera to achieve accurate material classification over a scene of objects on a table.
Static Pricing: Universal Guarantees for Reusable Resources

We consider a fundamental pricing model in which a fixed number of units of a reusable resource are used to serve customers. Customers arrive to the system according to a stochastic process and upon arrival decide whether or not to purchase the service, depending on their willingness-to-pay and the current price. The service time during which the resource is used by the customer is stochastic and the firm may incur a service cost. This model represents various markets for reusable resources such as cloud computing, shared vehicles, rotable parts, and hotel rooms. In the present paper, we analyze this pricing problem when the firm attempts to maximize a weighted combination of three central metrics: profit, market share, and service level. Under Poisson arrivals, exponential service times, and standard assumptions on the willingness-to-pay distribution, we establish a series of results that characterize the performance of static pricing in such environments. In particular, while an optimal policy is fully dynamic in such a context, we prove that a static pricing policy simultaneously guarantees 78.9% of the profit, market share, and service level from the optimal policy. Notably, this result holds for any service rate and number of units the firm operates. Our proof technique relies on a judicious construction of a static price that is derived directly from the optimal dynamic pricing policy. In the special case where there are two units and the induced demand is linear, we also prove that the static policy guarantees 95.5% of the profit from the optimal policy. Our numerical findings on a large testbed of instances suggest that the latter result is quite indicative of the profit obtained by the static pricing policy across all parameters.
Executive compensation and aspirational peer benchmarking

Abstract Using novel data on explicit compensation benchmarking peer groups, I document that small public firms engage in upward compensation benchmarking to a much greater extent than larger firms. Small firms choose aspirational peers that reflect their executives’ shifting opportunity sets. For these firms, compensation benchmarking is indicative of future growth and performance, and the rate at which pay adjusts toward peer levels is sensitive to executives’ outside employment opportunities. Growing and outperforming small firms strategically use upward benchmarking to adjust pay in an effort to retain valuable managerial talent.
Comparison between algebraic and matrix‐free geometric multigrid for a Stokes problem on adaptive meshes with variable viscosity

Problems arising in Earth's mantle convection involve finding the solution to Stokes systems with large viscosity contrasts. These systems contain localized features which, even with adaptive mesh refinement, result in linear systems that can be on the order of 10^9 or more unknowns. One common approach for preconditioning to the velocity block of these systems is to apply an Algebraic Multigrid (AMG) v-cycle (as is done in the ASPECT software, for example), however, with AMG, robustness can be difficult with respect to problem size and number of parallel processes. Additionally, we see an increase in iteration counts with adaptive refinement when using AMG. In contrast, the Geometric Multigrid (GMG) method, by using information about the geometry of the problem, should offer a more robust option. Here we present a matrix-free GMG v-cycle which works on adaptively refined, distributed meshes, and we will compare it against the current AMG preconditioner (Trilinos ML) used in the ASPECT software. We will demonstrate the robustness of GMG with respect to problem size and show scaling up to 114688 cores and $217$ billion unknowns. All computations are run using the open source, finite element library deal.ii.
Cell type-specific chromatin accessibility analysis in the mouse and human brain

The Assay for Transposase Accessible Chromatin by sequencing (ATAC-seq) is becoming popular in the neuroscience field where chromatin regulation is thought to be involved in neurodevelopment, activity-dependent gene regulation, hormonal and environmental responses, and pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric disorders. The advantages of using ATAC-seq include a small amount of material needed, fast protocol, and the ability to capture a range of gene regulatory elements with a single assay. With increasing interest in chromatin research, it is an imperative to have feasible, reliable assays that are compatible with a range of neuroscience study designs. Here we tested three protocols for neuronal chromatin accessibility analysis, including a varying brain tissue freezing method followed by fluorescence-activated nuclei sorting (FANS) and ATAC-seq. Our study shows that the cryopreservation method impacts the number of open chromatin regions identified from frozen brain tissue using ATAC-seq. However, we show that all protocols generate consistent and robust data and enable the identification of functional regulatory elements in neuronal cells. Our study implies that the broad biological interpretation of chromatin accessibility data is not significantly affected by the freezing condition. We also reveal additional challenges of doing chromatin analysis on post-mortem human brain tissue. Overall, ATAC-seq coupled with FANS is a powerful method to capture cell-type-specific chromatin accessibility information in mouse and human brain. Our study provides alternative brain preservation methods that generate high-quality ATAC-seq data while fitting in different study designs, and further encourages the use of this method to uncover the role of epigenetic (dys)regulation in the brain.
Multiscale Virtual Screening Optimization for Shotgun Drug Repurposing Using the CANDO Platform

Drug repurposing, the practice of utilizing existing drugs for novel clinical indications, has tremendous potential for improving human health outcomes and increasing therapeutic development efficiency. The goal of multi-disease multitarget drug repurposing, also known as shotgun drug repurposing, is to develop platforms that assess the therapeutic potential of each existing drug for every clinical indication. Our Computational Analysis of Novel Drug Opportunities (CANDO) platform for shotgun multitarget repurposing implements several pipelines for the large-scale modeling and simulation of interactions between comprehensive libraries of drugs/compounds and protein structures. In these pipelines, each drug is described by an interaction signature that is compared to all other signatures that are subsequently sorted and ranked based on similarity. Pipelines within the platform are benchmarked based on their ability to recover known drugs for all indications in our library, and predictions are generated based on the hypothesis that (novel) drugs with similar signatures may be repurposed for the same indication(s). The drug-protein interactions used to create the drug-proteome signatures may be determined by any screening or docking method, but the primary approach used thus far has been BANDOCK, our in-house bioanalytical or similarity docking protocol. In this study, we calculated drug-proteome interaction signatures using the publicly available molecular docking method Autodock Vina and created hybrid decision tree pipelines that combined our original bio- and chem-informatic approach with the goal of assessing and benchmarking their drug repurposing capabilities and performance. The hybrid decision tree pipeline outperformed the two docking-based pipelines from which it was synthesized, yielding an average indication accuracy of 13.3% at the top10 cutoff (the most stringent), relative to 10.9% and 7.1% for its constituent pipelines, and a random control accuracy of 2.2%. We demonstrate that docking-based virtual screening pipelines have unique performance characteristics and that the CANDO shotgun repurposing paradigm is not dependent on a specific docking method. Our results also provide further evidence that multiple CANDO pipelines can be synthesized to enhance drug repurposing predictive capability relative to their constituent pipelines. Overall, this study indicates that pipelines consisting of varied docking-based signature generation methods can capture unique and useful signals for accurate comparison of drug-proteome interaction signatures, leading to improvements in the benchmarking and predictive performance of the CANDO shotgun drug repurposing platform.