cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
An exploratory econometric analysis of shared electronic banking network adoption

Abstract This paper focuses on a specific kind of interorganizational system — shared electronic banking networks — and identifies firm characteristics that are likely to influence the perceived business value of network membership and thus lead to early adoption. We undertake an exploratory econometric analysis of the adoption of Yankee 24, a large shared electronic banking network in the northeastern USA. Using Bass's analytical diffusion model, we categorize Yankee 24 members into earlier and later adopters. Probit models are estimated to assess the impact of explanatory variables on network adoption. We find that a bank's total demand deposits have a positive impact on early adoption, while the number of a bank's branch offices, a proxy for the size of its proprietary network, has a negative impact on early adoption.
Scope of Reviewable Evidence in NEPA Predetermination Cases: Why Going off the Record Puts Courts on Target

Plaintiffs challenging an agency’s environmental impact statement on the grounds of predetermination have been met with different judicially created evidentiary standards. Under the Fourth Circuit’s approach, as applied in National Audubon Society v. Department of the Navy, courts should restrict the scope of reviewable evidence to the administrative record. Under the Tenth Circuit’s approach, however, extra-record evidence may also be considered in determining predetermination claims. In Forest Guardians v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Tenth Circuit considered emails, intra-agency correspondence, and a grant agreement outside the scope of the administrative record, and concluded that the agency had not predetermined the outcome of its impact statement. This Note advocates for the universal adoption of the expansive Tenth Circuit approach because of the importance of extra-record evidence in predetermination cases and its minimal risk to agency independence.
The Political Question Doctrine: Suggested Criteria

Whether there should be a political question doctrine and, if so, how it should be implemented continue to be contentious and controversial issues, both within and outside the Court. This Article urges that the Justices should reformulate the detailed definition that they have utilized (at least formally) since 1962, and adopt four criteria to be applied in future cases. The least disputed-textual commitment-is the initial factor listed in Baker v. Carr. The other three are based on functional considerations rather than constitutional language or original understanding. The first of these-structural issues: federalism and separation of powers-has been advanced and developed at length in my earlier work. It is based on a comparative advantage of the political process over the Court in sound constitutional decisionmaking respecting the relevant issues, as well as the trustworthiness respecting fundamental values of the national legislative/executive branches in doing so. The remaining two criteria involve removing questions of individual rights from the judiciary's realm, something that would (and should) occur very infrequently. The manageable standards test recognizes that there may be constitutional provisions for which the Court lacks the capacity to develop clear and coherent principles. The generalized grievance guide is similar in many ways to structural issues in that it is also grounded in matters of comparative advantage and trustworthiness of results. Copyright © 2005 Jesse H. Choper. t Earl Warren Professor of Public Law, University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall). I wish to express appreciation to Katherine Florey, Boalt '04, for her exceptionally able assistance in preparing this Article, to my colleagues Daniel A. Farber, Philip P. Frickey, Goodwin Liu, Paul J. Mishkin, and John C. Yoo for helpful comments on an early draft, and to my casebook collaborator Richard H. Fallon, Jr., for an invaluable review of the final manuscript. Of course, none are responsible for the policy judgments on which the Article is based. 1458 DUKE LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 54:1457
Mining Optimal Policies: A Pattern Recognition Approach to Model Analysis

This project spawned from an admission control problem we were working on for a major hospital in the Boston area. We tried to incorporate various aspects of the problem in a model, which resulted ...
Weak reflection principle for Lévy processes

In this paper, we develop a new mathematical technique which allows us to express the joint distribution of a Markov process and its running maximum (or minimum) through the marginal distribution of the process itself. This technique is an extension of the classical reflection principle for Brownian motion, and it is obtained by weakening the assumptions of symmetry required for the classical reflection principle to work. We call this method a weak reflection principle and show that it provides solutions to many problems for which the classical reflection principle is typically used. In addition, unlike the classical reflection principle, the new method works for a much larger class of stochastic processes which, in particular, do not possess any strong symmetries. Here, we review the existing results which establish the weak reflection principle for a large class of time-homogeneous diffusions on a real line and then proceed to extend this method to the Levy processes with one-sided jumps (subject to some admissibility conditions). Finally, we demonstrate the applications of the weak reflection principle in financial mathematics, computational methods and inverse problems.
Venture Capital and the Professionalization of Start-Up Firms: Empirical Evidence

This paper examines the impact venture capital can have on the development of new firms. Using a hand-collected data set on Silicon Valley start-ups, we find that venture capital is related to a variety of professionalization measures, such as human resource policies, the adoption of stock option plans, and the hiring of a marketing VP. Venture-capital-backed companies are also more likely and faster to replace the founder with an outside CEO, both in situations that appear adversarial and those mutually agreed to. The evidence suggests that venture capitalists play roles over and beyond those of traditional financial intermediaries.
The Distribution of Realized Exchange Rate Volatility

Using high-frequency data on deutschemark and yen returns against the dollar, we construct model-free estimates of daily exchange rate volatility and correlation that cover an entire decade. Our estimates, termed realized volatilities and correlations, are not only model-free, but also approximately free of measurement error under general conditions, which we discuss in detail. Hence, for practical purposes, we may treat the exchange rate volatilities and correlations as observed rather than latent. We do so, and we characterize their joint distribution, both unconditionally and conditionally. Noteworthy results include a simple normality-inducing volatility transformation, high contemporaneous correlation across volatilities, high correlation between correlation and volatilities, pronounced and persistent dynamics in volatilities and correlations, evidence of long-memory dynamics in volatilities and correlations, and remarkably precise scaling laws under temporal aggregation.
Of modest proposals and non-identity: a comment on the right to know your genetic parents.

As Ravelingien and Pennings note, in my 2012 article “Rethinking Sperm-Donor Anonymity: Of Changed Selves, Nonidentity, and One-Night Stands” I am one of the “surprisingly few authors” who have pub...
Do Empty Creditors Matter? Evidence from Distressed Exchange Offers

In this paper, I examine the effect of credit default swaps (CDSs) on the restructuring of distressed firms. Using a sample of U.S. distressed exchange offers during the period 2006–2011, I show that the participation rate among bondholders is significantly lower if the firm has CDSs traded on its debt. To address endogeneity concerns, I use the introduction of the Big Bang Protocol as a natural experiment. The results suggest that firms with CDSs find it difficult to reduce debt out of court. This is important because it can increase the likelihood of future bankruptcy, which is inefficient. The findings are consistent with the empty creditor hypothesis, which posits that bondholders who are hedged with CDSs are less likely to participate in a debt restructuring. The paper also contains direct evidence for the existence of empty creditors. This paper was accepted by Amit Seru, finance.
Optimal policies for the sizing and timing of software maintenance projects

We present a model to determine the optimal point for maintaining a software application. We also address the question: given that a maintenance project has been initiated, should maintenance effort continue till the project is completed? Most previous literature has implicitly assumed that it is optimal to complete a maintenance project once it has been initiated. We analyze two policies: a work-based policy and a time-based policy. In the work-based policy, a fixed amount of work needs to be completed, and the time taken to accomplish the work is random. In the time-based policy, a fixed amount of time is allocated to maintenance, but a random amount of work is completed. We examine similarities and differences between the above two policies and provide insights into the management of software maintenance projects. A key insight of this study is that under a variety of situations, partial maintenance is suboptimal.
The Minimum Wage Once Again

In the view of these authors, the minimum-wage law is practically the best thing that has ever been invented, at least since sliced bread. They maintain that this legislation has led to greater, not less, employment, particularly for low-skilled workers, who might have been expected to lose their jobs, or not attain any in the first place, at least according to the traditional analysis of such laws. The present essay is an attempt to defend the view that this pernicious legislation creates unemployment for the poor, who are the least likely to be able to withstand its deleterious effects.
Violent Video Games and the Rights of Children and Parents: A Critique of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association

This Article closely examines the 2011 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 131 S.Ct. 2729 (2011), which held that California’s effort to restrict children’s access to violent video games violated the First Amendment. The Article will show that the Supreme Court widely missed the mark in applying well-established First Amendment law to strike down California’s effort to limit a minor’s access to material reasonably deemed inappropriate by parents. The Court’s principal error was to mischaracterize the statute as a ban on the distribution of material deemed inappropriate by the Legislature. This allowed it to announce simplistically that the case was controlled by United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460 (2010) which rejected “a freewheeling authority to declare new categories of speech outside the scope of the First Amendment,” 559 U.S. at 472, in declaring unconstitutional a federal statute that made it a crime to possess a depiction of animal cruelty if done “for commercial gain.” Brown contains numerous flaws. If taken literally, it would broadly expand children’s First Amendment rights. But Brown is not really about children’s rights, it is more about allowing a wealthy corporate enterprise – the violent video industry, to continue sales to an important constituency, young males. In this Article, I demonstrate the many flaws in the majority’s opinion, including the irony that Justice Scalia gets to become a champion of children’s rights (for an extreme change). But my greatest criticism of Brown is the extent to which the Court ignores, even mocks, the plight of conservative parents who struggle with ways to keep material from their children that American law insists may not be generally banned but that reasonable parents may believe is nonetheless inappropriate for their children. I ultimately argue that a well-worded law (which the California statute was not) should be upheld as constitutional if its purpose was merely to prevent children from purchasing certain material themselves, without making it unlawful for children to have access to the materials with their parents’ permission (in much the same way minors currently may not access movie theatres).
An Interpersonal Problem Approach to the Division of Social Phobia Subtypes

In the DSM-IV, social phobia has been subdivided into a generalized and a nongeneralized subtype. Although a number of important quantitative distinctions have been identified between the subtypes, most studies have failed to find support for qualitative differences between them. The goal of the present study was to determine whether the investigation of interpersonal problems in social phobia would lead to qualitatively different subgroups, subgroups that would provide additional nonoverlapping information to the DSM-IV classification. Thirty generalized socially phobic, 30 nongeneralized socially phobic, and 30 nondisordered control participants were selected based on dual structured interviews. All participants completed the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems Circumplex Scales (IIP-C; Alden, Wiggins, & Pincus, 1990). Results showed that when social phobia subtypes were classified using the DSM-IV definition, the IIP-C reflected subgroup differences in global severity of interpersonal problems, with the generalized social phobia group evidencing the greatest difficulty. However, the subgroups could not be discriminated on core or central interpersonal problems. In contrast, when an interpersonal analysis of subtype classification was employed, two groups were formed, each with discriminating core unifying features suggesting qualitatively different problematic reactions to interpersonal situations. One group evidenced interpersonal problems related to hostile, angry behavior, whereas the other group exhibited problems related to friendly-submissive behavior. Interpersonally derived subtypes were unrelated to DSM-IV defined subtypes, depression, and Axis I or avoidant personality disorder comorbidity. The potential clinical relevance of an assessment of interpersonal dysfunction to the treatment of social phobia is discussed.
Reciprocity, Collective Action, and Community Policing

This Article has two goals. The first is to develop a theoretical framework for evaluating different techniques for policing street crime. The second is to highlight the explanatory and prescriptive power of a particular theory of social norms and law. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a diverse array of crime-fighting strategies-from "order maintenance" policing to churchpolice alliances to highly participatory forms of law enforcement. These innovations arguably deserve a significant share of the credit for the remarkable drop in crime during the last decade. They also speak to a dramatic reorientation in the politics of law enforcement: for decades a weapon by which dominant groups safeguarded their preeminence, streetlevel policing is now being recast by traditionally marginalized groups as a tool for revitalizing community life in the inner city.' But the proponents of the "New Community Policing" have so far failed to identify a single theory of crime control that is comparable in parsimony and prescriptive richness to the rational-actor model that animates traditional policing strategies. The absence of such a theory threatens to impede the New Community Policing by making its claims of efficacy less credible and its diverse strategies less amenable to comparison with one another. Almost contemporaneously with the development of the New Community Policing, the legal academy has witnessed the emergence of a sustained challenge to the conventional rational-actor theory that guides law and economics. This program features a diverse array of behavioral phenomena, often referred to generically as "social norms," drawn from
The (Legal) Value of Chance: Distorted Measures of Recovery in Private Law

Parties who make investments that generate externalities may sometimes recover from the beneficiaries, even in the absence of contract. Previous scholarship has shown that granting recovery, based on either the cost of reasonable investment or the benefit conferred, can provide optimal incentives to invest. This article demonstrates that the law often awards recovery that is neither purely cost-based nor purely benefit-based and instead equals either the greater or lesser of the two measures. These hybrid approaches to recovery distort compensation and incentives. The article demonstrates the surprising prevalence of these practices and explores informational and institutional reasons why they emerge.
LIBERTY LOST: THE MORAL CASE FOR MARIJUANA LAW REFORM

Marijuana policy analyses typically focus on the relative costs and benefits of present policy and its feasible alternatives. This essay addresses a prior, threshold issue: whether marijuana criminal laws abridge fundamental individual rights, and if so, whether there are grounds that justify doing so. Over 700,000 people are arrested annually for simple marijuana possession, a small but significant proportion of the one hundred million Americans who have committed the same crime. In this essay, we present a civil libertarian case for repealing marijuana possession crimes. We put forward two arguments, corresponding to the two distinct liberty concerns implicated by laws that both ban marijuana use and punish its users. The first argument opposes criminalization, demonstrating that marijuana use does not constitute the kind of wrongful conduct that is a prerequisite for just punishment. The second argument demonstrates that even in the absence of criminal penalties, prohibition of marijuana use violates a moral right to exercise autonomy in personal matters – a corollary to Mill's harm principle in the utilitarian tradition, or, in the non-consequentialist tradition, to the respect for personhood that was well described by the Supreme Court in its recent Lawrence v. Texas opinion. Both arguments are based on principles of justice that are uncontroversial in other contexts.
Women and the Law: How Far We've Come and Where We Need to Go

Introduction to program Women and the Law: How Far We’ve Come and Where We Need to Go, co-sponsored by the Pace Law School Center for Career Development, Pace Law School’s Women’s Association of Law Students and the Westchester Women’s Bar Association and held at Pace University School of Law, Oct. 24, 2008.
Stuck in the Seventies: Gas Prices and Consumer Sentiment

Using daily consumer survey data, we analyze the transmission of gas prices to consumer beliefs and expectations about the economy. We exploit the high frequency and geographic disaggregation of ou...
Heteroskedasticity of Unknown Form in Spatial Autoregressive Models with Moving Average Disturbance Term

In this study, I investigate the necessary condition for the consistency of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of spatial models with a spatial moving average process in the disturbance term. I show that the MLE of spatial autoregressive and spatial moving average parameters is generally inconsistent when heteroskedasticity is not considered in the estimation. I also show that the MLE of parameters of exogenous variables is inconsistent and determine its asymptotic bias. I provide simulation results to evaluate the performance of the MLE. The simulation results indicate that the MLE imposes a substantial amount of bias on both autoregressive and moving average parameters.
Recognition and Disclosure Reliability: Evidence from SFAS No. 106*

This paper examines a fundamental question of interest to researchers and regulators: Does the market treat disclosed financial statement information as if it is less reliable than information recognized in the body of the financial statements? Specifically, we compare the perceived reliability of liabilities for retiree benefits other than pensions (PRBs) disclosed prior to adoption of Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 106 (SFAS No. 106) with the perceived reliability of PRB liabilities subsequently recognized under SFAS No. 106. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the market treating disclosed PRB liabilities as less reliable than recognized PRB liabilities and pension liabilities. However, once PRB liabilities are recognized, they do not appear to be any less reliable than pension liabilities. These findings are inconsistent with the Choi, Collins, and Johnson 1997 conclusion that PRB liabilities are inherently less reliable than pension liabilities. The paper also investigates factors that may have contributed to the lower perceived disclosure reliability. Our results suggest that the market perceived PRB liability disclosures to be less reliable when firms provided range disclosures, had higher probabilities of reducing plan benefits, or had lower ratios of retiree to total PRB obligations. These findings suggest that reliability may have been enhanced if more supporting details had been provided in Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 74 disclosures.
Idiosyncratic risk and aggregate employment dynamics

Abstract This paper studies how idiosyncratic productivity risk impacts aggregate employment dynamics when there is a trade-off between workers' productivity and costs of job creation and destruction. In our analysis, increasing idiosyncratic risk induces a producer to move workers out of structured jobs that are costly to create and destroy and towards less productive but more flexible unstructured positions. This substitution leaves the producer's total employment more responsive to both idiosyncratic and aggregate disturbances. If all of an industry's producers respond to heightened idiosyncratic risk in this way, then industry-wide employment can respond more to a given aggregate shock. We apply this insight to connect differences between young and old manufacturing plants' aggregate employment dynamics with their corresponding differences in idiosyncratic variability.
Inflation Target In Emerging Countries: Modeling Exchange Rate Issues

The idea of inflation targeting in emerging countries is not a new one. There have been papers that favor or reject the idea of implementing such a system in these countries for mainly institutional reasons. This paper does not deal with these normative arguments. Emerging countries are implementing IT regimes and therefore it is necessary to understand how it should be done and what problems can arise. Therefore this paper focuses on exchange rate issues for inflation targeting. These issues have their root in the basic relation that exists in emerging countries between inflation and the exchange rate, a relation known as the “pass through effect”. The simple setup used in this paper shows how the monetary authorities implementing an IT regime must intervene in the exchange rate market in order to comply with the inflation target. The central bank intervenes in order to avoid exchange rate movements that would affect the overall inflation rate through the pass-through effect. These results mean that the dirty floating or fear of floating hypothesis should be modified when applied to countries implementing IT, since their intervention (or dirty floating activities) may be justified.
Quantification of abdominal fat from computed tomography using deep learning and its association with electronic health records in an academic biobank.

OBJECTIVE The objective was to develop a fully automated algorithm for abdominal fat segmentation and to deploy this method at scale in an academic biobank. MATERIALS AND METHODS We built a fully automated image curation and labeling technique using deep learning and distributive computing to identify subcutaneous and visceral abdominal fat compartments from 52,844 computed tomography scans in 13,502 patients in the Penn Medicine Biobank (PMBB). A classification network identified the inferior and superior borders of the abdomen, and a segmentation network differentiated visceral and subcutaneous fat. Following technical evaluation of our method, we conducted studies to validate known relationships with visceral and subcutaneous fat. RESULTS When compared with 100 manually annotated cases, the classification network was on average within one 5-mm slice for both the superior (0.4 ± 1.1 slice) and inferior (0.4 ± 0.6 slice) borders. The segmentation network also demonstrated excellent performance with intraclass correlation coefficients of 1.00 (P < 2 × 10-16) for subcutaneous and 1.00 (P < 2 × 10-16) for visceral fat on 100 testing cases. We performed integrative analyses of abdominal fat with the phenome extracted from the electronic health record and found highly significant associations with diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and renal failure, among other phenotypes. CONCLUSIONS This work presents a fully automated and highly accurate method for the quantification of abdominal fat that can be applied to routine clinical imaging studies to fuel translational scientific discovery.
Can Attention Masks Improve Adversarial Robustness

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known to be susceptible to adversarial examples. Adversarial examples are maliciously crafted inputs that are designed to fool a model, but appear normal to human beings. Recent work has shown that pixel discretization can be used to make classifiers for MNIST highly robust to adversarial examples. However, pixel discretization fails to provide significant protection on more complex datasets. In this paper, we take the first step towards reconciling these contrary findings. Focusing on the observation that discrete pixelization in MNIST makes the background completely black and foreground completely white, we hypothesize that the important property for increasing robustness is the elimination of image background using attention masks before classifying an object. To examine this hypothesis, we create foreground attention masks for two different datasets, GTSRB and MS-COCO. Our initial results suggest that using attention mask leads to improved robustness. On the adversarially trained classifiers, we see an adversarial robustness increase of over 20% on MS-COCO.
The matching and sorting of exporting and importing firms: Theory and evidence

Abstract This paper develops a general equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous exporters and heterogeneous importers. This theory is guided by new findings drawn from a matched exporter-importer dataset that characterizes the relationships between exporting and importing firms. I find that most exporters have a single importing partner, that highly productive exporters tend to trade with highly productive importers, and that the value traded is positively correlated with both exporter and importer productivities. The model analyzes the selection of exporters and importers into trading pairs and features simultaneous free entry into exporting and into importing. This theory provides a rationale for the fixed costs of entering export markets, associating them with the costs of searching for importing firms that distribute a product to final consumers abroad. I test this theory by studying the response of exporting and importing firms to the recent Colombia-U.S. free trade agreement. This evidence illustrates a novel mechanism of adjustment of U.S. firms to trade liberalization.
Response to Comment on “Resolving spatial and energetic distributions of trap states in metal halide perovskite solar cells”

Ravishankar et al claimed that drive-level capacitance profiling (DLCP) cannot resolve trap density in perovskites of given thickness. We point out that the trap densities derived by DLCP are from the differential capacitance at different frequencies; thus, the background charges caused by diffusion and geometry capacitance have been subtracted. Even for the nondifferential doping analysis, the contribution from diffusion capacitance is negligible and that from geometry capacitance is excluded.
The curious intersection of nuisance and takings law

Whenever the government operates a facility in a way that negatively affects the property interests of nearby owners, the question arises whether it has effected a taking. This is especially the case in instances in which the government's land use constitutes a nuisance. This Article explores the issue of when a nuisance ripens into a taking. The Article argues that when it is alleged that the government has effected a taking through its own land use, courts should employ a form of review that is more exacting than that applied in regulatory takings cases but that falls short of the categorical rule applied in physical invasion cases. In doing so, the Article focuses on both the magnitude of the harm, as well as the degree of its distribution among property owners, that accompanies intensive governmental land uses. The Article seeks to show how takings law can promote a greater degree of fairness when the government chooses sites for facilities that create significant negative externalities. The analysis will help property owners who have borne a disproportionate share of those externalities, including owners in poor and minority communities whose unequal treatment in this regard has given rise to the environmental justice movement.
Infant Gut Strain Persistence is Associated with Maternal Origin, Phylogeny, and Functional Potential Including Surface Adhesion and Iron Acquisition

Gut microbiome succession impacts infant development. However, it remains unclear what factors promote persistence of initial bacterial colonists in the developing gut. Here, we performed strain-resolved metagenomic analyses to compare gut colonization of preterm and full-term infants throughout the first year of life and evaluated links between strain persistence and strain origin as well as genetic potential. Analysis of 206 fecal metagenomes collected from full-term and preterm infants and their mothers revealed that infants’ initially distinct microbial communities converged by age one. Approximately 11% of early colonists, primarily Bacteroides and Bifidobacterium, persisted during the first year of life, and these were more prevalent in full-term compared to preterm infants. Gut-associated strains from mothers were significantly more likely to persist in the infant gut than other strains. Enrichment in genes for surface adhesion, iron acquisition and carbohydrate degradation may explain persistence of some strains through the first year of life.
Lattice calculation of hadronic tensor of the nucleon

We report an attempt to calculate the deep inelastic scattering structure functions from the hadronic tensor calculated on the lattice. We used the Backus-Gilbert reconstruction method to address the inverse Laplace transformation for the analytic continuation from the Euclidean to the Minkowski space.
Intermittent unsteady propulsion with a combined heaving and pitching foil

Aquatic animals swim with a wide range of kinematic motions affecting their shed vortex structures and propulsive performance. We explore the mechanistic trade-offs that occur when caudal fin swimmers use continuous or intermittent combined heaving and pitching motions. It is determined that intermittent swimming can improve efficiency for pitch dominated motions whereas heave dominated motions lead to higher efficiencies with continuous swimming. This phenomenon is a consequence of the physical origins of the force production for heave dominated and pitch dominated motions, which is discussed in light of unsteady thin airfoil theory.
Can a Linear Sigma Model Describe Walking Gauge Theories at Low Energies

In recent years, many investigations of confining Yang Mills gauge theories near the edge of the conformal window have been carried out using lattice techniques. These studies have revealed that the spectrum of hadrons in nearly conformal ("walking") gauge theories differs significantly from the QCD spectrum. In particular, a light singlet scalar appears in the spectrum which is nearly degenerate with the PNGBs at the lightest currently accessible quark masses. This state is a viable candidate for a composite Higgs boson. Presently, an acceptable effective field theory (EFT) description of the light states in walking theories has not been established. Such an EFT would be useful for performing chiral extrapolations of lattice data and for serving as a bridge between lattice calculations and phenomenology. It has been shown that the chiral Lagrangian fails to describe the IR dynamics of a theory near the edge of the conformal window. Here we assess a linear sigma model as an alternate EFT description by performing explicit chiral fits to lattice data. In a combined fit to the Goldstone (pion) mass and decay constant, a tree level linear sigma model has a Χ2 /d.o.f. = 0.5 compared to Χ2 /d.o.f. = 29.6 from fitting nextto-leading order chiral perturbation theory. When the 0++ (σ) mass is included in the fit, Χ2 /d.o.f. = 4.9. We remark on future directions for providing better fits to the σ mass.
Optimal, near-optimal, and robust epidemic control

In the absence of drugs and vaccines, policymakers use non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing to decrease rates of disease-causing contact, with the aim of reducing or delaying the epidemic peak. These measures carry social and economic costs, so societies may be unable to maintain them for more than a short period of time. Intervention policy design often relies on numerical simulations of epidemic models, but comparing policies and assessing their robustness demands clear principles that apply across strategies. Here we derive the theoretically optimal strategy for using a time-limited intervention to reduce the peak prevalence of a novel disease in the classic Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered epidemic model. We show that broad classes of easier-to-implement strategies can perform nearly as well as the theoretically optimal strategy. But neither the optimal strategy nor any of these near-optimal strategies is robust to implementation error: small errors in timing the intervention produce large increases in peak prevalence. Our results reveal fundamental principles of non-pharmaceutical disease control and expose their potential fragility. For robust control, an intervention must be strong, early, and ideally sustained. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the need for non-pharmaceutical epidemic mitigation strategies that can be effective even if they are limited in duration. Here, the authors derive analytically optimal and near-optimal time-limited strategies for limiting the epidemic peak in the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered model and show that, due to the sensitivity of such strategies to implementation errors, timely action is fundamental to non-pharmaceutical disease control.
Rate-Amplifying Demand and the Excess Sensitivity of Long-Term Rates

Long-term nominal interest rates are surprisingly sensitive to high-frequency (daily or monthly) movements in short-term rates. Since 2000, this high-frequency sensitivity has grown even stronger in U.S. data. By contrast, the association between low-frequency changes (at six- or twelve-month horizons) in long- and short-term rates, which was also strong before 2000, has weakened substantially. This puzzling post-2000 pattern arises because increases in short rates temporarily raise the term premium component of long-term yields, leading long rates to temporarily overreact to changes in short rates. The frequency-dependent excess sensitivity of long-term rates that we observe in recent years is best understood using a model in which (i) declines in short rates trigger “rate-amplifying” shifts in investor demand for long-term bonds and (ii) the arbitrage response to these demand shifts is both limited and slow. We study, both theoretically and empirically, how such rate-amplifying demand can be traced to mortgage refinancing activity, investors who extrapolate recent changes in short rates, and investors who “reach for yield” when short rates fall. We discuss the implications of our findings for the validity of event-study methodologies and the transmission of monetary policy.
Volumetric procedural models for shape representation

Abstract This article describes a volumetric approach for procedural shape modeling and a new Procedural Shape Modeling Language (PSML) that facilitates the specification of these models. PSML provides programmers the ability to describe shapes in terms of their 3D elements where each element may be a semantic group of 3D objects, e.g., a brick wall, or an indivisible object, e.g., an individual brick. Modeling shapes in this manner facilitates the creation of models that more closely approximate the organization and structure of their real-world counterparts. As such, users may query these models for volumetric information such as the number, position, orientation and volume of 3D elements which cannot be provided using surface based model-building techniques. PSML also provides a number of new language-specific capabilities that allow for a rich variety of context-sensitive behaviors and post-processing functions. These capabilities include an object-oriented approach for model design, methods for querying the model for component-based information and the ability to access model elements and components to perform Boolean operations on the model parts. PSML is open-source and includes freely available tutorial videos, demonstration code and an integrated development environment to support writing PSML programs.
Clinical evaluation of BCL-2/XL levels pre- and post- HER2-targeted therapy

Our previous pre-clinical work defined BCL-2 induction as a critical component of the adaptive response to lapatinib-mediated inhibition of HER2. To determine whether a similar BCL-2 upregulation occurs in lapatinib-treated patients, we evaluated gene expression within tumor biopsies, collected before and after lapatinib or trastuzumab treatment, from the TRIO-B-07 clinical trial (NCT#00769470). We detected BCL2 mRNA upregulation in both HER2+/ER- as well as HER2+/ER+ patient tumors treated with lapatinib or trastuzumab. To address whether mRNA expression correlated with protein expression, we evaluated pre- and post-treatment tumors for BCL-2 via immunohistochemistry. Despite BCL2 mRNA upregulation within HER2+/ER- tumors, BCL-2 protein levels were undetectable in most of the lapatinib- or trastuzumab-treated HER2+/ER- tumors. BCL-2 upregulation was evident within the majority of lapatinib-treated HER2+/ER+ tumors and was often coupled with increased ER expression and decreased proliferation. Comparable BCL-2 upregulation was not observed within the trastuzumab-treated HER2+/ER+ tumors. Together, these results provide clinical validation of the BCL-2 induction associated with the adaptive response to lapatinib and support evaluation of BCL-2 inhibitors within the context of lapatinib and other HER2-targeted receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors.
Virtual Gastroenterology Fellowship Recruitment During COVID-19 and Its Implications for the Future.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, medical education organizations endorsed a virtual recruitment format, representing a stark change from traditional in-person interviews. We aimed to identify the attitudes and perceptions of Gastroenterology Fellowship Program Directors (PDs) and applicants regarding the virtual interview experience and the role of virtual interviews (VI) in the future. We designed separate surveys targeting PDs and applicants using the Qualtrics software. At the end of the interview season, we e-mailed both survey links to all PDs and requested that they forward the applicant survey to their interviewed candidates. Surveys were voluntary and anonymous. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data with results presented as percentages. A total of 29.7% of PDs completed the survey. Compared to traditional interviews, VI were viewed by 46.5% of PDs to be very suboptimal or suboptimal. Yet, 69.1% envisioned a role for VI in the future. A total of 14.2% of applicants completed the survey. Compared to traditional interviews, VI were viewed by 42.3% of applicants to be very suboptimal or suboptimal. However, 61.8% saw a future role for VI. While both applicants and PDs reported that establishing an interpersonal connection was a disadvantage with VI, applicants placed more emphasis on this need for connection (p = 0.001). Overall, PDs and applicants report mixed views with regard to VI but anticipate that it may continue to have a future role. VI may augment future recruitment cycles with care taken to not disadvantage applicants, who rely heavily on the interview process to create personal connections with programs.
Could woodworking have driven lithic tool selection

Abstract Understanding early stone tools, particularly relationships between form and function, is fundamental to understanding the behavioral evolution of early hominins. The oldest-claimed flake tools date to ca. 3.3 million years ago, and their development may represent a key step in hominin evolution. Flake form, and its relationship to function, has long been a focus of Paleolithic studies, almost exclusively with respect to meat acquisition. However, evidence for woodworking is now known from sites dating to 1.5 Ma. Additionally, Pan troglodytes are known to manufacture wooden tools for hunting and foraging, thus creating a phylogenetic (parsimony) argument for more ancient woodworking. However, few studies examining woodworking and Paleolithic tools have been completed to date. Indeed, it remains an open question whether woodworking may have instigated specific selective demands on the form of early stone tools. Here, we conducted an experiment testing the comparative woodworking efficiency (measured by time) of small and large flakes. Two groups of participants used either a relatively small or large unretouched flake to remove a predefined area from standardized samples of wood. Those using larger flakes were significantly more efficient (i.e., required less time) during this woodworking task. Our results demonstrate that larger flakes could have been preferentially chosen by hominins for woodworking, consistent with previous data generated experimentally in other (non-woodworking) tasks. Moreover, the production of relatively large flakes, such as those at Lomekwi, could have been motivated by woodworking, rather than, or in addition to, butchery. Such issues may also have encouraged the use of Levallois production strategies in later times.
Parity sheaves and Smith theory

Let $p$ be a prime number and let $X$ be a complex algebraic variety with an action of $\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z}$. We develop the theory of parity complexes in a certain $2$-periodic localization of the equivariant constructible derived category $D^b_{\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z}}(X,\mathbb{Z}_p)$. Under certain assumptions, we use this to define a functor from the category of parity sheaves on $X$ to the category of parity sheaves on the fixed-point locus $X^{\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z}}$. This may be thought of as a categorification of Smith theory. When $X$ is the affine Grassmannian associated to some complex reductive group, our functor gives a geometric construction of the Frobenius-contraction functor recently defined by M. Gros and M. Kaneda via the geometric Satake equivalence.
The Pearson Bayes factor: An analytic formula for computing evidential value from minimal summary statistics

In Bayesian hypothesis testing, evidence for a statistical model is quantified by the Bayes factor, which represents the relative likelihood of observed data under that model compared to another competing model. In general, computing Bayes factors is difficult, as computing the marginal likelihood of data under a given model requires integrating over a prior distribution of model parameters. In this paper, I capitalize on a particular choice of prior distribution that allows the Bayes factor to be expressed without integral representation and I develop a simple formula -- the Pearson Bayes factor -- that requires only minimal summary statistics commonly reported in scientific papers, such as the $t$ or $F$ score and the degrees of freedom. In addition to presenting this new result, I provide several examples of its use and report a simulation study validating its performance. Importantly, the Pearson Bayes factor gives applied researchers the ability to compute exact Bayes factors from minimal summary data, and thus easily assess the evidential value of any data for which these summary statistics are provided, even when the original data is not available.
Semi Supervised Segmentation And Graph-Based Tracking Of 3d Nuclei In Time-Lapse Microscopy

We propose a novel weakly supervised method to improve the boundary of the 3D segmented nuclei utilizing an over-segmented image. This is motivated by the observation that current state-of-the-art deep learning methods do not result in accurate boundaries when the training data is weakly annotated. Towards this, a 3DU-Net is trained to get the centroid of the nuclei and integrated with a simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) supervoxel algorithm that provides better adherence to cluster boundaries. To track these segmented nuclei, our algorithm utilizes the relative nuclei location depicting the processes of nuclei division and apoptosis. The proposed algorithmic pipeline achieves better segmentation performance compared to the state-of-the-art method in Cell Tracking Challenge (CTC) 2019 and comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods in IEEE ISBI CTC2020 while utilizing very few pixel-wise annotated data. Detailed experimental results are provided, and the source code is available on 1 GitHub.1https://github.com/UCSB-VRL/ucsb_ctc
One year of flight data from the PASP Plus experiment

The PASP-Plus (Photovoltaic Array Space Power Plus Diagnostics) program is a photovoltaic experiment which is flying on the Air Force satellite APEX (Advanced Photovoltaic and Electronics Experiments). The satellite was launched on August 3, 1994 with a Pegasus low-cost launch vehicle. There are two other small experiments on APEX, however PASP-Plus is the largest, uses the most power, and accounts for the largest portion of the data requirements. The satellite is in an elliptical orbit with an apogee of 2552 km and a perigee of 363 km. The inclination is 70 degrees. The PASP-Plus experiment consists of twelve photovoltaic panels containing a total of sixteen separate cell modules. Two of the modules are concentrator modules, while the rest are planar. There are several different solar cell types flying on PASP-Plus including silicon, GaAs on germanium substrates, InP, amorphous silicon, and three multi-bandgap cells. The purpose of this paper is to present some of the data from the first year of the PASP-Plus flight. Cell performance and module thermal performance will be discussed as well as other relevant data.