cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Happiness at the House of Mouse: How Disney Negotiates to Create the "Happiest Place on Earth"

Poets rhapsodize about it, the Beatles sing about it, philosophers debate it, psychologists study it, and chocolate induces it. Disney, on the other hand, claims title to it: happiness. This Article examines, in the context of Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro's "Core Concerns" framework and general negotiation theory, the degree to which The Walt Disney Company creates happiness for those at the Walt Disney World Resort, particularly Walt Disney World's guests and cast members. It begins with a brief discussion of happiness and of negotiation theory. This Article next examines how Disney creates at Walt Disney World a negotiating environment conducive to the stimulation of happiness. It then analyzes observational evidence of Disney’s negotiations with guests and cast members and offers suggestions for how Disney could negotiate more effectively. Finally, this Article concludes with a judgment about Disney’s success in presenting Walt Disney World as the "Happiest Place on Earth" and with contemplation of how lessons learned from Disney are applicable to other companies.
Earnings smoothness, average returns, and implied cost of equity capital

ABSTRACT: Despite a belief among corporate executives that smooth earnings paths lead to a lower cost of equity capital, I find no relation between earnings smoothness and average stock returns over the last 30 years. In other words, owners of firms with volatile earnings are not compensated with higher returns, as one would expect if volatile earnings lead to greater risk exposure. Although prior empirical work links smoother earnings to a lower implied cost of capital, I offer evidence that this link is driven primarily by optimism in analysts' long‐term earnings forecasts. This optimism yields target prices and implied cost of capital estimates that are systematically too high for firms with volatile earnings. Overall, the evidence is inconsistent with the notion that attempts to smooth earnings can lead to a lower cost of equity capital.
Risk Pooling in the Presence of Moral Hazard

The size of an insurance pool that minimizes average risk per policy is derived for cases in which moral hazard offsets the benefits of pooling.
Trademark Dilution, Search Costs, and Naked Licensing

Trademark dilution needs to be rethought to ensure that it enhances social welfare. Blurring should only be considered harmful when it increases consumer search costs. The fact that a trademark calls to mind two different products should not itself be considered actionable. Blurring only causes real harm when it interferes with consumers’ ability to remember brand attributes. The Coase Theorem suggests that anti-dilution statutes will not block beneficial, non-competing uses of a mark, because, if transactions costs are low and the use is socially beneficial, the trademark owner will license the use. Unfortunately, the “naked licensing” rule, which forbids unsupervised licenses, adds unnecessary transactions costs and blocks potentially beneficial uses. Some commentators think free riding is or should be the essence of dilution. If free riding causes no harm – no consumer confusion, no blurring, and no tarnishment – then it is socially beneficial and should be allowed.
From the USA with Love: Sharing Home-Grown Hormones, GMOs, and Clones with a Reluctant Europe

The United States and the European Union (EU) disagree over the social, ethical, and environmental implications of producing, using, and trading the products of modern science. Since the 1990s, the United States and Europe have clashed heads in the World Trade Organization (WTO) over European regulations restricting imports of the products of modern biotechnology. In the first of these WTO disputes—the Beef Hormones dispute—the WTO upheld a United States challenge to EU regulations banning the importation of beef treated with hormones; this dispute is still ongoing. The scale of the Beef Hormones dispute pales in comparison to the pending row over genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The United States and the EU have adopted diametrically opposed regulatory regimes for the importation and use of GMOs, prompting yet another WTO trade dispute. In fall 2006, the WTO dispute settlement body found that Europe’s genetically modified (GM) regulations contradict international trade rules, thus fueling another epic transatlantic dispute. In late 2006, the United States laid the groundwork for yet another biotechnology-trade conflict. On December 28, 2006, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released Animal Cloning: A Draft Risk Assessment. One of the practical consequences of the FDA’s report is that cloned food products will not have to be labeled as such when they enter the human food market. The EU has not yet established a framework for regulating the products of cloned animals, but it is unlikely to adopt such a laissez-faire approach. This Article examines the beef hormones, GMOs, and cloned foods debates, focusing on whether cloned foods will incite American political and ethical debate or slide by without notice until the United States and the EU once again clash heads in the WTO. The Article concludes that the United States citizenry will likely continue to be, by and large, indifferent to food safety questions, but that the cloning debate will begin to turn the tide towards incorporating more public
Jurisdictional Prescriptions, Nonjurisdictional Processing Rules, and Federal Appellate Practice: The Implications of Kontrick , Eberhart & Bowles

In the recent cases of Kontrick v. Ryan, Eberhart v. United States, and Bowles v. Russell, the Supreme Court addressed the critical distinction between two kinds of mandatory timing prescriptions: one that directly governs a federal court's subject-matter jurisdiction, and one that merely governs a court's administration of a proceeding over which its subject-matter jurisdiction is not in doubt. While noncompliance with the former will deprive the court of jurisdiction to adjudicate the proceeding, noncompliance with the latter, which the Court has colloquially described as an inflexible claim-processing rule, will result in a litigant's forfeiture of the opportunity to raise a timeliness challenge once the court has adjudicated the proceeding on the merits. This Article seeks to address the implications of the three cases in question for at least two types of timing prescriptions routinely confronted by federal appellate litigants. The first concerns the initiation of an appeal as of right. Although the traditional understanding was that the relevant timing restrictions were jurisdictional regardless of the nature of the underlying proceeding or the status of the appellant, the Court has since confirmed that this understanding no longer pertains to appeals initiated by criminal defendants because the governing timing restrictions are not prescribed by statute. Accordingly, the government's failure to object to a defendant's appeal on timeliness grounds prior to its adjudication on the merits will result in a forfeiture of that objection. The second timing prescription concerns the filing in civil proceedings of certain post-judgment motions that routinely precede an appeal from the judgment. The requirements for the timely filing of such a motion, like the requirements for the timely filing of appeal as of right, had long been regarded as jurisdictional prerequisites. But because those restrictions are not prescribed by statute, they are now properly understood as mere processing rules that are subject to forfeiture by a litigant who fails to object on timeliness grounds before the district court's adjudication of the motion on the merits.
What do we learn from two new accounting-based stock market anomalies?

Abstract Hirshleifer et al. (J. Account. Econom. 38 (2004)) and Taffler, Lu and Kausar (J. Account. Econom. 38 (2004)) document large and statistically significant abnormal returns from trading on balance sheet data and audit opinions. However, the statistical tests ignore high transactions costs, especially for selling short, that would likely make the trading strategies unprofitable. The accounting anomalies literature is adding little to what we know about how and why markets operate more or less efficiently. I identify some research questions and opportunities, highlighting those with accounting and auditing implications.
Transcending the Means Principle

A robust, if not absolute, prohibition on treating people merely as a means seems to sit at the core of common sense deontological morality. But the principle prohibiting such treatment, the ‘means principle’ (MP), has been notoriously hard to defend: both the subjective, intention-focused and the objective, causal-role-focused interpretations of what it means to use someone as a means face potent objections. In this paper, my goal is not to defend the MP, but to articulate and defend a new principle, which I call the Restricting Claims Principle (RCP), that explains why a person’s causal role is morally significant. The RCP broadens the basic frame of relevant considerations from the MP’s concern with the dyadic relationship between agent and patient to a global balance of patient-claims on an agent. It distinguishes two kinds of patient-claims that weigh in that balance: restricting and non-restricting. In most cases, these can be distinguished as follows: Restricting claims, if respected as rights, would restrict an agent from doing what she could otherwise permissibly do if the claimant (or his property) were absent; non-restricting claims, if respected as rights, would not in that way restrict an agent. Only restricting claims press to make others worse off than if the claimant were absent. The RCP holds that restricting claims must therefore be substantially weaker than non-restricting ones. The claims of those who would be used as a means are non-restricting, while the claims of those who would be harmed as a side effect are restricting. Thus the RCP can account for the same cases (mostly) as the MP, without having to rely on the MP to do so.
Baby Boomer Retirement Security: The Roles of Planning, Financial Literacy, and Housing Wealth

Abstract We compare wealth holdings across two cohorts of the Health and Retirement Study: the early Baby Boomers in 2004, and individuals in the same age group in 1992. Levels and patterns of total net worth have changed relatively little over time, though Boomers rely more on housing equity than their predecessors. Most important, planners in both cohorts arrive close to retirement with much higher wealth levels and display higher financial literacy than non-planners. Instrumental variables estimates show that planning behavior can explain the differences in savings and why some people arrive close to retirement with very little or no wealth.
The spatial, temporal, and configurational characteristics of geographic dispersion in teams

As organizations operate across greater distances, scholars are increasingly interested in the work of geographically dispersed teams and the technologies that they use to communicate and coordinate their work. However, research has generally not specified the dimensions (spatial, temporal, or configurational) and degrees of team dispersion, nor has it articulated the theoretical connections between those dimensions and important team outcomes. This research essay expands upon previous field and lab studies of dispersed teamwork by presenting a new conceptualization of dispersion as a continuous, multidimensional construct, in which each dimension is theoretically linked with different outcomes. We illustrate this new conceptualization with a series of examples from real dispersed teams and present implications for research regarding technology use.
Promising Protection: 911 Call Records as Foundation for Family Violence Intervention

The usefulness of 911 call records in domestic violence situations is under-appreciated. This Article documents an extraordinary increase in prosecutorial success in routine misdemeanor DV cases when 911 call records are available and used in some fashion. It also explains how other parties could effectively use 911 event chronologies and sound recordings to stop domestic violence and protect children from being exposed to it, including child protection agencies, victims themselves, and children's other family members.
The Solution to the Real Blackmail Paradox: The Common Link Between Blackmail and Other Criminal Threats

Disclosure of true but reputation-damaging information is generally legal. But threats to disclose true but reputation-damaging information unless payment is made are generally criminal. Many scholars think that this situation is paradoxical because it seems to involve illegality mysteriously arising out of legality, a criminal act mysteriously arising out of an independently legal threat to disclose conjoined with an independently legal demand for money. But this formulation is not quite right. The real paradox raised by the different legal statuses of blackmail threats to disclose and disclosure itself involves a contradiction between our strong intuition that blackmail threats should be criminal and some equally strong arguments, all of which depend on the fact that disclosure is legal, that blackmail threats should be legal. So an adequate solution to the real Blackmail Paradox requires us either to drop the intuition or to refute the pro-legalization arguments. This Article will adopt the latter approach. It will explain why the six main arguments for legalizing blackmail threats all fail. In the course of refuting one of these arguments, it will also offer a novel positive justification for criminalizing blackmail threats: they should be criminal for the same reason that menacing, harassment, and stalking are criminal-- namely, because they involve the reasonable likelihood, and usually the intent, of putting the victim into a state of especially great fear and anxiety. Of course, one might object that disclosure itself is likely to have the same effect, if not malicious purpose. Yet, again, it is still legal. But this point shows only that we as a society value freedom of speech more than we value freedom from infliction of emotional injury. It does not show that we do not value freedom from infliction of emotional injury sufficiently to protect it when competing moral or institutional interests such as freedom of speech are not at stake.
Central bank intervention and the intraday process of price formation in the currency markets

Abstract We propose a novel theory of the impact of sterilized spot interventions on the microstructure of currency markets that focuses on their liquidity. We analyze the effectiveness of intervention operations in a model of sequential trading in which i) a rational Central Bank faces a trade-off between policy motives and wealth maximization; ii) currency dealers' sole objective is to provide immediacy at a cost while maintaining a driftless expected foreign currency position; and iii) adverse selection, inventory, signaling, and portfolio balance considerations are absent by assumption. In this setting, and consistent with available empirical evidence, we find that i) the mere likelihood of a future intervention—even if expected, non-secret, and uninformative—is sufficient to generate endogenous effects on exchange rate levels, to increase exchange rate volatility, and to impact bid-ask spreads; and ii) these effects are exacerbated by the intensity of dealership competition, the extent of the Central Bank's policy trade-off, and the credibility of its threat of future actions.
Erie and Preemption: Killing One Bird with Two Stones

The Supreme Court has developed a standard account of the Erie doctrine. The Court has directed different analyses of Erie cases depending upon whether the federal law in question is in the form of a federal rule (or statute) or is instead a judge-made law. But the cases applying the doctrine are difficult to explain using the standard account. Although the Court and commentators have noted that Erie is a type of preemption, they provide little, if any, rigorous analysis of Erie in light of preemption doctrines. This Article attempts to fill that void, offering an extended analysis of Erie as a preemption doctrine. The analysis demonstrates how and why Erie constitutes a species of preemption. It then shows the appropriateness of preemption analysis to Erie problems whether one is dealing with a federal rule of civil procedure or with federal common law. Because preemption underlies both wings of the Erie doctrine, the standard account’s bifurcated approach is wrong. Moreover, employing doctrines developed in other preemption contexts explains the results of the Supreme Court’s Erie cases better than the Court’s own standard account. By making explicit the linkage between Erie and preemption, one can clarify the analysis and better predict and explain the results of the Supreme Court’s cases.
A solution to the problem of nuisance suits: The option to have the court bar settlement

A solution to a broad category of nuisance suits is examined in this paper. The solution is to give defendants the option to have courts prevent settlements (by refusing to enforce them). Then, if a defendant knows he is facing a plaintiff who would not be willing to go to trial, the defendant would exercise his option to bar settlement, forcing the plaintiff to withdraw. And because the plaintiff would anticipate this, he would not bring his nuisance suit in the first place.
IR&D Project Data and Theories of R&D Investment

Abstract This paper analyzes data on a large sample of research and development (R & D) projects documented in the Defense Department's Independent R & D Data Bank, both to provide some stylized facts about R & D investment at the project level and to test the implications of a control-theoretic model developed by Grossman and Shapiro. We calculate moments of the marginal distributions and elasticities of cost with respect to time, by type of project (e.g., basic research, development), and discriminate between alternative hypotheses concerning the shape of the hazard function of R & D investment.
The pricing of earnings and cash flows and an affirmation of accrual accounting

Under accrual accounting, earnings add to shareholders’ equity. Cash flow generated by a business has no effect on the book value of shareholders’ equity but reduces the book value of net assets employed in business operations. In short, accrual accounting rules prescribe that earnings add to shareholder value, but cash flow is irrelevant to the valuation of equity. This paper documents that the stock market prices equity shares according to this prescription. Earnings are priced positively but, given earnings, a dollar more of free cash flow from a business—cash flow from operations minus cash investment—is, on average, associated with approximately a dollar less in the market value of the business and has no association with changes in the market value of the equity claim on the business. Furthermore, controlling for the cash investment component of free cash flow, cash flow from operations also reduces the market value of the business dollar-for-dollar and is unrelated to the changes in market value of the equity.
Why the SEC Failed: Regulators Against Regulation

In June 2009, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC or Commission) marks its seventy-fifth birthday. The anniversary comes at a time when the reputation and effectiveness of the agency are at their lowest point in its history. This is especially sad because the SEC was known for years as one of the finest, if not the finest, of the federal regulatory agencies. Its effectiveness as the nation’s principal securities regulator was a source of pride to its members and its employees and a source of comfort to investors. Furthermore, it was thought to be incorruptible. Professor William L. Cary, SEC Chairman in the early 1960s, attributed the Commission’s success to the fact that “it does not give away property rights, and has not actually engaged in the fixing of rates. . . . Nor is it an arbiter between competitors . . . .” Although Professor Cary’s observation is still largely true, the Commission has been corrupted in ways that he probably never envisioned. Two of the SEC’s most notorious failures came to light in 2008: the demise of several of the largest investment banking firms under its regulatory care and the SEC’s disregard of the warning signs that could have alerted it to Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme. 2
Improving Health Care Outcomes through Personalized Comparisons of Treatment Effectiveness Based on Electronic Health Records

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is one of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's significant initiatives that aims to improve treatment outcomes and lower health care costs. This article takes CER a step further and suggests a novel clinical application for it. The article proposes the development of a national framework to enable physicians to rapidly perform, through a computerized service, medically sound personalized comparisons of the effectiveness of possible treatments for patients' conditions. A treatment comparison for a given patient would be based on data from electronic health records of a cohort of clinically similar patients who received the treatments previously and whose outcomes were recorded. This framework has unique potential to simultaneously improve the quality of health care, reduce its cost, and alleviate public concerns about rationing and “one size fits all” medicine.
CONSCIENCE, VOLITIONAL NECESSITY, AND RELIGIOUS EXEMPTIONS

Why do we grant religious exemptions? Many distinguished scholars and judges have been drawn to the idea that conscience is entitled to special protection, because a person in its grip cannot obey the law without betraying his deepest, most identity-defining commitments. The weakness of this justification is shown by philosopher Harry Frankfurt's account of what he calls “volitional necessity,” which clarifies the structure of the argument that invocations of conscience imply. Frankfurt shows that a person can be bound in this way by allegiances that there is no reason to respect; volitional necessity can arise from anything at all that a person cares about. Conscience is thus a poor basis for claims upon other people. Accommodation must rather depend on some idea of the value of religion.
Changing Contract Lenses: Unexpected Supervening Events in English, New Zealand, U.S., Japanese, and International Sales Law and Practice

This article compares differences in the reasoning underlying contractual relationships between English and New Zealand law and U.S. and Japanese law. It then builds upon an existing framework by adding the notion of didactic formality to identify another important contrast between the laws of these countries. It also discusses how CISG and UPICC fit in to this spectrum. The article concludes by questioning "strong convergence" theory in commercial law worldwide.
The Standard of Causation in the Mixed-Motive Title VII Action -- A Social Policy Perspective

In this Article, Professor Brodin explores the causal-relation problem in individual employment discrimination suits alleging disparate treatment brought under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The effort in this Article is to define a theory of causation for the individual disparate treatment case that is consistent with the goals of title VII as well as with the realities and limitations of our adversary system of adjudication. Professor Brodin surveys the problem, traces the development of relevant case law and concludes with a proposal of causal analysis that separates issues of liability from those of remedy.
Expressing Conflict, Neutralizing Blame, and Making Concessions in Small‐Claims Mediation

This research examines the link between the way small-claims mediation participants express their conflicts and their willingness to engage in concession-making. Observations of seventy-seven mediation participants suggest that a significant factor in this relationship is the way participants manage the issue of blame. The research identifies three categories of mediants: individuals named in a civil suit who represent themselves; agents, usually lawyers, who represent the interests of other parties in a civil suit; and business owners or managers who represent the interests of their establishments. The study depicts some of the differences in the way these participants describe their conflicts. In particular, the research suggests that the manner in which mediation participants handle the issue of blame – by either justifying, excusing, or denying it – constrains their willingness to engage in concession-making, a fundamental aspect of the mediation process. I discuss implications for future research and for developing strategies that might improve the effectiveness of mediation for some participants.
The market for borrowing stock

Abstract To short a stock, an arbitrageur must first borrow it. This paper describes the market for borrowing and lending U.S. equities, emphasizing the conditions generating and sustaining short-sale constraints. A large institutional lending intermediary provided eighteen months (4/2000–9/2001) of data on loan supply (“shortability”), loan fees (“specialness”), and loan recalls. The data suggest that while loan market specials and recalls are rare on average, the incidence of these short-sale constraints is increasing in the divergence of opinion among investors. Beyond some threshold, investor optimism itself can limit arbitrage via the loan market mechanism.
Horizontal merger analysis

Abstract Economic analysis of competition regulation is most developed in the domain of horizontal mergers, and modern agency guidelines reflect a substantial consensus on the appropriate template for merger assessment. Nevertheless, official protocols are understood to rest on a problematic market definition exercise, to use HHIs and ΔHHIs in ways that conflict with standard models, and more broadly to diverge with how economic analysis of proposed mergers should be and often is conducted. These gaps, unfortunately, are more consequential than is generally appreciated. Moreover, additional unrecognized errors and omissions are at least as important: analysis of efficiencies, which are thought to justify a permissive approach, fails to draw on the most relevant fields of economics; entry is often a misanalyzed afterthought; official information collection and decision protocols violate basic tenets of decision analysis; and single-sector, partial equilibrium analysis is employed despite the presence of substantial distortions (many due to imperfect competition) in many sectors of the economy. This article elaborates these deficiencies, offers preliminary analysis of how they can best be addressed, and identifies priorities for further research.
Coordinate Methods for Matrix Games

We develop primal-dual coordinate methods for solving bilinear saddle-point problems of the form $\min\nolimits_{x\in \mathcal{X}}\max\nolimits_{y\in \mathcal{Y}}y^{\top}Ax$ which contain linear programming, classification, and regression as special cases. Our methods push existing fully stochastic sublinear methods and variance-reduced methods towards their limits in terms of per-iteration complexity and sample complexity. We obtain nearly-constant per-iteration complexity by designing efficient data structures leveraging Taylor approximations to the exponential and a binomial heap. We improve sample complexity via low-variance gradient estimators using dynamic sampling distributions that depend on both the iterates and the magnitude of the matrix entries. Our runtime bounds improve upon those of existing primal-dual methods by a factor depending on sparsity measures of the $m$ by $n$ matrix $A$ . For example, when rows and columns have constant $\ell_{1}/\ell_{2}$ norm ratios, we offer improvements by a factor of $m+n$ in the fully stochastic setting and $\sqrt{m+n}$ in the variance-reduced setting. We apply our methods to computational geometry problems, i.e. minimum enclosing ball, maximum inscribed ball, and linear regression, and obtain improved complexity bounds. For linear regression with an elementwise nonnegative matrix, our guarantees improve on exact gradient methods by a factor of $\sqrt{\text{nnz}(A)/(m+n)}$ .
TaNTIN: Terrestrial and non-terrestrial integrated networks-A collaborative technologies perspective for beyond 5G and 6G

The world is moving toward globalization rapidly. Everybody has easy access to information with the spread of Internet technology. Businesses are growing beyond national borders. Internationalization affects every aspect of life. In this scenario, by dispersing functions and tasks across organizational borders, time and space, global organizations have higher requirements for collaboration. In order to allow decision-makers and knowledge workers, situated at different times and spaces, to work more efficiently, collaborative technologies are needed. In this paper, we give an overview of potential collaborative technologies, their benefits, risks and challenges, types, and elements. Based on the conceptualization of terrestrial and non-terrestrial integrated networks (TaNTIN), we highlight artificial intelligence (AI), blockchains, tactile Internet, mobile edge computing (MEC)/fog computing, augmented reality and virtual reality, and so forth as the key features to ensure quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee of futuristic collaborative services such as telemedicine, e-education, online gaming, online businesses, the entertainment industry. We also discuss how these technologies will impact human life in the near future.
Wolbachia and Virus Alter the Host Transcriptome at the Interface of Nucleotide Metabolism Pathways

Wolbachia is a maternally transmitted bacterium that manipulates arthropod and nematode biology in myriad ways. The Wolbachia strain colonizing Drosophila melanogaster creates sperm-egg incompatibilities and protects its host against RNA viruses, making it a promising tool for vector control. Despite successful trials using Wolbachia-transfected mosquitoes for dengue control, knowledge of how Wolbachia and viruses jointly affect insect biology remains limited. Using the Drosophila melanogaster model, transcriptomics and gene expression network analyses revealed pathways with altered expression and splicing due to Wolbachia colonization and virus infection. Included are metabolic pathways previously unknown to be important for Wolbachia-host interactions. Additionally, Wolbachia-colonized flies exhibit a dampened transcriptomic response to virus infection, consistent with early blocking of virus replication. Finally, using Drosophila genetics, we show that Wolbachia and expression of nucleotide metabolism genes have interactive effects on virus replication. Understanding the mechanisms of pathogen blocking will contribute to the effective development of Wolbachia-mediated vector control programs.IMPORTANCE Recently developed arbovirus control strategies leverage the symbiotic bacterium Wolbachia, which spreads in insect populations and blocks viruses from replicating. While this strategy has been successful, details of how this "pathogen blocking" works are limited. Here, we use a combination of virus infections, fly genetics, and transcriptomics to show that Wolbachia and virus interact at host nucleotide metabolism pathways.
Leaving My Fingerprints: Motivations and Challenges of Contributing to OSS for Social Good

When inspiring software developers to contribute to open source software, the act is often referenced as an opportunity to build tools to support the developer community. However, that is not the only charge that propels contributions--- growing interest in open source has also been attributed to software developers deciding to use their technical skills to benefit a common societal good. To understand how developers identify these projects, their motivations for contributing, and challenges they face, we conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with OSS for Social Good (OSS4SG) contributors. From our interview analysis, we identified themes of contribution styles that we wanted to understand at scale by deploying a survey to over 5765 OSS and Open Source Software for Social Good contributors. From our quantitative analysis of 517 responses, we find that the majority of contributors demonstrate a distinction between OSS4SG and OSS. Likewise, contributors described definitions based on what societal issue the project was to mitigate and who the outcomes of the project were going to benefit. In addition, we find that OSS4SG contributors focus less on benefiting themselves by padding their resume with new technology skills and are more interested in leaving their mark on society at statistically significant levels. We also find that OSS4SG contributors evaluate the owners of the project significantly more than OSS contributors. These findings inform implications to help contributors identify high societal impact projects, help project maintainers reduce barriers to entry, and help organizations understand why contributors are drawn to these projects to sustain active participation.
ESCO: single cell expression simulation incorporating gene co-expression.

MOTIVATION Gene-gene co-expression networks (GCN) are of biological interest for the useful information they provide for understanding gene-gene interactions. The advent of single cell RNA-sequencing allows us to examine more subtle gene co-expression occurring within a cell type. Many imputation and denoising methods have been developed to deal with the technical challenges observed in single cell data; meanwhile, several simulators have been developed for benchmarking and assessing these methods. Most of these simulators, however, either do not incorporate gene co-expression or generate co-expression in an inconvenient manner. RESULTS Therefore, with the focus on gene co-expression, we propose a new simulator, ESCO, which adopts the idea of the copula to impose gene co-expression, while preserving the highlights of available simulators, which perform well for simulation of gene expression marginally. Using ESCO, we assess the performance of imputation methods on GCN recovery and find that imputation generally helps GCN recovery when the data are not too sparse, and the ensemble imputation method works best among leading methods. In contrast, imputation fails to help in the presence of an excessive fraction of zero counts, where simple data aggregating methods are a better choice. These findings are further verified with mouse and human brain cell data. AVAILABILITY The ESCO implementation is available as R package ESCO. Users can either download the development version via github (https://github.com/JINJINT/ESCO) or the archived version via Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/4455890). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Modified Wave Operators for a Scalar Quasilinear Wave Equation Satisfying the Weak Null Condition

We prove the existence of the modified wave operators for a scalar quasilinear wave equation satisfying the weak null condition. This is accomplished in three steps. First, we derive a new reduced asymptotic system for the quasilinear wave equation by modifying Hormander’s method. Next, we construct an approximate solution, by solving our new reduced system given some scattering data at infinite time. Finally, we prove that the quasilinear wave equation has a global solution which agrees with the approximate solution at infinite time.
Morikawa’s Unsolved Problem

By combining theoretical and computational techniques from geometry, calculus, group theory, and Galois theory, we prove the nonexistence of a closed-form algebraic solution to a Japanese geometry ...
The Scales of Reproductive Justice: Casey’s Failure to Rebalance Liberty Interests in the Racially Disparate State of Maternal Medicine

Despite the maternal medicine crisis in the U.S., especially for Black women, legislatures are challenging constitutional abortion doctrine and forcing women to interact with a system that may cost them their lives. This Article proposes that because of abysmal maternal mortality rates and the arbitrary nature of most abortion restrictions, the right to choose an abortion is embedded in our right Fourteenth Amendment right to not be arbitrarily deprived of life by the State. This Article is a call to abortion advocates to begin submitting state maternal mortality data when challenging abortion restrictions. The call for attention to life was central to the holding in Roe v. Wade and is central to rebalancing the scales of reproductive justice.
Generalized metallic means

The metallic means (also known as metallic ratios) may be defined as the limiting ratio of consecutive terms of sequences connected to the Fibonacci sequence via the INVERT transform. For example, the Pell sequence (invert transform of the Fibonacci sequence) gives the so-called silver mean, and the invert transform of the Pell sequence leads to the bronze mean. The limiting ratio of the Fibonacci sequence itself is known as the golden mean or ratio. We introduce a new family of kth-degree metallic means obtained through invert transforms of the generalized kth-order Fibonacci sequence. As it is the case for k=2, each generalized metallic mean is shown to be the unique positive root of a kth-degree polynomial determined by the sequence.
Changing the narrative perspective: From deictic to anaphoric point of view

Abstract We introduce the task of changing the narrative point of view, where characters are assigned a narrative perspective that is different from the one originally used by the writer. The resulting shift in the narrative point of view alters the reading experience and can be used as a tool in fiction writing or to generate types of text ranging from educational to self-help and self-diagnosis. We introduce a benchmark dataset containing a wide range of types of narratives annotated with changes in point of view from deictic (first or second person) to anaphoric (third person) and describe a pipeline for processing raw text that relies on a neural architecture for mention selection. Evaluations on the new benchmark dataset show that the proposed architecture substantially outperforms the baselines by generating mentions that are less ambiguous and more natural.
The Effect of Tightening Standards on Automakers’ Non-compliance

This study investigates how tightening standards can result in greater non‐compliance, especially when market and regulatory interests are misaligned. We confirm a causal relationship that explains the highly publicized auto industry non‐compliance phenomenon where on‐road NOx emissions exceeded standards. Based on a 15‐year on‐road vehicle emissions dataset covering 148,837 vehicles from 42 automakers in the EU, we use regression discontinuity to identify the causal impact of standards tightening on non‐compliance by controlling other confounding factors. Our results suggest that in the absence of effective monitoring, tightening standards directly drives up automakers’ non‐compliance. Furthermore, we find that automakers facing more intense substitution pressure from competitors or with less advanced emissions control technology have a higher non‐compliance rate. Our findings speak to both policymakers as well as managers in the private sector. When setting limit‐based performance goals in situations with conflicting interests and imperfect monitoring, they should anticipate non‐compliance from the regulated parties. Our results suggest that tightening standards in such situations should be accompanied by stricter monitoring or other actions that discourage non‐compliance.
Vacuum-induced transparency

Photons are excellent information carriers but normally pass through each other without consequence. Engineered interactions between photons would enable applications as varied as quantum information processing and simulation of condensed matter systems. Using an ensemble of cold atoms strongly coupled to an optical cavity, we found that the transmission of light through a medium may be controlled with few photons and even by the electromagnetic vacuum field. The vacuum induces a group delay of 25 nanoseconds on the input optical pulse, corresponding to a light velocity of 1600 meters per second, and a transparency of 40% that increases to 80% when the cavity is filled with 10 photons. This strongly nonlinear effect provides prospects for advanced quantum devices such as photon number–state filters.
Is the Platinum Rule credible? An examination of other-regarding perceptions and attitudes toward unethical behavior

This paper uses data for 53 countries from the World Values Survey in a multilevel regression analysis that seeks to disentangle individual, institutional and other-regarding factors affecting ethi...
Tuning the flat bands of the kagome metal CoSn with Fe, In, or Ni doping

CoSn is a Pauli paramagnet with relatively flat $d$ bands centered about 100 meV below the Fermi energy, ${E}_{F}$. Single crystals of CoSn lightly doped with Fe, In, or Ni are investigated using x-ray and neutron scattering, magnetic susceptibility and magnetization, AC susceptibility, specific heat, and resistivity measurements. Within the rigid-band approximation, hole doping with a few percent of Fe or In should move the flat bands closer to ${E}_{F}$, whereas electron doping with Ni should move the flat bands further away from ${E}_{F}$. We provide evidence that this indeed occurs. Fe and In doping drive CoSn toward magnetism, while Ni doping suppresses CoSn's already weak magnetic response. The resulting ground state is different for Fe versus In doping. For Fe-doped crystals, ${\mathrm{Co}}_{1\ensuremath{-}x}{\mathrm{Fe}}_{x}\mathrm{Sn}$, with $0.02lxl0.27$, the magnetic and specific-heat data are consistent with the formation of a spin glass, with a glass temperature, ${T}_{g}$, ranging from 1 K for $x=0.02$ to 10 K for $x=0.27$. Powder and single-crystal neutron diffraction found no evidence of long-range magnetic order below ${T}_{g}$ for samples with $x\ensuremath{\approx}0.17$. For In-doped crystals, $\mathrm{Co}{\mathrm{Sn}}_{1\ensuremath{-}y}{\mathrm{In}}_{y}$, both the magnetic susceptibility and the Sommerfeld coefficient, \ensuremath{\gamma}, increase substantially relative to pure CoSn, but with no clear indication of a magnetic transition for $0.05lyl0.2$. CoSn crystals doped with Ni (${\mathrm{Co}}_{0.93}{\mathrm{Ni}}_{0.07}\mathrm{Sn}$) have a significantly smaller magnetic susceptibility and \ensuremath{\gamma} than pure CoSn, consistent with flat bands further from ${E}_{F}$.
Government Equity Investments in Coronavirus Bailouts: Why, How, When?

Governments around the world are attempting to support individualsâ€™ incomes, rescue distressed businesses, and preserve jobs affected by the coronavirus pandemic by adopting fiscal stimulus programs of unprecedented scale. Although the bulk of this spending will involve direct payments to individuals or some type of direct lending or loan guarantees to businesses, large sums likely will (and should) take the form of government purchases of equity in distressed firmsâ€”either by direct purchase or by exercising warrants attached to rescue loans. We discuss why we think these equity injections will be necessary, but only in a limited number of cases; how they should be structured; when investments should be made and, almost as important, exited. We summarize (and tabulate) both the modest recent history of governments rescuing non-financial firms with equity injections and the voluminous research examining the efficacy of governments rescuing failing banks using equity investments. We highlight the dangers that would likely arise if governments permanently retain and vote the equity stakes purchased during the current crisis. Where equity investments must be made, we argue that these should: (1) be effective, in being large enough to be decisive; (2) be passive after the initial injection, when some financial restrictions should be imposed; (3) be temporary and preferably self-liquidating through openmarket sales or redemptions; (4) provide taxpayers an upside claim if and when the rescued firm recovers; (5) be restricted to exchange-listed companies in all but extreme cases; and (6) be timely, as speed is crucial. In most cases, the default instrument to employ should be either non-voting preferred stock or warrants that convert into immediately marketable common shares.
RescueNet: Joint Building Segmentation and Damage Assessment from Satellite Imagery

Accurate and fine-grained information about the extent of damage to buildings is essential for directing Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Response (HADR) operations in the immediate aftermath of any natural calamity. In recent years, satellite and UAV (drone) imagery has been used for this purpose, sometimes aided by computer vision algorithms. Existing Computer Vision approaches for building damage assessment typically rely on a two stage approach, consisting of building detection using an object detection model, followed by damage assessment through classification of the detected building tiles. These multi-stage methods are not end-to-end trainable, and suffer from poor overall results. We propose RescueNet, a unified model that can simultaneously segment buildings and assess the damage levels to individual buildings and can be trained end-to-end. In order to to model the composite nature of this problem, we propose a novel localization aware loss function, which consists of a Binary Cross Entropy loss for building segmentation, and a foreground only selective Categorical Cross-Entropy loss for damage classification, and show significant improvement over the widely used Cross-Entropy loss. RescueNet is tested on the large scale and diverse xBD dataset and achieves significantly better building segmentation and damage classification performance than previous methods and achieves generalization across varied geographical regions and disaster types.
Cortical alpha-synuclein preformed fibrils do not affect interval timing in mice

One hallmark feature of Parkinson's disease (PD) is Lewy body pathology associated with misfolded alpha-synuclein. Previous studies have shown that striatal injection of alpha-synuclein preformed fibrils (PFF) can induce misfolding and aggregation of native alpha-synuclein in a prion-like manner, leading to cell death and motor dysfunction in mouse models. Here, we tested whether alpha-synuclein PFFs injected into the medial prefrontal cortex results in deficits in interval timing, a cognitive task which is disrupted in human PD patients and in rodent models of PD. We injected PFF or monomers of human alpha-synuclein into the medial prefrontal cortex of mice pre-injected with adeno-associated virus (AAV) coding for overexpression of human alpha-synuclein or control protein. Despite notable medial prefrontal cortical synucleinopathy, we did not observe consistent deficits in fixed-interval timing. These results suggest that cortical alpha-synuclein does not reliably disrupt fixed-interval timing.
TapNet: The Design, Training, Implementation, and Applications of a Multi-Task Learning CNN for Off-Screen Mobile Input

To make off-screen interaction without specialized hardware practical, we investigate using deep learning methods to process the common built-in IMU sensor (accelerometers and gyroscopes) on mobile phones into a useful set of one-handed interaction events. We present the design, training, implementation and applications of TapNet, a multi-task network that detects tapping on the smartphone. With phone form factor as auxiliary information, TapNet can jointly learn from data across devices and simultaneously recognize multiple tap properties, including tap direction and tap location. We developed two datasets consisting of over 135K training samples, 38K testing samples, and 32 participants in total. Experimental evaluation demonstrated the effectiveness of the TapNet design and its significant improvement over the state of the art. Along with the datasets, codebase1, and extensive experiments, TapNet establishes a new technical foundation for off-screen mobile input.