Digital Platforms and Antitrust Law

This Article is about “big data” and antitrust law. Big data, for my purposes, refers to digital platforms that enable the discovery and sharing of information by consumers, and the harvesting and analysis of consumer data by the platform. The obvious example of such a platform is Google. The big platforms owe their market dominance not to anticompetitive conduct but to economies of scale. This Article discusses three types of anticompetitive conduct associated with digital platforms: kill zone expropriation, acquisition of nascent rivals, and denial of access to data. There is nothing so unusual about digital platforms that would require a reform of the antitrust laws. Some are described as two-sided markets, but this designation, even after Ohio v. American Express Co., should not present an obstacle to the application of antitrust law. I. Introduction II. Platforms III. Competition Issues ... A. Kill Zone Expropriation ... B. Acquisition of Nascent Rivals ... C. Denial of Access to Data IV. Antitrust Law V. Conclusio

A Smart Modular Wireless System for Condition Monitoring Data Acquisition

Smart sensors, big data, the cloud and distributed data processing are some of the most interning changes in the way we collect, manage and treat data in recent years. These changes have not significantly influenced the common practices in condition monitoring for shipping. In part this is due to the reduced trust in data security, data ownership issues, lack of technological integration and obscurity of direct benefit. This paper presents a method of incorporating smart sensor techniques and distributed processing in data acquisition for condition monitoring to assist decision support for maintenance actions addressing these inhibitors

BIG MAC: A bolometer array for mid-infrared astronomy, Center Director's Discretionary Fund

The infrared array referred to as Big Mac (for Marshall Array Camera), was designed for ground based astronomical observations in the wavelength range 5 to 35 microns. It contains 20 discrete gallium-doped germanium bolometer detectors at a temperature of 1.4K. Each bolometer is irradiated by a square field mirror constituting a single pixel of the array. The mirrors are arranged contiguously in four columns and five rows, thus defining the array configuration. Big Mac utilized cold reimaging optics and an up looking dewar. The total Big Mac system also contains a telescope interface tube for mounting the dewar and a computer for data acquisition and processing. Initial astronomical observations at a major infrared observatory indicate that Big Mac performance is excellent, having achieved the design specifications and making this instrument an outstanding tool for astrophysics

Social Epistemology as a New Paradigm for Journalism and Media Studies

Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge ‎generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and ‎algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is ‎provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation ‎in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for ‎journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining ‎knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition ‎and truth-seeking. This paper articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of ‎knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-‎mediated knowledge.

A survey of remote-sensing big data

We have entered an era of big data. It is popular to refer to the three Vs when characterizing big data: remarkable growths in the volume, velocity and variety of data. However, this statement is too general. Remote-sensing big data has several concrete and special characteristics: multi-source, multi-scale, high-dimensional, dynamic-state, isomer, and non-linear characteristics. This survey explains these characteristics in detail. Furthermore, according to whether the characteristics are closely related to the instruments or methods of data acquisition, we points out that the dynamic-state, multi-scale and non-linear characteristics are intrinsic characteristics of remote-sensing big data while the multi-source, high-dimensional and isomer characteristics are extrinsic characteristics of remote- sensing big data. In addition, we briefly review promising techniques and applications of remote-sensing big data

An Antitrust Economic Analysis of Stop & Shop's Proposed Acquisition of the Big V Shop Rite Supermarket Chain

In early 2002, the Royal Ahold subsidiary, Stop & Shop Supermarkets, offered to purchase the Big V supermarket chain, which was in bankruptcy court after three successive, unsuccessful leveraged buyouts over the past ten years. At a later date, Pathmark Supermarkets joined the offer to purchase. Big V was Wakefern Food Corporations largest member. The acquisition was a horizontal merger in at least three local markets, Newburgh NJ, Poughkeepsie NY, and Trenton NJ. This research was conducted for the Wakefern Food Corporation who provided much of the underlying data and information. We presented this report to the Bureau of Competition, Federal Trade Commission in March 2002 and to the New Jersey and New York Attorney Generals, Antitrust Section in April 2002. Thereafter, the Federal Trade Commission issued a second request in its merger review, and the bankruptcy judge ruled against the Stop & Shop/Pathmark offer. Big V subsequently was purchased by Wakefern and remains in the Shop Rite supermarket cooperative system.horizontal merger, market power, predation, Agribusiness, Industrial Organization,