Taxation of Electronic Gaming

At a doctrinal level, the subject of this Article is timely. During this time of the coronavirus pandemic, casinos have been closed and large populations have been subject to stay-home orders from local and state authorities. One can reasonably expect a large increase in electronic gaming and thus an increased need for proper consideration of its taxation. This Article argues for a cash-out rule of taxation. At a deeper level, the subject of this Article is timeless. Tax law is wickedly complex for a reason. This Article explores that complexity using the example of electronic gaming. It grapples with the source of that complexity: an inherent and unresolvable tension between economic theories of income and the practical needs of administering a system of taxation to a large population in a democracy. That tension led some scholars to argue for a standards-based approach to taxation. This Article considers and rejects that argument. Legal rules are necessary to mediate between theory and practice. Hence, this Article demonstrates the continued relevance and importance of doctrinal analysis in legal scholarship

The Enlightenment: A Beginner's Guide

Blamed for the bloody disasters of the 20th century: Auschwitz, the Gulags, globalisation, Islamic terrorism; heralded as the harbinger of reason, equality, and the end of arbitrary rule, the Enlightenment has been nothing if not divisive. To this day historians disagree over when it was, where it was, and what it was (and sometimes, still is). Kieron O’Hara deftly traverses these conflicts, presenting the history, politics, science, religion, arts, and social life of the Enlightenment not as a simple set of easily enumerated ideas, but an evolving conglomerate that spawned a very diverse set of thinkers, from the radical Rousseau to the conservative Burke

Stretching the Limits in Thermoplastic Forming of Bulk Metallic Glasses

Metallic glasses (MG) suggest that superb mechanical properties can be paired with plastic-like processing. Their high strength and elasticity are often paired with fracture toughness. Their supercooled liquid region gives rise to plastic-like processing and suggests parts and shapes that can otherwise not be obtained for crystalline metals. However, current processing techniques only allow for limited options in terms of geometry, thicknesses uniformity, and shape complexity. In the first part of my thesis, I introduce the form-giving aspect of metallic glass thermoforming, by introducing stretch blow molding, to expand the geometries that can be fabricated with metallic glasses. For this I developed a model, which allows to quantify stretch blow molding and provides insight into its potential use and limitations. We demonstrate that with stretch blow molding overall strains exceeding 2000% are achievable, significantly higher than the previously reported ~150% of blow molding. In the second part of my thesis, I focused on the effect of the processing on metallic glasses properties. This is motivated by the current understanding that most metallic glasses lack sufficient ductility or toughness when fabricated under conditions resulting in bulk glass formation. To address this shortcoming, I used strain rate to excite the liquid while simultaneously cooling it to freeze the excited liquid into a glass with a higher fictive temperature. Microscopically, straining causes the structure to dilate, hence “pulls” the structure energetically up the potential energy landscape. Upon further cooling, the resulting excited liquid freezes into an excited glass that exhibits enhanced ductility. I used Zr44Ti11Cu10Ni10Be25 as an example to pull metallic glasses through this excited liquid cooling method, which can lead to the tripling of bending ductility

A comparative study of personality traits between video poker and traditional pull/push machines players

Since the first spinning-reel slot machine was invented in 1895 by a German-born mechanic and installed in San Francisco taverns (Span 2003), machine games have enjoyed popularity among gamblers. Two main types of slot machines dominate the market: video poker machines, and the more traditional pull/push machines. Previous research suggests that video poker players and pull/push slot gamblers have different motivations for playing. In our study we looked at whether or not video poker and slot players have different personality traits as measured through Cattell\u27s 16 Personality Factors. The findings showed that video poker players presented a more dominant personality trait than pull/push slot machine gamblers when they play their games. Conversely, pull/push slot machine gamblers showed a more submissive personality trait than video poker players. The results were based on the fact that video poker provides decision processes, in other words, controlling processes against the game to the players, and pull/push slot machines offer simple, easy, and mindless gaming styles to gamblers

A lossless online Bayesian classifier.

We are living in a world progressively driven by data. Besides the issue that big data cannot be entirely stored in the main memory as required by traditional offline learning methods, the problem of learning data that can only be collected over time is also very prevalent. Consequently, there is a need of online methods which can handle sequentially arriving data and offer the same accuracy as offline methods. In this paper, we introduce a new lossless online Bayesian-based classifier which uses the arriving data in a 1-by-1 manner and discards each data right after use. The lossless property of our proposed method guarantees that it can reach the same prediction performance as its offline counterpart regardless of the incremental training order. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance over many well-known state-of-the-art online learning methods in the literature