Computer Programs, User Interfaces, and Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act of 1976: A Critique of Lotus v. Paperback

The Supreme Court\u27s landmark ruling Lotus Development Corp vs Paperback Software International is critiqued. The ruling did not resolve the issue of whether copyright law protects user interfaces

Coalition Formation in Political Games

We study the formation of a ruling coalition in political environments. Each individual is endowed with a level of political power. The ruling coalition consists of a subset of the individuals in the society and decides the distribution of resources. A ruling coalition needs to contain enough powerful members to win against any alternative coalition that may challenge it, and it needs to be self-enforcing, in the sense that none of its sub-coalitions should be able to secede and become the new ruling coalition. We first present an axiomatic approach that captures these notions and determines a (generically) unique ruling coalition. We then construct a simple dynamic game that encompasses these ideas and prove that the sequentially weakly dominant equilibria (and the Markovian trembling hand perfect equilibria) of this game coincide with the set of ruling coalitions of the axiomatic approach. We also show the equivalence of these notions to the core of a related non-transferable utility cooperative game. In all cases, the nature of the ruling coalition is determined by the power constraint, which requires that the ruling coalition be powerful enough, and by the enforcement constraint, which imposes that no sub-coalition of the ruling coalition that commands a majority is self-enforcing. The key insight that emerges from this characterization is that the coalition is made self-enforcing precisely by the failure of its winning sub-coalitions to be self-enforcing. This is most simply illustrated by the following simple finding: with a simple majority rule, while three-person (or larger) coalitions can be self-enforcing, two-person coalitions are generically not self-enforcing. Therefore, the reasoning in this paper suggests that three-person juntas or councils should be more common than two-person ones. In addition, we provide conditions under which the grand coalition will be the ruling coalition and conditions under which the most powerful individuals will not be included in the ruling coalition. We also use this framework to discuss endogenous party formation.

Voices of Moderation: Southern Whites Respond to Brown v. Board of Education

At the shining apex of racial reform in the civil rights era stands the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Recently passing its fiftieth anniversary, the ruling struck down legal school segregation which had been upheld by the same court some fifty-eight years earlier in the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. Brown is highly revered today as a sacred document and cornerstone of American race-relations, but the ruling initially garnered widespread shock, outrage, and defiance in the bedrock of segregation, the deep South. At least that is what we have been told. A closer analysis of southern public opinion regarding Brown reveals a multitude of views ranging from pure racist condemnation to praised acceptance and affirmation of racial equality. There were indeed voices of moderation in the South. In the summer of 1954, reaction and response to Brown v. Board of Education in the deep South was not unanimous; there were clear voices of racial moderation that called for a calm rational response, compliance and respect for the ruling, and eager acceptance of integrated education

Introduction: Symposium on “Forensics, Statistics, and Law”

Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., that federal judges must conduct a scientific gatekeeping inquiry before admitting expert evidence.1 That ruling reshaped how judges evaluate scientific and expert evidence. In 2000, Federal Rule of Evidence 702 was revised to comport with the Daubert ruling and many state courts adopted either the Daubert rule or the Federal Rule 702.2 The Daubert ruling coincided with a surge in scientific research relevant to criminal cases, including the development of modem DNA testing that both exonerated hundreds of individuals and provided more accurate evidence of guilt. 3 At the same time, the scientific communityThis is the introduction to a symposium published as Garrett, Brandon L. "Introduction: Symposium on “Forensics, Statistics, and Law”." Virginia Journal of Criminal Law 6, no. 2 (2018): 1. Posted with permission of CSAFE.</p

Ruling out the orbital decay of the WASP-43b

We present 15 new transit observations of the exoplanet WASP-43b in the $i'$,$g'$, and $R$ filters with the 1.0-m telescopes of Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) Network and the IAC80 telescope. We combine our 15 new light curves with 52 others from literature, to analyze homogeneously all the available transit light curves of this exoplanet. By extending the time span of the monitoring of the transits to more than $5~yr$, and by analyzing the individual mid-times of 72 transits, we study the proposed shortening of the orbital period of WASP-43b. We estimate that the times of transit are well-matched by our updated ephemeris equation, using a constant orbital period. We estimate an orbital period change rate no larger than $\dot{P}=-0.02 \pm 6.6~ms~yr^{-1}$, which is fully consistent with a constant period. Based on the timing analysis, we discard stellar tidal dissipation factors $Q_{*}<10^{5}$. In addition, with the modelling of the transits we update the system parameters: $a/Rs=4.867(23)$, $i=82.11(10)^{\circ}$ and $R_p/R_s=0.15942(41)$, noticing a difference in the relative size of the planet between optical and NIR bands.Comment: Accepted for publication in A

Political Institutions and Distributive Politics in Japan : Getting Along with the Opposition

This paper analyses distributive policy-making in Japan using a natural experimental situation from August 1993 to March 1995. During this period, the partisan makeup of the ruling coalition in the Lower House dramatically changed without dissolution of the House. By comparing FY1994 and FY1995 budgets compiled by two different coalition governments, we can control for incumbent-specific strength to influence pork-barreling and can focus on how each districts representation in the ruling coalition affects the geographical allocation of public expenditures. The result shows the negative effect of the ruling coalitions seat share on per capita transfers. We argue that this is a logically consistent consequence under incentive mechanisms produced by Japans political institutions. The ruling coalition had an incentive to buy the support or acquiescence of opposition members in order to assure smooth operation in the legislative process.

Super-Fast 3-Ruling Sets

A $t$-ruling set of a graph $G = (V, E)$ is a vertex-subset $S \subseteq V$ that is independent and satisfies the property that every vertex $v \in V$ is at a distance of at most $t$ from some vertex in $S$. A \textit{maximal independent set (MIS)} is a 1-ruling set. The problem of computing an MIS on a network is a fundamental problem in distributed algorithms and the fastest algorithm for this problem is the $O(\log n)$-round algorithm due to Luby (SICOMP 1986) and Alon et al. (J. Algorithms 1986) from more than 25 years ago. Since then the problem has resisted all efforts to yield to a sub-logarithmic algorithm. There has been recent progress on this problem, most importantly an $O(\log \Delta \cdot \sqrt{\log n})$-round algorithm on graphs with $n$ vertices and maximum degree $\Delta$, due to Barenboim et al. (Barenboim, Elkin, Pettie, and Schneider, April 2012, arxiv 1202.1983; to appear FOCS 2012). We approach the MIS problem from a different angle and ask if O(1)-ruling sets can be computed much more efficiently than an MIS? As an answer to this question, we show how to compute a 2-ruling set of an $n$-vertex graph in $O((\log n)^{3/4})$ rounds. We also show that the above result can be improved for special classes of graphs such as graphs with high girth, trees, and graphs of bounded arboricity. Our main technique involves randomized sparsification that rapidly reduces the graph degree while ensuring that every deleted vertex is close to some vertex that remains. This technique may have further applications in other contexts, e.g., in designing sub-logarithmic distributed approximation algorithms. Our results raise intriguing questions about how quickly an MIS (or 1-ruling sets) can be computed, given that 2-ruling sets can be computed in sub-logarithmic rounds

A continues multi-material toolpath planning for tissue scaffolds with hollowed features

This paper presents a new multi-material based toolpath planning methodology for porous tissue scaffolds with multiple hollowed features. Ruled surface with hollowed features generated in our earlier work is used to develop toolpath planning. Ruling lines are reoriented to enable continuous and uniform size multi-material printing through them in two steps. Firstly, all ruling lines are matched and connected to eliminate start and stops during printing. Then, regions with high number of ruling lines are relaxed using a relaxation technique to eliminate over deposition. A novel layer-by-layer deposition process is progressed in two consecutive layers: The first layer with hollow shape based zigzag pattern and the next layer with spiral pattern deposition. Heterogeneous material properties are mapped based on the parametric distances from the hollow features

Augmentations and Rulings of Legendrian Knots

A connection between holomorphic and generating family invariants of Legendrian knots is established; namely, that the existence of a ruling (or decomposition) of a Legendrian knot is equivalent to the existence of an augmentation of its contact homology. This result was obtained independently and using different methods by Fuchs and Ishkhanov. Close examination of the proof yields an algorithm for constructing a ruling given an augmentation. Finally, a condition for the existence of an augmentation in terms of the rotation number is obtained.Comment: 21 pages, 16 figure