Birds of a Feather: Patterns of Judicial Decision-Making at the International Court of Justice, 1946-2015

The technical legal expertise of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, is rarely questioned. However, from its inception critics have questioned its partiality by drawing attention to apparent extrajudicial influences on its decisions. While there has been no lack of research assessing the ICJ judges’ voting behavior, methodological limitations of prior research designs have stymied empirical assessments of the extent and nature of extrajudicial factors’ influence over the ICJ judges’ voting behaviors. This dissertation challenges previous research concluding that political and military alignments have no effect on judicial decision-making. In contrast to previous research findings, this dissertation reports that ICJ judges vote closely with those from countries that have regional or military alignments with the countries that nominate or appoint them. Judges from countries with a similar degree of economic and democratic development, and with cultural or religious similarities, also voted closely with each other. This dissertation concludes with a consideration of the causes and implications of the influence of non-legal factors on the World Court’s decisions

Supersymmetry and TT‾T \overline{T} Deformations

We propose a manifestly supersymmetric generalization of the solvable $T \overline{T}$ deformation of two-dimensional field theories. For theories with $(1,1)$ and $(0,1)$ supersymmetry, the deformation is defined by adding a term to the superspace Lagrangian built from a superfield containing the supercurrent. We prove that the energy levels of the resulting deformed theory are determined exactly in terms of those of the undeformed theory. This supersymmetric deformation extends to higher dimensions, where we conjecture that it might provide a higher-dimensional analogue of $T \overline{T}$, producing supersymmetric Dirac or Dirac-Born-Infeld actions in special cases.Comment: 32 pages; LaTeX; references and an acknowledgement adde

Quantifying the difference in activity between diabetics and healthy controls using activity data measured by accelerometers

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) is a com- bination of multiple cross-sectional studies designed to be representative for the US population. In addition to standard demographic, environmental and behavioral variables the 2003-2004 and 2005-2006 NHANES samples recorded activity data using a hip accelerometer, at the minute level and up to 7 days a week for each individual. The primary goal of this thesis is to understand how activity patterns are associated with health. The secondary goal of the thesis is to quantify the subject-specific patterns of physical activity transitions and study their distribution in the population

Holography and Irrelevant Operators

We explore the holographic proposal involving spacetimes with linear dilaton asymptotics in three dimensions from a gravity perspective. The holographic dual shares some properties with a symmetric product conformal field theory deformed by a single-trace analogue of the $T \overline{T}$ deformation. We present solutions of ten-dimensional supergravity which interpolate from BTZ black holes in the interior to either a linear dilaton spacetime near infinity, or to flat space. This allows a precise identification of field theory parameters with gravity parameters. The solutions manifestly exhibit the square root structure that is characteristic of $T \overline{T}$-deformed conformal field theories. We compute the mass of the spacetimes using the covariant phase space formalism and find agreement with the square root formula for the case of black holes without spin. We also discuss whether closed string tachyons might play a role when the deformation parameter becomes too large and the vacuum becomes unstable.Comment: 44 pages, LaTeX; v2: references and a new section adde

Where Will Players Move Next? Dynamic Graphs and Hierarchical Fusion for Movement Forecasting in Badminton

Sports analytics has captured increasing attention since analysis of the various data enables insights for training strategies, player evaluation, etc. In this paper, we focus on predicting what types of returning strokes will be made, and where players will move to based on previous strokes. As this problem has not been addressed to date, movement forecasting can be tackled through sequence-based and graph-based models by formulating as a sequence prediction task. However, existing sequence-based models neglect the effects of interactions between players, and graph-based models still suffer from multifaceted perspectives on the next movement. Moreover, there is no existing work on representing strategic relations among players' shot types and movements. To address these challenges, we first introduce the procedure of the Player Movements (PM) graph to exploit the structural movements of players with strategic relations. Based on the PM graph, we propose a novel Dynamic Graphs and Hierarchical Fusion for Movement Forecasting model (DyMF) with interaction style extractors to capture the mutual interactions of players themselves and between both players within a rally, and dynamic players' tactics across time. In addition, hierarchical fusion modules are designed to incorporate the style influence of both players and rally interactions. Extensive experiments show that our model empirically outperforms both sequence- and graph-based methods and demonstrate the practical usage of movement forecasting.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2022, code is available at https://github.com/wywyWang/CoachAI-Projects/tree/main/Movement\%20Forecastin

Wealth Effects of Dividend Announcements on Bondholders: The Case of Taiwan Bond Market

Although bonds play an important role in U.S. capital markets, this financial instrument is less common in the emerging markets. Taiwan is a typical case. In fact, both bond issuances and bond transactions in Taiwan have been declining in the past years. Consistent with the previous studies, this research documents that wealth transfer effects exist between bondholders and stockholders. We hypothesize that this wealth transfer discourages investors from investing in bond markets because companies in Taiwan seem to care less about the interest of bondholders. Using the event study methodology, we examine the price change of bonds and stocks in Taiwan capital market around cash dividend announcements. We find that there are significant abnormal returns before cash dividend announcements from 30 days to 60 days and that there is insignificant price change of bonds during the three-day period around the announcement. Possible explanations of the results include low bond trading volumes, insider trading before announcements, and mixing signaling and wealth transfer effects. Although this study cannot prove that the results are directly related to management holdings, we tend to believe that insider trading somehow matters

Tourniquet Use in Total Knee Arthroplasty

The use of an intraoperative tourniquet for total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is a common practice. Although it provides clear filed and ideal cementation during surgery, issues regarding the effectiveness, drawbacks and complications are still investigated. This review was conducted to evaluate the role of tourniquet in TKA through a comprehensive literature search was done in PubMed Medicine, Embase, and other internet database. Debating issues, including the blood loss, operation time, alignment, compromised wound healing, quadriceps weakness and timing of release were furtherly examined. Based on our prior work and the general consensus that the tourniquet should be set with the lowest pressure and for the least ischemic time possible, we recommend early tourniquet release right after the closure of extensor mechanism in the TKAs without drainage

TT¯ flows and (2, 2) supersymmetry

We construct a solvable deformation of two-dimensional theories with (2, 2) supersymmetry using an irrelevant operator which is a bilinear in the supercurrents. This supercurrent-squared operator is manifestly supersymmetric and equivalent to T (T) over bar after using conservation laws. As illustrative examples, we deform theories involving a single (2, 2) chiral superfield. We show that the deformed free theory is on-shell equivalent to the (2, 2) Nambu-Goto action. At the classical level, models with a superpotential exhibit more surprising behavior: the deformed theory exhibits poles in the physical potential which modify the vacuum structure. This suggests that irrelevant deformations of T (T) over bar type might also affect infrared physics