Privacy, Public Goods, and the Tragedy of the Trust Commons: A Response to Professors Fairfield and Engel

User trust is an essential resource for the information economy. Without it, users would not provide their personal information and digital businesses could not operate. Digital companies do not protect this trust sufficiently. Instead, many take advantage of it for short-term gain. They act in ways that, over time, will undermine user trust. In so doing, they act against their own best interest. This Article shows that companies behave this way because they face a tragedy of the commons. When a company takes advantage of user trust for profit, it appropriates the full benefit of this action. However, it shares the cost with all other companies that rely on the wellspring of user trust. Each company, acting rationally, has an incentive to appropriate as much of the trust resource as it can. That is why such companies collect, analyze, and “monetize” our personal information in such an unrestrained way. This behavior poses a longer term risk. User trust is like a fishery. It can withstand a certain level of exploitation and renew itself. But over-exploitation can cause it to collapse. Were digital companies collectively to undermine user trust this would not only hurt the users, it would damage the companies themselves. This Article explores commons-management theory for potential solutions to this impending tragedy of the trust commons

Txt2vz: a new tool for generating graph clouds

We present txt2vz (txt2vz.appspot.com), a new tool for automatically generating a visual summary of unstructured text data found in documents or web sites. The main purpose of the tool is to give the user information about the text so that they can quickly get a good idea about the topics covered. Txt2vz is able to identify important concepts from unstructured text data and to reveal relationships between those concepts. We discuss other approaches to generating diagrams from text and highlight the differences between tag clouds, word clouds, tree clouds and graph clouds

Collider signals of gravitino dark matter in bilinearly broken R-parity

In models with gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking the gravitino is the lightest supersymmetric particle. If R-parity is violated the gravitino decays, but with a half-live far exceeding the age of the universe and thus is, in principle, a candidate for the dark matter. We consider the decays of the next-to-lightest supersymmetric particle, assumed to be the neutralino. We show that in models where the breaking of R-parity is bilinear, the condition that R-parity violation explains correctly the measured neutrino masses fixes the branching ratio of the decay ${\tilde \chi}^0_1 \to {\tilde G}\gamma$ in the range $10^{-3}-10^{-2}$, if the gravitino mass is in the range required to solve the dark matter problem, i.e. of the order (few) 100 eV. This scenario is therefore directly testable at the next generation of colliders.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

The Brazilian Soybean Complex

Crop Production/Industries, Q13, O54, Q56, 013,

Mixed triplet and singlet pairing in multicomponent ultracold fermion systems with dipolar interactions

The symmetry properties of the Cooper pairing problem for multi-component ultra-cold dipolar molecular systems are investigated. The dipolar anisotropy provides a natural and robust mechanism for both triplet and singlet Cooper pairing to first order in the interaction strength. With a purely dipolar interaction, the triplet $p_z$-like polar pairing is the most dominant. A short-range attractive interaction can enhance the singlet pairing to be nearly degenerate with the triplet pairing. We point out that these two pairing channels can mix by developing a relative phase of $\pm\frac{\pi}{2}$, thus spontaneously breaking time-reversal symmetry. We also suggest the possibility of such mixing of triplet and singlet pairing in other systems.Comment: accepted by Phys. Rev.

Compressible Flows in Fluidic Oscillators

We present qualitative observations on the internal flow characteristics of fluidic oscillator geometries commonly referred to as sweeping jets in active flow control applications. This is part of the fluid dynamics videos.Comment: Videos include

Wages, racial composition, and quality sorting in labor markets

This paper examines the relationship between wage rates and the racial composition of jobs, using large cross-sectional and longitudinal samples constructed from monthly Current Population Surveys for 1983-92. Support is found for a "quality sorting" model that posits an equilibrium in which the racial composition of jobs serves as a skill index of unmeasured labor quality. Estimation of standard wage-level equations shows that wages of both black and white workers are substantially lower in occupations with a high density of blacks. Consistent with the quality sorting hypothesis, the magnitude of the relationship is reduced sharply after accounting for occupational skill measures. Longitudinal wage-change estimates controlling for person-specific quality indicate little if any causal effect of racial composition on wages. Estimates of racial discrimination are reduced only moderately after accounting for racial composition; unexplained differentials occur within occupations or reflect inter-occupational differences uncorrelated with racial composition and occupational skill measures.

Proposal for a Supersymmetric Standard Model

The fact that neutrinos are massive suggests that the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) might be extended in order to include three gauge-singlet neutrino superfields with Yukawa couplings of the type $H_2 L \nu^c$. We propose to use these superfields to solve the $\mu$ problem of the MSSM without having to introduce an extra singlet superfield as in the case of the next-to-MSSM (NMSSM). In particular, terms of the type $\nu^c H_1 H_2$ in the superpotential may carry out this task spontaneously through sneutrino vacuum expectation values. In addition, terms of the type $(\nu^c)^3$ avoid the presence of axions and generate effective Majorana masses for neutrinos at the electroweak scale. On the other hand, these terms break lepton number and R-parity explicitly implying that the phenomenology of this model is very different from the one of the MSSM or NMSSM. For example, the usual neutralinos are now mixed with the neutrinos. For Dirac masses of the latter of order $10^{-4}$ GeV, eigenvalues reproducing the correct scale of neutrino masses are obtained.Comment: 9 pages, latex, title modified. Final version published in PR

There is no finite-variable equational axiomatization of representable relation algebras over weakly representable relation algebras

We prove that any equational basis that defines RRA over wRRA must contain infinitely many variables. The proof uses a construction of arbitrarily large finite weakly representable but not representable relation algebras whose "small" subalgebras are representable.Comment: To appear in Review of Symbolic Logi