Learning Unethical Practices from a Co-worker: The Peer Effect of Jose Canseco

This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Specifically, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, one of the best baseball players in the last few decades, affected the performance of his teammates. In his autobiography, Canseco claims that he improved the productivity of his teammates by introducing them to steroids. Using panel data on baseball players, we show that a player’s performance increases significantly after they played with Jose Canseco. After checking 30 comparable players from the same era, we find that no other baseball player produced a similar effect. Clearly, Jose Canseco had an unusual influence on the productivity of his peers. These results are consistent with Canseco’s controversial claims, and suggest that workers not only learn productive skills from their co-workers, but sometimes those skills may derive from unethical practices. These findings may be relevant to many workplaces where competitive pressures create incentives to adopt unethical means to boost productivity and profits.peer effects, corruption, crime, externalities

Advanced Moisture and Temperature Sounder (AMTS) study

Retrieval of tropospheric humidity profiles from satellite-based upwelling radiances are shown to be improved by using physical methods for obtaining first-guess profiles as well as for inverting the radiative transfer equation by relaxation. The first guess is based on an empirically verified hypothesis, from theoretical considerations, that the brightness temperature corresponding to the radiance should be approximately equal to the actual temperatue at a channel-invariant optical depth provided that the surface and stratospheric contributions to the radiance are small. Even greater improvement of retrieved humidity profiles can be accomplished by increasing the number of channels used and by selecting their spectral location and bandpass to obtain sharper independent weighting functions. For example, the AMTS system, with high resolution water channels at 1650, 1700, 1839, 1850 and 1930 cm, is shown to be capable of reducing the retrieved water vapor errors in 200 mb thick layers by a factor of two or three relative to the HIRS-2 system errors. Expected AMTS errors in tropical layer water content are particularly low, less than 20% at all levels, and of the order of 10% or less in the middle troposphere

Blindly detecting orbital modulations of jets from merging supermassive black holes

In the last few years before merger, supermassive black hole binaries will rapidly inspiral and precess in a magnetic field imposed by a surrounding circumbinary disk. Multiple simulations suggest this relative motion will convert some of the local energy to a Poynting-dominated outflow, with a luminosity 10^{43} erg/s * (B/10^4 G)^2(M/10^8 Msun)^2 (v/0.4 c)^2, some of which may emerge as synchrotron emission at frequencies near 1 GHz where current and planned wide-field radio surveys will operate. On top of a secular increase in power on the gravitational wave inspiral timescale, orbital motion will produce significant, detectable modulations, both on orbital periods and (if black hole spins are not aligned with the binary's total angular momenta) spin-orbit precession timescales. Because the gravitational wave merger time increases rapidly with separation, we find vast numbers of these transients are ubiquitously predicted, unless explicitly ruled out (by low efficiency $\epsilon$) or obscured (by accretion geometry f_{geo}). If the fraction of Poynting flux converted to radio emission times the fraction of lines of sight accessible $f_{geo}$ is sufficiently large (f_{geo} \epsilon > 2\times 10^{-4} for a 1 year orbital period), at least one event is accessible to future blind surveys at a nominal 10^4 {deg}^2 with 0.5 mJy sensitivity. Our procedure generalizes to other flux-limited surveys designed to investigate EM signatures associated with many modulations produced by merging SMBH binaries.Comment: Submitted to ApJ. v1 original submission; v2 minor changes in response to refere

The Delta-Delta Intermediate State in 1S0 Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering From Effective Field Theory

We examine the role of the Delta-Delta intermediate state in low energy NN scattering using effective field theory. Theories both with and without pions are discussed. They are regulated with dimensional regularization and MSbar subtraction. We find that the leading effects of the Delta-Delta state can be absorbed by a redefinition of the contact terms in a theory with nucleons only. It does not remove the requirement of a higher dimension operator to reproduce data out to moderate momentum. The explicit decoupling of the Delta-Delta state is shown for the theory without pions.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, uses harvma

Timing the Nearby Isolated Neutron Star RX J1856.5-3754

RX J1856.5-3754 is the X-ray brightest among the nearby isolated neutron stars. Its X-ray spectrum is thermal, and is reproduced remarkably well by a black-body, but its interpretation has remained puzzling. One reason is that the source did not exhibit pulsations, and hence a magnetic field strength--vital input to atmosphere models--could not be estimated. Recently, however, very weak pulsations were discovered. Here, we analyze these in detail, using all available data from the XMM-Newton and Chandra X-ray observatories. From frequency measurements, we set a 2-sigma upper limit to the frequency derivative of \dot\nu<1.3e-14 Hz/s. Trying possible phase-connected timing solutions, we find that one solution is far more likely than the others, and we infer a most probable value of \dot\nu=(-5.98+/-0.14)e-16 Hz/s. The inferred magnetic field strength is 1.5e13 G, comparable to what was found for similar neutron stars. From models, the field seems too strong to be consistent with the absence of spectral features for non-condensed atmospheres. It is sufficiently strong, however, that the surface could be condensed, but only if it is consists of heavy elements like iron. Our measurements imply a characteristic age of about 4 Myr. This is longer than the cooling and kinematic ages, as was found for similar objects, but at almost a factor ten, the discrepancy is more extreme. A puzzle raised by our measurement is that the implied rotational energy loss rate of about 3e30 erg/s is orders of magnitude smaller than what was inferred from the H-alpha nebula surrounding the source.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables; accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal (Letters

A Simple Bargaining Mechanism That Elicits Truthful Reservation Prices

We describe a simple 2-stage mechanism that induces two bargainers to be truthful in reporting their reservation prices in a 1st stage. If these prices criss-cross, the referee reports that they overlap, and the bargainers proceed to make offers in a 2nd stage. The average of the 2nd-stage offers becomes the settlement if both offers fall into the overlap interval; if only one offer falls into this interval, it is the settlement, but is implemented with probability 1/2; if neither offer falls into the interval, there is no settlement. Thus, if the bargainers reach the 2nd stage, they know their reservation prices overlap even if they fail to reach a settlement, possibly motivating them to try again.Bargaining; truth-telling mechanisms; probabilistic implementation; incomplete information.

Inequalities for low-energy symmetric nuclear matter

Using effective field theory we prove inequalities for the correlations of two-nucleon operators in low-energy symmetric nuclear matter. For physical values of operator coefficients in the effective Lagrangian, the S = 1, I = 0 channel correlations must have the lowest energy and longest correlation length in the two-nucleon sector. This result is valid at nonzero density and temperature.Comment: 9 page

Charged and superconducting vortices in dense quark matter

Quark matter at astrophysical densities may contain stable vortices due to the spontaneous breaking of hypercharge symmetry by kaon condensation. We argue that these vortices could be both charged and electrically superconducting. Current carrying loops (vortons) could be long lived and play a role in the magnetic and transport properties of this matter. We provide a scenario for vorton formation in protoneutron stars.Comment: Replaced with the published version. A typographical error in Eq. 2 is correcte