McCulloch at 200

March 6, 2019 marked the 200th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s issuance of its decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, upholding the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States, the successor to Alexander Hamilton’s national bank. McCulloch v. Maryland involved a constitutional challenge by the Second Bank of the United States to a Maryland tax on the banknotes issued by the Bank’s Baltimore branch. The tax was probably designed to raise the Second Bank’s cost of issuing loans and thereby disadvantage it relative to Maryland’s own state-chartered banks. Marshall’s opinion famously rejected the Jeffersonian strict-constructionist argument that implied powers are limited to those legislative means that are indispensably necessary to the viability of the enumerated power. Instead, Marshall concluded, Congress must have discretion to choose among any means convenient or well-adapted to implementing the government’s granted powers. After concluding that Congress had the power to create the Second Bank, the McCulloch opinion turned to the question of whether Maryland could tax it. Reasoning that the essence of federal supremacy is to remove all obstacles to federal government action within its sphere, Marshall concluded that states cannot tax operations of the federal government

A Virtual Pandora\u27s Box: What Cyberspace Gambling Prohibition Means to Terrestrial Casino Operators

Recently, there has been increased pressure on the U.S. Congress to act against Internet gambling. While it may be tempting for terrestrial casinos to watch idly as the federal government moves to eliminate a potential competitor, those in the business of gaming must be leery of any federal efforts to halt gambling online. In the final analysis, the same arguments to restrict consumer choice in cyberspace can be easily used against gambling in real casinos-a compelling reason for terrestrial gaming operators to forcefully oppose any federal restrictions on Americans\u27 rights to gamble

The three different phases in the dynamics of chemical reaction networks and their relationship to cancer

We investigate the catalytic reactions model used in cell modeling. The reaction kinetic is defined through the energies of different species of molecules following random independent distribution. The related statistical physics model has three phases and these three phases emerged in the dynamics: fast dynamics phase, slow dynamic phase and ultra-slow dynamic phase. The phenomenon we found is a rather general, does not depend on the details of the model. We assume as a hypothesis that the transition between these phases (glassiness degrees) is related to cancer. The imbalance in the rate of processes between key aspects of the cell (gene regulation, protein-protein interaction, metabolical networks) creates a change in the fine tuning between these key aspects, affects the logics of the cell and initiates cancer. It is probable that cancer is a change of phase resulting from increased and deregulated metabolic reactions.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, EPL, in pres

Health Benefits for the Uninsured: Design and Early Implementation of the Accelerated Benefits Demonstration

Many Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) beneficiaries have serious and immediate health care needs, but, under current law, most are not eligible for Medicare until 24 months after they start receiving cash benefits. This policy brief describes a new project that is testing whether providing earlier access to health benefits, as well as other services, for new SSDI beneficiaries who have no other health insurance improves employment and health outcomes

Intercommection Incentives of a Large Network Facing Multiple Rivals

This paper extends Cremer, Rey and Tirole’s analysis of whether a firm with the most installed-base customers, in a market exhibiting network externalities, gains by degrading interconnection with rivals that compete with it for new customers. We allow any number of rivals and consider both tipping equilibria and interior equlibria. Degrading interconnection can yield tipping away from the largest network even if its installed-base share exceeds one half. For all parameter values (including those that admit interior equilibria), a share above one half is necessary but not sufficient to ensure degradation is profitable. Greater scope for market expansion—a lower marginal cost or smaller installed-base relative to potential additional demand—makes profitable degradation less likely.Interconnection, Network Externalities, Exclusion

Quantifying the power of multiple event interpretations

A number of methods have been proposed recently which exploit multiple highly-correlated interpretations of events, or of jets within an event. For example, Qjets reclusters a jet multiple times and telescoping jets uses multiple cone sizes. Previous work has employed these methods in pseudo-experimental analyses and found that, with a simplified statistical treatment, they give sizable improvements over traditional methods. In this paper, the improvement gain from multiple event interpretations is explored with methods much closer to those used in real experiments. To this end, we derive a generalized extended maximum likelihood procedure. We study the significance improvement in Higgs to bb with both this method and the simplified method from previous analysis. With either method, we find that using multiple jet radii can provide substantial benefit over a single radius. Another concern we address is that multiple event interpretations might be exploiting similar information to that already present in the standard kinematic variables. By examining correlations between kinematic variables commonly used in LHC analyses and invariant masses obtained with multiple jet reconstructions, we find that using multiple radii is still helpful even on top of standard kinematic variables when combined with boosted decision trees. These results suggest that including multiple event interpretations in a realistic search for Higgs to bb would give additional sensitivity over traditional approaches.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

From manuscript catalogues to a handbook of Syriac literature: Modeling an infrastructure for Syriaca.org

Despite increasing interest in Syriac studies and growing digital availability of Syriac texts, there is currently no up-to-date infrastructure for discovering, identifying, classifying, and referencing works of Syriac literature. The standard reference work (Baumstark's Geschichte) is over ninety years old, and the perhaps 20,000 Syriac manuscripts extant worldwide can be accessed only through disparate catalogues and databases. The present article proposes a tentative data model for Syriaca.org's New Handbook of Syriac Literature, an open-access digital publication that will serve as both an authority file for Syriac works and a guide to accessing their manuscript representations, editions, and translations. The authors hope that by publishing a draft data model they can receive feedback and incorporate suggestions into the next stage of the project.Comment: Part of special issue: Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages. 15 pages, 4 figure