Privately Policing Dark Patterns

Lawmakers around the country are crafting new laws to target “dark patterns”—user interface designs that trick or coerce users into enabling cell phone location tracking, sharing browsing data, initiating automatic billing, or making whatever other choices their designers prefer. Dark patterns pose a serious problem. In their most aggressive forms, they interfere with human autonomy, undermine customers’ evaluation and selection of products, and distort online markets for goods and services. Yet crafting legislation is a major challenge: Persuasion and deception are difficult to distinguish, and shifting tech trends present an ever-moving target. To address these challenges, this Article proposes leveraging state private law to define and track dark patterns as they evolve. Judge-crafted decisional law can respond quickly to new techniques, flexibly define the boundary between permissible and impermissible designs, and bolster state and federal regulatory enforcement efforts by quickly identifying those designs that most undermine user autonomy

The Internet Immunity Escape Hatch

Internet immunity doctrine is broken, and Congress is helpless. Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, online entities are absolutely immune from lawsuits related to content authored by third parties. The law has been essential to the internet’s development over the last twenty years, but it has not kept pace with the times and is now deeply flawed. Democrats demand accountability for online misinformation. Republicans decry politically motivated censorship. And all have come together to criticize Section 230’s protection of bad-actor websites. The law’s defects have put it at the center of public debate, with more than two dozen bills introduced in Congress in the last year alone. Despite widespread agreement on basic principles, however, legislative action is unlikely. Congress is deadlocked, unable to overcome political polarization and keep pace with technological change. Rather than add to the sizeable literature proposing changes to the law, this Article asks a different question—how to achieve meaningful reform despite a decades-old statute and a Congress unable to act. Even without fresh legislation, reform is possible via an unlikely source: the Section 230 internet immunity statute that is already on the books. Because of its extreme breadth, Section 230 grants significant interpretive authority to the state and federal courts charged with applying the statute. This Article shows how, without any change to the statute, courts could press forward with the very reforms on which Congress has been unable to act

Panel I: Cyber Regulation

Panel discussion on cyber regulation with Professors Asaf Lubin, Indiana-Bloomington Law, and Gregory Dickinson, St. Thomas Law. Moderated by Georgia Law Professor Thomas Kadri

Fucoidan and cancer: A multifunctional molecule with anti-tumor potential

There is a wide variety of cancer types yet, all share some common cellular and molecular behaviors. Most of the chemotherapeutic agents used in cancer treatment are designed to target common deregulated mechanisms within cancer cells. Many healthy tissues are also affected by the cytotoxic effects of these chemical agents. Fucoidan, a natural component of brown seaweed, has anti-cancer activity against various cancer types by targeting key apoptotic molecules. It also has beneficial effects as it can protect against toxicity associated with chemotherapeutic agents and radiation. Thus the synergistic effect of fucoidan with current anti-cancer agents is of considerable interest. This review discusses the mechanisms by which fucoidan retards tumor development, eradicates tumor cells and synergizes with anti-cancer chemotherapeutic agents. Challenges to the development of fucoidan as an anti-cancer agent will also be discussed

Negative Values in Vickrey Auctions

Abstract Some people assign negative values for new products sold on laboratory auction blocks (i.e., irradiated meat). We explore bidding behavior in two Vickrey auctions when people have positive and negative induced values for the good. Aggregate bidding in the second-price auction is precise but biased-highest-value positive bidders tend to overstate benefits, whereas lowest-negative bidders understate losses. In contrast, bidding behavior in the random nth-price auction is demand revealing irrespective of induced value, but it is imprecise. Examining on-and off-margin bidding behavior, we cannot conclude that any segments of demand are significantly different than the demand revealing regression line. Rather than having people bid on new products, we use a classic induced value design that controls preferences to create a testable behavioral benchmark (Smith). Our auction environment has people bidding over a good in which both positive and negative induced values exist within the population of bidders. We examine the potential bias and precision of bidding behavior for two popular auctions used in laboratory valuation work-the classic Vickrey second-price auction and the random nth-price auction, a mechanism initially designed to engage people with values otherwise below the market-clearing price in the second-price auction (se

SRTR Program-Specific Reports on Outcomes: A Guide for the New Reader

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72405/1/j.1600-6143.2008.02178.x.pd

Biparametric Adaptive Filter: detection of compact sources in complex microwave backgrounds

In this article we consider the detection of compact sources in maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) following the philosophy behind the Mexican Hat Wavelet Family (MHWn) of linear filters. We present a new analytical filter, the Biparametric Adaptive Filter (BAF), that is able to adapt itself to the statistical properties of the background as well as to the profile of the compact sources, maximizing the amplification and improving the detection process. We have tested the performance of this filter using realistic simulations of the microwave sky between 30 and 857 GHz as observed by the Planck satellite, where complex backgrounds can be found. We demonstrate that doing a local analysis on flat patches allows one to find a combination of the optimal scale of the filter R and the index of the filter g that will produce a global maximum in the amplification, enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the detected sources in the filtered map and improving the total number of detections above a threshold. We conclude that the new filter is able to improve the overall performance of the MHW2, increasing the SNR of the detections and, therefore, the number of detections above a 5 sigma threshold. The improvement of the new filter in terms of SNR is particularly important in the vicinity of the galactic plane and in the presence of strong galactic emission. Finally, we compare the sources detected by each method and find that the new filter is able to detect more new sources than the MHW2 at all frequencies and in clean regions of the sky. The BAF is also less affected by spurious detections, associated to compact structures in the vicinity of the galactic plane.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figures and 3 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRA

Type Ia Supernova Distances at z > 1.5 from the Hubble Space Telescope Multi-Cycle Treasury Programs: The Early Expansion Rate

We present an analysis of 15 Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) at redshift z > 1 (9 at 1.5 < z < 2.3) recently discovered in the CANDELS and CLASH Multi-Cycle Treasury programs using WFC3 on the Hubble Space Telescope. We combine these SNe Ia with a new compilation of 1050 SNe Ia, jointly calibrated and corrected for simulated survey biases to produce accurate distance measurements. We present unbiased constraints on the expansion rate at six redshifts in the range 0.07 < z < 1.5 based only on this combined SN Ia sample. The added leverage of our new sample at z > 1.5 leads to a factor of ~3 improvement in the determination of the expansion rate at z = 1.5, reducing its uncertainty to ~20%, a measurement of H(z=1.5)/H0=2.67 (+0.83,-0.52). We then demonstrate that these six measurements alone provide a nearly identical characterization of dark energy as the full SN sample, making them an efficient compression of the SN Ia data. The new sample of SNe Ia at z > 1 usefully distinguishes between alternative cosmological models and unmodeled evolution of the SN Ia distance indicators, placing empirical limits on the latter. Finally, employing a realistic simulation of a potential WFIRST SN survey observing strategy, we forecast optimistic future constraints on the expansion rate from SNe Ia.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 7 tables; submitted to Ap

Type Ia Supernova Rate Measurements To Redshift 2.5 From CANDELS: Searching For Prompt Explosions In The Early Universe

dThe Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) was a multi-cycle treasury program on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) that surveyed a total area of -0.25 deg2 with -900 HST orbits spread across five fields over three years. Within these survey images we discovered 65 supernovae (SNe) of all types, out to z 2.5. We classify -24 of these as Type Ia SNe (SNe Ia) based on host galaxy redshifts and SN photometry (supplemented by grism spectroscopy of six SNe). Here we present a measurement of the volumetric SN Ia rate as a function of redshift, reaching for the first time beyond z =- 2 and putting new constraints on SN Ia progenitor models. Our highest redshift bin includes detections of SNe that exploded when the universe was only -3 Gyr old and near the peak of the cosmic star formation history. This gives the CANDELS high redshift sample unique leverage for evaluating the fraction of SNe Ia that explode promptly after formation ( 40 Myr. However, mild tension is apparent between ground-based low-z surveys and space-based high-z surveys. In both CANDELS and the sister HST program CLASH (Cluster Lensing And Supernova Survey with Hubble), we find a low rate of SNe Ia at z > 1. This could be a hint that prompt progenitors are in fact relatively rare, accounting for only 20% of all SN Ia explosions-though further analysis and larger samples will be needed to examine that suggestion. Key words: infrared: general - supernovae:Astronom