Voting as a Rational Choice: Why and How People Vote to Improve the Well-Being of Others

For voters with "social" preferences, the expected utility of voting is approximately independent of the size of the electorate, suggesting that rational voter turnouts can be substantial even in large elections. Less important elections are predicted to have lower turnout, but a feedback mechanism keeps turnout at a reasonable level under a wide range of conditions. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) to show how, for an individual with both selfish and social preferences, the social preferences will dominate and make it rational for a typical person to vote even in large elections;(2) to show that rational socially-motivated voting has a feedback mechanism that stabilizes turnout at reasonable levels (e.g., 50% of the electorate); (3) to link the rational social-utility model of voter turnout with survey findings on socially-motivated vote choice.

Persistence and Opacity in Eastern Andalusian Harmony

This paper proposes a novel account of a derivationally opaque aspect of ATR harmony in Eastern Andalusian. Harmony in the language is driven by Positional Licensing: [-ATR] originating on final vowels must spread to the stressed vowel. Intervening post-tonic vowels optionally also harmonize, as do pretonic vowels. Typically in licensing-driven systems, if harmony is unable to reach the licensor, harmony does not affect non-licensing positions either. Not so in Eastern Andalusian: high vowels do not harmonize, but a stressed high vowel does not prevent unstressed vowels from harmonizing as normal – harmony can overapply on these vowels. The analysis, couched in serial Harmonic Grammar, develops a new mechanism called persistence that accounts for this opacity. Under persistence, once a feature satisfies Positional Licensing by spreading to the licensing position, Positional Licensing remains satisfied for the rest of the derivation, even if the feature vacates the licensing position. This allows a stressed high vowel to harmonize, thereby permitting unstressed vowels to harmonize, too, and then harmony can retract off the high vowel without running afoul of Positional Licensing

Observation and numerical simulation of a convective initiation during COHMEX

Under a synoptically undisturbed condition, a dual-peak convective lifecycle was observed with the COoperative Huntsville Meteorological EXperiment (COHMEX) observational network over a 24-hour period. The lifecycle included a multicell storm, which lasted about 6 hours, produced a peak rainrate exceeding 100 mm/hr, and initiated a downstream mesoscale convective system. The 24-hour accumulated rainfall of this event was the largest during the entire COHMEX. The downstream mesoscale convective system, unfortunately, was difficult to investigate quantitatively due to the lack of mesoscale observations. The dataset collected near the time of the multicell storm evolution, including its initiation, was one of the best datasets of COHMEX. In this study, the initiation of this multicell storm is chosen as the target of the numerical simulations

Laplacian-level meta-generalized gradient approximation for solid and liquid metals

We derive and motivate a Laplacian-level, orbital-free meta-generalized-gradient approximation (LL-MGGA) for the exchange-correlation energy, targeting accurate ground-state properties of $sp$ and $sd$ metallic condensed matter, in which the density functional for the exchange-correlation energy is only weakly nonlocal due to perfect long-range screening. Our model for the orbital-free kinetic energy density restores the fourth-order gradient expansion for exchange to the r$^2$SCAN meta-GGA [Furness et al., J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 11, 8208 (2020)], yielding a LL-MGGA we call OFR2. OFR2 matches the accuracy of SCAN for prediction of common lattice constants and improves the equilibrium properties of alkali metals, transition metals, and intermetallics that were degraded relative to the PBE GGA values by both SCAN and r$^2$SCAN. We compare OFR2 to the r$^2$SCAN-L LL-MGGA [D. Mejia-Rodriguez and S.B. Trickey, Phys. Rev. B 102, 121109 (2020)] and show that OFR2 tends to outperform r$^2$SCAN-L for the equilibrium properties of solids, but r$^2$SCAN-L much better describes the atomization energies of molecules than OFR2 does. For best accuracy in molecules and non-metallic condensed matter, we continue to recommend SCAN and r$^2$SCAN. Numerical performance is discussed in detail, and our work provides an outlook to machine learning.Comment: Significant revisions in response to referee comments. Under review at Physical Review Material

Evaluating LLMs for Privilege-Escalation Scenarios

Penetration testing, an essential component of cybersecurity, allows organizations to proactively identify and remediate vulnerabilities in their systems, thus bolstering their defense mechanisms against potential cyberattacks. One recent advancement in the realm of penetration testing is the utilization of Language Models (LLMs). We explore the intersection of LLMs and penetration testing to gain insight into their capabilities and challenges in the context of privilige escalation. We create an automated Linux privilege-escalation benchmark utilizing local virtual machines. We introduce an LLM-guided privilege-escalation tool designed for evaluating different LLMs and prompt strategies against our benchmark. We analyze the impact of different prompt designs, the benefits of in-context learning, and the advantages of offering high-level guidance to LLMs. We discuss challenging areas for LLMs, including maintaining focus during testing, coping with errors, and finally comparing them with both stochastic parrots as well as with human hackers

Effective Theory of the Triton

We apply the effective field theory approach to the three-nucleon system. In particular, we consider S=1/2 neutron-deuteron scattering and the triton. We show that in this channel a unique nonperturbative renormalization takes place which requires the introduction of a single three-body force at leading order. With one fitted parameter we find a good description of low-energy data. Invariance under the renormalization group explains some universal features of the three-nucleon system ---such as the Thomas and Efimov effects and the Phillips line--- and the origin of SU(4) symmetry in nuclei.Comment: 16 pages, Latex, 7 PS figures included with epsf.sty, discussion and references added, conclusions unchange