Believing in Life After Loving: IRS Regulation of Tax Preparers

Nearly anyone can be a tax preparer. There is no test to pass or code of ethics to follow. With few barriers to entry, the field of tax preparation has drawn unscrupulous players, many of whom prey on low-income families who claim the earned-income tax credit. In 2011, the IRS endeavored to regulate the anything-goes world of tax preparation. But a group of small-government activists at the Institute for Justice challenged the IRS\u27s regulations in federal court. And they won. The US. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the regulations as beyond the 1R.S. \u27s authority under section 330 of Title 31 of the United States Code. In the wake of that decision, Loving v. IRS, the only path forward for advocates of taxpayer protection is for Congress to explicitly empower the IRS to regulate swindlers posing as tax professionals. This Article is, fundamentally, a story of political and judicial failure in the age of small government absolutism. In a different era, federal oversight of unscrupulous tax preparers who have represented the blandest kind of common sense. But the Institute for Justice was able to convince a panel ofjudges on what is widely regarded as the second most influential court in the country that IRS oversight of tax preparers is unlawful. The government\u27s litigation strategy proved bumbling and ill-considered; it was easily outmaneuvered by its ideologically-driven adversary. In the Article, I provide background on the IRS regulations and the process by which they were developed; I detail the pervasive fraud and incompetence that motivated the IRS to act; I explore the Institute for Justice\u27s push to invalidate the regulations in court, and I look at the arguments it made outside the courtroom; I evaluate the state­level experience with tax preparer regulations to see what can be learned from these laboratories of democracy ; and, finally, I discuss how to proceed in the aftermath of Loving

Commentary on Szmukler: Mental Illness, Dangerousness, and Involuntary Civil Commitment

Prof. Cohen and I answer six questions: (1) Why do we lock people up? (2) How can involuntary civil commitment be reconciled with people's constitutional right to liberty? (3) Why don't we treat homicide as a public health threat? (4) What is the difference between legal and medical approaches to mental illness? (5) Why is mental illness required for involuntary commitment? (6) Where are we in our efforts to understand the causes of mental illness

Relational Parametricity for Computational Effects

According to Strachey, a polymorphic program is parametric if it applies a uniform algorithm independently of the type instantiations at which it is applied. The notion of relational parametricity, introduced by Reynolds, is one possible mathematical formulation of this idea. Relational parametricity provides a powerful tool for establishing data abstraction properties, proving equivalences of datatypes, and establishing equalities of programs. Such properties have been well studied in a pure functional setting. Many programs, however, exhibit computational effects, and are not accounted for by the standard theory of relational parametricity. In this paper, we develop a foundational framework for extending the notion of relational parametricity to programming languages with effects.Comment: 31 pages, appears in Logical Methods in Computer Scienc

MEMS 411: The Adjustable Bit Brace

This group set out to create an open-source adjustable bit brace as a tool to lower the barrier to entry for smaller individuals looking to pick up tools and work on DIY projects. The brace is designed to highlight 3D printed parts, as well as components that can be fabricated at home by an experienced maker. The design uses standard adjustment mechanisms such as button clips and bolts to bring the bit brace from full size down to 2/3 scale in seconds. The device is advised by engineering models, FEA analysis, stiffness/strength targets, and destructive testing protocols to create a brace that satisfies user needs and predefined performance goals. Several parts were created in an iterative process to determine the best 3D printed design, material, and integration method. The final brace underwent validation proof load testing to ensure that assembly-level analysis was correct and that the brace was safe for operation. With the final addition of steel gussets to the 3D printed components, the brace now exceeds the predetermined strength requirements for functionality. Finally, the brace was used to drill holes into wood beams at several size configurations including the largest and smallest to ensure that functionality and tactile feedback were preserved

Design of the WUFR-19 FSAE Suspension

This report outlines the rationale and design constraints for Wash U Racing’s WUFR-19 suspension for the 2019 FSAE Michigan competition. This includes competition rules, team design goals of drivability and control, and compliance with good engineering practices. To stay competitive, the team has reinvented the design philosophy of the car for the 2019 season, highlighting the use of multiple software packages and several parallel problem-solving methods when possible. The system was designed using MATLAB, SolidWorks, and OptimumKinematics racing software. Simulations were created to evaluate the car’s grip potential through heave, pitch, roll, and steer motions. These results were compared with tire data models to tune for improved control at peak conditions. Additionally, kinematic equations were used along with sensor data from past iterations of Wash U Racing projects to alternatively predict handling capabilities for the new platform. This paved the way for the creation of front and rear geometries in SolidWorks to be the basis for the WUFR-19 chassis and the rest of the project development

Energy spectrum and broken spin-surface locking in topological insulator quantum dots

We consider the energy spectrum and the spin-parity structure of the eigenstates for a quantum dot made of a strong topological insulator. Using the effective low-energy theory in a finite-length cylinder geometry, numerical calculations show that even at the lowest energy scales, the spin direction in a topologically protected surface mode is not locked to the surface. We find "zero-momentum" modes, and subgap states localized near the "caps" of the dot. Both the energy spectrum and the spin texture of the eigenstates are basically reproduced from an analytical surface Dirac fermion description. Our results are compared to microscopic calculations using a tight-binding model for a strong topological insulator in a finite-length nanowire geometry.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, to appear in Physical Review B (2011

A microfluidic 2×2 optical switch

A 2×2 microfluidic-based optical switch is proposed and demonstrated. The switch is made of an optically clear silicon elastomer, Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), using soft lithography. It has insertion loss smaller than 1 dB and extinction ratio on the order of 20 dB. The device is switching between transmission (bypass) and reflection (exchange) modes within less than 20 m

ASSERT: Automated Safety Scenario Red Teaming for Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models

As large language models are integrated into society, robustness toward a suite of prompts is increasingly important to maintain reliability in a high-variance environment.Robustness evaluations must comprehensively encapsulate the various settings in which a user may invoke an intelligent system. This paper proposes ASSERT, Automated Safety Scenario Red Teaming, consisting of three methods -- semantically aligned augmentation, target bootstrapping, and adversarial knowledge injection. For robust safety evaluation, we apply these methods in the critical domain of AI safety to algorithmically generate a test suite of prompts covering diverse robustness settings -- semantic equivalence, related scenarios, and adversarial. We partition our prompts into four safety domains for a fine-grained analysis of how the domain affects model performance. Despite dedicated safeguards in existing state-of-the-art models, we find statistically significant performance differences of up to 11% in absolute classification accuracy among semantically related scenarios and error rates of up to 19% absolute error in zero-shot adversarial settings, raising concerns for users' physical safety.Comment: In Findings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processin

The self-assembly and evolution of homomeric protein complexes

We introduce a simple "patchy particle" model to study the thermodynamics and dynamics of self-assembly of homomeric protein complexes. Our calculations allow us to rationalize recent results for dihedral complexes. Namely, why evolution of such complexes naturally takes the system into a region of interaction space where (i) the evolutionarily newer interactions are weaker, (ii) subcomplexes involving the stronger interactions are observed to be thermodynamically stable on destabilization of the protein-protein interactions and (iii) the self-assembly dynamics are hierarchical with these same subcomplexes acting as kinetic intermediates.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure