Polarized galactic synchrotron and dust emission and their correlation

We present an analysis of the level of polarized dust and synchrotron emission using the WMAP9 and Planck data. The primary goal of this study is to inform the assessment of foreground contamination in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements below $\ell\sim200$ from 23 to 353 GHz. We compute angular power spectra as a function of sky cut based on the Planck 353 GHz polarization maps. Our primary findings are the following. (1) There is a spatial correlation between the dust emission as measured by Planck at 353 GHz and the synchrotron emission as measured by WMAP at 23 GHz with $\rho\approx0.4$ or greater for $\ell<20$ and $f_{\mathrm{sky}}\geq0.5$, dropping to $\rho\approx0.2$ for $30<\ell<200$. (2) A simple foreground model with dust, synchrotron, and their correlation fits well to all possible cross spectra formed with the WMAP and Planck 353 GHz data given the current uncertainties. (3) In the 50$\%$ cleanest region of the polarized dust map, the ratio of synchrotron to dust amplitudes at 90 GHz for 50 $\leq \ell \leq$110 is $0.3_{-0.2}^{+0.3}$. Smaller regions of sky can be cleaner although the uncertainties in our knowledge of synchrotron emission are larger. A high-sensitivity measurement of synchrotron below 90 GHz will be important for understanding all the components of foreground emission near 90 GHz.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures; Published in JCAP. Source masks updated, minor change

Research issues in implementing remote presence in teleoperator control

The concept of remote presence in telemanipulation is presented. A conceptual design of a prototype teleoperator system incorporating remote presence is described. The design is presented in functional terms, sensor, display, and control subsystem. An intermediate environment, in which the human operator is made to feel present, is explicated. The intermediate environment differs from the task environment due to the quantity and type of information presented to an operator and due to scaling factors protecting the operator from the hazards of the task environment. Potential benefits of remote presence systems, both for manipulation and for the study of human cognition and preception are discussed

Recalling Why Corporate Officers are Fiduciaries

For all the recent federal attention to regulating - and differentiating - corporate officer and director functions, a curious fact remains: state fiduciary duty law makes no distinction between the fiduciary duties of these two groups. Instead, courts and commentators routinely describe the duties of directors and officers together, and in identical terms. To lump officers and directors together as generic fiduciaries with no distinction being made between them, suggests - as patently is not the case - that their institutional function and legal roles within the corporation are the same. Such a view, consequently, undermines efforts more sharply to distinguish, not blur, the governance responsibilities of these two groups. Failure to differentiate the duties of officers, who daily manage corporate operations, from directors, who more remotely monitor corporate affairs, stems from a puzzling failure to address an even deeper issue in corporate law: What exactly is the theoretical and conceptual basis for the widespread claim that corporate officers owe fiduciary duties to a corporation and its stockholders? Hardly a week goes by without yet another Delaware decision addressing the subject of director duties. Yet, surprisingly, no Delaware decision ever has clearly articulated the subject of officer duties and judicial standards for reviewing their discharge. For persons occupying such central places of power in corporations, senior officers largely have succeeded in eluding the distinctive attention of state corporation law. The thesis of this article is that corporate officers are fiduciaries because they are agents. The argument is not that agency principles should be introduced formalistically or uncritically into corporate governance. Rather, the claim is that drawing on the fiduciary duties of agents for guidance in fashioning modern understandings of corporate officer duties - and differentiating those duties from those of directors - can provide much-needed structure to what otherwise threatens to be an ad hoc enterprise. There are at least three benefits of our thesis. First, by understanding officer duties and director-officer interaction in this way it can be seen that state law remains the primary source for establishing the basic framework of corporate governance relations, both through corporate statutes and through judge-made fiduciary duty law. With a more highly differentiated state law model of director-officer relations, recent efforts of Congress, the SEC, the NYSE and Nasdaq to impose new responsibilities on directors - in an effort to improve their vital role in monitoring corporate officers - can be seen as congruent with, rather than at odds with, the underlying state framework. The current emphasis on director independence and the special focus on various board committees - audit, nominating/governance and compensation - can be seen as an effort to develop mechanisms to aid the board both in detaching from management and in divvying up the board\u27s key monitoring functions. Moreover, efforts by Congress and the SEC to place additional and different functions on senior officers also can be seen as supplementing, rather than displacing, existing state law-based fiduciary duties of officers. As a second benefit, our thesis clarifies immensely why courts can and should more closely scrutinize officer conduct than they now review director performance - i.e., the fiduciary duties of agents are more demanding than those of directors, especially the duty of care, and officers rightly face a greater risk of personal liability for misconduct. Heightened review of officer performance is especially fitting given that many of the recent corporate scandals involved wrongdoing at the officer level, and given that state law has been eerily silent about why officers owe duties at all, much less holding them to account. It also is important in light of the fact that recent federal initiatives aimed at improving officer performance eventually will be translated into, and will heavily influence, state fiduciary duty analysis. At a theoretical level, the third payoff, our thesis has several implications. These include our belief that we are entering an era when, due to heavier corporate regulation, the entity conception of the firm will be strengthened, as positive law, including agency law, still builds on that understanding of corporate relations. This period follows a span of perhaps twenty years when a highly disaggregated conception of corporate relations - the nexus of contracts theory - has predominated. We also believe that in the policy arguments for and against strong fiduciary duties over the years, virtually no attention has been given to distinguishing whether what is fitting for outside directors in the fiduciary duty area - relatively slack duties - is also fitting for corporate officers. Moreover, although agency law suggests greater liability for officers than directors, widespread (and longstanding) failure to understand officers in those terms means corporate law cannot as confidently assume that existing liability outcomes for officers are optimal, as might be the case with rules governing directors. We believe that, from a policy perspective, the fiduciary duties and liability rules for officers should be analyzed separately from those for outside directors. Contemporary corporate law and fiduciary discourse do not do so, however, thereby hindering attention to this subject. In the terms recently used by Professors Black, Cheffins and Klaussner to describe the state of law governing outside directors, we believe the window of liability risk for inside directors - i.e., officers - is in fact wide open, but it is thought, wrongly, to be virtually shut

Corporate Law After \u3cem\u3eHobby Lobby\u3c/em\u3e

We evaluate the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial decision in the Hobby Lobby case from the perspective of state corporate law. We argue that the Court is correct in holding that corporate law does not mandate that business corporations limit themselves to pursuit of profit. Rather, state law allows incorporation for any lawful purpose. We elaborate on this important point and also explain what it means for a corporation to “exercise religion.” In addition, we address the larger implications of the Court’s analysis for an accurate understanding both of state law’s essentially agnostic stance on the question of corporate purpose and also of the broad scope of managerial discretion