Why do Companies meet with the SEC Chair?

We examine whether meetings between the SEC Chair and public companies facilitate regulatory capture. Our analyses indicate that firms seek out meetings with the SEC Chair, as meetings are more likely to occur for politically active rather than industry leading firms, and meetings are more likely to occur during periods when the firm is under nonpublic investigation. In addition, we find that firms with meetings benefit from reduced monetary penalties, and that these reduced penalties are attributable, in part, to the favorable selection of the adjudication forum. These findings extend our understanding of how regulatory capture occurs at the SEC, and suggest that closed-door meetings between the SEC Chair and public companies may facilitate regulatory capture by providing a forum that helps firms negotiate for and obtain favorable regulatory outcomes

Endocrine-Therapy-Resistant ESR1 Variants Revealed by Genomic Characterization of Breast-Cancer-Derived Xenografts

To characterize patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) for functional studies, we made whole-genome comparisons with originating breast cancers representative of the major intrinsic subtypes. Structural and copy number aberrations were found to be retained with high fidelity. However, at the single-nucleotide level, variable numbers of PDX-specific somatic events were documented, although they were only rarely functionally significant. Variant allele frequencies were often preserved in the PDXs, demonstrating that clonal representation can be transplantable. Estrogen-receptor-positive PDXs were associated with ESR1 ligand-binding-domain mutations, gene amplification, or an ESR1/YAP1 translocation. These events produced different endocrine-therapy-response phenotypes in human, cell line, and PDX endocrine-response studies. Hence, deeply sequenced PDX models are an important resource for the search for genome-forward treatment options and capture endocrine-drug-resistance etiologies that are not observed in standard cell lines. The originating tumor genome provides a benchmark for assessing genetic drift and clonal representation after transplantation

Building a Scalable Geo-Spatial DBMS: Technology, Implementation, and Evaluation

This paper presents a number of new techniques for parallelizing geo-spatial database systems and discusses their implementation in the Paradise object-relational database system. The effectiveness of these techniques is demonstrated using a variety of complex geo-spatial queries over a 120 GB global geo-spatial data set. 1. Introduction and Motivation The past ten years have seen a great deal of research devoted to extending relational database systems to handle geo-spatial workloads; in fact, handling these workloads has been one of the driving forces for object-relational database technology. While researchers have always acknowledged the existence of very large data sets in the geo-spatial domain, the vast majority of research to date has focused on language issues or uniprocessor query evaluation and indexing techniques. This is unfortunate, since the large data set problems that have been lurking beneath the surface are now likely to surface with a vengeance. In this paper we d..