Newman/Martoma: The Insider Trading Law\u27s Impasse and the Promise of Congressional Action

The prohibition against insider trading is a judge-made law that has evolved for over fifty years, and has reached a critical impasse in two recent decisions in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals: United States v. Newman and United States v. Martoma. Judges of the Second Circuit are sharply divided over what conduct constitutes improper trading on material nonpublic information (“MNPI”), leaving the law in profound disarray. At bottom, the disagreement stems from a decades-old split within the judiciary about how to (1) ensure a fair securities marketplace, while (2) enabling institutional analysts to probe for corporate information in furtherance of efficient market valuation of securities. In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court in SEC v. Dirks sought to strike a balance between these two interests by holding that trading on MNPI is not illegal unless the information was disclosed in exchange for a personal benefit. But the effort to balance these two competing economic and moral interests should never have been the province of the judiciary, nor did its formulation ever win uniform consensus among the judges. After decades of struggle, the Newman/Martoma empasse is the consequence. Congress may finally be ready to pass a law of insider trading that would break the deadlock, but the bill under consideration ignores the market efficiency interests that undergirded the personal benefit element of insider trading. This Article suggests that before passing any law, Congress must undertake an empirical review of the impact that the insider trading bill would have on an efficient market to ensure that the final law is not only clear, but beneficial to the health of the capital markets

Weakly- and Self-Supervised Learning for Content-Aware Deep Image Retargeting

This paper proposes a weakly- and self-supervised deep convolutional neural network (WSSDCNN) for content-aware image retargeting. Our network takes a source image and a target aspect ratio, and then directly outputs a retargeted image. Retargeting is performed through a shift map, which is a pixel-wise mapping from the source to the target grid. Our method implicitly learns an attention map, which leads to a content-aware shift map for image retargeting. As a result, discriminative parts in an image are preserved, while background regions are adjusted seamlessly. In the training phase, pairs of an image and its image-level annotation are used to compute content and structure losses. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for a retargeting application with insightful analyses.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures. To appear in ICCV 2017, Spotlight Presentatio

Minimal ureagenesis is necessary for survival in the murine model of hyperargininemia treated by AAV-based gene therapy.

Hyperammonemia is less severe in arginase 1 deficiency compared with other urea cycle defects. Affected patients manifest hyperargininemia and infrequent episodes of hyperammonemia. Patients typically suffer from neurological impairment with cortical and pyramidal tract deterioration, spasticity, loss of ambulation, seizures and intellectual disability; death is less common than with other urea cycle disorders. In a mouse model of arginase I deficiency, the onset of symptoms begins with weight loss and gait instability, which progresses toward development of tail tremor with seizure-like activity; death typically occurs at about 2 weeks of life. Adeno-associated viral vector gene replacement strategies result in long-term survival of mice with this disorder. With neonatal administration of vector, the viral copy number in the liver greatly declines with hepatocyte proliferation in the first 5 weeks of life. Although the animals do survive, it is not known from a functional standpoint how well the urea cycle is functioning in the adult animals that receive adeno-associated virus. In these studies, we administered [1-13C] acetate to both littermate controls and adeno-associated virus-treated arginase 1 knockout animals and examined flux through the urea cycle. Circulating ammonia levels were mildly elevated in treated animals. Arginine and glutamine also had perturbations. Assessment 30 min after acetate administration demonstrated that ureagenesis was present in the treated knockout liver at levels as low at 3.3% of control animals. These studies demonstrate that only minimal levels of hepatic arginase activity are necessary for survival and ureagenesis in arginase-deficient mice and that this level of activity results in control of circulating ammonia. These results may have implications for potential therapy in humans with arginase deficiency

Educational Effect of Practical Examination on Basic Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Self-Learning

Simplification of basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) enables easy production of videos for training, and non-face-to-face training can be provided via internet. The participants of this study were 89 university students   who took basic CPR class in 2020. We utilized teaching materials that is a 50-minute teaching material for standard adult CPR, comprised of a 25-minute power point slide show and a 25-minute video. All participants completed self-learning via Google Classroom (Alphabet Inc., Mountain View, USA). The participants took compression-only (C-O) practical examination consisting of 180 chest compressions after 5-minute C-O CPR using Resusci Anne SkillReporter (Laerdal Medical, Stavanger, Norway). The collected data were analyzed at an ⍺=.05 using the SPSS 20.0 for Windows (IBM Inc, New York, USA). Changes in willingness, knowledge, performance, and attitude toward CPR before and after the practical exam were analyzed using t-tests. Willingness to perform CPR increased from 1.78 to 2.02, showing a statistically significant change (p=.040). The knowledge score increased from 3.12 to 3.56 and performance score increased from 2.87 to 3.36. The attitude score increased from 3.39 to 3.69, and all these changes were statistically significant (p<.001; p<.001; p<.001). The practical exam on self-learning of basic CPR was effective on improving willingness, knowledge, performance, and attitudes of non-healthcare providers

Calanoid copepods from the caribbean sea and gula of Mexico.2 new species and new records from plankton samples

Twenty-eight new species of calanoid copepods and the male of Bathypontia minor (Wolfenden, 1906) are described from specimens found in vertically collected samples of plankton obtained in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Diagnoses or systematic remarks are presented for 16 other species of calanoid copepods. Fifty-eight species of calanoid copepods not previously known from the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico are reported. A key is included for the identification of the species of Spinocalanus