Litigating State Interests: Attorneys General as Amici

An important strain of federalism scholarship locates the primary value of federalism in how it carves up the political landscape, allowing groups that are out of power at the national level to flourish—and, significantly, to govern—in the states. On that account, partisanship, rather than a commitment to state authority as such, motivates state actors to act as checks on federal power. Our study examines partisan motivation in one area where state actors can, and do, advocate on behalf of state power: the Supreme Court. We compiled data on state amicus filings in Supreme Court cases from the 1979–2013 Terms and linked it up with data on the partisanship of state attorneys general (AGs). Focusing only on merits-stage briefs, we looked at each AG’s partisan affiliation and the partisanship of the AGs who either joined, or explicitly opposed, her briefs. If partisanship drives amicus activity, then we should see a strong negative relationship between the partisanship of AGs opposing each other and a strong positive relationship between those who cosign briefs. What we found was somewhat surprising. States agreed far more often than they disagreed, and—until recently—most multistate briefs represented bipartisan, not partisan, coalitions of AGs. Indeed, for the first twenty years of our study, the cosigners of these briefs were generally indistinguishable from a random sampling of AGs then in office. The picture changes after 2000, when the coalitions of cosigners become decidedly more partisan, particularly among Republican AGs. The partisanship picture is also different for the 6% of cases in which different states square off in opposing briefs. In those cases, AGs do tend to join together in partisan clusters. Here, too, the appearance of partisanship becomes stronger after the mid-1990s

Active Object Localization in Visual Situations

We describe a method for performing active localization of objects in instances of visual situations. A visual situation is an abstract concept---e.g., "a boxing match", "a birthday party", "walking the dog", "waiting for a bus"---whose image instantiations are linked more by their common spatial and semantic structure than by low-level visual similarity. Our system combines given and learned knowledge of the structure of a particular situation, and adapts that knowledge to a new situation instance as it actively searches for objects. More specifically, the system learns a set of probability distributions describing spatial and other relationships among relevant objects. The system uses those distributions to iteratively sample object proposals on a test image, but also continually uses information from those object proposals to adaptively modify the distributions based on what the system has detected. We test our approach's ability to efficiently localize objects, using a situation-specific image dataset created by our group. We compare the results with several baselines and variations on our method, and demonstrate the strong benefit of using situation knowledge and active context-driven localization. Finally, we contrast our method with several other approaches that use context as well as active search for object localization in images.Comment: 14 page

Semantic Image Retrieval via Active Grounding of Visual Situations

We describe a novel architecture for semantic image retrieval---in particular, retrieval of instances of visual situations. Visual situations are concepts such as "a boxing match," "walking the dog," "a crowd waiting for a bus," or "a game of ping-pong," whose instantiations in images are linked more by their common spatial and semantic structure than by low-level visual similarity. Given a query situation description, our architecture---called Situate---learns models capturing the visual features of expected objects as well the expected spatial configuration of relationships among objects. Given a new image, Situate uses these models in an attempt to ground (i.e., to create a bounding box locating) each expected component of the situation in the image via an active search procedure. Situate uses the resulting grounding to compute a score indicating the degree to which the new image is judged to contain an instance of the situation. Such scores can be used to rank images in a collection as part of a retrieval system. In the preliminary study described here, we demonstrate the promise of this system by comparing Situate's performance with that of two baseline methods, as well as with a related semantic image-retrieval system based on "scene graphs.

Asteroids Observed by The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We announce the first public release of the SDSS Moving Object Catalog, with SDSS observations for 58,117 asteroids. The catalog lists astrometric and photometric data for moving objects observed prior to Dec 15, 2001, and also includes orbital elements for 10,592 previously known objects. We analyze the correlation between the orbital parameters and optical colors for the known objects, and confirm that asteroid dynamical families, defined as clusters in orbital parameter space, also strongly segregate in color space. Their distinctive optical colors indicate that the variations in chemical composition within a family are much smaller than the compositional differences between families, and strongly support earlier suggestions that asteroids belonging to a particular family have a common origin.Comment: 6 pages, 1 color figure, to be presented at "Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation", SPIE 200

A Background and Chronological Take on High Frequency Trading

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze, in context of high frequency trading, potential market manipulation techniques (i.e. market making arbitrage, statistical arbitrage, market structure arbitrage, and directional strategies), and to review the subject from a chronological perspective from the 1960s onward, covering topics not limited to Regulation National Market System, the flash crash of May 6, 2010, and the August 24, 2015 market crash. To date, high frequency trading’s effects on the United States market place have been well documented. This thesis will speculate about the true nature—whether adverse or beneficial-- of this fascinating, evolutionary, highly scrutinized topic

A follow-up study of the students who attended the E private business school

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University, 1948. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Clown Pranks : Caprice

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-ps/1333/thumbnail.jp