8,085 research outputs found
Collins Effect from Polarized SIDIS and Data
The recent data on the transverse single spin asymmetry
from HERMES and COMPASS Collaborations are
analysed within LO parton model with unintegrated parton distribution and
fragmentation functions. A fit of SIDIS data from HERMES Collaboration is
performed leading to the extraction of favoured and unfavoured Collins
fragmentation functions. A very good description of COMPASS data is obtained.
BELLE data are shown to be compatible with our estimates based on the
extracted Collins fragmentation functions. Predictions for
asymmetries at JLab and COMPASS operating on a
proton target are given.Comment: Talk presented at SPIN2006, 4 pages, 6 figure
Deep Haptic Model Predictive Control for Robot-Assisted Dressing
Robot-assisted dressing offers an opportunity to benefit the lives of many
people with disabilities, such as some older adults. However, robots currently
lack common sense about the physical implications of their actions on people.
The physical implications of dressing are complicated by non-rigid garments,
which can result in a robot indirectly applying high forces to a person's body.
We present a deep recurrent model that, when given a proposed action by the
robot, predicts the forces a garment will apply to a person's body. We also
show that a robot can provide better dressing assistance by using this model
with model predictive control. The predictions made by our model only use
haptic and kinematic observations from the robot's end effector, which are
readily attainable. Collecting training data from real world physical
human-robot interaction can be time consuming, costly, and put people at risk.
Instead, we train our predictive model using data collected in an entirely
self-supervised fashion from a physics-based simulation. We evaluated our
approach with a PR2 robot that attempted to pull a hospital gown onto the arms
of 10 human participants. With a 0.2s prediction horizon, our controller
succeeded at high rates and lowered applied force while navigating the garment
around a persons fist and elbow without getting caught. Shorter prediction
horizons resulted in significantly reduced performance with the sleeve catching
on the participants' fists and elbows, demonstrating the value of our model's
predictions. These behaviors of mitigating catches emerged from our deep
predictive model and the controller objective function, which primarily
penalizes high forces.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, 2018 IEEE International Conference on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA
Mine and me: exploring the neural basis of object ownership.
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A Political Economy Approach to Reforming the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
Prohibitions against transnational bribery suffer from a paradoxical problem of simultaneous over- and under-enforcement. On the “supply-side,” U.S. enforcement against bribery through the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) is increasingly over-aggressive, while enforcement by other developed economies is nearly non-existent. On the “demand-side,” governments of developing economies where bribes take place often have neither an interest in nor the capacity to rein in their corrupt officials. In light of these shortcomings, this Article proposes reforming the FCPA as follows. First, the SEC should cease paying profits disgorged by corporate defendants into the U.S. Treasury. Second, disgorgements should instead be transferred to the Host country where bribery took place, conditional on the Host government’s cooperation with the FCPA investigation. And third, if cooperation is not forthcoming, disgorgement proceeds should be transferred to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Working Group—an international organization designed to facilitate the enforcement of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery. Reforming FCPA enforcement in this manner would re-allocate the proceeds from anti-bribery regulation on a global scale so as to properly align the incentives of the parties involved and provide greater access to the information required for effective enforcement
Shortcomings of the Bond Orientational Order Parameters for the Analysis of Disordered Particulate Matter
Local structure characterization with the bond-orientational order parameters
q4, q6, ... introduced by Steinhardt et al. has become a standard tool in
condensed matter physics, with applications including glass, jamming, melting
or crystallization transitions and cluster formation. Here we discuss two
fundamental flaws in the definition of these parameters that significantly
affect their interpretation for studies of disordered systems, and offer a
remedy. First, the definition of the bond-orientational order parameters
considers the geometrical arrangement of a set of neighboring spheres NN(p)
around a given central particle p; we show that procedure to select the spheres
constituting the neighborhood NN(p) can have greater influence on both the
numerical values and qualitative trend of ql than a change of the physical
parameters, such as packing fraction. Second, the discrete nature of
neighborhood implies that NN(p) is not a continuous function of the particle
coordinates; this discontinuity, inherited by ql, leads to a lack of robustness
of the ql as structure metrics. Both issues can be avoided by a morphometric
approach leading to the robust Minkowski structure metrics ql'. These ql' are
of a similar mathematical form as the conventional bond-orientational order
parameters and are mathematically equivalent to the recently introduced
Minkowski tensors [Europhys. Lett. 90, 34001 (2010); Phys. Rev. E. 85, 030301
(2012)]
Reframing International Financial Regulation After the Global Financial Crisis: Rational States and Interdependence, not Regulatory Networks and Soft Law
The British bank Northern Rock failed on September 14, 2007; U.S. investment bank Bear Stearns collapsed on March 17, 2008 and was subject to a government-engineered takeover by J.P. Morgan Chase; and, on the night of September 15, 2008, U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and sent global financial markets into disarray the following Monday morning. These financial institutions shared several features in common prior to their downfall, but perhaps the most curious is that they were each considered fully compliant with the second generation framework for the Basel Accords on Capital Adequacy (Basel II), an international agreement requiring banks to maintain capital levels consistent with then, state-of-the-art risk metrics. Basel II, it turns out, was insufficient to ward off the insolvency of many large, multinational financial institutions. The Basel Committee on Bank Supervision was not the only international body exercising oversight of financial firms and markets prior to the global financial crisis of 2008 (2008 Crisis). One function of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was to provide continuous “surveillance” of international markets. Among other occasions, it did so informally in September of 2008 by publishing statements of its president Olivier Blanchard, entitled “Blanchard Sees Global Economy Weathering Financial Storm.” Contrary to the IMF’s forecast, however, Lehman Brothers collapsed just two weeks later and the global economy capsized in the ensuing financial storm
Overlapping Legal Rules in Financial Regulation and the Administrative State
Reforms which seek to overhaul the Dodd-Frank Acthave begun to gain support within the TrumpAdministration and Congress. The leading proposals gobeyond technical matters and reflect a wholesalecritique: financial regulation has become tooburdensome, too complex, and grants too muchdiscretion to regulators. This Article argues that what isreally at stake in these debates is the distinct issue of“regulatory overlap”—the joint use of multiple legalrules to address a common market failure. It begins bydeveloping a general framework for analyzingoverlapping legal rules of all kinds. That framework isthen applied in case studies of the two cornerstones offinancial regulation: capital adequacy requirements andresolution authority procedures.The most direct contribution of this Article is tosubstantive issues in financial regulation. Each casestudy yields insights about particular portions of theDodd-Frank Act that pending reforms attempt toeliminate, as well as the big picture problems of systemicrisk and banks that are “Too Big To Fail.” On a moretheoretical level, it also situates the concept of regulatoryoverlap within the law-and-economics literature on the
optimal design of legal rules, where it is otherwiseconspicuously absent. Lastly, this Article shows how ananalysis of overlapping rules in finance carries lessonsfor the regulatory process as a whole. It thereby adds toscholarship on administrative law, especially toresearch in that area that deals with a related set ofproblems concerning agency jurisdiction, cost-benefitanalysis procedures, and the role of uncertainty in thepolicymaking environment
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