1,983 research outputs found
The economics of copyright law: a stocktake of the literature
This article is a survey of publications by economists writing on
copyright law. It begins with a general overview of how economists analyse
these questions; the distinction is made between the economics of copying
and the economic aspects of copyright law as analysed in law and economics.
It then continues with sections on research on the effects of copying and
downloading and the effects of unauthorised use (âpiracyâ) and ends with an
overall evaluation of the economics of copyright in the light of recent technological
changes. Economists have always been, and still are, somewhat sceptical
about copyright and question what alternatives there are to it. On balance,
most accept the role of copyright law in the creative industries while urging
caution about its becoming too strong. And although European authorsâ rights
are different in legal terms from the Anglo-American copyright, the economic
analysis of these laws is essentially the same
Pitfalls of Professionalism? Military Academies and Coup Risk
Military academies tend to be strongly linked to the professionalization of the armed forces. This explains why many countries in the world have created such institutions. The following article studies a potential negative externality stemming from military schools: increased coup risk. We argue that military academies may create, inculcate, and strengthen cohesive views that could conflict with incumbent policies, and that these schools establish networks among military officers that may facilitate coordination necessary for plotting a putsch. We also contend and empirically demonstrate that these negative side effects of military academies are in particular pronounced in nondemocracies, that is, military academies have diverse effects across regime types. This work has significant implications for our understanding civilâmilitary relations. Furthermore, we contribute to the literature on military education and professionalization, as we suggest that military academies are important vehicles through which coups can emerge predominantly in authoritarian states
Reconstructing the Mind's Eye: fMRI-to-Image with Contrastive Learning and Diffusion Priors
We present MindEye, a novel fMRI-to-image approach to retrieve and
reconstruct viewed images from brain activity. Our model comprises two parallel
submodules that are specialized for retrieval (using contrastive learning) and
reconstruction (using a diffusion prior). MindEye can map fMRI brain activity
to any high dimensional multimodal latent space, like CLIP image space,
enabling image reconstruction using generative models that accept embeddings
from this latent space. We comprehensively compare our approach with other
existing methods, using both qualitative side-by-side comparisons and
quantitative evaluations, and show that MindEye achieves state-of-the-art
performance in both reconstruction and retrieval tasks. In particular, MindEye
can retrieve the exact original image even among highly similar candidates
indicating that its brain embeddings retain fine-grained image-specific
information. This allows us to accurately retrieve images even from large-scale
databases like LAION-5B. We demonstrate through ablations that MindEye's
performance improvements over previous methods result from specialized
submodules for retrieval and reconstruction, improved training techniques, and
training models with orders of magnitude more parameters. Furthermore, we show
that MindEye can better preserve low-level image features in the
reconstructions by using img2img, with outputs from a separate autoencoder. All
code is available on GitHub.Comment: Project Page at https://medarc-ai.github.io/mindeye-website/. Code at
https://github.com/MedARC-AI/fMRI-reconstruction-NSD
Deposition of impurity metals during campaigns with the JET ITER-like Wall
Post mortem analysis shows that mid and high atomic number metallic impurities are present in deposits on JET plasma facing components with the highest amount of Ni and W, and therefore the largest sink, being found at the top of the inner divertor. Sources are defined as âcontinuousâ or âspecificâ, in that âcontinuousâ sources arise from ongoing erosion from plasma facing surfaces and âspecificâ are linked with specific events which decrease over time until they no longer act as a source. This contribution evaluates the sinks and estimates sources, and the balance gives an indication of the dominating processes. Charge exchange neutral erosion is found to be the main source of nickel, whereas erosion of divertor plasma facing components is the main source of tungsten. Specific sources are shown to have little influence over the global mid- and high-Z impurity concentrations in deposits.Peer reviewe
Thinking like a man? The cultures of science
Culture includes science and science includes culture, but conflicts between the two traditions persist, often seen as clashes between interpretation and knowledge. One way of highlighting this false polarity has been to explore the gendered symbolism of science. Feminism has contributed to science studies and the critical interrogation of knowledge, aware that practical knowledge and scientific understanding have never been synonymous. Persisting notions of an underlying unity to scientific endeavour have often impeded rather than fostered the useful application of knowledge. This has been particularly evident in the recent rise of molecular biology, with its delusory dream of the total conquest of disease. It is equally prominent in evolutionary psychology, with its renewed attempts to depict the fundamental basis of sex differences. Wars over science have continued to intensify over the last decade, even as our knowledge of the political, economic and ideological significance of science funding and research has become ever more apparent
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