Working towards sustainable software for science: on the creation, maintenance and evaluation of open-source software

Alongside research papers and data, software is a vital research object. As more become confronted with its significance in the future of scientific discovery, a variety of opinions and philosophies are emerging over how to approach sustainable scientific software development. Matthew Turk provides background on his involvement in the Working towards Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE) workshops and the launch of the special collection from the Journal of Open Research Software

Large Scale SfM with the Distributed Camera Model

We introduce the distributed camera model, a novel model for Structure-from-Motion (SfM). This model describes image observations in terms of light rays with ray origins and directions rather than pixels. As such, the proposed model is capable of describing a single camera or multiple cameras simultaneously as the collection of all light rays observed. We show how the distributed camera model is a generalization of the standard camera model and describe a general formulation and solution to the absolute camera pose problem that works for standard or distributed cameras. The proposed method computes a solution that is up to 8 times more efficient and robust to rotation singularities in comparison with gDLS. Finally, this method is used in an novel large-scale incremental SfM pipeline where distributed cameras are accurately and robustly merged together. This pipeline is a direct generalization of traditional incremental SfM; however, instead of incrementally adding one camera at a time to grow the reconstruction the reconstruction is grown by adding a distributed camera. Our pipeline produces highly accurate reconstructions efficiently by avoiding the need for many bundle adjustment iterations and is capable of computing a 3D model of Rome from over 15,000 images in just 22 minutes.Comment: Published at 2016 3DV Conferenc

The Formation of Population III Binaries from Cosmological Initial Conditions

Previous high resolution cosmological simulations predict the first stars to appear in the early universe to be very massive and to form in isolation. Here we discuss a cosmological simulation in which the central 50 solar mass clump breaks up into two cores, having a mass ratio of two to one, with one fragment collapsing to densities of 10^{-8} g/cc. The second fragment, at a distance of 800 astronomical units, is also optically thick to its own cooling radiation from molecular hydrogen lines, but is still able to cool via collision-induced emission. The two dense peaks will continue to accrete from the surrounding cold gas reservoir over a period of 10^5 years and will likely form a binary star system.Comment: Accepted by Science, first published online on July 9, 2009 in Science Express. 16 pages, 4 figures, includes supporting online materia

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

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