A Fatally Flawed Proxy:The Role of “Intended Loss” in the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines for Fraud

This Article provides the first extended analysis of the new intended loss provision, and it does so primarily through the framework of rules and standards. Generally speaking, a rule is “framed in terms of concepts that can be applied without explicit reference to the principles or policies that might have motivated the rule, usually by specifying operative facts that trigger the rule.” In contrast, the use of standards “involve[s] recourse to justificatory principles or policies, mediated by some form of balancing that does not specify in advance the result thereof.” For example, a law prohibiting driving over sixty-five miles per hour is a prototypical rule; negligence is a prototypical standard. In the context of sentencing, rules and standards are primarily distinguished by when a sentencing directive is given its specific content (before the sentencing hearing or during it) and who decides its content (Congress, the Commission, or the judge). The pros and cons of rules and standards have been analyzed in depth in many areas of law, but they have only recently been applied systematically to sentencin

BRDF Representation and Acquisition

Photorealistic rendering of real world environments is important in a range of different areas; including Visual Special effects, Interior/Exterior Modelling, Architectural Modelling, Cultural Heritage, Computer Games and Automotive Design. Currently, rendering systems are able to produce photorealistic simulations of the appearance of many real-world materials. In the real world, viewer perception of objects depends on the lighting and object/material/surface characteristics, the way a surface interacts with the light and on how the light is reflected, scattered, absorbed by the surface and the impact these characteristics have on material appearance. In order to re-produce this, it is necessary to understand how materials interact with light. Thus the representation and acquisition of material models has become such an active research area. This survey of the state-of-the-art of BRDF Representation and Acquisition presents an overview of BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) models used to represent surface/material reflection characteristics, and describes current acquisition methods for the capture and rendering of photorealistic materials

Three perceptual dimensions for specular and diffuse reflection

Previous research investigated the perceptual dimensionality of achromatic reflection of opaque surfaces, by using either simple analytic models of reflection, or measured reflection properties of a limited sample of materials. Here we aim to extend this work to a broader range of simulated materials. In a first experiment, we used sparse multidimensional scaling techniques to represent a set of rendered stimuli in a perceptual space that is consistent with participants’ similarity judgments.Participants were presented with one reference object and four comparisons, rendered with different material properties.They were asked to rank the comparisons according to their similarity to the reference, resulting in an efficient collection of a large number of similarity judgments. In order to interpret the space individuated by multidimensional scaling, we ran a second experiment in which observers were asked to rate our experimental stimuli according to a list of 30 adjectives referring to their surface reflectance properties. Our results suggest that perception of achromatic reflection is based on at least three dimensions, which we labelled “Lightness”, “Gloss” and “Metallicity”, in accordance with the rating results. These dimensions are characterized by a relatively simple relationship with the parameters of the physically based rendering model used to generate our stimuli, indicating that they correspond to different physical properties of the rendered materials. Specifically,“Lightness” relates to diffuse reflections, “Gloss” to the presence of high contrast sharp specular highlights and “Metallicity” to spread out specular reflections

Estimation of protein folding probability from equilibrium simulations

The assumption that similar structures have similar folding probabilities ($p_{fold}$) leads naturally to a procedure to evaluate $p_{fold}$ for every snapshot saved along an equilibrium folding-unfolding trajectory of a structured peptide or protein. The procedure utilizes a structurally homogeneous clustering and does not require any additional simulation. It can be used to detect multiple folding pathways as shown for a three-stranded antiparallel $\beta$-sheet peptide investigated by implicit solvent molecular dynamics simulations.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, supplemetary material

Image based surface reflectance remapping for consistent and tool independent material appearence

Physically-based rendering in Computer Graphics requires the knowledge of material properties other than 3D shapes, textures and colors, in order to solve the rendering equation. A number of material models have been developed, since no model is currently able to reproduce the full range of available materials. Although only few material models have been widely adopted in current rendering systems, the lack of standardisation causes several issues in the 3D modelling workflow, leading to a heavy tool dependency of material appearance. In industry, final decisions about products are often based on a virtual prototype, a crucial step for the production pipeline, usually developed by a collaborations among several departments, which exchange data. Unfortunately, exchanged data often tends to differ from the original, when imported into a different application. As a result, delivering consistent visual results requires time, labour and computational cost. This thesis begins with an examination of the current state of the art in material appearance representation and capture, in order to identify a suitable strategy to tackle material appearance consistency. Automatic solutions to this problem are suggested in this work, accounting for the constraints of real-world scenarios, where the only available information is a reference rendering and the renderer used to obtain it, with no access to the implementation of the shaders. In particular, two image-based frameworks are proposed, working under these constraints. The first one, validated by means of perceptual studies, is aimed to the remapping of BRDF parameters and useful when the parameters used for the reference rendering are available. The second one provides consistent material appearance across different renderers, even when the parameters used for the reference are unknown. It allows the selection of an arbitrary reference rendering tool, and manipulates the output of other renderers in order to be consistent with the reference