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A legal trade in antiquities existed in Egypt until 1983. A recent publication on the antiquities trade provides the opportunity to scrutinize the process by which the Egyptian Service des Antiquités attempted to control the trade through the issuing of licenses to dealers. This offers a corrective view of Egyptology as something that is as much a bureaucratic process as an academic discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synchronization (sync) licenses are required for works in which music is synchronized to video and generally have high transaction costs because they must be individually negotiated. Traditionally, sync licenses were obtained by sophisticated parties for movies, television, commercials, and the like. But digital platforms like TikTok have brought sync licenses from obscurity into the hands of every person with a smartphone. This transformative innovation has created new issues for copyright law. First, usergenerated content (UGC) created by individuals and shared on the internet via social media platforms or websites may require sync licenses that are cumbersome to negotiate and overinclusive. Private agreements between platforms like TikTok and record labels and publishers usually fill the gap, allowing most users to play music with their videos free from concern about copyright infringement. However, these licenses do not account for copyright's fundamental balance between access and exclusivity because they are overinclusive: Some content on TikTok may be covered by the doctrine of fair use, in which case no license is required. Fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement that permits the defendant to use the copyrighted work without paying the rightsholder. Second, TikTok's agreements with labels and publishers could be eroding fair use. The ex-post nature of fair use means that risk-averse parties, when confronted by a situation in which the viability of their claim is unclear, are likely to obtain a license not required by law. This in turn can narrow the scope of fair use because the existence of an active licensing market makes it less likely that a court will find a use is fair. Future parties then become less likely to rely on an increasingly dubious fair use defense. In the TikTok context, doctrine about fair use and sync is especially uncertain. The scant precedent in UGC fair use cases appears to be highly fact-dependent, there are few cases that specifically deal with sync rights, and none of those have decided fair use as applied to sync. This Note proposes a blanket, compulsory license for noncommercial UGC sync as an imperfect solution to help correct the balance of copyright in the digital platform era. The compulsory license would return review of public copyright law back to Congress and courts and prevent private ordering from curtailing fair use. Further, valuable creativity would be protected because rightsholders would not be able to withhold permission for use of copyrighted material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of markets for private for‐profit care homes often raises concerns about the quality of services provided by these care homes. To address the fundamental needs of their residents, governments introduce quality regulations and, through mandatory licensing, allow private care homes to enter the market. However, in some countries, evidence reveals that many private care homes operate without a mandatory licence; information about the basic characteristics of these unlicensed care homes (UCHs) and their operations is often unavailable because they try to remain 'invisible'; they have also received little research attention. This article fills this gap using the case of Poland. The study employs a unique dataset combining inspection reports produced during public monitoring of UCHs and in‐depth interviews with owners of such care homes. This article explores how the regulation of markets for private care homes does not lead to the comprehensive licensing of such care homes. The findings show that the regulation enabled UCHs to remain 'partially visible' to many parties, including public sector entities. The findings contribute to a wider debate about the marketisation of long‐term care, particularly regarding the noncompliance of private providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research have two purposes: 1. to learn and explain the quality analysis of licensing management through the Online Single Submission Risk Based Approach (OSS-RBA) system at Dinas Penanaman Modal dan Pelayanan Terpadu Satu Pintu Kabupaten Maluku Tengah and 2. to know and explain what the supportive and impeding factors in the management of licences through the Online Single Submission Risk Based Approach (OSS - RBA) at Dinas Penanaman Modal dan Pelayanan Terpadu Satu Pintu Kabupaten Maluku Tengah. The method used in this research is qualitative with a descriptive approach, using five dimensions of quality according to Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. In this research, there were 22 respondents, consisting of 7 (seven) officers at Dinas Penanaman Modal dan Pelayanan Terpadu Satu Pintu Kabupaten Maluku Tengah and 15 entrepreneurs (14 UMK and 1 non-UMK). In this research, data collection techniques are carried out with observations, structured interviews, and documentation. Based on the results of the quality analysis of licensing management through the Online Single Submission Risk Based Approach (OSS-RBA) system at Dinas Penanaman Modal dan Pelayanan Terpadu Satu Pintu Kabupaten Maluku Tengah. The researcher concluded the following categories of results: 1. tangibles with a good category; 2. reliability with a good category; 3. responsiveness with an excellent category; 4. assurance with an excellent category; and 5. empathy with an excellent category. In addition, there are factors that support the process of licensing management through this OSS-RBA system: ease of requirements, accessibility, rapidity of handling time, and fee/cost setting. While the factors that hinder the process of licensing management through this OSS-RBA system are: network and system connections, compliance with requirements, has not made changes to the AHU for the enterprise/AHU blocked, the entrepreneur forgot their OSS access rights, incorrectly entered KBLI, still exists the brokering practice, Identity Card Number (NIK) and Taxpayer Identification Number (NPWP) having problems and invalid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to determine the Effect of Human Resources and Infrastructure Competence on the Performance of Licensing Services in the Investment Office and One-Stop Integrated Services of Central Maluku Regency, both partially and simultaneously. This type of research is quantitative research. The respondents in this study were people/business actors who came to the Investment Office and One-Stop Integrated Services of Central Maluku Regency to apply for permits with the number of samples obtained as many as 80 people. Data collection techniques using questionnaires and processed using the SPSS statistical analysis application program. The results showed that partially and simultaneously the competence of Human Resources and infrastructure facilities had a positive and significant effect on the performance of licensing services at the Investment Office and One-Stop Integrated Services of Central Maluku Regency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The entertainment industry is being rocked by the potential of deepfakes. A deepfake of a performer can appear to be the performer in a way that no CGI or makeup-enhanced stunt double possibly could, potentially serving as direct competition for them or deceiving audiences. It is now possible to have dead actors star in new productions, to revise casting choices months after filming, and to simulate extras electronically. The law has not caught up with this technological revolution. This Article traces the ways in which right of publicity law struggles to control this new form of identity exploitation. Specifically, it examines how traditional protections for expressive uses—key for allowing the depiction of real-world figures in biopics and historical dramas—are too broad when applied to digital replicas like deepfakes. This Article proposes changes to how right of publicity law treats expressive uses and also considers the problems raised by current right of publicity licenses and the overbroad terms they regularly contain. In the past, the problems created by these broad licensing terms were limited by technology—one could only do so much with the film available. But now new canons of interpretation are needed to prevent the contracts being used to justify uses beyond what the contracting parties could have imagined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on fieldwork for licensing environmental impact studies in Bahia, northeastern Brazil, we present new records of five tree species, including two species known only from their type locality. The records mostly originate from highly human-modified areas in Atlantic Forest, which we argue that should not be underestimated by environmental licensing studies. We assess the conservation status of the five species and highlight the importance of using trained botanists for recording species of conservation concern. Our data demonstrate that studies for environmental licensing can contribute knowledge and aid in biodiversity conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tattoos are unique amongst copyrightable forms of expression because, by virtue of being drawn onto human canvases, they necessarily require that the artist grant an implied license to the tattooed individual. By this license, a tattoo is integrated with the tattooed individual's overall likeness, with all the associated rights that follow. In recent years, a trio of federal district court decisions have attempted to demarcate the metes and bounds of the implied license for tattoos, specifically in the realm of video games. On March 26, 2020, in Solid Oak Sketches, LLC v. 2K Games, Inc., the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York held that the reproduction of the defendant's tattoos in a video game was de minimis, covered by an implied license, and protected by fair use as a matter of law. The litigation sparked national interest and gave rise to subsequent lawsuits on the same issue in other jurisdictions. On September 26, 2020, in Alexander v. Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., the District Court for the Southern District of Illinois held that the reproduction of athletes' tattoos in video games was not necessarily protected by implied license or fair use; rather, the question was a matter of fact for juries to consider at trial. On September 20, 2022, in Hayden v. 2K Games, Inc., the District Court for the Northern District of Ohio came to the same conclusion as Alexander. Although this issue has not yet reached the appellate level, the disagreement necessitates clearer guidance in the law. This Note argues that the Southern District of New York's approach should be adopted by the federal courts because it comports with the concept of bodily autonomy and most efficiently accomplishes the policy goals of copyright. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As corporations continue to prioritize environmental, social. and governance (ESG) improvements alongside profit, cooperation with competitors may be an important part of their toolbox. In particular. cooperation can help to advance initiatives like the elimination of an unsustainable product type, which is a drastic step a corporation likely would not take on its own.forfear of hurting its bottom line and customer loyalty. The issue is that agreements among competitors to engage in such steps may violate antitrust laws, as suggested by the Justice Department in the Trump administration and numerous state attorneys general. This Comment uses the term "green product fixing" to rejer to the practice of a business entering into agreements with its competitors regarding environmentally-focused product standards and identifies two principal reasons why antitrust law niayspell troublejor green product fixing. First. antitrust case law is clear that self-regulation in the form of extra-governmental product standards and codes Of conduct is a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Second, while the law does have some room to permit agreements that would otherwise be unlawful, based on certain o#setting procompetitive benefits. jactors like a reduction in carbon emissions or pollution would not be considered as procompetitive benefits under the current application of United States antitrust law. This Comment argues that a different type of analysis from that traditionally used in antitrust law is necessary with respect to green product fixing. The traditional analysis focuses on consumer welfare but does not capture the benefit to consumers, as members of society, from the reduction in negative externalities resulting.from a cooperation agreement. This Comment proposes balancing the traditional analysis with consideration of environmental benefits that trickle down to consumers. It also evaluates potential avenues for legislative and.judicial implementation of such an analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work is to show the importance of the licenses of passage -customs records where the goods that were transported through the Iberian Peninsula were noted down- for the History of Art and, specifically, as a source of information on the missing ceramics. From their study and analysis, we can see that earthenware and porcelain travelled between European courts as royal gift, as well as to the homes of the elite of society, which is evidence that it was an artistic object valued and esteemed by society during the 16th and 17th centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of sailing permits encounters challenges when the issuance of relevant sailing permits does not align with the designated jurisdictional authorities, as shown in the case involving KM Karya Indah. This study aims to identify the underlying causes of disharmony between Central and Regional Government Regulations regarding jurisdictional authority over sailing permits. Additionally, the study seeks to establish the proper approach to managing sailing permits based on the principles of balance and public interest. The research employed a normative legal research method, utilizing both the Statute Approach and the Conceptual Approach. Primary and secondary legal sources were employed as research materials. The findings indicate that within the domain of jurisdictional authority related to sailing permits, there is a lack of congruence between Central and Regional Government Regulations. In particular, the regional regulations necessitate that the processing of sailing permits should occur through the respective region first, under the jurisdiction of the Governor as the responsible authority. However, the practical application deviates from this structure, as the sailing permit processing is directly pursued at the central government level, and endorsed by relevant parties. The issuance of the pertinent sailing permits should align with the designated jurisdiction and the respective authorizing entities to avoid disharmony among regulations. Such harmonization is necessary to maintain balance and uphold the public interest, which serves both the permit applicants and the broader society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps) recently announced its intention to review Nationwide Permit 12 (NWP 12) to address widespread criticism that the permit raises serious environmental justice concerns. Such concerns are well-founded. NWP 12 fast tracks the development of oil and natural gas pipelines with minimal notice or environmental review. It has been instrumental to the permitting of proposed pipelines such as the notorious Keystone XL Pipeline or the Byhalia Pipeline in Southwest Memphis, both of which presented significant issues of environmental justice. For this reason, the Corps's decision to review NWP 12 is a watershed moment for critics of the Nationwide Permit Program. However, simply addressing NWP 12 in isolation will not solve the fundamental environmental justice problems that are built into the Nationwide Permit Program as a whole. Drawing on theories of procedural environmental justice, this Article will explain how the Nationwide Permit Program as a whole systematically disadvantages communities of color and other socially vulnerable communities and denies them the procedural rights that are necessary to protect their communities. By removing the public comment requirement o fa standard Clean Water Act individual permit, these Nationwide Permits make it harder for communities to make their voices heard to object to the siting and construction of harmful infrastructure in areas already overburdened by pollution. This Article will explain why NWP 12 should be revoked and will discuss how other Nationwide Permits, most notably Nationwide Permit 13, which permits seawalls and bulkheads, raise similar environmental justice concerns. Finally, this Article will explain how the Nationwide Permit Program should be reformed to address environmental justice concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fast digitalization of the power grids and the adoption of innovative software solutions is key to a successful energy transition. In other sectors, such as telecommunication or cloud computing, open-source software has already proven capable of transforming entire industries, by speeding up development and lowering development costs while achieving high levels of stability, interoperability, and security. However, the energy sector has not yet embraced open-source software to the same level. We discuss how existing open-source software principles can be applied to the unique challenges of the energy sector during the transition towards higher penetration of renewable energy resources. To provide an overview of the current state of the open-source software landscape, we collected and analyzed 388 open-source projects, in terms of project activities, community composition, relevant licenses, and commonly used programming languages. One finding was that the majority of projects are currently driven by academic contributors, but that commercial players do also play a role, and we identify positive examples of collaboration between the two, mostly related to standardization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image processing and embedded systems are used in many applications such as object recognition, robotic applications, autonomous and remote control systems developed for the defense industry, medical applications, face recognition, and vehicle license plate recognition. Many vehicle license number plate detection methods are not effective under vehicle license plate images have a degree of rotation or low resolution images. Thus, we used MVSR normalization algorithm to detect vehicle license plate recognition for better accuracy and lower computational cost. The MVSR normalization algorithm, Mean-Variance-Softmax-Rescale processes respectively is applied for high-accuracy real-time vehicle license plate detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the need to incorporate clients directly into legal education and licensing. Topics include the importance of clients in entry-level law practice, challenges faced by new lawyers in serving clients, difficulties in teaching client-related skills, and innovative approaches to licensing that prioritize clients.

The article explores the difference between the discretionary and presumptive stays afforded by the F.S. 120.98(3) of Florida's Administrative Procedure Act or F.S. Ch. 120 and its application to the case, Agency for Health Care Administration v. Ybor Medical Injury & Accident Clinic, Inc., by the Florida Supreme Court. Topics discussed include a background on the licensing process at issue in the case, and other court cases that laid the groundwork for the Ybor case.

The article focuses on revenue streams from licensing for choral composers with a particular emphasis on digital audio and video. Topics include traditional licensing (pre-digital era), mechanical licensing, and synchronization licensing all of which generate royalties and provide income for composers and publishers.

In this paper, we introduce a distinctive kind of psychological abuse we call Tightlacing. We begin by presenting four examples and argue that there is a distinctive form of abuse in these examples that cannot be captured by our existing moral categories. We then outline our diagnosis of this distinctive form of abuse. Tightlacing consists in inducing a mistaken self-conception in others that licenses overburdening demands on them such that victims apply those demands to themselves. We discuss typical Tightlacing strategies and argue that Tightlacing typically is manipulative. Typical tightlacers will be motivated by a strong desire to suppress a kind of behaviour on the victim's part. We will then differentiate Tightlacing from a related and widely discussed form of psychological abuse, Gaslighting. While Gaslighting focuses on the victim's epistemic capacities and typically serves to insulate the abuser from potential dissent, Tightlacing focuses on the kind of person the victim is and typically serves to insulate the abuser from confronting ways of behaviour they cannot cope with. While Gaslighting targets the victim's epistemic self-trust, Tightlacing targets their basic sense of who they are and their sense of entitlement to conduct themselves as who they really are. We finish by diagnosing the wrong-making features of Tightlacing, arguing that Tightlacing, among many secondary wrongs, makes the victim complicit in a denial of their rights as well as an erasure of who they are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intrinsic image decomposition is the task of mapping image to albedo and shading. Classical approaches derive methods from spatial models. The modern literature stresses evaluation, by comparing predictions to human judgements (“lighter”, “same as”, “darker”). The best modern intrinsic image methods train a map from image to albedo using images rendered from computer graphics models and example human judgements. This approach yields practical methods, but obtaining rendered images can be inconvenient. Furthermore, the approach cannot explain how a one could learn to recover intrinsic images without geometric, surface and illumination models, as people and animals appear to do. This paper describes a method that learns intrinsic image decomposition without seeing human annotations, rendered data, or ground truth data. Instead, the method relies on paradigms – spatial models of albedo and of shading. Rather than finding the “best” albedo and shading for an image via optimization, our approach trains a neural network on synthetic images. The synthetic images are constructed by multiplying albedos and shading fields sampled from our models. The network is subject to a novel smoothing procedure that ensures good behavior at short scales on real images. An averaging procedure ensures that reported albedo and shading are largely equivariant – different crops and scalings of an image will report the same albedo and shading at shared points. This averaging procedure controls long scale error. The standard evaluation for an intrinsic image method is a WHDR score. Our method achieves WHDR scores competitive with those of strong recent methods allowed to see training WHDR annotations, rendered data, and ground truth data. Our method produces albedo and shading maps with attractive qualitative properties – for example, albedo fields do not suppress wood grain and represent narrow grooves in surfaces well. Because our method is unsupervised, we can compute estimates of the test/train variance of WHDR scores; these are quite large, and suggest is unsafe to rely small differences in reported WHDR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increased interest in longitudinal neurodevelopment during the first few years after birth has emerged in recent years. Noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can provide crucial information about the development of brain structures in the early months of life. Despite the success of MRI collections and analysis for adults, it remains a challenge for researchers to collect high-quality multimodal MRIs from developing infant brains because of their irregular sleep pattern, limited attention, inability to follow instructions to stay still during scanning. In addition, there are limited analytic approaches available. These challenges often lead to a significant reduction of usable MRI scans and pose a problem for modeling neurodevelopmental trajectories. Researchers have explored solving this problem by synthesizing realistic MRIs to replace corrupted ones. Among synthesis methods, the convolutional neural network-based (CNN-based) generative adversarial networks (GANs) have demonstrated promising performance. In this study, we introduced a novel 3D MRI synthesis framework– pyramid transformer network (PTNet3D)– which relies on attention mechanisms through transformer and performer layers. We conducted extensive experiments on high-resolution Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP) and longitudinal Baby Connectome Project (BCP) datasets. Compared with CNN-based GANs, PTNet3D consistently shows superior synthesis accuracy and superior generalization on two independent, large-scale infant brain MRI datasets. Notably, we demonstrate that PTNet3D synthesized more realistic scans than CNN-based models when the input is from multi-age subjects. Potential applications of PTNet3D include synthesizing corrupted or missing images. By replacing corrupted scans with synthesized ones, we observed significant improvement in infant whole brain segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The KNN algorithm is one of the most popular data mining algorithms. It has been widely and successfully applied to data analysis applications across a variety of research topics in computer science. This paper illustrates that, despite its success, there remain many challenges in KNN classification, including K computation, nearest neighbor selection, nearest neighbor search and classification rules. Having established these issues, recent approaches to their resolution are examined in more detail, thereby providing a potential roadmap for ongoing KNN-related research, as well as some new classification rules regarding how to tackle the issue of training sample imbalance. To evaluate the proposed approaches, some experiments were conducted with 15 UCI benchmark datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vertex subset $S$ of a graph $G$ constitutes a 1-perfect code if the one-balls centered at the nodes in $S$ effect a vertex partition of $G$. This paper considers the quad-cube $CQ_{m}$ that is a connected $(m+2)$ -regular spanning subgraph of the hypercube $Q_{4m+2}$ , and shows that $CQ_{m}$ admits a vertex partition into 1-perfect codes iff $m=2^{k}-3$ , where $k\ge 2$. The scheme for that purpose makes use of a procedure by Jha and Slutzki that constructs Hamming codes using a Latin square. The result closely parallels the existence of a 1-perfect code over the dual-cube, which is another derivative of the hypercube. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Table-based scalar multiplication provides practical security for ECDSA signature generation. However, a novel key recovery attack against this form of ECDSA signature generation that exploits the collisions between entries was recently proposed at CHES 2021. This attack is possible even if table entries are unknown, such as with random permutated entry ordering. In this paper, we enhance the efficiency of the key recovery attack against secure ECDSA signature generation based on fixed-base comb scalar multiplication. We significantly reduce the required number of traces by compressing collision information using the mathematical relationship between table entry collisions. We verify this is a practical threat by performing an experiment on fixed-base comb method with window width $w=4$ w = 4 . Using our method, up to 27 traces are needed, much fewer than 1,019 traces required in the CHES publication. We cluster real traces measured using 32-bit STM32F4 microcontroller. In the experiment, we provide a selection method of points of interest using variance traces and unsupervised clustering-based leakage detection. With the selection method, we succeed in clustering leakages into 16 classes with a 100% success rate with 32-bit MCU. This represents the first experiment to cluster the more leakage classes with a 32-bit MCU than in literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning model deployment for training and execution has been an important topic for industry and academic research in the last decade. Much of the attention has been focused on developing specific toolchains to support acceleration hardware. In this article, we present Intermediate Representation Execution Environment (IREE), a unified compiler and runtime stack with the explicit goal to scale down machine learning programs to the smallest footprints for mobile and edge devices, while maintaining the ability to scale up to larger deployment targets. IREE adopts a compiler-based approach and optimizes for heterogeneous hardware accelerators through the use of the Multi-Level IR (MLIR) compiler infrastructure, which provides the means to quickly design and implement multilevel compiler intermediate representations (IR). More specifically, this article is focused on TinyIREE, which is a set of deployment options in IREE that accommodate the limited memory and computation resources in embedded systems and bare-metal platforms, while also demonstrating IREE's intuitive workflow that generates workloads for different ISA extensions and application binary interface (ABIs) through LLVM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends discussion of the recently introduced licence theory of legal personality to the two remaining categories of legal personality available under Australian law, namely, Natural Legal Personality and Bodies Politic. The licence theory conceives of legal personality as designated legal functions, grouped together for nominated purposes. More particularly, it conceives of legal personality as a licensing system, whereby legal personality is granted by the State subject to various nominated conditions. These conditions reflect the overarching purpose behind the grant of legal personality, and may be organised into three general categories: Capability Conditions; Public Interest Conditions; and Use Conditions. According to the licence theory, in forming an understanding of legal personality it is necessary to consider the following design factors: i) the means by which a particular legal person is activated; ii) the purpose underwriting the grant of legal personality by the State; iii) legal capacities and obligations; and iv) the various different conditions operative in relation to the grant of a particular class of legal personality. In this article, these four factors are applied and considered in relation to both Natural Legal Personality and the Commonwealth of Australia (being the pre-eminent manifestation of the Body Politic). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work addresses the topic of magnetic linear position detection, a common method used in modern industries to determine linear displacement by magnetic means. One major shortcoming of this method is the inherent airgap instability, which puts strong constraints on mechanical construction tolerances and limits resolution and sensitivity. We propose a method to improve the airgap stability by adding a second magnet, which makes the field and by extension the system output (locally) independent of the distance from the source. It is shown that the measurement error for 1-D systems can be reduced by a factor of ~14 and for 2-D systems by a factor of ~5 by application of this method for a realistic example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents summaries of informal advisory opinions issued by the Legal Ethics Counsel pursuant to Missouri Supreme Court Rule 5.30 and published in 2022. Topics include when information is generally known as in the case of an attorney who wishes to impeach former client, whether an attorney who is considering to retire from practice should change attorney's license to inactive status and the writing samples that should be submitted when attorneys apply for a job.

Occupational credentials provide an additional—and, at times, alternative—path other than traditional academic degrees for individuals to increase productivity and demonstrate their abilities and qualifications to employers. In the United States, these credentials typically take the form of licenses and certifications. Although a critical part of the workforce landscape, the literature on the returns to credentials is inadequate, with prior research typically relying on Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions which do not sufficiently control for selection. Using questions that identify credential receipt from the 2015 and 2016 United States' Current Population Surveys, we construct an instrumental variable of local peer influence using the within-labor market credential rate of individuals sharing the same sociodemographic characteristics, while controlling for the same group's average wages and a suite of demographic and geographic controls. We use this instrument in a marginal treatment effects estimator, which allows for estimation of the average treatment effect and determines the direction of selection, and we estimate the effects of credentials on labor market outcomes. We find large, meaningful returns in the form of increased probability of individual employment, an effect which is concentrated primarily among women. The effect of having a credential on log wages is higher for those in the sub-baccalaureate labor market, suggesting the potential role of occupational credentials as an alternative path to marketable human capital and a signal of skills in the absence of a bachelor's degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The optical coupling between dual elements of photonic crystal vertical cavity surface emitting laser arrays is characterized. The optically coupled microcavity lasers have independent bias injection currents. Output power and beam analysis measurements are used to quantify the effects of optical coherence in nominally 850 nm emitting arrays. Modelling and experiment show how the optical coupling is influenced by photonic crystal lattice period and the independent current injection into the elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contribution: This study presents the results of a systematic mapping on the classification and organization of open educational resources (OERs) focused on Computer Science Education (CSEd) in digital sources. Background: The number of open resources (e.g., images, videos, and websites) available on the Internet for the teaching of Computer Science has increased in recent years. As a consequence, several authors have proposed different ways of classifying them, which include lists of disciplines, classification algorithms, and semantic enrichment. However, such studies are dispersed and fragmented in the literature, making the current state-of-the-art unclear. Research Questions: 1) What digital sources have been used to classify OERs for CSEd? 2) What CSEd domains have been explored for the classification of OERs? and 3) What approaches have been adopted for the classification of OERs for CSEd? Methodology: Three search strategies were performed: 1) automatic search in the five major digital libraries of CSEd; 2) manual search in the major CSEd conferences and journals; and 3) snowballing on the references and citations. As a result, 22 relevant studies were selected. Findings: The main findings were systematization of the main OER sources for CSEd, identification of 64 CSEd domains covered by OERs organized in a taxonomy, the immaturity level of investigations and tools, and lack of mechanisms that organize OERs for CSEd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sidelnikov sequences, a kind of cyclotomic sequences with many desired properties such as low correlation and variable alphabet sizes, can be employed to construct a polyphase sequence family that has many applications in high-speed data communications. Recently, cyclotomic numbers have been used to investigate the linear complexity of Sidelnikov sequences, mainly about binary ones, although the limitation on the orders of the available cyclotomic numbers makes it difficult. This paper continues to study the linear complexity over $\mathbb {F}_{M}$ of $M$ -ary Sidelnikov sequence of period $q-1$ using Hasse derivative, which implies $q=p^{m}$ , $m\geq 1$ and $M|(q-1)$. The $t$ th Hasse derivative formulas are presented in terms of cyclotomic numbers, and some upper bounds on the linear complexity for $M=2$ and 3 are obtained only with some additional restrictions on $q$. Furthermore, concrete illustrations for several families of these sequences, such as $q\equiv 1\pmod {2}$ and $q\equiv 1\pmod {3}$ , show these upper bounds are tight and reachable; especially for $q=2\times 3^{\lambda }+1 (1\leq \lambda \leq 20)$ , the exact linear complexities over $\mathbb {F}_{3}$ of the ternary Sidelnikov sequences are determined; and it turns out that all the linear complexities of the sequences considered are very close to their periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed computing has become one of the most important frameworks in dealing with large computation tasks. In this paper, we propose a systematic construction of coded computing schemes for MapReduce-type distributed systems. The construction builds upon placement delivery arrays (PDA), originally proposed by Yan et al. for coded caching schemes. The main contributions of our work are three-fold. First, we identify a class of PDAs, called Comp-PDAs, and show how to obtain a coded computing scheme from any Comp-PDA. We also characterize the normalized number of stored files (storage load), computed intermediate values (computation load), and communicated bits (communication load), of the obtained schemes in terms of the Comp-PDA parameters. Then, we show that the performance achieved by Comp-PDAs describing Maddah-Ali and Niesen’s coded caching schemes matches a new information-theoretic converse, thus establishing the fundamental region of all achievable performance triples. In particular, we characterize all the Comp-PDAs achieving the pareto-optimal storage, computation, and communication (SCC) loads of the fundamental region. Finally, we investigate the file complexity of the proposed schemes, i.e., the smallest number of files required for implementation. In particular, we describe Comp-PDAs that achieve pareto-optimal SCC triples with significantly lower file complexity than the originally proposed Comp-PDAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced applications of the finite-element method use hybrid meshes of differently shaped elements that need transition cells between quadrilateral- and triangular-faced elements. The greatest ease of construction is obtained when, in addition to triangular prisms, one uses also pyramids with a quadrilateral base, as these are the transition elements with the fewest possible faces and edges. A distinctive geometric feature of the pyramid is that its vertex is the point in common with four of its faces, while the other canonical elements have vertices in common with three edges and three faces, and that is why pyramids’ vector bases have hitherto been obtained with complex procedures. Here, we present a much simpler and more straightforward procedure by shifting to a new paradigm that requires mapping the pyramidal cell into a cube and then directly enforcing the conformity of the vector bases with those used on adjacent differently shaped cells (tetrahedra, hexahedra, and triangular prisms). The hierarchical curl-conforming vector bases derived here have simple and easy to implement mathematical expressions, including those of their curls. Base completeness is demonstrated for the first time, and results confirming the avoidance of spurious modes and faster convergence are also reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic libraries are engaged in the process of assessing the impacts the COVID-19 health pandemic has had on the use of the electronic resources their institutions provide. Trends related to e-resource use prior to and during the pandemic at a small academic library and within its consortium are discussed. The results of this assessment dispel the assumptions behind a hypothesis that licensed online resources would see greater use in supporting instruction and research as institutions pivoted to online-only course delivery in the early months of the pandemic. Some potential underlying factors that may be leveraged to inform strategic collection development, information literacy, and service changes are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covariance matrix tapers have a long history in signal processing and related fields. Examples of applications include autoregressive models (promoting a banded structure) or beamforming (widening the spectral null width associated with an interferer). In this paper, the focus is on high-dimensional setting where the dimension $p$ is high, while the data aspect ratio $n/p$ is low. We propose an estimator called Tabasco (TApered or BAnded Shrinkage COvariance matrix) that shrinks the tapered sample covariance matrix towards a scaled identity matrix. We derive optimal and estimated (data adaptive) regularization parameters that are designed to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) between the proposed shrinkage estimator and the true covariance matrix. These parameters are derived under the general assumption that the data is sampled from an unspecified elliptically symmetric distribution with finite 4th order moments (both real- and complex-valued cases are addressed). Simulation studies show that the proposed Tabasco outperforms all competing tapering covariance matrix estimators in diverse setups. An application to space-time adaptive processing (STAP) also illustrates the benefit of the proposed estimator in a practical signal processing setup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to explain and address the problem of overlapping intellectual-property rights with a focus on permissive licensing. It mentions overview of copyright and trademark law and discusses the problem of overlapping copyright and trademark interests. It also mentions how the SCP Foundation situation might resolve and proposes a broad solution for how intellectual property should address the problems created by overlapping trademarks.

The severity evaluation of UHF signals of partial discharge in GIS is helpful to formulate a maintenance strategy in time, and improve the reliability of power system operation. Most of the evaluation methods are based on structured data, which cannot fully characterize the state of the equipment. In this paper, a method for evaluating the severity of UHF signals of partial discharge in GIS based on semantic analysis is presented. It comprehensively considers the influence of structured data and unstructured text data on the state of equipment, including measured data on partial discharge, relevant information of defects, and equipment operating parameters. Firstly, the severity of UHF signals of partial discharge is defined. According to the on-site detection of substations, a data set containing equipment detection reports and PRPS data is established. Aiming at semantic analysis, Word Embedding is used to associate and encode textual information to reduce the subjectivity of the encoding. Measured data on partial discharge is also combined and analyzed for evaluation. The method proposed is used for case analysis and compared with other methods. The results show that the comprehensive utilization of structured data and unstructured text data can reflect the state of equipment more comprehensively and truthfully, and improve the accuracy of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This study aimed at examining how racial disparities in social workers' licensing rates are explained by the major sources of the disparities: racial differences in educational eligibilities, the field of practice, and demographic vulnerabilities of social workers. Methods: Drawing a nationally representative sample of 3990 social workers from the Current Population Survey, this study tested how the probabilities of their licensing were explained by the major sources of racial disparities. Results: For master's level social workers, African American–White differences in the field of practice and the type of employers explained away the disparity in required licensing rates. The Hispanic–White and other race–White disparities were largely due to non-White social workers' limited educational eligibilities and the states of residence that might have imposed varying occupational regulations. Conclusions: As licensing disparities reflect socioeconomic injustice that confronts many non-White social workers, they call for more purposeful research and interventions within the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new sea surface wind speed (SSWS) retrieval modeling algorithm based on the empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis for observations acquired by the global navigation satellite system reflectometry (GNSS-R). As a nonparametric modeling algorithm, it is simpler compared with the nonlinear methods. The influence of wind speed and incident angle on the modeling error is analyzed for the first time using a spectrum analysis. Three types of data from 80% CYGNSS 2019–2020 observations [delay Doppler map average (DDMA) and leading edge slope (LES)], signal incident angle, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis V5 (ERA5) reference wind speed are used in the EOF analysis to establish two retrieval models. The remaining 20% of the data are used for accuracy evaluation after getting the final wind speed by the minimum variance (MV) estimator. As a result, when using three 0–20-m/s wind speeds of ERA5, Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT), and the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications V2 (MERRA2) as contrasts, the root mean squared errors (RMSEs) are 1.51, 1.45, and 1.43 m/s, respectively. Compared with CYGNSS wind product, the performance of this algorithm is closer to the L2 Climate Data Record (CDR) V1.1 product than V1.0. The results demonstrate that the EOF algorithm has a good performance in retrieving SSWS and can better retain the influence of the incident angle on the observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Induction motors are an important consumer of electricity. Among induction motors, speed-regulated induction motors have the greatest energy-saving potential. However, motors operating in a very wide speed range require a completely different approach than motors operating on a single supply frequency. An example of such motors are the drives of industrial washing machines. The article aimed to present how using field-circuit methods, but above all, analytical methods increase the efficiency of such a motor by changing its design. Thanks to the change of the design and the core material, it was possible to obtain the efficiency of the motor for the frequency of 10 and 20 Hz, meeting the requirements of the IE1 efficiency class specified for the frequency of 50 Hz, while for the frequency of 10 Hz it is 17.9% higher than in the currently produced motor, and for 20 Hz—by 11.1%, while for the frequency of 350 Hz the level of efficiency was corresponding to class IE4. The presented considerations may be the basis for such a procedure for other drives with similar properties. Additionally, an important element of the article is the refinement of the analytical method of determining core losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 100 years, the Epstein tester serves as a compact and simple apparatus for the measurement of magnetic energy losses, in particular for Fe–Si steel. However, drawbacks result from time-consuming cutting and stacking of the high number of just $W =3$ cm wide sample strips of the standard Epstein tester (SET). Furthermore, the effects of cutting result in increased losses. Needs of annealing impede tests of modern materials with domain refinement that may lose its effectiveness. Results of numerical modeling indicated that both problems can be reduced by a strong enlargement of the strip width. Here, we report a novel giant Epstein tester (GET) with $W =10$ cm, in combination with increased strip length $L = 65$ cm. Sufficient averaging over test material is attained with two layers, i.e., from just eight strips. The magnetic field strength is determined by four large 3-D-printed tangential field coils, excluding impact from the four corners of frame. Time-averaged loss $P$ is computed from instantaneous magnetization power values $p$ , offering also maximum loss and orientation power. Results of GET were compared to data from single-sheet tester (SST) data, proving close similarities, without needs of annealing which is significant for laser scribed steel, as tested here. Results from SET prove to be higher. Analysis of power $p$ indicates the impact of supplementary domains in the magnetization process of the scribed material. Compared to SST, the drawbacks of the GET are the need of eight sample strips, as well as lower absolute accuracy, due to higher inhomogeneity. On the other hand, advantages are the absence of a yoke system and simplicity of test apparatus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Versatile Video Coding (VVC/H.266) is an emerging successor to the widespread High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) and is shown to double the coding efficiency for the same subjective visual quality. Nevertheless, VVC still adopts the similar hybrid video coding scheme as HEVC and thereby sets the scene for reusing many HEVC coding tools and techniques as is or with minor modifications. This paper explores the feasibility of developing a practical software VVC intra encoder from our open-source Kvazaar HEVC encoder. The outcome of this work is called uvg266 VVC intra encoder that is distributed under the same permissive 3-clause BSD license as Kvazaar. uvg266 inherits the optimized coding flow of Kvazaar and all upgradable Kvazaar intra coding tools, but it also introduces basic VVC intra coding tools not available in HEVC. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to describe the implementation details of upgrading an HEVC encoder to a VVC encoder. The rapid development time with promising coding performance make our proposal a viable approach over the encoder development from scratch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The six infinite families of power APN functions are among the oldest known instances of APN functions, and it has been conjectured in 2000 that they exhaust all possible power APN functions. Another long-standing open problem is that of the Walsh spectrum of the Dobbertin power family, which is still unknown. Those of Kasami, Niho and Welch functions are known, but not the precise values of their Walsh transform, with rare exceptions. One promising approach that could lead to the resolution of these problems is to consider alternative representations of the functions in questions. We derive alternative representations for the infinite APN monomial families. We show how the Niho, Welch, and Dobbertin functions can be represented as the composition $x^{i} \circ x^{1/j}$ of two power functions, and prove that our representations are optimal, i.e. no two power functions of lesser algebraic degree can be used to represent the functions in this way. We investigate compositions $x^{i} \circ L \circ x^{1/j}$ for a linear polynomial $L$ , show how the Kasami functions in odd dimension can be expressed in this way with $i=j$ being a Gold exponent and compute all APN functions of this form for $n \le 9$ and for $L$ with binary coefficients, thereby showing that our theoretical constructions exhaust all possible cases. We present observations and data on power functions with exponent $\sum _{i = 1}^{k-1} 2^{2ni} - 1$ which generalize the inverse and Dobbertin families. We present data on the Walsh spectrum of the Dobbertin function for $n \le 35$ , and conjecture its exact form. As an application of our results, we determine the exact values of the Walsh transform of the Kasami function at all points of a special form. Computations performed for $n\leq 21$ show that these points cover about 2/3 of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The guesswork of a quantum ensemble quantifies the minimum number of guesses needed in average to correctly guess the state of the ensemble, when only one state can be queried at a time. Here, we derive analytical solutions of the guesswork problem subject to a finite set of conditions, including the analytical solution for any qubit ensemble with uniform probability distribution. As explicit examples, we compute the guesswork for any qubit regular polygonal and polyhedral ensemble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gravity measurement is an important geophysical prospecting method for mineral exploration. With most of the shallow ore deposits in China being exploited, the future targets for exploration will be aimed at the deep mineral resources about 4-km underground. To improve the resolving ability in the vertical direction of the 3-D density inversion to find deep-source minerals, we propose to achieve the inversion of gravity anomalies by combining power-spectrum derived adaptive weighting and cross-gradient regularization. First, spectral analysis is utilized to conduct the source-depth separation, and the adaptive weighting function is designed depending on the slope of the radial logarithmic power spectrum of the gravity anomaly, which can enhance the correspondence for the field sources with different depths to improve the vertical resolution relatively. Thus, each separated source with different depths could be given an adaptive weighting coefficient in each separated inversion. Second, the cross-gradient technique is introduced as a structural constraint in the objective function to further constrain the separated inversion process. By performing two-cuboid-source cases, it can be seen that this combination calculated approach has great potential to improve the quality of the inversion results. When examining the inversion of the actual gravity data from certain ore district in the west of Zhen’an, South Qinling, we speculate that a potential deep ore body would exist in the deposit via utilizing the recovered density model obtained by the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]