Another Mass Gap in the BTZ Geometry?

We attempt the construction of perturbative rotating hairy black holes and boson stars, invariant under a single helical Killing field, in 2+1-dimensions to complete the perturbative analysis in arbitrary odd dimension recently put forth in \cite{Stotyn:2011ns}. Unlike the higher dimensional cases, we find evidence for the non-existence of hairy black holes in 2+1-dimensions in the perturbative regime, which is interpreted as another mass gap, within which the black holes cannot have hair. The boson star solutions face a similar impediment in the background of a conical singularity with a sufficiently high angular deficit, most notably in the zero-mass BTZ background where boson stars cannot exist at all. We construct such boson stars in the AdS_3 background as well as in the background of conical singularities of periodicities \pi,2\pi/3,\pi/2.Comment: 13 pages, 2 appendices, Invited Contribution to an IOP special volume of Journal of Physics A in honor of Stuart Dowker's 75th birthday, v2: discussion in section 4 expande

Rights and Retrenchment in the Trump Era

Our aim in this Article is to leverage the archival research, data, and theoretical perspectives presented in our book, Rights and Retrenchment: The Counterrevolution against Federal Litigation, to illuminate the prospects for retrenchment in the current political landscape. In the book, we documented how an outpouring of rights-creating legislation from Democratic Congresses in the 1960s and 1970s, much of which contained provisions designed to stimulate private enforcement, prompted the conservative legal movement within the Republican Party to devise a response. Recognizing the political infeasibility of retrenching substantive rights, the movement’s strategy was to weaken the infrastructure for enforcing them. Although largely a failure in the elected branches and only modestly successful in the domain of court rulemaking, the project flourished in the federal courts. In both the book and this Article, we focus exclusively on law that bears on opportunities and incentives for private enforcement of federal rights. Our decision to limit the project in that way was based on considerations that are both practical and theoretical. It was fortified by evidence from our archival research that the counterrevolution started in the first Reagan administration as an ideological campaign against private litigation as a tool of federal policymaking and by our empirical data showing that the effort to retrench private enforcement of federal law preceded tort reform on both the administration’s and the legislative agenda during the Reagan years

A Computational Approach to Estimating Nondisjunction Frequency in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Errors segregating homologous chromosomes during meiosis result in aneuploid gametes and are the largest contributing factor to birth defects and spontaneous abortions in humans. Saccharomyces cerevisiae has long served as a model organism for studying the gene network supporting normal chromosome segregation. Measuring homolog nondisjunction frequencies is laborious, and involves dissecting thousands of tetrads to detect missegregation of individually marked chromosomes. Here we describe a computational method (TetFit) to estimate the relative contributions of meiosis I nondisjunction and random-spore death to spore inviability in wild type and mutant strains. These values are based on finding the best-fit distribution of 4, 3, 2, 1, and 0 viable-spore tetrads to an observed distribution. Using TetFit, we found that meiosis I nondisjunction is an intrinsic component of spore inviability in wild-type strains. We show proof-of-principle that the calculated average meiosis I nondisjunction frequency determined by TetFit closely matches empirically determined values in mutant strains. Using these published data sets, TetFit uncovered two classes of mutants: Class A mutants skew toward increased nondisjunction death, and include those with known defects in establishing pairing, recombination, and/or synapsis of homologous chromosomes. Class B mutants skew toward random spore death, and include those with defects in sister-chromatid cohesion and centromere function. Epistasis analysis using TetFit is facilitated by the low numbers of tetrads (as few as 200) required to compare the contributions to spore death in different mutant backgrounds. TetFit analysis does not require any special strain construction, and can be applied to previously observed tetrad distributions

Rethinking Novelty in Patent Law

The novelty requirement seeks to ensure that a patent will not issue if the public already possesses the invention. Although gauging possession is usually straightforward for simple inventions, it can be difficult for those in complex fields like biotechnology, chemistry, and pharmaceuticals. For example, if a drug company seeks to patent a promising molecule that was disclosed but never physically made in the prior art, the key possession question is whether a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) could have made it at the time of the prior disclosure. Put differently, could the PHOSITA rely on then-existing knowledge in the field to fill in any missing technical details from the prior disclosure? This Article argues that existing novelty jurisprudence mishandles the possession question in two ways. First, it tends to overestimate the PHOSITA\u27s then-existing knowledge by failing to fully appreciate the complex nature of certain technologies. Second, the current examination framework vitiates the presumption of novelty by placing proof burdens on the would-be inventor that can thwart innovation and frustrate important objectives of the patent system. To resolve these problems and to fill a gap in patent scholarship, this Article proposes a new paradigm that reframes the novelty inquiry during patent examination. Its implementation will not only improve the quality of issued patents, but also make the patent literature a more robust source of technical information. This Article contributes to broader policy debates over patent reform and joins a larger effort to bridge the disconnect between patent law and the norms of science

Consequences of Propagating Torsion in Connection-Dynamic Theories of Gravity

We discuss the possibility of constraining theories of gravity in which the connection is a fundamental variable by searching for observational consequences of the torsion degrees of freedom. In a wide class of models, the only modes of the torsion tensor which interact with matter are either a massive scalar or a massive spin-1 boson. Focusing on the scalar version, we study constraints on the two-dimensional parameter space characterizing the theory. For reasonable choices of these parameters the torsion decays quickly into matter fields, and no long-range fields are generated which could be discovered by ground-based or astrophysical experiments.Comment: 16 pages plus one figure (plain TeX), MIT-CTP #2291. (Extraordinarily minor corrections.

Numerical Boson Stars with a Single Killing Vector II: the D=3 Case

We complete the analysis of part I in this series (Ref. \cite{Stotyn:2013yka}) by numerically constructing boson stars in 2+1 dimensional Einstein gravity with negative cosmological constant, minimally coupled to a complex scalar field. These lower dimensional boson stars have strikingly different properties than their higher dimensional counterparts, most noticeably that there exists a finite central energy density, above which an extremal BTZ black hole forms. In this limit, all of the scalar field becomes enclosed by the horizon; it does not contract to a singularity, but rather the origin remains smooth and regular and the solution represents a spinning boson star trapped inside a degenerate horizon. Additionally, whereas in higher dimensions the mass, angular momentum, and angular velocity all display damped harmonic oscillations as functions of the central energy density, in $D=3$ these quantities change monotonically up to the bound on the central energy density. Some implications for the holographic dual of these objects are discussed and it is argued that the boson star and extremal BTZ black hole phases are dual to a spontaneous symmetry breaking at zero temperature but finite energy scale.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures (2 multipart figures), part II of a 2 part series, v3 minor changes throughou

An Examination of Additively Separable Willingness-To-Pay for Environmental Attributes: Evidence from a Pork Experiment

This paper examines what is the best method for pork producers to market pork products with environmental attributes. The objective is to examine evidence of whether it is beneficial for pork producers to incorporate multiple environmental attributes into a single product or sell multiple products with a single environmental attribute.Environmental Economics and Policy,

INTERPRETING BIDS FROM A VICKREY AUCTION WHEN THERE ARE PUBLIC GOOD ATTRIBUTES

This paper provides a model that allows for interpreting bids in a Vickrey auction when the good has public good attributes. It also examines information obtained from a Vickrey auction, which collected consumer's willingness-to-pay for pork products that had embedded environmental attributes, and applies the new interpretation to the bids.Consumer/Household Economics,