A review on continuous wave functional near-infrared spectroscopy and imaging instrumentation and methodology
F. Scholkmann, S. Kleiser, A. J. Metz
et al.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of functional near-infrared spectroscopy and imaging (fNIRS/fNIRI). As the vast majority of commercial instruments developed until now are based on continuous wave technology, the aim of this publication is to review the current state of instrumentation and methodology of continuous wave fNIRI. For this purpose we provide an overview of the commercially available instruments and address instrumental aspects such as light sources, detectors and sensor arrangements. Methodological aspects, algorithms to calculate the concentrations of oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin and approaches for data analysis are also reviewed. From the single-location measurements of the early years, instrumentation has progressed to imaging initially in two dimensions (topography) and then three (tomography). The methods of analysis have also changed tremendously, from the simple modified Beer-Lambert law to sophisticated image reconstruction and data analysis methods used today. Due to these advances, fNIRI has become a modality that is widely used in neuroscience research and several manufacturers provide commercial instrumentation. It seems likely that fNIRI will become a clinical tool in the foreseeable future, which will enable diagnosis in single subjects.
1768 sitasi
en
Computer Science, Medicine
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
Lawrence Lessig
1384 sitasi
en
Engineering
Existe uma experiência brasileira com remédios digitais?
Bruno Polonio Renzetti, Daniele Eduarda de Oliveira
Objetivo: o artigo investiga como remédios têm sido aplicados pelo Cade em casos envolvendo mercado digitais. O objetivo é verificar se a autoridade brasileira desenvolveu uma experiência singular na imposição de remédios digitais ou se tem seguido tendências de outras jurisdições, particularmente da União Europeia e dos Estados Unidos. A questão de pesquisa é relevante dado que o Brasil, como uma economia emergente, enfrenta desafios específicos ao lidar com grandes plataformas digitais, ao mesmo tempo em que desempenha um importante papel na economia da América Latina e do Sul Global.
Método: revisão bibliográfica de literatura e estudo de casos.
Conclusões: os autores concluem que a autoridade brasileira não possui experiência na aplicação de remédios específicos para mercados digitais, recorrendo frequentemente à medidas que foram adotadas em atos de concentração ou investigações de mercados não-digitais. Até o momento, não houve uma abordagem sob medida para remédios em mercados digitais na prática do Cade. Nesse sentido, os autores sugerem que o Cade desenvolva um marco orientativo abrangente para lidar com problemas competitivos específicos dos mercados digitais.
International relations, Commercial law
LLM-based Fusion of Multi-modal Features for Commercial Memorability Prediction
Aleksandar Pramov
This paper addresses the prediction of commercial (brand) memorability as part of "Subtask 2: Commercial/Ad Memorability" within the "Memorability: Predicting movie and commercial memorability" task at the MediaEval 2025 workshop competition. We propose a multimodal fusion system with a Gemma-3 LLM backbone that integrates pre-computed visual (ViT) and textual (E5) features by multi-modal projections. The model is adapted using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). A heavily-tuned ensemble of gradient boosted trees serves as a baseline. A key contribution is the use of LLM-generated rationale prompts, grounded in expert-derived aspects of memorability, to guide the fusion model. The results demonstrate that the LLM-based system exhibits greater robustness and generalization performance on the final test set, compared to the baseline. The paper's codebase can be found at https://github.com/dsgt-arc/mediaeval-2025-memorability
Multi-Observatory Study of Young Stellar Energetic Flares (MORYSEF): No Evidence For Abnormally Strong Stellar Magnetic Fields After Powerful X-ray Flares
Konstantin V. Getman, Oleg Kochukhov, Joe P. Ninan
et al.
We explore the empirical power-law relationship between X-ray luminosity (Lx) and total surface magnetic flux (Phi), established across solar magnetic elements, time- and disk-averaged emission from the Sun, older active stars, and pre-main-sequence (PMS) stars. Previous models of large PMS X-ray flares, lacking direct magnetic field measurements, showed discrepancies from this baseline law, which MHD simulations attribute to unusually strong magnetic fields during flares. To test this, we used nearly simultaneous Chandra X-ray and HET-HPF near-infrared observations of four young Orion stars, measuring surface magnetic fields during or just after powerful PMS X-ray flares. We also modeled these PMS X-ray flares, incorporating their measured magnetic field strengths. Our findings reveal magnetic field strengths at the stellar surface typical of non-flaring PMS stars, ruling out the need for abnormally strong fields during flares. Both PMS and solar flares deviate from the Lx-Phi law, with PMS flares exhibiting a more pronounced deviation, primarily due to their much larger active regions on the surface and larger flaring loop volumes above the surface compared to their solar counterparts. These deviations likely stem from the fact that powerful flares are driven by magnetic reconnection, while baseline X-ray emission may involve less efficient mechanisms like Alfven wave heating. Our results also indicate a preference for dipolar magnetic loops in PMS flares, consistent with Zeeman-Doppler imaging of fully convective stars. This requirement for giant dipolar loops aligns with MHD predictions of strong dipoles supported by polar magnetic surface active regions in fast-rotating, fully convective stars.
en
astro-ph.SR, astro-ph.HE
CISG Advisory Council Opinion No. 23: Mistake, Fraud, Misrepresentation and Initial Impossibility in CISG Contracts
CISG Advisory Council
The CISG AC started as a private initiative which was founded and supported by Albert H Kritzer Executive Secretary of the Institute of International Commercial Law at Pace University School of Law and the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary, University of London. The International Sales Convention Advisory Council (CISG-AC) is in place to support understanding of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and the promotion and assistance in the uniform interpretation of the CISG. At its formative meeting in Paris in June 2001, Prof. Peter Schlechtriem of Freiburg University, Germany, was elected Chair of the CISG-AC for a three-year term. Dr. Loukas A. Mistelis of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, was elected Secretary. The founding members of the CISG-AC were Prof. Emeritus Eric E. Bergsten, Pace University School of Law, Prof. Michael Joachim Bonell, University of Rome La Sapienza, Prof. E. Allan Farnsworth, Columbia University School of Law, Prof. Alejandro M. Garro, Columbia University School of Law, Prof. Sir Roy M. Goode, Oxford, Prof. Sergei N. Lebedev, Maritime Arbitration Commission of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation, Prof. Jan Ramberg, University of Stockholm, Faculty of Law, Prof. Peter Schlechtriem, Freiburg University, Prof. Hiroo Sono, Faculty of Law, Hokkaido University, Prof. Claude Witz, Universität des Saarlandes and Strasbourg University. Members of the Council are elected by the Council. At subsequent meetings, the CISG-AC elected as additional members Prof. Pilar Perales Viscasillas, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid; Prof. Ingeborg Schwenzer, University of Basel; Prof. John Y. Gotanda, Villanova University; Prof. Michael G. Bridge, London School of Economics; Prof. Han Shiyuan, Tsinghua University and Prof. Yeşim Atamer, Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey, Prof. Ulrich G. Schroeter, University of Mannheim, Germany, Prof. Lauro Gama Jnr, Pontifical Catholic University, Justice Johnny Herre, Justice of the Supreme Court of Sweden, Prof. Harry M. Flechtner, University of Pittsburgh, Prof. Sieg Eiselen, Department of Private Law of the University of South Africa, Prof. Edgardo Muñoz López, Universidad Panamericana, Guadalajara, México, and Assoc. Prof. Lisa Spagnolo, Macquarie Law School. Prof. Jan Ramberg served for a three-year term as the second Chair of the CISG-AC. At its 11th meeting in Wuhan, People's Republic of China, Prof. Eric E. Bergsten of Pace University School of Law was elected Chair of the CISG-AC and Prof. Sieg Eiselen of the Department of Private Law of the University of South Africa was elected Secretary. At its 14th meeting in Belgrade, Serbia, Prof. Ingeborg Schwenzer of the University of Basel was elected Chair and at its 24th meeting in Antigua, Guatemala, Prof. Michael G. Bridge of the London School of Economics was elected Chair of the CISG-AC. At its 26th meeting in Asunción, Paraguay, Ass. Prof. Milena Djordjević, University of Belgrade, Serbia, was elected Secretary, and she was re-elected short after the 37th meeting in Rio de Janeiro. Prof. Pilar Perales Viscasillas of the University Carlos III of Madrid was elected Chair of the CISG-AC after the 37th meeting in Rio de Janeiro. The meeting was kindly hosted by Kopaonik School of Natural Law - Slobodan Perović.
Does better regulatory institutions always enhance the productivity effects of services trade liberalization?
Fei Meng, Jun Yang, Xiaohui Xu
et al.
The majority of previous studies have asserted that the high quality of local institutions can improve the productivity effects of trade policies; yet, only a few studies have acknowledged the heterogeneous impact of these institutions. Using data from Chinese manufacturing plants, we examine the moderating effects of regional-level regulations on the effectiveness of national services trade policy. The key findings are threefold: First, as the initial degree of service liberalization advances, the productivity effect of trade liberalization diminishes. Second, opening access to foreign enterprises can substitute for pro-competitive regulatory reform. Regardless of whether the regulatory institutions related to administrative processes, law enforcement, and commercial service have improved, services trade liberalization can have significant productivity effects. Third, in contrast, when regulations to protect for local incumbents impose prohibitive costs for new entrants, the impact of services trade liberalization is highly contingent on local regulatory improvement. The confirmation that trade liberalization can potentially serve as an alternative measure for local regulation reform in Chinese context distinguishes this study from others.
Science (General), Social sciences (General)
On the Cyber-Physical Security of Commercial Indoor Delivery Robot Systems
Fayzah Alshammari, Yunpeng Luo, Qi Alfred Chen
Indoor Delivery Robots (IDRs) play a vital role in the upcoming fourth industrial revolution, autonomously navigating and transporting items within indoor environments. In this work, we thus aim to conduct the first security analysis of the IDR systems considering both cyber- and physical-layer attack surface and domain-specific attack goals across security, safety, and privacy. As initial results, we formulated a general IDR system architecture from 40 commercial IDR models and then performed an initial cyber-physical attack entry point identification. We also performed an experimental analysis of a real commercial IDR robot-side software and identified several vulnerabilities. We then discuss future steps.
Provincial allocation of China's commercial building operational carbon towards carbon neutrality
Yanqiao Deng, Minda Ma, Nan Zhou
et al.
National carbon peak track and optimized provincial carbon allocations are crucial for mitigating regional inequality within the commercial building sector during China's transition to carbon neutrality. This study proposes a top-down model to evaluate carbon trajectories in operational commercial buildings up to 2060. Through Monte Carlo simulation, scenario analysis is conducted to assess carbon peak values and the corresponding peaking year, thereby optimizing carbon allocation schemes both nationwide and provincially. The results reveal that (1) the nationwide carbon peak for commercial building operations is projected to reach 890 (+- 50) megatons of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) by 2028 (+- 3.7 years) in the case of the business-as-usual scenario, with a 7.87% probability of achieving the carbon peak under the decarbonization scenario. (2) Significant disparities will exist among provinces, with Shandong's carbon peak projected at 69.6 (+- 4.0) MtCO2 by 2029, approximately 11 times higher than Ningxia's peak of 6.0 (+- 0.3) MtCO2 by 2027. (3) Guided by the principle of maximizing the emission reduction potential, the optimal provincial allocation scheme reveals the top three provinces requiring the most significant reductions in the commercial sector: Xinjiang (5.6 MtCO2), Shandong (4.8 MtCO2), and Henan (4.7 MtCO2). Overall, this study offers optimized provincial carbon allocation strategies within the commercial building sector in China via dynamic scenario simulations, with the goal of hitting the carbon peak target and progressing toward a low-carbon future for the building sector.
Spectrophotometric accuracy of spectra obtained from spectroscopic plates measured with a commercial flatbed scanner
Kenshi Yanagisawa, Reiko Furusho, Shiomi Nemoto
et al.
The intensity spectra recovered from the spectroscopic photographic plates were compared with the CCD spectra, and we found the difference between the two was 2.5%.The measurements were taken using a commercial flatbed scanner instead of a microdensitometer. The results indicate that the following two statements are inaccurate: (1) Correct measurement of spectroscopic plates requires a microdensitometer, and a commercial flatbed scanner is insufficient; (2) The spectrophotometric accuracy of spectroscopic plate is approximately 10% accurate. These results will encourage the creation and publication of a digital archive of spectroscopic plates. This paper presents the measurement of spectroscopic plates, the method of recovering intensity spectra from photographic density spectra, the results of comparison with CCD spectra, and discusses the causes of the high accuracy spectra obtained with a commercial flatbed scanner.
Can't Hide Behind the API: Stealing Black-Box Commercial Embedding Models
Manveer Singh Tamber, Jasper Xian, Jimmy Lin
Embedding models that generate dense vector representations of text are widely used and hold significant commercial value. Companies such as OpenAI and Cohere offer proprietary embedding models via paid APIs, but despite being "hidden" behind APIs, these models are not protected from theft. We present, to our knowledge, the first effort to "steal" these models for retrieval by training thief models on text-embedding pairs obtained from the APIs. Our experiments demonstrate that it is possible to replicate the retrieval effectiveness of commercial embedding models with a cost of under $300. Notably, our methods allow for distilling from multiple teachers into a single robust student model, and for distilling into presumably smaller models with fewer dimension vectors, yet competitive retrieval effectiveness. Our findings raise important considerations for deploying commercial embedding models and suggest measures to mitigate the risk of model theft.
Processing of GASKAP-HI pilot survey data using a commercial supercomputer
Ian P. Kemp, Nickolas M. Pingel, Rowan Worth
et al.
Modern radio telescopes generate large amounts of data, with the next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) expected to feed up to 292 GB of visibilities per second to the science data processor (SDP). However, the continued exponential growth in the power of the world's largest supercomputers suggests that for the foreseeable future there will be sufficient capacity available to provide for astronomers' needs in processing 'science ready' products from the new generation of telescopes, with commercial platforms becoming an option for overflow capacity. The purpose of the current work is to trial the use of commercial high performance computing (HPC) for a large scale processing task in astronomy, in this case processing data from the GASKAP-HI pilot surveys. We delineate a four-step process which can be followed by other researchers wishing to port an existing workflow from a public facility to a commercial provider. We used the process to provide reference images for an ongoing upgrade to ASKAPSoft (the ASKAP SDP software), and to provide science images for the GASKAP collaboration, using the joint deconvolution capability of WSClean. We document the approach to optimising the pipeline to minimise cost and elapsed time at the commercial provider, and give a resource estimate for processing future full survey data. Finally we document advantages, disadvantages, and lessons learned from the project, which will aid other researchers aiming to use commercial supercomputing for radio astronomy imaging. We found the key advantage to be immediate access and high availability, and the main disadvantage to be the need for improved HPC knowledge to take best advantage of the facility.
Asymmetric drift in MaNGA: Mass and radially-dependent stratification rates in galaxy disks
Matthew A. Bershady, Kyle B. Westfall, Shravan Shetty
et al.
We measure the age-velocity relationship from the lag between ionized gas and stellar tangential speeds in ~500 nearby disk galaxies from MaNGA in SDSS-IV. Selected galaxies are kinematically axisymmetric. Velocity lags are asymmetric drift, seen in the Milky Way's (MW) solar neighborhood and other Local Group galaxies; their amplitude correlates with stellar population age. The trend is qualitatively consistent in rate (d(sigma)/dt) with a simple power-law model where sigma is proportional to t^b that explains the dynamical phase-space stratification in the solar neighborhood. The model is generalized based on disk dynamical times to other radii and other galaxies. We find in-plane radial stratification parameters sigma_(0,r} (dispersion of the youngest populations) in the range of 10-40 km/s and 0.2<b_r<0.5 for MaNGA galaxies. Overall b_r increases with galaxy mass, decreases with radius for galaxies above 10.4 dex (M_solar) in stellar mass, but is ~constant with radius at lower mass. The measurement scatter indicates the stratification model is too simple to capture the complexity seen in the data, unsurprising given the many possible astrophysical processes that may lead to stellar population dynamical stratification. Nonetheless, the data show dynamical stratification is broadly present in the galaxy population, with systematic trends in mass and density. The amplitude of the asymmetric drift signal is larger for the MaNGA sample than the MW, and better represented in the mean by what is observed in the disks of M31 and M33. Either typical disks have higher surface-density or, more likely, are dynamically hotter (hence thicker) than the MW.
SDSS-IV MaNGA: Calibration of astrophysical line-widths in the Hα region using HexPak observations
Sabyasachi Chattopadhyay, Matthew A. Bershady, David R. Law
et al.
We have re-observed $\rm\sim$40 low-inclination, star-forming galaxies from the MaNGA survey ($\upsigma\sim65$~\kms) at $\sim$6.5 times higher spectral resolution ($\upsigma\sim10$~\kms) using the HexPak integral field unit on the WIYN 3.5m telescope. The aim of these observations is to calibrate MaNGA's instrumental resolution and to characterize turbulence in the warm interstellar medium and ionized galactic outflows. Here we report the results for the H$\rm\upalpha$ region observations as they pertain to the calibration of MaNGA's spectral resolution. Remarkably, we find that the previously-reported MaNGA line-spread-function (LSF) Gaussian width is systematically underestimated by only 1\%. The LSF increase modestly reduces the characteristic dispersion of HII regions-dominated spectra sampled at 1-2 kpc spatial scales from 23 to 20 km s$^{-1}$ in our sample, or a 25\% decrease in the random-motion kinetic energy. This commensurately lowers the dispersion zeropoint in the relation between line-width and star-formation rate surface-density in galaxies sampled on the same spatial scale. This modest zero-point shift does not appear to alter the power-law slope in the relation between line-width and star-formation rate surface-density. We also show that adopting a scheme whereby corrected line-widths are computed as the square root of the median of the difference in the squared measured line width and the squared LSF Gaussian avoids biases and allows for lower SNR data to be used reliably.
en
astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.IM
Abuse of Procedural Right in the Review of Judicial Acts in the Civil Process
A. N. Melnikova
The purpose of this article is to analyze abuses of procedural right in civil and arbitrazh proceedings of the Russian Federation in the context of judicial review. The problem posed by the author is studied from “general” to “specific”: from the study of the potential for abuse of the right to appeal to the isolation and isolation of separate blocks of bad faith procedural behavior, typical for persons involved in the case. The author was able to identify four blocks of procedural abuse at the appeal stage: attempts to review judicial acts not in the manner prescribed by applicable law; circumvention of the prohibition to submit new evidence; inconsistent procedural conduct, as well as unreasonably prolonging the process of review. In addition, this article raises the question of the applicability of certain negative consequences for abusers in appellate and subsequent court proceedings. The article draws a conclusion about correlation of special norms (part 2 of article 111, part 5 of article 159 of the Commercial Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, article 99 of the Civil Procedure Code of the Russian Federation) with a basic general consequence of mala fide procedural behaviour — refusal to satisfy claims of an abuser fully or partially.
La Passivity Rule ai tempi dell’economia sostenibile: spunti per una prima analisi
Sebastiano Costa
It is frequently remarked, not only in the field of business law, how a change of perspective (maybe even of paradigm) is taking place in modern Western capitalism aimed at the realization of a sustainable economy. A decisive test of this approach is provided by the discipline dedicated to takeover bids and, precisely, by the rule imposing the so-called passivity rule. The study provides an initial starting point for the analysis of this issue.
Efficient Commercial Bank Customer Credit Risk Assessment Based on LightGBM and Feature Engineering
Yanjie Sun, Zhike Gong, Quan Shi
et al.
Effective control of credit risk is a key link in the steady operation of commercial banks. This paper is mainly based on the customer information dataset of a foreign commercial bank in Kaggle, and we use LightGBM algorithm to build a classifier to classify customers, to help the bank judge the possibility of customer credit default. This paper mainly deals with characteristic engineering, such as missing value processing, coding, imbalanced samples, etc., which greatly improves the machine learning effect. The main innovation of this paper is to construct new feature attributes on the basis of the original dataset so that the accuracy of the classifier reaches 0.734, and the AUC reaches 0.772, which is more than many classifiers based on the same dataset. The model can provide some reference for commercial banks' credit granting, and also provide some feature processing ideas for other similar studies.
Three-Dimensional Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect in Magnetic Topological Insulator Trilayers of Hundred-Nanometer Thickness
Yi-Fan Zhao, Ruoxi Zhang, Zi-Ting Sun
et al.
Magnetic topological states refer to a class of exotic phases in magnetic materials with their non-trivial topological property determined by magnetic spin configurations. An example of such states is the quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) state, which is a zero magnetic field manifestation of the quantum Hall effect. Current research in this direction focuses on QAH insulators with a thickness of less than 10nm. The thick QAH insulators in the three-dimensional(3D) regime are limited, largely due to inevitable bulk carriers being introduced in thick magnetic TI samples. Here, we employ molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to synthesize magnetic TI trilayers with a thickness of up to ~106 nm. We find these samples exhibit well-quantized Hall resistance and vanishing longitudinal resistance at zero magnetic field. By varying magnetic dopants, gate voltages, temperature, and external magnetic fields, we examine the properties of these thick QAH insulators and demonstrate the robustness of the 3D QAH effect. The realization of the well-quantized 3D QAH effect indicates that the nonchiral side surface states of our thick magnetic TI trilayers are gapped and thus do not affect the QAH quantization. The 3D QAH insulators of hundred-nanometer thickness provide a promising platform for the exploration of fundamental physics, including axion physics and image magnetic monopole, and the advancement of electronic and spintronic devices to circumvent Moore's law.
en
cond-mat.mes-hall, cond-mat.mtrl-sci
La naturaleza de las reglas para la interpretación de los contratos. Análisis sobre su alcance conceptual en la atribución de significado a cláusulas contractuales
Dúber Armando Celis Vela
Las reglas sobre la interpretación de los contratos han sido reconstruidas como normas imperativas y facultativas en la doctrina y la jurisprudencia colombianas. Sin embargo, esta calificación teórico-dogmática falla porque no da cuenta de la naturaleza de las obligaciones que tienen los intérpretes ni explica su relevancia práctica. Este artículo propone que tales normas pueden ser reconstruidas como reglas conceptuales que fijan el significado de la actividad interpretativa. La interpretación contractual consiste en establecer la intención común desde la configuración de un código interpretativo particular y contingente que opera como criterio de interpretación o presupuesto para la selección de resultados interpretativos.
Commercial law, Civil law
Architecture of a First-Generation Commercial Quantum Network
Duncan Earl, K Karunaratne, Jason Schaake
et al.
We present the architecture and near-term use cases for a first-generation commercial quantum network. We define the foundational hardware and software elements required to operate and manage the network. Finally, we discuss the configuration of this network for near-term consumer applications and propose how the network can support the broader technical goals of the quantum information science community.