This article was prompted by the recent discovery of two more copies of the so‐called ‘Heliodoros Stele’ from Maresha. A second one from Byblos was published in 2015. The third one, re‐discovered recently and published here for the first time, also comes from Maresha. The steles bear Seleukos IV's epistolary prostagma from 178 bc to his vizier Heliodoros, and forwarded to other officials with the instruction to display it in public. It...

This study exploits the confiscation and auctioning off of Church property that occurred during the French Revolution to assess the role played by transaction costs in delaying the reallocation of property rights in the aftermath of fundamental institutional reform. French districts with a greater proportion of land redistributed during the Revolution experienced higher levels of agricultural productivity in 1841 and 1852 as well as more...

In [BGLM] and [GLNP] it was conjectured that if H is a simple Lie group of real rank at least 2, then the number of conjugacy classes of (arithmetic) lattices in H of covolume at most x is x (γ(H)+o(1)) log x/ log log x where γ(H) is an explicit constant computable from the (absolute) root system of H. In [BLu] we disproved this conjecture. In this paper we prove that for most groups H the conjecture is actually true if we restrict to...

In this paper, we consider the use of deep neural networks in the context of Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) detection. We give a brief introduction to deep learning and propose a modern neural network architecture suitable for this detection task. First, we consider the case in which the MIMO channel is constant, and we learn a detector for a specific system. Next, we consider the harder case in which the parameters are known yet...

Program comprehension concerns the ability to understand code written by others. But not all code is the same. We use an experimental platform fashioned as an online game-like environment to measure how quickly and accurately 222 professional programmers can interpret code snippets with similar functionality but different structures. The results indicate, inter alia, that for loops are significantly harder than ifs, that some but not all...

This paper investigates the problem of reverse engineering, i.e., learning, select-project-join (SPJ) queries from a user-provided example set, containing positive and negative tuples. The goal is then to determine whether there exists a query returning all the positive tuples, but none of the negative tuples, and furthermore, to find such a query, if it exists. These are called the satisfiability and learning problems, respectively. The...

It is interesting, the authors note, that Kant periodically returned, or ‘relapsed,’ to images of self-organization. But only interesting insofar as his ‘ambivalence about self-organization’ is ‘paradigmatic, a stance shared widely in the modern world.’ Yes, certainly. But also no. In the second concept of self-organization, the one written between the naturalism of a mechanistic universe and the supernaturalism of God’s provident designs,...

The powerful film “I am not your Negro” concludes with novelist James Baldwin reflecting on how the United States made African-Americans into a “problem”. He states that addressing this “problem” is the responsibility of the country as a whole, not of blacks only. Still, Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil and Israel (GR) demonstrates the ways in which the burden of dealing with persistent...

We present a method that automatically evaluates emotional response from spontaneous facial activity. The automatic evaluation of emotional response, or affect, is a fascinating challenge with many applications. Our approach is based on the inferred activity of facial muscles over time, as automatically obtained from an RGB-D video recording of spontaneous facial activity. Our contribution is two-fold: First, we constructed a database of...

Many astounding feats of computer intelligence, from automated language translation to self-driving cars, are based on neural networks: machine learning systems that figure out how to solve problems with minimal human guidance. But that makes the inner workings of neural networks like a black box, opaque even to the engineers who initiate the machine learning process.

The widely held belief that BQP strictly contains BPP raises fundamental questions: if we cannot efficiently compute predictions for the behavior of quantum systems, how can we test their behavior? In other words, is quantum mechanics falsifiable? In cryptographic settings, how can a customer of a future untrusted quantum computing company be convinced of the correctness of its quantum computations? To provide answers to these questions, we...

Throughout history and across many societies, people have been facing conflicts between faith and the law. This article exposes and defines central dynamics of these conflicts by empirically investigating how educational leaders in religious communities tackle, reduce, and resolve conflicts with the law. Three main dynamics emerge: first, religious leaders frequently seek to harmonize law and religion by redefining the conflict around...

Some five years have passed between the Dublin conference on antisemitism and Holocaust Denial and the final writing of this chapter. Many things have happened during that period in the Middle East, in Europe and in the USA: there have been fresh rounds of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, at least one of them particularly violent; the collapse of a few Arab states under the attacks of different Islamist, Jihadists and other...

Using data obtained in a controlled ad-auction experiment that we ran, we evaluate the regret-based approach to econometrics that was recently suggested by Nekipelov, Syrgkanis, and Tardos (EC 2015). We found that despite the weak regret-based assumptions, the results were (at least) as accurate as those obtained using classic equilibrium-based assumptions. En route we studied to what extent humans actually minimize regret in our ad auction,...

Independent directors are an important feature of modern corporate law. Courts and lawmakers around the world increasingly rely on these directors to protect investors from controlling shareholder opportunism. In this Article, we argue that the existing director-election regime significantly undermines the ability of independent directors to effectively perform their oversight role. Both the election and retention of independent directors...

For many years the rhizosphere which is the zone of soil in the vicinity of the roots and which is influenced by the roots is known as a unique soil environment with different physical, biological and chemical properties than those of the bulk soil. In recent studies, it has been shown that root exudates and especially mucilage alter the hydraulic properties of the rhizosphere, and that drying and wetting cycles of mucilage result in...

Arginine methylation of histones is one mechanism of epigenetic regulation in eukaryotic cells. Methylarginines can also be found in non-histone proteins involved in various different processes in a cell. An enzyme family of nine protein arginine methyltransferases catalyses the addition of methyl groups on arginines of histone and non-histone proteins, resulting in either mono- or dimethylated-arginine residues. The reversibility of histone...

We study competitive equilibria in the basic Fisher market model, but with indivisible goods. Such equilibria fail to exist in the simplest possible market of two players with equal budgets and a single good, yet this is a knife's edge instance as equilibria exist once budgets are not precisely equal. Is non-existence of equilibria also a knife-edge phenomenon in complex markets with multiple goods? Our computerized search has indicated that...

Criminal law has served as both an archive and a template for early sociologists to understand how societies wished to perceive themselves. For Weber, Marx, and Durkheim, criminal codes were a window to understand the way society defined the boundaries of the normative, and indicated the range of acceptable behavior and with it the communities that shared the realm of “civility”. Therefore, criminal law has been a natural sight for boundary...

I suggest a way in which metaphysics might cure us of our desire for immortality. Supposing that time is composed of instants, or even that time could be composed of instants, leads to the conclusion that there is nothing good that immortality offers, nothing we might reasonably want, that is in principle unavailable to a mere mortal. My argument proceeds in three stages. First, I suggest a necessary condition for a feature to ground the...