• The article focuses on the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling on home equity theft, affirming that property rights extend beyond the wealthy. Topics include the legal arguments surrounding Geraldine Tyler's case against Hennepin County, the broader impact of similar laws in various states, and the economic effects of the ruling on low-value home prices.

In this Article, we offer a new design for our patent system with a view

to optimize its functioning. As multiple patent scholars have recognized, the

root cause of the ills of our patent system is the high rate of low-quality

patents. Extant patent law employs a binary screening process, under which

inventions either qualify for protection or fail. Thereafter, all qualifying

inventions are entitled to the same level of protection irrespective of the

degree of their novelty, utility and nonobviousness. As we establish

throughout this Article, patent law’s failure to distinguish among inventions

based on their quality greatly undermines the patent system’s principal

objective of optimally incentivizing and adequately rewarding innovative

progress. Society, at least in principle, ends up paying the same price for

all qualifying inventions, regardless of their level of innovation and

improvement upon the prior art.

Poor sleep is pervasive in modern society. Poor sleep is associated with major physical and mental health consequences, as well as with impaired cognitive function. Less is known about the relationship between sleep and emotional and interpersonal behavior. In this work, we investigate whether poor sleep impairs empathy, an important building block of human interaction and prosocial behavior. We aimed to capture the effects of poor sleep on the various aspects of empathy: trait and state, affect and cognition.

Study 1 (n = 155) assessed daily habitual sleep over several days, and global sleep quality in the past month. Participants who reported worse sleep quality exhibited lower empathic caring and perspective-taking traits. Study 2 (n = 347) induced a one-night disruption of sleep continuity to test a causal relationship between sleep and empathy. Participants in the sleep disrupted condition had to briefly wake up five times over the night, whereas the sleep-rested controls slept normally. In the next morning, participants’ empathy and prosocial intentions were assessed. Participants in the sleep disruption condition exhibited lower empathic sensitivity and less prosocial decision-making than sleep-rested controls.

The main contribution of this work is in providing a robust demonstration of the multi-faceted detrimental effects of poor sleep on trait and state empathy. Our findings demonstrate that poor sleep causally impairs empathic response to the suffering of others. These findings highlight the need for greater public attention to adequate sleep, which may impact empathy on a societal level.

BACKGROUND

Death registration completeness, the share of deaths captured by countries’ vital registration systems, vary substantially across countries. Estimates of completeness, even recent ones, are outdated or contradictory for many countries.

OBJECTIVE

We derive the most up-to-date and consistent estimates of death registration completeness in as many countries as possible.

RESULTS

Death registration is complete in Europe, North America, and other developed countries. In developing countries, completeness varies by region. While some have complete death registration, many countries completeness ranges from 40% to 75%. Regionally, Africa has lowest death registration completeness, and in many countries no registration data was located. In Latin America and Asia, several countries have improved their registration compared to previously available estimates.

CONTRIBUTION

This paper presents the publicly available International Completeness of Death Registration (ICDR) dataset: https://github.com/akarlinsky/death registration ICDR contains the annual amount of deaths registered and death registration completeness in 193 countries from 2015 to 2019.

חוקר אמריקני נהג לטייל עם כלבו על קו המים בחוף אגם מישיגן ולזרוק כדור למרחק רב. הכלב, כך הבחין, חזר שוב ושוב על אותו דפוס פעולה: הוא רץ על החוף עד נקודה מסוימת, ואז קפץ לאגם ושחה עד הכדור. כיצד יודע הכלב לבחור פעם אחר פעם את המסלול היעיל ביותר מבחינתו?
התשובה לשאלה זו ולשאלות נוספות הנוגעות לתהליכי חשיבה טמונה במערך סבוך של רשתות נוירונים שכדי להבין אותם, אנו נדרשים לחישובים מורכבים. הספר מודלים חישוביים במדעי הקוגניציה משתמש בכלים מתמטיים כדי להסביר מהלכים קוגניטיביים, והניסויים והתופעות המתוארים בו מלווים בהסברים בהירים.

נעם שנטל הוא פרופסור במחלקה למדעי המחשב באוניברסיטה הפתוחה. מחקריו עוסקים בביולוגיה חישובית.
יונתן לוינשטיין הוא פרופסור במחלקות לנוירוביולוגיה ולמדעי הקוגניציה והמוח, וחבר במרכז אדמונד ולילי ספרא למדעי המוח ובמרכז פדרמן לחקר הרציונליות באוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים. מחקריו עוסקים באספקטים חישוביים במדעי המוח והקוגניציה.

Robert J Aumann has received numerous prizes, including the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 2005.

With his 1976 paper, "Agreeing to Disagree", Robert Aumann pioneered the subject of interactive epistemology: the study of what people know, and what they know about what others know. Since then, the discipline has burgeoned enormously. This book documents Aumann's work leading to the 1976 paper and his subsequent contributions to the discipline. The scientific controversies emanating from his work are also included.

The World Health Organization has a mandate to compile and disseminate statistics on mortality, and we have been tracking the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic since the beginning of 2020. Reported statistics on COVID-19 mortality are problematic for many countries owing to variations in testing access, differential diagnostic capacity and inconsistent certification of COVID-19 as cause of death. Beyond what is directly attributable to it, the pandemic has caused extensive collateral damage that has led to losses of lives and livelihoods. Here we report a comprehensive and consistent measurement of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by estimating excess deaths, by month, for 2020 and 2021. We predict the pandemic period all-cause deaths in locations lacking complete reported data using an overdispersed Poisson count framework that applies Bayesian inference techniques to quantify uncertainty. We estimate 14.83 million excess deaths globally, 2.74 times more deaths than the 5.42 million reported as due to COVID-19 for the period. There are wide variations in the excess death estimates across the six World Health Organization regions. We describe the data and methods used to generate these estimates and highlight the need for better reporting where gaps persist. We discuss various summary measures, and the hazards of ranking countries’ epidemic responses.