Light, Shadow, Science, and Law

Light Space Perspective Shadow Maps

In this paper, we present a new shadow mapping technique that improves upon the quality of perspective and uniform shadow maps. Our technique uses a perspective transform specified in light space which allows treating all lights as directional lights and does not change the direction of the light sources. This gives all the benefits of the perspective mapping but avoids the problems inherent in...

Escaping the Shadow of Malpractice Law

Medical malpractice doctrine is one of the core issues in the current debate over healthcare reform in the United States. For decades now, it has been universally accepted that the threat or reality of formal litigation stemming from—or at least claiming—malpractice has been the single most important factor shaping the medico–legal arena. While conventional wisdom has it that patient safety is ...

Cognitive science and the law.

Numerous innocent people have been sent to jail based directly or indirectly on normal, but flawed, human perception, memory and decision making. Current cognitive-science research addresses the issues that are directly relevant to the connection between normal cognitive functioning and such judicial errors, and suggests means by which the false-conviction rate could be reduced. Here, we illust...

Science, ethics, and civil law.

The Interrupted Power Law and the Size of Shadow Banking

Using public data (Forbes Global 2000) we show that the asset sizes for the largest global firms follow a Pareto distribution in an intermediate range, that is "interrupted" by a sharp cut-off in its upper tail, where it is totally dominated by financial firms. This flattening of the distribution contrasts with a large body of empirical literature which finds a Pareto distribution for firm size...