In this paper, we analyzed parasitic coupling capacitance coming from dummy metal fill and its impact on timing. Based on the modeling, we proposed two approaches to minimize the timing impact from dummy metal fill. The first approach applies more spacing between critical nets and metal fill, while the second approach leverages the shielding effects of reference nets. Experimental results show ...

This paper examines the country specific effect of policy reform on infrastructure spending in China and India. In China we have examined how marketization and decentralization has affected the composition of provincial public expenditure and in the case of India we have examined the impact of fiscal reforms on sub-national infrastructure spending. It is observed that in China with a lower mark...

This paper suggests that consistently referring to variables as placeholders is an effective countermeasure for addressing a number of the difficulties students’ encounter in learning mathematics. The suggestion is supported by examples discussing ways in which variables are used to express unknown quantities, define functions and express other universal statements, and serve as generic element...

A society needs to decide which issues (laws, public projects, public facilities, etc.) in an agenda to accept. The decision can be any subset of the agenda but must reflect the preferences of its members, which are assumed to be “separable weak orderings”. We characterize a family of plurality-like rules based on strategy-proofness, restricted efficiency, anonymity, and two weak axioms pertain...

We assess the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 on corporate investment in an investment Euler equation framework, where a dummy for the passage of the Act is allowed to affect the rate at which managers discount future investment payoffs. Using generalized method of moments estimators, we find that the rate U.S. firm managers apply to discount investment projects rises significantly aft...

Dummy-based anonymization techniques for protecting the location privacy of mobile users have appeared in the literature. By generating dummies that move in humanlike trajectories, this approach shows that the location privacy of mobile users can be preserved. However, the trajectories of mobile users can still be exposed by monitoring the long-term movement patterns of users. We argue that, on...

The literature contains a variety of different mixes, some of which have been used in deployed anonymity systems. We explore their anonymity and message delay properties, and show how to mount active attacks against them by altering the traffic between the mixes. We show that if certain mixes are used, such attacks cannot destroy the anonymity of a particular message completely. We work out the...