Where does capture collide?

Regulatory capture is the process by which an agency set up to regulate an industry in the public interest comes instead to act mainly in the interest of the firms it oversees. Stigler's 1971 The Theory of Economic Regulation argued that regulation is often acquired by an industry and designed and run primarily for its benefit, because concentrated producers can organise to demand favourable rules while a dispersed public cannot. The referent is a shift in whose interest a public body serves, read from the rules and outcomes it produces, and it has nothing to do with a nucleus absorbing a particle, a marked animal caught a second time, or a variable held by a piece of code.[1]

Unit

One agency's drift from public to industry interest, read from the rules it makes

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Inferred from whose interests a body's rules and enforcement favour, and from the movement of staff and benefits between the regulator and the regulated

In nuclear physics, capture is the absorption of a particle by an atomic nucleus. In electron capture the nucleus draws in one of its own inner orbital electrons, turning a proton into a neutron and emitting a neutrino; in neutron capture a free neutron is absorbed and the excited nucleus usually sheds the extra energy as a gamma ray. Alvarez's 1938 The Capture of Orbital Electrons by Nuclei gave the first clear experimental demonstration of the electron-capture decay mode. The referent is an absorption event inside an atom, counted as a decay rate or a reaction cross section, and it is not an agency serving an industry, a tagged animal recaught in a trap, or a name bound inside a function.[2]

Unit

One event in which a nucleus absorbs a particle, such as an inner electron or a neutron

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Detected through the emitted X-rays, gamma rays, or neutrinos, and quantified as a decay rate or a capture cross section

Capture-recapture is a method for estimating the size of an animal population that cannot be counted directly: a sample of individuals is captured, marked, and released, and the fraction of marked animals in a later sample is used to infer the total. Jolly's 1965 Explicit estimates from capture-recapture data with both death and immigration-stochastic model set out a model that estimates abundance and survival even as animals are born, die, and move between catches. The referent is a statistical estimate of how many animals live in an area, reported as a count with error bounds, and it is unrelated to a regulator serving an industry, a nucleus absorbing an electron, or a variable held by a closure.[3]

Unit

One estimated population total, built from marked and recaptured samples

Recovery means

The method turns on recatching marked individuals, whose ratio to the unmarked yields the estimate

Measured by

Computed from the ratio of marked to unmarked animals across successive capture occasions, using a model such as Jolly-Seber

Variable capture is the way a function value, or closure, keeps a reference to variables from the scope in which it was created, so it can still read or change them when it runs later somewhere else. Landin's 1964 The Mechanical Evaluation of Expressions introduced the closure as an expression paired with the environment that binds its free variables, formalising how a nested function holds on to the names around it. The referent is a binding kept by a piece of code, found by tracing which names a function reads, and it is not an industry taking over its regulator, a nucleus taking in an electron, or a trap recatching a marked animal.[4]

Unit

One binding a closure holds to a variable in its enclosing scope

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by analysing which free variables a function references and how they are stored in its closure environment