Stealing Signs: How Broken Rules Structure Identity.

I investigate how individuals’ identities and social networks shape not only their knowledge of the law, but their tendencies to obey or disobey it. Using elite amateur baseball players and their illicit relationships with agents as a case study, I reveal a complex social structure that ties agent use to elite status, while at the same time hiding the NCAA rules violations associated with it. I create a dialog between political heuristics (cue theory) and legal consciousness to examine the ways that cultural structures create the conditions for individual cognitive shortcuts to replicate their social world. Many players mimic rational behavior by elites despite differing incentive structures. This dissertation argues that players’ narrative identities shape who they think of as relative peers and encourage them to act in ways that replicate the norm of agent use despite a cost to those who perpetuate it. Baseball’s embedded practices of self-confidence and self-deception affect both the existence of cues and the ways those cues are taken. The cultural roles that players and coaches perform with each other abjure the business of baseball, forcing players into the pattern of agent use and hiding from them alternative ways of playing their social role. Legal consciousness and cue theory offer each other ways to enrich their inquiries. Cue theory gives legal consciousness a new, productive way to think about how people navigate social structures and act in ways that replicate them, while in return getting a way to think about how cues are constructed in the first place, and how identity and culture can shape how we take them. What happens in amateur baseball shines a light on the ways we all try to find our way through complex rule-bound systems, and on how those systems push us along predefined paths.PhDPolitical ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107087/1/ajakle_1.pd

Actively stabilized wavelength-insensitive carrier elimination from an electro-optically modulated laser beam

We demonstrate a simple and robust technique for removal of the carrier wave from a phase-modulated laser beam, using a non-interferometric method that is insensitive to the modulation frequency and instead exploits the polarization-dependence of electro-optic modulation. An actively stabilized system using feedback via a liquid crystal cell yields long-term carrier suppression in excess of 28 dB at the expense of a 6.5 dB reduction in sideband power.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Liveable Liverpool City Region: A social and demographic scoping review of the Emergency Active Travel Fund: Tranche 1

The rapid reallocation of road space in Liverpool City Region is a unique period in the history of decarbonising transport in Liverpool City Region. Through the Emergency Active Travel local authorities have announced major funding in conjunction with the combined authority to provide new temporary and permanent cycle lanes that will connect to the LCWIP corridors. This cycling infrastructure could support a significant modal shift and the attendant air quality and economic benefits associated with a reduction in fossil fuel-based transit modes. The decarbonisation of transport is contingent upon both low-carbon transport options and societal acceptance of a modal shift taking place. There is an emerging evidence base nationally of the spatial variations in access to low-carbon transportation within and between city regions. There is also some evidence of variation in societal acceptance across space. This research looks at the rapid reallocation of road space in relation to social and demographic context of Liverpool City Region and explores questions of societal readiness and acceptance of increased active travel. This report evaluates the First Tranche of the Emergency Active Travel Fund in Liverpool City Region and the rapid reallocation of road space from a social and demographic perspective. It draws on evidence from postcode level analysis of resident attitudes, interviews with bike shop owners, analysis of bike mounted video camera footage

Learning algorithms for identification of whisky using portable Raman spectroscopy

Reliable identification of high-value products such as whisky is an increasingly important area, as issues such as brand substitution (i.e. fraudulent products) and quality control are critical to the industry. We have examined a range of machine learning algorithms and interfaced them directly with a portable Raman spectroscopy device to both identify and characterize the ethanol/methanol concentrations of commercial whisky samples. We demonstrate that machine learning models can achieve over 99% accuracy in brand identification across twenty-eight commercial samples. To demonstrate the flexibility of this approach we utilised the same samples and algorithms to quantify ethanol concentrations, as well as measuring methanol levels in spiked whisky samples. Our machine learning techniques are then combined with a through-the-bottle method to perform spectral analysis and identification without requiring the sample to be decanted from the original container, showing the practical potential of this approach to the detection of counterfeit or adulterated spirits and other high value liquid samples.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures, 2 tabl

Genetic assimilation of ancestral plasticity during parallel adaptation to Zinc contamination in Silene uniflora

Phenotypic plasticity in ancestral populations is hypothesized to facilitate adaptation, but evidence is piecemeal and often contradictory. Further, whether ancestral plasticity increases the probability of parallel adaptive changes has not been explored. The most general finding is that ancestral responses to a new environment are reversed following adaptation (known as reversion). We investigated the contribution of ancestral plasticity to adaptive evolution of gene expression in two independently evolved lineages of zinc-tolerant Silene uniflora. We found that the general pattern of reversion is driven by the absence of a widespread stress response in zinc-adapted plants compared with zinc-sensitive plants. We show that ancestral plasticity that moves expression closer to the optimum value in the new environment influences the evolution of gene expression among genes that are likely to be involved in adaptation and increases the chance that genes are recruited repeatedly during adaptation. However, despite convergence in gene expression levels between independently adapted lineages, ancestral plasticity does not influence how similar expression values of adaptive genes become. Surprisingly, we also observed that ancestral plasticity that increases fitness often becomes genetically determined and fixed, that is, genetically assimilated. These results emphasize the important role of ancestral plasticity in parallel adaptation

Co-Designing the 15-Minute City

This report relates to a project which explored the potential of a mixed-method approach of using Sensor monitoring and community planning techniques to co-design ideas of the 15-minute neighbourhood. The project, a collaboration between researchers at the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moore’s University used the neighbourhood of Toxteth, Liverpool as a base to explore how real time sensor-based monitoring would affect resident perceptions, understanding and support for active travel measures in the places that they lived, and thus could be used as a method to support place-based decarbonisation