The Constitutional Vulnerabilities of Kansas's Income Tax Reforms

This is the published version

Topics in perturbation theory

In providing a means of progressively improving an initial estimate, perturbation series have become a ubiquitous tool in modern physics. However, and mainly because this stepwise process of improvement rapidly becomes increasingly involved, surprisingly little is known about the formal properties of the series obtained. This thesis therefore investigates some aspects of these properties and how they effect the application of these techniques, with an emphasis on quantum field theory and the phenomenology of e+e(^-) colliders. One of the better understood examples of a perturbative series is the WKB one which is widely used to approximate the energy levels of quantum mechanical systems. Recently much interest has centred on a modification of this, the SWKB series. Apart from (possibly) offering an improvement on the original, this is intrinsically interesting in being related to the supersymmetry of field theory. Furthermore, as Chapter 1 explains, there is a close connection between the cases where the initial estimate requires no correction and an important set of quantum mechanical problems (the "shape invariant" ones) which can be solved elegantly and completely. The situation in field theory is more complicated, not least because the series for any particular problem is no longer unique. While this presents few theoretical difficulties, it has serious consequences when attempts are made to compare predictions with experiment. This obstacle is particularly severe in Quantum Chromodynamics and its fundamental constant (A(_QCD)) is therefore only roughly known at present. It will be argued that current responses to this are all imperfect, but that tests of the theory can be envisaged that circumvent the problem. This leads into questions concerning the origin of the divergences in the perturbation series - for although it may initially provide usefully improved estimates, the series probably breaks down eventually. Existing arguments about this topic are critically reviewed - and in one case substantially simplified - before an alternative one is proposed in some detail. By concentrating on a particularly restricted situation, the Common Effective Charge Approach simplifies matters to the extent that issues such as non-analyticity of functions and the potential accuracy of perturbative techniques in realistic applications can be conveniently investigated

Confessions, admissions and declarations by persons accused of crime under Scots law : a historic and comparative study

This work examines in depth the issue of the accused's own words as evidence against him in a Scottish criminal court. The work begins with a brief consideration of the historic development of the modern Scottish criminal justice system with particular emphasis on the position of the accused within that system. The literature of the topic is next considered. The right to silence is discussed in some detail, encompassing the modern law in both Scotland and England as well as the various, mainly English, proposals to attenuate the right under the guise of law reform. The early history of confessions in Scotland is examined before turning to the issue of the admissibility of confession evidence. The bulk of this discussion focusses, not surprisingly, on confessions to the police with the development of the law being traced on a case-by-case basis, but all other types of confession evidence are also treated. A comparative note on the English law is included. The issue of corroboration of confession evidence has recently received a considerable amount of attention in the press both legal and lay, and the present work examines both the general issues involved as well as the particular dangers caused by the development of the so-called `special knowledge' confession. Once again comparison is made with English law. The exceptional situation in Northern Ireland is considered in order to demonstrate, albeit in an extreme form, the dangers of unsupervised interrogation and other activities by the forces of `law and order' and the inquisitorial system is likewise considered to see what lessons, if any, can be learned and to identify the dangers and pitfalls of the main alternative procedural system

Optomechanically induced transparency and cooling in thermally stable diamond microcavities

Diamond cavity optomechanical devices hold great promise for quantum technology based on coherent coupling between photons, phonons and spins. These devices benefit from the exceptional physical properties of diamond, including its low mechanical dissipation and optical absorption. However the nanoscale dimensions and mechanical isolation of these devices can make them susceptible to thermo-optic instability when operating at the high intracavity field strengths needed to realize coherent photon--phonon coupling. In this work, we overcome these effects through engineering of the device geometry, enabling operation with large photon numbers in a previously thermally unstable regime of red-detuning. We demonstrate optomechanically induced transparency with cooperativity > 1 and normal mode cooling from 300 K to 60 K, and predict that these device will enable coherent optomechanical manipulation of diamond spin systems

High-Spatial-Resolution K-Band Imaging of Select K2 Campaign Fields

NASA's K2 mission began observing fields along the ecliptic plane in 2014. Each observing campaign lasts approximately 80 days, during which high-precision optical photometry of select astrophysical targets is collected by the Kepler spacecraft. Due to the 4 arcsec pixel scale of the Kepler photometer, significant blending between the observed targets can occur (especially in dense fields close to the Galactic plane). We undertook a program to use the Wide Field Camera (WFCAM) on the 3.8 m United Kingdom InfraRed Telescope (UKIRT) to collect high-spatial-resolution near-infrared images of targets in select K2 campaign fields, which we report here. These 0.4 arcsec resolution K-band images offer the opportunity to perform a variety of science, including vetting exoplanet candidates by identifying nearby stars blended with the target star and estimating the size, color, and type of galaxies observed by K2.Comment: 2 pages, Published by Research Notes of the American Astronomical Societ

Unstructured road detection in color imagery for the purpose of the automatic detection of explosive devices

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on March 8, 2013).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Thesis advisor: Dr. James KellerIncludes bibliographical references.M.S. University of Missouri--Columbia 2012."December 2012"This thesis proposes a method for segmenting an unstructured dirt road in color space images using color and texture analysis. A support vector machine (SVM), or a Random Forest classifier is trained on samples of on and off road patches from a similar road. Image patches are classified at an interval of 10 pixels at a fixed horizontal distance from the vehicle. Each patch is described by the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), the Local Binary Patterns (LBP), a histogram of the three color channels, and a set of statistics are calculated on the color histograms. The classified patches are transformed to the next frame of the sequence using the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) to reduce classification of image patches that have been classified in previous frames. Morphological opening and closing are used to transform the points into a mask, and reduce errors. Further error reduction and smoothing of the boundary is made possible by following the corners of the positive road classification with a Kalman filter. Experimental results measured against a hand segmented ground truth indicated that the algorithm can accurately segment road images given a set of training data from similar road utilizing only color imagery