Standards of Review and Scopes of Review in Pennsylvania - Primer and Proposal

Despite the importance of standards and scopes of review to the appellate process, legal practitioners continue to confuse these terms in their appellate briefs and in their oral arguments, resulting in the addition of unnecessary confusion to already complicated controversies. After explaining standard of review and scope of review, the author describes how each of these principles are applied in Pennsylvania\u27s appellate courts. The author concludes by analyzing various commonly used standards and scopes of review and by providing the context in which each is used in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Recent Developments in the Law: Public Sector Labor Relations

The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania recently rendered two notable decisions, Office of Administration v. Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board and Gehring v. Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board, which raise the specter of a potential sea change in the breadth of individual employee rights under the Public Employee Relations Act (PERA) and those statutory provisions giving police and firefighters collective bargaining rights commonly known as Act 111. This article will summarize and analyze these two prominent labor decisions in an effort to highlight current issues and themes in this critical area of the law

Excited-State Downfolding Using Ground-State Formalisms

Downfolding coupled cluster (CC) techniques are powerful tools for reducing the dimensionality of many-body quantum problems. This work investigates how ground-state downfolding formalisms can target excited states using non-Aufbau reference determinants, paving the way for applications of quantum computing in excited-state chemistry. This study focuses on doubly excited states for which canonical equation-of-motion CC approaches struggle to describe unless one includes higher-than-double excitations. The downfolding technique results in state-specific effective Hamiltonians that, when diagonalized in their respective active spaces, provide ground- and excited-state total energies (and therefore excitation energies) comparable to high-level CC methods. The performance of this procedure is examined with doubly excited states of H$_{2}$, Methylene, Formaldehyde, and Nitroxyl

Resource-Efficient Chemistry on Quantum Computers with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver and the Double Unitary Coupled-Cluster Approach.

Applications of quantum simulation algorithms to obtain electronic energies of molecules on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices require careful consideration of resources describing the complex electron correlation effects. In modeling second-quantized problems, the biggest challenge confronted is that the number of qubits scales linearly with the size of the molecular basis. This poses a significant limitation on the size of the basis sets and the number of correlated electrons included in quantum simulations of chemical processes. To address this issue and enable more realistic simulations on NISQ computers, we employ the double unitary coupled-cluster (DUCC) method to effectively downfold correlation effects into the reduced-size orbital space, commonly referred to as the active space. Using downfolding techniques, we demonstrate that properly constructed effective Hamiltonians can capture the effect of the whole orbital space in small-size active spaces. Combining the downfolding preprocessing technique with the variational quantum eigensolver, we solve for the ground-state energy of H2, Li2, and BeH2 in the cc-pVTZ basis using the DUCC-reduced active spaces. We compare these results to full configuration-interaction and high-level coupled-cluster reference calculations

Architects of time: Labouring on digital futures

Drawing on critical analyses of the internet inspired by Gilles Deleuze and the Marxist autonomia movement, this paper suggests a way of understanding the impact of the internet and digital culture on identity and social forms through a consideration of the relationship between controls exercised through the internet, new subjectivities constituted through its use and new labour practices enabled by it. Following Castells, we can see that the distinction between user, consumer and producer is becoming blurred and free labour is being provided by users to corporations. The relationship between digital technologies and sense of community, through their relationship to the future, is considered for its dangers and potentials. It is proposed that the internet may be a useful tool for highlighting and enabling social connections if certain dangers can be traversed. Notably, current remedies for the lack of trust on the internet are questioned with an alternative, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman and Georg Simmel, proposed which is built on community through a vision of a ‘shared network’

Quantum flow algorithms for simulating many-body systems on quantum computers

We conducted quantum simulations of strongly correlated systems using the quantum flow (QFlow) approach, which enables sampling large sub-spaces of the Hilbert space through coupled eigenvalue problems in reduced dimensionality active spaces. Our QFlow algorithms significantly reduce circuit complexity and pave the way for scalable and constant-circuit-depth quantum computing. Our simulations show that QFlow can optimize the collective number of wave function parameters without increasing the required qubits using active spaces having an order of magnitude fewer number of parameters