Putting Surveillance on the Political Agenda – A Short Defence of Surveillance: Citizens and the State

In February 2009 the House of Lords Constitutional Committee in the United Kingdom published the report Surveillance: Citizens and the State. Some have hailed this as a landmark document. Volume 6(3) of Surveillance & Society published 4 invited responses to this report written by prominent scholars. In the attached paper the two Specialist Advisers to this Committee set the context for the report and provide a brief rejoinder to the four responses. NOTE: The authors write in their academic and personal capacities, and not as representatives of the Committee

Privacy issues in integrated public services

Paper presented by Raab for the Privacy Workshop, chaired by Edwards and held in September 2005

IRISS (Increasing Resilience in Surveillance Societies) FP7 European Research Project, Deliverable 3.2: Surveillance Impact Report

External research report produced for the European Commission as part of the FP7 IRISS project: Increasing Resilience in Surveillance Socieities, containing European case studies on the varying formats of neighbourhood watch, including the cultural and historical factors which may influence the creation of neighbourhood watch groups in the first instance. Overview of neighbourhood watch in the United Kingdom and analysis of the changing role of the police in relation to community policing and the impact which this has had on the primary purpose of neighbourhood watch organisations.This deliverable was written as part of the IRISS project which received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under Grant Agreement No. 285593. Additional co-authors: Alessia Ceresa, Chiara Fonio, Walter Peissl, Robert Rothman, Jaro Sterbik Lamina, Ivan Szekely, Beatrix Vissy, Wolfgang Bonß, Daniel Fischer, Gemma Galdon Clavell, Reinhard Kreissl, Alexander Neumann, Nils Zurawsk

Observation of an Excited Bc+ State

Using pp collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 8.5 fb-1 recorded by the LHCb experiment at center-of-mass energies of s=7, 8, and 13 TeV, the observation of an excited Bc+ state in the Bc+π+π- invariant-mass spectrum is reported. The observed peak has a mass of 6841.2±0.6(stat)±0.1(syst)±0.8(Bc+) MeV/c2, where the last uncertainty is due to the limited knowledge of the Bc+ mass. It is consistent with expectations of the Bc∗(2S31)+ state reconstructed without the low-energy photon from the Bc∗(1S31)+→Bc+γ decay following Bc∗(2S31)+→Bc∗(1S31)+π+π-. A second state is seen with a global (local) statistical significance of 2.2σ (3.2σ) and a mass of 6872.1±1.3(stat)±0.1(syst)±0.8(Bc+) MeV/c2, and is consistent with the Bc(2S10)+ state. These mass measurements are the most precise to date

Supplement: "Localization and broadband follow-up of the gravitational-wave transient GW150914" (2016, ApJL, 826, L13)

This Supplement provides supporting material for Abbott et al. (2016a). We briefly summarize past electromagnetic (EM) follow-up efforts as well as the organization and policy of the current EM follow-up program. We compare the four probability sky maps produced for the gravitational-wave transient GW150914, and provide additional details of the EM follow-up observations that were performed in the different bands

Brain tumour differentiation: rapid stratified serum diagnostics via attenuated total reflection Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy

The ability to diagnose cancer rapidly with high sensitivity and specificity is essential to exploit advances in new treatments to lead significant reductions in mortality and morbidity. Current cancer diagnostic tests observing tissue architecture and specific protein expression for specific cancers suffer from inter-observer variability, poor detection rates and occur when the patient is symptomatic. A new method for the detection of cancer using 1 μl of human serum, attenuated total reflection - Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and pattern recognition algorithms is reported using a 433 patient dataset (3897 spectra). To the best of our knowledge, we present the largest study on serum mid-infrared spectroscopy for cancer research. We achieve optimum sensitivities and specificities using a Radial Basis Function Support Vector Machine of between 80.0 and 100% for all strata and identify the major spectral features, hence biochemical components, responsible for the discrimination within each stratum. We assess feature fed-SVM analysis for our cancer versus non-cancer model and achieve 91.5 and 83.0% sensitivity and specificity respectively. We demonstrate the use of infrared light to provide a spectral signature from human serum to detect, for the first time, cancer versus non-cancer, metastatic cancer versus organ confined, brain cancer severity and the organ of origin of metastatic disease from the same sample enabling stratified diagnostics depending upon the clinical question asked. © 2016, The Author(s)

Observation of the Decay Λ0b→Λ+cτ−¯ν

The first observation of the semileptonic b-baryon decay Λb0→Λc+τ-ν¯τ, with a significance of 6.1σ, is reported using a data sample corresponding to 3 fb-1 of integrated luminosity, collected by the LHCb experiment at center-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV at the LHC. The τ- lepton is reconstructed in the hadronic decay to three charged pions. The ratio K=B(Λb0→Λc+τ-ν¯τ)/B(Λb0→Λc+π-π+π-) is measured to be 2.46±0.27±0.40, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic. The branching fraction B(Λb0→Λc+τ-ν¯τ)=(1.50±0.16±0.25±0.23)% is obtained, where the third uncertainty is from the external branching fraction of the normalization channel Λb0→Λc+π-π+π-. The ratio of semileptonic branching fractions R(Λc+)B(Λb0→Λc+τ-ν¯τ)/B(Λb0→Λc+μ-ν¯μ) is derived to be 0.242±0.026±0.040±0.059, where the external branching fraction uncertainty from the channel Λb0→Λc+μ-ν¯μ contributes to the last term. This result is in agreement with the standard model prediction