Procedural justice at the custody desk: exploring interpreter need identification

The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) Codes of Practice C (revised February 2017) sets the statutory provision of an interpreter for suspects detained in police custody in England and Wales. In practice, interpreter determination is reliant upon police officer discretion where they must become linguists (Cotterill, 2000). Determination is therefore liable to inconsistency, inaccuracy, and even prejudice, with clear potential for unjust process. Through a mixed method research design driven by grounded theory, utilising semi-structured interviews (n=9) and an e-questionnaire (n=42), this exploratory research conceptualised the interpreter need determination by Custody Sergeants within the custody booking-in procedure within a medium-to-large sized police force. The Custody Sergeant’s determination was theoretically positioned using the procedural justice model, where more accurate and fairer determinations would be theoretically associated to improved perceptions of empirical legitimacy amongst limited-English speaking detainees and their communities, rather than a solely normative approach through provision alone. Affecting the ‘field’ not just the ‘habitus’ (Chan, 1996), the application of procedural justice theory in this way evolves police-minority engagement from the traditional ‘take me to your leader’ approach (Bradford, 2014), through a cost-effective employment of theory (Myhill et al, 2011). The interpreter determination was conceptualised by the core concept of ‘comprehension doubtfulness’, formed of 4 theorised independent variables or dimensions: ‘competency discovery mechanisms’; ‘competency threshold construction’; ‘linguistic vulnerability’; and ‘linguistic naivety’, each consisting of operational attitude statements. Reliability analysis was used to concentrate each scale. Results showed substantial variance between participants across the attitude items, where attitudes or a lack thereof, are potentially harmful to the accuracy of ‘comprehension doubtfulness’. The results suggest limited speaking foreign national detainees, particularly of middling English competency, face an interpreter provision lottery when arriving in custody, meaning they become even more vulnerable to their linguistic vulnerability. This research makes an original contribution to the literature of interpreter determination within policing, providing a more detailed and operationally tangible framework than the proficiency-demand dichotomies of Valdes (1990) and Cooke (2002). It raises debate and possibilities in relation to future minority engagement through targeted employment of theory and challenging prevailing notions of vulnerability. Findings support the current research theme relating to the ineffectiveness of PACE to increase vulnerability detection amongst detainees (Young et al, 2013)

Quantum Field Theory Is Not Merely Quantum Mechanics Applied to Low Energy Effective Degrees of Freedom

It is commonly assumed that quantum field theory arises by applying ordinary quantum mechanics to the low energy effective degrees of freedom of a more fundamental theory defined at ultra-high-energy/short-wavelength scales. We shall argue here that, even for free quantum fields, there are holistic aspects of quantum field theory that cannot be properly understood in this manner. Specifically, the ``subtractions'' needed to define nonlinear polynomial functions of a free quantum field in curved spacetime are quite simple and natural from the quantum field theoretic point of view, but are at best extremely ad hoc and unnatural if viewed as independent renormalizations of individual modes of the field. We illustrate this point by contrasting the analysis of the Casimir effect, the renormalization of the stress-energy tensor in time-dependent spacetimes, and anomalies from the point of quantum field theory and from the point of view of quantum mechanics applied to the independent low energy modes of the field. Some implications for the cosmological constant problem are discussed.Comment: Latex, 8 Pages, 5th Prize Essay, Gravity Research Foundatio

An Alternative to Inflation

Inflationary models are generally credited with explaining the large scale homogeneity, isotropy, and flatness of our universe as well as accounting for the origin of structure (i.e., the deviations from exact homogeneity) in our universe. We argue that the explanations provided by inflation for the homogeneity, isotropy, and flatness of our universe are not satisfactory, and that a proper explanation of these features will require a much deeper understanding of the initial state of our universe. On the other hand, inflationary models are spectacularly successful in providing an explanation of the deviations from homogeneity. We point out here that the fundamental mechanism responsible for providing deviations from homogeneity -- namely, the evolutionary behavior of quantum modes with wavelength larger than the Hubble radius -- will operate whether or not inflation itself occurs. However, if inflation did not occur, one must directly confront the issue of the initial state of modes whose wavelength was larger than the Hubble radius at the time at which they were "born". Under some simple hypotheses concerning the "birth time" and initial state of these modes (but without any "fine tuning"), it is shown that non-inflationary fluid models in the extremely early universe would result in the same density perturbation spectrum and amplitude as inflationary models, although there would be no "slow roll" enhancement of the scalar modes.Comment: 4th Prize Gravity Research Foundation essay, with minor revisions and a number of additional footnotes. 12 pages, Latex, no figure

Quantum field theory in curved spacetime, the operator product expansion, and dark energy

To make sense of quantum field theory in an arbitrary (globally hyperbolic) curved spacetime, the theory must be formulated in a local and covariant manner in terms of locally measureable field observables. Since a generic curved spacetime does not possess symmetries or a unique notion of a vacuum state, the theory also must be formulated in a manner that does not require symmetries or a preferred notion of a ``vacuum state'' and ``particles''. We propose such a formulation of quantum field theory, wherein the operator product expansion (OPE) of the quantum fields is elevated to a fundamental status, and the quantum field theory is viewed as being defined by its OPE. Since the OPE coefficients may be better behaved than any quantities having to do with states, we suggest that it may be possible to perturbatively construct the OPE coefficients--and, thus, the quantum field theory. By contrast, ground/vacuum states--in spacetimes, such as Minkowski spacetime, where they may be defined--cannot vary analytically with the parameters of the theory. We argue that this implies that composite fields may acquire nonvanishing vacuum state expectation values due to nonperturbative effects. We speculate that this could account for the existence of a nonvanishing vacuum expectation value of the stress-energy tensor of a quantum field occurring at a scale much smaller than the natural scales of the theory.Comment: 9 pages, essay awarded 4th prize by Gravity Research Foundatio

Evaluating Digital Math Tools in the Field

Many school districts have adopted digital tools to supplement or replace teacher-led instruction, usually based on the premise that these tools can provide more personalized or individualized experiences for students and at lower cost. Rigorously evaluating whether such initiatives promote better student outcomes in the field is difficult as most schools and teachers are unwilling to enforce rigorous study designs such as randomized control trials. We used study designs that were feasible in practice to assess whether two digital math tools, eSpark and IXL, were associated with improvements in 3rd – 6th grade student test scores in math. We also investigated the resource requirements and costs of implementing eSpark and IXL to assess whether these tools represent a valuable use of resources. We find that while IXL is substantially less costly to implement than eSpark, its use is not significantly associated with students’ math performance

Existence of Local Covariant Time Ordered Products of Quantum Fields in Curved Spacetime

We establish the existence of local, covariant time ordered products of local Wick polynomials for a free scalar field in curved spacetime. Our time ordered products satisfy all of the hypotheses of our previous uniqueness theorem, so our construction essentially completes the analysis of the existence, uniqueness and renormalizability of the perturbative expansion for nonlinear quantum field theories in curved spacetime. As a byproduct of our analysis, we derive a scaling expansion of the time ordered products about the total diagonal that expresses them as a sum of products of polynomials in the curvature times Lorentz invariant distributions, plus a remainder term of arbitrary low scaling degree.Comment: Minor revisions, 2 references added. 43 pages, Latex format, no figure