Blue sky over Bluewater?

The Thames Gateway plan is the largest and most complex project of urban regeneration ever undertaken in the United Kingdom. Not since the Great Fire of London will the capital city have been subject to such an enormous and concentrated process of change as what is currently being proposed: the building of affordable homes for half a million people on a flood plain, the construction of a new transport network to attract investment from across Europe and around the world, the creation of a whole new apparatus of governance to regulate London's historic Eastwards expansion, and the attempt to create a sustainable green environment out of some of the most polluted brownfield sites in the country. And, over and above all this, the location of London's 2012 Olympics. All this is being proposed against the background of widespread public sceptism about master plans and grand projects, coupled with concerns about the impact of global warming on London's flood protection systems and the fear that market led construction of mass housing will lead to Los Angeles style urban sprawl. This book provides a comprehensive overview and critique of the Thames Gateway plan, but at the same time, it uses the plan as a lens through which to look at a series of important questions of social theory, urban policy and governmental practice. It examines the impact of urban planning and demographic change on East London's material and social environment, including new forms of ethnic gentrification, the development of the eastern hinterlands, shifting patterns of migration between city and country, the role of new policies in regulating housing provision and the attempt to create new cultural hubs downriver. It also looks at issues of governance and accountability, the tension between public and private interests, and the immediate and longer term prospects for the Thames Gateway project both in relation to the 'Olympics effect' and the growth of new forms of regionalism

Slave to the Algorithm? Why a \u27Right to an Explanation\u27 Is Probably Not the Remedy You Are Looking For

Algorithms, particularly machine learning (ML) algorithms, are increasingly important to individuals’ lives, but have caused a range of concerns revolving mainly around unfairness, discrimination and opacity. Transparency in the form of a “right to an explanation” has emerged as a compellingly attractive remedy since it intuitively promises to open the algorithmic “black box” to promote challenge, redress, and hopefully heightened accountability. Amidst the general furore over algorithmic bias we describe, any remedy in a storm has looked attractive. However, we argue that a right to an explanation in the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is unlikely to present a complete remedy to algorithmic harms, particularly in some of the core “algorithmic war stories” that have shaped recent attitudes in this domain. Firstly, the law is restrictive, unclear, or even paradoxical concerning when any explanation-related right can be triggered. Secondly, even navigating this, the legal conception of explanations as “meaningful information about the logic of processing” may not be provided by the kind of ML “explanations” computer scientists have developed, partially in response. ML explanations are restricted both by the type of explanation sought, the dimensionality of the domain and the type of user seeking an explanation. However, “subject-centric explanations (SCEs) focussing on particular regions of a model around a query show promise for interactive exploration, as do explanation systems based on learning a model from outside rather than taking it apart (pedagogical versus decompositional explanations) in dodging developers\u27 worries of intellectual property or trade secrets disclosure. Based on our analysis, we fear that the search for a “right to an explanation” in the GDPR may be at best distracting, and at worst nurture a new kind of “transparency fallacy.” But all is not lost. We argue that other parts of the GDPR related (i) to the right to erasure ( right to be forgotten ) and the right to data portability; and (ii) to privacy by design, Data Protection Impact Assessments and certification and privacy seals, may have the seeds we can use to make algorithms more responsible, explicable, and human-centered

Algorithms that Remember: Model Inversion Attacks and Data Protection Law

Many individuals are concerned about the governance of machine learning systems and the prevention of algorithmic harms. The EU's recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been seen as a core tool for achieving better governance of this area. While the GDPR does apply to the use of models in some limited situations, most of its provisions relate to the governance of personal data, while models have traditionally been seen as intellectual property. We present recent work from the information security literature around `model inversion' and `membership inference' attacks, which indicate that the process of turning training data into machine learned systems is not one-way, and demonstrate how this could lead some models to be legally classified as personal data. Taking this as a probing experiment, we explore the different rights and obligations this would trigger and their utility, and posit future directions for algorithmic governance and regulation.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figur

An Economic Analysis of Children's Health and Intellectual Development

The basic purpose of our research is to contribute to an understanding of the joint determination of children's cognitive development and their health. Although there is a large literature concerning the first of these issues, there has been little work on the latter. We also explore interrelationships between various aspects of children's physical health and their intellectual development and, in particular, attempt to answer the important question of whether poor health retards the cognitive development of children.

Adolescent Health, Family Background, and Preventive Medical Care

This paper investigates the health of white adolescents, focusing particularly on the roles of family background and preventive medical care. This emphasis is motivated in part by our desire to study adolescent health in the context of the nature-nurture controversy. The findings indicate first, that family characteristics (especially mother's schooling) do have a significant impact on adolescent health and second, that preventive care is an important vehicle for this impact in the case of dental health hut not in the ease of physical health measures. Similarly, the greater availability of dentists has a positive impact on dental health, but greater availability of pediatricians does not alter the physical health measures. On the basis of these results we predict that government efforts to improve the dental health of adolescents with policies to lower the cost of dental care or increase the availability of dentists are much more likely to be successful than similar policies directed at improving their physical health.

Radiation transport and short pulse interaction in laser irradiated targets

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The kinetics of the reduction of nickel salts by hydrazine

Imperial Users onl