Fixed penalties for careless driving: the delusion of deterrence?

Government proposals to raise the level of fixed penalty notices for motoring offences by £30 and to add less serious instances of careless driving offences to those eligible for an FPN might seem small and relatively insignificant changes. Not so. They raise issues about public perceptions of punishment and wrongfulness, as well as concerns regarding accountability. In addition, there are dubious assumptions underpinning the proposals: that higher fines will deter and that the remedial training course - on offer instead of an FPN + 3 penalty points for a careless driving offence – can deliver effective rehabilitation. This paper will explore these issues

How effective is non-custodial sentencing in achieving compliance with road traffic law?

This paper was presented at the Achieving Compliance with Road Traffic Law: What can enforcement, prosecution and sentencing contribute? Conference hosted at Brunel University on the 13th June 2012.As we are all aware, the vast majority of road traffic offences – if known and processed - result in one particular type of non-custodial sentence, the fine, but there is also an increasing emphasis on community sentences which involve drug and alcohol treatment requirements for certain road traffic offences. Within that context we have been asked to review what we know about the effectiveness of non-custodial sanctions generally but specifically in relation to road traffic offences. This has proved to be a surprisingly difficult task for various reasons

Response to the Home Office Consultation (2006) on 'Making Sentencing Clearer'

This is the response of Dr Easton and Professor Piper to the Consulation Paper, 'Making Sentencing Clearer' published by the Home Office in 2006. The deadline for responses was 9 January 2007 and a summary of responses will be published on the Home Office web-site in April 2007. Easton and Piper argued in favour of encouraging the greater use of community sentences and fines but opposed several proposals on human rights grounds. They also argued that the current 'tough' sentencing messages may negate the positive aspects of the proposed changes

Comparison of NNLO DIS scheme splitting functions with results from exact gluon kinematics at small x.

We consider the effect of exact gluon kinematics in the virtual photon-gluon impact factor at small x. By comparing with fixed order DIS scheme splitting and coefficient functions, we show that the exact kinematics results match the fixed order results well at each order, which suggests that they allow for an accurate NLL analysis of proton structure functions. We also present, available for the first time, x-space parameterisations of the NNLO DGLAP splitting functions in the DIS scheme, and also the longitudinal coefficients for neutral current scattering

Making a case for introspection

Defending first-person introspective access to own mental states, we argue against Carruthers' claim of mindreading being prior to meta-cognition and for a fundamental difference between how we understand our own and others' mental states. We conclude that a model based on one mechanism but involving two different kinds of access for self and other is sufficient and more consistent with the evidence

SATURN'S INNER SATELLITES: ORBITS, MASSES, AND THE CHAOTIC MOTION OF ATLAS FROM NEW CASSINI IMAGING OBSERVATIONS

We present numerically-derived orbits and mass estimates for the inner Saturnian satellites, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Janus and Epimetheus from a fit to 2580 new Cassini ISS astrometric observations spanning February 2004 to August 2013. The observations are provided in a supplementary table. We estimate GM_ Atlas=0.384+/-0.001 x 10^(-3)km^3s^(-2), a value 13% smaller than the previously published estimate but with an order of magnitude reduction in the uncertainty. We also find GM_ Prometheus=10.677+/-0.006x10(-3)km^3s^(-2), GM_Pandora=9.133+/-0.009x10^(-3)km^3s^(-2), GM_Janus=126.51+/-0.03x10^(-3)km^3s^(-2) and GM_Epimetheus=35.110+/-0.009x10^(-3)km^3s^(-2), consistent with previously published values, but also with significant reductions in uncertainties. We show that Atlas is currently librating in both the 54:53 co-rotation-eccentricity resonance (CER) and the 54:53 inner Lindblad (ILR) resonance with Prometheus, making it the latest example of a coupled CER-ILR system, in common with the Saturnian satellites Anthe, Aegaeon and Methone, and possibly Neptune's ring arcs. We further demonstrate that Atlas's orbit is chaotic, with a Lyapunov time of ~10 years, and show that its chaotic behaviour is a direct consequence of the coupled resonant interaction with Prometheus, rather than being an indirect effect of the known chaotic interaction between Prometheus and Pandora. We provide an updated analysis of the second-order resonant perturbations involving Prometheus, Pandora and Epimetheus based on the new observations, showing that these resonant arguments are librating only when Epimetheus is the innermost of the co-orbital pair, Janus and Epimetheus. We also find evidence that the known chaotic changes in the orbits of Prometheus and Pandora are not confined to times of apse anti-alignement.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures. Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal 23 September 2014 (corrected Fig. 11

Identifying Unclear Questions in Community Question Answering Websites

Thousands of complex natural language questions are submitted to community question answering websites on a daily basis, rendering them as one of the most important information sources these days. However, oftentimes submitted questions are unclear and cannot be answered without further clarification questions by expert community members. This study is the first to investigate the complex task of classifying a question as clear or unclear, i.e., if it requires further clarification. We construct a novel dataset and propose a classification approach that is based on the notion of similar questions. This approach is compared to state-of-the-art text classification baselines. Our main finding is that the similar questions approach is a viable alternative that can be used as a stepping stone towards the development of supportive user interfaces for question formulation.Comment: Proceedings of the 41th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR '19), 201

Dirichlet boundary conditions in a noncommutative theory

We study the problem of imposing Dirichlet-like boundary conditions along a static spatial curve, in a planar Noncommutative Quantum Field Theory model. After constructing interaction terms that impose the boundary conditions, we discuss their implementation at the level of an interacting theory, with a focus on their physical consequences, and the symmetries they preserve. We also derive the effect they have on certain observables, like the Casimir energies.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figure, pdflate