Clinical Pathways to Ethically Substantive Autonomy

There is no shortage of support for the idea that ethics should be incorporated into the academic and professional curriculum. There is a difference, however, between, on the one hand, teaching professionals about ethics, and, on the other, demanding that they give ethical expression to the range of professional skills they are expected to apply daily in their work. If this expression is not to be perfunctory, ethical judgement must be genuinely integrated into the professional skill set. The mark of integration in this regard is the capacity for autonomous judgement. Ethical autonomy cannot be achieved by a mechanical, rule-bound and circumstance-specific checklist of ethical do’s and don’ts, and it is only partially achieved by a move from mechanistic rules to ‘outcome based’ processes. Rather, professional ethical autonomy presupposes not only a formal understanding of the requirements of an ethical code of conduct, but a genuine engagement with the substantive values and techniques that enable practitioners to interpret and apply principles confidently over a range of circumstances. It is not then, that ethical skill is not valued by the legal profession or legal education, or that the shortfall of ethical skill goes unacknowledged, it is rather that the language of professional ethics struggles to break free from the cautious circularity that is the mark of its formal expression. To require a professional to ‘act in their client’s interests’, or ‘act in accordance with the expectations of the profession’ or act ‘fairly and effectively’ are formal, infinitely ambiguous and entirely safe suggestions; to offer a substantive account of what, specifically, those interests might be, or what expectations we should have, are rather more contentious. Fears of dogma and a narrowing of discretion do, of course, accompany the idea of a search for ethical substance, and caution is to be expected in response to it. Notwithstanding these anxieties, there would appear to be no coherent alternative to the aspiration to substantive autonomy, and this must remain the goal of teaching legal ethics. In light of this, the problem facing educationalists is then perhaps expressed more diplomatically in terms of how ethical skill might be substantively developed, imparted, and integrated into a genuinely comprehensive conception of professional skill. Clinical education can go a long way to solving this problem: exposure to the practical tasks of lawyering is the surest and best way of raising consciousness in this regard: ‘Hands-on’ is good - and consciousness-raising is a step in the direction of autonomy, but raw experience and elevated awareness is not enough. We know that our most influential theories of learning tells us that it is in the process of reflection upon problem solving that the practitioner begins to take autonomous control of skill development. In the view of the author, reflection, requires content and direction, and in this paper, with the aid of three models of skill integration inspired by Nigel Duncan’s detailed analysis and video reconstruction of the ethical and technical skill deficiencies brought to light by R v Griffiths, we attempt to specify what might be understood in this regard: Reflective content refers to the discrete interests and values that compete to produce tension in what we will refer to the ‘matrix’ of concerns that feature in all forms of dispute resolution; reflective direction points to an engagement with the resources and techniques that can empower critical and autonomous judgment. In the context of a clinical process broadly structured by the insights of Wenger and by Rest’s model of ethical skill, guided reflection so specified thus serves as an interface between on the one hand, indeterminate ethical form, and, on the other, the substantive ethical wisdom to be found in the repository of values that underpin the very idea of the legal enterprise

Straight to Shapes: Real-time Detection of Encoded Shapes

Current object detection approaches predict bounding boxes, but these provide little instance-specific information beyond location, scale and aspect ratio. In this work, we propose to directly regress to objects' shapes in addition to their bounding boxes and categories. It is crucial to find an appropriate shape representation that is compact and decodable, and in which objects can be compared for higher-order concepts such as view similarity, pose variation and occlusion. To achieve this, we use a denoising convolutional auto-encoder to establish an embedding space, and place the decoder after a fast end-to-end network trained to regress directly to the encoded shape vectors. This yields what to the best of our knowledge is the first real-time shape prediction network, running at ~35 FPS on a high-end desktop. With higher-order shape reasoning well-integrated into the network pipeline, the network shows the useful practical quality of generalising to unseen categories similar to the ones in the training set, something that most existing approaches fail to handle.Comment: 16 pages including appendix; Published at CVPR 201

Determination of renewable energy yield from mixed waste material from the use of novel image analysis methods

Two novel techniques are presented in this study which together aim to provide a system able to determine the renewable energy potential of mixed waste materials. An image analysis tool was applied to two waste samples prepared using known quantities of source-segregated recyclable materials. The technique was used to determine the composition of the wastes, where through the use of waste component properties the biogenic content of the samples was calculated. The percentage renewable energy determined by image analysis for each sample was accurate to within 5% of the actual values calculated. Microwave-based multiple-point imaging (AutoHarvest) was used to demonstrate the ability of such a technique to determine the moisture content of mixed samples. This proof-of-concept experiment was shown to produce moisture measurement accurate to within 10%. Overall, the image analysis tool was able to determine the renewable energy potential of the mixed samples, and the AutoHarvest should enable the net calorific value calculations through the provision of moisture content measurements. The proposed system is suitable for combustion facilities, and enables the operator to understand the renewable energy potential of the waste prior to combustion

Staple: Complementary Learners for Real-Time Tracking

Correlation Filter-based trackers have recently achieved excellent performance, showing great robustness to challenging situations exhibiting motion blur and illumination changes. However, since the model that they learn depends strongly on the spatial layout of the tracked object, they are notoriously sensitive to deformation. Models based on colour statistics have complementary traits: they cope well with variation in shape, but suffer when illumination is not consistent throughout a sequence. Moreover, colour distributions alone can be insufficiently discriminative. In this paper, we show that a simple tracker combining complementary cues in a ridge regression framework can operate faster than 80 FPS and outperform not only all entries in the popular VOT14 competition, but also recent and far more sophisticated trackers according to multiple benchmarks.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201

William III and the Northern Crowns during the Nine Years War, 1689-1697

The present thesis, William III and the Northern Crowns during the Nine Years War 1689-97,examines the policy of the stadtholder-king towards Sweden and Denmark- Norway in the years immediately following the English Revolution. His attempts to secure their active assistance against France were thwarted by the Swedish king’s fears of risking the neutrality he needed to complete his domestic reforms and to fulfil his ambitions of mediating in the European conflict and by Denmark’s hopes of French subsidies and support for her territorial ambitions in North Germany; while 6,000 Danish troops were secured for the Allies in 1689,a favourable alliance with Christian V could not be concluded until November 1696. Both northern kingdoms feared the effects of the union of the two Maritime Powers on their plans for commercial expansion, which were further threatened by the Ango-Dutch convention of September 1689 barring all neutral trade with France. This led them to form a League of Armed Neutrality in 1691 which helped to persuade William to abandon the aims of the convention and agree to compensation for seizures of their merchant ships. Negotiations in Stockholm and the Hague in the latter years of the war to persuade Sweden, a guarantor of Westphalia and Nijmijgen, to extract favourable peace terms from Prance continued until and even beyond the acceptance of her mediation at the beginning of 1697. William was also active in preventing the diversion of a Northern war such as was threatened by the disputes between Denmark and the duke of Holstein-Gottorp in 1689 and 1696-7 and by the disputed succession to Saxe-Lauenburg. The study builds on manuscript material in the Public Record Office, the British Museum, the Berkshire Record Office, Nottingham University Library, at Plas-Newydd, Anglesey and in archives in the Hague, Copenhagen and Stockholm as well as on published collections of documents and secondary works

AX-5 space suit bearing torque investigation

The symptoms and eventual resolution of a torque increase problem occurring with ball bearings in the joints of the AX-5 space suit are described. Starting torques that rose 5 to 10 times initial levels were observed in crew evaluation tests of the suit in a zero-g water tank. This bearing problem was identified as a blocking torque anomaly, observed previously in oscillatory gimbal bearings. A large matrix of lubricants, ball separator designs and materials were evaluated. None of these combinations showed sufficient tolerance to lubricant washout when repeatedly cycled in water. The problem was resolved by retrofitting a pressure compensated, water exclusion seal to the outboard side of the bearing cavity. The symptoms and possible remedies to blocking are discussed

R3^3SGM: Real-time Raster-Respecting Semi-Global Matching for Power-Constrained Systems

Stereo depth estimation is used for many computer vision applications. Though many popular methods strive solely for depth quality, for real-time mobile applications (e.g. prosthetic glasses or micro-UAVs), speed and power efficiency are equally, if not more, important. Many real-world systems rely on Semi-Global Matching (SGM) to achieve a good accuracy vs. speed balance, but power efficiency is hard to achieve with conventional hardware, making the use of embedded devices such as FPGAs attractive for low-power applications. However, the full SGM algorithm is ill-suited to deployment on FPGAs, and so most FPGA variants of it are partial, at the expense of accuracy. In a non-FPGA context, the accuracy of SGM has been improved by More Global Matching (MGM), which also helps tackle the streaking artifacts that afflict SGM. In this paper, we propose a novel, resource-efficient method that is inspired by MGM's techniques for improving depth quality, but which can be implemented to run in real time on a low-power FPGA. Through evaluation on multiple datasets (KITTI and Middlebury), we show that in comparison to other real-time capable stereo approaches, we can achieve a state-of-the-art balance between accuracy, power efficiency and speed, making our approach highly desirable for use in real-time systems with limited power.Comment: Accepted in FPT 2018 as Oral presentation, 8 pages, 6 figures, 4 table

The Physics of Cloud-scale Star Formation and Feedback Across Cosmic Time

Stars are an important visible and massive constituent of galaxies. They form out of cool, dense molecular gas regions known as molecular clouds and in turn impact this gas by emitting energy and mass known as "stellar feedback". Therefore, understanding the formation of stars and the feedback they generate is crucial for understanding galaxy formation. As a result of modern telescope facilities, high sensitivity, high resolution (cloud-scale) imaging of molecular gas is becoming available in an increasing number of galaxies. Analysis of this data with matched resolution observations of recently-formed, massive stars allows the characterisation of the star formation process on the cloud scale. The "uncertainty principle for star formation" is a statistical method for measuring the relative duration and spatial distribution of evolutionary phases of the star formation process. When applied to observational images that trace molecular clouds and regions of young stars, the method measures the duration of molecular cloud lifetimes, the timescale of their destruction by stellar feedback and the mean separation length between star forming regions. In this thesis, I investigate the physics of star formation and feedback on the cloud scale and present contributions to the development of methods for this analysis. First, I assess the impact of noise, astrometric offsets and diffuse emission on measurements made with the "uncertainty principle for star formation". I present a physically motivated method for separating emission from compact structures and diffuse extended structure in an image. The method separates diffuse and compact emission via filtering in Fourier space, with a filter defined by the mean separation length between star forming regions. This method enables the determination of the molecular cloud lifecycle and the mean separation between star forming regions with the "uncertainty principle for star formation" in data containing a diffuse background component. Second, I present the application of the "uncertainty principle for star formation" to determine the lifecycles of molecular clouds in the nearby flocculent galaxy M33. These measurements indicate that clouds in M33 have lifetimes approximately once or twice the timescale for their collapse due to gravitational freefall. Subsequently clouds are dispersed by stellar feedback over a timescale that could allow the earliest supernovae to explode whilst still embedded in their natal clouds. Third, I present the decomposition of tracer images of the molecular and ionised gas in nine nearby galaxies into compact and diffuse components and thus determine the fraction of emission coming from these components. I then present a correlation analysis between these emission fractions and a number of parameters characterising the galaxies in the sample. Last, I summarise the work of the thesis and present some future prospects for extending analyses such as the work presented in this thesis to other galactic environments in the Nearby Universe and further out into cosmic history