The impact of algorithms on legitimacy in sentencing

This paper explores current and future possible uses of algorithms in sentencing and assesses the likely impact of their use on penal legitimacy. The focus is on sentencing in England and Wales, although examples from the United States, where the use of algorithms in sentencing is more extensive, are also considered. An understanding of legitimacy grounded in procedural fairness is used, with a particular focus on two key factors affecting fairness: bias and transparency. It is concluded that the use of algorithms in sentencing increases bias and decreases transparency, adversely affecting the fairness of the sentencing process and weakening penal legitimacy. The paper is intended to contribute to wider discussions on sentencing and the use of algorithms in criminal justice and may therefore appeal to academics in these areas, criminal justice practitioners and policymakers considering further development of algorithmic tools in sentencing

Single-Photon Switch based on Rydberg Blockade

All-optical switching is a technique in which a gate light pulse changes the transmission of a target light pulse without the detour via electronic signal processing. We take this to the quantum regime, where the incoming gate light pulse contains only one photon on average. The gate pulse is stored as a Rydberg excitation in an ultracold atomic gas using electromagnetically induced transparency. Rydberg blockade suppresses the transmission of the subsequent target pulse. Finally, the stored gate photon can be retrieved. A retrieved photon heralds successful storage. The corresponding postselected subensemble shows an extinction of 0.05. The single-photon switch offers many interesting perspectives ranging from quantum communication to quantum information processing

Single-Photon Transistor Using a F\"orster Resonance

An all-optical transistor is a device in which a gate light pulse switches the transmission of a target light pulse with a gain above unity. The gain quantifies the change of the transmitted target photon number per incoming gate photon. We study the quantum limit of one incoming gate photon and observe a gain of 20. The gate pulse is stored as a Rydberg excitation in an ultracold gas. The transmission of the subsequent target pulse is suppressed by Rydberg blockade which is enhanced by a F\"orster resonance. The detected target photons reveal in a single shot with a fidelity above 0.86 whether a Rydberg excitation was created during the gate pulse. The gain offers the possibility to distribute the transistor output to the inputs of many transistors, thus making complex computational tasks possible

Can Restorative Justice provide a solution to the problem of incoherence in sentencing?

Current sentencing practice in England and Wales is incoherent. This stems from the combination of conflicting philosophies of punishment, with no clear method adopted by sentencers in choosing between them. This presents a significant challenge as sentencing can have a profound impact on an offender’s life, as well as having wider implications for family members. Therefore, a coherent decision-making process is essential in order to limit arbitrary sentencing and support the legitimacy of the penal system. This thesis argues that Restorative Justice might offer a more coherent decision-making process. Restorative Justice is hypothesised to operate as a kind of mediation process between the philosophies of punishment and understandings of justice held by participants. Their voluntarily agreed outcome should therefore represent the best possible compromise between participants’ ideas of justice and philosophies of punishment. Analysis of existing empirical research has been undertaken, involving the examination of existing studies of Restorative Justice in Northern Ireland, England and Wales, Australia and New Zealand. This empirical research has explored problems which can arise in practice for the theoretical conception of Restorative Justice as a mediation process between ideas. The thesis concludes that Restorative Justice can in theory offer a more coherent process of sentencing, but that there are a number of obstacles to realising this in practice

Investigation of biomass gasification and effects of ammonia on producer gas combustion

Energy security and global climate change are two of the greatest challenges that face the next century and it will be up to this generation to figure out a solution to these monumental challenges. Nearly everything ranging from commerce to travel to education relies on abundant and cheap energy to function and progress. For the last 150 years, this energy has come through the combustion of fossil fuels which are limited by their very nature. As these fuels are combusted to produce heat and power, various harmful gasses are emitted into the atmosphere and can lead to acid rain, smog, depletion of the ozone layer, and even a heating of the earth\u27s surface. Gasification of biomass provides one possible solution to both of these problems by utilizing a renewable energy source that is abundant and has the potential to be carbon negative. NOx emissions are regulated by the government and could potentially be the limiting factor on the potential of biomass gasification to have a major impact in overcoming the two greatest challenges of today. It is believed one of the primary causes of NOx emissions is due to nitrogen found in the feedstock that is gasified. This work is aimed at both developing the tools necessary to understand the detailed systems involved in biomass gasification, as well as to characterize the NOx emissions that result from the combustion of the biomass-derived producer gas. In the current work, a two-fold approach is taken to address this issue. First, a process model is created utilizing the software Aspen Plus to simulate data taken from a pilot-scale gasification system utilizing maple and oak wood as the feedstock and air as the gasification medium. This model uses a mass balance approach to simulate the gasification process. A system of cyclones filter out the particulate matter in the producer gas before the gas is burned. Second, the effects of fuel-NOx are studied experimentally utilizing a newly developed lab-scale, low-swirl combustion apparatus. This combustion apparatus is first tested using natural gas that contains low concentrations of ammonia for four swirlers with varying effective areas. A single swirler is chosen to conduct tests to analyze the effect of ammonia concentration on NOx emissions from the producer gas. Results of the current work can be summarized as follows. (1) A biomass gasification model was created to model the gasification of wood feedstock. This model shows very good agreement with experimental results for all components except hydrogen in the producer gas. (2) For the swirlers studied, NOx emissions are reduced as the swirl strength increases. (3) For a natural gas flame, both the equivalence ratio and effect of thermal NOx are important considerations when trying to achieve low NOx emissions. (4) For the combustion of producer gas, higher equivalence ratios reduce the overall NOx emissions. The above results show the need for a greater understanding of producer gas combustion in low-swirl burners for a wide variety of compositions in order to better control overall emissions in the future

Investigation of fundamental transport and physicochemical phenomena in lignocellulosic fast pyrolysis

Fast pyrolysis of biomass has the potential for high-yield production of valuable fuels and chemicals from renewable biological and agricultural waste feedstocks. Optimization of this technology is dependent on developing a deeper understanding of the complex transport and kinetic phenomena which drive product formation. In this dissertation, direct, time-resolved imaging of feedstock degradation and product formation mechanisms for the pyrolysis of whole biomass and several of its components has been made inside an optically accessible pyrolysis reactor. The reactor thermal and transport characterization allows the determination of dominant mechanisms of pyrolysis product formation in the multiphase reacting environment. This novel investigation of biomass pyrolysis simultaneously captures relevant transport and kinetic phenomena including melt, agglomeration, ejection, evaporation and condensation throughout the pyrolysis of solid biomass feedstocks and the surrounding reactive environment. A novel pyrolysis reactor was developed in order to provide four-sided optical access to probe near-particle surface phenomena. The reactor and pyrolysis conditions were characterized using multiple techniques in order to better understand the relevant transport and kinetic limitations from which to interpret the imaging results. Condensed-phase products were analyzed via gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) to verify product compositions obtained using the optically accessible reactor match those observed in other small-scale test reactors. Acetone planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) temperature measurements and multi-point thermocouple mapping provide a detailed thermal profile of the reaction environment and the convectively driven transport near the reaction filament. A line heat source conductivity measurement was developed and used to characterize the biomass feedstock effective conductivity in order to understand heat transport through the biomass sample from the heated filament strip. These studies indicate non-isothermal pyrolysis conditions with both heat and mass transfer limitations which must be accounted for in the interpretation of results - as is common in many pyrolysis reactors. Planar Mie scattering of product condensation across a well characterized thermal boundary layer allows for time resolved tracking of product formation through distinct condensation bands which are attributed to unique classes of compounds. Correlating the time-resolved condensation scattering signal to simultaneous color micro-scale imaging of feedstock morphological changes allows for developing an understanding of the physical and chemical mechanisms which drive product formation during the pyrolysis of biomass. Dominant transport appears to occur via evaporation and condensation/re-polymerization reactions with minimal contribution from ejection of large aerosols/droplets. In order to elucidate the nature and timescales of the transport of evaporated products away from the reacting biomass sample, a planar fluorescence imaging technique was utilized coincident with planar Mie scattering imaging in order to track the product stream prior to and after Mie scattering signal is apparent from chemical condensation in the thermal boundary layer. Three excitation wavelengths (532 nm, 355nm, 266nm) generated from a 10 Hz Nd:YAG laser were used to probe the volume directly above the pyrolyzing biomass. Differences in the timescales of product/intermediate formation were observed and correlated with the primary observed condensed phase products via Mie scattering. In order to further explore the nature of the primary aerosols and droplets from biomass fast pyrolysis, products were collected directly above the reacting biomass sample and electron and fluorescence microscopy were used to explore the condensed products. Through time-resolved observation of fast pyrolysis of whole red oak, cellulose, and lignin, comparisons among the mechanisms and timescales of thermal degradation and product formation have been made. Single component studies may aid in building a comprehensive understanding of whole biomass pyrolysis but the application of these results must be framed within the context of the complex physicochemical characteristics unique to each feedstock and the specific reaction and transport limitations for a given system. Observations such as those presented in this dissertation indicate that predictive modeling efforts should incorporate the full complexity of biomass pyrolysis and include dynamics of the bulk systems in addition to pure kinetic results. For the pyrolysis regime utilized in this study where kinetic and transport effects both contribute, particle size, degree of polymerization, molecular complexity of the pseudo-components and feedstock compositional and structural variations were shown to influence the phenomena governing the conversion process

"The Intangible Commons of the Mind"? The Problem of Dualism in Narratives of Information Enclosure.

In this thesis, I argue that the nascent politics of Intellectual Property is poorly served through attempts to conceive IP rights as an “enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind” and highlight a number of problems with the enclosure/commons dialectic more generally. To this end, it tries to indicate some new possible directions for the politics of IP, based on the insights of pragmatist philosophy and Actor-Network Theory. Such insights, I argue, allow us to interrogate questions about IP along two axes that the enclosure/commons dialectic neglects. A move away from the “intangible commons” allows us to focus on the very material way in which many of the harms of IP rights play out, and on IP's contentious function as a regualtor of objects, bodies and technologies. Second, it allows for an interrogation of the epistemological question of whether knowledge is considered to have been created or discovered, a distinction which is of vital importance to the question of whether any give sort of knowledge will be protected by an IP right. In order to address these difficulties, I argue that, instead of seeing knowledge as a sort of substance, we should instead see it in terms of practice and relations. Ideas, I argue, are not things, but assemblages of materials. This perspective is developed and illustrated through a number of case studies. I examine the history of copyright, showing that its emergence was not as a means of granting rights to ideas, but instead as a method of controlling the circulation of books. The notion of knowledge as a substance, I argue, was introduced only later, as a way of legitimating and naturalising this system. I offer a similar account of the information commons, an idea that developed from the tendency to frame issues of internet regulation in terms of applying the law to a particular place – cyberspace. Finally, I examine the controversy surrounding the Google Book Search project. I argue that the attempted settlement should be understood as a combination of two different systems of control. Again, the language of substance obscures this insight, presenting the settlement as a compromise over access to knowledge. I conclude by arguing that this theoretical critique is also a political critique – that a politics of IP which gave up on the idea of knowledge of substance would necessarily have to focus more on the specific parties and practices that are threatened by IP rights

The impact of algorithms on legitimacy in sentencing

This paper explores current and future possible uses of algorithms in sentencing and assesses the likely impact of their use on penal legitimacy. The focus is on sentencing in England and Wales, although examples from the United States, where the use of algorithms in sentencing is more extensive, are also considered. An understanding of legitimacy grounded in procedural fairness is used, with a particular focus on two key factors affecting fairness: bias and transparency. It is concluded that the use of algorithms in sentencing increases bias and decreases transparency, adversely affecting the fairness of the sentencing process and weakening penal legitimacy. The paper is intended to contribute to wider discussions on sentencing and the use of algorithms in criminal justice and may therefore appeal to academics in these areas, criminal justice practitioners and policymakers considering further development of algorithmic tools in sentencing

Restorative Justice, Consistency and Proportionality: Examining the Trade-off

Restorative justice conferences that operate as sentencing mechanisms involve the making of a trade-off between empowering lay participants to make their own decisions, and the requirements of consistency and proportionality, which are established principles of sentencing. In current restorative justice practice, this trade-off tends to be made more in favour of consistency and proportionality, at the expense of the empowerment of lay participants. Empowerment is central to key benefits of restorative justice, such as reducing recidivism and increasing victim satisfaction. However, its importance to the effectiveness of restorative justice is not always properly acknowledged. In addition to this lack of acknowledgment, there are both conceptual and practical problems with the principles of consistency and proportionality (particularly in the way that they are presented when considered in relation to restorative justice) that are often overlooked. As a result, the tendency is for assumptions to be made about the necessary supremacy of these principles over empowerment. This paper urges more acknowledgement of the importance of empowerment in restorative justice, together with a greater appreciation of the problems with consistency and proportionality, with a view to challenging assumptions about the way that the trade-off must be made