Should we campaign against sex robots?

In September 2015 a well-publicised Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR) was launched. Modelled on the longer-standing Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, the CASR opposes the development of sex robots on the grounds that the technology is being developed with a particular model of female-male relations (the prostitute-john model) in mind, and that this will prove harmful in various ways. In this chapter, we consider carefully the merits of campaigning against such a technology. We make three main arguments. First, we argue that the particular claims advanced by the CASR are unpersuasive, partly due to a lack of clarity about the campaign’s aims and partly due to substantive defects in the main ethical objections put forward by campaign’s founder(s). Second, broadening our inquiry beyond the arguments proferred by the campaign itself, we argue that it would be very difficult to endorse a general campaign against sex robots unless one embraced a highly conservative attitude towards the ethics of sex, which is likely to be unpalatable to those who are active in the campaign. In making this argument we draw upon lessons from the campaign against killer robots. Finally, we conclude by suggesting that although a generalised campaign against sex robots is unwarranted, there are legitimate concerns that one can raise about the development of sex robots

Equality of Opportunity and the Distribution of Long-Run Income in Sweden

Equality of opportunity is an ethical goal with almost universal appeal. The interpretation taken here is that a society has achieved equality of opportunity if it is the case that what individuals accomplish, with respect to some desirable objective, is determined wholly by their choices and personal effort, rather than by circumstances beyond their control. We use data for Swedish men born between 1955 and 1967 for whom we measure the distribution of long-run income, as well as several important background circumstances, such as parental education and income, family structure and own IQ before adulthood. We address the question: in Sweden, given its present constellation of social policies and institutions, to what extent is existing income inequality due to circumstances, as opposed to 'effort'? Our results suggest that several circumstances, importantly both parental income and own IQ, are important for long-run income inequality, but that variations in individual effort account for the most part of that inequality.equality of opportunity, family background, inequality, long-run income

Combined riblet and lebu drag reduction system

The invention is a system of flow control devices which result in reduced skin friction on aerodynamic and hydrodynamic surfaces. The devices cause a breakup of large-scale disturbances in the boundary layer of the flow field. The riblet device acts to reduce disturbances near the boundary layer wall by the use of longitudinal striations forming V-shaped grooves. These grooves are dimensional on the order of the wall vortices and turbulent burst dimensions. The large eddy breakup device is a small strip or airfoil which is suspended in the upper region of the boundary layer. Various physical mechanisms cause a disruption of the large-scale vortices. The combination of the devices of this invention result in a substantial reduction in skin friction drag

Complexes of not ii-connected graphs

Complexes of (not) connected graphs, hypergraphs and their homology appear in the construction of knot invariants given by V. Vassiliev. In this paper we study the complexes of not $i$-connected $k$-hypergraphs on $n$ vertices. We show that the complex of not $2$-connected graphs has the homotopy type of a wedge of $(n-2)!$ spheres of dimension $2n-5$. This answers one of the questions raised by Vassiliev in connection with knot invariants. For this case the $S_n$-action on the homology of the complex is also determined. For complexes of not $2$-connected $k$-hypergraphs we provide a formula for the generating function of the Euler characteristic, and we introduce certain lattices of graphs that encode their topology. We also present partial results for some other cases. In particular, we show that the complex of not $(n-2)$-connected graphs is Alexander dual to the complex of partial matchings of the complete graph. For not $(n-3)$-connected graphs we provide a formula for the generating function of the Euler characteristic

Reconstructing Gene Trees From Fitch's Xenology Relation

Two genes are xenologs in the sense of Fitch if they are separated by at least one horizontal gene transfer event. Horizonal gene transfer is asymmetric in the sense that the transferred copy is distinguished from the one that remains within the ancestral lineage. Hence xenology is more precisely thought of as a non-symmetric relation: $y$ is xenologous to $x$ if $y$ has been horizontally transferred at least once since it diverged from the least common ancestor of $x$ and $y$. We show that xenology relations are characterized by a small set of forbidden induced subgraphs on three vertices. Furthermore, each xenology relation can be derived from a unique least-resolved edge-labeled phylogenetic tree. We provide a linear-time algorithm for the recognition of xenology relations and for the construction of its least-resolved edge-labeled phylogenetic tree. The fact that being a xenology relation is a heritable graph property, finally has far-reaching consequences on approximation problems associated with xenology relations

The Long Run Effects of Transformational Federal Policies: Redlining, the Affordable Care Act and Head Start

My dissertation research spans several subfields of applied microeconomics, including public, health and urban economics. In particular, my dissertation is concerned with identifying the longrun effects of large, transformational Federal policies. My research shows how increases in access to credit markets, early childhood education and medical care can influence the course of a person’s life. In the first chapter, my Job Market Paper, I show how racially motivated restrictions to credit markets implemented in the 1930s, which are colloquially called “redlining”, influence the present day distribution of crime. I employ two regression discontinuity (RD) designs. First, I use a spatial RD to show that redlining influenced the present day distribution of crime across neighborhoods in Los Angeles, California. Secondly, I use a city-level RD design that relies on an unannounced population cutoff used to determinate which cities were redline-mapped. I find both that redlining increased crime in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Los Angeles and that redline-mapping a city increased Black and Hispanic crime victimization in that city. I also find that redline-mapping increased city-level racial segregation, which suggests a mechanism through which credit-access restrictions could have influenced long-run crime volume. In the second chapter, which is a separate sole-authored paper, I exploit the staggered statelevel expansion of the Medicaid program (as allowed under the Affordable Care Act) as a natural experiment to ascertain whether increased access to medical services, including prescription drugs, increased opioid-related deaths. I also exploit the staggered stage-level legalization of marijuana to see whether the increased availability of an opioid substitute decreased opioid-related deaths. The state-level decision to expand Medicaid increased both opioid prescriptions and opioid-related deaths. These results vary strongly by demography, being driven largely by deaths of white men without college degrees. Overall, opioid accessibility shocks explain about 12,000 opioid deaths ii per year, or nearly a third of the death toll. The state-level decision to legalize recreational marijuana (a substitute painkiller) reduced opioid-related deaths. Overall, these opioid-substitute accessibility shocks also explain about 12,000 opioid deaths per year. I conclude that policy-makers can achieve reductions in opioid mortality without restricting access to opioids. Lastly, in the third chapter, a joint paper with Andrew Barr and Alex Smith, we use the staggered county-level implementation in the 1960s of a national early childhood education program called “Head Start” to show that access to early childhood education influences the likelihood of adulthood criminal behavior. We produce difference-in-difference estimates of the effect of Head Start availability in a child’s birth county on the likelihood of adulthood criminal conviction. Head Start availability reduces the likelihood of a serious conviction by age 35 by 1.3 percentage points, but only in high-poverty counties. This paper is the first to (1) provide large-scale evidence that early childhood education reduces later criminal behavior, (2) provide estimates that rely on administrative crime data to determine the effects of Head Start availability on later criminal behavior, and (3) estimate that, in high poverty counties, the discounted benefits generated by Head Start’s later crime reduction were greater than the costs of the program itself. Our results indicate a meaningful connection between targeted, large-scale early childhood education interventions and criminal behavior. These results provide evidence in support of recent state efforts to expand early childhood education, but point to large potential gains from targeting these efforts toward higher poverty areas

The Long Run Effects of Transformational Federal Policies: Redlining, the Affordable Care Act and Head Start

My dissertation research spans several subfields of applied microeconomics, including public, health and urban economics. In particular, my dissertation is concerned with identifying the longrun effects of large, transformational Federal policies. My research shows how increases in access to credit markets, early childhood education and medical care can influence the course of a person’s life. In the first chapter, my Job Market Paper, I show how racially motivated restrictions to credit markets implemented in the 1930s, which are colloquially called “redlining”, influence the present day distribution of crime. I employ two regression discontinuity (RD) designs. First, I use a spatial RD to show that redlining influenced the present day distribution of crime across neighborhoods in Los Angeles, California. Secondly, I use a city-level RD design that relies on an unannounced population cutoff used to determinate which cities were redline-mapped. I find both that redlining increased crime in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Los Angeles and that redline-mapping a city increased Black and Hispanic crime victimization in that city. I also find that redline-mapping increased city-level racial segregation, which suggests a mechanism through which credit-access restrictions could have influenced long-run crime volume. In the second chapter, which is a separate sole-authored paper, I exploit the staggered statelevel expansion of the Medicaid program (as allowed under the Affordable Care Act) as a natural experiment to ascertain whether increased access to medical services, including prescription drugs, increased opioid-related deaths. I also exploit the staggered stage-level legalization of marijuana to see whether the increased availability of an opioid substitute decreased opioid-related deaths. The state-level decision to expand Medicaid increased both opioid prescriptions and opioid-related deaths. These results vary strongly by demography, being driven largely by deaths of white men without college degrees. Overall, opioid accessibility shocks explain about 12,000 opioid deaths ii per year, or nearly a third of the death toll. The state-level decision to legalize recreational marijuana (a substitute painkiller) reduced opioid-related deaths. Overall, these opioid-substitute accessibility shocks also explain about 12,000 opioid deaths per year. I conclude that policy-makers can achieve reductions in opioid mortality without restricting access to opioids. Lastly, in the third chapter, a joint paper with Andrew Barr and Alex Smith, we use the staggered county-level implementation in the 1960s of a national early childhood education program called “Head Start” to show that access to early childhood education influences the likelihood of adulthood criminal behavior. We produce difference-in-difference estimates of the effect of Head Start availability in a child’s birth county on the likelihood of adulthood criminal conviction. Head Start availability reduces the likelihood of a serious conviction by age 35 by 1.3 percentage points, but only in high-poverty counties. This paper is the first to (1) provide large-scale evidence that early childhood education reduces later criminal behavior, (2) provide estimates that rely on administrative crime data to determine the effects of Head Start availability on later criminal behavior, and (3) estimate that, in high poverty counties, the discounted benefits generated by Head Start’s later crime reduction were greater than the costs of the program itself. Our results indicate a meaningful connection between targeted, large-scale early childhood education interventions and criminal behavior. These results provide evidence in support of recent state efforts to expand early childhood education, but point to large potential gains from targeting these efforts toward higher poverty areas

Grid-enabling FIRST: Speeding up simulation applications using WinGrid

The vision of grid computing is to make computational power, storage capacity, data and applications available to users as readily as electricity and other utilities. Grid infrastructures and applications have traditionally been geared towards dedicated, centralized, high performance clusters running on UNIX flavour operating systems (commonly referred to as cluster-based grid computing). This can be contrasted with desktop-based grid computing which refers to the aggregation of non-dedicated, de-centralized, commodity PCs connected through a network and running (mostly) the Microsoft Windowstrade operating system. Large scale adoption of such Windowstrade-based grid infrastructure may be facilitated via grid-enabling existing Windows applications. This paper presents the WinGridtrade approach to grid enabling existing Windowstrade based commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs). Through the use of a case study developed in conjunction with Ford Motor Company, the paper demonstrates how experimentation with the CSP Witnesstrade and FIRST can achieve a linear speedup when WinGridtrade is used to harness idle PC computing resources. This, combined with the lessons learned from the case study, has encouraged us to develop the Web service extensions to WinGridtrade. It is hoped that this would facilitate wider acceptance of WinGridtrade among enterprises having stringent security policies in place

Ion-Cyclotron Double Resonance

A charged particle in a uniform moving magnetic field H describes a circular orbit in a plance perpendicular to H with an angular frequency or "cyclotron frequency" omagae. When an alternating electric field E(t) is applied normal to H at omegae, the ions absorb energy from the alternating electric field, and are accelerated to larger velocities and orbital radii. [1] The absorption of energy from E(t) at the cyclotron resonance frequency can be conveniently detected using a marginal oscillator detector. When the ions accelerated by E(t) collide with other particles, they lose some of their excess energy. A mixture of ions and neutral molecules in the presence of H and E(t) then reaches a steady-state condition in which the energy gained by the ions from E(t) between collisions is lost to the neutral molecules in collisions