You Can\u27t Fight City Hall: Organization and Success in West Virginia

This research centers on the question of \u27Who wins?\u27 in criminal and civil cases heard by West Virginia\u27s Supreme Court of Appeals. The study examines litigant characteristics and whether court winners are favored by virtue of their higher organizational levels, such as being business or government affiliates. The study is a partial small-scale replication of the prior research by Songer and Sheehan (1992) who determined that litigation resources that resulted from higher organizational levels predicated higher win rates in the United States Courts of Appeals. I utilized an array of cross-tabulations of success and litigant organization for a two-year sample of appeals ( N=434) and also compared winning with a measure of organizational superiority. Results garnered support for the theoretical proposition of Donald Black (1976), which states that law will react more harshly toward less organization, and more favorably toward more organization. Study findings suggest that higher organizational levels did realize greater success for litigants in West Virginia\u27s appellate courts for the 2011-2012 term. The study also utilized a more detailed and complex approximation of litigant organizational levels that may be useful in further research exploring the relationship of organization with court success

Getting up: an ethnography of hip hop graffiti writers, their art, and perceptions of society\u27s reactions.

This ethnographic analysis of the modern hip hop graffiti writing subculture connects the separate but complementary theoretical constructs of serious leisure (Stebbins 1982), dark leisure (Smith and Raymen 2016), recreational specialization theory (Bryan 1977), and edgework (Lyng 1990) and situates the writer “standpoint” (Smith 1987) in terms of interrelations of policy and written discourse. Past research found that writers were motivated by fame and status, to express artistic skills, and to control and destroy space (Brewer and Miller 1990). Others found that writers sought to express contestant notions of style and resist economic and political authority (Ferrell 1996; 2006), and some emphasize affective aspects of accomplishment and desire in graffiti (Halsey and Young 2006). Policy research indicates wide misunderstandings of graffiti and its inclusion under a ‘gang’ label (Ferrell 1996), and cities increasingly favor “wars on graffiti” (Iveson 2010) where ineffective anti-graffiti campaigns justified in “broken windows” ideals often result in increasing illegal graffiti (Haworth, Bruce, and Iveson 2013). Interviews of policy officials of a mid-sized Midwestern city revealed varying views, preferences, and understandings of graffiti, and city ordinance criminalized all unsanctioned graffiti. Interview data from a snowball sample of writers indicated dynamic motives, views, and practices and three writer classes. A key finding is as writers specialized on a career trajectory, a shift in focus occurred from writing for thrill to writing for flow. Motives were consistent with past research, and the subculture regulated its membership via social control and mentoring. Further, socialization was a central part of progression, and writing occurred as “everyday forms of resistance” (Scott 1984), edgework, serious leisure, and recreation specialization. To acknowledge these nuances through policy may benefit the public, engage writer voices, and reduce fear by increasing awareness and public exposure to graffiti, potentially disassociating it from ‘master vandal’ or gang status

Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit

Practical quantum computing will require error rates that are well below what is achievable with physical qubits. Quantum error correction offers a path to algorithmically-relevant error rates by encoding logical qubits within many physical qubits, where increasing the number of physical qubits enhances protection against physical errors. However, introducing more qubits also increases the number of error sources, so the density of errors must be sufficiently low in order for logical performance to improve with increasing code size. Here, we report the measurement of logical qubit performance scaling across multiple code sizes, and demonstrate that our system of superconducting qubits has sufficient performance to overcome the additional errors from increasing qubit number. We find our distance-5 surface code logical qubit modestly outperforms an ensemble of distance-3 logical qubits on average, both in terms of logical error probability over 25 cycles and logical error per cycle ($2.914\%\pm 0.016\%$ compared to $3.028\%\pm 0.023\%$). To investigate damaging, low-probability error sources, we run a distance-25 repetition code and observe a $1.7\times10^{-6}$ logical error per round floor set by a single high-energy event ($1.6\times10^{-7}$ when excluding this event). We are able to accurately model our experiment, and from this model we can extract error budgets that highlight the biggest challenges for future systems. These results mark the first experimental demonstration where quantum error correction begins to improve performance with increasing qubit number, illuminating the path to reaching the logical error rates required for computation.Comment: Main text: 6 pages, 4 figures. v2: Update author list, references, Fig. S12, Table I

Non-Abelian braiding of graph vertices in a superconducting processor

Indistinguishability of particles is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics. For all elementary and quasiparticles observed to date - including fermions, bosons, and Abelian anyons - this principle guarantees that the braiding of identical particles leaves the system unchanged. However, in two spatial dimensions, an intriguing possibility exists: braiding of non-Abelian anyons causes rotations in a space of topologically degenerate wavefunctions. Hence, it can change the observables of the system without violating the principle of indistinguishability. Despite the well developed mathematical description of non-Abelian anyons and numerous theoretical proposals, the experimental observation of their exchange statistics has remained elusive for decades. Controllable many-body quantum states generated on quantum processors offer another path for exploring these fundamental phenomena. While efforts on conventional solid-state platforms typically involve Hamiltonian dynamics of quasi-particles, superconducting quantum processors allow for directly manipulating the many-body wavefunction via unitary gates. Building on predictions that stabilizer codes can host projective non-Abelian Ising anyons, we implement a generalized stabilizer code and unitary protocol to create and braid them. This allows us to experimentally verify the fusion rules of the anyons and braid them to realize their statistics. We then study the prospect of employing the anyons for quantum computation and utilize braiding to create an entangled state of anyons encoding three logical qubits. Our work provides new insights about non-Abelian braiding and - through the future inclusion of error correction to achieve topological protection - could open a path toward fault-tolerant quantum computing