The ethics of border guarding: a first exploration and a research agenda for the future

Although the notion of universal human rights allows for the idea that states (and supranational organizations such as the European Union) can, or even should, control and impose restrictions on migration, both notions clearly do not sit well together. The ensuing tension manifests itself in our ambivalent attitude towards migration, but also affects the border guards who have to implement national and supranational policies on migration. Little has been written on the ethics that has to guide these border guards in their work. Juxtaposing the ethics of border guarding against the ethics of the somewhat related military profession, this article attempts to (a) describe border guarding as a comparatively rule-guided profession; (b) outline the aim and basis of the ethics education that prepares border guards for their work; and (c) propose a research agenda for the future that should further our understanding of (a) and (b), but also help us improve the moral education of border guards

Persistent homology of quantum entanglement

Structure in quantum entanglement entropy is often leveraged to focus on a small corner of the exponentially large Hilbert space and efficiently parameterize the problem of finding ground states. A typical example is the use of matrix product states for local and gapped Hamiltonians. We study the structure of entanglement entropy using persistent homology, a relatively new method from the field of topological data analysis. The inverse quantum mutual information between pairs of sites is used as a distance metric to form a filtered simplicial complex. Both ground states and excited states of common spin models are analyzed as an example. Furthermore, the effect of homology with different coefficients and boundary conditions is also explored. Beyond these basic examples, we also discuss the promising future applications of this modern computational approach, including its connection to the question of how spacetime could emerge from entanglement.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figure

Yvonne Chiu: Conspiring with the Enemy: The Ethic of Cooperation in Warfare. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 344.)

Clausewitz made the intuitively appealing claim that wars tend to “absoluteness,” and that all limitations imposed by law and morality are in theory alien to it. Clausewitz of course knew that there are in practice many limitations to how wars are fought, but he saw them as contingent to what war is. Since then, however, historians such as John Lynn (Battle: A History of Combat and Culture [Westview Press, 2003]), John Keegan (A History of Warfare ([Random House,1993]) and Victor Davis Hanson (The Western Way of War [Oxford University Press, 1989]) have taught us to see things differently: war is a cultural phenomenon, and the limitations that rituals and taboos impose are essential to what war is. With Conspiring with the Enemy, her intelligent and erudite book on cooperation in war, Yvonne Chiu builds on that work by showing the wide variety of forms cooperation in war can take—something that, Chiu claims, we tend to overlook and take for granted at the same time

Integrity, Moral Courage and Innere Führung

The aim of this paper is to examine the usefulness of the somewhat related notions of integrity, moral courage, and Innere Führung (the leadership concept used by the German military) as a means of making military personnel behave ethically. Of these three notions, integrity is mentioned most often within military organizations, and the largest part of what follows is therefore devoted to a description of what integrity is, and what the drawbacks of this notion are for the military. This will lead us to conclude that integrity in its most common meaning is too vague and subjective to be of much use to the military. It is because of these drawbacks that this paper looks into moral courage and Innere Führung as possible alternatives for integrity

Accounting for surface temperature variations in Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard convection

Turbulent Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard convection is often modelled with a constant surface temperature. However, the surface temperature of many geophysical systems, such as lakes, is coupled to the atmospheric forcing. In this paper, we account for this dynamic surface temperature through an additional parameter $\beta$. Using an appropriately defined dynamical Rayleigh number \RaD, we recover many of the results from the standard Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard model. We hope that this work will simplify the application of Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard theory in geophysical contexts, such as lakes.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Risks, Robots, and the Honorableness of the Military Profession

1. Introduction 2. What honor is 3. Honor in the military 4. The use of robots and the honorableness of the military profession 5. Conclusio

Band gap prediction for large organic crystal structures with machine learning

Machine-learning models are capable of capturing the structure-property relationship from a dataset of computationally demanding ab initio calculations. Over the past two years, the Organic Materials Database (OMDB) has hosted a growing number of calculated electronic properties of previously synthesized organic crystal structures. The complexity of the organic crystals contained within the OMDB, which have on average 82 atoms per unit cell, makes this database a challenging platform for machine learning applications. In this paper, the focus is on predicting the band gap which represents one of the basic properties of a crystalline materials. With this aim, a consistent dataset of 12 500 crystal structures and their corresponding DFT band gap are released, freely available for download at https://omdb.mathub.io/dataset. An ensemble of two state-of-the-art models reach a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.388 eV, which corresponds to a percentage error of 13% for an average band gap of 3.05 eV. Finally, the trained models are employed to predict the band gap for 260 092 materials contained within the Crystallography Open Database (COD) and made available online so that the predictions can be obtained for any arbitrary crystal structure uploaded by a user.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure