Autonomous Weapons and the Nature of Law and Morality: How Rule-of-Law-Values Require Automation of the Rule of Law

While Autonomous Weapons Systems have obvious military advantages, there are prima facie moral objections to using them. By way of general reply to these objections, I point out similarities between the structure of law and morality on the one hand and of automata on the other. I argue that these, plus the fact that automata can be designed to lack the biases and other failings of humans, require us to automate the formulation, administration, and enforcement of law as much as possible, including the elements of law and morality that are operated by combatants in war. I suggest that, ethically speaking, deploying a legally competent robot in some legally regulated realm is not much different from deploying a more or less well-armed, vulnerable, obedient, or morally discerning soldier or general into battle, a police officer onto patrol, or a lawyer or judge into a trial. All feature automaticity in the sense of deputation to an agent we do not then directly control. Such relations are well understood and well-regulated in morality and law; so there is not much challenging philosophically in having robots be some of these agents — excepting the implications of the limits of robot technology at a given time for responsible deputation. I then consider this proposal in light of the differences between two conceptions of law. These are distinguished by whether each conception sees law as unambiguous rules inherently uncontroversial in each application; and I consider the prospects for robotizing law on each. Likewise for the prospects of robotizing moral theorizing and moral decision-making. Finally I identify certain elements of law and morality, noted by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, which robots can participate in only upon being able to set ends and emotionally invest in their attainment. One conclusion is that while affectless autonomous devices might be fit to rule us, they would not be fit to vote with us. For voting is a process for summing felt preferences, and affectless devices would have none to weigh into the sum. Since they don't care which outcomes obtain, they don't get to vote on which ones to bring about

The Impact of Transiting Planet Science on the Next Generation of Direct-Imaging Planet Searches

Within the next five years, a number of direct-imaging planet search instruments, like the VLT SPHERE instrument, will be coming online. To successfully carry out their programs, these instruments will rely heavily on a-priori information on planet composition, atmosphere, and evolution. Transiting planet surveys, while covering a different semi-major axis regime, have the potential to provide critical foundations for these next-generation surveys. For example, improved information on planetary evolutionary tracks may significantly impact the insights that can be drawn from direct-imaging statistical data. Other high-impact results from transiting planet science include information on mass-to-radius relationships as well as atmospheric absorption bands. The marriage of transiting planet and direct-imaging results may eventually give us the first complete picture of planet migration, multiplicity, and general evolution.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, IAU Transiting Planets Proceedings, in pres

Strategy Workshops and Strategic Change

Despite the attention that strategic change as a topic of research has received, there remain considerable difficulties in conceptualizing the actual sources of strategic change. Strategy workshops represent one obvious and explicit research site since organizations often use such events as a means of effecting or initiating strategic change. This paper examines empirical data from ninety-nine strategy workshops in ten separate organizations to address the research question: Do strategy workshops produce strategic change? The paper concludes that workshops can produce change but that one-off workshops are much less effective than a series of workshops. The data presented indicates that the elapsed duration of the entire series of workshops, the frequency of workshops, the scope and autonomy of the unit concerned, and the seniority of participants have an impact on the success or failure of the venture

Status and performance of the Gemini Planet Imager adaptive optics system

The Gemini Planet Imager is a high-contrast near-infrared instrument specifically designed to image exoplanets and circumstellar disks over a narrow field of view. We use science data and AO telemetry taken during the first 1.5 yr of the GPI Exoplanet Survey to quantify the performance of the AO system. In a typical 60 sec H-band exposure, GPI achieves a 5$\sigma$ raw contrast of 10$^{-4}$ at 0.4"; typical final 5$\sigma$ contrasts for full 1 hr sequences are more than 10 times better than raw contrasts. We find that contrast is limited by bandwidth wavefront error over much of the PSF. Preliminary exploratory factor analysis can explain 60-70% of the variance in raw contrasts with combinations of seeing and wavefront error metrics. We also examine the effect of higher loop gains on contrast by comparing wavefront error maps reconstructed from AO telemetry to concurrent IFS images. These results point to several ways that GPI performance could be improved in software or hardware.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figure

Adaptive Optics Observations of Exoplanets, Brown Dwarfs, & Binary Stars

The current direct observations of brown dwarfs and exoplanets have been obtained using instruments not specifically designed for overcoming the large contrast ratio between the host star and any wide-separation faint companions. However, we are about to witness the birth of several new dedicated observing platforms specifically geared towards high contrast imaging of these objects. The Gemini Planet Imager, VLT-SPHERE, Subaru HiCIAO, and Project 1640 at the Palomar 5m telescope will return images of numerous exoplanets and brown dwarfs over hundreds of observing nights in the next five years. Along with diffraction-limited coronagraphs and high-order adaptive optics, these instruments also will return spectral and polarimetric information on any discovered targets, giving clues to their atmospheric compositions and characteristics. Such spectral characterization will be key to forming a detailed theory of comparative exoplanetary science which will be widely applicable to both exoplanets and brown dwarfs. Further, the prevalence of aperture masking interferometry in the field of high contrast imaging is also allowing observers to sense massive, young planets at solar system scales (~3-30 AU)---separations out of reach to conventional direct imaging techniques. Such observations can provide snapshots at the earliest phases of planet formation---information essential for constraining formation mechanisms as well as evolutionary models of planetary mass companions. As a demonstration of the power of this technique, I briefly review recent aperture masking observations of the HR 8799 system. Moreover, all of the aforementioned techniques are already extremely adept at detecting low-mass stellar companions to their target stars, and I present some recent highlights.Comment: Invited Review for IAU Symposium 28

Comparative Venture Capital Governance. Private versus Labour Sponsored Venture Capital Funds

Private independent limited partnership venture capital funds receive capital from institutional investors, without tax incentives. Limited partnership investment activities are governed by restrictive covenants that are determined by negotiated contract between the fund managers (general partners) and the institutional investors (limited partners). By contrast, Canadian Labour Sponsored Venture Capital Corporations (LSVCCs) receive capital only from individual investors who receive tax breaks on capital contributions of up to CAN$5,000. LSVCC investment activities are governed by statutory restrictions. This chapter contrasts the governance of LSVCCs to limited partnerships. We also summarize Canadian evidence on the impact of LSVCC governance and tax incentives: (1) on the distribution of venture capital funding between private and LSVCC funds; (2) on the unusually large overhang of uninvested capital in the Canadian venture capital industry; (3) the portfolio size (i.e. number of investee firms per fund) of private funds versus LSVCCs; and (4) the performance of LSVCCs relative to other types of venture capital organiziations and other comparable investments for individual investors.venture capital, Canada, tax, government, crowding out, portfolio size, governance

Risk Management for Nonprofits

Our research, based on the first comprehensive financial analysis of New York's nonprofit sector, found that 10% of the city's nonprofits were insolvent and 40% had virtually no cash reserves. Less than 30% were financially strong. If anything, things are getting harder, given market volatility, the move to value-based payments in health care, and increased costs for real estate and labor.Fortunately, we also discovered that nonprofits can take a few concrete steps to reduce their risk of failure and sustain vital programs:Make risk management an explicit responsibility of the audit and/or finance committee.Develop a risk-tolerance statement, indicating the limits for risk-taking and the willingness to trade short-term impact for longer-term sustainability.Keep a running list of major risks and the likelihood and expected loss for each.Put in place plans for how to maintain service in the event of a financial disaster, or even a "living will" that specifies how programs will be transferred to other providers (or wound down in an orderly fashion) in the event that recovery is not possible.Brief trustees regularly about longer-term trends in the operating environment.Periodically explore the potential benefits of various forms of organizational redesign, such as mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, partnerships, outsourcing, managed dissolutions, and divestments.Compare financial performance to peers on an annual basis.Develop explicit targets for operating results (margins, months of cash, etc.) and contingency plans if minimum targets are not met.Redouble efforts to build and safeguard a financial cushion or "rainy-day fund," even if doing so forces consideration of difficult programmatic trade-offs.Doing any of these will depend on a functioning partnership between capable management and a critical mass of experienced, educated and engaged board members. Therefore, organizations serious about risk management must work hard to recruit board members with a wide range of experience. They need to ensure ongoing education for both new and existing board members and to empower high-functioning committees. Many organizations, particularly large and complex ones, would also benefit from having an experienced nonprofit executive on their board

Exoplanet detection with simultaneous spectral differential imaging: effects of out-of-pupil-plane optical aberrations

Imaging faint companions (exoplanets and brown dwarfs) around nearby stars is currently limited by speckle noise. To efficiently attenuate this noise, a technique called simultaneous spectral differential imaging (SSDI) can be used. This technique consists of acquiring simultaneously images of the field of view in several adjacent narrow bands and in combining these images to suppress speckles. Simulations predict that SSDI can achieve, with the acquisition of three wavelengths, speckle noise attenuation of several thousands. These simulations are usually performed using the Fraunhofer approximation, i.e. considering that all aberrations are located in the pupil plane. We have performed wavefront propagation simulations to evaluate how out-of-pupil-plane aberrations affect SSDI speckle noise attenuation performance. The Talbot formalism is used to give a physical insight of the problem; results are confirmed using a proper wavefront propagation algorithm. We will show that near-focal-plane aberrations can significantly reduce SSDI speckle noise attenuation performance at several lambda/D separation. It is also shown that the Talbot effect correctly predicts the PSF chromaticity. Both differential atmospheric refraction effects and the use of a coronagraph will be discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. To be published in Proc. SPIE Vol. 6269, p. 1147-1157, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy; Ian S. McLean, Masanori Iye; Ed

Confidence Level and Sensitivity Limits in High Contrast Imaging

In long adaptive optics corrected exposures, exoplanet detections are currently limited by speckle noise originating from the telescope and instrument optics, and it is expected that such noise will also limit future high-contrast imaging instruments for both ground and space-based telescopes. Previous theoretical analysis have shown that the time intensity variations of a single speckle follows a modified Rician. It is first demonstrated here that for a circular pupil this temporal intensity distribution also represents the speckle spatial intensity distribution at a fix separation from the point spread function center; this fact is demonstrated using numerical simulations for coronagraphic and non-coronagraphic data. The real statistical distribution of the noise needs to be taken into account explicitly when selecting a detection threshold appropriate for some desired confidence level. In this paper, a technique is described to obtain the pixel intensity distribution of an image and its corresponding confidence level as a function of the detection threshold. Using numerical simulations, it is shown that in the presence of speckles noise, a detection threshold up to three times higher is required to obtain a confidence level equivalent to that at 5sigma for Gaussian noise. The technique is then tested using TRIDENT CFHT and angular differential imaging NIRI Gemini adaptive optics data. It is found that the angular differential imaging technique produces quasi-Gaussian residuals, a remarkable result compared to classical adaptive optic imaging. A power-law is finally derived to predict the 1-3*10^-7 confidence level detection threshold when averaging a partially correlated non-Gaussian noise.Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures, accepted to Ap