Playing Politics with Schengen

The European Commission has been at the forefront of criticism of France and Denmark for re-introducing border controls. This was not because they in fact threatened Schengen but because such decisions undermine the Commission’s power as the executive of Europe

Entry Denied: Revolution in North Africa and the Continued Centrality of Migration to European Responses

The recent revolutions in Tunisia and Libya have brought the issue of trans-Mediterranean migration to the forefront of popular discussions about Europe’s relationship with its immediate neighbors in the Middle East and North Africa. It was on the back of hyperbolic and cataclysmic predictions of Europe being “swamped” by migrants that the case for intervention in Libya was partly made and following this, a number of EU member states have agreed on a temporary suspension of the Schengen Agreement

Searching for accountability in EU migration-management practices

The uprisings in North Africa, the subsequent increase in migrants crossing the Mediterranean and the cataclysmic predictions about an end to the Schengen acquis has highlighted a hitherto under-investigated policy practice of the EU: migration-management. Polly Pallister-Wilkins scrutinizes current practices in search of accountability

Criticism of EU-Libya migration policy is too little, too late

An EU-Libya framework agreement signed in 2010 is only the tip of the iceberg of shameful EU extraterritorialised migration-management, argues Polly Pallister-Wilkin

Master Teacher Interview - Mrs. Lucille Luckey

Master Teacher Interview - Mrs. Lucille Luckey.https://scholars.fhsu.edu/ors/1216/thumbnail.jp

Optimal verification of entangled states with local measurements

Consider the task of verifying that a given quantum device, designed to produce a particular entangled state, does indeed produce that state. One natural approach would be to characterise the output state by quantum state tomography; or alternatively to perform some kind of Bell test, tailored to the state of interest. We show here that neither approach is optimal amongst local verification strategies for two qubit states. We find the optimal strategy in this case and show that quadratically fewer total measurements are needed to verify to within a given fidelity than in published results for quantum state tomography, Bell test, or fidelity estimation protocols. We also give efficient verification protocols for any stabilizer state. Additionally, we show that requiring that the strategy be constructed from local, non-adaptive and non-collective measurements only incurs a constant-factor penalty over a strategy without these restrictions.Comment: Document includes supplemental material. Main paper: 5 pages, 2 figs; supplemental material: 16 pages, 2 fig

BEEBS: Open Benchmarks for Energy Measurements on Embedded Platforms

This paper presents and justifies an open benchmark suite named BEEBS, targeted at evaluating the energy consumption of embedded processors. We explore the possible sources of energy consumption, then select individual benchmarks from contemporary suites to cover these areas. Version one of BEEBS is presented here and contains 10 benchmarks that cover a wide range of typical embedded applications. The benchmark suite is portable across diverse architectures and is freely available. The benchmark suite is extensively evaluated, and the properties of its constituent programs are analysed. Using real hardware platforms we show case examples which illustrate the difference in power dissipation between three processor architectures and their related ISAs. We observe significant differences in the average instruction dissipation between the architectures of 4.4x, specifically 170uW/MHz (ARM Cortex-M0), 65uW/MHz (Adapteva Epiphany) and 88uW/MHz (XMOS XS1-L1)

Optimizing the flash-RAM energy trade-off in deeply embedded systems

Deeply embedded systems often have the tightest constraints on energy consumption, requiring that they consume tiny amounts of current and run on batteries for years. However, they typically execute code directly from flash, instead of the more energy efficient RAM. We implement a novel compiler optimization that exploits the relative efficiency of RAM by statically moving carefully selected basic blocks from flash to RAM. Our technique uses integer linear programming, with an energy cost model to select a good set of basic blocks to place into RAM, without impacting stack or data storage. We evaluate our optimization on a common ARM microcontroller and succeed in reducing the average power consumption by up to 41% and reducing energy consumption by up to 22%, while increasing execution time. A case study is presented, where an application executes code then sleeps for a period of time. For this example we show that our optimization could allow the application to run on battery for up to 32% longer. We also show that for this scenario the total application energy can be reduced, even if the optimization increases the execution time of the code

Less is More: Exploiting the Standard Compiler Optimization Levels for Better Performance and Energy Consumption

This paper presents the interesting observation that by performing fewer of the optimizations available in a standard compiler optimization level such as -O2, while preserving their original ordering, significant savings can be achieved in both execution time and energy consumption. This observation has been validated on two embedded processors, namely the ARM Cortex-M0 and the ARM Cortex-M3, using two different versions of the LLVM compilation framework; v3.8 and v5.0. Experimental evaluation with 71 embedded benchmarks demonstrated performance gains for at least half of the benchmarks for both processors. An average execution time reduction of 2.4% and 5.3% was achieved across all the benchmarks for the Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M3 processors, respectively, with execution time improvements ranging from 1% up to 90% over the -O2. The savings that can be achieved are in the same range as what can be achieved by the state-of-the-art compilation approaches that use iterative compilation or machine learning to select flags or to determine phase orderings that result in more efficient code. In contrast to these time consuming and expensive to apply techniques, our approach only needs to test a limited number of optimization configurations, less than 64, to obtain similar or even better savings. Furthermore, our approach can support multi-criteria optimization as it targets execution time, energy consumption and code size at the same time.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 71 benchmarks used for evaluatio

An economic study of elementary: education in county Durham in the early part of the nineteenth century

In the early years of the century the funds for public elementary education came principally from the charities which had been established in the previous centuries, the best local examples being those associated with the Blue Coats and with Lord Crewe. Crewe's work In County Durham was continued and surpassed in value by Bishop Barrington's efforts in the first two decades of the 19th Century, especially in his relationship with the Barrington Schools, the Weardale Schools Committee and the Diocesan School Society. Between 1810 and 1850 the National Society became predominant in the public sector of elementary education in County Durham, the other societies being dwarfed by its efforts. But by 1850the State v/as beginning to accept the leading position as a provider of funds for elementary education. Of less significance in money value was the philanthropic work of industry, such as that of the lead companies, the Londonderry family, the coal-owners and the iron-masters. The poor children in the workhouses, were either educated in workhouse schools if these existed or at schools nearby. Supplementing these efforts was the private sector of education where large numbers of small schools educated, at times, as many children as were to be found in total in other schools. An estimate of the amount spent on elementary education out of National Income in 1851 gives about 0.3 per.cent, as compared with approximately 1,3 percent, today. In the context of disease, poverty, malnutrition and inadequate sanitation such as existed in the mid-19th Century the 0.3 per cent seems to represent a greater sacrifice in economic terms than the 1.3 per.cent, does today