Justice and security in the United Kingdom

This paper outlines the ways in which the United Kingdom manages civil litigation concerning sensitive national security material. These are: the common law of public interest immunity; the use of closed material procedure and special advocates; and the secret hearings of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. With these existing alternatives in mind the paper analyses the background to, the reasons for, and the controversies associated with the Justice and Security Act 2013, enacted in the wake of the UK Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling in Al Rawi v Security Service

What’s left of the political constitution?

This paper argues that we should move on from what has become a rather outdated contrast between the political constitution and the legal constitution. Taking as its focus the constitution of the United Kingdom, the paper analyzes the contemporary constitutional order as a mixed system of politics and law combined. It argues that such a mix may be a more compelling and attractive system than either the model of the political constitution or that of the legal constitution

The Guardianship of the public interest: a British tale of contestable administrative law

No abstract available

Nature tables: Discovering Children's interest in natural objects

Primary school pupils in the UK today may be less familiar with natural objects, less exposed to formal natural history teaching and have less time given to school-based observation and discussion of natural objects. This study of children’s responses to a ‘Nature Table’ of displayed natural objects was designed to assess pupils’ knowledge of those objects, the sources of their knowledge and the phenomenological nature of those children’s interest in items which they selected to talk about or to photograph. Children in the study were drawn from the first year of formal schooling (age 5-6) and the fifth year of formal schooling (age 9-10). Responses have been recorded and analysed using a simple systemic network. Results show that pupils are attracted most towards items with: an animate or novel nature or appearance, or for which they have some prior familiarity. Items are also attractive if they have aesthetic attributes, which display some responsiveness to the child or engage with the child’s previous experience, or elicit affective feeling. The present study reveals a greater home-based, rather than school-based, source for much of this experience and suggests how the criteria for teachers selecting natural objects for learning in school might be improved

Learning a mixture of two multinomial logits

The classical Multinomial Logit (MNL) is a behavioral model for user choice. In this model, a user is offered a slate of choices (a subset of a finite universe of n items), and selects exactly one item from the slate, each with probability proportional to its (positive) weight. Given a set of observed slates and choices, the likelihood-maximizing item weights are easy to learn at scale, and easy to interpret. However, the model fails to represent common real-world behavior. As a result, researchers in user choice often turn to mixtures of MNLs, which are known to approximate a large class of models of rational user behavior. Unfortunately, the only known algorithms for this problem have been heuristic in nature. In this paper we give the first polynomial-time algorithms for exact learning of uniform mixtures of two MNLs. Interestingly, the parameters of the model can be learned for any n by sampling the behavior of random users only on slates of sizes 2 and 3; in contrast, we show that slates of size 2 are insufficient by themselves

Discrete choice, permutations, and reconstruction

In this paper we study the well-known family of Random Utility Models, developed over 50 years ago to codify rational user behavior in choosing one item from a finite set of options. In this setting each user draws i.i.d. from some distribution a utility function mapping each item in the universe to a real-valued utility. The user is then offered a subset of the items, and selects theone of maximum utility. A Max-Dist oracle for this choice model takes any subset of items and returns the probability (over the distribution of utility functions) that each will be selected. A discrete choice algorithm, given access to a Max-Dist oracle, must return a function that approximates the oracle. We show three primary results. First, we show that any algorithm exactly reproducing the oracle must make exponentially many queries. Second, we show an equivalent representation of the distribution over utility functions, based on permutations, and show that if this distribution has support size k, then it is possible to approximate the oracle using O(nk) queries. Finally, we consider settings in which the subset of items is always small. We give an algorithm that makes less than n(1=2)K queries, each to sets of size at most (1/2)K, in order to approximate the Max-Dist oracle on every set of size |T| K with statistical error at most. In contrast, we show that any algorithm that queries for subsets of size 2O( p log n) must make maximal statistical error on some large sets

Technology adoption and club convergence

Although the importance of technology adoption has been acknowledged, nevertheless, at a more general level, a critical question arises: how do the overall infrastructure conditions affect the absorptive ability of a regional economy? This question can be stated alternatively as: what are the implications of a ‘poor’ or a ‘superior’ infrastructure for regional convergence? It is possible to provide some answers to these questions by constructing a model of regional convergence that encapsulates the impact of infrastructure in the absorptive ability of a regional economy. In this model the possibility that high technological gaps might act as obstacles to convergence is taken explicitly into consideration. The model developed in this paper indicates that convergence towards leading regions is feasible only for regions with sufficient absorptive capacity, which is assumed to be a function of infrastructure conditions in a regional economy. The model is tested using data for the NUTS-2 regions of the EU-27 during the time period 1995-2006. The results suggest that adoption of technology has a significant effect on regional growth patterns in Europe.Convergence-club, Technological Gap, European Regions