Constituting best practice in management consulting

This paper offers critical reflections on the construction and propagation of ‘best practice’: a concept which has become increasingly important in the business world and in civic life more generally. Focusing upon the activities of the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) we offer an analysis of the awards process instituted to applaud ‘best practice’ in the arena of consulting. Departing from existing academic representations of the advice industry which generally exclude this trade body from the analytical frame we consider the role which the MCA performs in the field of consulting. Situating the MCA’s attempt to constitute best practice within the work of Bruno Latour we argue that this construct depends upon the mobilization of an extended network of allies, advocates and spectators whose interactions have been written-out of academic analysis. The paper concludes by proposing the need for further research designed to explore, both, the heterogeneity and the porosity of the networks that construct, convey and applaud key knowledge products such as ‘best practice’

Depolarizing channel parameter estimation using noisy initial states

We consider estimating the parameter associated with the qubit depolarizing channel when the available initial states that might be employed are mixed. We use quantum Fisher information as a measure of the accuracy of estimation to compare protocols which use collections of qubits in product states to one in which the qubits are in a correlated state. We show that, for certain parameter values and initial states, the correlated state protocol can yield a greater accuracy per channel invocation than the product state protocols. We show that, for some parameters and initial states, using more than two qubits and channel invocations is advantageous. These results stand in contrast to the known optimal case that uses pure initial states and a single channel invocation on a pair of entangled qubits

Re-Evaluating Competence to Stand Trial

The current federal law governing a defendant’s competence to stand trial is substantially contained in 18 U.S.C. § 4241 that can be traced to a 1949 statute and, in Dusky v. United States, a three paragraph opinion of the Supreme Court, delivered in 1960. The federal statute was initially drafted by a committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Thus, material aspects of the federal tests for assessing a defendant’s competence to stand trial were composed by federal judges. This paper explains why the current federal law concerning a defendant’s competence to stand trial is antiquated and no longer fit for purpose. The deficiencies in the current law primarily stem from the fact that the legislative test is confined to defendants who suffer a “mental disease or defect” that renders them incompetent and fails to address the circumstances of defendants whose incompetence is caused by other factors, including psychological and neurological conditions. The Dusky test, while more broadly based than 18 U.S.C. § 4241 also suffers from a number of limitations and has led to conflicting decisions from the Supreme Court and significant uncertainty about its scope. As responsibility for the deficiencies in the current federal law rests almost entirely with the federal judiciary, this paper suggests that federal judges should address the errors of their predecessors and reform the way a defendant’s competence to stand trial is assessed. This can be achieved by the Supreme Court, in an appropriate case, revisiting its decision in Dusky and adopting a test that focuses upon a defendant’s ability to effectively participate in their trial. The effective participation test is derived from jurisprudence from the European Court of Human Rights, and has recently been endorsed by the Law Commission of England and Wales. It is a test that is gaining international traction and is one that would enhance the way the law responds to a significant cohort of defendants in the federal criminal justice system

Estimating Distributional Impacts of an Innovation Across Sectors in an Industry: A case study of the Australian wool industry

In this paper an approach that can be used to determine the distribution of a productivity gain on an industry is detailed. In particular, the model developed in this paper extends earlier evaluations by emphasising the crucial role of substitution between inputs across different participants in the supply chain. Crucial to any analysis of an industry are the estimates of the elasticity's of derived demand at each stage and how it changes, as the product is further refined. The wool industry is used to illustrate the effects of an innovation across sectors.Agribusiness, Production Economics,