Our Responsibilities to Refugees

The paper explores the basis of the responsibilities we owe to refugees. That we have such responsibilities is a very widely shared intuition: the need of those fleeing from persecution seems to call out for a response on our part. But what exactly are our obligations to such people? Who are they owed to and why do we have them? The paper argues in favour of a human rights approach to refugee protection that includes the requirement of the implementation of a burden sharing scheme. DOI 10.17879/95189441435

Commercialisation of government communications:submission to the Government Communications Review Group, Stirling Media Research Institute

Much of the debate around government communications has focused on the use of special advisers, the lobby system and the centralisation of the system under Alastair Campbell. This is a legitimate focus and much has been said on this topic which is borne out by our own research.2 However the purpose of this submission is to raise a different set of issues which are less often discussed. These relate in particular to the organisation of the civil service and government communications and to the increased role of commercial agencies and commercial criteria in running and evaluating government communications. I wish to concentrate on six aspects. These do not fit very neatly under the headings of the review but are most relevant to the issues of context, politicisation and organisation

Studies of the internal properties of jets and jet substructure with the ATLAS Detector

The internal structure of jets produced in pp collisions at the LHC is measured using the ATLAS detector in an inclusive jet sample corresponding to 35pb-1 of pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV. Classical jet shape and energy flow measurements are complemented with measurements of new substructure observables with comparisons made to several leading order parton shower Monte Carlo programs. The jet invariant mass and \kt splitting scale are measured for anti-kt jets with a distance parameter of R=1.0 and Cambridge-Aachen jets with R=1.2. Furthermore, a splitting and filtering procedure is applied to the Cambridge-Aachen jets. These tools are then utilized for the first measurements of the filtered jet mass at the LHC in the inclusive jet sample as well the W+1 jet sample, in which a hadronic W mass peak is observed in the jet invariant mass spectrum. A sample of candidate boosted top quark events is also analyzed in detail for the jet substructure properties of hadronic "top-jets" in the final state.Comment: Proceedings of the EPS-HEP 2011 Conference, 21 - 27 July 2011, Grenoble, Rhone-Alpes, Franc

How complicated must an optical component be?

We analyze how complicated a linear optical component has to be if it is to perform one of a range of functions. Specifically, we devise an approach to evaluating the number of real parameters that must be specified in the device design or fabrication, based on the singular value decomposition of the linear operator that describes the device. This approach can be used for essentially any linear device, including space-, frequency-, or time-dependent systems, in optics or in other linear wave problems. We analyze examples including spatial mode converters and various classes of wavelength demultiplexers. We consider limits on the functions that can be performed by simple optical devices such as thin lenses, mirrors, gratings, modulators, and fixed optical filters, and discuss the potential for greater functionalities using modern nanophotonics