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Thomas Marlow

Publications and source records attributed to Thomas Marlow.

10 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2016

Mining Spatio-temporal Data on Industrialization from Historical Registries

Despite the growing availability of big data in many fields, historical data on socioevironmental phenomena are often not available due to a lack of automated and scalable approaches for collecting, digitizing, and assembling them. We have developed a data-mining method for extracting tabulated, geocoded data from printed directories. While scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) can digitize printed text, these methods alone do not capture the structure of the underlying data. Our pipeline integrates both page layout analysis and OCR to extract tabular, geocoded data from structured text. We demonstrate the utility of this method by applying it to scanned manufacturing registries from Rhode Island that record 41 years of industrial land use. The resulting spatio-temporal data can be used for socioenvironmental analyses of industrialization at a resolution that was not previously possible. In particular, we find strong evidence for the dispersion of manufacturing from the urban core of Providence, the state's capital, along the Interstate 95 corridor to the north and south.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2006

Natural Philosophy and Quantum Theory

We attempt to show how relationalism might help in understanding Bell's theorem. We also present an analogy with Darwinian evolution in order to pedagogically hint at how one might go about using a theory in which one does not even desire to explain correlations by invoking common causes.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2006

Partial Observers

We attempt to dissolve the measurement problem using an anthropic principle which allows us to invoke rational observers. We argue that the key feature of such observers is that they are rational (we need not care whether they are `classical' or `macroscopic' for example) and thus, since quantum theory can be expressed as a rational theory of probabilistic inference, the measurement problem is not a problem.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2006

A Bayesian Analogue of Gleason's Theorem

We introduce a novel notion of probability within quantum history theories and give a Gleasonesque proof for these assignments. This involves introducing a tentative novel axiom of probability. We also discuss how we are to interpret these generalised probabilities as partially ordered notions of preference and we introduce a tentative generalised notion of Shannon entropy. A Bayesian approach to probability theory is adopted throughout, thus the axioms we use will be minimal criteria of rationality rather than ad hoc mathematical axioms.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2006

Weak Values and Relational Generalisations

We justify generalisations of weak values from a tentatively relational perspective by deriving them from a generalisation of Bayes' rule. We also argue that these generalisations have implications of quantum nonlocality and may form a novel approach to quantum gravity and cosmology.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2006

Relationalism vs. Bayesianism

We compare and contrast the basic principles of two philosophies: Bayesianism and relationalism. These two philosophies are both based upon criteria of rationality. The analogy invoked in such a comparison seems rather apt when discussing tentative proofs of quantum nonlocality. We argue that Bayesianism is almost to quantum theory, what general covariance is to general relativity. This is because the Bayesian interpretation of quantum theory can be given a relational flavour.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2006

Bayesian Probabilities and the Histories Algebra

We attempt a justification of a generalisation of the consistent histories programme using a notion of probability that is valid for all complete sets of history propositions. This consists of introducing Cox's axioms of probability theory and showing that our candidate notion of probability obeys them. We also give a generalisation of Bayes' theorem and comment upon how Bayesianism should be useful for the quantum gravity/cosmology programmes.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2005

A Bayesian Account of Quantum Histories

We investigate whether quantum history theories can be consistent with Bayesian reasoning and whether such an analysis helps clarify the interpretation of such theories. First, we summarise and extend recent work categorising two different approaches to formalising multi-time measurements in quantum theory. The standard approach consists of describing an ordered series of measurements in terms of history propositions with non-additive `probabilities'. The non-standard approach consists of defining multi-time measurements to consist of sets of exclusive and exhaustive history propositions and recovering the single-time exclusivity of results when discussing single-time history propositions. We analyse whether such history propositions can be consistent with Bayes' rule. We show that certain class of histories are given a natural Bayesian interpretation, namely the linearly positive histories originally introduced by Goldstein and Page. Thus we argue that this gives a certain amount of interpretational clarity to the non-standard approach. We also attempt a justification of our analysis using Cox's axioms of probability theory.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2005

On the Probabilistic Compatibility of Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

In this paper we introduce the three main notions of probability used by physicists and discuss how these are to be used when invoking spacelike separated observers in a relativistic format. We discuss a standard EPRB experiment and concentrate upon problems of the interpretation of probabilities. We promote a particularly conservative interpretation of this experiment (which need not invoke an objective notion of collapse) where probabilities are, tentatively, passively Lorentz invariant. We also argue that the Heisenberg picture is preferable in relativistic situations due to a conflict between the Schrodinger picture and passive Lorentz transformations of probabilities. Throughout most of this paper we discuss the relative frequency interpretation of probability as this is most commonly used. We also introduce the logically necessary notion of `prior-frequency' in discussing whether the choice by an observer can have any causal effect upon the measurement results of another. We also critically examine the foundational use of relative frequency in no-signalling theorems. We argue that SQT and SR are probabilistically compatible, although we do not discuss whether they are compatible on the level of individual events.

quant-ph↗