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The Real effects of Banks' Nationalisation - Evidence from the UK
Get PDFHow did the nationalization of UK operating banks as a result of the 2008 banking crisis
impact their client firms’ performance? We use unique firm-bank data and a propensity score
matching technique and find that firms that borrowed from nationalized banks show a slight
decrease in the growth of investment and innovation relative to firms that borrowed from non-nationalized banks. Interestingly, we find that firms that borrowed from nationalized banks slightly
increase employment, short-term debt and cash holdings. Overall, these firms were able to
maintain performance as a result of the policy intervention
Welfare, Warfare, and Lawfare: Studies of Edwardian Liberals (1906-14), Nathaniel Rothschild (1840-1915), and Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959)
Get PDFThis thesis on `Welfare, Warfare and Lawfare’ is based on three of my books, The British Welfare Revolution (2017), The Unexpected Story of Nathaniel Rothschild (2015), and Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (2008 and paperback 2015). These three of my books were selected because they share two themes, the changing legal rules of the international order imposed after the two World Wars and whether the state should be responsible for the welfare of its citizens or whether this task should be undertaken by affluent individuals through voluntary agencies and the limits of self-help expected of its citizens.
My book, The British Welfare Revolution 1906-14 (2017), was based on a vast array ofmaterial from the Newspaper Library, the annual reports of reformist associations, the private papers of politicians and reformers as well as an extensive examination of contemporary social studies. I argued that it was the evolution of a counter-elite which shifted the Liberal administrations of 1906-14 in the direction of a series of social reforms which challenged the viability of the Poor Law and threatened to replace it. I split the recruiting grounds of the counter-elite into five different sectors, showing how they were linked to specific reforms. Members of the counter-elite completely re-appraised the role of the British state in providing for the welfare of its citizens in every area from health and unemployment to education and housing. This enabled me to challenge the current assessment of the careers of Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill, the Webbs, and Beveridge and offer fresh interpretations about child welfare, housing, sweating and the minimum wage, and unemployment, particularly unemployment insurance; and by doing so, provide a fresh overall account of the first welfare reforms.
The Unexpected Story of Nathaniel Rothschild (2015), contained themes which were linked to my other two books. Based on surviving papers in the Rothschild archives, as he destroyed his private papers, I had to research his letters to correspondents in archives in Britain, the United States and Israel. It was the first full length biography of Lord Rothschild (1840-1915), who was a key figure in the debate as to whether the state should sponsor social services for the working classes or whether it should rely on the private initiative of wealthy individuals and voluntary agencies. He was also important as he supported the civil and religious rights of minority groups which were enshrined in law after the Great War in the Minority Rights Treaties. I also found new material in archives about his private education and charitable activities. The book, moreover, was a study of Lord Rothschild as a leader of Anglo-Jewry and perhaps of world Jewry, where he acted as an intercessor. It tried to show the limits of his power and influence in his interventions in Russia, Romania, Persia and North Africa and indicate how this old style of leadership was being replaced by new men, who were recruited from the professions.
My biography of Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), the originator of the concept of genocide and the principal campaigner for the United Nations Genocide Convention (1948), was the first study based on his private papers which were split among three archives in the United States as well as material in the National Archives of Britain and America. I traced his career against his Jewish background in Eastern Europe and the ethnic quagmire of his childhood and adult years in Poland and his Zionist beliefs. I showed how his early years influenced the evolution of his ideas which started with trying to stem the outbreak of pogroms and massacres in the 1930s and ended by formulating an international regime to make the destruction of national groups more difficult. By uniting with Jewish and Christian organizations, sections of the international women’s movement, South American activists and the World Federation of United Nations Associations, he outmanoeuvred British and Russian opposition to a Genocide Convention. Lemkin attached particular importance to cultural genocide, but unfortunately it was blocked by a number of Western powers with colonies. He was also important for inaugurating the historical study of genocide which I surveyed. Like the Minority Rights Treaties, of which Lord Rothschild’s programme was a forerunner, the Genocide Convention was established to protect group rights after a World War. Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention was published in 2008 with a paperback edition containing a new introduction in 2015. My account was the first full length biography of Lemkin’s life and remains an authoritative study, despite some contentious debate
Analysing and Improving the Security of Contactless Payment Cards
Get PDFEuropay, MasterCard, and Visa (EMV) is the most used payment protocol around the world with 85.9% of the payment cards in the EU and the UK being EMV based cards in 2019. The EMV payment protocol has made contactless transactions faster and more convenient for cardholders as they only need to place the card next to the Point of Sale (POS) to make a payment. According to the latest report of the UK Finance, the total value of contactless card transactions in 2019 was higher than the cash ones for the first time ever.
On the other hand, the introduction of the wireless interface in the EMV contactless transactions opens the door for several attacks to be launched on contactless cards such as skimming, eavesdropping, replay, and relay attacks. Since April 2020, the limit of contactless transactions has increased to £45 as a response to the Covid-19 crisis. This might create an extra motivation for launching more attackers on contactless cards.
This thesis is primarily concerned with investigating and analysing the security of contactless card’s payments and uncovering the impact of key vulnerabilities in the EMV contactless card specifications. The two main vulnerable are the one-way authentication methods and the lack of cardholder verification in such transactions.
The thesis also proposes the following four practical protocols to improve the security and the privacy of the EMV contactless cards.
1- A new tokenization protocol to replace the actual Primary Account Number (PAN) with a token to prevent the EMV contactless cards from revealing the actual PAN.
2- A mutual authentication protocol to address the vulnerabilities related to the EMV one-way card authentication methods in the EMV payment protocol.
3- A novel gyroscope sensor into EMV contactless cards to be used for activating the cards by perfuming a simple move by the cardholder.
4- A protocol to use cardholders’ NFC enabled smartphones to activate contactless cards.
The two main aims of these four proposed protocols are to prevent such cards from being read by unauthorised NFC enabled readers/smartphones and to give cardholders more control of their contactless cards in order to prevent several attacks. Moreover, the thesis also describes a Java framework to mimic a genuine EMV contactless card and validate the four proposed solutions.
The thesis argues that the first two proposed solutions require minimal changes to the existing EMV infrastructures and do not have any impact on the user’s experience while the last two proposed solutions require some changes the users’ experience when making contactless card transactions
Towards Secure Identity-Based Cryptosystems for Cloud Computing
Get PDFThe convenience provided by cloud computing has led to an increasing trend of many business organizations, government agencies and individual customers to migrate their services and data into cloud environments. However, once clients’ data is migrated to the cloud, the overall security control will be immediately shifted from data owners to the hands of service providers. When data owners decide to use the cloud environment, they rely entirely on third parties to make decisions about their data and, therefore, the main challenge is how to guarantee that the data is accessible by data owners and authorized users only.
Remote user authentication to cloud services is traditionally achieved using a combination of ID cards and passwords/PINs while public key infrastructure and symmetric key encryptions are still the most common techniques for enforcing data security despite the missing link between the identity of data owners and the cryptographic keys. Furthermore, the key management in terms of the generation, distribution, and storage are still open challenges to traditional public-key systems.
Identity-Based Cryptosystems (IBCs) are new generations of public key encryptions that can potentially solve the problems associated with key distribution in public key infrastructure in addition to providing a clear link between encryption keys and the identities of data owners. In IBCs, the need for pre-distributed keys before any encryption/decryption will be illuminated, which gives a great deal of flexibility required in an environment such as the cloud. Fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems are promising extensions of IBCs that rely on biometric modalities in generating the encryption and decryption keys instead of traditional identities such as email addresses.
This thesis argues that the adoption of fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems seems an ideal option to secure cloud computing after addressing a number of vulnerabilities related to user verification, key generation, and key validation stages. The thesis is mainly concerned with enhancing the security and the privacy of fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems by proposing a framework with multiple security layers. The main contributions of the thesis can be summarised as follows.
1. Improving user verification based on using a Challenge-Response Multifactor Biometric Authentication (CR-MFBA) in fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems that reduce the impacts of impersonators attacks.
2. Reducing the dominance of the “trusted authority” in traditional fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems by making the process of generating the decryption keys a cooperative process between the trusted authority server and data owners. This leads to shifting control over the stored encrypted data from the trusted authority to the data owners.
3. Proposing a key-validity method that relies on employing the Shamir Secret Sharing, which also contributes to giving data owners more control over their data.
4. Further improving the control of data owners in fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems by linking the decryption keys parameters with their biometric modalities.
5. Proposing a new asymmetric key exchange protocol based on utilizing the scheme of fuzzy identity-based cryptosystems to shared encrypted data stored on cloud computing
English Legal System
No full textThis book offers a modern, contemporary and innovative approach to the core curriculum, offering clear explanations to clarify the material without oversimplification. Carefully developed learning tools are used to help students to build their knowledge of the legal system of England and Wales; moreover, all the materials needed by a reader new to legal education are here in one place.
English Legal System will also help students to translate knowledge successfully to an assessment situation (whether examination, tutorial preparation or coursework) through the acquisition and development of key skills such as problem solving and application, critical reasoning and evaluation, and research and referencing. The text has been written with the changes to legal education envisaged by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board in mind.
The focus throughout will be on recent and key case law and contemporary real-life examples, bringing the subject alive and helping students to understand the foundations on which the law in England and Wales is based. The key pedagogic features seek to embed those legal skills within the context of the content on the legal system.
The associated website provides a comprehensive learning environment that will provide further illumination of the text and graphics and that caters for a number of different learning styles with additional video and audio content
A generic deep learning framework to classify thyroid and breast lesions in ultrasound images
Get PDFBreast and thyroid cancers are the two common cancers to affect women worldwide. Ultrasonography (US) is a commonly used non-invasive imaging modality to detect breast and thyroid cancers, but its clinical diagnostic accuracy for these cancers is controversial. Both thyroid and breast cancers share some similar high frequency
ultrasound characteristics such as taller-than-wide shape ratio, hypo-echogenicity, and ill-defined margins. This study aims to develop an automatic scheme for classifying thyroid and breast lesions in ultrasound images using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN). In particular, we propose a generic DCNN architecture with transfer learning and the same architectural parameter settings to train models for thyroid and breast cancers
(TNet and BNet) respectively, and test the viability of such a generic approach with ultrasound images collected from clinical practices. In addition, the potentials of the thyroid model in learning the common features and its performance of classifying both breast and thyroid lesions are investigated. A retrospective dataset of 719 thyroid
and 672 breast images captured from US machines of different makes between October 2016 and December 2018 is used in this study. Test results show that both TNet and BNet built on the same DCNN architecture have achieved good classification results (86.5% average accuracy for TNet and 89% for BNet). Furthermore, we used TNet to classify breast lesions and the model achieves sensitivity of 86.6% and specificity of 87.1%, indicating its
capability in learning features commonly shared by thyroid and breast lesions. We further tested the diagnostic performance of the TNet model against that of three radiologists. The area under curve (AUC) for thyroid nodule classification is 0.861 (95% CI: 0.792–0.929) for the TNet model and 0.757–0.854 (95% CI: 0.658–0.934) for the three radiologists. The AUC for breast cancer classification is 0.875 (95% CI: 0.804–0.947) for the TNet model and 0.698–0.777 (95% CI: 0.593–0.872) for the radiologists, indicating the model’s potential in classifying both breast and thyroid cancers with a higher level of accuracy than that of radiologists
Isolation and Purification of Rodent Pancreatic Islets 2 of Langerhans
Get PDFThis chapter describes the detailed protocol for the isolation and purification of islets of Langerhans from 6 AU1
rodent pancreas using collagenase digestion. The first step of the process is to separate and isolate the 7
insulin-producing islets of Langerhans from the rest of the pancreas. The pancreas is excised from the 8
animal, trimmed of nonpancreatic tissues before being inflated and chopped into small pieces. The 9
connective tissue is then broken down with a collagenase enzyme solution to selectively digest the bulk 10
of the exocrine tissue while leaving the endocrine islets intact and separated from their surrounding 11
non-islet tissue. Once this process is completed, the islets of Langerhans are separated from the remaining 12
mixture by centrifugation and purified by the means of hand picking. Once isolated, the subsequent islets 13
can be used for several varied experimental processes, including transplantation, the study of pathophysio- 14
logical mechanisms in diabetic conditions, and in the screening of novel therapeutic approaches in phar- 15
macological research
Securitisation and the Role of the State in Delivering UK Cyber Security in a New-Medieval Cyberspace
Get PDFBoth the 2010 and the 2015 UK National Security Strategies identified threats from cyberspace as being among the most significant ‘Tier One’ threats to UK national security. These threats have been constructed as a threat to the state, a threat to the country’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI), a threat to future economic success and a threat to businesses and individual citizens. As a result, the response to this threat has historically been seen as being a shared responsibility with most potential victims of cyber-attack responsible for their own security and the UK state agencies operating as a source of advice and guidance to promote best practice in the private sector. A range of government departments, including the Cabinet Office, MI5 and GCHQ among others, have been responsible for the government’s own cyber security. However, despite a budget allocation of £860 million for the 2010 – 2015 period, progress on reducing the frequency and cost of cyber-attacks was limited and the 2010 strategy for dealing with cyber security was widely seen as having failed.
This led to a new National Cyber Security Strategy (NCSS) in 2016 which indicated a significant change in approach, in particular with a more proactive role for the state through the formation of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and a £1.6 billion budget for cyber security between 2016 and 2021. However, cyber-attacks remain a significant issue for many organisations in both the public and private sector, and attacks such as the Wannacry ransomware/wiper attack, UK specific data breaches such as those witnessed in 2017 at Debenhams, Three, Wonga and ABTA, and breaches outside the UK that impacted UK citizens such as Equifax show that the frequency and impact of cyber security issues remain significant.
The underlying cause of the insecurity of cyberspace is reflected in the metaphorical description of cyberspace as the wild-west or as an ungoverned space. This is a result of cyberspace features such as anonymity, problematic attribution and a transnational nature that can limit the effective reach of law enforcement agencies. When these features are combined with an increasing societal and economic dependence on information technology and mediated data, this increases the potential economic impact of disruption to these systems and enhances the value of the data for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes.
This thesis argues that cyberspace is not ungoverned, and that it is more accurate to consider cyberspace to be a New Medieval environment with multiple overlapping authorities. In fact, cyberspace has always been far from ungoverned, it is just differently governed from a realspace Westphalian nation state system. The thesis also argues that cyberspace is currently experiencing a ‘Westphalian transformation’ with the UK state (among many others) engaged in a process designed to assert its authority and impose state primacy in cyberspace. This assertion of state authority is being driven by an identifiable process of securitisation in response to the constructed existential threat posed by unchecked cyberattacks by nation states and criminal enterprises. The Copenhagen School’s securitisation theory has been used to inform an original analysis of key speech acts by state securitising actors that has highlighted the key elements of the securitisation processes at work. This has clearly shown the development of the securitisation discourse, and the importance of referent objects and audience in asserting the state’s authority through the securitisation process.
Original qualitative data collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with elite members of the cyber security community has provided insights to the key issues in cyber security that support the view that cyberspace has New Medieval characteristics. The interview data has also allowed for the construction of a view of the complexities of the cyberspace environment, the overlapping authorities of state and private sector organisations and some of the key issues that arise.
These issues are identified as being characteristic of a particularly complex form of policy problem referred to as a ‘wicked problem’. An understanding of cyber security as a wicked problem may aid in the identification of future possible policy approaches for cyber security policy in the UK
Gaming when things get tough? Examining how emotion regulation and coping self-efficacy influence gaming during difficult life situations
Get PDFResearch suggests that gaming can play an important role in dealing with life difficulties, but few studies have examined this directly. Building on recent research, the current study set out to develop a measure of gaming in difficult life situations (GDLS) and explored the role of emotion regulation and coping self-efficacy as predictors of this behaviour. A total of 667 gamers completed the online survey. Initial analyses demonstrated validity and reliability of the GDLS scale (α=.92), with players turning to gaming as a distraction from life difficulties, to feel a sense of achievement, to connect with others, and for in-game connection and simulation. Multiple regression analysis showed that younger age, more time spent gaming in general, and lower coping self-efficacy predicted gaming in difficult life situations, but emotion regulation was non-significant. The study presents novel insights and a new measure for future research in this area
Beauty, Women's Bodies and the Law - Performances in Plastic
Get PDFThe proposition that women’s bodies can be allowed to walk daily on the street, exist in the paid workplace or appear anywhere in public without enhancement or embellishment is becoming less and less acceptable. Just as clothing maketh the woman, with employer demands that women wear high-heels to the office, renounce trousers or pants in the executive suite, behind the receptionist desk, working at a computer terminal, seated in a work cubicle or anywhere else on a business premises, so too with women’s personal attributes. Once, make-up, false eyelashes, tattooed eyeliner and false bosoms were the signature of a woman on the stage, or a signal that she haunted alleys and backstreets in hope of a paying customer, or appeared in movies labelled ‘porn’. In the 21st century, these are signifiers of mainstream woman. Hence, in 2011 a ‘team of scientists and psychologists’ from Harvard and Boston Universities in collaboration with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, disclosed data gleaned from their study that women wearing make-up are perceived as ‘more competent, attractive, likeable and trustworthy’. The study’s finding was that this follows, whether women are made-up in a ‘natural’, ‘professional’ or ‘glamorous’ style, and whether the images are flashed before the eyes of participants in the study or are viewed by them for more lengthy periods