The Fraud Act 2006 : The E-crime Prosecutor’s Champion or the Creator of a New Inchoate Offence?

An analysis of whether the Fraud Act 2006 is sufficently rebust to be able to tackle the challenges of e-crimePeer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Agent-based Traffic Operator Training Environments for Evacuation Scenarios

Realistic simulation environments play a vital role in the effective training of traffic controllers to respond to large-scale events such as natural disasters or terrorist threats. BAE SYSTEMS is developing a training environment that comprises of: a physical traffic control centre environment, a 3D visualisation and a traffic behaviour model. In this paper, we describe how an agent-based approach has been essential in the development of the traffic operator training environment, especially for constructing the required behavioural models. The simulator has been applied to an evacuation scenario, for which an agent-based model has been developed which models a variety of relevant driver evacuation behaviours. These unusual behaviours have been observed occurring in real-life evacuations but to date have not been incorporated in traffic simulators. In addition, our agent-based approach includes flexibility within the simulator to respond to the variety of decisions traffic controllers can make, as well as achieving a strong degree of control for the scenario manager

Seeing More than Orange: Organizational Respect and Positive Identity Transformation in a Prison Context

This paper develops grounded theory on how receiving respect at work enables individuals to engage in positive identity transformation and the resulting personal and work-related outcomes. A company that employs inmates at a state prison to perform professional business-to-business marketing services provided a unique context for data collection. Our data indicate that inmates experienced respect in two distinct ways, generalized and particularized, which initiated an identity decoupling process that allowed them to distinguish between their inmate identity and their desired future selves and to construct transitional identities that facilitated positive change. The social context of the organization provided opportunities for personal and social identities to be claimed, respected, and granted, producing social validation and enabling individuals to feel secure in their transitional identities. We find that security in personal identities produces primarily performance-related outcomes, whereas security in the company identity produces primarily well-being-related outcomes. Further, these two types of security together foster an integration of seemingly incompatible identities—”identity holism”—as employees progress toward becoming their desired selves. Our work suggests that organizations can play a generative role in improving the lives of their members through respect-based processes

Self-healing tile sets: rates of regrowth in damaged assemblies

This thesis looks into rates of growth within holes in self-assembled tile structures. Specifically, we are interested in whether the hole will regrow or decay further under a certain set of conditions. Tile sets have the ability to assemble themselves (including regrowing damaged sections of an assembly) when under good conditions, chiefly whether the ratio of monomer concentration to bond strength is below a certain threshold. Inside a hole, however, regrowth may or may not occur even when this threshold is exceeded

Assisting Inhabitants of Residential Homes with Management of Their Energy Consumption

Although there are already a range of energy monitoring and automation systems available in the market that target residential homes, mostly with the aim of reducing their total energy consumption, very few of these systems are directly concerned with how those energy savings are actually made. As such, these systems do not provide tools that would allow users to make intelligent decisions about their energy usage strategies, and encourage them to change their energy use behaviour. In this paper we describe a system designed to facilitate planning and control of energy usage activities in residential homes. We also report on a user study of this system which demonstrates its potential for making energy savings possible

Revised Annotations, Sex-Biased Expression, and Lineage-Specific Genes in the Drosophila melanogaster group

Here, we provide revised gene models for D. ananassae, D. yakuba, and D. simulans, which include UTRs and empirically verified intron-exon boundaries, as well as ortholog groups identified using a fuzzy reciprocal-best-hit blast comparison. Using these revised annotations, we perform differential expression testing using the cufflinks suite to provide a broad overview of differential expression between reproductive tissues and the carcass. We identify thousands of genes that are differentially expressed across tissues in D. yakuba and D. simulans, with roughly 60% agreement in expression patterns of orthologs in D. yakuba and D. simulans. We identify several cases of putative polycistronic transcripts, pointing to a combination of transcriptional read-through in the genome as well as putative gene fusion and fission events across taxa. We furthermore identify hundreds of lineage specific genes in each species with no blast hits among transcripts of any other Drosophila species, which are candidates for neofunctionalized proteins and a potential source of genetic novelty.Comment: Revised manuscript, also available online preprint at G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics. Gene models, ortholog calls, and tissue specific expression results are available at http://github.com/ThorntonLab/GFF or the UCSC browser on the Thornton Lab public track hub at http://genome.ucsc.ed

Walking builds community cohesion: Survey of two New Hampshire communities looks at social capital and walkability

This brief reports the results of a survey conducted in 2009 of approximately 2,000 households in Portsmouth and Manchester, New Hampshire, to examine the connection between walkability and social capital. Authors Shannon Rogers, Kevin Gardner, and Cynthia Carlson report that higher levels of social capital are found in areas that are perceived to be more walkable, as measured by the number of places people can walk to in their community. In addition, walkability is influenced by concerns of safety, access, time, and health and by physical characteristics such as proximity, scale, and aesthetics. Given the link between walkability and greater social capital, and in turn the link between social capital and numerous positive outcomes, refitting communities with greater walkability can have short- and longer-term payoffs. The authors conclude that more walkable communities are healthier communities, and as the research in the brief shows, residents in them are more connected to one another not only by sidewalks but also through the social networks and social capital they form when they live in communities that encourage gathering and meeting face-to-face

Landscape of standing variation for tandem duplications in Drosophila yakuba and Drosophila simulans

We have used whole genome paired-end Illumina sequence data to identify tandem duplications in 20 isofemale lines of D. yakuba, and 20 isofemale lines of D. simulans and performed genome wide validation with PacBio long molecule sequencing. We identify 1,415 tandem duplications that are segregating in D. yakuba as well as 975 duplications in D. simulans, indicating greater variation in D. yakuba. Additionally, we observe high rates of secondary deletions at duplicated sites, with 8% of duplicated sites in D. simulans and 17% of sites in D. yakuba modified with deletions. These secondary deletions are consistent with the action of the large loop mismatch repair system acting to remove polymorphic tandem duplication, resulting in rapid dynamics of gain and loss in duplicated alleles and a richer substrate of genetic novelty than has been previously reported. Most duplications are present in only single strains, suggesting deleterious impacts are common. D. simulans shows larger numbers of whole gene duplications in comparison to larger proportions of gene fragments in D. yakuba. D. simulans displays an excess of high frequency variants on the X chromosome, consistent with adaptive evolution through duplications on the D. simulans X or demographic forces driving duplicates to high frequency. We identify 78 chimeric genes in D. yakuba and 38 chimeric genes in D. simulans, as well as 143 cases of recruited non-coding sequence in D. yakuba and 96 in D. simulans, in agreement with rates of chimeric gene origination in D. melanogaster. Together, these results suggest that tandem duplications often result in complex variation beyond whole gene duplications that offers a rich substrate of standing variation that is likely to contribute both to detrimental phenotypes and disease, as well as to adaptive evolutionary change.Comment: Revised Version- Accepted at Molecular Biology and Evolutio

Coherent control of Snell's law at metasurfaces

It was recently demonstrated that the well-known Snell's law must be corrected for phase gradient metasurfaces to account for their spatially varying phase, leading to normal and anomalous transmission and reflection of light on such metasurfaces. Here we show that the efficiency of normal and anomalous transmission and reflection of light can be controlled by the intensity or phase of a second coherent wave. The phenomenon is illustrated using gradient metasurfaces based on V-shaped and rectangular apertures in a metal film. This coherent control effect can be exploited for wave front shaping and signal routing