Can the general fraud offence 'get the law right'? Some perspectives on the 'problem' of financial crime

The Fraud Bill, which received Royal Assent on 8 November 2006, created an offence of fraud in English criminal law which marks a departure of utmost significance from the approach adopted hitherto, whereby a number of related offences cover behaviour deemed to amount to fraud. To mark the passage of the Fraud Act 2006 into law, this article examines the references which were made during its consideration in Parliament to fraud as activity which is serious and which is often erroneously portrayed as 'victimless' crime. In joining these key criminal policy-making debates with academic study of white-collar crime, it will be suggested that as yet too little attention is being paid to 'ambiguous' popular perceptions of financial crimes for there to be confidence that the fraud offence will, in the words of the current Solicitor-General, 'get the law right'

An evolutionary perspective on zinc uptake by human fungal pathogens

DW is supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society (Grant Number 102549/Z/13/Z).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Baosteel Group – A national champion amongst national champions

In comparison to many of the Chinese and Indian state-owned enterprises examined in this volume, the institutional and competitive position of the Baosteel Group is somewhat unique. First, Baosteel stands out as one of the major success stories of recent Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform. Created as a national steel champion by the Chinese government in the early years of the reform period, and benefiting from the industrial policy support this status has brought during the intervening three decades, Baosteel has earned the status of one of China’s most internationally competitive SOEs. However, Baosteel is also unique in that it does not dominate the Chinese steel sector. Accounting for only a small share of Chinese steel production, Baosteel’s position is one of a technological leader within a competitive market structure populated by a large ‘national champions group’ of SOEs. Moreover, Baosteel has also faced special obligations to implement national industrial policies, by acting as a technological leader tasked with the role of acquiring and upgrading ailing steelmakers. Understanding Baosteel’s position within the Chinese steel sector as a ‘national champion amongst national champions’ is critical to explaining its operational characteristics, its special relationship with the Chinese government, and the benefits and costs this has carried for the firm

Embracing complexity: theory, cases and the future of bioethics

This paper reflects on the relationship between theory and practice in bioethics, by using various concepts drawn from debates on innovation in healthcare research—in particular debates around how best to connect up blue skies ‘basic’ research with practical innovations that can improve human lives. It argues that it is a mistake to assume that the most difficult and important questions in bioethics are the most abstract ones, and also a mistake to assume that getting clear about abstract cases will automatically be of much help in getting clear about more complex cases. It replaces this implicitly linear model with a more complex one that draws on the idea of translational research in healthcare. On the translational model, there is a continuum of cases from the most simple and abstract (thought experiments) to the most concrete and complex (real world cases). Insights need to travel in both directions along this continuum—from the more abstract to the more concrete and from the more concrete to the more abstract. The paper maps out some difficulties in moving from simpler to more complex cases, and in doing so makes recommendations about the future of bioethics

The Value of Currency

published or submitted for publicatio

E-book readers in higher education

Ebook readers have received a mixed press, with some hailing them as the future of reading and others believing that they will never be popular. The study outlined here aims to understand the attitudes of, and issues of importance to, lecturers in UK academia, with a view to improving the design of ebook readers for education in the future. An evaluation of five portable devices is presented, in which lecturers were given the opportunity to read an ebook and provide feedback via a questionnaire. Results are compared with concerns arising from other experiments in the same field, and recommendations are made for successful ebook design

Word length distributions in modern Welsh prose texts.

This paper examines the distribution of word lengths in 12 prose texts written in modern Welsh (a P-Celtic language). The texts belong to the genres of new articles and Bible translation. For all texts, the observed frequencies can best be fitted by the 1-displaced Singh-Poisson distribution. This differs from published results on a Q-Celtic language (Scottish Gaelic) and suggests a P-celtic/Q-Celtic difference in word-length distribution. Further work is required to investigate other genres of Welsh as well as the other P- and Q-celtic languages