White-collar victimisation: A study exploring the harms which employees may incur as a result of working for organisations in which white-collar violations take place

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This project examines two case studies of 'employee victimisation', as part of a wider exploration of 'victimisation' by 'white-collar crime'. Former employees of Robert Maxwell's business empire are interviewed, and the impacts upon their lives of the plundering of their company pension schemes by their boss, Robert Maxwell, are documented. The second case study analysed is that of the closure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Former employees of this bank are interviewed and the impacts upon their lives as a result of working for an institution considered to be corrupt by regulatory authorities are documented. Results reveal that, similar to the consequences of physical and sexual violence and property crime, the individuals taking part in this project endured emotional, psychological, physical, behavioural and financial harms. At the same time, however, unforeseen and undocumented consequences were uncovered which point to the need for further research on 'employee victimisation' and on 'white-collar victimisation' in general.This work is funded by the Law Department at Brunel University

Numerical methods for electromagnetic engineering: Class Notes

Full classnotes2022/20231r quadrimestre3.

Electromagnetic Propagation Velocities in an Inhomogeneous or Random Atmosphere

This thesis is concerned primarily with determination of statistics for the velocities of propagation of an electromagnetic wave in a dispersive medium. The velocities of propagation are discussed in terms of a plane travelling wave solution of Maxwell\u27s equations obtained using the multiple Laplace transformation and complex inversion integrals. The types of dispersion discussed correspond to a magneto-ionic, electron displacement and polar resonances of the ionosphere and troposphere. The physical nature of the randomness of the dispersive index of refraction is derived from considerations of statistical turbulence theory. Expressions are then obtained for determining the mean, mean square and variance of the signal, group and phase velocity of an electromagnetic wave. It is proposed by S. M. Harris (IRE Trans. Vol. AP-9, No. 2, pp. 207-210, Mar., 1961) that the group velocity and phase velocity of an electromagnetic wave propagated in the ionosphere may be averaged to obtain a velocity estimate free of refraction to within second order refractive effects. The basis for this procedure is that for an operating frequency considerably above the critical frequencies of the ionospheric medium, the group velocity is slightly less than the velocity of light

An error-based variational approach to computational electromagnetics

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Applying the finite-difference time-domain to the modelling of large-scale radio channels

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Finite-difference models have been used for nearly 40 years to solve electromagnetic problems of heterogeneous nature. Further, these techniques are well known for being computationally expensive, as well as subject to various numerical artifacts. However, little is yet understood about the errors arising in the simulation of wideband sources with the finitedifference time-domain (FDTD) method. Within this context, the focus of this thesis is on two different problems. On the one hand, the speed and accuracy of current FDTD implementations is analysed and increased. On the other hand, the distortion of numerical pulses is characterised and mitigation techniques proposed. In addition, recent developments in general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) have unveiled new methods for the efficient implementation of FDTD algorithms. Therefore, this thesis proposes specific GPU-based guidelines for the implementation of the standard FDTD. Then, metaheuristics are used for the calibration of a FDTD-based narrowband simulator. Regarding the simulation of wideband sources, this thesis uses first Lagrange multipliers to characterise the extrema of the numerical group velocity. Then, the spread of numerical Gaussian pulses is characterised analytically in terms of the FDTD grid parameters. The usefulness of the proposed solutions to the previously described problems is illustrated in this thesis using coverage and wideband predictions in large-scale scenarios. In particular, the indoor-to-outdoor radio channel in residential areas is studied. Furthermore, coverage and wideband measurements have also been used to validate the predictions. As a result of all the above, this thesis introduces first an efficient and accurate FDTD simulator. Then, it characterises analytically the propagation of numerical pulses. Finally, the narrowband and wideband indoorto-outdoor channels are modeled using the developed techniques