Conscious Leadership: Transformational Approaches to a Sustainable Future

There is no room for the status quo. Apathy and lack of true leadership will simply perpetuate the unsustainable, self-destructive course we have embarked upon and continue to perpetuate. Renesch passionately calls to end any legitimacy given to dysfunctional systems; to seek long-term approaches necessary to achieve a sustainable future; to terminate polarization in order to seek common ground; and to take corrective measures without fearing failure

The Olympic transport legacy

This article examine sustainable transport provision for the London 2012Olympics and its intended legacy role in economic and social regeneration across East London. It concludes that ultimately, legacy success will depend on the ability to adapt to, and adopt, the new processes and cultural shifts over time, quickly assimilating them in a move towards more sustainable transport systems. The Olympics can put into place the foundations for a more sustainable society, but it needs more than this alone to realise the potential

The Courier Conundrum: The High Costs of Prosecuting Low-Level Drug Couriers and What We Can Do About Them

Since the United States declared its “War on Drugs,” federal enforcement of drug-trafficking crimes has led to increased incarceration and longer prison sentences. Many low-level drug couriers and drug mules have suffered disproportionately from these policies; they face mandatory punishments that vastly exceed their culpability. Drug couriers often lack substantial ties to drug-trafficking organizations, which generally recruit vulnerable individuals to act as couriers and mules. By using either threats of violence or promises of relatively small sums of money, these organizations convince recruits to overlook the substantial risks that drug couriers face. The current policies of pursuing harsh punishments for low-level couriers generate significant societal costs. These costs include not only monetary costs but also collateral damage imposed on both the couriers and innocent third parties. Further, these harsh policies fail to generate appreciable benefits or satisfy the goals of either retributive or utilitarian theories of punishment. This Note proposes a legislative amendment to the current importation statute that would create a carveout under which low-level drug couriers could be charged under a separate misdemeanor statute. The proposal lays out a number of criteria that drafters could use to identify lowlevel participants and exempt them from the stiff mandatory minimum sentences and the long-term consequences that accompany a felony drug conviction

Technological Threat Attribution, Trust and Confidence, and the Contestability of National Security Policy

The world has been asked to believe that China is a source of cyberthreat and that Russia is meddling in U.S. elections. Western populations are being asked to trust the words of intelligence agencies and world leaders that these unspecified technological threats are real. The oftenclassified nature of the threat results in governments not being able to provide the public with an evidence base for the threat attribution. This presents a social scientific crisis where without substantive evidence the public is asked to trust and have confidence in a particular technological threat attribution claim without any further assurance. It is sensible for the public to ask whose security claim should be believed and why? Likewise, it seems a critical social responsibility for security policy makers and academia to first acknowledge this conundrum and then strive to develop frameworks to better understand the trust and confidence challenges around technological threat attribution. This talk draws on New Zealand as a sociological case study to illustrate where and if a technological threat attribution and trust and confidence challenge might be evident in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet’s 2018 National Cyber Strategy refresh and the New Zealand Defence Force’s 2018 Strategic Defense Policy Statement. This case study is used to sketch out a broader project focusing on how the contestability of national security strategy and government security discourse can present specific trust and confidence challenges for both the public and government, and how we might begin to address these challengesfals

Dynamic Information Flow Analysis in Ruby

With the rapid increase in usage of the internet and online applications, there is a huge demand for applications to handle data privacy and integrity. Applications are already complex with business logic; adding the data safety logic would make them more complicated. The more complex the code becomes, the more possibilities it opens for security-critical bugs. To solve this conundrum, we can push this data safety handling feature to the language level rather than the application level. With a secure language, developers can write their application without having to worry about data security. This project introduces dynamic information flow analysis in Ruby. I extend the JRuby implementation, which is a widely used implementation of Ruby written in Java. Information flow analysis classifies variables used in the program into different security levels and monitors the data flow across levels. Ruby currently supports data integrity by a tainting mechanism. This project extends this tainting mechanism to handle implicit data flows, enabling it to protect confidentiality as well as integrity. Experimental results based on Ruby benchmarks are presented in this paper, which show that: This project protects confidentiality but at the cost of 1.2 - 10 times slowdown in execution time

The NOW dilemma

Energy efficiency has found its place at the very core of the discussion in Architecture and Urban Planning. Research & Development, Political Agendas and Education Curriculums are increasingly driven by the need to reach a fair balance between the way we inhabit the world and the energy we require for it. After many decades neglecting this discussion a growing awareness about the carrying capacity of our environment is being brought to actual policies on the built environment. The dominant tendency today privileges economic growth, thus being the maximization of performed labor per energy unit its ultimate goal. Renewal energy sources and energy efficiency are means for, on the one hand, an alternative to finite fossil fuel sources and, on the other hand, the optimization in the use of energy. Very little attention has been paid, however, to a more profound paradigm shift in economy. Some authors, however, have also claimed replacing the myth of economic growth by a more steady-state development as a solution for the current sustainability conundrum. The question is whether withholding the use of energy might be an alternative to its hi-tech optimization. Some of the contemporary authors who have discussed the issue in recent energy crisis are recounted here for a wider and holistic understanding of the problem.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Robustness of bipartite Gaussian entangled beams propagating in lossy channels

Subtle quantum properties offer exciting new prospects in optical communications. Quantum entanglement enables the secure exchange of cryptographic keys and the distribution of quantum information by teleportation. Entangled bright beams of light attract increasing interest for such tasks, since they enable the employment of well-established classical communications techniques. However, quantum resources are fragile and undergo decoherence by interaction with the environment. The unavoidable losses in the communication channel can lead to a complete destruction of useful quantum properties -- the so-called "entanglement sudden death". We investigate the precise conditions under which this phenomenon takes place for the simplest case of two light beams and demonstrate how to produce states which are robust against losses. Our study sheds new light on the intriguing properties of quantum entanglement and how they may be tamed for future applications.Comment: To be published - Nature Photonic

No. 17: The State of Food Insecurity in Gaborone, Botswana

The results of AFSUN’s study of the food security situation of the poor in Gaborone show that not everyone is benefitting from Botswana’s strong and growing economy and that many of the urban poor experience extremely high levels of food insecurity. The study, which formed part of AFSUN’s baseline survey of 11 Southern African cities, collected data on a broad range of issues that affect household food insecurity and found that four out of five households in the surveyed areas in Gaborone reported severe or moderate food insecurity. Only 18% were either food secure or mildly food insecure. Income level is a particularly important determinant of food insecurity as most households access food from the marketplace rather than grow their own. The impacts of chronic food insecurity on Gaborone’s population are likely to be considerable unless this problem is urgently addressed. The problem is in some sense invisible because there appears to be no shortage of food in the shops and on the streets of this booming city. The challenge is not one of food supply but food accessibility and food quality. Given that Botswana is one of the most rapidly urbanizing and most urbanized countries in Africa, its example has wider importance for the general study of urban food security on the continent