Polling Matters: Will it be 1992 all over again for the pollsters?

Polling Matters is an independent, non-partisan podcast providing expert polling news and analysis, with guests, in the run up to the General Election. In the most recent episode, the team spoke to Chris Hanretty from electionforecast.co.uk and a reader in politics at the University of East Anglia. We discussed his forecasting model and the challenges faced in projecting the most unpredictable election in a generation

Distribution of trace elements in the blister copper – white metal system: copper blow conditions

The aim of this experimental work is to investigate the distribution coefficients (LXCu/Wm) of cobalt, nickel, silver, gold and palladium in copper converting conditions between the metal phase and the white metal phase. The first part of this work is a literature review, the later part describes the experimental work and presents the data. The experimental work investigates the distribution coefficients of the elements as functions of temperature ranging from 1250 C° to 1350 °C and sulphur dioxide partial pressures ranging from 0.01 to 1 atm in SO2 – Ar mixtures. The experimental work consisted of the equilibration of the samples, quenching into ice cold water, grinding and polishing of the cross sections and the analysis of concentrations in both phases by EPMA. The EPMA work was carried out at the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK). It was found that there are dependencies between the LXCu/Wm and PSO2 and temperature for silver, gold, palladium and nickel. Silver was found to be more concentrated to the metal phase at 1250 °C and 1 atm P(SO2) with a value for LAgCu/Wm decreases as a function of increasing temperature and decreasing P(SO2). LNiCu/Wm is found to increase with increasing temperature and P(SO2). For cobalt it was found that there was a dependency between LXCu/Wm and PSO2. LCoCu/Wm increases as P(SO2) decreases, LCoCu/Wm falls from 0.85 to 0.15. The concentrations of silver in certain experiments, gold and palladium in the white metal phase fell below the detection limit of the EPMA. Both gold and palladium were found to be more concentrated to the metal phas

Comparing Theories of Radicalisation with Countering Violent Extremism Policy

This article assesses whether the scholarly literature on radicalisation is adequately integrated into national policy strategies for countering violent extremism (CVE). It outlines concepts and models of radicalisation, and offers a framework for understanding its various complex causes. The article then compares this scholarly research against case studies of CVE policy from the United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark, Sweden and The Netherlands. These countries’ policies adequately capture the core nature of radicalisation, but otherwise exhibit significant variation in how they explain its causes. This can be explained partly by a lack of clarity over how and why radicalisation happens. However, it also suggests that CVE policy is often shaped less by evidence-based research, and more by cultural, political and historical factors. This confirms a need for evidence-based approaches to CVE, and for deeper comparative studies of how radicalisation is understood across national contexts

Polling Matters: Could the Lib Dems be kingmakers again and what do they do next?

Polling Matters is an independent, non-partisan podcast providing expert polling news and analysis, with guests, in the run up to the General Election. In the most recent episode, Keiran spoke to PR and communications expert Mark Pack to get his take on the Liberal Democrats, how they might do at the General Election and what’s next for Nick Clegg and the Party after May

Polling Matters: Why Plaid Cymru are not the SNP

Polling Matters is an independent, non-partisan podcast providing expert polling news and analysis, with guests, in the run up to the General Election. In the most recent episode, the team spoke to Roger Scully from the University of Cardiff to discuss the political situation in Wales and the role nationalist parties might play in Westminster in the event of a hung parliament after the election. In this post, Keiran Pedley examines why so little attention is paid to Welsh politics in Westminster and the opportunity the General Election presents for Plaid Cymru

Polling Matters: Political Betting – Place your bets now

Polling Matters is an independent, non-partisan podcast providing expert polling news and analysis, with guests, in the run up to the General Election. In the most recent episode, the team spoke to Matthew Shaddick from Ladbrokes politics about what the bookies make of the General Election overall and discussed some of the more interesting constituency battles

Polling matters: The ‘unstoppable’ rise of Boris Johnson?

Polling Matters is an independent, non-partisan podcast providing expert polling news and analysis, with guests, in the run up to the General Election. In the most recent episode, the team sat down with Tony Travers from the LSE to discuss all things London, including the seats that matter in May, devolution and PR for local Government and who might replace Boris Johnson in 2016. In this post, Keiran Pedley examines the Mayor’s popularity and what his future may hold

Scalable attack modelling in support of security information and event management

Includes bibliographical referencesWhile assessing security on single devices can be performed using vulnerability assessment tools, modelling of more intricate attacks, which incorporate multiple steps on different machines, requires more advanced techniques. Attack graphs are a promising technique, however they face a number of challenges. An attack graph is an abstract description of what attacks are possible against a specific network. Nodes in an attack graph represent the state of a network at a point in time while arcs between nodes indicate the transformation of a network from one state to another, via the exploit of a vulnerability. Using attack graphs allows system and network configuration information to be correlated and analysed to indicate imminent threats. This approach is limited by several serious issues including the state-space explosion, due to the exponential nature of the problem, and the difficulty in visualising an exhaustive graph of all potential attacks. Furthermore, the lack of availability of information regarding exploits, in a standardised format, makes it difficult to model atomic attacks in terms of exploit requirements and effects. This thesis has as its objective to address these issues and to present a proof of concept solution. It describes a proof of concept implementation of an automated attack graph based tool, to assist in evaluation of network security, assessing whether a sequence of actions could lead to an attacker gaining access to critical network resources. Key objectives are the investigation of attacks that can be modelled, discovery of attack paths, development of techniques to strengthen networks based on attack paths, and testing scalability for larger networks. The proof of concept framework, Network Vulnerability Analyser (NVA), sources vulnerability information from National Vulnerability Database (NVD), a comprehensive, publicly available vulnerability database, transforming it into atomic exploit actions. NVA combines these with a topological network model, using an automated planner to identify potential attacks on network devices. Automated planning is an area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which focuses on the computational deliberation process of action sequences, by measuring their expected outcomes and this technique is applied to support discovery of a best possible solution to an attack graph that is created. Through the use of heuristics developed for this study, unpromising regions of an attack graph are avoided. Effectively, this prevents the state-space explosion problem associated with modelling large scale networks, only enumerating critical paths rather than an exhaustive graph. SGPlan5 was selected as the most suitable automated planner for this study and was integrated into the system, employing network and exploit models to construct critical attack paths. A critical attack path indicates the most likely attack vector to be used in compromising a targeted device. Critical attack paths are identifed by SGPlan5 by using a heuristic to search through the state-space the attack which yields the highest aggregated severity score. CVSS severity scores were selected as a means of guiding state-space exploration since they are currently the only publicly available metric which can measure the impact of an exploited vulnerability. Two analysis techniques have been implemented to further support the user in making an informed decision as to how to prevent identified attacks. Evaluation of NVA was broken down into a demonstration of its effectiveness in two case studies, and analysis of its scalability potential. Results demonstrate that NVA can successfully enumerate the expected critical attack paths and also this information to establish a solution to identified attacks. Additionally, performance and scalability testing illustrate NVA's success in application to realistically sized larger networks