Case study report: exploring employee engagement in the police force. Anonymised report

Employee engagement is one of the most significant concepts in the management field (Crawford et al 2014; Fletcher et al 2018). Its importance was emphasised in the MacLeod Review (2009) and lead to the voluntary movement, Engage for Success. Tasked by the UK Government to start conversations on issues of employee engagement, the movement focuses on developing our knowledge of engagement through topic specific groups, and our understanding of engagement through regional and national events. In 2016, Engage for Success launched the Line Manager Thought and Action Group (TAG) with the aim of conducting case study research around the role of line managers in developing and sustaining employee engagement initiatives. The following report focuses on research conducted at PFX using semi-structured interviews and focus groups with participants from senior management to front line officers. Participation in the research was voluntary and confidentiality was ensured. As a result, quotes used in this report have been anonymised. Findings are structured around the four enablers to employee engagement highlighted in the MacLeod Review, specifically strategic narrative, engaging manager, employee voice, and organisational integrity. A persistent theme across interviews and focus groups was the need for a collaborative and consistent strategic narrative on employee engagement. As a concept, it is currently considered as a transactional process, or ‘add on’, and is not integrated as a key focus across the organisation. Instead, there is an apparent ‘them and us’ culture, with a strong divide between front line officers and senior management. In addition, there is a lack of training and support on issues of engagement and leadership. Coupled with issues of miscommunication and a lack of employee voice, a negative impact on organisational integrity and trust is apparent. Our research all case study organisations has highlighted that engagement is everyone’s responsibility. Improving levels of engagement requires a series of roles fulfilled by all stakeholders in the organisation: from senior management to front-line staff. Employee engagement is a two-way process and is not something that HR, or line managers, can change in isolation. It needs a strong, consistent and collaborative strategic narrative, engaging managers that have the necessary skills and training, and an employee voice that is heard and enacted upon. Although there are several areas that are contributing to a negative staff experience, there is a strong sense of purpose throughout the organisation at all levels that is commendable

Round Optimal Concurrent Non-Malleability from Polynomial Hardness

Non-malleable commitments are a central cryptographic primitive that guarantee security against man-in-the-middle adversaries, and their exact round complexity has been a subject of great interest. Pass (TCC 2013, CC 2016) proved that non-malleable commitments with respect to commitment are impossible to construct in less than three rounds, via black-box reductions to polynomial hardness assumptions. Obtaining a matching positive result has remained an open problem so far. While three-round constructions of non-malleable commitments have been achieved, beginning with the work of Goyal, Pandey and Richelson (STOC 2016), current constructions require super-polynomial assumptions. In this work, we settle the question of whether three-round non-malleable commitments can be based on polynomial hardness assumptions. We give constructions based on polynomial hardness of Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption or Quadratic Residuosity or Nth Residuosity, together with ZAPs. Our protocols also satisfy concurrent non-malleability

Candida dubliniensis fungemia: the first four cases in North America.

We report the first four North American cases of Candida dubliniensis fungemia, including the first isolation of this organism from the bloodstream of an HIV-infected person. All isolates were susceptible in vitro to commonly used antifungal drugs. This report demonstrates that C. dubliniensis can cause bloodstream infection; however, the incidence of disease is not known

A Unified Approach to Constructing Black-box UC Protocols in Trusted Setup Models

We present a unified framework for obtaining black-box constructions of Universal Composable (UC) protocol in trusted setup models. Our result is analogous to the unified framework of Lin, Pass, and Venkitasubramaniam [STOC\u2709, Asiacrypt\u2712] that, however, only yields non-black-box constructions of UC protocols. Our unified framework shows that to obtain black-box constructions of UC protocols, it suffices to implement a special purpose commitment scheme that is, in particular, concurrently extractable using a given trusted setup. Using our framework, we improve black-box constructions in the common reference string and tamper-proof hardware token models by weakening the underlying computational and setup assumptions

UC-Secure OT from LWE, Revisited

We build a two-round, UC-secure oblivious transfer protocol (OT) in the common reference string (CRS) model under the Learning with Errors assumption (LWE) with sub-exponential modulus-to-noise ratio. We do so by instantiating the dual-mode encryption framework of Peikert, Vaikuntanathan and Waters (CRYPTO\u2708). The resulting OT can be instantiated in either one of two modes: one providing statistical sender security, and the other statistical receiver security. Furthermore, our scheme allows the sender and the receiver to reuse the CRS across arbitrarily many executions of the protocol. To the best of our knowledge, this gives the first construction of a UC-secure OT from LWE that achieves both statistical receiver security and unbounded reusability of the CRS. For comparison, there was, until recently, no such construction from LWE satisfying either one of these two properties. In particular, the construction of UC-secure OT from LWE of Peikert, Vaikuntanathan and Waters only provides computational receiver security and bounded reusability of the CRS. Our main technical contribution is a public-key encryption scheme from LWE where messy public keys (under which encryptions hide the underlying message statistically) can be recognized in time essentially independent of the LWE modulus $q$

A glimpse into the differential topology and geometry of optimal transport

This note exposes the differential topology and geometry underlying some of the basic phenomena of optimal transportation. It surveys basic questions concerning Monge maps and Kantorovich measures: existence and regularity of the former, uniqueness of the latter, and estimates for the dimension of its support, as well as the associated linear programming duality. It shows the answers to these questions concern the differential geometry and topology of the chosen transportation cost. It also establishes new connections --- some heuristic and others rigorous --- based on the properties of the cross-difference of this cost, and its Taylor expansion at the diagonal.Comment: 27 page

Evaluation and implications of natural product use in preoperative patients: a retrospective review

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Medication Reconciliation and Medication Safety are two themes emphasized in a variety of healthcare organizations. As a result, health care facilities have established methods for obtaining a patient's medication history. However, these methods may vary among institutions or even among the health care professionals in a single institution, and studies have shown that patients are reluctant to disclose their complementary and alternative medicine use to any health care professional. This lack of disclosure is important in surgical patients because of potential herbal interactions with medications and drugs used during the surgical procedure; and the potential for adverse reactions including effects on coagulation, blood pressure, sedation, electrolytes or diuresis. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to identify patterns of natural product use, to identify potential complications among patients scheduled for surgery, to improve existing medication reconciliation efforts, and to develop discontinuation guidelines for the use of these products prior to surgery.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A retrospective review of surgery patients presenting to the Anesthesia Preoperative Evaluation Clinic (APEC) at the University of Kansas Hospital was conducted to identify the prevalence of natural product use. The following data was collected: patient age; gender; allergy information; date of medication history; number of days prior to surgery; source of medication history; credentials of person obtaining the history; number and name of prescription medications, over-the-counter medications and natural products; and natural product dosage. Following the collection of data and analysis of the most common natural products used, possible complications and interactions were identified, and a protocol regarding the pre-operative use of natural products was developed and implemented.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Approximately one-fourth of patients seen in the APEC indicated the use of natural products. Patients taking natural products were significantly older, were more likely to undergo cardiac or chest surgery, and were more likely to be taking more prescription and non-prescription medications (all p < 0.001).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Based on the results of this study, it is concluded that there is a need for established guidelines regarding discontinuation of selected natural products prior to surgery and further education is needed concerning the perioperative implications of natural products.</p

Non-Uniformly Sound Certificates with Applications to Concurrent Zero-Knowledge

We introduce the notion of non-uniformly sound certificates: succinct single-message (unidirectional) argument systems that satisfy a ``best-possible security\u27\u27 against non-uniform polynomial-time attackers. In particular, no polynomial-time attacker with s bits of non-uniform advice can find significantly more than s accepting proofs for false statements. Our first result is a construction of non-uniformly sound certificates for all NP in the random oracle model, where the attacker\u27s advice can depend arbitrarily on the random oracle. We next show that the existence of non-uniformly sound certificates for P (and collision resistant hash functions) yields a public-coin constant-round fully concurrent zero-knowledge argument for NP

Secure Quantum Extraction Protocols

Knowledge extraction, typically studied in the classical setting, is at the heart of several cryptographic protocols. We introduce the notion of secure quantum extraction protocols. A secure quantum extraction protocol for an NP relation $\mathcal{R}$ is a classical interactive protocol between a sender and a receiver, where the sender gets the instance $z$ and a witness $w$, while the receiver only gets the instance $z$. For any efficient quantum adversarial sender (who follows the protocol but can choose its own randomness), there exists a quantum extractor that can extract a witness $w'$ such that $(z,w') \in \mathcal{R}$ while a malicious receiver should not be able to output any valid witness. We study and construct two types of secure quantum extraction protocols. (1) Quantum extraction protocols secure against quantum malicious receivers based on quantum fully homomorphic encryption satisfying some mild properties and quantum hardness of learning with errors. In this construction, we introduce a non black box technique in the quantum setting. All previous extraction techniques in the quantum setting were solely based on quantum rewinding. (2) Quantum extraction protocols secure against classical malicious receivers based on quantum hardness of learning with errors. As an application, based on the quantum hardness of learning with errors, we present a construction of constant round quantum zero-knowledge argument systems for NP that guarantee security even against quantum malicious verifiers; however, our soundness only holds against classical probabilistic polynomial time adversaries. Prior to our work, such protocols were known based, additionally, on the assumptions of decisional Diffie-Hellman (or other cryptographic assumptions that do not hold against polynomial time quantum algorithms).Comment: Accepted at TCC 202

Spectroscopic study of sub-barrier quasi-elastic nuclear reactions

The technique developed in this paper is particularly well suited to the detailed spectroscopic study of low energy quasi-elastic nuclear reactions and by overcoming the limitations of conventional procedure, the prospect of detailed studies of inclusive reaction mechanism may be realised. With only limited statistics we find evidence for strong multistep character in the transfer of a single nucleon from spherical vibrational target to spherical projectile nuclei. The suggestive measurements reported here may be made definitive through extended runs based on this technique and experiments planned for the future offer the real prospect of developing a quantified interpretation of the reaction process. 9 refs. 5 figs