Genetics Crime and Justice

This review is unashamedly from the perspective of English law because busy United Kingdom criminal law solicitors and barristers mostly wish to know what the law states, which case is a precedent case and whether the author has provided up-to-date legal information. This is because legal practitioners deal with real and urgent cases. The English Income Tax Act gained Royal Assent in 1799 the first government attempt to stop early tax avoidance. Later, tax avoidance schemes (which in English Law were deemed a legitimate method of minimising one payment of taxation) became de rigueur all over the world and often involved creation of Deeds of Covenant and Trusts, notably Discretionary Trusts under civil law. Man’s ingenuity knows no bounds and this applies to man’s characteristic of criminality as it does to scholarship, enterprise and innovation. Despite protestations by some countries police agencies, contrary to the rise of crime, the fact is that that crime is increasing exponentially worldwide, but the number of people committing crime is not increasing because many crimes are repeated crimes committed by persons with habitual criminal behaviour, ie hard-core criminals

Forms and processes of information systems evolution

The way in which software evolves over time has been much studied and is now fairly well-understood. What has been less thoroughly studied are the processes by which information systems – containing software as one component, but also with significant human and organisational aspects – evolve. In many organisations, few information systems are built at all from scratch, but rather are modified from or built on top of existing ones or bolted together from third-party components. In practice, the old division between design, implementation and maintenance has largely disappeared. In this paper, I discuss the nature of IS evolution. I make a distinction between planned (intentional and strategic) evolution, for which we can formulate a clear process; and unplanned (emergent and externally-driven) evolution, where we can simply study the dynamics of the process and be ready for events

Math biology and quantum chaos highlight sixth annual meeting of SIAM's UKIE section

The sixth annual meeting of the UKIE Section of SIAM, held at Leeds University on January 11, provided a taste of the diversity of industrial and applied mathematics activity in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Organised by the section officers---David Parker (president), Ivan Graham (vice-president), and Peter Jimack (secretary/treasurer)-the meeting brought together more than 50 people to hear talks on subjects ranging from mathematical biology to quantum chaos

On boundaries and disciplines: constructing a set of key systems thinkers

Over the past four years, the Open University has been working on an internal project of systems scholarship, called 'Systems Thinkers'. We have examined the life and work of fifty key thinkers, held discussions on their significance, and are in the process of writing a book and a postgraduate course about these thinkers. This work has raised many interesting questions about the boundaries of systems as an intellectual and practical discipline. In this paper, we will discuss some of these questions, asking what it means to be a discipline and how to establish its boundaries

Introduction: The difference that makes a difference

This article introduces TripleC’s Special Issue on The Difference That Makes a Difference, containing papers arising from a workshop of the same name that ran in Milton Keynes in September 2011. The background to the workshop is explained, workshop sessions are summarised, and the content of the papers introduced. Finally, some provisional outcomes from the workshop and the Special Issue are described

Global perspectives on legacy systems

Summarises findings of two international workshops on legacy systems, held in conjunction with an EPSRC managed programme. Issues covered include the nature and dynamics of legacy systems, the co-evolution of software and organisations, issues around software as a technology (its engineering and its management), and organisational/people issues

Information systems: a cyborg discipline?

This paper argues for a model of information systems in terms of cyborgs – a boundary-crossing mixture of the technical and the social. The argument for this model is substantiated from the personal experience of the author, presented as examples of being a cyborg researcher within a disciplinary context. Lessons for information systems are drawn

Local stability and a renormalized Newton Method for equilibrium liquid crystal director modeling

We consider the nonlinear systems of equations that result from discretizations of a prototype variational model for the equilibrium director field characterizing the orientational properties of a liquid crystal material. In the presence of pointwise unit-vector constraints and coupled electric fields, the numerical solution of such equations by Lagrange-Newton methods leads to problems with a double saddle-point form, for which we have previously proposed a preconditioned nullspace method as an effective solver [A. Ramage and E. C. Gartland, Jr., submitted]. The characterization of local stability of solutions is complicated by the double saddle-point structure, and here we develop efficiently computable criteria in terms of minimum eigenvalues of certain projected Schur complements. We also propose a modified outer iteration (“Renormalized Newton Method”) in which the orientation variables are normalized onto the constraint manifold at each iterative step. This scheme takes advantage of the special structure of these problems, and we prove that it is locally quadratically convergent. The Renormalized Newton Method bears some resemblance to the Truncated Newton Method of computational micromagnetics, and we compare and contrast the two

The effect of elastic anisotropy on nematic disclination lines

No abstract available