Unified Forensic Methodology for the Analysis of Embedded Systems

Embedded systems are ubiquitous in society and can contain information that could be used in criminal cases for example in a serious road traffic accident where the car management systems could provide vital forensic information concerning the engine speed etc. A critical review of a number of methods and procedures for the analysis of embedded systems were compared against a ‘standard’ methodology for use in a Forensic Computing Investigation. A Unified Forensic Methodology (UFM) has been developed that is forensically sound and capable of dealing with the analysis of a wide variety of Embedded Systems

Acting on job stress - do we have a context for action?

Psychosocial risk is possibly the single biggest cause of occupational ill-health inAustralia, causing up to 30% of cardiovascular disease in working men and up to 30% ofdepression in working women. While the number of studies on effective workplaceinterventions has increased significantly in recent years, there has been at best onlylimited analysis examining the context for these interventions. The literature provideslittle evidence with which to answer critical public policy questions. In order to determine how diverse stakeholders are responding to job stress, this studydirectly sought to characterise this context. Through interviews across industry and withkey stakeholders, this study provides a thorough and empirically grounded description ofcurrent Victorian practice, a critical support for developing a systems approach toworkplace stress. The interviews examined the views of Victorian stakeholders in thearea of job stress to investigate understanding of and receptivity to systems approaches and reviewed experiences in workplaces. The picture that emerges from the interview data is contrasting, but with common features across groups. Most parties understood stress as an individual health issue, even though the links to the wider workplace environment were recognised by many. The views of some interviewees imply moral judgements about acceptable stress, experienced by “good” people who deal with trauma and conflict in their work, and unacceptable stress, experienced by “bad” people who can’t cope with the ups and downs of working life. Even so, the need to deal with job stress is recognised by all

The Compendium Compertorum and the making of the Suppression Act of 1536

This thesis investigates the relationship between the Royal Visitation of 1535 — 1536, the Compendium Compertorum and the Suppression Act of 1536. Through the extensive examination of new and corrected manuscript evidence and by the updating of previous analysis, the Royal Visitation has been identified as more extensive, geographically and conceptually, than has hitherto been recognised. This work identifies for the first time all the Commissioners and their regions of responsibility in England and Wales. This discovery has enabled a thorough review of their visiting itineraries to be made and has allowed their actions to be examined relative to a central, emerging policy. The Royal Commissioners understood they had a reforming responsibility at the institutions they visited. This has not been previously recognised by historians who have seen the Royal Visitation as purely a means of collecting damaging evidence of monastic corruption. This work makes clear that the principal purpose of the Visitation, however, was to gain the wide acceptance of the Royal Supremacy among a range of ecclesiastical institutions, including religious houses. It will be shown that although Thomas Cromwell co-ordinated the Commissioners, he can occasionally be identified bending to the royal will. The emergence of the core Injunctions in August 1535, for example, was a result of King Henry's intervention. The Commissioners had occasional direct contact with the king to discuss the progress of the Visitation. This work identifies that the decision to widen the definition of sexual crime in the Visitation was made in September 1535, when the court was at Winchester. Thereafter, Cromwell can be seen considering various policies for possible monastic reform. On the eve of the passing of the Suppression Act Cromwell's chosen monastic reform policy was overruled. The Suppression Act in its final form was the preferred choice of King Henry. The data obtained on monastic crime was edited and manipulated from the Visitors' Act Book into the Compendium Compertorum to assist the passing of the Act. The Royal Visitation information was also used to evaluate the likely effects of the Act's implementation. This work outlines why the Crown invested seven months in undertaking the Royal Visitation. It helps explain the first assault in the 1530s, by the government, on the English and Welsh monasteries. The widely held view that the Suppression Act was formulated by Cromwell must be revised. Cromwell certainly supervised the Royal Visitation but the king defined the final monastic suppression policy

Selective C-C coupling at a Pt(IV) centre : 100% preference for sp2-sp3 over sp3-sp3

The oxidative addition of three different organic halides to the non-symmetric platinum(II) mer coordinated dicyclometallated C^N^C complex 1 yielded short-lived six-coordinate platinum(IV) complexes 2(R), with the incoming groups trans across the platinum centre. A spontaneous reductive coupling reaction then occurred with, in each case, a completely chemoselective sp2-sp3 coupling, and exclusively gave R-3, with the newly introduced R group bonded to the previously cyclometallated aryl ring. Following a recyclometallation reaction, the oxidative addition/reductive elimination cycle was repeated and gave the same selectivity. A one-pot route to doubly alkylating the aryl ring was developed. The observed selectivity might have been predicted on the normal basis of a steric barrier associated with non-flat sp3 hybridised groups, but we suggest that it arises from the stereochemistry at the metal, and the orientation of the ligands

A dynamic neural field model of leaky prosody: proof of concept

Recent work has shown that lexical items come to take on the phonetic characteristics of the prosodic environments in which they are typically produced, a phenomenon referred to as "leaky prosody". Focusing on pitch patterns in Mandarin, we show that leaky prosody can be derived from a flat (i.e., non-transformational, non-optimizing) model of speech production. Formalized using Dynamic Field Theory, in our model, lexical, phonological, and prosodic inputs each exert forces on a Dynamic Neural Field representing pitch. Notably, the forces exerted by these inputs reflect surface distributions in a large corpus of spontaneous speech. Our simulations showed that the flat model derives the short timescale effect of prosodic prominence on pitch production as well as the longer timescale effect of leaky prosody. By updating lexical items based on surface phonetic form, words that are consistently produced in high/low prosodic prominence positions take on the phonetic characteristics of those environments