Can the general fraud offence 'get the law right'? Some perspectives on the 'problem' of financial crime

The Fraud Bill, which received Royal Assent on 8 November 2006, created an offence of fraud in English criminal law which marks a departure of utmost significance from the approach adopted hitherto, whereby a number of related offences cover behaviour deemed to amount to fraud. To mark the passage of the Fraud Act 2006 into law, this article examines the references which were made during its consideration in Parliament to fraud as activity which is serious and which is often erroneously portrayed as 'victimless' crime. In joining these key criminal policy-making debates with academic study of white-collar crime, it will be suggested that as yet too little attention is being paid to 'ambiguous' popular perceptions of financial crimes for there to be confidence that the fraud offence will, in the words of the current Solicitor-General, 'get the law right'

S-matrices for spinor particles on Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes

The scattering problems arising when considering the contribution of the topologically inequivalent configurations of the spinors on Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes to the Hawking radiation are correctly stated. The corresponding $S$-matrices are described and presented in the form convenient to numerical computations.Comment: 11 pages, LaTe

Business, state, and community: 'responsible risk takers', New Labour, and the governance of corporate business

In December 1998, Peter Mandelson MP, one of the principal architects of the Labour Party’s victory in the May 1997 general election, dramatically resigned as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Nevertheless, despite his relatively brief period in that office, Mr. Mandelson left his imprint on policy through the publication in November 1998 of a major White Paper, ‘Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy’. The White Paper sets out the New Labour analysis of the national political economy in a globalized world economy and is very much influenced by Mr. Mandelson’s experience of the entrepreneurial spirit during his fact-finding visit to the United States of America. This article seeks to chart the relationship between New Labour’s desire to foster the development of the corporate sector within a vibrant entrepreneurial culture and the need to ensure that the integrity of the market is preserved in an arena which is seen as inimicable to strong regulatory intervention by the state. As well as mapping New Labour’s political rhetoric onto contemporary debates in corporate governance, the analysis will involve an examination of the interface between business practice and morality. In particular, the article will focus upon the role of the conception of company directors as ‘responsible risk takers’ and the upon the use of name-and-shame sanctions in the development of an entrepreneurial culture in which all corporate enterprises are seen as having a legitimate societal ‘licence to operate’

Indium adhesion provides quantitative measure of surface cleanliness

Indium tipped probe measures hydrophobic and hydrophilic contaminants on rough and smooth surfaces. The force needed to pull the indium tip, which adheres to a clean surface, away from the surface provides a quantitative measure of cleanliness

Elite male Flat jockeys display lower bone density and lower resting metabolic rate than their female counterparts: implications for athlete welfare

To test the hypothesis that daily weight-making is more problematic to health in male compared with female jockeys, we compared the bone-density and resting metabolic rate (RMR) in weight-matched male and female Flat-jockeys. RMR (kcal.kg-1 lean mass) was lower in males compared with females as well as lower bone-density Z-scores at the hip and lumbar spine. Data suggest the lifestyle of male jockeys’ compromise health more severely than females, possibly due to making-weight more frequently

Light-Front QCD and the Constituent Quark Model

A general strategy is described for deriving a constituent approximation to QCD, inspired by the constituent quark model and based on light-front quantization. Some technical aspects of the approach are discussed, including a mechanism for obtaining a confining potential and ways in which spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking can be manifested. (Based on a talk presented by K.G. Wilson at ``Theory of Hadrons and Light-Front QCD,'' Polana Zgorzelisko, Poland, August 1994.)Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX, no figure

Gauge invariant action at the ultraviolet cutoff

We show that it is possible to formulate a gauge theory starting from a local action at the ultraviolet (UV) momentum cutoff which is BRS invariant. One has to require that fields in the UV action and the fields in the effective action are not the same but related by a local field transformation. The few relevant parameters involved in this transformation (six for the $SU(2)$ gauge theory), are perturbatively fixed by the gauge symmetry.Comment: 5 pages, Latex, no figure