Role of the Pension Protection Fund in financial risk management of UK defined benefit pension sector: a multi-period economic capital study

With the advent of formal regulatory requirements for rigorous risk-based, or economic, capital quantification for the financial risk management of banking and insurance sectors, regulators and policy-makers are turning their attention to the pension sector, the other integral player in the financial markets. In this paper, we analyse the impact of applying economic capital techniques to defined benefit pension schemes in the United Kingdom. We propose two alternative economic capital quantification approaches, first, for individual defined benefit pension schemes on a stand-alone basis and then for the pension sector as a whole by quantifying economic capital of the UK’s Pension Protection Fund, which takes over eligible schemes with deficit, in the event of sponsor insolvency. We find that economic capital requirements for individual schemes are significantly high. However, we show that sharing risks through the Pension Protection Fund reduces the aggregate economic capital requirement of the entire sector

Protecting the flight test programme

Considerable effort is put into the safety risk assessment of any flight test programme - and rightly so, since failures to apply best practice in this area may cause significant expense, and in extremis loss of life. However, it must also be remembered that the flight test programme itself is an essential component in the development of the aircraft or system, and that even if safety is never compromised, the failure of a test programme to deliver the required results on time and budget can cause failure of the entire aircraft programme. This paper considers the areas in which planning and conduct of a flight test programme should be protected. In particular it considers the conduct of flight test personnel in ways which go beyond only safety training, the important of documenting all flight test planning and conduct and the continuous justification of flight test conclusions, planning project manning to ensure that the loss (for whatever reason) of key personnel or equipment does not cause complete failure of the flight test programme, how to recover from significant programme disruptions, and most importantly whilst protecting or recovering the flight test programme – how to ensure that safety is not compromised in the process

Ordered Landmarks in Planning

Many known planning tasks have inherent constraints concerning the best order in which to achieve the goals. A number of research efforts have been made to detect such constraints and to use them for guiding search, in the hope of speeding up the planning process. We go beyond the previous approaches by considering ordering constraints not only over the (top-level) goals, but also over the sub-goals that will necessarily arise during planning. Landmarks are facts that must be true at some point in every valid solution plan. We extend Koehler and Hoffmann's definition of reasonable orders between top level goals to the more general case of landmarks. We show how landmarks can be found, how their reasonable orders can be approximated, and how this information can be used to decompose a given planning task into several smaller sub-tasks. Our methodology is completely domain- and planner-independent. The implementation demonstrates that the approach can yield significant runtime performance improvements when used as a control loop around state-of-the-art sub-optimal planning systems, as exemplified by FF and LPG

On the extraction, ordering, and usage of landmarks in planning

Many known planning tasks have inherent constraints concerning the best order in which to achieve the goals. A number of research efforts have been made to detect such constraints and use them for guiding search, in the hope to speed up the planning process. We go beyond the previous approaches by dening ordering constraints not only over the (top level) goals, but also over the sub-goals that will arise during planning. Landmarks are facts that must be true at some point in every valid solution plan. We show how such landmarks can be found, how their inherent ordering constraints can be approximated, and how this information can be used to decompose a given planning task into severa smaller sub-tasks. Our methodology is completely domain- and planner-independent. The implementation demonstrates that the approach can yield significant performance improvements in both heuristic forward search and GRAPHPLAN-style planning

The identification and exploitation of almost symmetry in planning problems

Previous work in symmetry detection for planning has identified symmetries between domain objects and shown how the exploitation of this information can help reduce search at plan time. However these methods are unable to detect symmetries between objects that are almost symmetrical: where the objects must start (or end) in slightly different configurations but for much of the plan their behaviour is equivalent. In the paper we outline a method for identifying such symmetries and discuss how this symmetry information can be positively exploited to help direct search during planning we have implemented this method and integrated it with the FF-v2.3 planner and in the paper we present results of experiments with this approach that demonstrate its potential

Abstraction-based action ordering in planning

Many planning problems contain collections of symmetric objects, actions and structures which render them difficult to solve efficiently. It has been shown that the detection and exploitation of symmetric structure in planning problems can dramatically reduce the size of the search space and the time taken to find a solution. We present the idea of using an abstraction of the problem domain to reveal symmetric structure and guide the navigation of the search space. We show that this is effective even in domains in which there is little accessible symmetric structure available for pruning. Proactive exploitation represents a flexible and powerfulalternative to the symmetry-breaking strategies exploited in earlier work in planning and CSPs. The notion of almost symmetry is defined and results are presented showing that proactive exploitation of almost symmetry can improve the performance of a heuristic forward search planner

Utopian youth justice?

This Context Statement constitutes Part One of a two-part submission towards a PhD by Public Works, Part Two consisting of nine publications in the area of youth crime and youth justice. As these various works were written for distinct purposes and focused on a more diverse group of subjects than would be the case for a conventional PhD, the Context Statement aims to ‘glue’ them together by situating them within a broader political and theoretical context. It also seeks to provide firmer intellectual foundations than was evident in the original works, by reviewing in detail relevant literature, outlining the methods adopted in the studies, subjecting each publication to systematic critique and reflecting on my own development as a researcher. Finally, the Context Statement defines what I consider to be the significant contribution to contemporary analyses of youth justice policy that the public works represent. The Context Statement is organised into five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the Statement with a short account of how the publications came to be written and of my growing awareness of the need to give the applied work I was doing a more critical edge. Chapter 2 outlines the academic context for the research, reviewing the literature around four broad themes: the victimisation of children and young people; the relationship between schools, school exclusion and youth crime; the links between social exclusion and crime; and the preventative turn in youth Justice policy from the late 1990s. Chapter 3 reflects on the nature, scope and limitations of applied social research and considers different approaches that may fall under this heading, with consideration to their political and theoretical implications. Against this backdrop, it then describes and evaluates the range of methods employed in the studies on which the public works were based. Chapter 4 critically reviews each of the public works in turn, considering their focus, validity, impact and significance, and identifies the continuities between them as well as emergent themes. Chapter 5 concludes by re-situating the key findings from the works within the broader policy and theoretical context outlined in the literature review and demonstrating why, collectively, these public works constitute an original and coherent contribution to knowledge. The public works submitted towards this PhD straddle the semi-connected worlds of youth crime and youth justice. They contribute to a growing appreciation of the victimisation of children amongst criminologists and others, emphasising that victimisation and offending correlate less because of the characteristics of the individuals and families involved than because of the restricting circumstances characteristic of late modern capitalist societies. The analysis of preventative strategies, in particular mentoring, whilst revealing examples of success and plausible explanations for this, also questions the extent to which such ‘solutions’ to the crime problem can ‘work’, given that they are predominantly geared towards changing individuals and so can have little bearing on the disadvantageous social and economic circumstances these individuals face. This said, utopianism may not be the worst thing in an uncertain world

An evaluation of the NCY Trust teenage parenting project

This report presents the findings from an evaluation of the Newham Children and Young People’s (NCY) Trust Teenage Parenting project. Research has demonstrated that teenage parents and their children are disproportionately likely to be NEET (not in education, employment or training) but also that their prospects improve when provided with appropriate support

ITERA: IDL Tool for Emission-line Ratio Analysis

We present a new software tool to enable astronomers to easily compare observations of emission line ratios with those determined by photoionization and shock models, ITERA, the IDL Tool for Emission-line Ratio Analysis. This tool can plot ratios of emission lines predicted by models and allows for comparison of observed line ratios against grids of these models selected from model libraries associated with the tool. We provide details of the libraries of standard photoionization and shock models available with ITERA, and, in addition, present three example emission line ratio diagrams covering a range of wavelengths to demonstrate the capabilities of ITERA. ITERA, and associated libraries, is available from \url{http://www.brentgroves.net/itera.html}Comment: Accepted for New Astronomy, 3 figures. ITERA tool available to download from http://www.brentgroves.net/itera.htm

Unsupervised learning of visual taxonomies

As more images and categories become available, organizing them becomes crucial. We present a novel statistical method for organizing a collection of images into a treeshaped hierarchy. The method employs a non-parametric Bayesian model and is completely unsupervised. Each image is associated with a path through a tree. Similar images share initial segments of their paths and therefore have a smaller distance from each other. Each internal node in the hierarchy represents information that is common to images whose paths pass through that node, thus providing a compact image representation. Our experiments show that a disorganized collection of images will be organized into an intuitive taxonomy. Furthermore, we find that the taxonomy allows good image categorization and, in this respect, is superior to the popular LDA model