Consumer boycotts and consumer sovereignty

Cranfield School of Managemen

A regional model of endogenous growth with creative destruction

We consider a two region growth model with vertical innovations where technical externalities in R&D lead to a technology leading region being the most attractive location for innovative firms. Innovations are produced in the form of quality improvements building on available knowledge and firms choose a technologically advanced location to maximise the productivity of R&D and maintain their niche monopoly. The partial nature of spillovers causes an additional force for agglomeration: the clustering effect. Agglomerated locations have the benefit of local inter-varietal knowledge spillovers for growth while peripheral locations depend on trade and regional knowledge spillovers

Enhancements in reservoir flood risk mapping: example application for Ulley

In July 2007, at Ulley Reservoir, South Yorkshire, a catastrophic dam failure was narrowly avoided due to emergency preventative actions. During the event, a number of homes were evacuated and roads were closed for precautionary measures. Within very close proximity of the reservoir lies the town of Rotherham, the busy M1 motorway and a trunk freight railway line. The incident highlights the need for detailed flood risk and hazard modelling to improve management of the risk and better incident planning.Hazards and population vary in both time and space, but when traditionally modelling flood risk, the population are invariably located within the residential housing stock. This paper innovatively combines flood inundation and spatio-temporal population modelling for better estimates of the population potentially at risk. This is demonstrated though application to Ulley for the most probable worst case failure scenario should the preventative measures not have been undertaken and the dam have failed.This paper proposes an enhanced flood risk assessment in three stages: (i) probabilistic modelling of a failure scenario using embankment breach models; (ii) hydrodynamic inundation modelling for assessment of flood water spreading, depths and velocities; (iii) spatio-temporal population modelling to assess the risk to the population likely to be present. The combination with spatio-temporal population outputs aims to demonstrate the enhancements achievable in reservoir flood risk mapping when vulnerable populations are concerned

Fast, uniform, and compact scalar multiplication for elliptic curves and genus 2 Jacobians with applications to signature schemes

We give a general framework for uniform, constant-time one-and two-dimensional scalar multiplication algorithms for elliptic curves and Jacobians of genus 2 curves that operate by projecting to the x-line or Kummer surface, where we can exploit faster and more uniform pseudomultiplication, before recovering the proper "signed" output back on the curve or Jacobian. This extends the work of L{\'o}pez and Dahab, Okeya and Sakurai, and Brier and Joye to genus 2, and also to two-dimensional scalar multiplication. Our results show that many existing fast pseudomultiplication implementations (hitherto limited to applications in Diffie--Hellman key exchange) can be wrapped with simple and efficient pre-and post-computations to yield competitive full scalar multiplication algorithms, ready for use in more general discrete logarithm-based cryptosystems, including signature schemes. This is especially interesting for genus 2, where Kummer surfaces can outperform comparable elliptic curve systems. As an example, we construct an instance of the Schnorr signature scheme driven by Kummer surface arithmetic