Law, sex and the city: Regulating sexual entertainment venues in England and Wales

Purpose – This paper aims to explore how municipal law, in its various guises, serves to police the boundaries of acceptable sexual conduct by considering how Sexual Entertainment Venues (SEVs) in British cities are controlled through diverse techniques of licensing and planning control. Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes the emergence of permissive new licensing controls that provide local authorities considerable control over SEVs. Licensing decisions, judicial review cases and planning inspectorate adjudications since the inception of the new powers are examined to explore the logic of judgements preventing SEVs operating in specific localities. Findings – Through analysis of case studies, it is shown that local authorities have almost total discretion to prevent SEVs operating in specific localities, particularly those undergoing, or anticipated to be undergoing, redevelopment and regeneration. Originality/value – This paper offers unique insights on the “scope” of municipal law by highlighting how land uses associated with “sexual minority” interests are regulated in the interests of urban regeneration, redevelopment and restructuring

Tracks made by swimming Hippopotami: An example from Koobi Fora (Turkana Basin, Kenya)

Here we report an ichnological surface close to Koobi Fora, Kenya in palaeontological collecting Area 103. The surface is marked by hominin tracks, as well as many traces from large animals. A southern excavation of the surface some 70 m from the hominin tracks displays a diverse range of animal track typologies, most of which appear to have been made by a four digit animal moving via punting or bottom walking in a shallow water body. Due to the track morphology and the associated fossil record, the non-hominin tracks are interpreted as being made by hippopotami, potentially including pygmy species or juveniles. The track typologies are explained using modern analogue observations of hippopotami sub-aquatic locomotion. This work provides important environmental context for adjacent hominin tracks and fossils, as well as providing the first recorded description of fossilized swim tracks made by mammals. The site has implications for the interpretation of swim tracks in the geological record particularly the widespread and controversial tracks made by sauropods and other dinosaurs

Quantum Lightning Never Strikes the Same State Twice

Public key quantum money can be seen as a version of the quantum no-cloning theorem that holds even when the quantum states can be verified by the adversary. In this work, investigate quantum lightning, a formalization of "collision-free quantum money" defined by Lutomirski et al. [ICS'10], where no-cloning holds even when the adversary herself generates the quantum state to be cloned. We then study quantum money and quantum lightning, showing the following results: - We demonstrate the usefulness of quantum lightning by showing several potential applications, such as generating random strings with a proof of entropy, to completely decentralized cryptocurrency without a block-chain, where transactions is instant and local. - We give win-win results for quantum money/lightning, showing that either signatures/hash functions/commitment schemes meet very strong recently proposed notions of security, or they yield quantum money or lightning. - We construct quantum lightning under the assumed multi-collision resistance of random degree-2 systems of polynomials. - We show that instantiating the quantum money scheme of Aaronson and Christiano [STOC'12] with indistinguishability obfuscation that is secure against quantum computers yields a secure quantum money schem

Preserving the impossible: conservation of soft-sediment hominin footprint sites and strategies for three-dimensional digital data capture.

Human footprints provide some of the most publically emotive and tangible evidence of our ancestors. To the scientific community they provide evidence of stature, presence, behaviour and in the case of early hominins potential evidence with respect to the evolution of gait. While rare in the geological record the number of footprint sites has increased in recent years along with the analytical tools available for their study. Many of these sites are at risk from rapid erosion, including the Ileret footprints in northern Kenya which are second only in age to those at Laetoli (Tanzania). Unlithified, soft-sediment footprint sites such these pose a significant geoconservation challenge. In the first part of this paper conservation and preservation options are explored leading to the conclusion that to 'record and digitally rescue' provides the only viable approach. Key to such strategies is the increasing availability of three-dimensional data capture either via optical laser scanning and/or digital photogrammetry. Within the discipline there is a developing schism between those that favour one approach over the other and a requirement from geoconservationists and the scientific community for some form of objective appraisal of these alternatives is necessary. Consequently in the second part of this paper we evaluate these alternative approaches and the role they can play in a 'record and digitally rescue' conservation strategy. Using modern footprint data, digital models created via optical laser scanning are compared to those generated by state-of-the-art photogrammetry. Both methods give comparable although subtly different results. This data is evaluated alongside a review of field deployment issues to provide guidance to the community with respect to the factors which need to be considered in digital conservation of human/hominin footprints

The Implications of an Operating System Level DRM Controller

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the persistent access control of digital content. This paper examines the implications of enforcing access control rules at the operating system kernel level. We describe our design for a prototype, operating system kernel level DRM Controller. Initial performance benchmarks measuring access time have yielded promising results. Only negligible overhead was measured unprotected data, while the overhead incurred for protected data is unnoticeable to a human user. Lastly, we discuss implications of operating system level DRM

Study protocol: evaluation of a parenting and stress management programme: a randomised controlled trial of Triple P discussion groups and stress control

<br>Background: Children displaying psychosocial problems are at an increased risk of negative developmental outcomes. Parenting practices are closely linked with child development and behaviour, and parenting programmes have been recommended in the treatment of child psychosocial problems. However, parental mental health also needs to be addressed when delivering parenting programmes as it is linked with parenting practices, child outcomes, and treatment outcomes of parenting programmes. This paper describes the protocol of a study examining the effects of a combined intervention of a parenting programme and a cognitive behavioural intervention for mental health problems.</br> <br>Methods: The effects of a combined intervention of Triple P Discussion Groups and Stress Control will be examined using a randomised controlled trial design. Parents with a child aged 3?8?years will be recruited to take part in the study. After obtaining informed consent and pre-intervention measures, participants will be randomly assigned to either an intervention or a waitlist condition. The two primary outcomes for this study are change in dysfunctional/ineffective parenting practices and change in symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. Secondary outcomes are child behaviour problems, parenting experiences, parental self-efficacy, family relationships, and positive parental mental health. Demographic information, participant satisfaction with the intervention, and treatment fidelity data will also be collected. Data will be collected at pre-intervention, mid-intervention, post-intervention, and 3-month follow-up.</br> <br>Discussion: The aim of this paper is to describe the study protocol of a randomised controlled trial evaluating the effects of a combined intervention of Triple P Discussion Groups and Stress Control in comparison to a waitlist condition. This study is important because it will provide evidence about the effects of this combined intervention for parents with 3?8?year old children. The results of the study could be used to inform policy about parenting support and support for parents with mental health problems. Trial registration ClinicalTrial.gov: NCT01777724, UTN: U1111-1137-1053.</br&gt

Experiences in Implementing a Kernel-Level DRM Controller

The enforcement of DRM licenses is performed by a DRM controller, and it can be implemented at the application level, the operating system level and at a hardware level. In this paper we discuss our experiences in implementing an operating system level DRM controller based on the GNU-Linux kernel. This paper investigates the feasibility of creating a transparent, application independent DRM controller and the performance implications thereof. Our investigation has revealed, that while a number of access control rules can be enforced transparently at the operating system level, there are also a number of rules that require application level enforcement. Thus, we recommend separation of rights to two levels of enforcement to take advantage of transparent enforcement at the kernel level. Our performance analysis shows promise with minimal user observable time impact for small files less than 25 MB in size. However, there is still a significant performance impact and a very noticeable user observable time performance impact for larger files. Thus improvements are necessary if DRM controllers are to be deployed in multi-user, high-load environments like file servers