Financial Stability: What It Is and Why It Matters

What is financial stability? What is the role of the central bank and other government agencies in bringing it about? What are the implications for the private sector?monetary policy, financial stability

Data Breach Notification Laws and the Quantum Decryption Problem

In the United States, state data breach notification laws protect citizens by forcing businesses to notify those citizens when their personal information has been compromised. These laws almost universally include an exception for encrypted personal data. Modern encryption methods make encrypted data largely useless, and the notification laws aim to encourage good encryption practices. This Note challenges the wisdom of laws that place blind faith in the continued infallibility of encryption. For decades, Shor’s algorithm has promised polynomial-time factoring once a sufficiently powerful quantum computer can be built. Competing laboratories around the world steadily continue to march toward this end. Once quantum computers become strong enough, classical encryption will no longer remain secure. Ramifications of quantum decryption would reverberate through all aspects of security and society. This Note focuses only on the interplay of this development with data breach notification laws. While these laws cannot prevent technological progress, a federal data breach notification law could encourage adoption of a quantum-secure classical encryption method. This would dampen the harm quantum decryption causes by limiting the relevance of newly useful encrypted data

Montana Business Quarterly, Summer 1968

This is an academic publication produced by the Bureau of Business and Economic Research (BBER) at the University of Montana’s College of Business. This is volume 6, number 3. The cover page mistakenly indicates that this is the fall rather than the summer issue.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/mtbusinessquarterly/1037/thumbnail.jp

NEUROWAR IS HERE!

Mysterious attacks on the human brain have begun plaguing U.S. diplomats and officials with increasing frequency, ranging from overseas diplomatic outposts to right here in the United States. Known in the media as Havana Syndrome, these attacks appear to be signaling a new form of warfare—one that is focused on enhancing, targeting, and weaponizing the human brain—neurowarfare. Indeed, the human brain is at the center of a biotechnological revolution currently underway. At the same time, great power competition has returned to the forefront of international relations, as China and Russia seek to contest America’s global leadership. In an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, this contest is ultimately a battle of ideas and influence, with more value placed on information and non-lethal means to manipulate and control both adversaries and domestic populations alike. The battle for influence begins and ends in the human mind, where reality is perceived. The implications of these developments point to both a new form and domain of warfare centering on the human brain. By highlighting recent attacks targeting the brain and revealing research from the United States and its two main competitors—China and Russia—this thesis seeks to argue that neurowar is not just coming, but rather is already here and is likely to fundamentally alter conflict and warfare.Lieutenant Colonel, United States Air ForceMajor, United States Air ForceApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Water Infrastructure Vulnerability to Coastal Flood Hazards : A Space-Place Analysis of Manteo, New Bern, and Plymouth, North Carolina

With the impending threat of sea level rise, as well as the recurring annual danger of storm surges during hurricane season and floods from heavy rain events, North Carolina's coast is especially vulnerable to coastal flooding, due mostly to large extents of low lying coastal areas. Water utility infrastructure is a vital resource to any community, while concurrently containing hazardous material that could be potentially devastating to the residents if parts are damaged. Unfortunately, they are commonly located in highly vulnerable areas along the coast. Hurricane Sandy illustrated how large magnitude natural hazards can damage vulnerable infrastructure, leaving municipalities burdened with enormous repair costs, as well as large parts of the city without running clean water.   To reduce the vulnerability of these important systems in several coastal North Carolina communities, New Bern, Plymouth and Manteo were assessed for their vulnerability to storm surge, sea level rise, and riverine flooding using downscaled surge flood models, and applying Geographic Information Systems techniques to improve the accuracy of Digital Elevation Models used in flood mapping. A geospatial overlay of the water infrastructure assists in the computation of vulnerability of this resource to these risks, which will be used to promote proactive solutions to city officials in order to reduce their vulnerability. By modeling these different hazards for three different communities with different geographical contexts, we can observe how they differ within and throughout differing areas.  M.A

Framing Fracking: Public responses to potential unconventional fossil fuel exploitation in the North of England

The emerging prospect of the exploitation of onshore unconventional fossil fuels (unconventionals) across the UK has been accompanied by a significant degree of public unease. Institutional actors have regularly claimed that the risks associated with hydraulic fracturing (fracking), the controversial technique often involved in the extraction of unconventionals, are safely manageable. Public concern over both the technique of fracking and the prospect of the exploitation of unconventionals has regularly been categorised by these institutional actors as being ostensibly about these risks. As a result sceptical public positions have often been represented as lacking (technical) understanding and as in need of being informed of “the facts”. This account of the controversy, regularly evident in media, expert, and political discourse, makes a series of questionable assumptions about public responses and is showing signs of a failure to learn lessons from previous instances of controversy surrounding emerging technological innovation. This research is an attempt to articulate the currently scarcely acknowledged factors underlying public concerns and a series of conditions upon which the ‘acceptability’ of fracking and unconventionals may rest. In order to do so a deliberative focus group methodology is employed, with an explicit focus on the framing of the issue, including institutional treatment of questions from beyond established scientific risk knowledge and often unquestioned normativities involved in nominally expert accounts

An analytical tool to aid the reflective selection of equity investments

Purpose: The problem the allocator of financial capital has to deal with is that asset selection decisions need to be made today based on uncertain future expectations derived from accounting measurements and estimations produced in the past which are vulnerable to error and creative accounting. The research looks at how this problem has been dealt with in the academic and professional literature and develops a new tool leveraging both quantitative methods and the reflective practitioner’s experiential intuition. Methodology design: A qualitative methodology based on real-world case study (Flyvbjerg 2011) and microanalysis (Strauss and Corbin 1998) is used to develop customised reflexive research tools to assess management success in allocating capital, and audit metrics to illuminate techniques used to conceal poor returns. Findings: Returns which failed to reach market indices or inflation were observed in the UK investment trust sector over the past ten years suggesting their customers’ capital lost value in real terms. Although Modern Portfolio Theory has useful insights, strong form Efficient Market Hypothesis is rejected as is the over-reliance on mathematical models most of which have been developed under non-realistic assumptions. Monte Carlo simulation was examined and used alongside experiential intuition (Burke and Miller 1999, Dane and Pratt 2007) to generate insights into future risk management priorities and also as a way of optimising portfolio weighting options. The use of Monte Carlo for risk analysis, while not new in the financial services industry, is less common in industry, which in turn served to generate client work and publication of findings during the research. In carrying out the research, data inquiry limitations and in some cases data, design and formulaic errors were found in the publicly available research databases. Therefore a customised accounting database was designed with which to carry out the real-world case studies, which in turn exposed usage of modified accounting bases, creative accounting (Griffiths 1992) and concealment of earnings fluctuations in the statement of comprehensive income (Athanasakou et al 2011). Conclusions: A customised accounting research database (CARD) is developed to provide a basis for conducting structured quantitative analysis based on DuPont (Brealey et al 2006), Graham (1976) and my own experientially derived metrics. This quantitative analysis is further supported with experiential intuitive unstructured inquiries in such areas as the likelihood of future returns, debt structuring risks, management orientation and so forth. Monte Carlo is used for estimating probable future outcome distributions and in optimising portfolio weighting. To further reduce the risk of incorrect decisions, a capital allocation policy is developed drawing from both the literature review (mainly Hertz 1964, Modigliani and Miller 1958, Buffett 1977 – 2012, Stiglitz 2010) and my own experiences. At each step in the analysis the practitioner has the opportunity to reflect on the data gathered and to formulate questions needed to address the knowledge gaps arising. The findings expose the care needed when analysing corporate financial data due to the vulnerabilities of financial databases to error as well as the vulnerabilities of published financial data to earnings management (Nelson et al 2002). The tools developed in the project place particular emphasis on data integrity through the use of both existing and new analytical and triangulation formulae