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The central contention of this thesis, and its original contribution to the subject area, is that the recent development of civilian intelligence analysis in Scottish policing presents a challenge to an otherwise hegemonic ‘cop culture’ in police intelligence work. In advancing this argument this thesis develops the existing literature by recognising that academic research to date on ‘police culture’ has focused almost exclusively on the cultures of sworn police officers, and particularly those ‘cops’ engaged in ‘frontline’ policing. Civilian police staff groups have been excluded from existing cultural accounts, despite their long-established position in many police forces, particularly those in Scotland. Drawing upon five years of qualitative sociological fieldwork, and taking inspiration from the theory and research of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this thesis highlights how civilian intelligence analysts – as office-based, young, predominantly female and embodying a new ‘academic’ knowledge that is divorced from experience – have become increasingly essential to the effective functioning of intelligence-led policing. The integration of civilian intelligence analysis into police intelligence work in Scotland, however, is inhibited by the persistent hegemony of a cop culture that privileges masculinity, physicality, solidarity, cynicism and, above all, the experiential knowledge that the ‘crime-fighting’ cop has gained from policing ‘the streets’. The cultural challenge of civilian intelligence analysis, emerging from within wider processes of civilianisation and pluralisation, has provoked a patriarchal response from police officers. This response is characterised by masculine domination and the exertion of symbolic violence within the wider ideological construction of the ‘police family’. This patriarchal response has also contributed to the infantilisation of the intelligence analyst in Scottish policing, as a concomitant form of cultural control. The interplay of these processes of cultural challenge and control contributes to a phenomenon of cultural dissonance – a sense of difference, discord and disharmony – between police officers and intelligence analysts. This cultural dissonance is sustained in everyday practice through the perpetuation and persistence of a ‘them and us’ culture between these groups. This thesis concludes by exploring the future of intelligence analysis in the context of profound and on-going organisational reform, and in doing so identifies recent processes of de-civilianisation in Scottish policing. Although intelligence analysis has remained relatively insulated from de-civilianisation to date, fieldwork disclosed how there has emerged disquiet about the potential diversification of the intelligence analyst role and concern for the future position of the intelligence analyst in Scottish policing as it enters a new phase in its distinctive development.

A small-scale dry-spinning system has been designed and constructed for investigating the effect of spinning variables on physical and mechanical properties of dry-spun filaments. The system comprises a prefiltration unit, an extrusion head, a spinning column and a take-up unit. Spinning is a batch process, whereby a small, fixed volume of dope (41 ml) is fed to the spinneret at predetermined rates and temperatures. Extrudate drying is carried out on the column in a current of preheated air. The direction of the airflow in the column may be varied by selecting one of several possible flow routes. The take-up unit consists of godet rollers and a winding head, and is capable of operating at winding speeds of up to 600 m min -1. It features the ability to continuously wind filament whilst doffing a package. This provides a means of separating filament samples, spun under different spinning conditions.

In this thesis we analyse stochastic control problems for the valuation of a natural gas storage facility and natural gas-fi red power station while taking into account their operating characteristics. In the gas storage problem the underlying spot price dynamics is a mean-reverting process driven by a time-inhomogeneous Levy process. For the power valuation both electricity and gas spot price processes exhibit mean-reverting spikes and Markov regime-switches. The Levy regime-switching model incorporates the effects of demand-supply uctuations in energy markets and abrupt economic disruptions or business cycles. We make use of skewed Levy copulas to model the dependence risk of electricity and gas jumps. The corresponding HJB equations are solved by an explicit finite difference method. The numerical approach gives us both the values of the facilities and their optimal operating strategies depending on the gas and electricity prices, storage level, current temperature of the boiler and time. The surfaces of control strategies and contract values are obtained by implementing the numerical method for particular examples.

The mathematical treatment of a transient wave theory with complex structural interactions has been investigated in various elastic problems as a tool for detection and interpretation of material properties by remote sensing methods. These problems are of great importance when attempting to gain information of an enclosed material when there is no direct access, with particular significance in worldwide applications including down hole oil exploration and screening of containers. Here we concentrate on the development of a transient analysis of such elastic wave sensor problems, employing both rigorous analytical and numerical methods. The thesis begins with a model problem of a single elastic solid layer under antiplane deformation. With the availability of analytic solutions, the understanding of the transient response is aided considerably. A forcing piston theory is thus formulated by distributing the original line load formulation over part of the free surface of the layer material. From this we evaluate the transient response of the problem numerically using various receiver sensor outputs, with either the layer thickness or the density of the layer material identified. Along with providing an overview of some of the main techniques used in the later chapters, the model problem introduces an averaging method formulation that develops an approximate form of solution, which is utilised throughout the thesis. The second of these problems presented is a two-dimensional analysis of elastic solid layers enclosing a channel comprising of a stationary and compressible viscous fluid. A forcing piston of a given displacement is applied to both of the free elastic surfaces to create a transient disturbance that propagates throughout the layered structure. If the force is applied with some discrete time-signature, the receiver signal processing mechanism is the measurement of the surface displacement either away from the piston, or at the piston location itself, at a later time. A number of ancillary and mathematical tools have been developed here so that various checks on the calculations can be made. The transient response of the problem is then examined numerically in an attempt to detect variation in the material parameters of the viscous fluid channel enclosed within the elastic layers. The two problems considered later in this thesis concentrate on the separate antiplane displacements and plane strain motions of a partially filled cylinder. This annular structure may be arbitrarily filled anywhere between empty and fully filled in a simple two phase system. The sensor is modelled as a long line load which reduces the problem to a two-dimensional analysis at any cross section of the cylindrical pipe, with displacement measurements made at either the source or elsewhere along the external pipe boundary. The piston theory is again introduced to provide further insight into the response mechanism of the cylinder structure. The transient response of the problem is then evaluated numerically to allow detection and quantitative determination of some characteristic material properties, this being the depth of the partial filling material or the density of the content that is enclosed within the cylinder.

Discrete time models of portfolio optimisation and option pricing are studied under the effects of proportional transaction costs. In a multi-period portfolio selection problem, an investor maximises expected utility of terminal wealth by rebalancing the portfolio between a risk-free and risky asset at the start of each time period. A general class of probability distributions is assumed for the returns of the risky asset. The optimal strategy involves trading to reach the boundaries of a no-transaction region if the investor’s holdings in the risky asset fall outside this region. Dynamic programming is applied to determine the optimal strategy, but it can be computationally intensive. In the limit of small transaction costs, a two-stage perturbation method is developed to derive approximate solutions for the exponential and power utility functions. The first stage involves ignoring the no-transaction region and transacting to the optimal point corresponding to the zero transaction costs case. Approximations of the resulting suboptimal value functions are obtained. In the second stage, these suboptimal value functions are corrected to obtain approximations of the optimal value functions and optimal boundaries at all time steps. A discrete time option pricing model is developed based on the utility maximisation approach. This model reduces to the binomial model in the special case where the risky asset follows a binomial price process without transaction costs. Incorporating transaction costs, the utility indifference price and marginal utility indifference price of the option are observed to depend on the price of the underlying risky asset and the investor’s holdings in the risky asset. The regions where these option prices do not vary with the investor’s holdings in the risky asset are identified. An example illustrates how utility indifference pricing or marginal utility indifference pricing enables one to determine the bid and ask price of a European call option.

This thesis proposes alternative ways to price contingent claims written on portfolios of credit instruments as well as on carbon underlying assets. On the first topic of this research we tackle the pricing of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) by introducing two different approaches through the application of respectively Johnson SB distributions and entropy optimization principles, in contrast to market standard pricing approaches based on variations of the Gaussian copula model. The relevance of this topic is in line with the events that unfolded during the “credit crunch” of mid-2007 to early 2009, when CDOs made headlines as being responsible for more than $542 billion in losses through writedowns by financial institutions. On the second topic we propose a pricing methodology for Emission Reduction Purchase Agreement (ERPA) contracts. These are instruments based on carbon as an asset class and created by the emergence of an international carbon market that followed the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol (KP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December 1997. ERPAs are of vital importance to the function of KP’s market mechanisms and the carbon markets at large as they formalize transactions of emissions reduction offsets between sellers and buyers, more specifically transactions involving Certified Emission Reductions (CERs). We propose a pricing methodology based on stochastic modeling of CER volume delivery risk and carbon prices as the two main drivers underlying ERPAs, and apply it to a case study on a run-of-river hydro power CDM project activity in China.

There are different theoretical approaches to the construction of a portfolio which offer maximum expected returns for a given level of risk tolerance and where the goal is to find the optimal investment rule. Each investor has a certain utility for money which is reflected by the choice of a utility function. In this work, two different types of risk averse utility functions (the power utility function and an exponential one) are studied in discrete time without making any assumptions about the underlying probability distribution of the returns of the asset prices. Each investor chooses, at the beginning of an investment period, the feasible portfolio allocation which maximises the expected value of the utility function for terminal wealth. Effects of both large and small proportional transaction costs on the choice of an optimal portfolio are taken into account. The transaction regions are approximated by using asymptotic methods, when the proportional transaction costs are small, and by using expansions about critical points for large transaction costs. At first the one-risky asset case is looked at then a multi-asset case is studied. A method for computing the distribution of the total wealth of the portfolio is then developed using a chosen distribution for the returns: the lognormal and then a distribution derived from the maximum entropy. The Value at Risk is then defined and used to constrain the portfolio optimisation problem with a different utility: the utility of consumption.

Density and viscosity measurements are needed in many industrial applications. Integrated circuit techniques and micromachining allow the creation of new designs of sensors for these properties. When a structure immersed in a fluid is set in vibration, its frequency response depends on the density and viscosity of the fluid. This is the principle used in a new generation of fluid property sensors. A model that couples the structural vibration with the behaviour of the surrounding fluid is needed to optimise future sensor designs. The first part of this thesis concentrates on understanding the fluid reaction on vibrating plates of different shapes. A general expression for a thin plate of any shape is derived, with application to a rectangular plate. Numerical results are presented as a function of the dimensionless parameter beta, equal to the frequency of vibration times the characteristic length squared over the kinematic viscosity. It is shown that the pressure differential across the plate near the edge is difficult to resolve using this numerical method, especially for large values of beta which corresponds to the region of interest for the application. This is the motivation to start an asymptotic study for large values of beta. This method provides an analytical expression relating the pressure differential on the plate to the velocity of the plate. Both methods are also applied to the problem of a vibrating disc and comparisons between numerical and analytical results are given for this case. In the second part of the thesis, an integrated model for a cantilever plate sensor is presented. The analytic relation between the pressure differential across the plate and the velocity allows one to solve the equation of motion of the plate analytically. Thus the frequency response of the plate in a viscous fluid is calculated.