Housing and Planning in London under the Conservative Government: Spatial impacts, social polarisation, sustainable development and social justice

This paper will be based on my continuing research on planning and housing development in London. It will focus on the proposals in the Government’s Housing and Planning Bill, which are likely to be enacted in Spring 2016. It will review the evidence of potential spatial impacts in terms of the supply of existing affordable homes and the location and affordability of new supply. This will be related to a review of the alternative development options for London’s growth in the context of the Mayor of London’s draft 2050 Infrastructure Plan. The paper will analyse the potential impact of new Government policy and legislation on whether London’s housing requirements can be delivered in accordance with the objectives of sustainable planning and social justice, and will also consider the constraints on the ability of the new Mayor of London, to be elected in May 2016 to achieve manifesto commitments.

Language Teaching Methodologies, Intercultural Awareness and Autonomous Learning

This paper will examine familiar reasons for including the teaching of intercultural competence within Language Teaching before adding some less familiar ones. It will focus in particular on the question of how far intercultural competence can be learned when students are formally studying languages and how far such competence needs to be acquired autono-mously. It will though also ask to what extent being initiated to the very varied facets of in-tercultural competence during formal language study plays an important role in allowing ef-fective autonomous acquisition to take place. The paper will conclude that a significant part of the intercultural development that students need to undertake if they are to be able to communicate effectively in a foreign language must happen autonomously, but that it is, nonetheless, vital that language courses at least sow the seeds of intercultural learning in ways that will facilitate autonomous learning. As such, language courses, if they are genuinely to meet student needs, should incorporate elements of intercultural training. The paper also concludes by outlining the type of empirical research that would need to be carried out for these claims to be fully substantiated.

LocLess: Do You Really Care Where Your Cloud Files Are?

Physical location of data in cloud storage is a problem that gains a lot of attention not only from the actual cloud providers but also from the end users' who lately raise many concerns regarding the privacy of their data. It is a common practice that cloud service providers create replicate users' data across multiple physical locations. However, moving data in different countries means that basically the access rights are transferred based on the local laws of the corresponding country. In other words, when a cloud service provider stores users' data in a different country then the transferred data is subject to the data protection laws of the country where the servers are located. In this paper, we propose LocLess, a protocol which is based on a symmetric searchable encryption scheme for protecting users' data from unauthorized access even if the data is transferred to different locations. The idea behind LocLess is that "Once data is placed on the cloud in an unencrypted form or encrypted with a key that is known to the cloud service provider, data privacy becomes an illusion". Hence, the proposed solution is solely based on encrypting data with a key that is only known to the data owner.