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Quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols are intended to allow cryptographic keys to be generated and distributed in way that is provably secure based on inherent limitations, such as the no-cloning principle, imposed by quantum mechanics. This unique advantage compared with classical cryptography comes with an added difficulty: key bits in QKD protocols are encoded in analogue quantum states and their preparation is consequently subject to the usual imprecisions inevitable in any real world experiment. The negative impact of such imprecisions is illustrated for the BB84 QKD protocol. Following this, the main part of this thesis is concerned with the incorporation of such imprecisions in security proofs of the BB84 and two semi-device-independent protocols against the class of collective attacks. On a technical level, by contrast with the vast majority of security proofs developed since the turn of the century, in which recasting the protocol into an equivalent entanglement-based form features heavily in the analysis, the main results obtained here are approached directly from the prepare-and-measure perspective and in particular the connection with the no-cloning theorem and an early security proof by Fuchs et al. against the class of individual attacks is emphasised.<p><p>This thesis also summarises, as an appendix, a separate project which introduces and defines a hierarchy of polytopes intermediate between the local and no-signalling polytopes from the field of Bell nonlocality. / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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During the Great War, poetry played a more significant role in the war effort than articles and pamphlets. A campaign of extraordinary language filled with abstract and spiritualized words and phrases concealed the realities of the War. Archaic language and lofty phrases hid the horrible truth of modern mechanical warfare. The majority and most recognized and admired poets, including those who served on the front and knew firsthand the horrors of trench warfare, not only supported the war effort, but also encouraged its continuation. For the majority of the poets, the rejection of the war was a postwar phenomenon. From the trenches, leading Great War poets; Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Sitwell, and others, learned that the War was neither Agincourt, nor the playing fields of ancient public schools, nor the supreme test of valor but, instead, the modern industrial world in miniature, surely, the modern world at its most horrifying.

Access to education is a central part of federal higher education policy, and federal grant and loan programs are in place to make college degrees more attainable for students. However, there is still controversy about whether there are unintended consequences of implementing and maintaining these programs, and whether they are effectively achieving the goal of increased accessibility. In order to answer questions about whether three specific types of federal aid cause higher tuition rates and whether these programs increase graduation rates, four ordinary least squares regression models were estimated. They include changes in both in-state and out-of-state tuition sticker prices, graduation rates, as well as changes in three types of federal aid, and other variables indicative of the value of a degree for four-year public universities in Arizona, California, Georgia, and Florida for years 2001-2011. The regressions indicate a positive effect of Pell Grants on in-state and out-of-state tuition and fees, a positive effect of disbursed subsidized federal loans on the change in number of degrees awarded, and a positive effect of Pell Grants on graduation rates.

From the first electric lights in London along Pall Mall, and in the Holborn Viaduct in 1878 to the nationalisation of National Grid in 1947, the narrative of the simple ascendency of a new technology over its outdated predecessor is essential to the way we have imagined electric light in London at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, the interplay between gas and electric light - two co-existing and competing illuminary technologies - created a particular and peculiar landscape of light, a 'lightscape', setting London apart from its contemporaries throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this narrative forms the basis of many assertions made in critical discussions of artificial illumination and technology in the late-twentieth century; however, this was not how electric light was understood at the time nor does it capture how electric light both captivated and eluded the imagination of contemporary Londoners. The influence of the electric light in the representations of London is certainly a literary question, as many of those writing during this period of electrification are particularly attentive to the city's rich and diverse lightscape. Though this has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, electric lights are the nexus of several important and ongoing discourses in the study of Victorian, Post-Victorian, Modernist, and twentieth-century literature. This thesis will address how the literary influence of the electric light and its relationship with its illuminary predecessors transcends the widespread electrification of London to engage with an imaginary London, providing not only a connection with our past experiences and conceptions of the city, modernity, and technology but also an understanding of what Frank Mort describes as the 'long cultural reach of the nineteenth century into the post-war period'.

The Edinburgh Mathematical Society started out in 1883 as a society with a large proportion of teachers. Today, the member base is mainly academical and there are only a few teachers left. This thesis explores how and when this change came about, and discusses what this meant for the Society. It argues that the exit of the teachers is related to the rising standard of mathematics, but even more to a change in the Society’s printing policy in the 1920s, that turned the Society’s Proceedings into a pure research publication and led to the death of the ‘teacher journal’, the Mathematical Notes. The thesis also argues that this change, drastic as it may seem, does not represent a change in the Society’s nature. For this aim, the role of the teachers within the Society has been studied and compared to that of the academics, from 1883 to 1946. The mathematical contribution of the teachers to the Proceedings is studied in some detail, in particular the papers by John Watt Butters. A paper in the Mathematical Notes by A. C. Aitken on the Bell numbers is considered in connection with a series of letters on the same topic from 1938–39. These letters, written by Aitken, Sir D’Arcy Thompson, another EMS member, and the Cambridge mathematician G. T. Bennett, explores the relation between the three and gives valuable insight into the status of the Notes. Finally, the role of the first women in the Society is studied. The first woman joined without any official university education, but had received the necessary mathematical background from her studies under the Edinburgh Association for the University Education of Women. The final chapter is largely an assessment of this Association’s mathematical classes.

This thesis provides a detailed account of the introduction, use, and repeal of the alternative vote (AV) in British Columbia in the 1950s. It argues that British Columbians, familiar with polarized, two-party politics, were dismissive of majority representation. Conversely, the public expressed a strong preference for local representation during discussions of redistribution. While the Liberal and Conservative Coalition parties introduced AV to keep the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation from forming a government, party members were often stronger proponents of electoral reform than their leaders. Nevertheless, the system was debated in terms of democratic values. This was true of electoral reform debates across Canada, including federal debates on proportional representation. Contrary to histories that focus solely on the 1952 and 1953 AV elections and W.A.C. Bennett and Social Credit, this project traces the origins of the alternative vote in BC from the 1940s forward, including ongoing discussions of the single transferable vote (STV) and a points system. The history of BC’s provincial party system in the twentieth century is included in order to establish how polarized politics affected British Columbians’ attachment to the idea of local representation. This thesis contends that the public’s preference for plurality voting contributed to its dismissal of AV: even those who ranked multiple candidates did not necessarily endorse the system. This project also looks at the alternative vote debates in the 1970s and redistribution commissions in BC, particularly the 1978 Eckardt Commission, in order to better understand British Columbians’ attachment to local representation and first-past-the-post, and their dismissal of a preferential system that encouraged them to rank candidates. Social Credit favoured regional representation over representation by population during the redistribution process, and the theme of local representation has consistently framed discussions of electoral reform in British Columbia, including the 2004 BC Citizens’ Assembly’s STV proposal.

This thesis aims to develop a new methodological concept better to understand art and curating in a post-human setting. Departing from a post-humanist ontology, my initial idea was to analyse contemporary artworks dealing with food and trace and substantiate a figuration of the gut/intestinal system (connected to post-human notions as the ideas of trans- corporeality, vibrant matter, etc.) and how it could create a productive reading of these works. During my research on food-related art projects, I realised that the gut-figuration has broader implications and could function as a tool to understand the contemporary art world and curating at large, through a post-human lens. Accordingly, I suggest my thesis to be a contribution to what I would like to name an “intestinal turn”, a contemporary post-humanist, trans-corporeal understanding of art that could change how art is perceived and how the subjectivity of the artist, and curatorial work, could be understood today.

This dissertation demonstrates how props act as conduits of knowledge and (thus?) power in Sophocles’ “non-Theban” plays. I show how certain props challenge the definitions and values that they accrue as they move between actors onstage. Key props in these four plays behave unlike other props in extant tragedy, opening up the possibility for a sustained inquiry into the ways that property speaks to and for power. Focusing on the urn in Electra, the bow in Philoctetes, Hector’s sword and Ajax’s own shield in Ajax, and the robe in Trachiniae, this project argues for the centrality of these props in these plays’ verbal exchanges. The introduction sets up a framework and methodology that draws on Michel Foucault’s notion of power-knowledge (pouvoir-savoir) and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu alongside contemporary thinkers like Jack Halberstam, Jane Bennett, and Sara Ahmed. The first chapter, “The Urn is the Wor(l)d in Sophocles’ Electra,” builds on prior scholarship on this much-studied stage object by showing how it accrues “symbolic power” and comes to construct reality and the social world. The possibility of that consensus breaks down, however, in the face of the familiar/l strife at Argos, and it is through this breakdown that the urn gives audience members a way to examine the play’s puzzling lack of resolution. The second chapter, “Stringing a Bow: Learning, use, and power in Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” builds on the previous chapters’ by showing how the bow defines the limits of Neoptolemus’ education on Lemnos and the terms of its own exchange. The bow’s frequent back and forth between characters and its role in Odysseus’s subterfuge belie the fact that it still belongs to Heracles, who alone can authorize its use. This reading draws out the strange relationship between the deceptions of the False Merchant and the divine interventions of Heracles, demonstrating an uncomfortable consonance between the two scenes. The third chapter, entitled “Ajax’s economy of hostility: the necropolitics of kleos,” explores how Ajax paradoxically gives up his shield even as it merges with his identity as a defense for the Achaeans against the Trojans. Ajax himself attempts to manipulate this threat through the handling and “exchange” of the sword of Hector with its native soil, misleading his compatriots — and possibly himself — about his intentions in his so-called “deception speech.” When Hector’s sword pierces Ajax’s body, Trojan and personal hostilities merge until Odysseus manages to rectify the play’s errant exchanges and restore Ajax’s status as a shield for his companions. The fourth and final chapter, “Ceci n’est pas un prop: The robe as gift and garment in Sophocles’ Trachiniae,” shows that the robe’s failure to appear onstage as a prop — the audience might see it as part of Heracles’ costume at the end of the play — enacts the conflict between oikos and wilderness that the characters inhabit, exposing them to the threats of order and disorder as they attempt to integrate Heracles’ pure excess into the oikonomia of Trachis. This process ultimately reveals the futility of attempts to analyze the play in terms of its dichotomies: female-male, oikos-polis, concealed-revealed, etc. The circulation of the robe in its box charts a path for understanding the play in terms that defy dichotomization by locating the play’s exchanges along intersecting modes of valuation. In the conclusion, I widen the perspective of this methodology again, turning to the instrumentalization of bodies in Sophocles’ Theban plays. I raise questions about how meaning, use, value, and power come to be confused via onstage exchanges, and I gesture towards possible future avenues of inquiry that might account for the trouble with bodies that Ajax raises.