The Looking Glass

  Yusuf Shahrestani U6T How SMEs Navigate Inequality to Create Opportunity in the UK Economic inequality can be defined as the unequal distribution of resources, income, or wealth among individuals or groups in a particular society; though people often refer to it as ‘the gap between the rich and the poor’. In the UK, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs): businesses that have fewer than 250 employees and shared capital less than £66 Million, are particularly affected by these disparities. They depend heavily on the resources in their location, such as finances like loans, or having good internet and technology. Because these resources are not equally available everywhere, it can make it harder for SMEs in certain areas to compete in equal footing. Yet, some businesses manage to turn these very challenges into opportunities, finding innovation solutions that allow their businesses to expand. Why does this matter? Well, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), SMEs...

Artificial Intelligence and the legal system: Have we got the balance right?       - Parth Shah The world we are living in is everchanging; continuous developments and innovations are shaping the modern world, with the paramount discovery being in ‘Artificial Intelligence.’ It is a problem solver. The legal profession is not exempt from its impact. Many would believe that it would be a disadvantage not to implement AI in a firm. But is this really so? The use of AI can open many possibilities: not only would it improve the access to justice, but also can bring in a greater clientele by increasing the efficiency of work. After all, time is what the firm is selling. Whilst on one level this could benefit both clients and the firm, it could result in job displacement, vulnerabilities in data protection and ethical risks, all which carries immense costs. Therefore, a firm looking to implement AI within their infrastructure would need to weigh up both the pros and co...

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems and the Limits of Mathematical Logic By Raheel Sultan, L6N Towards the end of the 19 th century, mathematicians began to uncover inconsistencies within the foundations of logic. Set theory was in its infancy at the time, and a complete definition of a set had not been universally agreed upon. One attempt came from Gottlob Frege, who proposed in his book, Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik , a list of rules outlining the behaviour of sets. These rules were constructive, in that the only set explicitly stated to exist was the empty set, and the rest of the rules described how sets were constructed from other ones. His fifth rule asserted that a set exists containing all objects satisfying a given property. For instance, such a property may be that a set contains the number 1; Frege’s fifth rule then implies that there exists a set of all sets which contain the number 1. This seemingly innocuous rule was the source of a paradox, as uncovered by Bertrand Rus...

  If the citizens of a democracy are not well informed, is that democracy imperilled? ___ By Michal A. Davis INTRODUCTION The purpose of my essay is twofold. Initially, I intend to explore the failure of educational systems to deliver on the notion of a ‘well-informed’ citizenry and how this has detrimentally impacted the democratic consensus which the ‘west’ has maintained since the end of the second world war eliciting a shift towards populist politics. Secondly, I wish to delve into the means by which democracy is threatened on a national (UK) and global scale by a rise in anarchist or authoritarian predilections among the population and whether this is as a result of citizens being ill-informed. The state of democracy is one that has become a highly contemporaneous issue in recent years. Kamala Harris partially ran her failed campaign on the basis of the preservation of American democracy marking out Donald Trump as an authoritarian. Trump has now been president for over one ...