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The overarching goal and ambition of this research is to realise a potential solution to the chemical instability found with known functionalised diamond surfaces. A sub-set of these form a dipole that gives rise to a negative electron affinity property that promotes enhanced electron emission at thermionic temperatures and has numerous technological applications including concentrated solar thermal power generation. The prime focus of the research presented in this thesis is the use of tin (Sn), a very nontoxic, abundantly available, less expensive heavy metal, as an alternative termination of the diamond surface. The suitability of tin was established using the density functional theory (DFT) where Sn and tin monoxide (SnO) groups used as a termination on the diamond (100) surface have resulted in a large adsorption energy of -4.4 eV in half monolayer configuration (HML) with an electron affinity of -1.43 eV and up to -6.5 eV in HML configuration with an electron affinity up to −1.37 eV, respectively. The NEA occurs as a result of dipole formation on the surface due to the shift in the electron density toward or in the vicinity of surface carbon atoms, realised through the electrostatic potential and density of states calculations. Lithium nitride solution was deposited on the diamond surface with subsequent annealing at higher temperatures to gain an insight into the mobility of the Li atoms on the diamond. Li atoms were seen to move from the surface into the near surface bulk and then back to the surface through the temperatures of 650°C - 750°C - 850°C, at which point the LiO was completely desorbed from the surface. This was seen to affect the bulk properties of diamond. An air stable sub monolayer of SnO nanoclusters was formed "reliably" on the surface of diamond (100) using physical vapor deposition. SnO was seen to impart an NEA of -0.02 eV to the diamond surface along with a reduction in the WF by 1.8 eV. Inclusion of Li atoms into this structure resulted in Li atoms taking up oxygen from SnO and forming SnOₓ-LiO₂ heterostructure with an NEA of - 0.42 eV and WF reduction by 2.3 eV. This interaction has also resulted in the increased stability of the Li on diamond surface. Only about 15% of Li was lost in the case of Li₂O-SnOₓ termination on diamond (100) compared to 47% lost in case of LiO terminated diamond at similar elevated temperatures.

This thesis relies on the three-paper approach, where all three papers has a broader aim of determining the extent of the effect of female directors' characteristics on merger and acquisition (M&A) investments. The first paper (chapter 2) represents a systematic literature review of 179 articles that focused on how the board of directors' characteristics affect M&A investments. The aim of this study was to synthesise the articles on this topic into one paper and to identify the gaps for possible future work. Seven main themes were identified: (1) individual-level factors, (2) firm-level factors, (3) board independence, (4) experience, (5) connections, (6) ownership, and (7) compensation. Three main limitations were identified from the literature: methodological and sample, theoretical, and empirical limitations. First, for the methodological and sample limitations, future studies are recommended to examine developing markets, separate financial from non-financial firms, adopt more qualitative studies, and study the effect of the board of directors' characteristics on the bondholders within the M&A context. Second, for the theoretical limitations, future studies should engage the relevant theories with their hypotheses and combine several theories in their studies. Third, for the empirical limitations, future studies are recommended to use more than one factor to drive their findings, consider the long-term and accounting performance measures, and cover the aspects not addressed yet. In the second paper (chapter 3), a sample of 256 acquisition deals from publicly listed nonfinancial UK firms were used. The findings suggest that different female directors have different effects on the risk of M&A deals proxied by using cash as the payment method, making crossborder deals, and paying a high premium. Independent female directors with a long career horizon, high educational level, short tenure, and domestic nationality are more likely to be risktakers in M&A deal than their female counterparts. Moreover, the gender of the independent directors within the same characteristic category had a different effect on risk-taking behaviour. The study also covers other possible interpretations of the findings. Proceeding with the same sample as in paper 2, the third paper (chapter 4) suggests that different female directors have different effects on acquisition efficiency proxied by return on assets. Independent female directors with a short career horizon, low educational level, short tenure, and foreign nationality are more likely to enhance acquisition efficiency than their counterpart female directors. Moreover, the gender of the independent directors in the same characteristic category had different effects on acquisition efficiency.

The impact of the political crisis on Libyan tourism sector is investigated in this work, primarily using stakeholder's theory. A comprehensive framework is developed in conjunction with recommendations for resolving the crisis confronting national-level tourism plans, which is then applied to the Libyan case. It is argued that by systematically examining the people involved in the tourism planning as well as the tourism sector in general along with the tourism planning documents against a set of criteria, much can be learned about tourism planning. This dissertation identifies several characteristics that should be included in national-level tourism plans, including involved stakeholders and the inclusion of scenarios and a backup plan. This thesis also determines the factors that constituted an obstacle to tourism development in Libya through the PESTEL model and then focused on a number of those factors. Based on the analysis of these factors, a model is developed that organises the practical elements that could enhance the tourism sector in developing countries. This is considered a pillar of national tourism planning, focusing on local and international stakeholders and their role in the success of the planning, as well as identifying other factors supporting the planning process and then dividing each component. It then points to crucial points drawn from the relevant literature indicating the characteristics of a good plan and, accordingly, the human and financial resources that must be reserved in the plan due to their importance to the success of planning. The framework is then used to guide the evaluation of the Libyan Tourism Plan, characterising its strengths and limitations. Furthermore, an integrated impact of social, political, and economic factors on the development and implementation of a national tourism plan is established. The analysis concludes with recommendations for improving Libyan tourism planning. This research contributes to tourism planning by proposing a framework that can address tourism plans of the politically troubled nations at the national level, thereby facilitating the identification of problems and issues, allowing for the most efficient learning from mistakes, and providing a framework for conducting comparative studies.

In mouse, Notch signalling is important for the maintenance of the muscle stem cell (muSC) niche during muscle development and regeneration. Inhibition of Notch signalling in Pax7+ cells leads to the loss of the muSC pool due to premature differentiation, perturbing muscle repair. Following muscle damage, an influx of immune cells generates a pro-inflammatory microenvironment. Murine macrophage ablation studies have demonstrated the importance of macrophages in successful muscle repair. Following macrophage ablation, neutrophilic mediated inflammatory microenvironment is prolonged, leading to increased muscular necrosis and fibrosis, not seen in normal regeneration. Furthermore, it has been shown that proinflammatory macrophages inhibit myogenic precursor cell (MPC) fusion and promote proliferation, whereas anti-inflammatory macrophages promote differentiation. Moreover, it has been shown in mouse that both anti- and proinflammatory macrophages inhibit Notch activity in muSCs. The activity of Notch signalling in muSC during muscle repair is still poorly defined in vivo, and it is not understood if Notch regulates muscle regeneration in zebrafish. Moreover, it is not known if infiltrating immune cells, macrophages and neutrophils, and the inflammatory microenvironment are important for regulating Notch activity during regeneration. Therefore, I aim to determine how Notch signalling regulates muSC biology in zebrafish. Additionally, I aim to understand if the inflammatory microenvironment influences the Notch-dependent regulation of muSCs. To understand the importance of Notch signalling for the muSC response to injury in zebrafish, I used transgenic zebrafish to visualise muSCs in conjunction with pharmacological (DAPT) and genetic (dnsu[h]) tools to globally inhibit Notch. I found that fewer proliferating pax7a-expressing muSCs were present following injury in the absence of Notch, which was associated with an increase in the proportion of differentiating muSCs. Moreover, I found that in the myosepta, described as the muSC niche, there was an increase in the number of proliferating pax7a-expressing muSCs in the absence of injury. This suggests that Notch signalling is important to promote proliferation following injury, and limit proliferation in the absence of injury. A dynamic reporter of Notch activity revealed that proliferating pax7a+ cells express Notch (Tp1:VenusPEST). Additionally, by immunolabelling I also found that very few Pax7+ cells express a stable reporter for Notch activity (Tp1:H2BmCherry) at 24 hpi. Moreover, the proportion of Tp1:H2BmCherry+ cells expressing pax7a increased over time following injury. Taken together, I concluded that the majority of Tp1+ nuclei reside in myofibers and do not contribute to muscle repair. Contrastingly, Tp1+ cells which upregulate pax7a expression, respond to muscle injury. Moreover, I found that these Tp1:H2BmCherry+ cells are controlled by Notch signalling. DAPT treatment resulted in more Tp1:H2BmCherry+ cells after injury. Using a pharmacogenetic method to ablate macrophages, DEX (steroid) and a TNF-a receptor mutant zebrafish line, I showed that reducing inflammatory signalling following injury resulted in more Pax7+ muSCs. Additionally, I found that macrophages express DeltaD suggesting that macrophages can signal to adjacent cells via Notch. Together my data shows that muSCs are regulated by Notch signalling and the inflammatory microenvironment. I propose that pro-inflammatory macrophages signal via DaltaD to limit Pax7+ and Tp1+ cell proliferation. Moreover, as macrophage ablation and Notch inhibition have opposing effects on the Pax7+ cell population, Notch activity is also important to limit Pax7-expressing muSC differentiation and promote proliferation.

Background: Transarterial chemoembolisation (TACE) occludes tumour vascular supply and is administered to advanced hepatocellular carcinomas (HCC) with a 26 month median overall survival. The effect of vandetanib, which targets VEGFR-II to disrupt new vasculature, when loaded in TACE beads and delivered with and without radiotherapy was studied in preclinical models. Methods: Various 2D culture assays and 3D spheroids grown in Matrigel and RAFT systems were employed. Vandetanib titration measured dose-dependent lethality. Drug loading on TACE beads was quantified and elution was measured with fluorescence. Radiosensitisation was measured by 2-D clonogenic survival assay. Cell cycle arrest after radiation was studied with FACS. VEGFR-II expression of HCC cell lines was measured via western blot and the role of autophagy in vandetanib radiosensitisation was studied. Gapfilling invasion was measured following vandetanib and radiation. Serum samples from patients receiving vandetanib TACE were analysed with cross-correlation and PCA. Combined treatment outcomes were tested in vitro and in vivo. 3-D spheroids in matrigel were treated with vandetanib alone or with radiation. Tumour growth was measured in an immunocompetent mouse model under vandetanib, radiation and combination treatment. Results: In 2-D culture, an IC50 range of 2.7-83 μM was measured. Drug loading was found to be 0.92-1.66 μg per bead with complete elution in matrigel in <4 hours. Exposure-time dependent radiosensitisation by vandetanib was significant (p<0.05). Spheroids treated with radiation showed a cell cycle delay in G2/M. VEGFR-II expression was null in all HCC lines tested. Autophagic exhaustion was found in cells treated with both vandetanib and radiation. 2-D migration assays showed a dose-dependent reduction in migration after vandetanib treatment (p<0.05) and additive reduction in cells receiving combined treatment (p<0.05). Patient serum revealed inflammatory and vascular markers respond to TACE treatment. Significant (p<0.05) growth reduction was observed in 3-D spheroids treated with both 5 μM vandetanib and 4 Gy radiation compared to spheroids treated with 4 Gy radiation alone and 5 μM vandetanib alone. In 3-D spheroid co-culture with HCC and fibroblasts, combination treatment significantly reduced invasion over radiation (p<0.05) and vandetanib (p<0.0005). In animal models, HCC tumours experienced a growth delay with significant (3x2 Gy + VAN vs. 3x2 Gy p<0.005, 3x2 Gy vs. VAN p<0.0001) size reduction compared with control. Conclusion: The advantages of 3-D over 2-D models were demonstrated via direct comparisons. Markers of response to vandetanib TACE were identified in patient serum. Vandetanib inhibited spheroid growth and 3-D co-cultures of HCC and stromal cells were significantly inhibited by combined vandetanib and radiation. A reduction in tumour size was observed in vandetanib and radiation treated animals compared to controls, supporting vandetanib treatment of HCC.

Introduction: Dental erosion is a chemical process of mineralised tissue loss from enamel or dentine due to acid exposure. Sodium fluoride may have a protective effect on both pre- and post-dietary acidic challenges with or without abrasion. The aim of this work was to investigate the effect on human dentine of acid erosion alone or with abrasion under the influence of 1,450 ppm and 5,000 ppm sodium fluoride (NaF). Materials and methods: Dentine specimens were sectioned from the coronal aspect of previously extracted human molars and polished using previously published protocols. With acid erosion alone, the dentine samples were eroded with pH 2.6 of 0.3% citric acid at 10, 15, 20 and 25 min. For acid erosion and erosion/abrasion, the dentine samples were pre-treated by immersion into either 1,450 ppm NaF solution (F1450), 5,000 ppm NaF solution (F5000) or water (0 ppm) for 3 mins and then placed in artificial saliva for 30 mins. Following that, each group was fully immersed in 0.3% citric acid at pH 2.6. Then, samples with erosion/abrasion were exposed to 240 strokes. Samples were analysed using profilometry and digital microscopy for mean step height and SEM for a qualitative assessment of change. Results: The mean and standard error (SE) step height of the dentine samples with acid erosion alone with the 0.3% citric acid at pH 2.6 was at 10 mins 1.82 (±0.4 µm) which increased to 9.37 (±0.9 µm) at 25 mins. A statistically significant difference (p<0.05) was noticed between all groups at different acid immersion times. The mean (SE) step height change with 0, 1,450 or 5,000 ppm of NaF were for 0 ppm 4.4 (± 0.6 µm) at 10 mins and 9.0 (± 0.7 µm) at 25 min acid immersion, for F1450 fluoride groups 4.97 (± 0.57 µm) and 8.74 (± 0.58 µm) and for F5000 groups 3.47 (± 0.77 µm) and 7.01 (± 0.56 µm), respectively. There were statistically significant differences (p<0.05) in the step height between 0 ppm and F5000 with erosion, however, there were no statistically significant differences with F1450. The mean (SD) in step height with 0, 1,450 or 5,000 ppm of NaF with 0.3% citric acid at pH 2.6 for 25 min which were subjected to 240 brushing strokes were for 0 ppm 12.24 (± 0.43 µm), for F1450 groups 11.35 (± 0.76 µm) and for F5000 10.53 (± 0.77 µm). There were statistically significant differences (p<0.05) in the step height between 0 ppm and F5000 with erosion/abrasion. However, there were no statistically significant differences with F1450 with erosion/abrasion. There were no statistically significant differences in the step height between profilometry and digital microscopy in an erosion/abrasion model. Conclusions: Step height increased with increasing the time of exposure to citric acid. Sodium fluoride had statistically significantly less step height only for F5000 and this was repeated when abrasion was included. For erosive tooth wear on dentine in this laboratory study, 5,000 ppm of sodium fluoride had a protective effect against acid challenges. The digital microscope is an alternative approach for measurement of dentine step height under the conditions performed in this thesis.

This study employed hermeneutic phenomenology paradigm to investigate the 'lived experiences' and 'perceived outcomes' of using Appreciative Inquiry (AI) in organisations in Jordan, and how AI approach and its tools have been implemented through analysing the lived experiences of people using AI in these organisations. This study used the hermeneutic phenomenology within the interpretive paradigm to design and analyse research qualitative data. Three organisations that have been engaged with AI activities in Jordan were selected as research sites, where 34 participants across the three organisations participated in the study. A qualitative data approach utilizing multiple methods that included participants' reflective notes, researcher's observations and semi-structured interviews; 12 semi-structured interviews were conducted. A hermeneutical cycle for interpreting the qualitative data is adopted. Specifically, an ongoing interpretation of the phenomenon of AI, through three data analysis stages; transcription and naive reading stage (stage one), structural analyses and interpretation stages (stage two), and comprehensive understanding, and illustrating the phenomena stage (stage three). The findings of the lived experiences and perceived outcomes of using AI suggest that adoption of the AI increased employee's independence, their engagement, better employment relationships, and improved emotional management. The results also indicate that adoption of the AI increases the climate of trusting and respectful employment relationships, increases the sense of self-awareness and confidence through shared stories and ideas. Individuals felt more aware of their impact on others and been recognised the power of active listening to understand and work with difference. The findings also suggest that adoption of the AI process offered a new way of thinking that allowed individuals to challenge assumptions and consider options and collaborative working. AI also been seen as tools and a method for an organisation to develop its strategy and make quality decisions. Overall the findings of lived experiences indicated the perceived outcomes of using AI that involvement and inclusion, collaboration and relationship development, positive focus, energy and leadership. This study has contributed to the existing literature in three ways. First, this study contributes to the limited and emerging literature regarding AI within organisations, and more specifically in Jordan context, as the current study is the first of its nature to evaluate the lived experiences of AI in Jordanian context. Second, this study has used a methodology worthy applied in the AI literature, the use of a hermeneutic phenomenology approach, specifically; to analyses the AI lived experiences in the organisational context enables access to a phenomenon that is often subconscious and provides a means of interpreting participants' understanding and their experiences of AI. Third, the finding of this study has implications for organisations and business managers and those involved in Organisation Development and change. This study will be of interest to organisations and business managers to understand how to establish real relationships among their employees to achieve the best practices drawn from grounded past positive experiences.

The aim of this study is to examine the education and training associated with the implementation of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Saudi Arabia. Underpinned by Institutional Theory, a mixed-methods research approach was employed to obtain a holistic picture and in-depth understanding of the investigated topic. The first research method consisted of a questionnaire survey aimed to obtain the perceptions of a large number of accounting academics, professional trainers and preparers of financial statements with regard to IFRS education and training. The second research method consisted of twenty semi-structured interviews with the same targeted groups, to expand and gain in-depth views from a range of interviewees on the subject of the study. The findings suggested that SOCPA is the primary provider of IFRS training, with a small number of Saudi universities incorporating IFRS curricula and teaching the subject in the country. The findings also indicated that teaching methods adopted to deliver IFRS education and training were diverse, including classroom-based learning , online-based learning and others, although traditional classroom-based learning consisting of lectures is the most frequently used teaching approach in academic institutions. In addition, the results revealed that the education and training associated with IFRS was largely ineffective due to poor interrelationship and communication between three actors, namely: SOCPA, universities, and companies. There was a virtual absence of cooperation between universities and companies with regard to IFRS training. The findings also highlighted key institutional factors such as educational, language, economic, and political features, IFRS complexity, and the principles-based nature of IFRS, which impacted the education and training associated with IFRS in Saudi Arabia. For example, educational factors such as a dearth of suitably-qualified accounting academics and trainers, poor continuing education and training, and adoption of IFRS educational programmes from other countries were identified as the key educational features affecting the development of accounting education and training associated with the implementation of IFRS in Saudi Arabia. With respect to language related factors, both the poor quality of translated IFRS and the lack of updated IFRS materials in the Arabic language were viewed as problematic. The findings also indicated that political factors (specifically, the Saudi government) played a key role in developing the accounting education system in the country by supporting and funding IFRS adoption and the education and training associated with the standards, with the aim of promoting a greater understanding of IFRS and making better use of it. In addition, the study found that the presence of a robust economy had a substantial role in developing accounting education in general and IFRS education in particular. However, economic factors such as the prohibitive costs associated with IFRS education could pose a barrier to widespread acquisition of IFRS knowledge. Finally, the findings revealed that the complicated nature of IFRS was a problem for those seeking to obtain the necessary IFRS education and training. Meanwhile, the principles-based nature of IFRS had an impact on the development of IFRS education, as its greater flexibility plays a substantial role in providing understanding of a potential opportunity for the exercise of professional accounting judgement.

The COVID-19 pandemic had lasting detrimental effects on the teaching profession (Milman, 2020). Teachers faced multiple transitions from classroom teaching to emergency remote teaching during a stay-at-home order confining them to their homes while instructing students virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic (Kim & Asbury, 2020; Milman, 2020). It is significant to recognize what teachers experienced and its effects on their practice and outlook of the profession for the future. This phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of Pennsylvania high school teachers' multiple transitions from classroom teaching to emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic during the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years. This study examined teachers' experiences during multiple transitions to emergency remote teaching and their perceptions of professional identity, self-efficacy, and the teaching profession during the COVID-19 pandemic. Semi-structured interviews took place via Zoom with six participants who encountered multiple transitions to emergency remote teaching, which provided data for qualitative phenomenological analysis. Schlossberg's (1981) transition theory is the foundation for this study. Data was comprised of emergent themes from the interviews. Four themes were identified from the interviews: a) uncertainty, (b) finding a way, (c) the importance of relationships, and (d) confusing government and administrative directives. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This thesis develops methods for representing how the contents of theories of meaning become conceived by their users. These contents are treated as the range of systematically elicited conceptions afforded by a designated corpus of key texts. The approach being taken involves first detailing a formal scheme for the components of situations attributed to various entities (e.g. 'your situation'). This scheme is then applied as a framing device to form a template which accounts for the shared structure between the mental spaces which embody how people conceive different theories of meaning. For the purposes of this task, cognition is treated as embodied in the sense that both the form and content of personal conceptualisations are largely dependent on what both bodily and ecological factors afford. The purpose of this approach is to help understand how theories operate when viewed as worldly entities within a materialist framework. The significance of such understanding lies in enabling analyses and comparisons which account for the effects of material restrictions such as how a theory's presentation must necessarily be selective and how human cognition operates on models set by precedent. The framework being provided here allows the conceptions each individual theory of meaning elicits to be reduced to formal, commensurate models which account for differences between typical influences on the conceptions characteristic of different demographics such as experts of related fields. Approaching theories of meaning from this angle also reveals new avenues of comparison concerning otherwise implicit details. One involves theory-internal conditions on the full material identity of meaning-instantiating entities. The other concerns the extent of the domains for aggregating applicable influences for which a theory accounts and the range of those it may accommodate.

Typical research in second language (L2) implicit knowledge acquisition has centred on the role of learning conditions (e.g., explicit learning, focus on form, and oral output) in stimulating automatic processing in the L2 developing system. However, the process of automating L2 grammatical knowledge can be affected not only by learning mechanisms but also by the modality of stimulus presentation and working memory (WM) capacity. The present investigation aimed i) to examine whether encoding modality (auditory vs. visual) affects L2 implicit grammatical knowledge acquisition differently, and ii) to explore the modulating effects of WM capacity on the rate of emergence of L2 implicit knowledge in each encoding modality. In each of the two experiments, Experiment 1 with Chinese first-language speakers (n = 77) and Experiment 2 with Arabic first-language speakers (n = 37), participants were split into two groups, one of which was trained on three syntactic structures (tag questions, negative adverbs, and counterfactual conditional) under auditory exposure, whereas the other group was trained on the same structures but under visual exposure. The development of implicit grammatical knowledge, accrued from each input modality, was assessed via a pretest/posttest design using the measures of implicit knowledge (i.e., a timed grammaticality judgement task [timed GJT] and an elicited imitation task [EIT]). The WM capacity was measured using an operation-word-span (OSPAN) task. The results of both experiments demonstrated that auditory and visual exposure to L2 English syntax were found to result in successful emergence of implicit grammatical knowledge, as determined by both implicit knowledge measures: timed GJT and EIT. Furthermore, only in Experiment 1 was WM capacity found to correlate positively with automatized knowledge development accrued from auditory exposure on the GJT, but not on the EIT. However, the results demonstrated no significantly differentiable effects between visual and auditory interventions, but there was an observed trend towards visual modality advantage in grammatical knowledge automatization in Experiment 1 only, in both timed GJT and EIT. Overall, the study suggests that modality effects may indeed be another relevant factor in stimulating the automatic processing in the L2 developing system. I argue, from a psycholinguistic view, that computational demands exerted by auditory modality on WM capacity are greater than those exerted by visual modality, resulting in detrimental effects on the development of automatic processing.

Membrane tubes are structures ubiquitous in cells, and understanding their dynamics and morphology is of vital importance for cellular biophysics. This thesis will discuss several aspects of the dynamics of membrane tubes in situations where they are driven out of equilibrium by various biologically inspired processes. We analyse the inflation of membrane tubes and their subsequent instability due to ion pumps driving an osmotic pressure difference. This is inspired by the structure of an organelle called the contractile vacuole complex, and leads to a new instability with a much longer natural wavelength than a typical pearling instability. The stability of membrane tubes with a shear in the membrane ow is analysed and a novel helical instability which acts to amplify the fluctuations is found. We discuss the relevance of this instability in the process of dynamin-mediated tube scission. Finally we consider the dynamics and fluctuations of a membrane tube with active forces acting on it.

In this work, the non-linear optical technique of sum-frequency spectroscopy (SFG) has been used to investigate a variety of surfactant and phospholipid systems at different interfaces. Firstly, the effects of temperature and ionic strength on the adsorption of cationic and non-ionic surfactants were investigated. The binary surfactant system used here is a simplified hair conditioner model, consisting of a fatty alcohol and a long chain quaternary ammonium salt, self-assembled from solution onto a silica surface (which serves as a very approximate model of the hair surface). SFG was used to investigate and the effects of temperature and ionic strength on the conformational ordering of the adsorbed monolayer. The structure of a tethered bilayer lipid membrane (tBLM) produced by different methods was investigated. The tBLM is a bilayer of phospholipids, which are tethered to a gold substrate by a self-assembled monolayer (SAM). The SAM is a mixture of disulfide tether molecules and disulfide spacer molecules, which form covalent bonds to the gold surface. Ideally, the tether molecules should inter-digitate into the phospholipid membrane and hold it to the gold surface. This type of system is often used as a robust model for a cell membrane. Here, SFG was used to investigate the structure of the SAM, and of the membrane when formed either by rapid solvent exchange, or by a combination of Langmuir-Blodgett and Langmuir-Schaefer deposition. Significant differences in the resulting spectra of the tBLM were observed, as a result of the fabrication technique. SFG was also used to confirm that the polar orientation of the phospholipid in the tethered membrane systems was as expected for a bilayer. Two versions of the quaternary ammonium surfactant used previously were also investigated at the air/water interface. The only difference between the two surfactants was their counterion. The slow collapse of the compressed monolayer was monitored using SFG and by surface pressure measurements. Langmuir-Blodgett deposition onto glass and mica was used at different stages of the monolayer collapse; the resulting air/solid systems were investigated using SFG and atomic force microscopy. Two different methods of obtaining sum-frequency intensity data over time were evaluated, and the effect of the counterions on the kinetics of the slow collapse mechanism was discussed. The structure of surfactin, a surface-active lipopeptide, was investigated at the air/water interface. Deuterated analogues of the bio-surfactant were produced from Bacillus Subtilis by feeding the bacteria with deuterated glucose and/or deuterated leucine. These analogues were used to confirm spectroscopic assignments and make conclusions of the structure of surfactin at the air/water interface. The effect of the surfactin concentration, the pH of the subphase, and the addition of calcium ions to the subphase was also investigated. The acquired knowledge of the structure of surfactin was then used to investigate the interaction of surfactin with a phospholipid monolayer. The surface pressure and sum-frequency spectra were monitored over time after the injection of surfactin into the subphase beneath a phospholipid monolayer compressed at the air/water interface. The surface pressure rose, indicating that surfactin penetrated into the monolayer, but it was found that sum-frequency signals arising from surfactin disappear in the final equilibrium system. Mechanisms and possible structures which are compatible with the data are discussed.

The entrepreneurial ecosystem is a relatively new perspective within the field of entrepreneurship but is now one of the most discussed topics in that field. It emphasizes the role of broader framework conditions that promote or constrain entrepreneurial activity in any region. The supportive institutional framework (reduced number of government regulations, ease in compliance of taxation system and control over corruption) and physical conditions (ease in access to finance, developed infrastructure, stability in political environment, the availability of an educated workforce and reduced competition with informal sector) create an entrepreneurial ecosystem where entry, survival and growth of firms will be at the highest rate. These elements of the institutional framework and physical conditions are interactive in nature, therefore, policymakers around the world are trying to achieve a balance between these components of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. There is a paucity of research on the entrepreneurial ecosystems of developing countries, therefore, the findings of this thesis will not only be an addition to the literature but will also be useful for policymakers in these countries. In this study, pooled cross-sectional data for Pakistan and 41 low-middle income countries (LMICs) covering the period 2006-13 have been used to identify different entrepreneurial ecosystems and explain their impact on the performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The performance of SMEs has been measured through the annual change in sales growth, employment growth and labour productivity growth. The findings based on the analysis of the entrepreneurial ecosystems for the group of LMICs show that all of the identified components can have a negative effect on the performance of the SMEs. However, ranking of components on the basis of magnitude and statistical significance of effect shows that corruption has the most negative effect on firm performance, which warranted further examination. Therefore, we compare the firm performance of the most corrupt and least corrupt LMICs through the use of propensity score matching (PSM) methods. The results of matching methods show that firm performance in the most corrupt countries is at least 10% lower than firms in the least corrupt countries. Thus, LMICs need to take steps to improve their control over corruption in order to achieve better performance of their SMEs. However, only the individual components of the entrepreneurial ecosystems could be assessed for LMICs because of the heterogeneity of the institutional frameworks and physical conditions of these countries. Therefore, the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Pakistan has also been analysed to determine its existence and composition, and its effects on the performance of SMEs. The entrepreneurial ecosystem of Pakistan is examined using firm level survey data provided by the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) for the years 2007 and 2013. A cluster analysis and canonical discriminant analysis (CDA) is undertaken to identify the composition of the entrepreneurial ecosystem existing in Pakistan. This bottom-up approach, recommended in the literature, has been used to measure the interactive effects of components of the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Pakistan. None of the studies in the literature has measured and empirically tested the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Pakistan using this approach. The findings indicate that the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Pakistan is a combination of elements of the institutional framework and physical conditions. Except for government regulations and political stability, all other components contribute negatively to the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Pakistan. Thus, the aggregate effect of the entrepreneurial ecosystem is negative on the performance of SMEs. Moreover, an index was calculated using the interactive weighted effect of the components of the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Pakistan. The regression estimates based on the index values affirmed the negative effect of the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Pakistan as a system. Our findings for Pakistan can be used as a guideline for policymakers in other developing countries with similar institutional frameworks and physical conditions. However, it can be inferred that there is no shortcut to create a supportive entrepreneurial ecosystem. The gradual improvements, with government acting as facilitator, are required to make the entrepreneurial ecosystems in LMICs conducive for entry, survival and growth of businesses. The specific recommendations for both policymakers and entrepreneurs are given at the end of the thesis.

Learning management systems (LMS), which allow education at the student's choice of place and time, have been widely adopted in higher education worldwide. In the case of Saudi Arabia, LMS have been recently introduced in Saudi universities at the request of the Ministry of Education. The effectiveness of these systems ultimately depends on whether students use them. However, previous literature suggests that student utilisation of LMS remains low in some educational contexts. Addressing this problem, this thesis proposes and examines a theoretical framework that might help explain the factors affecting student use of LMS in higher education. More specifically, the proposed model was developed based on the technology acceptance model (TAM), previous literature on the perceived usability of education technology, and student demographic characteristics. Using the probability multi-stage cluster-sampling technique, quantitative online surveys were sent by email to 2,000 students at three public universities in Saudi Arabia: King Abdulaziz University, King Saud University, and Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University. A total of 851 surveys were submitted by students, and 833 surveys were employed for data analysis. The data were coded, cleaned, and preliminarily analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) package. Furthermore, the proposed model and hypotheses were examined using the partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique and SmartPLS software. The results reveal the significant drivers of student use of LMS, the differences in the acceptance of LMS based on the student demographic characteristics (namely gender, age, education level, and experience), and the moderating effect of these demographics on the proposed relationships. This study is relevant for scholars, university leaders, and e-learning developers working to enhance student use of LMS, in particular where there is not yet widespread adoption.

An increasing number of product recalls due to improper quality has inspired decision makers to expand their quality management (QM) practices across supply chains (SC) to continuously improve their products and processes. Specifically, a great source of concern in the pharmaceutical industry is to ensure the quality of their products within SC and avoid operational problems that are caused by poor medicine quality. To accomplish this, companies need to generate value from their SC, and more precisely, assimilate and absorb the SC knowledge. However, the present understanding of the absorptive capacity (AC) role in supply chain quality integration (SCQI), and its impact on operational performance is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this study is twofold: i) to explain the role of AC processes within SCQI practices in the pharmaceutical sector. ii) to investigate the impact of AC onto SCQI and operational performance. The evidence was collected from global pharmaceutical manufacturers in Jordan and the UK, through a mixed methodology approach, using two rounds of interviews (54 interviews) and a survey (264 questionnaire). The results demonstrate that AC is essential for SCQI through developing the companies' abilities to exploit valuable knowledge that is important for their internal quality integration, because it is involved in improving the production's products and processes. Thus, the companies' become more able to build consistent internal products/processes quality and design their quality, along with robust partnerships with SC members in order to continuously improve their products and processes. Further, the findings demonstrate differences in the AC implementation between Jordan and the UK, where by these differences have significant impacts on internal and external quality integration, as well as the companies' operational performance. Unlike previous studies, this study reveals a series of mediations between AC and operational performance through internal and external quality integration. Interestingly, this result further demonstrates that internal quality integration is important to a company's success; however, it is insufficient in improving operational performance. As a result, companies need to develop their AC and integrate their quality process with their key SC partners in order to improve operational performance. The study concludes that there is a lack of perception in the importance of building the AC process and a limited view of the quality implementation inside the companies as well as within the SCs in Jordanian pharmaceutical manufacturers. This leads to a significant gap in the implementation of AC processes and SCQI practices between the pharmaceutical manufacturers in Jordan and the UK, in addition to significant differences in operational performance. This study proposes and tests a model that explains how AC can be used to improve SCQI practices and how the AC process impacts the SCQI along with operational performance. Moreover, this study compares the results between a developed and a developing country in order to guide the decision makers in developing countries to the importance of building their AC process with a view to facilitating the SCQI and improve their operational performance. Through the lens of the dynamic capability theory, the study identifies the processes and the resources that increase the companies' competencies, since previous studies fall short in explaining these processes and resources. Finally, this study offers guides for implementing AC and SCQI, which can facilitate future studies in this field.

Agrobiodiversity are threatened due to habitat loss, land reclamation and fragmentation, spread of diseases and pests, genetic uniformity, genetic erosion, and other human activities. Crop wild relatives (CWR) are wild species that are more or less genetically related to crops that can be used to introgress useful genes for improvement of productivity, resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses and quality of cultivated crop. These valuable resources are threatened and untapped for crop improvements. Therefore, their conservation would be valuable and will contribute to maintaining and promoting the sustainability of crop diversity, facilitating agricultural production and supporting the increasing demand for food, feed and natural resources. This thesis tackle for the first time the diversity and conservation status of CWR in North Africa region. In order to achieve this goal, different methods, approaches and techniques were used. These are identifying CWR in the region (CWR checklist), prioritize the checklist, ex situ and in situ gap analyses, species distribution modelling, threat assessment using IUCN Red List categories, climate change assessment and molecular genetic analysis of wild barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. spontaneum (C. Koch) Thell). The outcomes will assist in lay the foundations for future ex situ and in situ conservation, and subsequent use.

Visual texture has multiple perceptual attributes (e.g. regularity, isotropy, etc.), including scale. The scale of visual texture has been defined as the size of the repeating unit (or texel) of which the texture is composed. Not all textures are formed through the placement of a clearly discernible repeating unit (e.g. irregular and stochastic textures). There is currently no rigorous definition for texture scale that is applicable to textures of a wide range of regularities. We hypothesised that texture scale ought to extend to these less regular textures. Non-overlapping sample windows (or patches) taken from a texture appear increasingly similar as the size of the window gets larger. This is true irrespective of whether the texture is formed by the placement of a discernible repeating unit or not. We propose the following new characterisation for texture scale: “the smallest window size beyond within which texture appears consistently”. We perform two psychophysical studies and report data that demonstrates consensus across subjects and across methods of probing in the assessment of texture scale. We then present an empirical algorithm for the estimation of scale based on this characterisation. We demonstrate agreement between the algorithm and (subjective) human assessment with an RMS accuracy of 1.2 just-noticeable-differences, a significant improvement over previous published algorithms. We provide two ground-truth perceptual datasets, one for each of our psychophysical studies, for the texture scale of the entire Brodatz album, together with confidence levels for each of our estimates. Finally, we make available an online tool which researchers can use to obtain texture scale estimates by uploading images of textures.

This thesis examines the impact of financial integration on growth, poverty and inequality and crises. Chapter 1 surveys the theoretical linkages proposed in the literature between financial integration and growth, poverty and inequality and crises. Chapter 2 examines the impact of financial integration on growth using a panel dataset covering 175 countries over the time period 1970-2013. The Panel Threshold Regression (PTR), Logistic Smooth Transition Regression (LSTR) and OLS estimation methods are deployed. For developing countries, a high threshold level is observed above which increasing openness is severely damaging for growth. On the contrary, for emerging markets, with increasing financial liberalization, growth increases both below and above the threshold. For transition economies, the threshold level is low, but above this threshold increase in financial openness results in decreasing growth. Chapter 3 looks at the impact of financial integration on poverty and inequality using 79 developing countries over the time period 1980-2013. Similar to chapter 2, the PTR, LSTR and OLS estimation methods are used. A low threshold level is found when measuring the impact on poverty, above this threshold it is observed that increasing openness decreases poverty. When measuring the impact on income groups, below the threshold it is observed that income share increases for all income groups, but above the threshold income only increases for the richest 20% and 10%. On the contrary income share decreases for the poorest 10% and 20%. Increased openness also results in increased income inequality. Finally, chapter 4 examines the impact of the intensity of financial liberalization on the likelihood of crises using 93 developing countries over the time period 1980-2013 using multivariate probit regression models. It is observed that increasing the intensity of financial liberalization reduces the likelihood of a banking, currency and twin crises. Improvements in the conditions of political institutions lowers the likelihood of crises but rising political polarization increases the likelihood of crises.

This thesis aims to investigate different approaches to fabricate well-defined and uniform polymeric materials, with sizes ranging from micrometre to nanometre. We first developed a simple approach via which the size of polymer microparticles resulting from conventional suspension polymerisation could be satisfactorily controlled. The approach employed a two-stage stirring protocol in which a conventional emulsification was conducted in the first stage at a higher agitation speed, followed by polymerisation at reduced stirring speed. The proposed policy led to the formation of more uniform particles, depending on the stabiliser concentration, than those obtained from the one-stage conventional method. The two-stage stirring protocol was extended to include membrane emulsification as the precursor to polymerisation. The use of a stirred-vessel membrane emulsification, by which the size of drops could be controlled with more accuracy, followed by a shear-controlled suspension polymerisation significantly improved the uniformity of products. The effects of various governing parameters in membrane emulsification, such as the feeding policy, stirring speed, stabiliser concentrations, and flowrates were studied in order to find the optimum conditions under which the one-to-one copy of the initial drops and polymer microparticles could be achieved. In the next stage, both emulsification and polymerisation stages were replaced by the state of art microfluidics and UV polymerisation, respectively, to produce complex microparticles with highly ordered and well-defined interconnected windows. Uniform water/oil/water (w/o/w) double emulsion, with controlled number of inner water droplets, was first produced and then used as precursor before it was consolidated into porous microparticles through UV photopolymerisation. The sizes and number of cores, porosity and the morphology of the porous microparticles were precisely tuned by the flowrate, confinement offered by the geometry of the channel and packing structure of the inner droplets. The study was then extended to fabricate 3D porous structures known as polyHIPE. Uniform w/o, in which the internal phase ratio (water phase) occupies more than 74.05% of the total volume of the emulsion, was produced by co-flow microfluidics device. A centrifugal-step was also attempted to further increase the phase ratio and thus the resultant porosity of the structure. Polymerisation of the external oil phase resulted in the formation of open polyHIPE structures with distinctive morphology and porosity. The final aim of this thesis was to synthesis uniform polymer nanoparticles with a high solids content. Emulsifier-free emulsion polymerisation was chosen as the technique, but a mixture of acetone and water was used as the reaction media to increase the solubility of the monomer phase. The particle size, number of particles and the uniformity were controlled by the concentration of acetone as well as the monomer concentrations. The combined effects of co-monomer and acetone were also investigated and sub-100nm uniform nanoparticles with high solids content were obtained.

Peripheral T-cell lymphomas (PTCLs) are rare diseases with a high mortality that respond poorly to conventional chemotherapy. They represent, therefore, a relatively large unmet medical need. Gene expression profiling has shown that a large subgroup of PTCL are derived from normal follicular helper (Tfh) T-cells. Interleukin-2 inducible T-cell kinase (ITK) is a tyrosine kinase and member of the TEC family of kinases, of which Bruton's tyrosine kinase (BTK), a B-cell signalling protein is also a member, and is expressed in Tfh cells and is important for T-cell receptor (TCR) and chemokine signalling. ITK is highly expressed in Tfh derived PTCL and is, therefore a potential target for treatment. It is inhibited by the clinically active BTK inhibitor, ibrutinib. We have compared siRNA knockdown of ITK and small molecule ITK inhibitors (ITKi) for their effects on proliferation and signalling in human T-cell lines and normal human primary T-cells. There was variation in some effects but all inhibitors repressed proliferation, calcium signalling and cytokine production and caused modest increases in apoptosis. Studies of mice with homozygous disruption of the Itk locus, by other researchers, showed that ITK deficiency skewed CD4 T-cell subset differentiation from Th17 to Treg but Tfh differentiation was not investigated. We were able to show that the effects previously reported in vivo were reproduced on tonsillar CD4 T-cells cultured under polarising conditions in vitro by ITKi. Unexpectedly, we showed that ITK inhibitors prevented Tfh differentiation whilst promoting that of suppressive Treg cells. Blocking IL-21, an important Tfh cytokine regulated by ITK, with IL21R-Fc partially prevented ITKi effects on Tfh and Treg differentiation suggesting a mechanism of action. We also had the opportunity to investigate two cases of primary human T-cell lymphoma and showed that the lymphoma cells had the capacity to differentiate to Tfh cells in vitro, which was prevented by ITKi, accompanied by an increase in Tregs. This suggested the exciting hypothesis that ITK inhibitors might alter the T-cell lymphoma environment from activating Tfh to inhibitory Treg. We speculate that in addition to preventing proliferation and enhancing apoptosis, a third potential therapeutic mechanism for ITK inhibitors in PTCL is skewing the microenvironment towards repression. Finally, in an effort to show that ITK inhibitors can be a component of combination treatments we demonstrated synergy with chemotherapy and PI3K inhibitors. The data presented in this thesis supports ITK as a target for therapy of Tfh-derived T-cell lymphomas.

Clustering is an essential data mining technique that divides observations into groups where each group contains similar observations. K-Means is one of the most popular and widely used clustering algorithms that has been used for over fifty years. The majority of the running time in the original K-Means algorithm (known as Lloyd's algorithm) is spent on computing distances from each data point to all cluster centres to find the closest centre to each data point. Due to the current exponential growth of the data, it became a necessity to improve KMeans even further to cope with large-scale datasets, known as Big Data. Hence, the main aim of this thesis is to improve the efficiency and scalability of Lloyd's K-Means. One of the most efficient techniques to accelerate K-Means is to use triangle inequality. Implementing such efficient techniques on a reliable distributed model creates a powerful combination. This combination can lead to an efficient and highly scalable parallel version of K-Means that offers a practical solution to the problem of clustering Big Data. MapReduce, and its popular open-source implementation known as Hadoop, provides a distributed computing framework that efficiently stores, manages, and processes large-scale datasets over a large cluster of commodity machines. Many studies introduced a parallel implementation of Lloyd's K-Means on Hadoop in order to improve the algorithm's scalability. This research examines methods based on triangle inequality to achieve further improvements on the efficiency of the parallel Lloyd's K-Means on Hadoop. Variants of K-Means that use triangle inequality usually require extra information, such as distance bounds and cluster assignments, from the previous iteration to work efficiently. This is a challenging task to achieve on Hadoop for two reasons: 1) Hadoop does not directly support iterative algorithms; and 2) Hadoop does not allow information to be exchanged between two consecutive iterations. Hence, two techniques are proposed to give Hadoop the ability to pass information from an iteration to the next. The first technique uses a data structure referred to as an Extended Vector (EV), that appends the extra information to the original data vector. The second technique stores the extra information on files where each file is referred to as a Bounds File (BF). To evaluate the two proposed techniques, two K-Means variants are implemented on Hadoop using the two techniques. Each variant is tested against variable number of clusters, dimensions, data points, and mappers. Furthermore, the performance of various implementations of K-Means on Hadoop and Spark is investigated. The results show a significant improvement on the efficiency of the new implementations compared to the Lloyd's K-Means on Hadoop with real and artificial datasets.

The amount of music available digitally is overwhelmingly increasing. The main purpose of music recommendation systems is to suggest quality relevant songs that fit with the user's preferences. Currently, most of the streaming music systems recommend songs based on Collaborative Filtering and Content-Based filtering techniques. However these systems fail in dealing with the Cold-Start problem. This thesis presents user-based hybrid algorithms for music recommendation systems to address the Cold-Start problem and to recommend music for both new and existing users based on their context by integrating the social information to provide context aware personalized music recommendation. This thesis makes two major contributions: First, hybrid recommendation algorithms are developed using multi-strategy approach to give more accurate recommendations by combining collaborative filtering, content based and the user's context obtained from social network in order to provide both new and existing users with an easy way to discover new songs. In this way, the system is able to estimate what artist/song would match user preferences. Second, a generic Context-Aware Personalised Music (CAPM) framework is proposed for supporting the rapid development of context-aware music recommendation systems and for clarifying the whole process of recommendation. As there are myriad approaches of recommendation, there is a need for a generic framework not only to gather these approaches, but also to interpret them under the proposed framework. Recommendation algorithm types differ by the input structure. For example, social recommendation algorithm uses social information, collaborative filtering uses users rating data, whereas content based recommendation uses item's characteristics. This difference affects enormously the representation of data and consequently the process of recommendation. CAPM is able to present different input data and uniforms the recommendation process. The proposed algorithms and the framework have been successfully evaluated via practical experiments by real users. The practical experiments are carried out by presenting a Context-Aware Personalised Music (CAPMusic) application in Google Play which helps users to discover new artists, albums or songs. Satisfactory results have been obtained which indicate that using the proposed hybrid recommendation algorithms leads to better results compared with using the pure content based and collaborative filtering techniques.

The Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing is a promising technology for the Next Generation Networks. This technique was selected because of the flexibility for the various parameters, high spectral efficiency, and immunity to ISI. The OFDM technique suffers from significant digital signal processing, especially inside the Inverse/ Fast Fourier Transform IFFT/FFT. This part is used to perform the orthogonality/De-orthogonality between the subcarriers which the important part of the OFDM system. Therefore, it is important to understand the parameter effects on the increase or to decrease the FPGA power consumption for the IFFT/FFT. This thesis is focusing on the FPGA power consumption of the IFFT/FFT uses in the OFDM system. This research finds a various parameters effect on FPGA power of the IFFT/FFT. In addition, investigate the computer software used to measure and analyse the FPGA power consumption of OFDM transceivers, and selects the target hardware used in the computer software. The researched parameters include the number of bits used in calculating the phase factor precision; Cyclic Prefix length effected on IP core IFFT, Subcarrier modulation type, word length width, Real and Complex Value IFFT, IFFT length, and subcarriers sampling frequency. The real value IFFT is proposed in 1987 and implemented in this thesis. These parameters above are discussed by comparing the result between the Real and Complex value IFFT used inside the OFDM system.

This study aims to investigate the impact of Internet usage on the psychological well-being related to family functioning in the context of Saudi Arabian society. Internet usage is represented by two aspects, firstly by type of online activities including searching, pleasure, communication, gaming, friendships, and shopping; secondly by time spent on these online activities. In terms of family functioning, two dimensions are derived from the Circumplex Model of Marital and Family System, they are family cohesion and adaptability (Olson, 1983). Finally, four individual variables of psychological well-being were selected: loneliness, self-esteem, satisfaction with life, and satisfaction with family life. For the present work five separate studies were carried out to address the main aim. The first study is a translation study which aims to translate the scales under study into Arabic using two different methods of translation, back translation, and statistical translation. The results indicated that the translated items of the self-report scales are understandable and have similar meaning to the original items. The second study, which is the pilot study, aims to test the properties of the scales and examine the relationships among the variables. Fifty-eight participants (39 males, 18 females) with mean age 31.6 years took part, all of them Saudi nationals and native speakers. The results indicated significant relationships among the variables, especially Internet usage and family functioning. Results also indicated that the scales under study have acceptable psychometric proprieties. Some items, especially in the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale (FACESII), were found to have minimal relationship with the total of the scale. Thus, the decision was made to further validate in a follow-up study. The third study aims to validate FACESII to be used in Saudi society. The sample of this study was extended to include one hundred and eighty-one participants 100 males (55%), and 81 females (44%), average of 30.6 years. Three types of validity were considered; face validity, congruent validity, and construct validity. The results showed that FACESII correlated well with the self-esteem whilst correlating poorly with loneliness. Also, the items of FACESII loaded on different factors to the items loaded in loneliness and self-esteem. This study ended with some suggestions to further develop the FACESII scale. The three aforementioned studies can constitute a preparation process to move towards the main study aim. The fourth study aims to examine the effect of using the Internet on family functioning and well-being, starts with developing scales by using the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), then examines the model of current study using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Four models developed to examine the impact of Internet use on family and couple functioning and well-being. These main models consider family and couple functioning as a mediation variable between Internet usage and psychological well-being. Four hundred and thirty-three participants with average mean of 30.23 years took part in survey. Participants were all Saudi nationals and native speakers, from different positions in the household of Saudi families. Overall, results were shown to support the main models and to confirm the mediating role of family functioning for the relationship of Internet usage and individual well-being. Furthermore, comparison between UK and KSA sample were made to find differences in all study's variables and among family members. The final study, a longitudinal study, aims to examine Internet effects on family functioning and well-being over time. Seventy-four, 48 males and 26 females, with a mean age 33.2 took part in the survey used in study four for a second time. Cross-lagged regression models were used to compare effects over time. Results of this study confirmed that Internet usage has stronger effects on family functioning compared with effects on psychological well-being. This lends further support to the assumed mediating mechanism. Also, some comparisons were made to find out the differences in the study's variables between first longitudinal and cross-sectional samples, and between participants who took part in the longitudinal study with sample who did not. All in all, the results support the models that proposed which the Internet usage can be more effective on psychological well-being through the family functioning; cohesion and adaptability.

Researchers have studied voice onset time (VOT) in a number of languages but there is a scarcity of research on the acquisition of VOT of English, particularly by adult Saudi learners, and on the VOT of Saudi Arabic. The current study aims to fill these gaps. At the same time, we aimed to assess whether key claims of Flege's Speech Learning Model (SLM) were supported by this kind of data. 31 adult advanced Saudi learners of English and 60 monolinguals (30 native English and 30 Arabic monolinguals) participated in this study. The VOTs of the voiced and voiceless stops were measured followed by three different vowels, in both isolated word and word in sentence contexts. The results show that the learners produced English voiceless stops with aspiration closer to Arabic than to the higher native English VOT values, and voiced stops with pre-voicing, similar to Arabic, rather than with native English short-lag VOT values. Context had an effect in English but vowel did not, while the reverse was true for the learners and Arabic native speakers. Overall, learners' acquisition was modest despite their level and exposure, in that they overwhelmingly resembled Arabic rather than English native speakers. Several hypotheses based on SLM expectations were not confirmed in an unqualified way. However, support was found for learners' phonetic categories being ‘deflected’ away from both L1 and L2 categories. All three groups produced longer positive VOT for aspirated than unaspirated or voiced plosives. All exhibited VOT increasing across places of articulation, front to back for the voiceless stops, but only English native speakers showed this clearly for the voiced stops. Length of residence in UK and daily use of English did not seem to affect nativelikeness of learner VOT.

Natural Photosynthesis process is the source of life; it converts the sunlight into chemical energy. This process takes place in the chloroplast of the green plants in a sophisticated and complex pathway. It involves electron transfer cascades from the photoexcited reaction centre to sustainable energy storage. As a route to develop new chemical systems for artificial photosynthesis in an efficient and fast electron transfer cascade, it is essential to propose three-dimensional molecular ensembles of both electrochemically and photochemically active systems. This thesis studies the behaviour of using L-cysteine and potassium iodide as electroactive species in a reduction reaction of chlorpromazine hydrochloride on glassy carbon electrodes and rotating glassy carbon disk electrodes with the aid of cyclic voltammetry and linear sweep voltammetry. The electrochemical characteristics of chlorpromazine hydrochloride (CPZ.HCl) in various concentrations, which induce catalytic oxidation reactions of different concentrations of the electroactive materials, are investigated. The experimental results show that the increase in oxidation peaks current of chlorpromazine hydrochloride depends on the concentrations of L-cysteine and potassium iodide. The current response was enhanced through fast transport via a rotating glassy carbon disk electrode. The peak potentials of chlorpromazine hydrochloride in the solution containing L-cysteine shift to more negative values for all concentrations and speeds; similarly for potassium iodide. The electrochemical reaction of chlorpromazine hydrochloride with the electroactive materials determined EC' reactions. The diffusion coefficient for chlorpromazine hydrochloride was found to be 1.28×10-6 m2 s-1. This thesis studies the adsorption and electrochemical investigation of one of the derivatives of chlorophyll-chlorophyllin, at gold and glassy carbon electrodes. Parameters such as the adsorption time, the electrolyte nature and concentration and chlorophyllin concentration were investigated. The use of chlorophyllin as a redox mediator was examined, with a gold electrode being employed. The importance of gold electrode surface preparation in determining the mechanism of redox was described, and the environment of adsorption process of the different concentrations of chlorophyllin on the surface of the gold electrode had been elucidated in this study. The electrochemical method shows that the cyclic voltammetry responses of studied adsorption chlorophyllin pigment on the gold electrode were more efficient than glassy carbon electrode, with processes being more favourable in aqueous solution. Third, the oxidation reaction of various concentrations of chlorophyllin is investigated in the bulk solution in the presence of Triton X 100 and potassium iodide. The extraction and identification of chlorophyll in fresh spinach were examined by using thin layer chromatography and UV-visible spectrophotometry techniques. The cyclic voltammetry for this pigment was elucidated in the presence of Triton X 100 and vitamin K1 at the gold electrode, the mechanism of this reaction was suggested to be EC'. Lastly, this study has emphasised chlorophyll a and Total chlorophyll (Tchl), based on the effect of electrode materials and diameter, pH, solvent and electrolyte. The inducing of electron transfer of Tchl pigment was examined in presence and absence of vitamin K1 through light and dark atmosphere. The system of chlorpromazine-lyotropic liquid crystal (CPZ-LLC) was highlighted in this thesis. The effect of parameters such as electrode materials, electrode diameters and CPZ.HCl concentrations in this system have been documented. The self-assembled phase was recorded using polarising optical microscopy and X-ray scattering. The CPZ-LLC system was fabrication into photogalvanic cells. The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of this cell is (0.58%), which is useful and novel.

The influence coefficient (IC) method is an acceptable field balancing approach for rotating machines. However, it is generally observed that the IC method often uses vibration response acquired at single machine speed at bearing pedestals for the rotor unbalance estimation for industrial applications. The estimated rotor unbalance may not be accurate at a single speed either due to noise in the measured signal or measurement at single speed not reflecting the machine dynamics accuratly or both. Therefore, an improved unbalance estimation is proposed by using the IC method, but using vibration measurements at multiple rotor speeds together in a single band to estimate rotor unbalance accuratly. Sensitivity analysis of the proposed method is also carried out to understand the dependency of adding more speeds in a single band on the accuracy of unbalance estimation. In the recent past, with the support of the advanced computer technology, the model-based rotor fault identification approach has been introduced earlier. This method requires vibration measurements of a single machine transient operation and reasonably accurate numerical model of the rotating machine. Despite all the significant research contributions towards the enhancement of the aforementioned two balancing methods (i.e. IC and model-based approaches), they are currently applied using two orthogonal vibration sensors per bearing pedestal. Therefore, this study proposes that the two balancing methods can be enhanced by applying them with using only one sensor at a bearing pedestal. The proposed balancing techniques are applied on experimental rigs with single as well as multiple balancing planes. Also, several added unbalance scenarios are used for both methods. The proposed rotor mass unbalance estimation methods can estimate the rotor unbalance of different unbalance configurations accurately for all cases. This indicates that the proposed unbalance estimation approaches have the potential for future industrial application.

Phishing has been the most frequent cybercrime activity over the last 15 years and has caused billions of dollars to be stolen. This happens due to the fact that phishing attackers always use new (zero-day) and sophisticated techniques to deceive online customers. The most common way to initiate a phishing attack is by using email. In this thesis, a novel framework is proposed that combines a neural network with reinforcement learning for detecting online phishing attacks. This thesis addresses the effectiveness of phishing email detection, and it makes the following contributions. Firstly, a novel pre-processing system has been designed to gather and extract the features and patterns of phishing email. To cover all behaviour that phishers use to deceive online customers, fifty features were selected. Pre-processing is divided into three layers, based on the main types of email content. Secondly, a novel algorithm has been proposed for the exploration of new phishing behaviour. The proposed algorithm has the ability to select the effective list of features from the list of features extracted in the pre-processing phase. Thirdly, this thesis proposed a novel Dynamic Evolving Neural Network using Reinforcement Learning (DENNuRL) algorithm, which can be used to generate the best neural network for classification problem based on reinforcement learning idea. Finally, a novel framework for Phishing Email Detection System (PEDS) has been proposed. The PEDS has the ability to adapt itself to generate a new PEDS that reflects changes in behaviour. Therefore, reinforcement learning is adopted in the proposed framework combined with neural network to enhance the system dynamically over time in the online mode. The proposed technique can effectively handle zero-day phishing attacks. The proposed phishing email detection model was trained, tested and validated in the online mode using an approved dataset. The promising results showed that the DENNuRL can provide an effective means of phishing detection. The proposed model successfully classified and identified approximately 98.6% of phishing emails selected from the test dataset, with low false positive rates of 1.8%. A comparison with other similar techniques using the same dataset shows that the proposed technique outperforms the existing methods.

This study is to investigation and development of the PV self -cleaning impacted of dust that would enable a wider deployment of solar photovoltaic systems in the Middle East and Gulf region which enjoys abundant solar radiation throughout the year, and where sandstorm dust and elevated ambient temperature persist. The dust reduces the power generated by the solar devices or hinders the visibility through windshields. The research intends to combine a number of technologies to assist and improve the operational performance of photovoltaic (PV) systems. This investigation covered some of systems which employed PV self-cleaning techniques to remove the particles of dust from the PV panel surface. Regular cleaning of the panels is often necessary to prevent serious degradation of their performance, especially in regions with dusty climates. However, manual cleaning of solar panels, especially in the context of large installation, can be a labour-intensive process and thus often prohibitively costly. Even in small buildings, cleaning a PV system can involve complicated issues of access that might require the intervention of specialist staff. Some of the technologies involve the use of electrodynamic screens for electrostatic dust removal, robotic cleaning tools, vibrating mechanisms featuring piezo-ceramic actuations, as well as TiO2-treated chemical or nano-films. Nevertheless, none of these technologies has to date been able to establish itself as an industry standard and achieve the necessary commercial breakthrough. The numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the diameter of the nozzle throat has a significant impact on the mass flow rate of the water vapour; some results in a high mass flow rate whereas a larger diameter leads to a lower rate. The nozzle diameter also affects the magnitude of the velocity and the mass fraction of the water vapour. It was found that a nozzle throat of a 5 mm diameter above the PV surface by 50 mm with 222m/s is optimum for the jet pump design for water vapour production and dust removal covering sufficient PV surface area. Moreover, variations in the length of the mixing chamber have a significant effect on the mass flow rate of the water vapour. It was found that the mass flow rate of the water vapour is higher in a shorter mixing chamber than it is in a longer mixing chamber. Therefore, to be more effective, a jet pump should have a smaller nozzle diameter, a shorter mixing chamber and a smaller jet pump throat. In light of the above, self-cleaning technologies could present the perfect solution to these issues and help address many of the obstacles preventing solar panel technology from becoming more widely adopted. This would help reduce dependence on the fossil-fuel based energy resources which can be devoted to the generation of national revenues and also leads to a reduction of CO2 emissions to the environment.

Humans report a strong pitch percept in response to a complex tone – the sum of a series of harmonics – presented to either a single ear (‘monaurally’) or both ears (‘diotically’). Interspike interval histograms of responses of neurons in the auditory system to monaural complex tones show a peak at the period of the pitch reported by humans – a ‘neural correlate of pitch’. However, the same pitch percept can be generated by presenting complexes with harmonics distributed across both ears (‘dichotically’). This requires combination of the neural signals underlying pitch from both sides of the auditory system, termed ‘binaural fusion’. Temporal coding generally deteriorates along the auditory pathway; binaural fusion should occur at a relatively early stage. One of the prime candidates is in the superior olivary complex (SOC). Although the guinea pig auditory system has been extensively studied, this work is the first in vivo investigation of the guinea pig SOC. Cells of the lateral superior olive (LSO) show sensitivity to interaural level differences; medial superior olive (MSO) cells show sensitivity to interaural time differences. Additionally, cells with responses similar to the medial nucleus of the trapezoid body (MNTB) and superior paraolivary nucleus (SPN) of other species were found in the guinea pig SOC. Presumed MNTB cells showed a three-component spike waveform shape; presumed SPN cells responded at the offset of contralaterally-presented stimuli. MSO and LSO cells respond to the overall pitch of complex tones, even if the monaural waveforms presented to each ear differ; this is consistent with the perception of humans. In contrast, cells of the ventral cochlear nucleus, which provide the main input to MSO and LSO cells, do not show evidence of a binaural pitch response. In conclusion, SOC cells are able to encode the pitch of binaural complex tones in their spike timing patterns.

In a world that faces global warming and other major environmental challenges, it is essential that students learn about the principles of sustainability so that they can apply these principles in their future lives and careers. This is particularly so in fields such as interior architecture and design, which will impact how well humans can move toward a sustainable way of life. The aim of the present study was to evaluate a participatory teaching approach for students of interior design that incorporates ecological thinking. It is particularly intended for use at universities and other places of higher education where such contexts are not currently available and, furthermore, where the teaching has been primarily of a didactic, teacher-centred form. The teaching approach was developed and tested through the involvement of students and staff at a technical institute in Kuwait – a country with severe environmental problems in which teaching at all levels has traditionally been rigidly didactic. A review was carried out of literature on learning theories, design principles, and sustainability paradigms that bore upon the research aim. Following this, a method was chosen, based on action research that involved running different types of workshops, in order to measure the impact of the teaching styles that are ideal to deliver ecological knowledge.

This thesis explores the development of the accounting profession with a specific reference to the case of Lebanon, utilising a qualitative research design. The establishment of the exclusive body of accounting in Lebanon, the Lebanese Association for Certified Public Accountants (LACPA), in 1994 constitutes a central element of this development. The analysis refers back to the period preceding the LACPA, specifically from when the first union of accountants in Lebanon was established in 1963. While the professionalization project of accounting in Lebanon, which is when the accounting profession was recognised by the state like other reputable professions, along with institutionalising entry requirements, could be understood in terms of several influencing factors, such as the French colonial legacy, or the Civil War and the reconstruction project associated with it, this case argues that this project is the outcome of the work of indigenous accounting practitioners. The data collected in this study is theoretically analysed within the concept institutional work, defined as the purposive action of individuals and organisations aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions (Lawrence et al., 2009). As institutions are traditionally framed within a structural understanding, the concept of institutional work, while not neglecting the significance of structural factors in relation to institutions, demonstrates that the role of actors and their actions in relation to institutions should not be overlooked. After addressing the establishment of the exclusive body of accounting in Lebanon, this case explores how the accounting profession is being maintained amid political, religious and sectarian divisions, and demonstrates that the survival of this profession is understood beyond the technical aspects of the accounting profession and practice, to embody these broader divisions. Given this multidimensional nature of the maintenance/survival of the accounting profession as an institution, the notion of agonistic pluralism (Mouffe, 2013) provided a more nuanced understanding of the accounting profession as an arena that is composed of different groups, and how these groups' interactions enhance our knowledge and understanding of the accounting profession. This study relies on semi-structured interviews with key players of the accounting profession in Lebanon, mainly executive members of the LACPA, and supports these interviews with archival documents. This approach was chosen because personal experiences and discourses enable a better understanding of actions and intentions of actors, and their inter-relatedness with political and religious/sectarian considerations. This study reveals what takes place in the backstage of governance, how and on what basis the different groups interact with each other, and ultimately how this is reflected on the function of the LACPA as the exclusive body of accounting in Lebanon. This thesis provides an empirical study that enables a re-thinking of the essence of the accounting profession, not only because this context is under-researched, but also because of the following reasons. First, this case addresses how local accounting practitioners, through engaging in strategies of institutional work, were able to grant the accounting profession authority and recognition at a time when the state and politicians were unwilling to legislate for the accounting profession. Second, this case understands the establishment and maintenance of the accounting profession in terms of agonising relations between groups with different perspectives. Thus, an integral part of institutional work is to establish an agonistic environment that would ensure the survival of the accounting profession, amid divided re-constructed identities of actors. Moreover, by addressing the work of actors of a professional association, this case illustrates how the accounting profession and its maintenance are related to other institutions operating at a broader level. This contributes to our knowledge about how professional associations engage in institutional work (Ramirez, 2013) by demonstrating that the aspired agonistic environment encompasses not only professional considerations, but also other political and religious considerations that are vital for the maintenance of the accounting profession. This case sheds light about phenomena, relationships, and divisions that are present nearly in all contexts, yet not explicitly associated with the accounting profession, hence, a broader understanding of the essence of the accounting profession is presented in this thesis.

This research discusses the issue of education reform in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) through an exploration of the perspectives of a range of participants involved in the preparation programme for science teachers which is run through an existing relationship between the University of Taibah and public schools in Medina city in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The research examines the perspectives of participants in the university and the school (university supervisors, university coordinators, headteachers, collaborating teachers and science student teachers). It discusses teacher preparation issues in the multiple contexts reported in the literature. Teacher preparation in other contexts has revealed models which could be useful in the Saudi context. Activity Theory (AT) was used as the theoretical framework to achieve this study’s objective of exploring the academic systems of the university/school and the relationship between them in science teacher preparation, focussing on the contradictions that create conflicts for student teachers learning to teach the modern science curriculum. Activity Theory was a useful tool in organizing this research as it permitted the exploration of the relationships between systems, analysing the rich data collected on the relationship between university and school. Activity Theory acted as a link between the need for a more expansive unit of analysis in initial teacher education (ITE) studies and appropriate and effective research methods. This research is situated within the interpretative paradigm. It usescase study with mixed methods as an appropriate methodology, using multiple methods of data collection, namely semi-structured interviews as the main tool, questionnaires and documentary evidence. This research revealed the utilitarian nature of the relationship between the university and the school, which did not reach the level of a cooperative partnership, and which contained many contradictions that created conflicts for science teachers when learning the teaching skills required of modern science curricula.

Hemerythrins are oxygen-binding proteins, originally found in the body fluids and tissues of marine invertebrates such as the worms Sipunculids and Priapulida. In these organisms, a multimeric form of hemerythrin is found in their blood cells and a monomeric myohemerythrin in their muscles. Both, however, are very similar in function and structure and are often described according to the oxidation and ligation states of their iron centre. Hemerythrins differ from haemoglobin and haemocyanin in that they possess non-haem di-iron atom sites that bind one molecule of O2. Recently, they have been reported in a wide variety of bacteria particularly in microaerophilic and anaerobic bacteria. Campylobacter jejuni is one species in the family Campylobacteraceae, and it is one of the most common causes of gastroenteritis worldwide, but a commensal of chickens and other fowl. C. jejuni is a microaerophile and therefore needs a quite low oxygen environment (5-10% O2) for optimal growth. Throughout its life cycle, however, it is essential for it to be able to survive in the aerobic environment (21% O2), as well as the oxidative stress response of the human host. There is no clear molecular explanation for the microaerophilic nature of C. jejuni. The majority of Campylobacter species have been shown to have multiple hemerythrin-like proteins, many of which contain a C-terminal domain of unknown function but with high homology among strains. The analysis of the genome of NCTC11168 in C jejuni shows three different genes encoding proteins with iron and oxygen binding hemerythrin-like characteristics: cj0241c, cj1224 and cj0045c. Protein sequences of the Cj0241, Cj1224 and Cj0045 hemerythrins reveal that they all include conserved histidine motifs H, HxxE, HxxxH and HxxxxD, which are important to bind the di-iron centre critical for hemerythrin function. Therefore, the project aimed to resolve the question of the presence of these three genes, determine information on their different roles and the function of some the essential residues in these hemerythrins and their role in oxygen sensing and protection in Campylobacter jejuni. Plasmids for the overexpression of cj0241c, cj1224 and cj0045c were obtained from the laboratory of Prof David Kelly. A range of experiments were performed related to function and structure determination. The expression and purification of Cj0241 was very successful, and the structure was determined. The three-dimensional crystal structure was solved at 1.1 Å resolution using Single-wavelength Anomalous Dispersion (SAD) data sets. It showed a four alpha helix bundle with a central di-iron site bridged by an oxygen atom and coordinated by the conserved histidine residues. Analysis revealed a clear tunnel down the middle of the protein along which water and other solvent molecules could travel from the protein exterior to the di-iron site. The Cj1224 and Cj0045 proteins were successfully purified and analyses carried out on them although it was not possible to obtain crystal structures. Chemical, biochemical and biophysical experiments to study the properties of the proteins suggested that the C-terminal extensions in the Cj1224 and Cj0045 proteins might possess zinc binding properties. Attempts to measure the autoxidation rates of the hemerythrins implied a sensor or transport role for the proteins.

This thesis aims to investigate the performance of different types of franchisees, in terms of perceived market share and profitability, are affected by constrains defined by the theories of franchise selection and contractual terms. The two different types of franchisees researched include novice and parallel. This begins by examining how the constraints defined by the Resource Base, Social Exchange and Equity theories of franchise selection are applicable to entrepreneurs who want to become franchisees, and by examining the differences in the attitude of franchisees toward contractual terms. The main contribution is that the research broadens and extends other franchising and entrepreneurship studies by exploring external and internal factors to examine perceived franchisee performance. Therefore, this study relates the criteria used by franchisees in the selection of potential franchisors and contract clauses, to their performance in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Sultanate of Oman in the food and beverage sector. Moreover, existing research has primarily focused on the perspective of franchisors and has not adequately explored the franchisee's perspective on determining success. Therefore, this study contributes to franchising literature by broadening the scope of existing theories. The study has adopted a multi-methodology strategy, employing a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. Qualitative data was collected through 11 face-to-face interviews, 5 franchisees in Oman, and 6 in Saudi Arabia; using semi-structured questionnaires. Quantitative data was collected via a survey. A self-administrated questionnaire was designed, translated, piloted and distributed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Data analysis was conducted on a sample of 123 responses. Factor analysis was implemented to test the scale, followed by the Mann-Whitney U test, regression, and moderation analysis. The qualitative findings show that constraints defined by the resource-based theory are applicable to novice franchisees. However, franchisor training and support were found to be exceptional resources, applicable to both novice and parallel franchisees. Constraints defined by the social exchange theory are applicable to both novice and parallel franchisees; whereas constraints defined by the equity theory are applicable only to parallel franchisees. The quantitative findings indicate that both types of franchisee have different attitudes toward training clauses; support clauses; contract duration clauses; territorial exclusivity clauses; tying arrangement clauses and franchise fees clauses. However, both types of franchisees have similar attitudes toward termination clauses. Moreover, the results show that franchisor brand reputation, technical know-how and high franchise fee factors will increase the franchisee perceived market share. Additionally, franchisor brand reputation and higher franchise fees, will increase franchisee perceived profitability. Furthermore, parallel franchisees believe that a franchisor's local market knowledge will decrease their performance in terms of perceived profitability. Alternatively, novice franchisees believe long contract duration will help them increase their perceived profitability. In addition, imposing higher franchise fees on novice franchisees will increase their perceived profitability more than that of parallel franchisees. Finally, the results show that contract clauses such as: extensiveness of support; long contract duration, and stricter termination clauses, will affect franchisee perceived market share positively. Finally, contract clauses such as extensiveness of support and short contract duration clauses, will affect franchisee perceived profitability positively; whereas extensiveness of training clauses will affect franchisee perceived profitability negatively.

The focus of this thesis is to investigate the roles of leaders, managers, and mutual roles in aligning strategy and project management (ASPM) in public sector organisations (PSOs) in developing countries (DCs). ASPM as a phenomenon has emerged to support organisations to improve the performance of their projects and fulfil their strategic objectives. In reviewing the normative literature in this area, it is evident that a limited number of studies have been conducted on ASPM, particularly studies related to PSOs in DCs, where the statistics reflect a higher percentage of failed and/or delayed projects. To the best of this author's knowledge, and having conducted a thorough review of the literature, it is believed that none of the existing research studies conducted on ASPM have explored the roles of leaders, managers, and mutual roles in ASPM in PSOs. Thus, the author asserts that it is of high importance to investigate this area within ASPM and to prepare a study that contributes by shedding light on the roles of leaders, managers, and common roles between them in ASPM in PSOs in DCs. This thesis contributes to the body of knowledge related to strategic alignment and management, project management, the public sector and leadership/management as it investigates the roles of leaders, managers, and mutual roles in ASPM in PSOs in DCs. Furthermore, this thesis presents the factors that influence leaders and managers as they carry out their individual as well as mutual roles. The proposed conceptual framework is developed and presented in Chapter 3. From a practical perspective, this thesis contributes by providing the decision makers with a tool that has been tested through multiple units in KSA government case, which may support them in improving the performance of their projects and bring benefits to organisations. In addition to that, in Chapter 5 this thesis presents some lessons learned from the pilot unit study. The author assumes that such the conceptual framework and the factors influencing the roles of managers and leaders and the mutual roles in ASPM are significant and novel and may help to improve project performance, highlighting the importance of strategy management, and ultimately improving the performance in PSOs. The author uses qualitative, interpretive, multiple unit studies research strategy to validate the proposed conceptual framework. The author found from the pilot unit study and other four units study results, present that this kind of approach contributes to more strong decisions for ASPM implementation and highlight that it is acceptable by the unit studies. In spite of the fact that these results cannot be generalised, they can allow others researcher's to link their views with the ones reported in this thesis. This thesis proposes tests and presents a novel framework for ASPM and contributes to the body of knowledge by enriching the literature. The findings from the five units study organisations reveal that the proposed framework is acceptable and clearly indicate the significance of ASPM in PSOs.

The secure and economic operation of the future power system is facing major challenges. These challenges are driven by the increase of the penetration of converter connected and distributed renewable generation and electrified demand. In this thesis, a new smart energy management paradigm, i.e. a Virtual Energy Storage System (VESS), to address these challenges was studied. A VESS aggregates energy storage and flexible demand units into a single entity which performs similarly to a large-capacity conventional energy storage system. A VESS mitigates the uncertainty of the response from flexible demand through coordination with a minimum capacity of costly energy storage systems. Mathematical models of four components of a VESS were developed. Specifically, models of two types of energy storage, i.e. flywheel energy storage and battery energy storage, were developed. Thermodynamic models of two types of flexible demand units, i.e. domestic refrigerators and industrial bitumen tanks, were developed. These models were validated against the performance of similar equipment from the literature. Aggregated models, representing a population of units, for each of flywheels, batteries, refrigerators and bitumen tanks were developed. These aggregated models represent a randomly diversified population of units. These aggregated models were used to establish the frequency and the voltage control schemes of a VESS. A frequency control scheme of the VESS was designed. The control scheme provides low, high and continuous frequency response services to the system operator. The centralised control scheme coordinates models of refrigerators and units of the flywheel energy storage system. Following frequency deviations, the local frequency controllers of refrigerators changed their power consumption. The local frequency controllers of the flywheel units cover the power mismatch between the change in refrigerators power consumption and the required response from the VESS. The required response from the VESS is determined by a droop control. Case studies were conducted to evaluate the frequency control scheme by connecting the VESS to a simplified GB power system. Results showed that the response from the frequency control scheme of the VESS was similar to that of only flywheel energy storage. Based on an economic evaluation, the VESS is estimated to obtain approximately 50% higher return compared with the case II that only uses flywheel energy storage system. These revenues are based on providing frequency response services to the system operator. A voltage control scheme of the VESS was also designed. The control scheme facilitates the integration of distributed renewable energy generation by enhancing the voltage control of the distribution network. The control scheme coordinates models of bitumen tanks and battery energy storage system through different time delay settings of their voltage controllers. The local voltage controllers of bitumen tanks alter their power consumption following significant voltage deviations. If voltage violations continue, the distributed voltage controller of the battery energy storage system charges or discharges the battery using a droop setting obtained from voltage sensitivity factors. A case study was undertaken to assess the voltage control scheme by connecting the VESS, solar panels and wind farms to a UK Generic Distribution System (UKGDS) network. Results showed that the voltage control scheme made a significant improvement in the voltage and reduced tap changing actions of the on-load tap changing transformer and the voltage regulator by approximately 30 % compared with the base case where no VESS was used. Based on an economic evaluation, The VESS is an efficient solution to accommodate distributed renewable energy generation compared with network reinforcement.

Engineering software systems is a complex task which involves various stakeholders and requires planning and management to succeed. As the role of software in our daily life is increasing, the complexity of software systems is increasing. Throughout the short history of software engineering as a discipline, the development practises and methods have rapidly evolved to seize opportunities enabled by new technologies (e.g., the Internet) and to overcome economical challenges (e.g., the need for cheaper and faster development). Today, we are witnessing the Post-PC era. An era which is characterised by mobility and services. An era which removes organisational and geographical boundaries. An era which changes the functionality of software systems and requires alternative methods for conceiving them. In this thesis, we envision to execute software development processes in the cloud. Software processes have a software production aspect and a management aspect. To the best of our knowledge, there are no academic nor industrial solutions supporting the entire software development process life-cycle(from both production and management aspects and its tool-chain execution in the cloud. Our vision is to use the cloud economies of scale and leverage Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to integrate production and management aspects into the development process. Since software processes are seen as workflows, we investigate using existing Workflow Management Systems to execute software processes and we find that these systems are not suitable. Therefore, we propose a reference architecture for Software Development as a Service (SDaaS). The SDaaS reference architecture is the first proposal which fully supports development of complex software systems in the cloud. In addition to the reference architecture, we investigate three specific related challenges and propose novel solutions addressing them. These challenges are: Modelling & enacting cloud-based executable software processes. Executing software processes in the cloud can bring several benefits to software develop ment. In this thesis, we discuss the benefits and considerations of cloud-based software processes and introduce a modelling language for modelling such processes. We refer to this language as EXE-SPEM. It extends the Software and Systems Process Engineering (SPEM2.0) OMG standard to support creating cloudbased executable software process models. Since EXE-SPEM is a visual modelling language, we introduce an XML notation to represent EXE-SPEM models in a machine-readable format and provide mapping rules from EXE-SPEM to this notation. We demonstrate this approach by modelling an example software process using EXE-SPEM and mapping it to the XML notation. Software process models expressed in this XML format can then be enacted in the proposed SDaaS architecture. Cost-e cient scheduling of software processes execution in the cloud. Software process models are enacted in the SDaaS architecture as workflows. We refer to them sometimes as Software Workflows. Once we have executable software process models, we need to schedule them for execution. In a setting where multiple software workflows (and their activities) compete for shared computational resources (workflow engines), scheduling workflow execution becomes important. Workflow scheduling is an NP-hard problem which refers to the allocation of su cient resources (human or computational) to workflow activities. The schedule impacts the workflow makespan (execution time) and cost as well as the computational resources utilisation. The target of the scheduling is to reduce the process execution cost in the cloud without significantly a ecting the process makespan while satisfying the special requirements of each process activity (e.g., executing on a private cloud). We adapt three workflow scheduling algorithms to fit for SDaaS and propose a fourth one; the Proportional Adaptive Task Schedule. The algorithms are then evaluated through simulation. The simulation results show that the our proposed algorithm saves between 19.74% and 45.78% of the execution cost, provides best resource (VM) utilisation and provides the second best makespan compared to the other presented algorithms. Evaluating the SDaaS architecture using a case study from the safety-critical systems domain. To evaluate the proposed SDaaS reference architecture, we instantiate a proof-of-concept implementation of the architecture. This imple mentation is then used to enact safety-critical processes as a case study. Engineering safety-critical systems is a complex task which involves multiple stakeholders. It requires shared and scalable computation to systematically involve geographically distributed teams. In this case study, we use EXE-SPEM to model a portion of a process (namely; the Preliminary System Safety Assessment - PSSA) adapted from the ARP4761 [2] aerospace standard. Then, we enact this process model in the proof-of-concept SDaaS implementation. By using the SDaaS architecture, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and its applicability to di erent domains and to customised processes. We also demonstrate the capability of EXE-SPEM to model cloud-based executable processes. Furthermore, we demonstrate the added value of the process models and the process execution provenance data recorded by the SDaaS architecture. This data is used to automate the generation of safety cases argument fragments. Thus, reducing the development cost and time. Finally, the case study shows that we can integrate some existing tools and create new ones as activities used in process models. The proposed SDaaS reference architecture (combined with its modelling, scheduling and enactment capabilities) brings the benefits of the cloud to software development. It can potentially save software production cost and provide an accessible platform that supports collaborating teams (potentially across di erent locations). The executable process models support unified interpretation and execution of processes across team(s) members. In addition, the use of models provide managers with global awareness and can be utilised for quality assurance and process metrics analysis and improvement. We see the contributions provided in this thesis as a first step towards an alternative development method that uses the benefits of cloud and Model-Driven Engineering to overcome existing challenges and open new opportunities. However, there are several challenges that are outside the scope of this study which need to be addressed to allow full support of the SDaaS vision (e.g., supporting interactive workflows). The solutions provided in this thesis address only part of a bigger vision. There is also a need for empirical and usability studies to study the impact of the SDaaS architecture on both the produced products (in terms of quality, cost, time, etc.) and the participating stakeholders.

The present thesis addresses two questions, expressed broadly as: how comprehensively is the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) embedded in Jordanian national law? and how readily do Jordanian courts apply the provisions of UNCAC? UNCAC is the first legally binding international anti-corruption instrument. In its 8 Chapters and 71 Articles, the UNCAC obliges its State Parties to implement a wide and detailed range of anti-corruption measures affecting their laws, institutions and practices. The Convention's far-reaching approach and the mandatory character of many of its provisions make it a unique tool for developing a comprehensive response to a global problem. The significance of UNCAC can be seen in the fact that by July, 2017 140 states parties had signed the convention. The questions are asked in the light of the need to combat corruption in the pursuit of countries' development, where its presence has long been seen as a major impediment. Despite Jordan's participation in drafting the Convention, some elements of the convention are still missing in Jordanian law. So for the first question, it can be seen that missing elements include bribery in the private sector; bribery of foreign Public Officials and officials of public international organizations; trading in influence, and concealment. For the second question, it appears that Jordanian courts do not favour using UNCAC in coming to their verdicts, as Judges consider that Jordanian legislation is enough to deal with corruption cases. A comparative approach between the Jordanian national law and the international treaty is initially adopted, incorporating (textual) analysis contrasting different elements of national legislation in Jordan and UNCAC. A wide range of government documents and international organizations' reports are considered. This doctrinal style of research then leads to a second phase. Thirty face-to-face expert structured interviews were then conducted. The interviews examined opinion concerning the application of UNCAC's provisions by Jordan. This served to identify opinion on the strengths and challenges in current Jordanian statutes, and suggest the potential impact that any statutory changes might have in reducing corruption in Jordan. The results demonstrate a relatively high level of agreement amongst the experts concerning the current state of Jordan's law in relation to UNCAC. The research suggests that use of the law has potential to further reduce corruption in Jordan. This twin-track approach leads to insights into the nature of corruption offences in an Arab and largely Islamic context. The research provides guidelines for the implementation of the UNCAC in Arab jurisdictions sharing elements of the Jordanian situation. Consideration of the international review process provides insight into how such implementation might best be accomplished. The thesis contributes both to theory-building and practical understanding of how legislation may be used to combat corruption.

The aim of this study was to investigate hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) and its application to metabolic profiling. The effect of different mobile phase modifiers on the retention behaviour of acidic and neutral test probes was studied on silica gel based columns which confirmed the hypothesis that HILIC is due to a combination of hydrophilic interactions and electrostatic interactions. Among the acidic probes tested, the more negatively charged maleic acid was not strongly retained until the strength of the ammonium ion in the mobile phase was high enough to shield the acid from repulsion by charged silanol groups on the silica gel surface. The neutral test probes were increasingly retained with increasing ionic strength of the mobile phase suggesting that the thickness of the water layer on the surface of the silica gel increased with the strength of the ionic modifier. The utility of three silica hydride columns, Cogent silica C, Cogent Phenyl Hydride and Cogent UDC cholesterol, for separating mixture of metabolites was successfully assessed with an alternating gradient from high organic to high aqueous and then from high aqueous to high organic, thus permitting two orthogonal selectivities to be obtained on the same column. A method for the reductive amination was developed for the analysis of sugars and sugar phosphates. This method was very successful with deuterated aniline as a tag which led to the separation of the three common hexoses glucose, galactose and mannose. The method was applied to the profiling of sugars in milk and in brain tissue. An extensive study of seal milk in comparison with other mammalian milks was also conducted which found that unlike the milks of terrestrial mammals, seal milk had very little lactose. Thus seal pups appear to rely on fat metabolism to produce energy. A notable feature of the milk was that it contained high levels of nicotinamide, an essential precursor for the production of the cofactor NAD+ which is required for the β-oxidation of fats.

It has become undeniable that English is the global academic lingua franca to the extent that it is mostly used synonymously with globalisation at the tertiary level. This is partly due to its implementation as a medium of instruction (EMI) in an increasing number of the world’s universities. In view of this, it has become important for both language and content teachers in such contexts not only to know English, but also about English. With such a kind of knowledge, those teachers can respond to the international reality of English in their worksites. A number of studies have investigated the global role(s) of English in different university contexts and disciplines (see Dafouz et al., 2013) and how this entails certain critical issues related to its definition, varieties and ownership in international universities (see Jenkins, 2014). However, there is still value in researching English roles in different content units within the same international university to understand the context as a whole. In light of that, the present study focuses on investigating language and content teachers’ beliefs on Englishisation in their international higher education institution (IHEI). It aims to understand university English language teachers’ beliefs with regard to English varieties in academia, content lecturers’ beliefs in the areas of Engineering, Natural sciences, Social sciences and Humanities, their teaching and assessment practices with regard to the diversified uses of English enacted by these teachers (language and content) and the relationship between teachers’ overtly expressed beliefs and their teaching and assessment practices. For this end, a qualitative research approach has been implemented for this study with the use of semi-structured interviews and classroom observations as research tools. Both Qualitative content analysis (QCA) and discourse analysis (DA) were found methods of choice to approach the data set via the use of NVivo 10 software package. The findings of this study are expected to complement other studies on English in IHEIs where it reveals how irrelevant for teachers in the studied academic setting to demonstrate their native-like proficiency in English. That is, all what is required from the members in such an environment is to master the rules and norms of their own academic disciplines, as cultural models, regardless of their lingua-cultural backgrounds.

Recently, soft biometrics has emerged as a novel attribute-based person description for identification. It is likely that soft biometrics can be deployed where other biometrics cannot, and have stronger invariance properties than traditional vision-based biometrics, such as invariance to illumination and contrast. Previously, a variety of soft body and face biometrics have been used for identifying people and have increasingly garnered more research interest and are often considered as major cues for identity, especially in the absence of valid traditional hard biometrics, as in surveillance. Describing a person by their clothing properties is a natural task performed by people. As yet, clothing descriptions have attracted little attention for biometric purposes as it has been considered unlikely to be a potential cue to identity. There has been some usage of clothing attributes to augment biometric description, but a detailed description has yet to be used. In everyday life, several cases and incidents arise highlighting the usefulness and capability of information deduced from clothing regarding identity. Clothing is inherently more effective for short-term identification, since people can change clothes. This thesis introduces semantic clothing attributes as a new form of soft biometrics. The usability and efficacy of a novel set of proposed soft clothing traits is explored, showing how they can be exploited for human identification and re-identification purposes. Furthermore, the viability of these traits is investigated in correctly retrieving a subject of interest, given a verbal description of their clothing. The capability of clothing information is further examined in more realistic scenarios offering viewpoint invariant subject retrieval. Although clothing traits can be naturally described or compared by humans for operable and successful use, it is desirable to exploit computer-vision to enrich clothing descriptions with more objective and discriminative information. This allows automatic extraction and semantic description and comparison of visually detectable clothing traits in a manner similar to recognition by eyewitness statements. This thesis proposes further a novel set of automatic clothing attributes, described using small groups of high-level semantic labels, and automatically extracted using computer-vision techniques. In this way, we can explore the capability of clothing attributes inferred by human vis-a-vis those which are inferred automatically by computer-vision. Extended analysis of clothing information is conducted. Human identification and retrieval are achieved, evaluated, and compared using different proposed forms of soft clothing biometrics in addition and in isolation. The experimental results of identification and retrieval highlight clothing attributes as a potentially valuable addition to the field of soft biometrics.

Background: The Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia estimates that there are at least 20,000 strokes per year across the country (126/100,000) and approximately half of those with stroke may develop cognitive dysfunction or mood disorders. However, a review of the literature revealed that research in the area of post-stroke cognitive dysfunction and mood disorders in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is severely lacking. Accordingly, these studies aimed to bridge the knowledge gap with an emphasis on three central aspects. The first aim was to assess the prevalence of post-stroke cognitive dysfunctions in the KSA population using neuropsychological tests. The second aim was to assess the prevalence of post-stroke mood disorders in the KSA using self-report scales. The third aim was to evaluate the relationship between cognitive dysfunctions and mood disorders. Method: Observational methods were used to collect descriptive information about the prevalence of cognitive dysfunctions and mood disorders in the Saudi population. Participants were recruited from three medical centres in the KSA: King Abdulaziz Medical City, King Fahad Medical City, and Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Humanitarian City. The target sample was age 18 years and above who were diagnosed by neurologists with ischemic or haemorrhagic stroke according to CT-scan results, and who were at least one month post first-ever stroke, and either attending out-patient clinics or admitted to medical centre. Participants were excluded from the study sample if they satisfied any the following conditions: severe dementia; sever aphasia; chronic psychiatric or other concurrent neurological disorders; a known history of alcohol or drug abuse; blindness or deafness; participant non Saudi citizen; an inability to speak or understand Arabic; or medically unstable. Results: For the empirical investigation, 76 men and 24 women were recruited (mean age 60.53 ± 11.26 years). Of these, 52% had deficits of orientation/attention, 55% of memory, 36% of fluency, 46% of language, 26% of visuospatial ability, 35.7% of visual neglect, 58.4% of visual-motor skills, 69% of executive function, and 52% had overall cognitive impairment, 36% had anxiety and 44% had depression after stroke. The results confirmed a strong relationship between cognitive dysfunctions and mood disorders. However, from the regression model, it was found that ‘literacy’ (literate vs. illiterate), ‘time since stroke’ (≤ 6 vs. ≥ 7 months), ‘fluency impairment’ and ‘memory impairment’ were significant predictors of the severity of anxiety disorder after stroke. Similarly, ‘literacy’ (literate vs. illiterate), ‘time since stroke’ (≤ 6 vs. ≥ 7 months), ‘fluency impairment’, ‘memory impairment’, ‘visuospatial ability impairment’ and ‘visual neglect’ were significant predictors of the severity of depression after stroke. Conclusion: Based on the sample of Saudi patients (n= 100), it can be concluded that cognitive dysfunctions have an effect on the stroke patient’s mood. The severity of cognitive dysfunction is significantly related with mood disorders, in particular depression disorder.

Introduction: Whilst OSCEs are a well-recognised format for assessing clinical competence, an increasing body of research focuses on the factors that contribute to differences in assessors' judgement in performance assessment. Perspectives from psychosocial research have explored factors influencing these differences, but less attention has been paid to non-verbal behaviours of candidates, assessors and patients that could influence assessors' judgements during OSCEs. This PhD report investigates how non-verbal behaviour influences assessors' global marking when examining undergraduate medical students using OSCEs. Methodology: In reaching theoretical saturation, 18 OSCE assessors participated in 1:1 interviews (11 male; 7 female, all medically qualified and had undergone OSCE faculty training). Each participant scored 2 videos of students consulting with a simulated patient (these were carefully constructed to layer in multiple non-verbal behaviour types), and made judgements on each performance using a standard scoring format and written feedback. A retrospective think aloud methodology was used as a stimulus to explore factors in the students' performances. Interview transcripts were coded and a modified grounded theory approach used to develop a framework to interpret results. Results: Thematic analysis revealed a rich framework where the interaction of non-verbal behaviours of assessors, patients and candidates all contributed to global ratings. Assessors' identification and response to candidate behaviours was complex and individual. Subthemes included the importance of 'body language' and the impact of assessor fatigue, coupled with individualistic approaches to the use of (and reliance on) pre-determined stereotypes. All these themes are further influenced by organisational and environmental factors. Discussion: In the 'theatre of performance' of the OSCE, all the characters contribute to variance - and thus (unlike many other papers) this research does not just focus on one character or another, but all and the environment. The nonverbal behaviours of the three 'characters' in the OSCE (student, patient and assessor), and the environment in which it is situated, make significant contributions to global ratings and contribute to the multiple factors that influence inter-rater reliability. This is important in station and scoring format design, assessor selection and training and the ongoing research into assessor decision-making in high stakes performance tests. Conclusion: 'It does not need to be voiced to be counted'. Non-verbal behaviours within an OSCE station have significant impact on assessor judgements, and contribute to the multiple factors that reduce inter-rater reliability.

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has garnered increasing interest and research attention and become particularly significant in many studies of translation. The present study is located within the framework of descriptive and applied Translation Studies. The thesis reports a study investigating the applicability of SFL to translating English prose fiction into Arabic. What makes this study so important is that it addresses several interrelated issues serving two vital purposes in Translation Studies: assessing translations and training translators. The two purposes are kept in balance in a well-constructed, three-phase research model, establishing the joint effect of testing the viability of SFL in English-to-Arabic translation of fiction. In the area of assessment, two SFL-based models are applied and developed. Firstly, Kim's metafunction shift analysis is applied to a 48-clause sample from seven Arabic translations of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. The results of this rigorous metafunctional match analysis show that Process and Circumstance top the 10-catgory list of optional shifts. The seven translations are ordered based on this matching analysis. Using the same sample, another in-depth study is carried out on three translations (those having the highest, the lowest and medial number of metafunction shifts) to examine the validity of a newly created multi-level schema of optional explicitation located beyond the scope of metafunction shift analysis model. The results demonstrate that the order of the three translations is maintained. This schema suffices to adequately describe the lexicogrammatical nature of the explicitatives (at the micro-level) and to show how this can facilitate identifying their effect on the texture of the target text (at the macro-level). Secondly, in implementing House's well-established model for translation quality assessment, three interdependent developmental processes are introduced to facilitate its application, develop its tools and gauge its efficiency. A source text Profile Template, a Match Tracer and a statistical comparative table (which can together be potentially exploited in other genres or adapted for other language pairs) are applied to the same three translations using a longer excerpt. The results show that the order of the three translations remains the same. In summary, the results of the three studies lend further support to the general premise that the SFL framework can be applied reliably in assessing Arabic translations of English fiction. The applicability of SFL is also tested empirically in the area of training. A three-month training experiment involving a sample of two groups (control and experimental) of final-year Arab university students majoring in English (40 participants each) is designed and carried out to compare the progress of performance between the two groups with and without the presence of an SFL-based translator training course. The data are gathered through initial and final exams involving assessing short Arabic translated extracts of English fiction and translating a longer extract into Arabic. The results indicate that the four sub-competences constituting the scoring rubric of the control group show an increase/decrease of 10%, -0.75%, 0.0% and 9.5% respectively, whereas in the experimental group they show a massive increase of 47.5%, 21.25%, 34.5% and 49.5% respectively. Likewise, the total rate of performance of the control group in the final exam increases slightly by 7.1%, while in the experimental group it increases greatly by 43.1%. Further, the overall percentage change between the total rate of performance of the initial and final exams for the control group is +76.3%, while for the experimental group it is + 218.8%. The pool of data is also used to explore the nature of the relationship between the two skills of assessing short Arabic translated extracts of English fiction and translating English fiction. The results demonstrate that the correlation coefficients of the two elements of relationships regarding the relevant sub-competences of the experimental group increase significantly between the initial and final exams (0.721 and 0.636), while they increase insignificantly in the control group (0.164 and 0.016). These results confirm a strong positive relationship between the two skills if the SFL-based translator training factor is strongly present. The results of this large-scale study yield the conclusion that SFL is highly effective in assessing professional English-to-Arabic translations of fiction and in training prospective translators in an academic institution.

Power quality problems are now receiving much interest from the distribution system operators (DSO). This can be attributed to rising competition in today's electricity markets, new regulations and standards regarding the power quality, and also because newer types of load equipment require certain levels of power quality. Furthermore, the current trend towards increased penetration of distributed generation (DG) in the distribution network (in particular electronics interfaced and intermittent DG) has its impact on the power quality performance of the distribution networks, which also draw more attention of the DSOs to the power quality issues. The research presented in the thesis is divided into two main parts; the first part is to estimate and evaluate power quality indices in distribution networks with DG. By comparing the estimated PQ performance with the customers' PQ requirements the weak areas of the network are identified, i.e., the areas requiring power quality improvements. Most of the PQ phenomena are well defined in international standards and appropriate thresholds for individual phenomena are set in these standards. The thesis presents simulation and evaluation methodologies for some of the main PQ phenomena. Particular attention is given to the longer terms study of harmonics in distribution network with limited monitoring. The second part deals with the optimum provision of differentiated power quality based on the temporal and spatial variations of the network state and the customers' power quality requirements. Two new global PQ indices are developed to evaluate the overall PQ of a bus in compressed format. The proposed global indices are the Compound Bus PQ Index (CBPQI) which is based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology and the PQ Reserve index (PQR) which is based on weighted average of performance of different phenomena. The CBPQI is then used as an objective function to optimize the selection of the PQ mitigation solutions. This involves utilising the available power quality mitigation solutions and considering the new smart technologies for network operation in order to provide the optimum level of power quality to different areas of the network at different times. The research outcomes contribute to the benchmarking of power quality performance, quantifying the impact of DG on the power quality in the networks, and to identifying the areas of distribution networks where the investments in power quality monitors and solutions should be made. The studies presented in the thesis are based on both simulations and real PQ measurements. All the simulations are performed in DigSilent PowerFactory and OpenDSS simulation software packages. The studies are performed on a generic distribution network and a real distribution feeder.

This thesis reports on the factors that hinder the acquisition of the past verb forms in (past simple form, past progressive form, past perfect form) by Saudi learners of English. This study argues that Arabic and English share similar grammatical characteristics in the past verb forms. It also sheds light on the role of these similarities in facilitating the acquisition process of the targeted forms. This is a mixed-method study conducted on thirty-six Saudi EFL learners. The participants were assigned to two groups: group A (received treatment session about the past verb forms in English and highlighted their counterparts in Arabic) and group B (received treatment session about the past verb forms in English only). Three types of tasks were employed: multiple choice, gap-filling, and storytelling, and they were conducted at three periods: pre intervention, post intervention, and delayed test. A randomly-selected group was invited for stimulated recall interviews immediately after the delayed test. The interviews were conducted individually. The study answered two research questions and hypotheses: RQ1: To what extent does linking the similarities in the past verb forms between English and Arabic help Saudi EFL learners to acquire these forms? H1: Drawing the Saudi EFL learners’ attention to the similarities in the past verb forms between Arabic and English facilitates their acquisition. RQ2: Does L1 Arabic influence the choice of past verb forms in English for Saudi EFL learners? (a) What is the impact on explicit and implicit knowledge? (b) What is the impact on receptive and productive knowledge? H2: Saudi EFL learners consciously resort to their first language when they lack the correct past verb form in English. The results show that the intervention that highlighted the similarities in past verb forms between Arabic and English helped the participants to acquire the targeted forms. L1 has influence on the learners’ choice of forms, and they consciously resort to their first language. The results suggest that rising the awareness of Saudi EFL learners about the. The study suggests further research utilising a longitudinal QUAN-QUAL research paradigm.

This work investigates the nonlinear dynamics and polarisation properties of Spin-Vertical-(External)-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers (V(E)CSELs). The focus is on gaining a broad understanding of the various polarised resolved nonlinear dynamical effects in solitary and injected 1300 nm spin-V(E)CSELs. We report a comprehensive study including theory, based on the Spin Flip Model, and experiments of the stability characteristics of solitary 1300 nm dilute nitride Quantum-Well (QW) spin-VCSELs. Various forms of oscillatory behaviour causing self-sustained oscillations in the polarisation of the spin-VCSEL subject to Continuous-Wave (CW) pumping are found. Additionally, this work is extended to study experimentally and theoretically the evolution of the output polarisation ellipticity, and experimentally the nonlinear dynamics of the light polarisation emitted by the QW spin VCSELs under polarised optical injection. Rich nonlinear dynamics of the optically injected QW spin-VCSEL are reported ranging from polarisation control, polarisation switching and bistability to periodic oscillations and chaos. Good agreement is found between measurements and calculations where theoretical results are available. We also report the first 1300 nm Quantum-Dot (QD) Semiconductor Disk Laser (SDL) using a very simple and compact laser configuration involving a high reflection (HR)-coated fibre as the top mirror. Moreover, by applying spin injection to the 1300 nm SDL via CW polarised optical pumping we also demonstrate the first 1300 nm QD spin Vertical-External-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser (Spin-VECSEL). This is also accompanied by an investigation of the dynamics of the solitary 1300 nm QD spin-VECSEL. Finally, we present the first experimental study of the evolution of the output polarisation ellipticity and nonlinear dynamics of the 1300 nm QD spin-VECSEL under polarised optical injection. Our findings show nonlinear effects similar to the ones seen in optically injected QW spin-VCSELs.