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Until recently research on the history of psychiatry was largely focused on the institutions where this controversial branch of medicine emerged, on its practitioners, treatments, theories and clinical practices, and the shifting social, institutional and legal contexts in which it has developed. Two pioneering figures in the histories of psychiatry and medicine, Michel Foucault and Roy Porter, opened the historiographical field up to much broader perspectives, expanding the range of sources and interpretations to encompass a wide-lens focus on matters such as the relationships between histories of madness and rationality, ‘the patient’s view’ and ‘anti-authority struggles’ by psychiatric patients. The study undertaken here seeks to develop aspects of the historiographical approaches advanced by Foucault and Porter by investigating how psychiatric patients engaged in collective action and campaigned for reform to mental health services in late twentieth-century Scotland. Through an excavation, description and analysis of untapped archival and oral history sources, I chart the spaces of emergence and trace the intersecting lines of descent of the ‘Scottish user movement’ in the era of deinstitutionalisation. By examining the records of patient groups and oral history interviews with activists, I reveal how this small but significant social movement was formed through the interplay between top-down social and governmental practices and bottom-up resistance and action by patients. The study makes visible the characters, voices, settings, events and actions, which made up the changing discursive and social practices of patients groups in Scotland over the last half-century.

This dissertation focuses primarily on potential explanations for bank common stock abnormal returns, and their patterns, coincident with the announcement of bank capital issues. Potential influences considered include increased regulatory pressure, conflicting regulatory and market views of bank capital adequacy and the relative predictability of security type. Where possible, the dissertation is set in both UK and US contexts. The dissertation has four principal research components; (1) a review of historical and contemporary bank capital regulation in the UK and US. Historical analysis indicates that the definition of capital, as determined by its functional properties, is dynamic and qualifies the consistency of its measurement over time. The regulatory control of absolute levels of capital is seen to have influence on bank structural development, costs and risk. The regulatory control of relative bank capital (ie in terms of balance sheet structure) is found to have a long and controversial history in the US and is effective progenitor of the current methodology of bank capital measurement and assessment, such as the Basle Agreement, and contains a number of potentially costly deficiencies. (2) an examination of bank capital issue announcement effects in the UK. Following similar work in the US (eg Keeley 1989) negative abnormal return effects are found associated with the announcements of UK ordinary share issues. Also, evidence hints that an imposed increase in regulatory capital pressure (viz the introduction of a minimum capital ratio regime) causes a reduction in issue announcement effects for ordinary share issues. (3) assessment of the capital adequacy of UK and US banks from a market perspective and in terms of a number definitions of capital; namely equity, regulatory primary capital (US), and the 1992 Basle Agreement capital. Conflict between market and regulatory views of capital adequacy are observed in certain years for primary capital. In terms of the capital structure relevance hypothesis, this suggests particular costs which may influence issue announcement effects. (4) modelling the predictability of UK bank capital issue security type (viz ordinary share and debt) and assessing the hypothesis that it is inversely related to the announcement abnormal returns.

This dissertation considers the work of three representative writers of the Transcendentalist movement—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Henry David Thoreau—and one of its most ardent skeptics—Herman Melville. Rather than presuming a single Transcendentalism, this study proposes several models of “affective Transcendentalisms,” interpreted as the various ways that these Transcendentalist writers speak for and of the spirit through the language of sense. “Affective Transcendentalisms” argues that the Transcendentalist movement comprises different affective experiences, each one an epistemology of the inner sense. Furthermore, these inner senses of spirit become sites of negotiation between a Transcendental idealism that would deny an embodied subjectivity and a variety of attachments to transcendence and immanence that ultimately tell what Transcendentalism feels like. American Transcendentalism is, in essence, a belief in the spirit. Their writings were affirmations of an intuitive soul in a quest to recover a faith in the spiritual. As such, the Transcendentalists posed a challenge to the Unitarian establishment on matters of divine inspiration and Christian evidences, on how or by what authority one could know God, by asserting intuition and inspiration over a Unitarianism that relied upon Lockean sensationalism and empiricism to affirm the miraculous in Christianity. This “spiritual philosophy” searched the soul for a personal, immediate connection with the divine. This meant cultivating a perception of truth, that is, a “Reason” that could read nature as symbol corresponding to the spiritual. These inner senses, however, were determined in large part by the physical senses themselves. This affective discourse of sense and spirit can be found in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s changing thoughts on the “moral sense” or “moral sentiment”; Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s millennial visions of “the life” through her idea of a “social principle”; and Henry David Thoreau’s ideas about the “contact” between nature, humanity, and eternity in a “sympathy with intelligence.” The present work also looks at how Herman Melville questions the epistemology of Transcendentalist “spirit.” Thus considered, these affective Transcendentalisms anticipate in their own ways what William James will later call “radical empiricism,” in the unity it perceives in sense experience and spiritual being.

Wireless surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors offer unique advantages over other sensor technologies because of their inherent ability to operate in harsh environments and completely passive operation, providing a reliable, maintenance-free life cycle. For certain SAW sensor applications the challenge is building a wirelessly interrogatable device with the same lifetime as the SAW substrate. The design of these application intensive sensors is complicated by the degradation of device bond wires, die adhesive, and antenna substrate. In an effort to maximize the benefits of the platform, this dissertation demonstrates wafer-level integrated SAW sensors that directly connect the thin film SAW to a thick film on-wafer antenna. Fully integrated device embodiments are presented that operate over a wide range of temperatures using different fabrication techniques, substrates, and coding principles.