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Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the major cause of morbidity and premature mortality in type 2 diabetes (T2DM). Carotid artery intima-media thickness (cIMT) is a marker of cardiovascular disease. Carotid artery IMT heritability estimates are increased in both healthy and type 2 diabetic families, providing support for the role of genetic factors. This close link between CVD and T2DM raises the possibility that common gene variants might increase susceptibility to both conditions, the "common soil" hypothesis. Common variants of the genes encoding PPARy and adiponectin have been found to increase susceptibility to type 2 diabetes. The hypothesis to be investigated is that these susceptibility genes exhibit pleiotropy and increase the risk of CVD. Methods/Results: Subjects aged 30-60 years were recruited at 19 centres in 14 European countries. Each subject underwent anthropometric and metabolic assessment including euglycaemic hyperinsulinaemic clamp to study insulin sensitivity and β-mode ultrasound scan for the measurement of carotid IMT.The study cohort consists of 1278 subjects. Pro12 Ala was genotyped by restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP-PCR). SNP T-45G and SNPs (A-11426G, G-11391A and C-I 1377G) of the ADIPOQ gene were detected by Sequenom and TaqMan assay respectively. Results/Conclusions: In this study we confirmed that the Pro 12Ala of the PPARy variant influences insulin sensitivity in the healthy population. Specifically, subjects homozygous for the Ala allele are more insulin sensitive compared to the rest of the population independent of measures of adiposity. However in this cross sectional data, there was no significant association between cIMT and the genetic variation of the Pro 12 Ala variant. We also found that SNP +45 of the ADIPOQ gene influences insulin sensitivity independent of serum adiponectin in this healthy population. Subjects homozygous for the G allele are less insulin sensitive compared to the T allele carriers, have high waist circumference and fasting NEF As. However, there was no association of this polymorphism and c IMT, a measure of CVD. However, it was established that variation in the ADIPOQ gene promoter was directly associated with carotid IMT, and this was independent of circulating adiponectin levels and classical CVD risk factors. This observation needs to be replicated in other cohorts, and further evidence is needed to explore the potential mechanisms by which variation in adiponectin influence IMT and CVD.

The primary focus of this study is with the interactions and power relations between UK companies and other persons and organisations (who directly or indirectly are involved with their concerns) and the Accounting Standards Committee(RSC). Such a concern is explored at both the general level (i.e interactions and power relations about the process of setting accounting standards more generally) and on the specific level (i.e the depreciation and leasing standards). Th. contents of this study can be seen to be divided into three major parts. The first, presents a case for, and describes the nature of, a methodological approach based on Foucault's philosophy. The second, building on the first, takes a critical look at literature related to the concern of this study, paying particular attention to Its epistemological and methodological underpinnings. The third part, building again on the first, traces the micro —powers (techniques of power ) exercised between UK companies (directly or indirectly) and the ASC. In so doing, the study demonstrates and lends support to the following points. Firstly, to fully understand, the interactions and power relations between UK companies and the ASC concerning particular standards requires an uncovering of the wider context of interactions between the other interested parties and the RSC. In addition, these interactions should be placed in the wider context of interactions concerning the process of setting accounting standards more generally. Secondly, any change in the standards and the process of setting them, as visible events, are preceded and surrounded with Invisible interactions and power relations between UK companies and other interested parties and the ASC. Thirdly, these interactions have been expressed through both visible and invisible procedures and processes. These different forms of interaction are presented at every stage in the formulation of any standard. Fourthly, and finally, power exercised In the process of setting accounting standard on both a general and specific level has disciplinary, relational, and positive aspects.

The technology of precision bending of tubes has recently increased in importance and is widely demanded for many industrial applications. However, whilst attention has been concentrated on automation and increasing the production rate of the bending machines, it seems that with one exception very little work has been done in order to understand and therefore fundamentally improve the bending process. A new development for the process of draw-bending of tubes, in which the supporting mandrel is axially vibrated at an ultrasonic frequency, has been perfected. A research programme was undertaken to study the mechanics of tube• bending under both vibratory and non-vibratory conditions. For this purpose, a conventional tube-bending machine was modified and equipped with an oscillatory system. Thin-walled mild steel tubes of different diameter to thickness ratios were bent to mean bend radii having various values from 1.5 to 2.0 times the tube diameter. It was found that the application of ultrasonic vibration reduces the process forces and that the force reduction increases with increasing the vibration amplitude. A reduction in the bending torque of up to 30 per cent was recorded and a reduction in the maximum tube-wall thinning of about 15 per cent was observed. The friction vector reversal mechanism as well as a reduction in friction account for the changes of the forces and the strains. Monitoring the mandrel friction during bending showed, in some cases, that the axial vibration reverses the mandrel .mean force from tension to compression and, thus, the mandrel is assisting the tube motion instead of resisting it. A theory has been proposed to describe the mechanics of deformation during draw-bending of tubes, which embodies the conditions of both "with" and "without" mandrel axial vibration. A theoretical analysis, based on the equilibrium of forces approach, has been developed in which the basic process parameters were taken into consideration. The stresses, the strains and the bending torque were calculated utilising this new solution, and a specially written computer programme was used to perform the computations. It was shown that the theory is in good agreement with the measured values of the strains under vibratory and non-vibratory conditions. Also, the predicted bending 'torque showed a similar trend to that recorded experimentally.

The present thesis consists of two parts: one, an introductory biographical and actual part, prefacing the actual text of al-Hutai'ah's work; two, the newly revised text of his diwan. The introduction is divided into two main parts, biographical study of al-Hutai'ah's life and personality, and a critical study of his diwan, its contents and form, its distinguishing characteristics and transmissions. It is the main purpose of this thesis to rectify the errors prevalent in the judgements of Arabic philologists both ancient and modern, and to produce a new unbiased evaluation of his personality and his work. Consequently, most conventional views regarding his allegedly dubious origin, his character and his work had to be refuted and ultimately rejected on the grounds of inaccuracy and prejudice. The new image of al-Hutai'ah has been reconstructed on the basis of those statements of ancient Arabic critics which were found reliable on the one hand, and on an analysis of his background and his own poetry on the other. The present edition of the diwan is composed of a main part which comprises al-Hutai'ah's poetry as recorded in al-Sukkari's transmission and three appendices, one containing additional poems found in Ibn al-Sikkit's recension, the second comprising poems not presented in any of the transmissions of the diwan, hut collected from ancient Arabic sources. The third appendix consists of Ibn al-Sikkit's commentary on al-Hutai'ah's poetry.

MapReduce, designed by Google, is widely used as the most popular distributed programming model in cloud environments. Hadoop, an open-source implementation of MapReduce, is a data management framework on large cluster of commodity machines to handle data-intensive applications. Many famous enterprises including Facebook, Twitter, and Adobe have been using Hadoop for their data-intensive processing needs. Task stragglers in MapReduce jobs dramatically impede job execution on massive datasets in cloud computing systems. This impedance is due to the uneven distribution of input data and computation load among cluster nodes, heterogeneous data nodes, data skew in reduce phase, resource contention situations, and network configurations. All these reasons may cause delay failure and the violation of job completion time. One of the key issues that can significantly affect the performance of cloud computing is the computation load balancing among cluster nodes. Replica placement in Hadoop distributed file system plays a significant role in data availability and the balanced utilization of clusters. In the current replica placement policy (RPP) of Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS), the replicas of data blocks cannot be evenly distributed across cluster's nodes. The current HDFS must rely on a load balancing utility for balancing the distribution of replicas, which results in extra overhead for time and resources. This dissertation addresses data load balancing problem and presents an innovative replica placement policy for HDFS. It can perfectly balance the data load among cluster's nodes. The heterogeneity of cluster nodes exacerbates the issue of computational load balancing; therefore, another replica placement algorithm has been proposed in this dissertation for heterogeneous cluster environments. The timing of identifying the straggler map task is very important for straggler mitigation in data-intensive cloud computing. To mitigate the straggler map task, Present progress and Feedback based Speculative Execution (PFSE) algorithm has been proposed in this dissertation. PFSE is a new straggler identification scheme to identify the straggler map tasks based on the feedback information received from completed tasks beside the progress of the current running task. Straggler reduce task aggravates the violation of MapReduce job completion time. Straggler reduce task is typically the result of bad data partitioning during the reduce phase. The Hash partitioner employed by Hadoop may cause intermediate data skew, which results in straggler reduce task. In this dissertation a new partitioning scheme, named Balanced Data Clusters Partitioner (BDCP), is proposed to mitigate straggler reduce tasks. BDCP is based on sampling of input data and feedback information about the current processing task. BDCP can assist in straggler mitigation during the reduce phase and minimize the job completion time in MapReduce jobs. The results of extensive experiments corroborate that the algorithms and policies proposed in this dissertation can improve the performance of data-intensive applications running on cloud platforms.