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Background: Frailty is common as people age and is associated with multiple adverse health outcomes. With an increasing number of older people worldwide, preventing frailty is recognised as a major public priority. The aims of this thesis are to examine associations between three potential modifiable lifestyle risk factors, smoking, alcohol and fruit and vegetable consumption, and frailty risks among community-dwelling older people. Methods: This thesis used data on community-dwelling older men and women aged > 60 from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), an ongoing prospective panel study of a nationally representative population in England. Frailty was defined by modified frailty phenotype criteria. Information on smoking, alcohol and fruit and vegetable consumption was self-reported. Subsequent frailty risks over 4 years according to the three modifiable lifestyle risk factors at baseline were examined using logistic regression models controlling for potentially confounding factors. Results: Current smokers had a significantly higher odds of frailty risk compared with non-smokers (never and past smokers). Non-drinkers had significantly worse health profiles at baseline and had a significantly increased risk of developing frailty compared with low drinkers (> 0-7 UK units per week). This association was fully attenuated after adjusting for self-reported general health. Among drinkers, alcohol use (of any amount) was not associated with frailty. Consumption of 5-10 portions of fruit and vegetables a day was associated with reduced odds of pre-frailty and frailty combined compared to those with low consumption (0-2.5portions); however those eating high amounts (> 10 portions per day) had a similar risk of frailty as those with low consumption. Conclusions: The findings suggest that smoking cessation and moderate-high consumption of fruit and vegetables (5-10 portions a day) have potential to reduce risk of frailty, however they do not support reducing alcohol consumption to prevent frailty over a short period of 4 years.

Some contrasts in the second language (L2) impose difficulty in processing for learners, especially when these contrasts are not used phonemically in a learner's first language (L1). This thesis is to examine how American English speakers learning Japanese discriminate and store information regarding the L2 contrasts as a part of their lexicon (i.e. lexical encoding). The central discussion is on how length contrasts, both consonantal and vocalic (e.g. shita "under," "shitta" "came to know" and "shiita" "theta") are perceived and processed by learners. In addition, a relationship between geminate and long vowel were examined (e.g. "shitta" "came to know" and "shiita" "theta").Three experiments were conducted to test the learner's ability to discriminate and lexically encode (a) singleton vs. geminate consonant, (b) short vs. long vowel, and (c) geminate and long vowel. The first experiment was a discrimination task (ABX) to see whether learners can discriminate between these contrasts. The other two tasks were lexical decision and forced lexical choice (FLeC). These tasks implicitly require full lexical processing. The FLeC task is an innovative experimental paradigm that was introduced in this thesis in order to supplement the lexical decision task. The results from the ABX and lexical decision tasks indicated that there is a distinction between discriminating length contrasts and successfully encoding length contrasts as a part of Japanese words. The results from the lexical decision and FLeC tasks suggested that learners refer to the closest or most familiar L1 phoneme (i.e. singleton/short vowel) to process a new L2 phoneme. Thus, results exhibited an asymmetric lexical encoding pattern: lower accuracy rates were observed in test words with geminate or long vowel when compared to test words with singleton or short vowel. In contrast, higher accuracy rate was observed in test non-words with geminate or long vowel in comparison to the ones with singleton or short vowel. The results suggest that learners' representations for geminates and long vowels are less accurate than those for singleton consonants and short vowels, while also showing that learners are successfully maintaining L2 contrasts. [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.]

Japanese women are having fewer children than ever before. There have been many quantitative studies undertaken to attempt to reveal the reasons behind this. The Japanese government has been concerned about the future economic decline of the country, and has been encouraging women to have more children. Although the Japanese government has been supporting women financially, it has not focused on gender equality, making it more difficult for women to be able to pursue their chosen careers. Japanese women have greater access to higher education than ever before, yet the Japanese patriarchal social structure still compels women to rely on men and all but eliminates their independence. The Japanese male-dominated society is resistant want to change. Family ties are still very strong, and women are expected to take care of the household and do unpaid work, while men work outside the home and earn a paid salary. In the labour force, women do not enjoy the same level of equality and opportunity as their male counterparts, as it is naturally marry, have children, and take care of the family. The system is skewed in favor of the males. Women are not able to pursue the same career path as men; even from the start, women are often considered as candidates for potential wives for the male workers. In the course of this research, I conducted a total of 22 interviews of single and married Japanese women. I set out to explore and discover the causes behind why Japanese women are choosing to postpone marriage and have fewer children, as well as touching upon the much deeper issue of gender inequality due to the Japanese patriarchal social structure. Women cannot live how they want to and only for themselves; they must always put their families first. This study reveals the struggles of Japanese women and how many are confused, and how some resist the patriarchal system. Many women waste their education, careers, knowledge and experience, all in the name of maintaining family ties and the patriarchal social structure.

The aim of this study was to investigate Japanese learners’ and teachers’ beliefs about learning English and to explore related issues that are likely to impinge on the process of the learning of a language. The research was carried out using an interpretive paradigm and involved five multiple case studies to investigate the beliefs of five groups of Japanese language learners and teachers. The different groups were made up from seventeen secondary school students and twenty two university students located in Japan; four students studying in the UK; seven secondary school teachers of English who were also studying in the UK; and three university professors of English who taught in Japan. Data were collected from participants using open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The content analysis was based around six pre-determined themes and four emerging themes. The findings revealed that certain beliefs, for example, optimistic beliefs and the commitment to a preferred model of learning English can negatively or positively impinge on the way individuals learn in different situations. The study also suggests that language learners need to have positive attitudes towards learning a language, but that each individual is motivated differently. Whether learners regard English as a subject at school or as a means of communication is likely to make a big difference to learners’ motivation to learn English. The role of aesthetic completeness in traditional Japanese arts might also negatively influence the attitudes of Japanese learners of English, in that their aspiration for precision can easily outrun their real linguistic ability, and in so doing make it more difficult for them to achieve proficiency in the use of language. With respect to teaching English, the study indicated the importance of understanding students’ beliefs in the educational context. It was also revealed that teachers’ beliefs have a great influence on learners’ progress or motivation for learning. The implications of this study suggest that, as well as the consideration of individual differences, in the process of learning close attention should also be given to the psychological aspects that impinge on acquiring English in the context of Japanese culture.

In the 1890s, the Meiji government established its Japanese constitution. After the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, Japan colonised Taiwan and Korea and increased its military power. The Japanese artists who lived during this time were in many ways reacting to this rapid social change that was taking place. This thesis aims to analyse the diverse images of women that were primarily produced by artists working under the government regime and to show how these artists seek to resolve through their work the tensions to which modernity, nation and empire give rise. My discussion begins with the French-trained Japanese painter, Kuroda Seiki, who introduced life class to Japan after he became the head of the Department of Western Art at the Tokyo School of Fine Art in 1896. He also introduced the studio fraternity of male artists to Japan and encouraged students to paint female nudes to catch up with the standards set by Western art. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Okada SaburOsuke and Wada Eisaku created images of "kimono beauty" by internalising the Westernern gaze on Japanese women in kimonos as exotic objects. The Mitsui kimono shop promoted newly designed kimonos for bourgeois women as a "national dress." They popularised kimono beauty with their products in print and billboards. These images had a major influence on nihonga artists of the 191 Os, which led to the vogue of Bijin-ga (paintings of beautiful women). As Japan expanded its territory in East Asia, Japanese artists needed to create new icons of Japan. Fujishima Takeji expressed t6y6 seishin (spirit of the East) in the 1920s by using images of women in Chinese dress that symbolised a modernised Japan that was the counterpart of the West. After the Japanese invasion of China, a vogue of images of women in modern Chinese dress appeared in the 1930s. Artists who had been to Europe in the 1920s rediscovered the beauty of Japanese nature and life while simultaneously depicting Japanese subalterns by humble images of their women. Contrasted with these, images of kimono beauty in the 1930s distinguished themselves through expressions of urbanity and prosperity. Examples of kimono beauty produced by female painters at the end of the 1930s reveal that they themselves as well as the images that they produced were incorporated within the imperial regime.

What was the foundation of Japanese ultranationalism, which started to spread its roots between 1895 and 1930? Ultranationalism is an ideological monism which downplays or even denies other components of human identity, and de facto views human beings not as individuals, but as cells within a national organism. This thesis argues that Japanese ultranationalism emerged from the belief of subordinate Self and collective immortality. Nine Japanese thinkers from different backgrounds, born in 1860-80s, shared the idea of subordinate Self and collective immortality as a premise for their respective arguments. Historiology of Japanese ultranationalism has focused on specific groups of people within the Japanese society to create a clearer picture of Japanese ultranationalism. Namely, they were the Emperor, the military personnels, Shintōists, and terrorists. This thesis builds on these previous studies to discover the underpinning idea of subordinate Self and collective immortality shared throughout Japanese society, regardless of their social status.

This study explores theoretical discussions on alignments and misalignments between Communities of Practice (CoP; Wenger 1998) and foreign language classroom reality as well as learning in each context. The exploration links the two contexts to propose an extended social learning theory, Foreign Language Communities of PracticeS (FLCCoPS) as better applicable to classroom language educational research and practice than the original CoP. CoP invited scholars to explore classroom language learning using its core concepts such as domain, practice, community, participation, and identity development and shed new light on social aspects of classroom language learning. However, literature (e.g. Lamb 2012) argues that the idealised theoretical construct of CoP misaligns with the classroom reality and construes an oversimplified view of a community and participation. Although some theoretical adjustments have been suggested (Haneda 2006), an understanding of the alignments and misalignments continues to be unclear. To understand classroom reality better from this perspective, establishing a more viable theory for language classrooms is the first step. This study employed classroom ethnography (Bloome 2012). Primary data came from online-questionnaires, class-observations, interviews, and journal entries of students, senior-student-supporters, and teachers in introductory Japanese classrooms at UNSW Sydney where social learning theories are practised. The analysis informed by grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967) identified salient categories and provided storylines of two semesters as its by-products. Using the storylines, this study discussed alignments and misalignments between the original CoP and classroom reality. Whereas FL classrooms in this study showed some alignments with CoP such as community growth, developmental participation, and evolving forms of membership identity, they also highlighted multiplicity, complexity and diversity in such phenomena not best understood within the original CoP. This study drew on the theoretical discussion to propose FLCCoPS; a foreign language classroom where members negotiate and share learning goals and collectively deepen their expertise in the relevant areas by regularly interacting and socialising in the foreign language with each other within a sustained duration. The analysis, design and improvement of FL classrooms for students’ social language learning will be enhanced by FLCCoPS.

Compartmentalization combined with regulated exchange and release of biomaterials is the key biological function. At the subcellular level, organelles sequester enzymes and substrates for storage while processing and releasing on demand. At the organism level, appropriate cellular compartmentalization gives rise to tissue organization and higher order function. Man-made bioreaction compartmentalization typically relies on micro-reactors constructed with glass, silicon, hard plastic, or amiphiphilic molecular walls. Reactors with such physical barriers, in return for excellent compartmentalization, lack amenability to molecular and cellular release and exchange as seen in the body. This thesis describes the engineering of multi-compartment bioreactors that utilize stable reagent partitioning within immiscible aqueous solutions. The all aqueous compartmentalization scheme, when combined with a micropatterned surface that pins the liquid-liquid interfaces, enable versatile direct printing of arbitrary multi-compartment bioreactor networks. Additionally, the lack of physical barriers at the liquid-liquid interface between the different aqueous compartments allows use of phase-altering chemicals to trigger rapid and selective mixing of materials between compartments in ways not possible with conventional miroreactors. Specific examples demonstrated include a compartmentalized cascade reaction that utilizes glucose and oxygen as nutrients to catalzye the production of different colored dyes within microcompartments and the localization-enhanced degradation of the microcompartments with a polysaccharide-degrading enzyme. In a separate strategy, a shrinking microreactor platform was created using oil dehydration. These shrinking bioreactors were utilized for micro-scale ATPS phase diagram determination and also adopted for micro-scale self-assembly of CdTe nanoparticles. Finally, surface-templated hydrogel micropatterning was used to compartmentalize cancer cells as well as limit diffusion of chemoattractants. This platform revealed the importance of extracellular matrix-mediated capture and localization of chemoattractants in triggering cancer cell migration that lead to a breakdown of cellular compartmentalization, tissue dis-organization and cancer metastasis. In addition to the specific demonstrations and biological insights obtained, the described macromolecular phase-separation microreactor platforms are versatile in configuration possibilities, particularly when combined with microfabrication technologies, and amenable to further explore materials science and biomedical engineering applications.

This dissertation examines the particular ways in which the Japanese employment system is becoming insecure, and how workers negotiate the emerging forms of precarious employment. I use the case of blue collar temporary agency workers to analyze the patterns of insecure workers' responses to precarious employment arrangements, both in their individual and collective forms. During eighteen months in the field from April 2008 to September 2009, I gathered ethnographic data on temp workers by working on an assembly line for five weeks. To examine the collective forms of worker responses, I joined a labor union in Tokyo and studied street demonstrations, collective bargaining negotiations, and struggles in court. A total of fifty-five in-depth interviews were conducted with temp workers, temp agency managers, corporate executives, permanent workers, and labor union officers. The predominant form of worker agency at the individual level is diligence and commitment. Temp workers work very hard, involving their psyche in finding ways to work faster and mindfully aiming for high quality output. I revisit the Marxist question of surplus appropriation, why do temp workers work as hard as they do when management rewards so little? In response to the conventional answers of "coercion" and "consent," I borrow Bourdieu's concepts of practical sense and illusio to show how they become absorbed in perfecting their jobs as they manage the particular deprivations arising from factory temp work. However, their passion and commitment generated emotional suffering because of the discriminatory treatment they continued to receive. In analyzing the collective forms of worker agency, I introduce the concept of "advocacy without constituency" to examine how particular types of Japanese labor unions called general unions and community unions make relatively small efforts to organize the temp workers while spending much of their resources on rallying, lobbying, and waging court struggles to change labor laws. I show how these small and poor unions compensate for their structural weaknesses by networking with other organizations, at times crossing the historical fissures that exist within the left.

Recently, a highly resolved, finite element mesh was developed for the purpose of performing hydrodynamic calculations in the Western North Atlantic Tidal (WNAT) model domain. The WNAT model domain consists of the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the entire portion of the North Atlantic Ocean found west of the 60° W meridian. This high resolution mesh (333K) employs 332,582 computational nodes and 647,018 triangular elements to provide approximately 1.0 to 25 km node spacing. In the previous work, the 333K mesh was applied in a Localized Truncation Error Analysis (LTEA) to produce nodal density requirements for the WNAT model domain. The goal of the work herein is to use these LTEA-based element sizing guidelines in order to obtain a more optimal finite element mesh for the WNAT model domain, where optimal refers to minimizing nodes (to enhance computational efficiency) while maintaining model accuracy, through an automated procedure. Initially, three finite element meshes are constructed: 95K, 60K, and 53K. The 95K mesh consists of 95,062 computational nodes and 182,941 triangular elements providing about 0.5 to 120 km node spacing. The 60K mesh contains 60,487 computational nodes and 108,987 triangular elements. It has roughly 0.5 to 185 km node spacing. The 53K mesh includes 52,774 computational nodes and 98,365 triangular elements. This is a particularly coarse mesh, consisting of approximately 0.5 to 160 km node spacing. It is important to note that these three finite element meshes were produced automatically, with each employing the bathymetry and coastline (of various levels of resolution) of the 333K mesh, thereby enabling progress towards an optimal finite element mesh. Tidal simulations are then performed for the WNAT model domain by solving the shallow water equations in a time marching manner for the deviation from mean sea level and depth-integrated velocities at each computational node of the different finite element meshes. In order to verify the model output and compare the performance of the various finite element mesh applications, historical tidal constituent data from 150 tidal stations located within the WNAT model domain are collected and examined. These historical harmonic data are applied in two types of comparative analyses to evaluate the accuracy of the simulation results. First, qualitative comparisons are based on visual sense by utilizing plots of resynthesized model output and historical tidal constituents. Second, quantitative comparisons are performed via a statistical analysis of the errors between model response and historical data. The latter method elicits average phase errors and goodness of average amplitude fits in terms of numerical values, thus providing a quantifiable way to present model error. The error analysis establishes the 53K finite element mesh as optimal when compared to the 333K, 95K, and 60K meshes. However, its required time step of less than ten seconds constrains its application. Therefore, the 53K mesh is manually edited to uphold accurate simulation results and to produce a more computationally efficient mesh, by increasing its time step, so that it can be applied to forecast tide and storm surge in the Western North Atlantic Ocean on a real-time basis.