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Practices of sculpture and geography have collaborated ever since Stone Age humans hoisted up rocks to point them into the air. The ephemerality of life was rendered in a circle of forms and mass that celebrated the union of sky, earth and dwelling. Through the manipulation of stone, the land became a place, it became a home, it became situated and navigable. As millennia unfolded, the land was written with the story of itself. The creativity woven into the story of place is an evolution of material collaborations. In recent decades, academic geographers have explored the realms of creativity in their work, and sculptors have critically engaged with the nature of place. I have united these disciplines in the exploration of a truth of materials. The aim of the research was to investigate the relationship between making and place. The structure of my PhD focussed on the development of a transdisciplinary research environment that could host a range of creative practices around stone-working. I developed a long-term relationship with Trenoweth Dimension Granite Quarry, working as an apprentice sawman and mason. Here, I examined the everyday practices of labour and skill development, from which emerged deeper material and human interactions, that went on to inform my sculpture and modes of making. Arguing that granite has threads of relational agency embedded within its matrix, I initiated a series of practices that made use of my emerging knowledge as a granite-quarry worker, cast within experimental sculpture, texts, performance, photography and film. By formulating my methods around the vibrancy of matter, I disclosed new materialisms and more-than-human relations. This assemblage of documentation and artwork records and reflects on a series of practices and processes in tension. This productive tension arises from a re-rendering of artisanal practice as a research method; ushering in modes of representation as loops of experience and interpretation take place across different sites, spaces and times of mediation. The objective for the PhD research was to present a critically informed practice of sculpture-as-ethnography that could not only provide a model for practice-based research in general, but also significantly expand what might be meant by stone-work. This PhD by alternative submission is presented as a Commentary with an accompanying Digital Archive website.

This thesis is concerned with the economic effects of advertising. Perhaps the most significant barrier to empirical work in the UK in this area is the lack of reliable, published data. Thus, at the heart of the thesis is a firm level questionnaire which provided advertising data on 325 large and medium-sized UK firms. Following a review of the theoretical and empirical literature in the area, the main empirical part of the of the thesis begins with an analysis of the determinants of both the advertising decision by firms and their advertising intensity. In particular, the standard modelling of the inverse U-curve relating advertising to market structure is re-specified using survey data. Following on from this, the effect of advertising on firm profitability is investigated. Evidence is found that profitability is higher for firms in consumer based industries who advertise heavily. In addition, firms who do not advertise seem more likely to go into receivership than others. Related to the question of profitability effects, previous work that persistent effects of advertising disappear when firm fixed effects are taken into account is called into question. On the question of persuasive and informative advertising, the evidence in the this study suggests that only a small proportion of firms include any information on prices in their advertisements. Consumer firms and those operating in a very competitive environment tend to be more likely to include at least some price information. The last section of the thesis looks at the strategic use of advertising. Evidence is presented that many firms do adjust their advertising in response both to rivals and to changes in business conditions. In many cases, these responses are found to be asymmetric: increasing in response to booms or rival increases but not decreasing in response to recessions or rival decreases.

Investigation of a suspected case of hog cholera led to the isolation of bovine viral diarrhoea viruses from a persistently infected steer and from five sibling piglets. The persistently infected steer was able to infect pigs by indirect contact under controlled laboratory conditions and the bovine virus was able to cause congenital porcine disease. Pestiviruses isolated from the steer and from the pigs infected on the farm were compared with one another and with the bovine virus after experimental pig passage. Antigenic and genetic analyses of the gp53 proteins and genes of these viruses revealed that the bovine virus had only three amino acid changes consequent upon experimental passage in pigs, but was distinct from the porcine field isolates. The initial assumption that the persistently infected steer had infected the farm pigs was therefore not confirmed by experimentation. A panel of BVDV mAbs that included some of those used to discriminate between the above and other pestivirus strains was characterised with respect to protein specificity. Most of the mAbs recognised either the major envelope glycoprotein (gp53) of BVDV or an immunodominant non-structural protein (p80). Competitive binding studies demonstrated four domains on p80 and two on gp53. Conservation of epitopes was much greater for p80 than for gp53. Sequence comparison between mAb neutralization-escape mutants and parental viruses indicated the possible location of antibody binding sites on gp53 and suggested two domains, one of which was defined by relatively conserved epitopes. The pattern of amino acid differences comparing escape mutant viruses with both parental viruses and others of known mAb reactivity suggested that gp53 epitopes may be non-linear.

Abstract: Funded by Alberta Environment, Research Secretariat.