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The use of critical loads of acidity to quantify damage to sensitive components of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems has developed rapidly over the last decade. While much work has focused on defining damage to forested ecosystems, surface waters and groundwaters, there has been little work done on defining critical loads of acidity for ombrotrophic and minerotrophic peat. This thesis presents a modelling approach to quantify damage to ombrotrophic peat ecosystems, since such damage can result in a decline in both surface water quality and the ability of peat to act as an absorbent to aerial pollutants. Initial investigations were concerned with the factors which could be included in investigations of critical loads of N and acidity to the surface organic horizons of forest and moorland soils. The modelling approach was then developed from a series of laboratory-based simulation experiments to investigate the effect of contents of H&'43 , Ca2&'43 and Mg2&'43 in rainfall upon the chemistry of the peat ion exchange complex. The basic tenet of the modelling approach was that ion exchange equilibria for peat is rapid, mineral input to the surface of ombrotrophic peat from mineral weathering is negligible and that atmospheric inputs of wet and dry deposition will dominate the peat chemistry. These simulation experiments provided peat pH values resulting from equilibration with the simulated rainfall. By combining these with databases of atmospheric depositon for the U.K., critical loads of acidity and the present day peat pH were calculated and mapped. The critical load values for peat thus obtained were incorporated in the U.K. Critical Load mapping program, which was used to support the on-going European negotiations of emission reduction within the United Nations Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (U.N. E.C.E. C.L.T.A.P.).

The purpose of this comparative qualitative study examined the impact of the achievement gap on the lack of highly qualified teachers instructing African American students consistently from K-12th grades and its effects on high-stakes testing. In addition, the study examined teacher perceptions that could also be contributing factors of the achievement gap that exists between African American and Caucasian students. The study included two suburban charter high schools in metropolitan New Orleans, LA. School A had a predominantly African American faculty and student population, while School B had a diverse faculty and student population, but the majority of the faculty and student population was Caucasian. The educators from both schools participated on a voluntarily basis. The majority of each faculty participated in the study. The participants were educators, including teachers, paraprofessionals, counselors, social workers and school administrators. The instrument that was administered is the Achievement Gap Survey (2007), designed by the School Improvement Network. The instrument consisted of questions that were rated on a Likert-scale, with a few open-ended questions. The data indicated that when African American students are given "highly qualified teachers" to catch up with their Caucasian peers their high-stakes test scores improved, as evidenced on the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program high-stakes test given in Louisiana yearly. Between 2007 and 2009, more students moved from the "unsatisfactory" and "approaching basic" categories to "basic," "mastery," and "advanced" categories in mathematics and English Language Arts. [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 study contributes an approach to understanding the cognitive models underlying rhetorical arguments about the "first wave" of women's rights discourse in the United States, which began to emerge more publically with the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and started to gain momentum in 1851 and beyond. The usage of the lexical item "sphere" (in relation to noun phrases which appeared in primarily subject positions, and in some cases object positions) in nineteenth century woman's rights discourse was a part of the cognitive discourse which identified women and men as belonging to particular "spheres" or domains of gender, power, influence, and freedom. Study results suggest that not only was this lexical item, "sphere," used metaphorically, but that schematic patterns common to cognitive linguistic analysis may be identified in the repeated patterns and usages of certain phrases such as "woman's sphere," "proper sphere," "domestic sphere," "true sphere," etc. Specifically, patterns related to assignment and definition, hierarchy, and containment were found in the data studied. This study also provides additional supporting evidence for the application of cognitive modeling to discourse analysis. The evidence of schematic mappings which contributed to the construction and reconstruction of basic level and more complex cognitive models, as well as evidence of embodiment as a contributing factor in developing these ideological constructs, suggests that a Lakoffian approach to discourse analysis is both robust enough to provide relevant results, but also flexible enough to take a variety of basic and increasingly complex patterns into account. Finally, the results of this 1848-1851 data sample suggest that further research across a wider time frame might yield even more information about inferential associations between the cognitive models apparent in the discourse and the rhetorical arguments used to advocate or refute the expansion of woman's rights and roles in both public and private "spheres." Further analysis of the correlations between the cognitive models of the past and corresponding models of the present may shed further light on the role of language in shaping and reinforcing hegemonic constraints which continue to inform and dictate the roles of men and women in society today. [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 interprets the memorialisation of African diasporan history and culture at diverse museums and sites of memorialisation in Britain, America and France. Through case studies, the thesis reflects on how an alignment with Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic can impact the reach of these sites by both its presence and its absence. The case study focus is largely on very recent developments, where significant public and private money has been directed towards memorialising racial issues which have previously been pushed to the margins of historical memorialisation. These recent museological shifts are seen here within a comparative frame of how black Atlantic identity is memorialised, or commemorated, at diverse museum sites. The case studies identify how the potential for a sense of inclusive, transatlantic belonging for the African diaspora at new museums - both local and national - is at odds with a reductive, nationalist hierarchy of racial history still being told at other sites. Working alongside a critical tradition of diverse black Atlantic approaches, the case study analysis comprises the National Museum of African American History and Culture, (NMAAHC), The Whitney Plantation and a multi-site focus on Toussaint Louverture's black Atlantic Identity as permanently memorialised at 1) The Chateau de Joux in France, 2) the Paradox of Liberty Exhibit at the Smithsonian's NMAAHC and 3) a temporary exhibit, in 2018, in the Asahi Shimbun Room 3 of The British Museum in London.

Methods that use signature biomarkers have become increasingly important in the field of environmental microbiology. Signature lipid biomarker (SLB) analysis is a method of analysis for the quantitative definition of viable biomass, community composition, and nutritional status of microbiota isolated from a wide variety of environmental matrices, including air, soil and water. Biomarkers examined in this thesis were glyco- and phospholipids, and dipicolinic acid. Organisms tested were Cryptosporidium parvum, C. baileyi, C. muris, Eimeria tenella, E. acervulina, E. maxima, Escherichia coli, and Bacillus subtilis. Three species of Cryptosporidium were examined using signature lipid biomarker analysis. This analysis was successfully applied to the species-specific identification of C. parvum, C. baileyi and C. muris. The glycolipid fraction from the SLB analysis was also examined for C. parvum , as the possibility of a unique biomarker (10-hydroxy stearic acid) was present in research done by others. This compound was shown to be an artifact of sample preparation. SLB analysis was also used to examine the phospholipids of Eimeria tenella, E. acervulina, and E. maxima. This analysis clearly differentiated these three species from each other. SLB analysis was also used to examine chlorine-injured Escherichia coli . The experiments presented herein ensure the validity of oxirane fatty acids as indicators of sterilization efficiency. The detection of epoxidated fatty acids firmly establishes that the cells have been in contact with hypochlorite, thus providing a chemical marker for hypochlorite exposure and sterility. For the examination of dipicolinic acid from endospores, a new extraction and methylation technique was devised and GC/MS analysis was employed for the detection of dimethyl dipicolinate. Preliminary studies also evaluated spectrofluorometric analysis using terbium chloride. Bacillus subtilis spores were detected using the new in situ SFE extraction and methylation technique and GC/MS with a lower limit of quantification of 3 x 104 spores in a sand mixture, and the lower limit of detection was observed to be 3 x 103 spores.

Pulse responses are not suitable for evaluating H(z) frequency responses that include digital errors. Digital error effects, however, are conveniently included in H(z) frequency response calculations based on the step response. A non-real time algorithm for computing the frequency response of a real time digital filters based on the filter step response is developed and verified through an example.

The purpose of the project is to investigate the politics of hegemonic white Atlantics in film. Case studies were selected as paradigmatic of specific historical moments in the development of white Atlanticist discourses. The focus of analysis in each case was the representation of racialised whiteness in a context of its gradual decentring and a concomitant emergence of transnational identities in a post-national discursive paradigm. The argument presented here is that the white Atlantic is a political construct variously both resisted and produced in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic paradigms of racialised transatlantic whiteness. As such it is capable of mutation and inflection as it is deployed in the mobilisation of power. A range of textual analysis techniques and tools, including semiotics, genre and narrative analysis, were applied to the selected case studies. The methodology employed was derived from post-structuralist accounts of discourse as both constitutive and productive of identities, in which film may be understood as part of the cultural repertoire of signifiers of ‘what is on the mind’ of the producers and readers of white Atlanticist discourse. The project is limited by its substantive scope and methodological approach. Substantively, its scope is limited to film. Interrogation of other expressive forms would enlarge the scope to readings. The methodology also leads to an emphasis on a reading of the text, while the audience is assumed. An ethnographic methodology may offer different results. Most significantly, the project is limited by its case study scope. A fuller interpretation of the development of the white Atlantic in film requires a considerably more substantive transatlantic genealogy to interrogate its polyvalence in different times and locations. The project extends the academic study of racialised whiteness which has mainly been focused within national boundaries. It also extends the contemporary development of work on transatlantic whiteness of which the substantive research has been mainly of a historical nature. In extending the range of research in these ways, the project identifies and offers a reading of contemporary white Atlanticist discourses and their development. The case study readings suggest that, in the context of the progressive decentring of whiteness, polyvalent discourses of racialised transatlantic whiteness have emerged, articulated, in particular, via available tropes of romance and masculinity.

British identity has undergone a dynamic transformation over the past fifty years. The debates surrounding multiculturalism and the extent to which non-white Britons have genuinely integrated into mainstream British society have given rise to a generation of writing that arguably contends with these issues. Anglophone writers such as Monica Ali, Jamila Gavin, Maggie Gee, Raman Mundair, Ravinder Randhawa, Kami/a Shamsie, Zadie Smith and Meera Syal are amongst those contemporary writers who portray diverse aspects of Asian British communities, in which the Asian British characters arguablv subvert the Orientalist, colonialist binary of white over brown. Writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth fictionally represent Indian students who come to Britain as temporary migrants on foreign study sojourns, using these students to interrogate the significance of an English education. These novels explode the reductive myth of Asian Britons as nice, well-behaved members of our multicultural society. This thesis demonstrates how these texts indeed interrogate depoliticised, sentimental portrayals of Asian Britons as harmless.

This thesis aims to test the theory of the evangelical theologian. Michael Vasey, that AIDS would prompt gay Dien to articulate a new cultural voice for death in Britain. Vasey believed that this would involve the expression of a tragic rather than a natural understanding of death and an embrace of the ancient Christian connection between desire and immortality which would be expressed in funerals which gay men themselves , would take control of. Using the model of practical theology devised by Riet Bons-Storm and developed by Melanie Shelton Morrison Vasey's theory is tested against a variety of different bodies of evidence. Chapter two employs liturgical theology to analyse a variety of Christian denominations' teaching on death and the afterlife. It is demonstrated that Vasey was correct in his assertion that contempormy Churches in the UK. teach a natural understanding of death and make no explicit connection between desire and immortality. Chapter three analyses those theologies which claim to speak out of the experience of lesbian and gay people and those living with HIV. By using a historical theological approach it is established that theologians rarely engaged with AIDS as a theological issue which raised questions about death and the afterlife. In chapters four and five nine interviews with gay Christian men living with HIV and twenty-two interviews with those who had in various capacities supported gay men to their deaths with AIDS are analysed. The analysis reveals that lesbian and gay theology did not reflect the experiences of those it claimed to for gay men were deeply concemed about issues around death and immortality though some articulated their concerns in anthropocentric understandings of the afterlife rather than in the theocentric model adopted by Vasey. The interviews provide ample evidence of gay men taking control of their own funerals in which they often articulate a non-natural understanding of death and furthermore often engage in a performance of gay identity which is so extreme as to point to a reality beyond it This evidence is reinforced in chapter six by the liturgical theological analysis of a number of funeral liturgies constructed for AIDS funerals and further substantiated by the theological reading of six, films about AIDS in chapter seven. Using Clive Marsh's theology of negotiation to engage with the films it is demonstrated that some gay filmmakers showed a willingness to face without flinching the tragedy of death, combined with clear articulations of hope for life beyond death which is imaged in both anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric term.s. In the final chapter the conclusion is drawn that Vasey's theory has been proven (although it is argued that gay men articulated a postmodern rather than a new cultural voice for death , ,and that anthropocentric as well as theocentric visions of the afterlife demonstrate a reconnection being made between desire and immortality among that group) but is not reflected in any relevant contemporary theological reflection. Using Radical Orthodoxy to reflect upon the findings of the project, the thesis concludes that gay men living with AIDS have held ancient traditions concerning death and the afterlife alive whilst the Church as a whole as largely lost sight of them.