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Regulation of axonal trafficking of membrane-bound compartments is important for delivery of various neuronal cargoes towards the distal synapses and for quality control of damaged cellular components/toxic proteins. The contribution of Rab GTPase pathways in neurodegenerative pathologies and the regulatory mechanism to replenish various Rab proteins in the axonal periphery remain unclear. In the Encalada lab, we modeled familial prion disease axonopathies in primary murine hippocampal neurons, to determine (1) the biogenesis pathway that forms neurotoxic mutant prion protein (PrPmut) aggregates and (2) the consequences of PrPmut aggregate formation on cytoskeletal-organelle interactions within swollen axons that PrPmut aggregates reside. Firstly, I, and the research team, identified that the small GTPase ARL8 recruits kinesin-1 and HOPS for axonal transport and fusion, respectively, that generates neurotoxic PrPmut aggregates in non-degradative endolysosomes, called 'endoggresomes.' This axonal rapid endosomal sorting and transport-dependent aggregation (ARESTA) mechanism forms endoggresomes rapidly, and as a result impair calcium dynamics and neuronal viability. Inhibition of ARESTA reduces axonal endoggresome densities and rescues neuronal dysfunction, providing an anti-aggregation target to ameliorate prionopathies. Secondly, axonal micro-domain analysis of live organelle dynamics within endoggresome sites showed deficits to the MT-based active transport system, that result in enhanced mitochondrial-Rab7 endosomal contacts that induce mitochondrial fission via Rab7 activity and render retained mitochondria dysfunctional. In the Davis lab, I studied post-transcriptional fate of rab GTPase mRNA towards their axonal localization and function at the Drosophila larval neuromuscular junction (NMJ) pre-synapse. I found that a conserved RNA-binding protein Imp and kinesin-1 are required for rab11 mRNA delivery to axon termini and are required for synaptic plasticity and unimpaired locomotory behavior. Furthermore, I detected transcripts of multiple important rab GTPases for endosome recycling at the axonal and glial periphery at the NMJ, uncovering an unorthodox regulatory mechanism of axonal membrane trafficking.

"Service-learning" (SL) is an experiential pedagogy that engages students in working for, with, and in communities in need. While prior research has explored the effects of SL on second language (L2) users' (perceived) language development (e.g., Gaugler & Matheus, 2019), intercultural awareness (e.g., Sa´nchez-Naranjo, 2021), and critical awareness (e.g., Shannahan et al., 2021), to this day, little is known about SL as a social activity (but see, e.g., Perren, 2007). Furthermore, the nexus between classroom and service site practices remains largely under- scrutinized (Overfield, 2007). To make informed pedagogical decisions for L2 service-learners, it is important to understand the linkage between classroom and service site practices. This dissertation aims to fill this notable lacuna by exploring participants' interactional practices for achieving SL activities at service sites and in classrooms. Drawing on insights from a decade's worth of applied linguistics research on bridging between classrooms and the wild (e.g., Lilja et al., 2019; Lilja & Piirainen-Marsh, 2019; Piirainen-Marsh & Lilja, 2019; Theodorsdo´ttir, 2011; Wagner, 2015), the study adopts multimodal conversation analysis (CA; e.g., Deppermann, 2013; Mondada, 2016; Streeck et al., 2011) as a robust framework to investigate SL as a social activity and reciprocity as an interactional achievement. Data consist of naturally-occurring audio- and video-recorded interaction collected across different settings: service sites (15 hours), classrooms (6 hours), and focus groups (5 hours). The study only focuses on the service and classroom interaction. Participants included 14 university- level L2 users in an SL program within an intensive English language program in Hawai'i, ESL teachers, and community members. The analyses center on two interactional phenomena frequently observed in the data: (a) mobilizing others and being mobilized (Taleghani-Nikazm et al., 2020) and (b) intercorporeal co-operative practices (C. Goodwin, 2018; Meyer et al., 2017).The findings uncovered some (dis)similarities between participants' practices at the service sites and in the classroom. When mobilizing others, for example, the participants used less explicit, highly elliptical, and action-oriented mobilization designs (e.g., "cut" + an environmentally coupled gesture, C. Goodwin, 2018), contrasting with more explicit, modulated, and talk-oriented mobilization designs in the classroom (e.g., "one more time, please" + holding out an index finger). These differences indicate that the participants' mobilizing turn designs at the service sites shows an orientation to urgency, whereas in the classroom, they orient to achieving mutual access to a knowledge object. In intercorporeal co-operative practices, the participants produced synchronized and sequentially mirrored actions to achieve various interactional outcomes (e.g., stance alignment, affiliation, co-engagement on task). At the service sites, they oriented to collaborative task completion by adopting or transforming others' actions to achieve near-synchrony. On the other hand, in the classroom, they generally showed an orientation toward "wanting to be on the same page" by chiming into a choral co-production (e.g., Ehmer, 2021; Lerner, 2002; Pfa¨nder & Couper-Kuhlen, 2019). These findings suggest that SL is a fertile ground for L2 users to engage in diverse multimodal practices while orienting to reciprocity as a collaborative enterprise. The study contributes to improving our current understanding of SL as a multimodal achievement. It also hopes to expand extant SL research traditions by demonstrating multimodal CA as a productive framework for scrutinizing reciprocity at various levels: interpersonal (reciprocity among SL stakeholders) as well as programmatic and community levels (reciprocity between educational objectives and community engagement). Methodological and pedagogical implications of the findings will be discussed. [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.]

One of the key objectives in neuroscience is to understand how the brain processes sensory information to generate perception and guide decisions. Sensory processing has been studied extensively, primarily from a hierarchical perspective with a focus on the processing along ascending pathways. However, ascending sensory pathways are accompanied by descending connections at various levels of processing, yet their contributions to sensory processing remain unclear. In this thesis, I studied one of the major descending circuits in the central auditory system, the cortico-collicular pathway, which connects the auditory cortex (AC) to the auditory midbrain (i.e. the inferior colliculus, IC). To understand the role of this pathway during sound-guided behaviour, I used two-photon calcium imaging to measure the activity of neurons in the IC that receive projections from the AC while manipulating the AC inputs during a sound detection task. I found that individual cortico-recipient inferior colliculus (CRIC) neurons exhibited heterogeneous patterns of activity, and that the AC appears to be involved in influencing some of these patterns. Further, I showed that the CRIC trial-by-trial network activity contained behaviourally-relevant information, and that this information was more unreliable when the AC input was removed. Overall, this work offers novel insights into the neural and behavioural function of the auditory cortico-collicular pathway, which contributes to our understanding of the role of descending sensory pathways in perception and behaviour.

Rising antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a challenge to public health, animal health, and the environment. Early detection of phenotypic-based antimicrobial resistance remains an essential step to effectively optimizing antibiotic treatments. By using 3D printed technology and Raspberry Pi - computers, two novel assays were developed for early detection of antimicrobial resistance based on motility and the bacterial response to antibiotics on agar media. Integrating culture steps and determination of minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) into one single test, this thesis elucidated the identification of bacterial species and their MIC within hours using a frame dip slide, as well as within just 5 minutes of testing to show the results of bacterial susceptibility based on their movement or stop swimming. In addition, the temperature remains a crucial factor for bacterial growth. By designing a mobile incubator, all microbiology tests can be carried out in a variety of settings including next to the bed of patients or in the field, instead of in the laboratory. Automation of image analysis contributes another tool to better understand physiological bacteria when living in vitro conditions. These successful tools contributed alternative approaches to surveying at real-time detection of antimicrobial resistance in the field. Beyond the laboratory, these tools brought the concept to combine all-in-one. Using a frame dip slide combined with a mobile incubator as well as combining Microcapillary Film (MCF) with 3D printed microscopy created a portable kit for affordable phenotypic assays for rapid detection of bacterial antibiotic resistance anywhere, not just for performing in the laboratory.

Recent research on English-Medium-Instruction (EMI) classroom interaction, where students learn the subject matter through L2 English, has examined the role of translanguaging in supporting classroom participants to exploit multilingual and multimodal resources to facilitate content teaching and learning. Nevertheless, there is a lack of research to date that examines the details of how translanguaging is practised in content learning classrooms. This study focuses on the sequential organisation of translanguaging practices in content classrooms and illuminates how EMI teachers create different translanguaging spaces through mobilising multiple languages and modalities in EMI mathematics and history classrooms in two secondary schools in Hong Kong. The data of this study consists of classroom observations with fieldnotes, ethnographic interviews with teachers and other stakeholders, classroom video recordings and video-stimulated-recall-interviews. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is carried out on the classroom interactional data, looking at not only different named languages but also spatial repertoire, the use of objects and other facilities in the classroom space. The analyses of the classroom interactional data are triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interview data which are analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis in order to analyse the teacher's reflections on his pedagogical and interactional strategies. Findings reveal different translanguaging spaces that being created by the EMI teachers. These translanguaging spaces are constructed through 1) engaging in playful talk, 2) integrating the students' everyday life knowledge into the learning space, 3) deploying the affordances of a technological device, 4) increasing student engagement for responding to diverse students' needs and 5) engaging in co-learning between teacher and students. The construction of these translanguaging spaces requires the EMI teachers to utilise various linguistic, multimodal, spatial resources and their sociocultural and pedagogical knowledge. It is argued that an EMI classroom is an integrated translanguaging space which entails multiple translanguaging sub-spaces that afford teachers to draw on available resources in a coordinated performance in order to engage students in the learning process and promote equitable knowledge construction processes. The findings of this research reveal important implications for adopting a translanguaging perspective to studying classroom discourse and implications for EMI education and policymaking.

The instinctive synthesis [IS] model of sentencing applied by Australian courts is a deliberately unstructured approach. It requires sentencers to consider all of the relevant factors in a single step to arrive at the appropriate sentence. There is no common decision-making process or methodology to which sentencers must adhere. Instead, IS is designed to allow sentencers maximum judicial discretion and flexibility so that they may deliver individualised justice with each sentence. Using doctrinal analysis and data from interviews with judges from the Victorian County Court, Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, this thesis examines how the unstructured IS model is applied in practice. Interview responses suggest that the majority of sentencers are willing to be guided in general ways, for example through the application of sentencing principles, but are opposed to hard limits on their discretion. Many are willing to overlook issues of transparency and consistency surrounding IS in order to preserve their very broad discretion. Sentencing judges in Victoria appear to have developed their own informal means of structuring sentencing decision-making. Addressing relevant factors under wide headings such as 'objective seriousness of the offence' and 'factors relating to the offender' suggests that judges are not opposed to approaching sentencing decision-making in a structured manner. In fact, the vast majority find it a useful means of organising the many different, at times competing, factors. The informal process applied by many interviewees is broadly similar to that in sentencing guidelines applied in England and Wales and proposed in Victoria. Such guidelines bring clarity, order and transparency to sentencing decision making but are heavily opposed by many sentencers, often mistaking the guiding or structuring judicial discretion as imposing strict limitations on discretion. This misunderstanding compromises the ability to secure judicial support for changes to the sentencing status quo.

This qualitative interview study examines challenges college students may experience in extracurricular dialogues on contested sociopolitical issues. It also discusses approaches that students claim support them through the challenges of contested issues dialogues. This study found that college students encountered challenges including difficulty expressing disagreement, tensions related to their identities and group representation, and difficulty building trust and openness with peers in dialogue. Despite these difficulties, students also developed skills and capacities to bridge differences, to build community within dialogue, as well as to learn about themselves, others and sociopolitical issues. Through participants' accounts on how they perceive and negotiate these challenges, the study is intended to portray in-depth student perspectives about this critical aspect of peer dialogues on sociopolitical issues. [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 research aimed to investigate how achievement emotions predict, mediate, and affect academic achievement in online learning. Online learning has been proliferating, but little is known about how emotion mediates cognition in the Community of Inquiry framework. Recent progress in cognitive neuroscience provided the theoretical foundation for researchers to investigate emotion's role in online learning, especially academic achievement. The researcher of this study adopted a quantitative non-experimental research design to investigate how achievement emotions mediated, predicted, and affected academic achievement in the Community of Inquiry framework. The Partial Least Square Structure Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) method was adopted for statistical analysis. The participants were 110 undergraduate university students enrolled in an online course called Digital Identity in the Spring and Summer semesters of 2021 in a large public university. The researcher of this study discovered activity emotions singularly and significantly mediated teaching presence and cognitive presence to predict and affect academic achievement. This research was the first to pinpoint the criticality of activity emotions to academic achievement in online learning. Although four limitations existed in this research, the findings of this research extended the Control Value Theory of Achievement Emotions into the Community of Inquiry framework. A new learning theory called the Cogmotion Theory of Learning was proposed for the asynchronous online learning environment. Thus, this research and the Cogmotion Theory of Learning can enable future researchers to specify new design principles based on the criticality of activity emotions for learners to realize better achievement and higher performance. [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.]

In most markets, consumers of goods and services have vastly more options available to them than they will consider closely. At the point of making a decision, consumers are choosing between only a small subset (i.e., a consideration set) of all possible alternatives. The preceding process that forms these consideration sets is the focus of this dissertation. Consumers themselves may optimally restrict their consideration set based on their preferences and search costs (i.e., cost of time). However, firms, platforms and governments all play a considerable role in influencing the consideration set of products that consumers choose between. This influence ranges widely, from awareness building through advertisements, to steering through recommendations and to legislative standards that completely remove options from the market. My dissertation investigates the process of search and information gathering that consumers undertake before choosing between alternatives "and" how external parties influence that process. On the Amazon.com marketplace, both Amazon and small businesses compete in offering retail products. However, Amazon chooses what products consumers see when they search. Products sold by Amazon may have a better position compared to small business products, but the effects on consumers and sellers are unclear. Policymakers have expressed antitrust concerns about this, suspecting "self-preferencing" and "gatekeeper" market power. To study this, I develop a model where heterogeneous consumers search for differentiated products arranged on an acyclic graph (i.e., tree). Firms price in response to consumer search and how their products are arranged--highlighting how search design determines market structure. The model endogenizes consideration set formation and recovers the correlated distribution of consumer preferences and search costs. Estimated on Amazon data, I show that not accounting for product arrangement (e.g., search results and BuyBox) leads to incorrect price elasticity estimates. I provide three results on market power and antitrust policies using counterfactual product arrangements. (i) To isolate the effect of Amazon's position advantage, I remove it through a "neutral" product arrangement. Profits shift from Amazon to small businesses, confirming Amazon's sizable market power. However, consumer welfare falls when consumers reduce their search intensity in response to reduced value from searching. This suggests Amazon's incentives and consumers' preferences are aligned, weakening the claim of self-preferencing. (ii) Banning the platform owner from also being a seller reduces consumer welfare through price rather than product variety. (iii) I propose an alternate policy, splitting the platform into an Amazon side and a small-business side. Giving consumers the ability to search for and "support small businesses" would alleviate the market power imbalance without harming consumers. Moving away from consumer goods markets, the higher education market likewise contends with issues of limited awareness, particularly for nascent online colleges. The share of US students enrolled in entirely-online college degrees has doubled in recent decades (from 5% in 2008 to 10% in 2015). The importance of online colleges as a differentiated product in the higher education market is likely to increase, particularly after the online learning experiment of the 2020 pandemic. However, awareness of this nascent product may be limiting its role in the higher education market. Additionally, policymakers concerned about tuition and student debt growth are interested in whether online degrees could put downwards pressure on tuition and increase access. The effect of online degrees on student choice, competition and post-graduation outcomes remains little studied. In theory, the online degree market should be highly competitive, as it lacks the geographic market power that in-person colleges wield and it is highly scalable. However, the extent to which online degrees are differentiated affects whether it simply expands the market or intensifies overall competition. I provide evidence that online colleges: (i) cater to specific segments of students (e.g., mature age students with family); (ii) deliver a wide range of post-graduation outcomes that are no worse on average than in-person colleges; and (iii) face stronger competition, but with little measurable spillover on in-person colleges. Finally, I provide causal evidence that advertising drives information search and enrollment for the advertised college. Interestingly, individual college advertising appears to have negative spillovers for broad information search (i.e., searching for all options). In the broader higher education market, minimum quality standards play an important role in restricting the consideration set of students, but these standards have received little attention. US Federal Student Aid is only extended to students enrolling at "accredited" higher education institutions, but the quality standards set by Accreditors is not well understood or studied. Due to historical reasons, 10 separate not-for-profit Accreditors grant accreditation to institutions in the US. Accreditors aim to set similar standards, but standards are multi-dimensional; often qualitative and quantitative; difficult to compare; and enforced with differing strictness. As such, standards may be lower (or higher) than desired by policymakers. I develop a simple revealed-preference estimation that recovers the ordering and relative strictness of quality standards set by each Accreditor. I find that the Accreditor singled out by policymakers in 2016 for accrediting now-bankrupt for-profit colleges does indeed have the lowest standards. My estimates are consistent with the common belief that National Accreditors set higher quality standards than Regional Accreditors. The estimated relative level and dispersion of quality standards should be of interest to policymakers looking to evaluate the effectiveness of the accreditation system. [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.]

The increasing pervasiveness of the Internet of Things (IoT) offers a wealth of business model opportunities. Many conventional product-based companies are seeking to increase their competitiveness by moving towards a service-based business model whereby the IoT can bring tremendous opportunities. These traditional product sales manufacturing firms are required to consider business models beyond their conventional product-focused, firm-centric core competence business model innovation and respond to fast-changing digitalisation dynamics focused on promoting service-centric solution availability instead of physical products. However, the literature has not yet provided profound and actionable approaches to service business models in IoT-driven environments for manufacturing firms. This research aims to fill the gap and elaborate framework of design guidelines for designing service business models for the IoT in manufacturing firms; accordingly, the elevators industry is selected as the main case study applying proposed framework of design guidelines. The thesis adopts the journal format with four essays. The first paper focuses on deriving six guiding principles from an illustration of the value of the IoT and a systemic review of academic literature focusing on IoT business models: service centrism, value co-creation, resource integration, long-term relationships, the ecosystem, and capitalised value of information. Papers 2 to 4 contain three essays that delve deeper into each of the design guidelines under design framework. The second paper illustrates the criticality for firms to move toward the ecosystem business model approach from the conversational single and firm-centric business model, again using a comparable case study in the elevator industry. The third paper aims to demonstrate how the IoT can enable an elevator company to shift from having a product focus to being a service-centric company through value co-creation and resource integration, hence maintaining a long-term relationship business model. The fourth paper aims to depict how the IoT can enable an elevator company to achieve information-driven, condition-based maintenance in its service business model. Case studies of real-world IoT service business models demonstrate the applicability of the proposed guiding principles and their managerial implications and challenges, as well as options to overcome these challenges. The evaluation of the applicability of these implications pertaining to the emerging context of the IoT business model can enable researchers and practitioners to visualise and analyse service business model design in a structured and actionable way.

My thesis concerns the fate of the spiritual capacities of human beings in the time of digital media systems in relation to the work of Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler's framing of the problem is situated within his ambigious, or pharmacological, approach to technology, in which it is simultaneously poison and cure. It is also founded on his notion of 'originary technicity', in which humanity and technology 'invent' each other. Both avoid a reductive reading of human-technological relations. Stiegler's account of subjectivity is one founded on the linguistic, philosophical and sociological notions of agency whereby the self is conceived as a performance within the symbolic and aesthetic order of culture. This performance necessitates a public stage akin to that of the Greek tragic age that allows its audience to reflect upon and question their society in order for the society to remain ethically reflexive. Yet, the growth of mass culture and global consumerism threatens this reflexivity and must be recovered. The generalized proletarianization of the consumer age is one that compromises the acting out of spirit due to the exhaustion of human drives. Furthermore, the social fabric, as with the fabric of the self, is a composition of tendencies, a 'weaving' of social bonds that is created by society and its individuals. Therefore, as with the reflexive public stage, society must have the requisite knowledge and ability to interpret and create this production of the social. In a digital age, this must now be a society of 'image-readers'. By looking at Stiegler's theorizing of a new contributive economy, I examine the elevating possibilities that can come out of the disindividuating processes of hyper-industrial, consumer-driven technology, and, therefore, what spiritually expressive and transformative performances of self, and society, digital media enable. I argue the aesthetic performance of the self must be one in which the individual is an amateur artist aware of the reflexive social stage that digital platforms provide.

Advancements in capsule endoscopy technology allow it to image the upper gastrointestinal tract. Oesophagogastroduodenoscopy (OGD) is the gold standard examination, but it is often poorly tolerated and requires sedative premedication. This thesis examines how capsule endoscopy can improve the quality of an upper GI endoscopic examination. The first study examines the rate of, and factors affecting missed cancer occurrence after conventional OGD. In this retrospective study, a total of 48 (7.7%) of 627 patients with oesophagogastric cancer had OGDs up to three years prior, which are considered missed opportunities to diagnose early neoplasia. Endoscopy sessions with missed cancer occurrence had at least one procedure more when compared to sessions where cancer was subsequently diagnosed or sessions where benign focal lesions were diagnosed. In the next two studies, we examine the patients experience in a comparative study of tolerance and acceptability between magnet controlled capsule endoscopy (MACE) and conventional OGD (n=44) and transnasal endoscopy (TNE; n=16). By comparison to OGD in Chapter 4 and TNE in Chapter 5, patients were more accepting of and preferred MACE. Patients experienced significantly more distress (greater distress with higher median score) due to gagging (6 vs 1), choking (5 vs 1), abdominal bloating (2 vs 1), instrumentation (4 vs 1), discomfort during (5 vs 1) and after (2 vs 1) OGD when compared to MACE (all p<0.0001). Patients undergoing TNE were more distressed by gagging (1.5 vs 1, p=0.03), choking (3 vs 1, p=0.001), instrumentation (4.5 vs 1, p=0.001), discomfort during (5 vs 1, p=0.001) and after TNE (2 vs 1, p=0.01) by comparison to MACE. A small bowel examination can be performed immediately after an upper GI MACE. It is hypothesised that laxative pre-procedure preparation may benefit small bowel mucosal visualisation, although likely to impact on tolerability and acceptance. The fourth study examines how to optimise an upper GI MACE examination to investigate iii the small bowel. In advance of a small bowel capsule endoscopy, 186 patients were randomised to three pre-procedure preparation groups: clear fluids only or a single or split dose of polyethylene glycol (PEG) the examine the need for laxative pre-procedure medication. Split dose PEG improved distal small bowel mucosal views and overall adequacy of examination compared to clear fluids alone, although patients tolerated better and were more accepting of the later. Acceptance of novel technology may be prohibited by cost. In the final study, we perform a cost minimisation analysis to examine how the cost of MACE compares to TNE and OGD, and examine in scenario analyses the potential effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and need for endoscopic biopsies on cost. We found that per procedure, MACE was most expensive, followed by OGD and TNE. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the costs of OGD and TNE would rise by between 27% to 112% depending on changes in endoscopy capacity. In scenario analyses, cost parity between MACE and OGD could be reached if the price of single use capsule endoscopes fell by two thirds. If endoscopy capacity fell to 40%, cost parity could be reached if the price of capsule endoscopes fell by a third. This thesis supports the use of MACE in the upper GI tract from the perspective of a superior patient experience compared to conventional OGD. Further improvements in imaging technology and reduction in cost of MACE will advance capsule endoscopy in the examination of the upper GI tract.

Microtubules (MTs) are important linear protein filaments which participate in many intracellular physiological processes and provide mechanical support against external compression. The kinetics and mechanics of MTs change rather distinctively in different environment. It is therefore important to examine the interaction of MTs with the environment they are in, for a better understanding of how intracellular physiological phenomena are achieved. In this thesis, I first examine the effect of the quenched-disordered intracellular cytoskeleton network on the critical buckling of MTs. I apply the replica technique and find that the disorder reduces the critical buckling force, and the increase in disorder strength acts as the trigger of the switch from the first- and second-order buckling, in analogy to phase transitions. I then consider a system of fiber-crumbling inside cell aggregate, as an example to show the effect of the external environment on the ‘post-buckling’ pattern. I fit the experimental helix pitch size and radius with a helical buckling theory in an elastic medium, to extract the collective force generated by the cell aggregate on the crumbled fiber and the elasticity of this aggregate – this force value is from a few hundreds of nN to a few μN, and the estimated elastic modulus is weak and below 200 Pascals. In kinetics, MTs in cells experience a repeated pattern of length growth and shrinkage, where free tubulin concentration in solution is a key environmental factor determining the average time of growth and shrinkage. I consider the effect of the MT structural change induced by hydrolysis of GTP-tubulins on the average MT growth time before shrinkage, as a function of tubulin concentration, using a mean-first-passage-time (MFPT) method. The results are comparable with experiment in the low-medium concentration regime, making it a potential MT catastrophe mechanism in contrast with the popular GTP-cap models, where the structural information is over-simplified. I further investigate a kinetic process of dissociating MTs being ‘rescued’ into regrowth, by GTP-tubulin islands produced via random hydrolysis along the filament. I formulate this kinetic problem as a particle passing through partially-adsorbing traps, with the MFPT method. By comparing the theoretical averaged MT rescue site with experiment, I discover that only the scenario of slow hydrolysis and high tubulin concentration, with a large rescue reaction timescale, has a chance to match with the experimental mean rescue site. Thus, I suspect that GTP-islands created solely by random hydrolysis cannot fully explain the observed MT rescue kinetics.

Crossmatching between Planck and Herschel data has revealed a number of candidate protoclusters with starbursting galaxies. These starbursting galaxies are believed to be progenitors of elliptical galaxies in the cores of today's massive galaxy clusters. In this thesis, multi-wavelength observations of the candidate starbursting protoclusters are shown and their physical properties are studied. Using SCUBA-2 observations, number counts, colours, photometric redshifts, star-formation rates (SFRs) and infrared luminosities of the 850 μm sources in the candidate protoclusters are estimated. More than 70% of the candidate protoclusters show overdensities of 850 μm sources compared with the field. Using the Very Large Array (VLA) 6 GHz observations, number counts, the far-infrared-radio correlation, morphologies and multiplicities of the radio sources are studied, in which tentative overdensities and AGNs are found. Using lens modelling, the source distribution of a lensed dusty star-forming galaxy (DSFG) is studied, revealing multiple components in its radio emission. Using the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) observations at optical/near-infrared, the 4000-Å breaks of the candidate member galaxies are identified, and their colours and photometric redshifts are estimated. Using millimetre spectroscopy at IRAM’s 30m Telescope, CO lines are detected for a starbursting galaxy in a candidate protocluster, and its physical properties are determined. The multiwavelength observations suggest that the candidate starbursting protoclusters lie at redshifts between 1 < z < 3, and their starbursting member galaxies are forming the majority of their stellar masses with SFR 1,000 solar-masses/yr, which is consistent with the peak of cosmic SFR-density (SFRD) at z ∼ 2. Future work and observations are expected to increase the sample of these extreme protoclusters and to understand the formation of galaxy and galaxy clusters.

This thesis examines three major aspects of international convertible bond offerings, particularly the market reaction and its determinants, the determinants of bookrunner selection in underwriting market and the outcomes of bookrunner selection. These issues are important for a corporate firm to design the best features of convertible bond underwriting contracts to enhance shareholders' wealth and mitigate asymmetric information. These are relevant to the underwriters to understand whether informational advantage gained via reputation and geographic proximity could equip them if more competitive advantage in delivering better underwriting services. Furthermore, financial regulators are benefited from this study to better understand the underwriting market in convertible bond offerings. My research focuses on an overall sample size of 11,350 convertible bond offerings worldwide issued between 1984 and 2015. I analyse the market reaction for different countries, industrial classifications and stated purpose of proceeds following the announcements of convertible bond offerings. I regress the stock price reactions against firm-specific, issue-specific, market-specific, country-specific and investor protection-specific factors. I examine the determinants of domestic, regional and reputable bookrunner selection by regressing them on firm-specific, issue-specific and market-specific. I also examine whether bookrunners with economies of scale advantage are more likely to gain underwriting contracts in convertible bonds. The bookrunner performance is analysed based on the stock price reactions, underwriting fees and offering yields-at-issue. I further explore to investigate the outcome of bookrunner selection across different regions. The findings of this study have important implications for various strands of academic literature. I contribute to reveal that the stock prices of convertible bond issuers react differently to different countries, industrial classifications and stated purpose of proceeds. My results from regression analysis show that the different market reactions are significantly associated by firm-specific, issue-specific, market specific, country-specific and legal system factors. I also contribute to identify the underwriting preferences by corporate treasurers in hiring domestic, regional and reputable bookrunners. This helps underwriters to effectively gain underwriting contracts. This study contributes to two dominant literature on geographic proximate and reputable bookrunner selections in international convertible bond offerings. My findings provides important policy suggestions for issuers and investors to make a better evaluation on the outcomes of both geographical proximate and reputable bookrunners simultaneously in international convertible bond offerings.

This thesis focuses on the synthesis and properties of block polyesters and polycarbonates, proposed as sustainable alternatives to existing petrochemicals. The polymers are prepared using efficient catalysed reactions, including the ring opening copolymerization (ROCOP) of epoxide/anhydride or CO2 and lactone ring opening polymerization (ROP). The thesis comprises an introduction, providing a review of the literature and setting out the thesis aims, followed by three related research chapters which examine different aspects of these block polymers.

There is a need for non-industrial robots such as in homecare and eldercare. Light-weight mobile robots preferred as compared to conventional fixed based robots as the former is safe, portable, convenient and economical to implement. Sensor system for light-weight mobile flexible manipulator is studied in this research. A mobile flexible link manipulator (MFLM) contributes to high amount of vibrations at the tip, giving rise to inaccurate position estimations. In a control system, there inevitably exists a lag between the sensor feedback and the controller. Consequently, it contributed to instable control of the MFLM. Hence, there it is a need to predict the tip trajectory of the MFLM. Fusion of low cost sensors is studied to enhance prediction accuracy at the MFLM's tip. A digital camera and an accelerometer are used predict tip of the MFLM. The main disadvantage of camera is the delayed feedback due to the slow data rate and long processing time, while accelerometer composes cumulative errors. Wheel encoder and webcam are used for position estimation of the mobile platform. The strengths and limitations of each sensor were compared. To solve the above problem, model based predictive sensor systems have been investigated for used on the mobile flexible link manipulator using the selected sensors. Mathematical models were being developed for modeling the reaction of the mobile platform and flexible manipulator when subjected to a series of input voltages and loads. The model-based Kalman filter fusion prediction algorithm was developed, which gave reasonability good predictions of the vibrations of the tip of flexible manipulator on the mobile platform. To facilitate evaluation of the novel predictive system, a mobile platform was fabricated, where the flexible manipulator and the sensors are mounted onto the platform. Straight path motions were performed for the experimental tests. The results showed that predictive algorithm with modelled input to the Extended Kalman filter have best prediction to the tip vibration of the MFLM.

My thesis explores the concept and manifestations of Transcendence in selected poems and prose written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge between 1796 and 1817. Amid the dissenting atmosphere in Britain, in the wake of the French Revolution, religious Truth is rigorously contested by Romantic writers and thinkers. For Kant, Transcendence is displaced by Transcendentalism in order to separate speculative reasoning from rational metaphysics. Aspiring to defend religious Truth, Coleridge feels the need to keep the transcendent faith in a living God alive in ways that find congruence with transcendental philosophy. Accordingly, Coleridge explores the meaning of Truth in his writings and seeks to salvage Religion from being sheer dogmatism or superstition. Tracing different versions of Transcendence across the development of the term's transformation in Coleridge's thoughts and poetry is central to my reassessment of the religious and spiritual aspects of the Coleridgean Imagination. My Introduction explores the dual meanings of 'Versions of Transcendence' in terms of the critical approach adopted in this thesis and its content. Chapter one focuses on 'Religious Musings', 'The Eolian Harp' and 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' to demonstrate Coleridge's Theism and his concept of Transcendence in the late 1790s. Chapter two and three explore the ways in which Original Sin can be viewed as the impediment of Transcendence in 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan' during the period 1798-1804. Chapter four and five argues for the compatibility between Transcendence and Transcendentalism in 'A Letter to--', 'Dejection: An Ode' and 'To W. Wordsworth' during the 1800s. Chapter six explores Coleridge's struggles to reconcile the Fall with God's benevolence in Christabel (1816). Chapter seven offers a coda to the thesis and suggests through a discussion of Biographia Literaria (1817) that, for Coleridge, the highest (sublime) worth of the human mind is to know the invisible God through an intuitive knowledge accessible through the Imagination.

This thesis examines mid-nineteenth century perceptions of Germany in the minds of English thinkers, writers, and journalists. At the time, Germany received increasing attention from the English, in no small part due to an exploration of their own national character. This exploration led them to the shared Anglo-Saxon heritage in order to explain their own understanding of the peculiarities and nuances of the English national character. By examining reactions to the myriad events that took place in the burgeoning German nation, the thesis aims to provide insight into the role of national character in shaping perceptions of other nations. It will also observe the change in attitudes towards Germany as the nineteenth century progressed, and Germany became an ascendant Great Power, capable of challenging France in terms of military might, and England in terms of industrial capability. It further aims to demonstrate that the Anglo-German antagonism started some decades prior to the fin de siècle, but that, alongside a growing suspicion of German, and particularly Prussian, expansionism, there remained an admiration for German culture, in this thesis, focusing on the sphere of German literature. Via these observations, the thesis will aim to shed more light on the importance of national character and nationhood to mid-nineteenth century English thinkers.

Managing hydrates is one of the most important hurdles in flow-assurance applications. Among various technological alternatives, the use of low-dosage hydrate inhibitors is attracting attention for both economic and environmental reasons. However, it is not well understood how these chemicals function. Molecular simulations were conducted to identify some of the molecular mechanisms that can help prevent growth and agglomeration of hydrates using anti-agglomerants. It has been suggested that the structure of the anti-agglomerants film at the hydrate-oil interface is important in determining performance. Therefore, the structure of anti-agglomerants adsorbed at the interface between methane hydrates and a liquid hydrocarbon was firstly investigated. The anti-agglomerants considered were surface-active compounds with three hydrophobic tails and a complex hydrophilic head that contained both amide and tertiary ammonium cation groups. The tail length, the surface density of the compounds as well as the composition of the liquid hydrocarbon were changed systematically. Some of the surfactants helped maintain a disordered structure at the interface, while others packed tightly, yielding a film that resembled a frozen interface. Comparing qualitatively to experimental data indicates that anti-agglomerants for which a frozen interface was observed exhibited better performance in rocking cell experiments. The results showed that anti-agglomerants films can yield an effective resistance to the agglomeration as well as the growth of gas hydrates, provided their density is sufficiently high. Using non-equilibrium simulations, the anti-agglomerants with short n-butyl tails were found to be able to stabilize hydrate cages and promote growth. However, the penetration of the alkyl tails into the growing hydrate structure helps anti-agglomerants firmly adsorb at the hydrate surface, which is expected to retard hydrate particles agglomeration. These results are crucial for quantifying the hydrate growth mechanism in the presence of anti-agglomerants, which could be exploited for designing new substances with better hydrate-promoting or hydrate-inhibiting characters for different applications.

At the most individual level, those operating within firms have a shared interest - the want to improve. Since the foundational ideas of Adam Smith and the division of labour, economists have taken an interest in attempting to understand what the firm does and how exactly it operates. The pioneering work of Coase (1937) explored the nature of the firm and the economic understanding of exactly why individuals choose to form firms to undertake business, rather than conducting market operations on an individual contractual basis. This marked the beginning of what was and has become a broad and diverse area of the literature. While the notion may have been hinted at and mentioned implicitly, the term transaction costs, coined by and developed by Williamson (1979) and Williamson (1981) made apparent the costs associated with initial contracts with suppliers and the importance of relational and ownership implications over time between buyer and seller. More generally, in the area of contract theory, theoretical applications of the principal-agent problem, in relation to the firm, have considered the design of contracts that maximise incentives on behalf of the worker, as well as considering the moral hazard that presents when information asymmetries are present (Hölmstrom, 1979; Grossman and Hart, 1983). In the advent of novel econometric techniques in the 1970s, such as stochastic fron- tier (Battese and Corra, 1977) and data envelopment analysis Charnes et al. (1978), made possible empirical studies of firm performance, namely efficiency in cost and production. While at the start of this literature, such techniques were solely used as a means to evaluate a numerical measure of efficiency and rank the observed individual units, more recent methodological advances have allowed an additional dimension of performance and efficiency studied. Using either a two or one-stage estimation method (Kumbhakar and Lovell, 2003), empirical researchers are able to use the efficiency estimates, attained from either the cost or production function, as a measure that could be explained by other explanatory covariates. This develop- ment was critical as it allowed the economist, policy maker and firms themselves, an insight into exact what attributes of the firm and the business environment either im- prove or hinder their performance. Aside from individual desires to make profit, the importance of understanding firm efficiency and its determinants has much wider implications. Given that small and medium-sized enterprise dominate the composition of firms within the private sector, particularly in developing countries; in combination with the fact that research has indicated that higher levels of GDP per capita in countries with larger numbers of SMEs (Beck et al., 2005; Ayyagari et al., 2007), there is a larger importance to understanding how we can encourage efficiency and performance. Moreover, despite the advent of new techniques, firm-level data that can be em- ployed in this framework have been relatively limited. While the applied SFA literature has been primarily concerned with the measure measurement of efficiency within utilities and agriculture, some firm or industry-level studies have emerged. That being said, those that do exists lack a expansive coverage of countries at different stages of economic and institutional development, as such, the application of policy recommendations are particularly constrained. This thesis attempts to fill a number of gaps within the existing body of literature in a number of ways. Firstly, we employ the use of a novel and comprehensive dataset. The World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) has an extensive coverage 139 countries, at differing stages of economics and institutional development and transition from 2006-2016. The pooled cross-sectional dataset is multifaceted, in that, it includes a range of accounting and production measures, as well as a number of typical and atypical firm characteristics. Most notable, the survey ask firm managers about their perception to a range of obstacles to firm performance, including corruption, access to finance, the informal economy and business licensing. To our knowledge, this particular insight is unique within the data available on firms at any level of coverage. Secondly, in previous studies of corruption more generally, the established mea- sures of corruption are usually at the country-level in the form of indices, namely the Corruption Perceptions Index or International Country Risk measure. In this thesis, not only do we have information about the level of corruption at the level of the firm but we also know what the perceived level of corruption that firm has experience. Similarly, with respect to financial constraints, while the availability of data measur- ing access to finance at the firm-level is more prevalent, disaggregation by severity is less so. Moreover, the characteristics of the firm included in the data set, go far beyond usual variables such as age and size. Information on tax inspections, time spent on regulatory matters, use of IT communication in client dealings and external audits are provided, that allow far more a detail analysis of the determination of firm efficiency that has also been observed in the literature thus far. In the first of three studies in this thesis, we employ a one-stage SFA approach to both calculate and subsequently attempt to understand the role of corruption and financial constraints in the variation amongst firms in productive efficiency. In doing so, we test our hypotheses. Based on a survey of the literature, we formulate two hypotheses; the severity of both corruption and constraints to finance will reduce firm efficiency. The results of our empirical analysis find that while higher levels of severity in financial constraints reduce the level of efficiency, we find evidence to the contrary for the minor levels of perceived corruption. While the former result is in agreement with the established literature, our result regarding corruption is in line with the ‘grease money’ hypothesis. In lieu of the negative effects on efficiency found in chapter two, in chapter three, we endevour to understand what determines the severity to financial constraints the firm faces, particularly different information types, soft and hard. Based on the work of Beck et al. (2006), we employ a generealised ordered probit methodology to assess the marginal effects of different information types. In contrast with Beck et al. (2006), we find evidence against using the ordered probit over the generealised model, allowing a relaxing of the parallel lines assumption. In essence we find that, despite a documented over-reliance of hard information used in the consideration of loan applications Cole et al. (2004), soft information has important implications which are otherwise disregarded in the decision-making process. For completeness, we create two scales that assess the total number of problems firm report to face, as well as their aggregate severity. Just as is the case in considering only access to finance, we find that both information types are important to both severity and number of obstacles to operation that firms must endure. Following from this, in chapter four we employ two novel approaches to construct a index measures of obstacles that firms face. By using these approachs, namely generalised structural equation modelling (GSEM), empirical Bayes prediction and polychoric principal component analysis, we construct two measure of firm obsta- cles that are manifested within the 15 perceived obstacles measures that the survey measures, given the oversimplification that simpler arithmetic measures embody. In the construction of these measures, we find the perceived obstacles with the largest weighting are corruption, courts and business licensing, in line with some theoretical predictions made in the corruption and bribery literature (Guriev, 2004). Once con- structed, we use these measures, as well as a number of other firm characteristic to assess the effect on firm performance, namely firm sales. Initially, we find that the polychoric principal component measure to be statistically preferred to the empirical bayes prediction. For the sample as a whole, we find a negative significant negative linear relation between the firm’s placement on the scale and the level of firm sales. This persists also above the 40th percentile of firm sales, as well as in particular regions, sectors and firm sizes. Finally, chapter five will summarise the thesis.

Synthetic cathinones, a group of novel psychoactive substances, have appeared in drug markets worldwide, causing a range of serious health risks and social problems and hence are controlled by legislation in many countries. Intelligence of synthetic cathinones has become important for law enforcement agencies to prevent the spread of these products. However, literature findings about synthetic cathinones focused on identification and quantification of these compounds in their illicit products and biological specimens. Limited studies have been published concerning the intelligence of this group of novel psychoactive substances. Two analytical techniques, chiral and stable isotope analysis, were hypothesised to have the potential of providing intelligence of illicit synthetic cathinone products due to possible variations of relative enantiomeric abundances of synthetic cathinones and relative stable isotopic abundances of any chemicals among the products. Therefore, analytical methods were aimed to be developed in this thesis for performing the two types of analysis to study their potential of providing intelligence of illicit synthetic cathinone products. To study the potential of utilising chiral analysis for providing intelligence, two chiral analytical methods involving chromatography and mass spectrometry were investigated for their ability of determining relative enantiomeric abundances of some synthetic cathinones. In both methods, chiral derivatisation was performed before instrumental analysis. In one of the methods, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry was involved, and thirteen out of fourteen tested pairs of synthetic cathinone enantiomers could be baseline separated using gas chromatography after being derivatised by the reagent, (R)-(−)-α-methoxy-α-(trifluoromethyl)-phenylacetyl chloride. Eight out of the thirteen were further subjected to optimise the derivatisation and instrumental conditions for the method to perform quantitative chiral profiling of them. Method validation results showed that this method was able to quantify five out of the eight pairs of the individual enantiomers accurately and precisely across an approximately 10-fold dynamic range when a quadratic calibration model was used with appropriate deuterated synthetic cathinones as the internal standards. The limits of detection and quantification were ranged from 0.0075 to 0.025 μg and from 0.0225 to 0.05 μg respectively, which are low enough for illicit product analysis. The mass spectrometric method was also found to give the required specificity for illicit synthetic cathinone product analysis. In the other method, high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry was involved, and eleven out of fourteen tested pairs of synthetic cathinone enantiomers could be baseline separated using high performance liquid chromatography after being derivatised by the reagent, (1R)-(−)-menthyl chloroformate. Three out of the eleven, including two which were not enantio-separated well by the method involving gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, were further subjected to optimise the derivatisation and instrumental conditions for the method to perform quantitative chiral profiling of them. Method validation results showed that this method was able to quantify one of the three pairs of individual enantiomers accurately and precisely across an approximately 67-fold dynamic range when a quadratic calibration model was used with the exact deuterated analogues as the internal standard. The limits of detection and quantification were 0.001 μg and 0.015 μg respectively, which are low enough for illicit product analysis. The tandem mass spectrometric method was also found to be highly specific for illicit synthetic cathinone product analysis. Despite not a large set of illicit products were obtained as samples to study the potential of utilising chiral analysis for providing intelligence, eight illicit products were analysed to see if any synthetic cathinone with varying relative enantiomeric ratios could be found. All samples were analysed by the method involving GC-MS and were found to be synthetic cathinones. The identities of synthetic cathinones in the samples were further confirmed by 1-dimensional and 2-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Four different synthetic cathinones were identified, with two newly identified (not one of the fourteen which were studied in method development) members also being baseline enantio-separated by the method. Three samples which were identified as 4-methylmethcathinone, were found to be racemic and hence one could not exclude the possibility that they were produced from the same source. Due to limited number of samples obtained for the study, it is unclear if a wide range of variation of relative enantiomeric abundance of a synthetic cathinone can be observed among illicit products and hence whether chiral analysis could be useful for providing intelligence. Therefore, more samples collected from various known sources should be analysed in future to study the variation of relative enantiomeric abundances of synthetic cathinones. However, the applicability of one of the developed methods has been demonstrated and both gas chromatography and high performance liquid chromatography mass spectrometry are capable for quantitative chiral analysis of various synthetic cathinones. On the other hand, to study the potential of utilising stable isotope analysis for providing intelligence, analytical methods involving gas chromatography-isotope ratio mass spectrometry were developed, and caffeine, an adulterant commonly found in illicit synthetic cathinone products, was targeted for analysis to determine if stable isotope signature of it could be utilised to distinguish the products which contains it as an ingredient. Commercial sport supplements, which are readily available and may contain caffeine as an ingredient, were used to study the potential of this approach for intelligence of illicit synthetic cathinone products. Methods of carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis of caffeine in sport supplements were developed and validated. Both carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratio measurements for caffeine were reproducible and independent of the sample amount used for analysis within the dynamic range of about 10s - 100 mg. The extraction method was found to be efficient without causing stable isotope fractionation. In addition, method of hydrogen stable isotope analysis of caffeine was also investigated and found to be reproducible, although the method validation has not yet completed. Six brands of sport supplements were analysed by the methods. Relative carbon and nitrogen stable isotopic abundances of the caffeine in these products were found to agree with other findings of pure caffeine and various products containing caffeine. The six brands of sport supplements were all distinguishable from each other by comparing the caffeine carbon and nitrogen stable isotope signature, but supplements of a single brand were not distinguished. To conclude, the potential of utilising caffeine stable isotope signature for providing intelligence of illicit products which contain caffeine as an ingredient, was observed. Real illicit synthetic cathinone products, which contain caffeine, with known sources of production should be analysed in future to determine the usefulness of the approach.

Paternalistic employment relations have been a tradition supported by the government in Taiwan whilst trade unions were brought in to support political development and economic growth. The government promulgated a ‘harmony culture’ in order to control employment relations, and in the 1980s set up the campaign of the ‘factory as one family, factory as one school’ to encourage employers to inculcate paternalistic beliefs in their employees’ everyday working lives. Authority, benevolence and morality, the characteristics of paternalistic management, make workers docile and loyal to management and stunt the sense of collective identity. This qualitative research selects one primary case, a privatised enterprise SteelCo and its union Steel-U, to conduct participant observation, in-depth interviews with union officers, labour representatives and management, surveys of union members, and documentary analysis of official documents and meeting minutes. One supplementary case is a state-owned enterprise SugarCo with its union Sugar-U; this mainly involved in-depth interviews with union representatives and limited access to some documents. Corporate trade unions take advantage of the paternalistic tradition to gradually develop their organisations as recognised by employers. Implementing nonunion representation is a practice of paternalistic ideology, offering trade unions another platform on which to work with management. Workers identify both themselves and the trade union as parts of the enterprise family rather than seeing the union as an agent of collectivity. The union has to be a service provider offering welfare and benefits to attract members before triggering any mobilisation. To conclude, paternalism has helped corporate trade unions to establish themselves in state-owned and privatised workplaces, and empowered trade unions to engage legitimately, effectively and autonomously in workplace affairs. To revitalise themselves from the paternalistic ideology, trade unions are expected to take the route of partnering unionism with the manipulation of nonunion representation in a top-down process of shaping labour’s collective identity.

In this thesis, higher derivative theories and constrained dynamics are investigated in detail. In the first part of the thesis, we discuss how the Ostrogradski instability emerges in non-degenerate higher derivative theories in the context of a one-dimensional point particle where the position of the particle is a function only dependent on time. We show that the instabilities can only be removed by the addition of constraints if the original theory’s phase space is reduced. We then generalize this formalism to the most general higher derivative gravity theory where the action is not only linearly dependent on the Ricci scalar but also the quadratic curvature invariants in four-dimensional spacetime. We find that the instabilities can be removed by the judicious addition of constraints at the quadratic level of metric fluctuations around Minkowski and de Sitter backgrounds while the dimensionality of the original phase space is reduced. The constrained higher derivative gravity theory is ghost free as well as preserves the renormalization properties of higher derivative gravity, at the price of giving up the Lorentz invariance. In the second part of the thesis, we study the spherically symmetric static solution of a class of two scalar-field theory, where one of them is a Lagrange multiplier enforcing a constraint relating the value of the other scalar field to the norm of its derivative. We find the spherically symmetric static solution of the theory with an exponential potential. However, when we investigate the stability issue of the solution, the perturbation with the odd type symmetry is stable, while the even modes always contain one ghostlike degree of freedom.

Glucagon-like peptide-2 (GLP-2) is a pleiotropic peptide secreted in the human intestine with known intestinotrophic properties beneficial in conditions like short bowel syndrome (SBS); a condition characterized by malabsorption of both fluid and nutrients. Left untreated, SBS can lead to dehydration, malnutrition, and weight loss. Teduglutide, a long acting analogue of GLP-2, has been used in multiple clinical studies to elucidate its trophic properties. Murine studies however have also shown that GLP-2 inhibits pro-inflammatory cytokines raising the possibility of an anti-inflammatory property and its potential use in intestinal inflammatory conditions; in particular inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Dendritic cells (DC) play a central role in the initiation and regulation of the immune system. They bridge the innate and adaptive immune systems and are unique in their ability to activate naïve T cells as well as dictate the type of T-cell immunity. We hypothesized that GLP-2 has an immunomodulatory role and exert this action via DC. Toxic effects of GLP-2 peptide on human DC in-vitro have not previously been experimented. Our experiments showed that GLP-2 did not have a toxic effect on DC at 1pM, 1nM and 1μM concentrations and hence we were subsequently able to look at the effects of GLP-2 on human DC phenotype and function. Using whole blood and intestinal biopsies from healthy volunteers, we obtained a population of enriched low density cells (LDC) which offered a novel and 'physiological' model for DC. These cells were labelled with appropriate fluorochromes and assayed by a flow cytometer. We established that DC incubated overnight with GLP-2 had a reduced intensity ratio of HLA DR and an increased expression of CD14 in a dose dependent way compared with controls. The expression of co-stimulatory molecule CD86 was also higher in the treated DC. This phenotypic change suggests that GLP-2 modulated DC into an immature state although still able to stimulate T-cell proliferation. Ongoing cytokine production of IFN-γ and IL-12 from healthy blood DC was inhibited by GLP-2 however only cytokine production of IFN-γ from intestinal lamina propria DC was inhibited. These findings suggest that GLP-2 may induce a 'homeostatic' or 'immuno-tolerant' state and block Th1 cytokines in DC. Functional experiments confirmed that GLP-2 modulated DC enhanced T cell proliferation although this occurred only with intestinal DC. GLP-2 conditioned DC also functionally affected the cytokine profile of T cells by reducing the cytokines IFN-γ in both human blood and intestinal DC and IL-12 in only the latter. Hence our human DC in-vitro findings mirror some of the results found in murine studies showing GLP-2 effects on blocking Th1 cytokines. The results suggest that GLP-2 has an immunoregulatory effect and that the mechanism of action may possibly involve direct effects on DC. GLP-2 therefore is able to modulate DC characteristics and function leading to future application as an immunotherapy for inflammatory diseases.

Cast in the shadow of the soldier-poets of the First World War, the Civilian poets of the Crimean War (1854-56) have long been dismissed as ill-informed patriots. Challenging this long-standing assumption, this thesis argues that Crimean War poetry constitutes a distinctive category of war poetry which should be studied in its own right, and that reading a civilian’s war poem requires a careful consideration of the poet’s engagement with the epistemological, ethical and formal implications of dealing with war and suffering at several removes. For mid-nineteenth-century critics and poets the distant war in the Crimea was not only a media war but also a literary one, during which they drew on established traditions and forms to negotiate with revised conceptions of the role and genre of war poetry. These conceptions were in turn being constantly updated and contested by modern forms of reportage, particularly telegraphic dispatches and photographs. This thesis considers the artistic endeavours of a wide range of civilian poets including Alfred Lord Tennyson, his friend Franklin Lushington, the ‘Spasmodic’ Sydney Dobell, the working-class Chartist Gerald Massey, the Punch contributor Tom Taylor, the satirist Robert Brough and anonymous poets whose works appeared in newspapers, journals and magazines at the time. In doing so, it seeks to provide fresh, historically nuanced readings of the cultural impact and legacy of their poetic output. This thesis also argues for a differentiation between early and late poetic responses. Burdened with their knowledge of the suffering caused by their government’s mismanagement of the war, civilian poets from January 1855, set out to challenge established conventions of war poetry and experiment with sophisticated poetic forms other than the lyric. They drew on a range of formal resources, including the sonnet, satires and dramatic monologue to write new kinds of documentary, questioning, or even satirical war poetry. As such, their poetic responses were not intended to arouse readers’ patriotic sentiment and to advocate the government’s military campaign as did traditional patriotic poetry, but to perform a wide variety of political critiques- to challenge the political elite’s prosecution of the war and the dominant class system; to commemorate the bodily pain of the wounded; to give voice to the emotional suffering of civilians remaining at home during the war; to ease the public’s anxiety about the welfare of soldiers’ families, and to explore the trauma of war.

Metamaterials display unusual electromagnetic properties, such as, a negative effective permeability and negative effective permittivity. This has sparked much interest due to possibility of negative refraction which was later confirmed by experiments. The ability of magnetically coupled resonant circuits to display an effective permeability lead to the discovery of magneto-inductive waves. These waves are only supported on arrays of magnetically coupled resonant circuits. Research into magneto-inductive waves has been largely concentrated on their use in filters and their potential use in magnetic resonance imaging. However, some work has proposed the use of magneto-inductive waveguides as a data transfer medium. This report builds on previous work which found that an optimum existed for terminal-waveguide coupling, and aims to investigate the application of magneto-inductive waves in data transfer systems. A brief overview of the topic is given along with a description of the underlying characteristics. Factors that affect the capacity of magneto-inductive wave data transfer systems, such as inter element coupling, were identified. Two novel structures, both with the intent of increasing the bandwidth via different methods, are studied. One, by making a pseudo one-dimensional channel from a two-dimensional structure, and the other by using a dual-layer design to increase the coupling between adjacent elements. Both systems are modelled, using simple circuit theory and the impedance matrix method, and a comparison between simulated behaviour and experimental observation was made. There is discussion about the differences between experiment and simulation as well as their limitations. Magneto-inductive wave data transfer systems are eventually expected to support multiple terminals and as previous research only considered two-terminal systems, an investigation into the response of a one- and two-dimensional system with a blocking terminal was undertaken. The system was modelled, again using simple circuit theory and the impedance matrix method, and simulation and experiment were compared. As a whole, the simulations showed good agreement with experiments, after some initial adjustments. Both one- and two-dimensional systems showed that their performance was not severely effected by a blocking terminal. This suggests that magneto-inductive waveguides could support more terminals.

The current study examines the effect of two methods of vocabulary instruction on writing: reading-based vocabulary instruction and writing-based vocabulary instruction. The two methods were compared on their impact on Taiwanese college students' writing quality, number of target words used, receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledge. Participants were 84 first-year ) technological college students, who were taught 75 target words over five weeks, receiving either writing-based or reading-based instruction. Reading-based instruction, learning vocabulary from a receptive approach, consisted of receptive learning activities including copying words, translation activities from L2 to L l , choosing and matching activities. Writing-based instruction, learning vocabulary from a productive approach, consisted of learning vocabulary through word pairs, translation activities from Ll to L2, sentence writing and story writing activities. Outcomes were measured on task of writing quality on pre and post picture-based story writing which was scored using two kinds of writing rubrics, number of target words used in post picture-based story writing tasks, receptive vocabulary knowledge as assessed by using a multiple-choice test and productive vocabulary knowledge assessed by using a sentence completion test. Students' pre and post writing attitude and perception toward the two learning methods after treatment were also compared. The findings suggest that the writing-based instruction may be a more effective method than reading-based instruction of improving writing quality and developing productive vocabulary knowledge. Students who received the writing-based instruction achieved higher scores on tests of writing quality and sentence completion, while no differences were found between groups in receptive vocabulary knowledge and writing attitude. The main implication is that learning vocabulary from a writing-based approach for writing may improve writing quality better than a reading-based approach.

This study is aimed to investigate Taiwanese senior high school teachers’ motivation toward teaching tasks across different subjects. The focus is to examine whether there are differences in teacher motivation toward five teaching tasks: class preparation, teaching, evaluation of students, classroom management, and administrative tasks, across five subjects: Chinese, English, social studies, maths, and science. A total of 283 practising teachers in 11 senior high schools located in northern Taiwan completed a questionnaire adapted from the Work Tasks Motivation Scale for Teachers (Fernet et al., 2008). The collected quantitative data was analysed by computing descriptive statistics and inferential statistics which included two-way ANOVA. Thirty teachers were involved in the qualitative data collection using semi-structured interviews. The phenomenographic method was used to analyse the interview data, to uncover the qualitatively different ways in which teachers experience and conceptualise teaching and learning. The findings from the quantitative analyses showed that, in general, teachers had a relatively high level of autonomous motivation and a moderately high level of controlled motivation toward the five teaching tasks. There were significant differences in (1) intrinsic motivation toward class management, (2) identified regulation toward class preparation, and (3) introjected regulation toward class preparation and teaching across the five subjects. No significant differences in external regulation and amotivation toward the five teaching tasks across five subjects were found. In contrast, there were significant differences in the five types of motivation (intrinsic motivation, identified regulation, introjected regulation, external regulation, and amotivation) toward the five different teaching tasks across the five subject areas. The findings from both the quantitative and qualitative analyses were integrated in order to answer research question 2: Are there differences in the five types of motivation toward teaching across five subjects? The results showed that: 1) teachers of Chinese, social studies, and English might have a tendency to have a higher level of introjected regulation toward teaching; 2) teachers of maths and science tended to have a lower level of introjected regulation toward teaching; 3) science teachers might have an inclination to have intrinsic motivation toward teaching; and 4) English teachers were apt to have external regulation toward teaching. It is recommended that government policy makers, educational reformers, school principals, administrators, and teachers should consider the potential influence of Chinese culture, the social and working context, subject areas, and teaching tasks on teachers’ levels and types of motivation. It is also recommended that they consider the nuances of teachers’ conceptions of teaching and learning across subjects when implementing educational reforms. Finally, the influence of Confucian culture on teachers’ work motivation and conceptions of teaching and learning calls for more exploration, as this study only provides preliminary evidence on the existing work motivation and conceptions of teaching and learning held by teachers in Taiwan.

This study aimed to explore university undergraduates’ experiences of student involvement in assessment (SIA). Based on Biggs’ 3P model of student learning, this study focused on students’ experiences prior to SIA, during SIA and after SIA in three Business and Management modules. Applying this framework, different practices of involving students in assessment (peer assessment, self assessment or self designed assessment) were studied from the perspectives of the students concerned. Unlike other studies that normally test to what extent the designed outcomes of SIA have been met, the goal of this research was to reveal the inside picture of how students were coping with those SIA tasks and their learning. This picture was outlined from students’ perceptions of SIA, the main factors that might influence students’ engagement with SIA, and students’ reflections on SIA practice in the particular module. This study adopted mixed research methods with sequential explorative design. It employed the ETLA (Environment of Teaching, Learning and Assessment) questionnaire and follow up semi-structured interviews. There were in total 251 valid questionnaire responses from students and 18 valid student interviews. The data were collected from three undergraduate Business and Management degree modules in which different strategies were used to involve students in assessment. The three innovative modules were all from Scottish universities in which assessment practices were being re-engineered by involving students in assessment. Two of the modules had participated in the REAP (Re-engineering Assessment Practice) project. However, they were different from each other in terms of the way in which they involved students in assessment and the level or extent of student involvement in assessment that was entailed. The report and analysis of the findings has taken three main forms. First, the module context including the teaching, learning and assessment environment and student learning approaches and satisfactions in the particular module were compared and analysed using the questionnaire data. The results showed a strong association between the elements in the teaching and learning environment and student learning approaches. They also indicated that the quality of teaching, feedback and learning support played significant roles in the quality of student learning. Secondly, an analysis of the interview data was undertaken to examine why and how students would learn differently in different module contexts with different SIA practices, and how students were coping with their learning in the SIA tasks concerned. In addressing these questions, students’ previous experiences in SIA, and knowledge about SIA, peers’ influence, teachers’ support and training for SIA, interaction between and among students and teachers, the clarity of the module objectives and requirements and learning resources were found to be the major factors that might influence students’ engagement in the SIA. Additionally, the salient learning benefits and challenges of SIA as perceived by students were explored. Thirdly, based on the preceding findings, the analysis of each module aimed to further consider in what way the three modules differed from each other with respect to SIA practices, and how students responded in the three different module contexts in terms of their engagement with SIA. These three forms of analysis made it possible to gain a rich understanding of students’ experiences of SIA that could also feed into a consideration of what kind of support the students might need in order to better engage them into the SIA and better prepare them for life-long learning.

This thesis presents a mathematical formulation of informational inhomogeneity in financial markets, with emphasis on its impact on asset volatility, the notion of information extraction, and the role of information providers. We begin with a brief review of the BHM framework, which models the market filtration by an information process consisting of a signal and a noise term, such that the signal-to-noise ratio is determined by the information flow rate. Motivated by the observations that valuable information is rarely circulated homogeneously across financial markets, and that the information flow rate is typically random, we introduce, in the first part of the thesis, an extension of the BHM approach that leads to the simplest class of stochastic volatility models. In this extended framework we derive closed form expressions: for (a) asset price processes; (b) pricing formulae for options; and (c) option deltas. We show that the model can be calibrated to fit volatility surfaces reasonably well, and that it can be used effectively to model information manipulation. In the second part we introduce a framework for the valuation of information. In particular, a new formulation of the utility-indifference argument is introduced and used as a basis for pricing. We regard information as a quantity that converts a prior distributions into a posterior distributions. The amount of information can thus be quantified by relative entropy. The key to our theory is to equate the maximised a posterior utility with the a posterior expectation of the utility of the a priori optimal strategy. This formulation leads to one price for a given quantity of upside, and another for a given quantity of downside information. Various intuitive, as well as counterintuitive implications (for example, price of information is not necessarily an increasing function of the volume of information) of our theory are discussed in detail.

Platinum(IV) complexes are usually inert and stable compounds which can be photoactive pro-drugs to produce Pt(II) species with promising anti-cancer activity. Studies of the photochemistry of Pt(IV) complexes by time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) and spectroscopic methods show close agreement. Broad exploration of cis/trans geometries, trans influences, the nature of the OR− and (pseudo)halogen ligands, electron-withdrawing/donating/ delocalizing substituents on the N-ligands, and intramolecular H-bonds shows that (1) the design of platinum(IV) complexes with intense bands shifted towards longer wavelengths (~330 nm) can be achieved by introducing intramolecular Hbonds involving the OH ligands and 2-hydroxyquinoline or by iodido ligands, (2) mesomeric electron-withdrawing substituents on pyridine result in low-energy absorption with significant intensity in the visible region, and (3) the distinct makeup of the molecular orbitals in electronic transitions for cis/trans-{Pt(N3)2} isomers result in different photoproducts. In general, the comparison of the optimised geometries shows that Pt(IV) complexes with longer Pt−L bonds are more likely to undergo photoreduction with longer-wavelength light. Complex trans, trans, trans-[Pt(N3)2(OH)2(NH3)(4-nitropyridine)] was first synthesised. The experimental UV-Vis spectrum in aqueous solution correlates well with the intense band in the computed spectrum whereas the overlay in the low-energy absorption region can be improved by a solvent model. This combined computational and experimental study shows that TDDFT can be a design tool to tune the coordination environment for optimizing photoactive Pt(IV) compounds as anticancer agents without immediate need for synthesis. Additionally, molecular modeling is used to study DNA distortions induced by binding metal-containing fragments derived from cisdiamminodichloroplatinum( II) (cisplatin) and a new class of photoactive platinum anticancer drugs. Ligand field molecular mechanics (LFMM) parameters for Pt– guanine interactions are derived and validated against a range of experimental structures from the Cambridge Structural Database, published quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) structures of model Pt-DNA systems and additional DFT studies. LFMM gives a good description of the local Ptguanine coordination at a fraction of the computational cost of QM/MM methods. The force field is then used to develop protocols for ligand field molecular dynamics (LFMD) simulations using experimentally characterised bifunctional DNA adducts involving both an intra- and an interstrand crosslink of cisplatin as a prelude to studying the interaction of trans-{Pt(py)2}2+ (P, py = pyridine), the major photoproduct of the novel platinum(IV) complex trans,trans,trans- [Pt(N3)2(OH)2(py)2] (17), with the DNA duplex dodecamer, d(C1C2T3C4T5C6G7T8C9T10C11C12)• d(G13G14A15G16A17C18G19A20G21A22G23G24). Based on the observed formation of a trans species when 17 is photoreduced in the presence of 5’-guanosine monophosphate plus the major-groove binding mode of the monofunctional complex cis-{Pt(NH3)2(py)}2+, P is proposed to coordinate to G7 and G19. This P-DNA adduct has a widened minor groove at one end of the platinated site and deepened minor groove at the opposite end, and exhibits a global bend of ~67° and an unwinding of ~20°. Brabec et al. subsequently demonstrated experimentally that such interstrand GG crosslinks can form as a result of the photoactivation of 17 in the presence of DNA. Such cross-links offer possibilities for specific protein–DNA interactions and suggest possible mechanisms to explain the high potency of this photoactivated complex.

This thesis investigates the manner in which an understanding of the spatial nature of the contemporary lyric poem (broadly reducible to the poem as and the poem of space) combines with voicing and affect in the act of reading poetry to create a third way in which space operates in the lyric: the ‘vocalic space’ of the voiced lyric poem. Together with the poem as and of space, the vocalic space of the contemporary lyric poem gives way to an enunciating I and eye with which we, as reader, identify and which we voice, in a process of ‘affective mapping’. Voice, and the spaces the I/eye of the contemporary lyric poem visualises and articulates, is affective, contested, and multiple. Visual and vocalic identification with the voice of the poem through this free, fragmented, or multiple, I/eye leads us to understand more fully the poem on its own terms. The chapters of this thesis offer readings of John Montague’s The Rough Field, Thomas Kinsella’s A Technical Supplement, Kathleen Jamie’s This Weird Estate, and Alice Oswald’s Dart, as well as the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn and Mimi Khalvati, in order to investigate the implication of this thesis on the way we read, voice, and analyse contemporary British lyric poetry. The work of each poet offers different perspectives on perception, place, and space, and different engagements with the voiced and textual spaces of poetry, from the more formal poetics of Heaney, Jamie, and Gunn, to the experiments with text and image of Montague, Kinsella, and Jamie, the use of different languages by Montague, Jamie, and Khalvati, and the manipulation of the space of the page and angle of poetic vision and voice by Montague, Khalvati, and Oswald. The chapters work almost chronologically from The Rough Field (1972) to Dart (2002) with an emphasis on the importance of space, voice, and affect to the readings of the poems and poets in question.

An investigation on the motion responses of a Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel moored in irregular waves has been carried out based on both frequency- and time-domain approaches. In the frequency-domain approach a three-dimensional panel method was employed in order to calculate the first-order hydrodynamic forces and moments such as added masses, potential damping and wave excitation forces and moments and of the resulting the first-order motions and mean second-order forces and moments on the vessel in six degrees of freedom behaviour. A spectral analysis was carried out in order to estimate both the significant and the extreme values of the first-order motions. Additionally Pinkster’s approximation was used to find the mean-square values of slow drift motions, in order to calculate wave-induced extreme excursions and the resulting tensions on the mooring lines of the vessel. Two different methods were used in the time-domain approach for undertaking a mooring analysis. One method used a fast practical time-domain technique that calculates the first-order motion responses in random waves based on the frequency-domain response amplitudes and simulated seas, and also solves the uncoupled second-order motion responses of the FPSO induced by second-order forces, based on Newman’s approximation in irregular seas. The other method is by solving six coupled equations of motion based retardation functions transformed from potential damping for the FPSO and induced by the first-order and second-order wave excitations in random seas. The results of the wave-induced extreme excursions and the mooring line tensions obtained by means of the frequency- and time-domain methods are compared and discussed. As the selected FPSO is operating in deep water, the effect of the mooring line inertia may be significant. The equations of motion of line dynamics were formulated and numerically solved to investigate the importance of line dynamics for deep water mooring. Comparisons between the results of the line tensions both with and without the effects of line dynamics are made and discussed.

Cellular and molecular mechanisms of postembryonic muscle fibre recruitment were investigated in zebrafish (Danio rerio L.), a standard animal model for developmental and genetic studies. Distinct cellular mechanisms of postembryonic muscle fibre recruitment in fast and slow myotomal muscles were found. In slow muscle, three overlapping waves of stratified hyperplasia (SH) from distinct germinal zones sequentially contributed to a slow and steady increase in fibre number (FN) through the life span. In fast muscle, SH only contributed to an initial increase of FN in early larvae. Strikingly, mosaic hyperplasia (MH) appeared in late larvae and early juveniles and remained active until early adult stages, accounting for >70% of the final fibre number (FFN). The molecular regulation of postembryonic muscle fibre recruitment was then studied by characterising myospryn and cee, two strong candidate genes previously identified from a large scale screen for genes differentially expressed during the transition from hyperplastic to hypertrophic muscle phenotypes. Zebrafish myospryn contained very similar functional domains to its mammalian orthologues, which function to bind to other proteins known to regulate muscle dystrophy. Zebrafish myospryn also shared a highly conserved syntenic genomic neighbourhood with other vertebrate orthologues. As in mammals, zebrafish myospryn were specifically expressed in striated muscles. Zebrafish cee was a single-copy gene, highly conserved among metazoans, ubiquitously expressed across tissues, and did not form part of any wider gene family. Its protein encompassed a single conserved domain (DUF410) of unknown function although knock-down of cee in C. elegans and yeast have suggested a role in regulating growth patterns. Both myospyrn and cee transcripts were up-regulated concomitant with the cessation of postembryonic muscle fibre recruitment in zebrafish, indicating a potential role in regulating muscle growth. Furthermore, a genome-wide screen of genes involved in the regulation of postembryonic muscle fibre recruitment was performed using microarray. 85 genes were found to be consistently and differentially expressed between growth stages where muscle hyperplasia was active or inactive, including genes associated with muscle contraction, metabolism, and immunity. Further bioinformatic annotation indicated these genes comprised a complex transcriptional network with molecular functions, including catalytic activity and protein binding as well as pathways associated with metabolism, tight junctions, and human diseases. Finally, developmental plasticity of postembryonic muscle fibre recruitment to embryonic temperature was characterised. It involved transient effects including the relative timing and contribution of SH and MH, plus the rate and duration of fibre production, as well as a persistent alteration to FFN. Further investigation of FFN of fish over a broader range of embryonic temperature treatments (22, 26, 28, 31, 35°C) indicated that 26°C produced the highest FFN that was approximately 17% greater than at other temperatures. This finding implies the existence of an optimal embryonic temperature range for maximising FFN across a reaction norm. Additionally, a small but significant effect of parental temperature on FFN (up to 6% greater at 24 and 26°C than at 31°C) was evident, suggesting some parental mechanisms can affect muscle fibre recruitment patterns of progeny. This work provides a comprehensive investigation of mechanisms underlying postembryonic muscle fibre recruitment and demonstrates the power of zebrafish as an ideal teleost model for addressing mechanistic and practical aspects of postembryonic muscle recruitment, especially the presence of all major phases of muscle fibre production in larger commercially important teleost species.

This thesis incorporates a study of the syntactic distribution and pragmatic properties of empty pronouns in Mandarin Chinese (Chinese in short) from the point of view of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). With reference to various accounts of Chinese empty pronouns by previous researchers (e.g., J. Huang 1984; Y. Huang 1995; Pan and Hu 2000) and the problems with their analyses, we offer a conjunctive approach to capture how Chinese zero anaphora is constrained at the level of syntax and the level of pragmatics. A series of syntactic rules are proposed and every occurrence of Chinese empty pronouns must strictly obey these absolute, inviolable syntactic constraints. Intersententially, discourse-dependent pragmatic conditions based on Lambrecht’s (1994) information-structure theory form the second part of our two-way characterization of Chinese empty pronouns. Lastly, we present a comparison between the case study of empty pronouns in Japanese by Kameyama (1985) and our current study of empty pronouns in Chinese, and demonstrate two distinctive pro-drop phenomena. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the notion of pro-drop, types of empty pronouns identified in Chinese, and the theoretical frameworks assumed in this study. Chapter 2 reviews three different previous analyses of Chinese empty pronouns, discusses the problems each account suffers, and promotes an integrating account which takes both syntax and pragmatics into consideration. Chapter 3 investigates the syntactic distribution of Chinese zero anaphora, whilst Chapter 4 provides a contrasting pragmatic characterization, followed by an examination of our proposal by testing it in naturalistic data and then a comparative study of Chinese and Japanese empty pronouns in Chapter 5. Finally, Chapter 6 summarizes the previous chapters, points out relevant issues that are not covered in this thesis but which could be research topics for future investigation, and reiterates how LFG is useful in this present work.

This thesis concerns the development of new types of solvent extractants for use in the hydrometallurgical recovery of base metals, and addresses the ligand design features which are needed to control the strength, transport efficiency and selectivity of these extractants. Chapter 1 provides background on the development of extractive metallurgy, e.g. pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy, and introduces the history, basic terminology and various processes and reagents involved. Solvent extraction as a hydrometallurgical technique to achieve the recovery of base metals is discussed in most detail. The design criteria of extractants are highlighted as the focus of the whole thesis. Chapter 2 investigates the potential of salicylaldehyde hydrazones as cation exchange extractants for hydrometallurgical recovery of copper, and studies substituent effects, e.g. electronic, steric and particularly “buttressing” of ligand-ligand hydrogen bonding, on the strength and efficacy of the extractants. A series of 3-substituted (X) and N-substituted salicylaldehyde hydrazones has been developed. Solvent extraction experiments show that the 3-substitution can increase the distribution coefficient of the methylhydrazone for copper extraction by more than three orders of magnitudes along the series (X) Me < OMe ≤ H < Br < NO2. Both the phenol acidity and intermolecular hydrogen bonding are significantly influenced by the 3-substituent as judged by a systematic NMR study on the solution speciation of the free ligands. Electron-withdrawing groups which also act as hydrogen bond acceptors (X = NO2 or Br) are particularly effective in enhancing the strength of the methylhydrazones. Compared to the commercially applied salicylaldoximes, the hydrazones are weaker extractants, and the strength varies in the order: oximes > methylhydrazones > phenylhydrazones. This order probably arises from a combination of variations in the phenol acidities and the strength of the hydrogen bonding motifs, which are also probed in the free ligands using NMR techniques. Chapter 3 considers reagents capable of extracting metal salts and deals with the development of polytopic salicylaldimine ligands bearing pendant tertiary amine groups for the hydrometallurgical recovery of zinc chloride. These extractants show extremely high transport efficiency of metal salts with more than two moles of ZnCl2 loaded per mole of ligand, and high chloride over sulfate selectivity in solvent extraction experiments. The unusual multiple loading suggests the extraction of chlorozincate as anion species, which is supported by the elemental analysis and ESI MS spectra of the formed complexes. The zinc chloride dependent extraction and stripping experiments further indicate that the extraction process is controlled by the Cl- activities in the aqueous solutions. 1H NMR studies show that two different complexes are successively formed in solution as the ligand to zinc stoichiometry is increased to 1L : 2ZnCl2, with the first formed by extracting the zinc cation at low ZnCl2 concentrations and the second likely resulting from the further extraction of chlorozincate at high ZnCl2 concentrations. An extraction mechanism is proposed in which a tritopic assembly [ZnLCl2] forms by binding the Zn2+ cation with the N2O2 2- site of the “salen” type ligands and two Cl- anions with the protonated pendant amine groups and then a ditopic assembly [ZnL(ZnCl4)] forms by extracting the [ZnCl4]2- anion when the reagent is contacted with high tenor ZnCl2 feed. The possible formation of tritopic assemblies [ZnL(ZnCl3)2] accounts for Zn-loadings higher than 200%. The ligand design features such as the benefits of combining cation and anion binding sites in the same molecule are indicated by comparing the polytopic ligands with a series of dual host pairs of the salen ligand and hydrophobic amines. The polytopic ligands show potential for industrial application as ZnCl2 extractants. Finally chapter 4 focuses on the anion binding and selectivity involving simple anions and chlorometallates in solvent extraction by the polytopic ligands discussed in chapter 3 and their metal complexes. A novel and reliable method for chloride analysis in the presence of complexing metal cations has been developed using excess silver(I) to precipitate chloride and then analyze the silver content by ICP-OES technique. Multiple loadings of chloride are achieved by the polytopic ligands, which confirms the uptake of metal salt as ZnCl2, and is desirable for excellent material balances in hydrometallurgical processes. The anion binding of the copper-only complex [Cu(L-2H)] supports the proposed extraction mechanism by indicating that one mole of zinc is extracted in the likely form of chlorozincate anions when the cation binding site is occupied by Cu2+. The polytopic ligands and their copper-only complexes [Cu(L-2H)] show the same anion selectivity following the order [ZnCl4]2- > Cl- > SO4 2-, which can be explained by the hydration energies of these anions. Extractions from ZnCl2, ZnSO4, Zn(NO3)2 or mixed feed solutions indicate that the zinc transport efficiency is also dependent on the nature of counter anions.

This thesis examines the constitution of Taiwan's dance in higher education by focusing on the changes it has undergone to achieve and maintain its institutional status. Historical shifts that had taken place in dance in higher education are studied in four areas: the social value of dance; political interference, the influence of foreign cultures, and the violence of power relations. Recent changes are examined and analysed in primary and secondary data using interdisciplinary methods from historical and cultural studies. Pierre Bourdieu's five key concepts: field, agent, habitus, forms of capital, and symbolic violence, provide the analytical framework for analysing the motivation, process and consequences of change. In addition, methods of social, cultural and historical analysis contribute to the discussion of the historical constitution of dance as an institutional disciplinary specialisation and to the consideration of problematic issues in the present. Particular attention is given to inequalities created by control of power-knowledge in dance in Taiwan's higher education. First-hand material has been gathered from interviews and the personal experience of the researcher. This thesis first draws on dance's history before the establishment of dance in higher education since the late nineteenth century, to provide a background analysis of changes in political, cultural and social practices, which have affected people's attitudes and aesthetic judgement toward dance. Then it moves on to discuss the significant changes that have taken place in dance in higher education in two periods: the martial law period and the post-martial law period. Two case studies were carried out to provide better understanding of the effects of a government controlled student mission and the educational reforms of dance in the higher education field.

The clearance of neurotoxic amyloid beta (Aβ) from the brain represents a novel therapeutic target for Alzheimer's disease (AD). The ability of two blood-brain barrier (BBB) drug transporters, P-glycoprotein (P-gp) and the breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP), to transport Aβ was investigated using a human brain endothelial cell (BEC) line, hCMEC/D3. P-gp expression by hCMEC/D3 cells was stable over a high passage number, polarised on the apical membrane, consistent with the blood side in vivo, and comparable, albeit slightly reduced, to primary isolated human BECs. The P-gp inhibitors tariquidar and vinblastine prevented the efflux of rhodamine 123 from hCMEC/D3 cells, indicative of functional P-gp expression. hCMEC/D3 cells therefore constituted a suitable model to investigate P-gp substrate interactions in vitro. P-gp, and to a lesser extent BCRP, inhibition, increased the net influx and decreased the efflux of 0.1 nM¹²⁵ I Aβ 1-40 in hCMEC/D3 cells. Both P-gp and BCRP inhibition increased the apical-to-basolateral but not the basolateral-to-apical permeability of hCMEC/D3 cells to nM¹²⁵ I Aβ 1-40. This data is consistent with P-gp and BCRP, acting in vivo to prevent blood-borne Aβ peptides entering the brain but not to clear Aβ load from the brain.

This thesis initially presents the work carried out on the research hypothesis –agent-based simulation is better than traditional discrete-event modelling. To test this assertion, a comparison of these two modelling approaches is made by way of a case study. The scenario, a global repair operation of a fleet of civil jet engines, is a real lifecycle costing example which involves logistics and is typical of problems commonly modelled using either of these paradigms. To carry out the comparison, the method involved building a discrete-event model which matched the functions of an existing agent-based model as closely as possible. Rigorous control was applied during its implementation phase by way of formal code walkthroughs and model dynamic testing. Among the internal metrics, lines of code provided an estimate for model size while the McCabe Cyclomatic Number measured structural complexity. The external software quality of maintainability was derived from these metrics and estimated by modelling experts through Delphi sessions. The dynamic performance of each model was determined by the execution times of successfully completed simulation runs over a range of engine fleet sizes. This research went on to develop a hybrid approach (which is currently the subject of a Rolls-Royce patent application) which draws on the strengths of both agent and discrete-event paradigms. In order to combine agent roles and discrete event processes, a new model was implemented using a three-layered architecture. A full fleet simulation was developed using this hybrid approach. Although the code size is slightly larger and run times slightly longer than the conventional model, the thesis argues that, crucially, it is more maintainable as it reduces the conceptual gap between problem and model.

Success in association mapping of disease genes depends on knowledge of Linkage Disequilibrium (LD) structure in candidate regions. An LD map characterising such structures is constructed by making use of the Malecot model which describes the decline of LD with physical distance based on pairwise measures of association between SNPs. The HapMap project provides a valuable resource that can be used to construct genome-wide LD maps. However, the millions of SNPs in the HapMap data pose a heavy computational challenge. This difficulty can be resolved by excluding the very distant SNP pairs without losing map quality. Modern computational technology with parallel processing can be used to speed up the process of map construction. A composite likelihood approach employing LD maps for association mapping has successfully localised several causal variants. An application to Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is described here. This approach, utilising the genome-wide LD map, is very suitable for genome-wide association studies.

Fracture mechanics has come a long way since the introduction of Hooke's law. The ability to predict the structural integrity of components or structures has improved significantly but there is still a need for improvement. A promising recent development in fracture analysis is the Crack Tip Opening Angle (CTOA) fracture criterion. It was developed to characterize the material fracture resistance of low constraint structures because the other more established fracture criteria such as K and J-integral were found to be unable to do so. The CTOA criterion hypotheses that for a given alloy, a constant CTOA value is obtained in the stable crack growth phase and this value can be used to characterise the crack resistance behaviour. However, CTOA has yet to be used extensively because there are doubts about CTOA being a true material property. This is because the exact definition of CTOA has yet to be agreed upon and the values are affected by various parameters which are discussed further in the report. There are also disagreements on the measurement techniques. This dissertation focuses predominantly on developing and evaluating experimental techniques used for CTOA characterisation. The materials used were aerospace AA2024T3 and an aluminium alloy supplied by Airbus. A range of tests were conducted to evaluate the mechanical and fracture properties of the alloys in a bid to find a correlation with CTOA. The measurement of CTOA was done using the optical method for· measuring crack edges, digital image correlation (DIC) for displacement measurements which CTOA is then derived and a grid technique which derives CTOA from gridline rotation. Results further suggest CTOA to be a material property but it also highlights the importance of measurement techniques due to its influence on CTOA. The techniques used were able to produce good quantities of consistent data which corresponded well to literature data. However, the conclusion of this study was that CTOA evaluation is not a straight forward process due to effects of constraints, fracture behaviour, crack initiation conditions and more importantly the different measurement techniques which can sometimes produce contradicting results due to its intrinsic nature or operator error.