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Due to the considerable impact of Orientalism in the 1990s, Chinese tropes began to be widely deployed in global luxury fashion brand collections. In the late twentieth century, following the success of ‘China style’ effects, the use of Chinese tropes was a dominant trend in emerging luxury Chinese branding practices. The deployment of Chinese tropes as representations of nationality in brand design has generated vigorous debate about the effectiveness of cultural translation. Edward Said (1994) has termed such an ideological ‘East’ as ‘Orientalism’ and claims that the Orient is ‘an integral part of European material civilisation and culture’ (Said, 1994, p.2). This phenomenon of the Chinese trope design continues to leave a visible mark in brand communications in the twenty-­‐first century. This research investigates the ways in which emerging luxury Chinese lifestyle fashion brands make use of Chinese tropes, symbols, and metaphors in branding practices within the context of the cultural, social, political, and economic changes in China from 1994 to 2014. This study attempts to construct visual taxonomies to examine the cultural expression of Chinese tropes in the material culture of China, generating a visual archive of Chinese identity interpretation. The study also draws upon multiple case studies of emerging luxury Chinese lifestyle fashion brands to investigate the ramifications and the perceived limitations of the practice of Chinese trope deployment and their relationship to a shift in Chinese identity caused by changing lifestyles. The thesis also challenges the notion of authenticity of ‘Chinese brand’ and ‘Made in China’ and highlights the need to redefine the assessment criteria of ‘country of origin’ for global luxury branding practices in the future.

This thesis investigates the adverse outcomes amongst survivors of childhood cancer using the British Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (BCCSS) and the Pancare Childhood and Adolescent Cancer Survivor Care and Follow-up studies (PCSF). The specific aims were to investigate (1) adverse outcomes up to 50 years of follow-up in survivors of Wilms’ tumour; (2) risks of hospitalisations due to renal morbidities in childhood cancer survivors; (3) risk of subsequent primary neoplasms arising in the digestive system in survivors of childhood cancer; and (4) adverse outcomes beyond 50 years of follow-up in survivors of heritable retinoblastoma. This thesis demonstrated that survivors of Wilms’ tumour are at substantial risk of premature mortality, particularly for those who have survived 30 years from original diagnosis. This particular group of survivors have the highest risk of hospitalisations due to renal morbidities, such as chronic renal failure, and subsequent primary neoplasms in specific organs in the lower digestive system. Survivors of heritable retinoblastoma who received external beam radiotherapy experienced an increased risk of subsequent primary neoplasms developing above the shoulder, whereas those who received brachytherapy were similar to those who did not receive any radiotherapy and did not experience an increased risk of subsequent primary neoplasms.

In this thesis, two topics in portfolio management have been studied: utility-risk portfolio selection and a paradox in time consistency in mean-variance problem. The first topic is a comprehensive study on utility maximization subject to deviation risk constraints. Under the complete Black-Scholes framework, by using the martingale approach and mean-field heuristic, a static problem including a variational inequality and some constraints on nonlinear moments, called Nonlinear Moment Problem, has been obtained to completely characterize the optimal terminal payoff. By solving the Nonlinear Moment Problem, the various well-posed mean-risk problems already known in the literature have been revisited, and also the existence of the optimal solutions for both utility-downside-risk and utility-strictly-convex-risk problems has been established under the assumption that the underlying utility satisfies the Inada Condition. To the best of our knowledge, the positive answers to the latter two problems have long been absent in the literature. In particular, the existence of an optimal solution for utility-semivariance problem, an example of the utility-downside-risk problem, is in substantial contrast to the nonexistence of an optimal solution for the mean-semivariance problem. This existence result allows us to utilize semivariance as a risk measure in portfolio management. Furthermore, it has been shown that the continuity of the optimal terminal wealth in pricing kernel, thus the solutions in the binomial tree models converge to the solution in the continuous-time Black-Scholes model. The convergence can be applied to provide a numerical method to compute the optimal solution for utility-deviation-risk problem by using the optimal portfolios in the binomial tree models, which are easily computed; such numerical algorithm for optimal solution to utility-risk problem has been absent in the literature. In the second part of this thesis, a paradox in time consistency in mean-variance has been established. People often change their preference over time, so the maximizer for current preference may not be optimal in the future. We call this phenomenon time inconsistency or dynamic inconsistency. To manage the issues of time inconsistency, a game-theoretic approach is widely utilized to provide a time-consistent equilibrium solution for dynamic optimization problem. It has been established that, if investors with mean-variance preference adopt the equilibrium solutions, an investor facing short-selling prohibition can acquire a greater objective value than his counterpart without the prohibition in a buoyant market. It has been further shown that the pure strategy of solely investing in bond can sometimes simultaneously dominate both constrained and unconstrained equilibrium strategies. With numerical experiments, the constrained investor can dominate the unconstrained one for more than 90% of the time horizon. The source of paradox is rooted from the nature of game-theoretic approach on time consistency, which purposely seeks for an equilibrium solution but not the ultimate maximizer. Our obtained results actually advocate that, to properly implement the concept of time consistency in various financial problems, all economic aspects should be critically taken into account at a time.

The current criteria and recommendations for assessing the acceptability of wind-induced building motion were largely established based on human perception thresholds and/or tolerance to wind-induced building motion. Therefore, they may not be able to ensure the performance of manual tasks is unaffected by wind-induced building motion. Few studies have investigated the effects of wind-induced building motion on manual task performance, and the findings of these studies are inconclusive. Hence the relationships between manual task performance and the wind-induced building motion and the mechanisms causing manual task performance degradation are yet to be explored and fully understood. Sopite syndrome describes a set of symptom centering around drowsiness due to exposure of healthy individuals to real or apparent motion. Recent studies have shown that symptoms of sopite syndrome are the most frequent manifestations of the effects of wind-induced building motion and decrease subjective work performance and objective cognitive task performance of building occupants. However, no study has investigated the effects of sopite syndrome on manual task performance. This thesis investigates the effects of low-frequency, low-acceleration motion and sopite syndrome on manual task performance based on a series of motion simulator experiments. Twelve low-frequency, low-acceleration motion conditions were generated using four frequencies (0.125, 0.25, 0.5, and 1 Hz) and three acceleration magnitudes (8, 16, and 30 milli-g) for both fore-aft and lateral directions. A continuous tracking task (CTT) was used as a paradigm to investigate the effects of the motion on manual task performance. Aiming accuracy of the CTT is the dependent measure. Twenty (10 males and 10 females) participants completed the experiment under fore-aft motion conditions and another 20 participants (10 males and 10 females) under lateral motion conditions. A Motion Sickness Assessment Questionnaire (MSAQ) was used to measure motion sickness severity, in particular sopite syndrome severity, of the participants before and after the exposure to the motion conditions. Activation levels of soleus (SOL) and tibialis anterior (TA), the lower leg muscles involved in maintaining balance in the fore-aft direction, were measured using electromyography (EMG) to provide supporting evidences for the effects of motion and sopite syndrome on manual task performance from a physiological perspective. Both acceleration and frequency were found to contribute to the degradations of manual task performance. Acceleration shows a strong inverse relationship with manual task performance; manual task performance decreases as the acceleration increases from 8 milli-g to 30 milli-g. The acceleration effect is attributable to an increase in inertial force. The activation levels of the SOL and TA also increase as acceleration increases from 8 milli-g to 30 milli-g. Evidently, the increase in inertial force can, in turn, induce visual impairment, disrupt balance, increase vibration breakthrough, and/or trigger motion sickness or sopite syndrome. In contrast, frequency has a complex nonlinear relationship with manual task performance. The worst manual task performance was measured at 0.5 Hz among the test frequencies ranging from 0.125 Hz to 1 Hz. This frequency effect is associated with the frequency response characteristic of the human body. Body sway increases as frequency approaches the resonant frequency of a standing human, which occurs at near 0.5 Hz. The activation levels of SOL and TA increase as frequency increases from 0.125 Hz to approximately 0.5 Hz, then drop as frequency increases from 0.5 Hz to 1 Hz. This affirms that the body sways the most at 0.5 Hz. The increases in body sway can cause discomfort, divert attention resources from performing a manual task, and trigger anxiety that increases difficulty to response to manual tasks.

Cardiovascular disease and falls are common causes of morbidity and mortality in older people and the prevalence of both increases with age. Arterial stiffness is a predictor of adverse cardiovascular events and considered a marker of “vascular ageing”. The concept of vascular ageing has not been explored in relation to falls. A review of the literature on the epidemiology of falls including cardiovascular factors in falls and measurement of cardiovascular integrity was undertaken. This work set out to explore the possible relationships between cardiovascular factors and falls in older people living in the community. The aims of the study were to establish correlations between different cardiovascular measurements, cognition, cerebral structural changes and falls in older people. The participants in the study came from a longitudinal study (Memory and Ageing Study) which includes clinical and neuropsychological assessment, blood tests and cerebral magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures as part of its test battery. Participants were then invited for postural stability and cardiovascular assessment. A number of validated methods for measuring postural stability (falls risk and balance) and cardiovascular integrity were administered. Five hundred and thirty one participants, aged between 73 to 92 years, were assessed at baseline and then followed prospectively for falls over a 12 month period. Significant findings of the study include: 1. Arterial stiffness was found to correlate with postural stability. 2. In men, arterial stiffness was found to correlate with the following cognitive domains: processing speed, attention and executive function. 3. Arterial stiffness was higher among fallers. 4. Use of cardiovascular medications was not associated with falls, with the exception that fallers were taking fewer medications affecting the renin-angiotensin system. The study findings provide links between vascular ageing and falls by uncovering associations between arterial stiffness, postural stability, neuropsychological performance and falls. Clinically, they support the increasing trend to treat cardiovascular disease and hypertension in older people. Cardiovascular medication use in the older people appears not to increase the risk of falls and the use of medications affecting the renin-angiotensin system may decrease falls risk.