Strain Sensors Fabricated From Conductive Polymer Composites

Strain sensors are vital tools for ensuring the safety, performance, and efficiency of a wide range of systems and structures. There is a need for low cost yet highly sensitive strain sensors, as this is not available in the current commercial market. Conductive Polymer Composites (CPC) have the potential to fulfil this requirement due to their good processability, cost-effectiveness and tunable electrical properties. However, despite significant progress in recent years, there are still areas of CPC-based strain gauges which require further research before they can be used for practical applications. This thesis investigates carbon black and flexible epoxy resin (CB/epoxy) composites for use as strain sensors. The CB/epoxy composites are fabricated using a method which is low cost and easily scalable, and during environmental testing found to have a Temperature Coefficient of Resistance just three times the magnitude of traditional metallic strain sensors. The CB/epoxy composites are tested under cyclic strain and calculated to have a Gauge Factor (GF) up to eight times that of typical metallic strain gauges. Thin-film metallic strain gauges are also fabricated, analysed and tested under cyclic strain to provide a reference against conventional strain gauge technology. A design of a Rig for testing strain gauges under cyclic strain is also presented. A model for the electrical properties of the CPCs under strain is developed in order to give insight into the microscopic mechanisms that determine GF, offering a valuable potential tool for optimising CPC compositions to achieve enhanced performance. Currently few simulations exist for modelling the piezoresistive properties of CPCs. This thesis not only validates the potential of CPCs as a viable alternative to conventional strain gauges, but also lays the groundwork for further innovation in the design of highly-sensitive, cost-effective strain sensors

Gendered Spirituality within Female Monastic Space in Britain, c. 800-1300

This study seeks to explore the monastic spirituality of women in England from the early to high medieval periods, approximately 800-1300 CE, through the analysis of their material culture, primarily their books, bodies, and buildings – evidence of their existence and participation within monasticism. The foundation of this project is understanding how gender functioned within medieval female monasticism as such to influence and inform feminine spirituality. Constructing medieval ideas of gender within a monastic setting is crucial and it is not possible to do this without using the ideas of post-modern gender theorists. Yet it is a fine line to walk, analysing materials without imposing the modern on the medieval. The strategy is to acknowledge and understand the ‘mess’. Early within Gender Trouble, Butler states: ‘Gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts.’ This is especially true in the medieval context, where culturally accepted meanings of gender identities are often contradictory, even as simple binaries abound. By establishing relevant discourse on medieval conceptions of gender and sex – and also understanding how certain gender-based ideologies continued to inform the study of the period – fragments of female participation in the material culture of their own spirituality becomes visible

Forming Catholic Identity in Young People: Contingency, Agency and the Power of Family Life

This thesis argues that the formation of Catholic identity is not exclusively an institutional nor an innate process, but is co-produced by families and young people in a complex relationship with the institutional Church. It highlights the expertise and labour of Catholic families to contextualise catholicity within specific family, social and cultural settings; the agency and persistence of participants as they seek out the relational, affective Catholicity required to maintain their identity; and the ambiguous role of the institutional Church in balancing forces of innovation and tradition. The study reveals the processes of inheriting or choosing, normalising, enacting and imagining this identity in cycles of adaptation and innovation. Drawing Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Orsi into conversation to examine the interrelationship of structuring structures and improvisation in the data, I sketch three styles of Catholic parenting: spiritual apprenticeship, enforcing, and enabling. I then outline the range of participants’ responses and the surprising role of ambiguity and paradox in their religious lives. A capacious catholicity is revealed, centred around a loving relationship with God, capable of withstanding the shocks and challenges of adolescence, and more concerned with the doxa of their families and communities than the orthodoxy of the institutional Church. I argue that these daily micro-innovations contribute to Catholicism’s ability to adapt across time and space, raising questions about the complex role of the Church in managing processes of change while remaining recognisably Catholic. Developing an emic, non-normative Lived Catholicism approach during the research, I have argued that Catholic identity is far more contingent, diverse and locally produced than either sociologists of religion or the Church itself usually acknowledge. This research contributes to the wider discussion about the production of religious identity in young people, the future shape of the Catholic Church, and the complex relationship between religion and secular culture

Navigating the Cloud: Exploring Gamer Switching Behavior, Service Quality, and Service Failure Management in Cloud Gaming

This thesis investigates critical aspects of cloud gaming, focusing on gamer behavior, service quality measurement, and service failure management through three interrelated studies. The rapid adoption of cloud gaming represents a significant shift from traditional means of gaming, requiring gamers to adapt to a new paradigm where computation and storage are offloaded to cloud servers. Study 1 applies the Push-Pull-Mooring (PPM) model to explore the antecedents of gamers’ switching behavior from traditional gaming to cloud gaming. The findings highlight key push factors, such as rising hardware costs and the limitations of traditional gaming, as well as pull factors such as the convenience and cross-device compatibility of cloud gaming. The study also identifies significant mooring factors, including habitual behavior and emotional attachment to traditional gaming, which act as barriers to switching. Study 2 develops a specialized service quality measurement tool tailored for cloud gaming, expanding traditional service quality models to account for the unique demands of this highly technical service. The tool divides service quality into two dimensions: technical service quality and support service quality. The study validates this tool through empirical analysis, providing cloud gaming service providers with a systematic method for assessing and improving service performance across technical and support domains. Study 3 examines the impact of service failures in cloud gaming, utilizing Expectation-Disconfirmation Theory (EDT) and Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) theory. The study categorizes service failures into network disruptions, latency issues, and game crashes. It explores how these failures trigger emotional and cognitive responses that influence gamers’ decisions to continue using cloud gaming services. The results demonstrate that different types of failures provoke varying emotional and behavioral outcomes, with significant implications for user retention and service recovery strategies. Collectively, this thesis contributes to the fields of technology adoption, service quality assessment, and service failure management by expanding existing theoretical frameworks and providing practical insights for cloud gaming service providers. The research highlights the importance of understanding gamer motivations, optimizing service quality, and effectively managing service failures to ensure long-term user satisfaction and loyalty in the growing cloud gaming market

Self-Giving and Human Fulfilment: Critical Reflections on Self-giving in the Thought of Pope John Paul II in Dialogue with Psychology

Pope John Paul II is credited for introducing a long-awaited “heart” to the Church’s teaching on marriage through A Theology of the Body and its affirmation of spousal love. JPII’s emphasis on love made his defence of Humanae Vitae’s key teaching that marriage must be open to procreation more appealing and compelling to some than earlier papal expositions. I propose that JPII’s emphasis on spousal love was not the authentic affirmation of love that it appeared but rather an appealing distraction from the deep essentialism at the heart of his thinking. This essentialism did more than restate the primacy of procreation; it raised the stakes for compliance with papal teaching that marriage must be open to procreation by claiming it as the highest form of love, the closest exemplar in human experience of being formed into the image of the Trinity. Rooted in personalistic language uncommon to papal teaching, JPII’s self-claimed “integral approach” to self-giving as human fulfilment combined a form of Thomistic personalism with traditional papal teaching on natural law. JPII defended Humanae Vitae through a theology of self-giving by framing the inseparability of the ends of marriage outlined by Paul VI as the pinnacle of human fulfilment in total spousal self-giving. These claims were further supported by tying self-giving in both love and suffering with human flourishing. I propose that JPII’s chief concern in A Theology of the Body might not have been, as he claimed, to exposit and affirm spousal love, but instead to validate and extol Humanae Vitae. I draw on psychology to examine JPII’s empirical claims. Applying Carl Jung’s theory of individuation, I explore the role of wholeness in human realisation. Drawing on positive psychology, I challenge JPII’s reverence of suffering and corresponding neglect of positive emotions in orienting our lives towards the other

Investigating the Impact of Environment on the Galaxy Luminosity Function.

In this thesis, we present the DESI Y1 Bright Galaxy Survey (BGS) Luminosity Functions (LFs) in the $r$, $g$, $z$ and $w_1$-bands from $0.002 -15$. These LFs are in agreement with those presented in the literature. We further validate our results by using a range of methodologies ($1/V_{\textrm{max}}$, $1/ V_{\textrm{dc, max}}$, \gls{SWML}) to construct the LFs, which broadly agree with each other. We note some areas where further investigation is needed. This includes a disparity between the North and South LFs at the bright end, a potential need for a more complex evolutionary model, and the issue of imaging systematics at the faint end of the LF. Nevertheless, the small jackknife errorbars on our global LFs demonstrate that our results are well-constrained, and these errors will only become smaller with the release of the Y3 and Y5 BGS datasets. Moreover, we confirm that our methodology of dealing with the differing photometry in North and South is broadly successful. We extend this analysis by using the luminosity function to investigate the environmental dependencies of galaxies. In particular, we investigate how luminosity and colour depend on local density, and present our results here. These results agree well with prior results in the literature from GAMA, indicating that we have developed a successful methodology for dealing with boundary corrections and holes in the survey. Although the effective volume of the BGS survey is similar to the GAMA results due to boundary corrections, this will yield promising results on the Y3 and Y5 results which will be more complete and will have a much larger effective volume. Finally, we then use our methodology to generate $1/V_{\rm max}$ Stellar Mass Functions (SMFs). With these SMFs, we help to test and validate a new methodology called Photometric Objects Around Cosmic Webs (PAC). PAC was developed to estimate the excess projected density distribution of a spectroscopic catalogue by utilising the signal in the cross-correlation of faint galaxies from the Legacy photometric surveys with the brighter DESI BGS galaxies with known spectroscopic redshift. In doing so, PAC can estimate the SMF in a novel way, and yields results that agree with our $1/V_{\rm max}$ SMF above $10^9 M_{\odot}$ but currently differs at the low-mass end. Both our LF and SMF results serve as useful results that can act to better constrain and distinguish between different galaxy formation models

Writhing across the protein universe

The function of a protein is primarily determined by its specific 3D structure, which is itself informed by the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein. Thus, being able to predict the final 3D shape of a protein from its sequence is of vital importance to researchers. This thesis discusses methods for studying protein structure on various scales, motivated in large part by the development of Carbonara; a software for rapid refinement of protein structure based on experimental solution scattering data. This software fills the gap where machine learning methods such as AlphaFold are unable to produce predictions which accurately capture a proteins structure and dynamics in near native conditions in solution. The local geometry of a protein is well understood to be tightly constrained by its chemistry, we provide constraints on the super secondary and tertiary scale. To achieve this, we present a novel method for smoothing the protein’s backbone curve which produces a minimal representation of the underlying entanglement of its secondary structure elements. By studying the distribution of writhe for these smoothed backbone curves we find clear limits on their entanglement. We show that a large scale helical geometry is responsible for proteins which have maximal entanglement relative to this bound. We show that helical geometries are also dominant as a super secondary motif within proteins, linked to their structural and thermal stability. We show that there is a clear lower bound on the expected amount of absolute entanglement of the backbone as a function of its secondary structure. This insight was key to the development of Carbonara, with this lower bound acting as a penalty to produce biologically plausible predictions. This is a vital step in Carbonara’s pipeline, allowing the coarse grained model to be safely passed into all-atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. We present the framework for a complementary model to Carbonara which uses gradient descent to optimise the backbone curve model

Understanding Body Image and Eating Disorder Risk Across Development

Body image and eating disorder development is complex and the chronological patterns of this development are relatively understudied. Additionally, many methodological issues exist within the field of body image and eating disorder risk in childhood which present difficulties in recruitment and study design which should be addressed. Furthermore, body image has historically mainly been studied in the West, and research into body image cross-culturally is sorely lacking. This thesis presents five empirical chapters researching body image and eating disorder risk across childhood and adolescence and concludes with a broader look at body image across the lifespan. Chapter 3 presents a longitudinal cohort study which considers predictors of eating disorders from 7-15 and found different pathways for boys and girls, as well as the mediating effect of depression for girls only. Chapter 4 employs behavioural play with dolls and qualitative methods to explore the relationship between gender stereotypes and ideal body internalisation in children as young as 4- years-old. Chapter 5 is the first ever study to look at where children and adolescents look on their body using eye-tracking methods and how this is related to body part satisfaction and overall body satisfaction, as well as identifying the development of body avoidance. Chapter 6 uses an innovative virtual reality paradigm to explore children’s thoughts about different sized bodies using a mixed methods approach and finds that children and adolescents both have strong preferences for lower adiposity bodies. Finally, Chapter 7 looks at body image and sociocultural pressure across the lifespan and cross-culturally to explore the lifetime developmental patterns of body image. Together, this thesis highlights the developmental patterns of body image and eating disorder risk in individuals aged 4-80-years-old. Each empirical chapter employs different methodologies and age ranges to create a full and detailed picture of how one’s body image develops and what sociocultural, biological, and psychological influences are salient at each point in our lives

Keeping the Diseased: Plague workers, policy and the poor in early modern England and Scotland c. 1597-1666

This thesis seeks to answer one fundamental question: how would our understanding of the plague change if we centred marginalised experiences? While scholars have long examined the plague's impact, highlighting its medical, economic, and political ramifications, we are yet to fully understand the social impact of the disease. However, outbreaks of plague provide a unique lens to explore society and social relations during times of crisis. By focusing on the experiences of those typically pushed to the margins of the historical record, such as women and the poor, we can observe how these groups navigated and responded to new forms of authority and crisis conditions. Inspired by the social turn of the 1970s and 80s, as well as recent events during the Covid-19 pandemic, I hope to have written a history of the plague 'from below', one where the voices and experiences of ordinary people, women and the poor take centre stage. Within this broader investigation, my thesis explores several key areas: the experiences of nurses and other plague workers during epidemics, the extent of increased powers wielded by authorities, the responses of ordinary people and the poor to emergency measures, and the processes by which people rebuilt their lives post-epidemic. Through these inquiries, my research aims to increase our understanding of early modern social relations during periods of immense upheaval. In short, my thesis uncovers new and compelling evidence to support Keith Wrightson's analysis that the plague did not divide early modern society as severely as we once thought. Rather than fracturing communities, my thesis reveals evidence of complex networks of care and solidarity. Neighbours, families and friends often rallied together to ensure the survival of their communities. These findings challenge the notion of social disintegration during crises, highlighting the resilience and strength of communal bonds in early modern society

Testing the Effectiveness of Imagined Contact as a Tool to Promote Intergroup Prosociality

This PhD thesis investigated the effectiveness of imagined contact, the act of imagining positive intergroup encounters, as a strategy to enhance intergroup prosociality. Specifically, it explored whether, how, and when imagined contact promotes prosocial responses towards outgroups. The research comprised data from a sample of 1,762 British participants, across eight studies targeting three distinct outgroups: drug addicts, refugees, and homeless people. Chapter 2 (Studies 1-4) demonstrated that imagined contact increased emotional support for drug addicts, mediated by empathy towards drug addicts and self-perceptions of empathy, particularly when the interaction was envisioned from a third-person perspective. However, it did not significantly affect charitable donations. Chapter 3 (Studies 1-3) found that imagined contact was linked to enhanced prosocial intentions and emotional support towards refugees through empathy and reduced attributions of blame, particularly among non-liberal participants. It also showed that imagined contact was related to prosocial intentions towards drug addicts through the same mechanisms. Chapter 4 (Study 1) extended these findings, revealing that the effects of imagined contact on prosocial intentions towards refugees through empathy and attributions of blame extended to prosocial intentions towards homeless individuals among non-liberals. While Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) did not significantly moderate any of the effects of imagined contact, Belief in a Just World (BJW) did moderate its direct effects on prosocial intentions, with imagined contact being particularly effective for individuals with higher BJW. Overall, this thesis makes an important and novel contribution to the literature by identifying imagined contact as a potent strategy for fostering prosocial responses in intergroup contexts and elucidating the underlying psychological mechanisms and moderating factors that influence its effectiveness