Punishing apostasy : the case of Islam and Shari'a law re-considered

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Exploiting Nonlinear Recurrence and Fractal Scaling Properties for Voice Disorder Detection

Background: Voice disorders affect patients profoundly, and acoustic tools can potentially measure voice function objectively. Disordered sustained vowels exhibit wide-ranging phenomena, from nearly periodic to highly complex, aperiodic vibrations, and increased "breathiness". Modelling and surrogate data studies have shown significant nonlinear and non-Gaussian random properties in these sounds. Nonetheless, existing tools are limited to analysing voices displaying near periodicity, and do not account for this inherent biophysical nonlinearity and non-Gaussian randomness, often using linear signal processing methods insensitive to these properties. They do not directly measure the two main biophysical symptoms of disorder: complex nonlinear aperiodicity, and turbulent, aeroacoustic, non-Gaussian randomness. Often these tools cannot be applied to more severe disordered voices, limiting their clinical usefulness.

Methods: This paper introduces two new tools to speech analysis: recurrence and fractal scaling, which overcome the range limitations of existing tools by addressing directly these two symptoms of disorder, together reproducing a "hoarseness" diagram. A simple bootstrapped classifier then uses these two features to distinguish normal from disordered voices.

Results: On a large database of subjects with a wide variety of voice disorders, these new techniques can distinguish normal from disordered cases, using quadratic discriminant analysis, to overall correct classification performance of 91.8% plus or minus 2.0%. The true positive classification performance is 95.4% plus or minus 3.2%, and the true negative performance is 91.5% plus or minus 2.3% (95% confidence). This is shown to outperform all combinations of the most popular classical tools.

Conclusions: Given the very large number of arbitrary parameters and computational complexity of existing techniques, these new techniques are far simpler and yet achieve clinically useful classification performance using only a basic classification technique. They do so by exploiting the inherent nonlinearity and turbulent randomness in disordered voice signals. They are widely applicable to the whole range of disordered voice phenomena by design. These new measures could therefore be used for a variety of practical clinical purposes.
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As Southern Africa faces new urban drought challenges, who is heeding the wake-up call?

As experts forecast the likelihood of El Nino in southern Africa over the next few months, Kate Gannon, Patrick Curran and Declan Conway examine the impact of drought-related water and electricity supply disruption on businesses in southern Africa during the 2015/16 El Niño

Antitumour responses induced by a cell-based Reovirus vaccine in murine lung and melanoma models

Background: The ever increasing knowledge in the areas of cell biology, the immune system and the mechanisms of cancer are allowing a new phase of immunotherapy to develop. The aim of cancer vaccination is to activate the host immune system and some success has been observed particularly in the use of the BCG vaccine for bladder cancer as an immunostimulant. Reovirus, an orphan virus, has proven itself as an oncolytic virus in vitro and in vivo. Over 80 % of tumour cell lines have been found to be susceptible to Reovirus infection and it is currently in phase III clinical trials. It has been shown to induce immune responses to tumours with very low toxicities. Methods: In this study, Reovirus was examined in two main approaches in vivo, in mice, using the melanoma B16F10 and Lewis Lung Carcinoma (LLC) models. Initially, mice were treated intratumourally (IT) with Reovirus and the immune responses determined by cytokine analysis. Mice were also vaccinated using a cell-based Reovirus vaccine and subsequently exposed to a tumourigenic dose of cells (B16F10 or LLC). Using the same cell-based Reovirus vaccine, established tumours were treated and subsequent immune responses and virus retrieval investigated. Results: Upregulation of several cytokines was observed following treatment and replication-competent virus was also retrieved from treated tumours. Varying levels of cytokine upregulation were observed and no replication-competent virus was retrieved in vaccine-treated mice. Prolongation of survival and delayed tumour growth were observed in all models and an immune response to Reovirus, either using Reovirus alone or a cell-based vaccine was also observed in all mice. Conclusion: This study provides evidence of immune response to tumours using a cell-based Reovirus vaccine in both tumour models investigated, B16F10 and LLC, cytokine induction was observed with prolongation of survival in almost all cases which may suggest a new method for using Reovirus in the clinic

Some electroanalytical investigations into the cure chemistry of industrial sealants

This thesis represents a study of the cure chemistry of three contrasting adhesive technologies, applying a range of analytical approaches to gain further insight into the complex chemistry of adhesives. An introduction is given in chapter one into the general chemistry of adhesives and their analysis, with particular emphasis on anaerobic adhesives and the crucial role played by transition metals in the cure chemistry. In order to elucidate the role played by tertiary amines and saccahrin in anaerobic adhesives, polarography was used to monitor the concentrations of various transition metal species in the presence of selected cure components. In addition, cyclic voltammetry was used to measure the oxidation potentials of anaerobic adhesive accelerators at a range of pH values. A polarographic study of the reactions of elemental copper and iron in the presence of 1,2,3,4-tetrahydroquinoline based cure systems was carried out in chapter three. The ability of iron and copper ions to decompose cumene hydroperoxide, and the influence of anaerobic adhesive accelerators on these reactions, was also studied. In chapter four, a brief introduction is given into the autoxidation of N-phenyl-2- propyl-3,5-diethyl-l,2-dihydropyridine (DHP) and its potential as an initiator in rapid curing, surface insensitive one-part adhesives. A variety of analytical techniques were then used, including spectrophotometry and an enzyme-based biosensor, to conclusively prove that hydrogen peroxide is generated in the autoxidation of DHP. In chapter five, an investigation was made on the use o f anion exchange chromatography coupled with conductivity detection, for the determination of inorganic anions and organic acid anions in cyanoacrylate adhesives. A brief overview of the main findings of the thesis are given in chapter six, along with suggestions for future studies

Seasonal-adjustment Based Feature Selection Method for Large-scale Search Engine Logs

Search engine logs have a great potential in tracking and predicting outbreaks of infectious disease. More precisely, one can use the search volume of some search terms to predict the infection rate of an infectious disease in nearly real-time. However, conducting accurate and stable prediction of outbreaks using search engine logs is a challenging task due to the following two-way instability characteristics of the search logs. First, the search volume of a search term may change irregularly in the short-term, for example, due to environmental factors such as the amount of media or news. Second, the search volume may also change in the long-term due to the demographic change of the search engine. That is to say, if a model is trained with such search logs with ignoring such characteristic, the resulting prediction would contain serious mispredictions when these changes occur. In this work, we proposed a novel feature selection method to overcome this instability problem. In particular, we employ a seasonal-adjustment method that decomposes each time series into three components: seasonal, trend and irregular component and build prediction models for each component individually. We also carefully design a feature selection method to select proper search terms to predict each component. We conducted comprehensive experiments on ten different kinds of infectious diseases. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms all comparative methods in prediction accuracy for seven of ten diseases, in both now-casting and forecasting setting. Also, the proposed method is more successful in selecting search terms that are semantically related to target diseases.Comment: The 25th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '19

The psychology of crowd policing

Traditional psychological explanations of crowd theory have decontextualised events and obscured the fact that crowd incidents are typically inter group encounters. This has led to research being rooted in the crowd whilst ignoring the other parties who may be present - including the police - and how events develop as function of the interaction between the two. The studies reported in this thesis attempted to provide insights into the decision making of senior public order officers of the Metropolitan Police utilising a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Four main studies are reported. In the first study (of police training) a grounded theory analysis revealed that the police have a fear of the crowd which is seen in a concern with provoking violence by being too harsh or permitting violence by being too lenient. The balance of harshness and leniency is informed by accountability considerations arising from internal and external sources and the phase of violence the officers perceived themselves to be in. In the second study, the relationship of accountability and phase was manipulated in a controlled experimental setting providing supportive evidence for the grounded theory model. The third was a series of pilot participant observation studies which looked at the policing of the Muslim festivals of Eid al Fitr and the Sikh festivals of Vaisakhi. These studies raised practical issues and was used in designing the fourth study which looked at the 'in vivo' processes of decision making during the biggest public order event in London of 1999. This confirmed and extended the focus on the importance of accountability concerns in senior officer decision making; firstly by showing them to be more complex than was originally thought, secondly by showing how those in different positions within the police had different accountability concerns, and thirdly by showing that such different concerns could lead to conflict between different sections of the police. The implications of this research and the foundations of future research are also discussed

Reducing Interfacial Losses in Perovskite Solar Cells

Metal-halide perovskites possess an unprecedented combination of electronic and optical properties resembling those of traditional inorganic semiconductors yet can be processed at low temperatures from solution. Additionally, these materials have short estimated energy payback times and high potential for integration into tandem-on-silicon solar cells. The latest record single junction perovskite solar cell has reached a certified efficiency of 25.8% and perovskitesilicon tandem solar cells have reached an efficiency of 33.7%. Nevertheless, numerous research challenges remain towards commercialization, including efficiency, stability, scalability, and Pb toxicity. The research within this thesis focuses on a materials driven approach to reduce nonradiative losses in perovskite photovoltaics for single junction and tandem-on-silicon applications. I will first describe the synthesis, characterization, and material properties an NDI side chain copolymer incorporating cinnamate crosslinking groups. We demonstrate the polymer&rsquo;s high transparency, thermal stability, photocrosslinking, and n-doping via solution and sequential processes. We implement this polymer in PSCs and characterize its solar-cell device performance relative to an uncrosslinked homopolymeric counterpart in n-i-p devices with a MA-free perovskite absorber. Next, I will discuss a large photoluminescence-based screening of passivation materials. Candidate passivators were screened across a variety of perovskite compositions. A benzylammonium trifluoromethanesulfonate salt, BAOTf, was identified as a highly effective passivation molecule, allowing for the fabrication of solar cells exhibiting very low hysteresis with PCEs &gt;19% with a MA-free mixed-cation mixed-halide perovskite absorber (Cs17Br25). Finally, the reactivity of amines and ammoniums with formamidinium salts was explored. Understanding solution reactivity of amines with formamidinium salts enabled the synthesis, isolation, and implementation of the product(s) formed in these reactions as additives and surface passivation agents in perovskites. This work helped to elucidate the role of the amine/ammonium additives in controlling FA-containing perovskite growth and crystallization processes.</p

The Failure to Establish Codetermination in Australia: A Comparative Political Economic Analysis

Codetermination has entered the Australian public conversation in the last 4 years with commentators arguing it could reduce labour market inequality. Yet this is not the first-time it has surfaced in Australian debates – the federal Hawke government committed to introducing codetermination, but to no avail. Australian advocates for codetermination failed to do what European Christian Democrats succeed at; persistently championing codetermination and ensuring both businesses and trade unions supported it in practice. Codetermination first appeared in Germany in the writings of Catholic social thinkers, and through these thinkers and papal encyclicals it gained wider acceptance amongst the catholic community. In both Germany and Belgium, it was catholic actors – Christian trade unions, employers’ organisations and Christian democratic parties – that pushed codetermination. During the interwar period, these catholic actors won socialist trade union support for the idea, but their efforts ultimately failed due to sustained opposition from the business community. In the post-war period, these catholic actors again pushed codetermination whilst rebuilding the economy and garnered the support of the business community, ensuring its survival thereon. Comparatively, there was no substantial catholic political movement in Australia, and subsequently codetermination did not enter public debate until the 1970s & 1980s. Furthermore, businesses were never won over to the idea, and so the matter was solely advocated by the trade unions and the Labor party. Ultimately, both the Labor party and trade unions lacked the resolve to instate codetermination, and ultimately dropped the idea as other economic matters became more pressing

Silver Doped Perfluoropolyether-Urethane Coatings: Antibacterial Activity and Surface Analysis

The colonisation of clinical and industrial surfaces with pathogenic microorganisms has prompted increased research into the development of effective antibacterial and antifouling coatings. There is evidence that implanted biomedical surfaces coated with metallic silver can be inactivated by hysiological fluids, thus reducing the bioactivity of the coating. In this work, we report the biofilm inhibition of Staphylococcus epidermidis using a roomtemperatureprocessedsilver dopedperfluoropolyether-urethane coating. The release of silver ions from these fluoropolymers over a six-day period inhibited bacterial encrustation – as observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis indicated differences in carbon, fluorine and sodium surface composition between silver doped and undoped fluoropolymers after exposure to nutrient rich media. These silver doped perfluoropolyether coatings also exhibited antibacterial activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii; suggesting potential use in preventing transmission of pathogenic and opportunistic microbes on environmental surfaces in healthcare facilities. The broad-spectrum antibacterial activity of these silver release coatings may be exploited on biomaterials surfaces to combat the development of resistant Gram-negative Enterobacteriaceae that can occur during prophylactic treatment for urinary tract infections