9,173 research outputs found

    A view of colonial life in South Australia: An osteological investigation of the health status among 19th-century migrant settlers

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    Studies of human skeletal remains contribute to understanding the extent to which conditions prevailing in various past communities were detrimental to health. Few of these studies have evaluated the situation in which the first European colonists of South Australia lived. Colonial Australian skeletal collections are scarce, especially for research purposes. This makes the 19th-century skeletal remains of individuals, excavated from St Mary’s Cemetery, South Australia, a rare and valuable collection. The overarching aim of this thesis was to investigate the general and oral health of this specific group of 19th-century settlers, through the examination of their skeletons and dentitions. Four research papers in this thesis address this overarching aim. The first two papers determine the general skeletal health of the settlers, with a focus on pathological manifestations on bones associated with metabolic deficiencies and the demands of establishing an industrial society. Paper 3 investigated whether Large Volume Micro- Computed Tomography (LV Micro-CT) could be used as a single technique for the analysis of the in situ dentoalveolar complex of individuals from St Mary’s. This led to a detailed investigation of the dentitions of the St Mary’s sample, in paper 4, with the aims of determining the oral health status of these individuals, and understanding how oral conditions may have influenced their general health. The skeletal remains of 65 individuals (20 adults and 45 subadults) from St Mary’s sample were available for the four component investigations using non-destructive techniques - macroscopic, radiographic and micro-CT methods. Signs of nutritional deficiencies (vitamin C and iron) were identified in Paper 1. The findings of paper 2 showed joint diseases and traumatic fractures were seen and that gastrointestinal and pulmonary conditions were the leading causes of death in subadults and adults respectively. Paper 3 found that the LV Micro-CT technique was the only method able to generate images that allowed the full range of detailed measurements across all the oral health categories studied. A combination of macroscopic and radiographic techniques covered a number of these categories, but was more time-consuming, and did not provide the same level of accuracy or include all measurements. Results for paper 4 confirmed that extensive carious lesions, antemortem tooth loss and evidence of periodontal disease were present in the St Mary’s sample. Developmental defects of enamel (EH) and areas of interglobular dentine (IGD) were identified. Many individuals with dental defects also had skeletal signs of co-morbidities. St Mary’s individuals had a similar percentage of carious lesions as the British sample, which was more than other historic Australian samples, but less than a contemporary New Zealand sample. The 19th-century migrants to the colony of South Australia were faced with multiple challenges such as adapting to local environmental conditions as well as participating in the development of settlements, infrastructure and new industries. Evidence of joint diseases, traumatic injuries and health insults, seen as pathological changes and/ or abnormalities on the bone and/or teeth, confirmed that the settlers' health had been affected. The number of burials in the ‘free ground’ area between the 1840s -1870s was greater than the number in the leased plots, reflecting the economic problems of the colony during these early years. Validation of the reliability and accuracy of the LV Micro-CT system for the analysis of the dentoalveolar complex, in situ within archaeological human skull samples, provided a microanalytical approach for the in-depth investigations of the St Mary’s dentition. Extensive carious lesions, antemortem tooth loss and periodontal disease seen in this group would have affected their general health status. The presence of developmental defects (EH and IGD) indicated that many of the settlers had suffered health insults in childhood to young adulthood. Contemporaneous Australian, New Zealand and British samples had comparable findings suggesting that little improvement had occurred in their oral health since arriving in South Australia. In conclusion, the findings of this investigation largely fulfilled the initial aims. Our understanding of the extent to which conditions prevailing in the new colony were detrimental to human health has increased, as has our knowledge of why pathological manifestations and/or abnormalities were seen on the bones and teeth of individuals from the St Mary’s sample. A multiple-method approach, to derive enhanced information has been shown to be effective, whilst establishing a new methodology (LV Micro-CT) for the analysis of dentition in situ in human archaeological skulls. Further, this investigation has digitally preserved data relating to this historical group of individuals for future comparisons.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Biomedicine, 202

    Investigación clínico-epidemiológica en pronóstico: desarrollos metodológicos y aplicación clínica

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    Tesis Doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Medicina, Departamento de Medicina Preventiva y Salud Pública y Microbiología. Fecha de Lectura: 13-07-2021Esta tesis tiene embargado el acceso al texto completo hasta el 13-01-2023En esta Tesis se presentan dos modelos pronósticos para predecir desenlaces importantes en dos contextos clínicos distintos. Ambos modelos han sido desarrollados siguiendo alternativas metodológicas complementarias. En el primero de ellos, ante la ausencia en la literatura científica de herramientas que permitieran predecir el riesgo de crisis epilépticas durante el embarazo en mujeres en tratamiento antiepiléptico, se desarrolló un modelo pronóstico de novo a partir de los datos primarios recogidos en el estudio EMPiRE. En el segundo contexto clínico, la situación es distinta y se disponía ya de varios modelos en la literatura para predecir el riesgo de mortalidad postoperatoria en pacientes con endocarditis infecciosa. Por ello se optó por hacer una revisión sistemática y meta-análisis para identificar y evaluar la calidad de los modelos disponibles y, a partir de ellos, crear un modelo único (metamodelo) que fue optimizado para el registro nacional GAMES de endocarditis infecciosa. En ambos escenarios clínicos, se ha pretendido adicionalmente promover la utilización de estos modelos en la práctica clínica. Para este fin se han creado dos calculadoras online de libre acceso que han sido implementadas en la plataforma web Evidencio (https://www.evidencio.com/). Esta implementación facilita enormemente la obtención de una predicción personalizada del riesgo de los desenlaces considerados dadas las características individuales de los pacientes. A pesar de que los métodos para el desarrollo y validación de los modelos pronóstico han sido descritos por múltiples autores, estos métodos son en ocasiones complejos para investigadores con conocimientos limitados de estadística. Por ello, es recomendable que el equipo investigador de un estudio de desarrollo o validación de un modelo pronóstico cuente entre sus miembros con algún estadístico o persona con amplio bagaje metodológico. Sin embargo, no siempre es así, por lo que facilitar a los investigadores herramientas útiles y de manejo sencillo, como el comando – bsvalidation – para el software Stata que se ha presentado en el tercer estudio de la tesis, puede ayudar a paliar los efectos de las carencias metodológicas del equipo investigador

    Empowering Clean Water whilst Safeguarding Water Distribution Pipeline Integrity: Towards Manganese- and Iron-Free Lime Hydrate for Water Treatment

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    Hydrated limes are amongst the most economically valuable alkalis used by the water industry for the treatment of potable water. They are typically manufactured from the thermal decomposition of high purity limestones. However, the latter contain both manganese and iron impurities, which are transformed into the oxides Mn3O4 and Fe2O3 on burning in kilns (between 900 – 1100 oC) during the manufacture of lime, and are retained in the lime hydrate upon slaking. These impurities can be released through oxidation by conventional water disinfection chemicals (such as alkaline hypochlorite) during the use of lime hydrate as the alkaline pH modifier during conventional operations in water treatment works. This work investigates the redox mechanisms for manganese and iron removal from lime hydrate using alkaline hypochlorite: for manganese, interfacial electron transfer occurs first leading to dissolution as permanganate; in the case of iron impurities, solubility is encouraged in oxygenated solutions first through formation of solid ferrite, with oxidative dissolution of ferrite to ferrate. As expected for activation-controlled reactions, the oxidative dissolution is enhanced with increased temperatures; mapping the dissolution process with time allows for the unravelling of “rule-of-thumb” relationships for impurity removal of ~1%/min for manganese and ~3%/min for iron at 90 oC in alkaline hypochlorite

    Ab Initio Language Teaching in British Higher Education

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    Drawing extensively on the expertise of teachers of German in universities across the UK, this volume offers an overview of recent trends, new pedagogical approaches and practical guidance for teaching at beginners level in the higher education classroom. At a time when entries for UK school exams in modern foreign languages are decreasing, this book serves the urgent need for research and guidance on ab initio learning and teaching in HE. Using the example of teaching German, it offers theoretical reflections on teaching ab initio and practice-oriented approaches that will be useful for teachers of both German and other languages in higher education. The first chapters assess the role of ab initio provision within the wider context of modern languages departments and language centres. They are followed by sections on teaching methods and innovative approaches in the ab initio classroom that include chapters on the use of music, textbook evaluation, the effective use of a flipped classroom and the contribution of language apps. Finally, the book focuses on the learner in the ab initio context and explores issues around autonomy and learner strengths. The whole builds into a theoretically grounded guide that sketches out perspectives for teaching and learning ab initio languages that will benefit current and future generations of students

    Affinity-Based Reinforcement Learning : A New Paradigm for Agent Interpretability

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    The steady increase in complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is accompanied by a corresponding increase in opacity that obfuscates insights into their devised strategies. Methods in explainable artificial intelligence seek to mitigate this opacity by either creating transparent algorithms or extracting explanations post hoc. A third category exists that allows the developer to affect what agents learn: constrained RL has been used in safety-critical applications and prohibits agents from visiting certain states; preference-based RL agents have been used in robotics applications and learn state-action preferences instead of traditional reward functions. We propose a new affinity-based RL paradigm in which agents learn strategies that are partially decoupled from reward functions. Unlike entropy regularisation, we regularise the objective function with a distinct action distribution that represents a desired behaviour; we encourage the agent to act according to a prior while learning to maximise rewards. The result is an inherently interpretable agent that solves problems with an intrinsic affinity for certain actions. We demonstrate the utility of our method in a financial application: we learn continuous time-variant compositions of prototypical policies, each interpretable by its action affinities, that are globally interpretable according to customers’ financial personalities. Our method combines advantages from both constrained RL and preferencebased RL: it retains the reward function but generalises the policy to match a defined behaviour, thus avoiding problems such as reward shaping and hacking. Unlike Boolean task composition, our method is a fuzzy superposition of different prototypical strategies to arrive at a more complex, yet interpretable, strategy.publishedVersio

    Preferentialism and the conditionality of trade agreements. An application of the gravity model

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    Modern economic growth is driven by international trade, and the preferential trade agreement constitutes the primary fit-for-purpose mechanism of choice for establishing, facilitating, and governing its flows. However, too little attention has been afforded to the differences in content and conditionality associated with different trade agreements. This has led to an under-considered mischaracterisation of the design-flow relationship. Similarly, while the relationship between trade facilitation and trade is clear, the way trade facilitation affects other areas of economic activity, with respect to preferential trade agreements, has received considerably less attention. Particularly, in light of an increasingly globalised and interdependent trading system, the interplay between trade facilitation and foreign direct investment is of particular importance. Accordingly, this thesis explores the bilateral trade and investment effects of specific conditionality sets, as established within Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). Chapter one utilises recent content condition-indexes for depth, flexibility, and constraints on flexibility, established by Dür et al. (2014) and Baccini et al. (2015), within a gravity framework to estimate the average treatment effect of trade agreement characteristics across bilateral trade relationships in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) from 1948-2015. This chapter finds that the composition of a given ASEAN trade agreement’s characteristic set has significantly determined the concomitant bilateral trade flows. Conditions determining the classification of a trade agreements depth are positively associated with an increase to bilateral trade; hereby representing the furthered removal of trade barriers and frictions as facilitated by deeper trade agreements. Flexibility conditions, and constraint on flexibility conditions, are also identified as significant determiners for a given trade agreement’s treatment effect of subsequent bilateral trade flows. Given the political nature of their inclusion (i.e., the appropriate address to short term domestic discontent) this influence is negative as regards trade flows. These results highlight the longer implementation and time frame requirements for trade impediments to be removed in a market with higher domestic uncertainty. Chapter two explores the incorporation of non-trade issue (NTI) conditions in PTAs. Such conditions are increasing both at the intensive and extensive margins. There is a concern from developing nations that this growth of NTI inclusions serves as a way for high-income (HI) nations to dictate the trade agenda, such that developing nations are subject to ‘principled protectionism’. There is evidence that NTI provisions are partly driven by protectionist motives but the effect on trade flows remains largely undiscussed. Utilising the Gravity Model for trade, I test Lechner’s (2016) comprehensive NTI dataset for 202 bilateral country pairs across a 32-year timeframe and find that, on average, NTIs are associated with an increase to bilateral trade. Primarily this boost can be associated with the market access that a PTA utilising NTIs facilitates. In addition, these results are aligned theoretically with the discussions on market harmonisation, shared values, and the erosion of artificial production advantages. Instead of inhibiting trade through burdensome cost, NTIs are acting to support a more stable production and trading environment, motivated by enhanced market access. Employing a novel classification to capture the power supremacy associated with shaping NTIs, this chapter highlights that the positive impact of NTIs is largely driven by the relationship between HI nations and middle-to-low-income (MTLI) counterparts. Chapter Three employs the gravity model, theoretically augmented for foreign direct investment (FDI), to estimate the effects of trade facilitation conditions utilising indexes established by Neufeld (2014) and the bilateral FDI data curated by UNCTAD (2014). The resultant dataset covers 104 countries, covering a period of 12 years (2001–2012), containing 23,640 observations. The results highlight the bilateral-FDI enhancing effects of trade facilitation conditions in the ASEAN context, aligning itself with the theoretical branch of FDI-PTA literature that has outlined how the ratification of a trade agreement results in increased and positive economic prospect between partners (Medvedev, 2012) resulting from the interrelation between trade and investment as set within an improving regulatory environment. The results align with the expectation that an enhanced trade facilitation landscape (one in which such formalities, procedures, information, and expectations around trade facilitation are conditioned for) is expected to incentivise and attract FDI

    The Disputation: The Enduring Representations in William Holman Hunt's “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple,” 1860

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    This interdisciplinary thesis problematizes the Jewish presence in the painting The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860) by William Holman Hunt. This “Jewish presence” refers to characters within the painting, Jews who posed for the picture and the painting’s portrayal of Judaism. The thesis takes a phenomenological and hermeneutical approach to The Finding providing careful description and interpretation of what appears in the painting. It situates the painting within a newly configured genre of disputation paintings depicting the Temple scene from the Gospel of Luke (2:47 – 52). It asks two questions. Why does The Finding look the way it does? And how did Holman Hunt know how to create the picture? Under the rubric of the first question, it explores and challenges customary accounts of the painting, explicitly challenging the over reliance upon F.G. Stephens’s pamphlet. Additionally, it examines Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian religious contexts and bringing hitherto unacknowledged artistic contexts to the fore. The second question examines less apparent influences through an analysis of the originary Lukan narrative in conjunction with the under-examined genre of Temple “disputation” paintings, and a legacy of scholarly and religious disputation. This demonstrates a discourse of disputation informing The Finding over and above the biblical narrative. In showing that this discourse strongly correlates with the painting’s objectifying and spectacular properties, this thesis provides a new way to understand The Finding’s orientalism which is further revealed in its typological critical reworking of two Christian medieval and renaissance paintings. As a demonstration of the discourse, the thesis includes an examination of Jewish artists who addressed the theme of disputation overtly or obliquely thereby engaging with and challenging the assumptions upon which the disputation rests

    The Ideal Psychologist vs. a Messy Reality: Using and Misunderstanding Effect Sizes, Confidence Intervals and Power

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    In the past two decades, there have been calls for statistical reform in psychology. Three key concepts within reform are effect sizes, confidence intervals and statistical power. The aim of this thesis was to examine the use and knowledge of these particular concepts, to examine whether researchers are suitably equipped to incorporate them into their research. This thesis consists of five studies. Study 1 reviewed author guidelines across 100 psychology journals, to look for any statistical recommendations. Study 2 (n = 247) and Study 3 (n = 56) examined the use and knowledge of effect sizes using a questionnaire and online experiment. Study 4 surveyed psychology researchers on their use and knowledge of confidence intervals (n = 206). Similarly, Study 5 surveyed psychology researchers on their use and knowledge of power analyses and statistical power (n = 214). Typically, psychology journals expect authors to report effect sizes in their work, although there are fewer expectations related to confidence intervals. Power analyses are also frequently encouraged for sample size justification. Self-reported use of effect sizes, confidence intervals and power analyses was high, while common barriers to use included a lack of knowledge, a lack of motivation, and the influence of academic peers. While knowledge of effect sizes was quite high, they appear to only be understood in relatively limited contexts. In contrast, both confidence intervals and statistical power appear to be frequently misunderstood, and many researchers find power analysis calculations difficult. Researchers would benefit from increased education and support to encourage them to confidently adopt an assortment of statistics in their work, and more effort must be made to prevent statistical changes from becoming a new series of tick-box exercises that do not improve the integrity of psychological research

    Queer spies in British Cold War culture: literature, film, theatre and television

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    This PhD thesis investigates how male homosexuality has been represented in British spy fiction from the 1950s to the 2010s in multiple media: literature, film, television and theatre. Due mainly to the betrayal of the Cambridge Spy ring around the middle of the century, British culture has associated spies with homosexuality, while the wider Anglophone world was in the grip of a homophobic atmosphere created by McCarthy's Red Scare. My thesis explores how this history is reflected in the spy genre from the Cold War to the present, in which male homosexuality and secret agency intersect as “queer”, in so far as they were both considered to be discreet and criminal, existing outside of the heteronormative order. By following multiple texts across media and time, I discuss how some writers, television and film directors and actors update queer identity in spy fiction, creating a shifting image of queer spies through decades. I refer to the findings of adaptation studies and queer studies, along with numerous studies on spy fiction. I conclude that the interrelation of different media has contributed to the re-drawing of queer identity in spy fiction. These developments have enabled the spies' queer identity to transcend its pejorative history in British culture, towards its more flexible and pliant sense which is designated by the term's modern usage. I also discuss that spies’ homosexuality has been represented as a fleeting ghost in most of the texts examined, hovering on the margins of pages and screen. Although homosexuality is not “the love that dare not speak its name” anymore, clandestine queer spies have been preserved as spectral others in the genre for many years. Spy fiction is a cultural repository retaining the memory of violence inflicted against those who have been called “queer” in twentieth century Britain, and the spectral nature of queer spies narrates this history reaching back to the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895, from which point British queer identity as we know now developed. This thesis benefits the study of spy fiction by filling a gap in the investigation of homosexual representation. It also contributes to the field of gender studies of literature, film, television, and theatre by illustrating queer history in a genre which has not received a great deal of focus on its representation of homosexuality. Spy fiction occupies a central position in British popular culture, and by exploring this genre in terms of homosexuality, this research will identify the role which same-sex desire has historically played in the British cultural imagination
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