Saints and subverters : the later Covenanters in Scotland c.1648-1682

In 1649 a radical faction of Covenanters seized power in Scotland. Upheld by supporters as the zenith of the 'Covenanted Reformation' - the constitutional revolution and godly reformation underwritten by the National Covenant of 1638 and Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 - the 'rule of the saints' left an ideological legacy which endured its termination in 1651, the Cromwellian occupation from 1652 and the restoration of Charles II in 1660. By investigating how this period was remembered and reimagined, and by scrutinising the relationship between policies and practices, this thesis explores how Covenanting developed in the politically hostile environment of Restoration Scotland.Taking inspiration from innovations in the fields of intellectual history and memory studies, the thesis draws upon a range of cultural artefacts in order to reconsider the intellectual and social dynamics of Covenanting opposition to the Restoration regime. In particular, journals, diaries, memoirs, histories, correspondence and printed polemic are examined to explain how the cause came to endorse a mix of religious dissent, popular protest and armed resistance the likes of which had been hitherto unseen in early modern Scotland - if not the wider early modern world. As a result, the thesis challenges traditionally static views of seventeenth century Scottish society while charting the remarkably subversive nature of later Covenanting ideology.In 1649 a radical faction of Covenanters seized power in Scotland. Upheld by supporters as the zenith of the 'Covenanted Reformation' - the constitutional revolution and godly reformation underwritten by the National Covenant of 1638 and Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 - the 'rule of the saints' left an ideological legacy which endured its termination in 1651, the Cromwellian occupation from 1652 and the restoration of Charles II in 1660. By investigating how this period was remembered and reimagined, and by scrutinising the relationship between policies and practices, this thesis explores how Covenanting developed in the politically hostile environment of Restoration Scotland.Taking inspiration from innovations in the fields of intellectual history and memory studies, the thesis draws upon a range of cultural artefacts in order to reconsider the intellectual and social dynamics of Covenanting opposition to the Restoration regime. In particular, journals, diaries, memoirs, histories, correspondence and printed polemic are examined to explain how the cause came to endorse a mix of religious dissent, popular protest and armed resistance the likes of which had been hitherto unseen in early modern Scotland - if not the wider early modern world. As a result, the thesis challenges traditionally static views of seventeenth century Scottish society while charting the remarkably subversive nature of later Covenanting ideology

An empirical analysis of sediment export dynamics from a constructed landform in the wet tropics

Although plot-scale erosion experiments are numerous, there are few studies on constructed landforms. This limits the understanding of their long-term stability, which is especially important for planning mined land rehabilitation. The objective of this study was to gain insight into the erosion processes in a 30 × 30 m trial plot on a mine waste rock dump in tropical northern Australia. The relationships between rainfall, runoff and suspended and bedload sediment export were assessed at annual, seasonal, inter-event and intra-event timescales. During a five-year study period, 231 rainfall– runoff–sediment export events were examined. The measured bedload and suspended sediments (mainly represented in nephelometric turbidity units (NTU)) showed the dominance of the wet season and heavy rainfall events. The bedload dominated the total mass, although the annual bedload diminished by approximately 75% over the five years, with greater flow energy required over time to mobilise the same bedload. The suspended load was more sustained, though it also exhibited an exhaustion process, with equal rainfall and runoff volumes and intensities, leading to lower NTU values over time. Intra-event NTU dynamics, including runoff-NTU time lags and hysteretic behaviours, were somewhat random from one event to the next, indicating the influence of the antecedent distribution of mobilisable sediments. The value of the results for supporting predictive modelling is discussed. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Managing Grassy Woodlands: Balancing Production and Conservation of Resources

Eastern Australian eucalypt woodlands are important agricultural areas that have been widely modified during two centuries of European-style use. Despite this they contain important natural resources including significant biodiversity. Long term sustainability of production depends on maintaining resources and management must be for both production and conservation. A research program on four properties in south east Queensland showed the properties were in generally good condition although all had some problems, and has highlighted a number of significant costs and barriers to adopting a more balanced approach to production and conservation

Prevention of mother-to-child Transmission: A report-back from the XV International AIDS Conference, Bangkok, 11 - 16 July 2004

The XV International AIDS Conference was held in Bangkok from 11 to 16 July 2004. The theme of the conference was ‘Access for all\'. It was an enormous gathering; 10 000 abstracts were accepted for presentation, of which approximately 400 were oral. There were 19 500 attendees from all over the globe with a high representation from Asian countries. South Africa was well represented by a large contingent including politicians, researchers, activists and government officials. The abstracts and presentations which may have an impact on policy and research directions have been reviewed and are summarised. Southern African Journal of HIV Medicine Vol. 5 (3) 2004: 17-2

Learning to tell tales: automatic story generation from Corpora

Automatic story generation has a long-standing tradition in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The ability to create stories on demand holds great potential for entertainment and education. For example, modern computer games are becoming more immersive, containing multiple story lines and hundreds of characters. This has substantially increased the amount of work required to produce each game. However, by allowing the game to write its own story line, it can remain engaging to the player whilst shifting the burden of writing away from the game’s developers. In education, intelligent tutoring systems can potentially provide students with instant feedback and suggestions of how to write their own stories. Although several approaches have been introduced in the past (e.g., story grammars, story schema and autonomous agents), they all rely heavily on handwritten resources. Which places severe limitations on its scalability and usage. In this thesis we will motivate a new approach to story generation which takes its inspiration from recent research in Natural Language Generation. Whose result is an interactive data-driven system for the generation of children’s stories. One of the key features of this system is that it is end-to-end, realising the various components of the generation pipeline stochastically. Knowledge relating to the generation and planning of stories is leveraged automatically from corpora and reformulated into new stories to be presented to the user. We will also show that story generation can be viewed as a search task, operating over a large number of stories that can be generated from knowledge inherent in a corpus. Using trainable scoring functions, our system can search the story space using different document level criteria. In this thesis we focus on two of these, namely, coherence and interest. We will also present two major paradigms for generation through search, (a) generate and rank, and (b) genetic algorithms. We show the effects on perceived story interest, fluency and coherence that result from these approaches. In addition, we show how the explicit use of plots induced from the corpus can be used to guide the generation process, providing a heuristically motivated starting point for story search. We motivate extensions to the system and show that additional modules can be used to improve the quality of the generated stories and overall scalability. Finally we highlight the current strengths and limitations of our approach and discuss possible future approaches to this field of research

Plot Induction and Evolutionary Search for Story Generation

In this paper we develop a story generator that leverages knowledge inherent in corpora without requiring extensive manual involvement. A key feature in our approach is the reliance on a story planner which we acquire automatically by recording events, their participants, and their precedence relationships in a training corpus. Contrary to previous work our system does not follow a generate-and-rank architecture. Instead, we employ evolutionary search techniques to explore the space of possible stories which we argue are well suited to the story generation task. Experiments on generating simple children’s stories show that our system outperforms previous data-driven approaches.

Learning to Tell Tales: A Data-driven Approach to Story Generation

Computational story telling has sparked great interest in artificial intelligence, partly because of its relevance to educational and gaming applications. Traditionally, story generators rely on a large repository of background knowledge containing information about the story plot and its characters. This information is detailed and usually hand crafted. In this paper we propose a data-driven approach for generating short children’s stories that does not require extensive manual involvement. We create an end-to-end system that realizes the various components of the generation pipeline stochastically. Our system follows a generate-and-and-rank approach where the space of multiple candidate stories is pruned by considering whether they are plausible, interesting, and coherent.

Accounting for dependencies in regionalized signatures for predictions in ungauged catchments

A recurrent problem in hydrology is the absenceof streamflow data to calibrate rainfall–runoff models.A commonly used approach in such circumstances conditionsmodel parameters on regionalized response signatures.While several different signatures are often available to beincluded in this process, an outstanding challenge is the selectionof signatures that provide useful and complementaryinformation. Different signatures do not necessarily provideindependent information and this has led to signatures beingomitted or included on a subjective basis. This paperpresents a method that accounts for the inter-signature errorcorrelation structure so that regional information is neitherneglected nor double-counted when multiple signatures areincluded. Using 84 catchments from the MOPEX database,observed signatures are regressed against physical and climaticcatchment attributes. The derived relationships are thenutilized to assess the joint probability distribution of the signatureregionalization errors that is subsequently used in aBayesian procedure to condition a rainfall–runoff model. Theresults show that the consideration of the inter-signature errorstructure may improve predictions when the error correlationsare strong. However, other uncertainties such as modelstructure and observational error may outweigh the importanceof these correlations. Further, these other uncertaintiescause some signatures to appear repeatedly to be misinformative