Controversies and contradictions: approaches to the study of Harriet Martineau 1802-76

This thesis is a reassessment of Harriet Martineau's place in feminist and mainstream scholarship. It focuses on Harriet Martineau, first, as a subject of research and, second, as an object of text. The importance of Harriet Martineau as a subject of research is explored through consideration of her social position as a nineteenth-century, female, unmarried, middle-class, writer, reformer and intellectual. Further, it is claimed that she provides one of the links between Enlightenment feminism and the nineteenthcentury women's xtcvement in Britain, and that her prioritisation of economic and legal advances for women marks her out as an important feminist theorist. In particular her leaders on the condition of women in the Daily News merit wider attention. As an object of text, Harriet Martineau is investigated through the work of her biographers, ranging from her contemporaries to coimientaries written in the 1970s and 1980s. In examining Harriet Nartineau's writing and that of her biographers, opportunities are provided for the exploration of a range of issues within feminist theory and scholarship. These include questioning conventional notions of significance, the relationship between theory and methodology in feminist research, and the subjective reading of texts

'Independent' in Scotland: elite by education?

A central sociological question has been how to understand the ways in which privilege is reproduced by and through education. A key difficulty for such work has been the limited possibilities for conducting research in institutions that successfully transmit power and privilege. This chapter seeks to examine this question through a focus on private and elite schooling in Scotland, both historically and in current times. The chapter opens with an initial discussion of what it means to be ‘elite’ in Scottish education. This is followed by a review of the literature on Scottish private and elite schooling. The role played by the Scottish capital city of Edinburgh is highlighted since fully one quarter of the city’s pupils attend private schools. Discussion then turns to the Scottish Independent Schools Project (SISP), and its research into capitals, power, space, gender and reflexivity, in order to identify the specific practices and processes around elite schooling in Scotland

Counting Scotland In! Making 'Gender and education' more inclusive and attractive as a research field

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Looking back in anger : What New Labour has done to gender equality in schools

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Poverty and Children's Access to Services and Social Participation

This briefing paper summarises evidence in the research and policy literature on inequalities surrounding access to services and social participation for children and young people living in poverty in Scotland. The related policy and practice implications for services’ access and societal participation are also outlined. In the poverty and inequalities context, a mix of policy interventions aimed at rebalancing power at all levels are more likely to be effective to changing the status quo. Rather than searching for a single ‘silver bullet’, policy should target the multiple dimensions of poverty and inequality and their intersections as experienced by young people

The genetic architecture of the human cerebral cortex

The cerebral cortex underlies our complex cognitive capabilities, yet little is known about the specific genetic loci that influence human cortical structure. To identify genetic variants that affect cortical structure, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of brain magnetic resonance imaging data from 51,665 individuals. We analyzed the surface area and average thickness of the whole cortex and 34 regions with known functional specializations. We identified 199 significant loci and found significant enrichment for loci influencing total surface area within regulatory elements that are active during prenatal cortical development, supporting the radial unit hypothesis. Loci that affect regional surface area cluster near genes in Wnt signaling pathways, which influence progenitor expansion and areal identity. Variation in cortical structure is genetically correlated with cognitive function, Parkinson's disease, insomnia, depression, neuroticism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Brain multiplexes reveal morphological connectional biomarkers fingerprinting late brain dementia states

Accurate diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) before conversion to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is invaluable for patient treatment. Many works showed that MCI and AD affect functional and structural connections between brain regions as well as the shape of cortical regions. However, ‘shape connections’ between brain regions are rarely investigated -e.g., how morphological attributes such as cortical thickness and sulcal depth of a specific brain region change in relation to morphological attributes in other regions. To fill this gap, we unprecedentedly design morphological brain multiplexes for late MCI/AD classification. Specifically, we use structural T1-w MRI to define morphological brain networks, each quantifying similarity in morphology between different cortical regions for a specific cortical attribute. Then, we define a brain multiplex where each intra-layer represents the morphological connectivity network of a specific cortical attribute, and each inter-layer encodes the similarity between two consecutive intra-layers. A significant performance gain is achieved when using the multiplex architecture in comparison to other conventional network analysis architectures. We also leverage this architecture to discover morphological connectional biomarkers fingerprinting the difference between late MCI and AD stages, which included the right entorhinal cortex and right caudal middle frontal gyrus

Multimodal and Multiscale Deep Neural Networks for the Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease using structural MR and FDG-PET images

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease where biomarkers for disease based on pathophysiology may be able to provide objective measures for disease diagnosis and staging. Neuroimaging scans acquired from MRI and metabolism images obtained by FDG-PET provide in-vivo measurements of structure and function (glucose metabolism) in a living brain. It is hypothesized that combining multiple different image modalities providing complementary information could help improve early diagnosis of AD. In this paper, we propose a novel deep-learning-based framework to discriminate individuals with AD utilizing a multimodal and multiscale deep neural network. Our method delivers 82.4% accuracy in identifying the individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who will convert to AD at 3 years prior to conversion (86.4% combined accuracy for conversion within 1–3 years), a 94.23% sensitivity in classifying individuals with clinical diagnosis of probable AD, and a 86.3% specificity in classifying non-demented controls improving upon results in published literature

Early role of vascular dysregulation on late-onset Alzheimer's disease based on multifactorial data-driven analysis

Multifactorial mechanisms underlying late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) are poorly characterized from an integrative perspective. Here spatiotemporal alterations in brain amyloid-β deposition, metabolism, vascular, functional activity at rest, structural properties, cognitive integrity and peripheral proteins levels are characterized in relation to LOAD progression. We analyse over 7,700 brain images and tens of plasma and cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Through a multifactorial data-driven analysis, we obtain dynamic LOAD–abnormality indices for all biomarkers, and a tentative temporal ordering of disease progression. Imaging results suggest that intra-brain vascular dysregulation is an early pathological event during disease development. Cognitive decline is noticeable from initial LOAD stages, suggesting early memory deficit associated with the primary disease factors. High abnormality levels are also observed for specific proteins associated with the vascular system's integrity. Although still subjected to the sensitivity of the algorithms and biomarkers employed, our results might contribute to the development of preventive therapeutic interventions