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This dissertation is about the role of NGOs in the lives of subaltern youth in urban India. It is an ethnography on the everyday lives of young people between the ages of 18-32 from impoverished 'red-light areas' in Kolkata who grew up participating in NGO youth programmes. This thesis investigates how NGOs partake in a process of subject making, and how young people interact with and improvise NGO subjectification to better their own lives in a world- class aspiring city. The youth featuring in this dissertation spent their childhood and adolescence either residing in NGO shelter homes or regularly attending NGO drop-in-centres in their neighborhoods. They came of age attending NGO education programmes, job skills trainings, and human rights workshops. Grounded in 13 months of fieldwork, my ethnography tells the stories of young people’s lives after their participation in NGO programmes, amidst their everyday worlds of work, consumption, and politics. My examination of the young people’s post-NGO daily lives in Kolkata makes three key contributions. First, it reveals the contradictions of NGO development. It examines the ambivalent effects of NGOs on subaltern young people’s gender and class identity, as well as their social and political subjectivity and mobility. Second, it illustrates the plural forms of agency practised by urban marginalised youth. My thesis demonstrates how young people are not just passive recipients of NGO development opportunities, but active negotiators of development as they interact with NGOs and navigate its attempts to regulate youth. Third, it illustrates how NGOs and post-NGO youth both foster and trouble class divisions in the world-class aspiring city of Kolkata. I illustrate how young people develop cultural dispositions that straddle across subaltern and middle classes and unsettle class boundaries but not inequalities. This dissertation argues for ethnographic attention to the everyday lives of post-NGO youth as an analytical lens to theorise NGOisation and global city processes in contemporary India and the greater global South.

The primary objective of this work is to relate the biomass fuel quality to fast pyrolysis-oil quality in order to identify key biomass traits which affect pyrolysis-oil stability. During storage the pyrolysis-oil becomes more viscous due to chemical and physical changes, as reactions and volatile losses occur due to aging. The reason for oil instability begins within the pyrolysis reactor during pyrolysis in which the biomass is rapidly heated in the absence of oxygen, producing free radical volatiles which are then quickly condensed to form the oil. The products formed do not reach thermodynamic equilibrium and in tum the products react with each other to try to achieve product stability. The first aim of this research was to develop and validate a rapid screening method for determining biomass lignin content in comparison to traditional, time consuming and hence costly wet chemical methods such as Klason. Lolium and Festuca grasses were selected to validate the screening method, as these grass genotypes exhibit a low range of Klason /Acid Digestible Fibre lignin contents. The screening methodology was based on the relationship between the lignin derived products from pyrolysis and the lignin content as determined by wet chemistry. The second aim of the research was to determine whether metals have an affect on fast pyrolysis products, and if any clear relationships can be deduced to aid research in feedstock selection for fast pyrolysis processing. It was found that alkali metals, particularly Na and K influence the rate and yield of degradation as well the char content. Pre-washing biomass with water can remove 70% of the total metals, and improve the pyrolysis product characteristics by increasing the organic yield, the temperature in which maximum liquid yield occurs and the proportion of higher molecular weight compounds within the pyrolysis-oil. The third aim identified these feedstock traits and relates them to the pyrolysis-oil quality and stability. It was found that the mineral matter was a key determinant on pyrolysis-oil yield compared to the proportion of lignin. However the higher molecular weight compounds present in the pyrolysis-oil are due to the lignin, and can cause instability within the pyrolysis-oil. The final aim was to investigate if energy crops can be enhanced by agronomical practices to produce a biomass quality which is attractive to the biomass conversion community, as well as giving a good yield to the farmers. It was found that the nitrogen/potassium chloride fertiliser treatments enhances Miscanthus qualities, by producing low ash, high volatiles yields with acceptable yields for farmers. The progress of senescence was measured in terms of biomass characteristics and fast pyrolysis product characteristics. The results obtained from this research are in strong agreement with published literature, and provides new information on quality traits for biomass which affects pyrolysis and pyrolysis-oils.

The thesis describes the effects of pressure from 1 to 4,400 atm. on the kinetics of polymerisation of acenaphthylene, and its copolymerisation with methyl methacrylate and with maleic anhydride. The rates of homopolymerisation were measured in toluene, benzene and carbon tetrachloride, with azobisisobutyronitrile (AIBN) as initiator at 60°C., and were found to be proportional to [1]0.62 and [M]0.9 at 1 atm. This result is interpreted in terms of degradative chain transfer involving the abstraction of a hydrogen atom from the naphthalene ring of the monomer, the resulting radical being resonance-stabilised.

Scabies is a neglected tropical disease (NTD) that contributes greatly to global morbidity and mortality. Caused by infestation with a microscopic mite, scabies is responsible for a wide range of infections including impetigo, abscesses and cellulitis that can lead to serious complications such as septicaemia, kidney disease and rheumatic heart disease. Despite the apparent burden of disease in many countries, the worldwide prevalence of scabies is uncertain. There have been few large-scale surveys of scabies prevalence or risk factors and control strategies have often proven to be ineffective, short-term solutions. This thesis aimed to provide new information on the occurrence and risk factors for scabies and impetigo and on control strategies aimed at eliminating scabies as a public health problem in resource-poor settings. After an overall introduction to the topic, the thesis presents a systematic review of published studies on scabies and impetigo prevalence. The review found that scabies prevalence varied significantly between regions and communities with studies reporting data ranging from 0.2% to 70%. Most regions reported prevalence greater than 10% but overall scabies and impetigo prevalence were highest in the Pacific and particularly high in children. The next chapter reports on the world’s first national population-based survey of scabies and impetigo to evaluate the magnitude of the problem and found that one in four adults and one in two children had scabies after surveying 10,000 people across Fiji. Effective treatments are available for scabies but in populations where the disease is endemic reinfestation can occur rapidly even when contacts are treated. Mass drug administration (MDA) has proven to be successful for the control of other NTD. To strengthen the evidence-base for MDA for scabies control, a comparative trial was undertaken in Fiji and showed that MDA was safe and highly effective particularly with ivermectin as primary agent. These results demonstrated the potential role of MDA in addressing a serious cause of illness in many developing countries. The baseline data from the trial were also analysed to identify risk factors for scabies. Scabies was strongly associated with overcrowding and age and was a major risk factor for impetigo. This burden of disease in resource-poor settings highlights the need to undertake research to investigate strategies for public health control of scabies and impetigo at population level.

Melodrama manifests itself in a variety of forms – as a film and theatre practice, as a discursive category, as a mode of imagination. This dissertation discusses film melodrama in its visual, gestural, and aural manifestations. My focus is on the persistence of melodrama and the traces it leaves on post-World War II Italian cinema: from the Neorealist canon of the 1940s to works that engage with the psychological and physical, private, and collective traumas after the experience of a totalitarian regime (Cavani’s Il portiere di notte, 1974), to postmodern Viscontian experiments set in a 21st-century capitalist society (Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore, 2009). The aural dimension is fundamental as an opening to the epistemology of each film. I pay particular attention to the presence of operatic music – as evoked directly or through semiotic displacement involving the film’s aesthetic and expressive figures – and I acknowledge the existence of a long legacy of practical and imaginative influences, infiltrations and borrowings between the screen and the operatic stage in the Italian cinematographic tradition. In doing so, I challenge the theoretical bias that associates melodrama with a reliance on grandiose theatrical settings, clichéd symphonic soundtracks, Manichean narrative tropes, redundancy and excess.My contribution to the understanding of cinematic melodrama encompasses two main dimensions. First, I show how the melos in films is crucial to the epistemological structure of every film, rather than a separate or ancillary entity. Whereas realist cinema and melodrama are usually regarded as opposites or antagonists, realism in fact relies on melodramatic aural and gestural figures to fashion its reality effects. Second, my investigation contributes to an understanding of melodrama, in its visual and aural manifestations, both as a mode and as a discourse – a system of mutually enlightening relationships that are influenced by and, in turn, can influence historical and social changes.

Reseña de: Carlos GOÑI ZUBIETA, Historia de la filosofía, I. Filosofía antigua, Ed. Palabra («Colección Albatros», 3), Madrid 2002, 346 pp.

A numerical model which uses thermodynamic and hydrostatic equilibrium was developed to study the cloud structure of the outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The model calculates cloud locations, cloud densities, the mixing ratio profiles of the condensates, and the thermal structure from the appropriate wet/dry adiabatic lapse rate. The effects of ortho-to-para H(,2) conversion (latent heat release and change in heat capacity of H(,2)) are also considered. The outer planets are predicted to have a multilayered cloud structure consisting of one or more of the following clouds: NH(,3)-H(,2)O solution, H(,2)O-ice, NH(,3)-ice, NH(,4)SH-solid, H(,2)S-ice, or CH(,4)-ice. Model predictions are compared to relevant observations. In particular, the observed NH(,3) depletion on Uranus is consistent with loss into an extensive NH(,3)-H(,2)O solution cloud, and it is not necessary to selectively enrich H(,2)S to NH(,3). Following condensation in the troposphere, CH(,4) remains the only trace gas that is present in large enough abundance in the stratospheres of Uranus and Neptune to be photolyzed. The coupled continuity equations for CH(,4), CH(,3), C(,2)H(,2), C(,2)H(,4), C(,2)H(,6), and H were solved numerically. Comparison of model predictions to observations provides constraints on eddy mixing. The predicted C(,2)H(,6) abundances are in agreement with the detection of C(,2)H(,6) in emission in the IR from Neptune but not from Uranus. For both planets, the calculated mixing ratios of CH(,2) and C(,2)H(,6) are large enough to form ice hazes in the vicinity of the tropopause. Coupled cloud physics and Mie scattering calculations favor ice particles with radii 10(mu) or larger to explain the observed clarity in the visible spectrum for this atmospheric region. For Uranus, polyacetylene production will also contribute to aerosols at this layer.