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Understanding how a child's language system develops into an adult-like system is a central question in language development research. An increasingly influential account proposes that the brain constantly generates top-down predictions and matches them against incoming input, with higher-level cognitive models serving to minimize prediction errors at lower levels of the processing hierarchy. However, the role of prediction in facilitating language development remains unclear. This dissertation aims to understand the contribution of prediction to language development by addressing the following research questions: First, we examined developmental differences in the ability to detect auditory prediction errors in auditory inputs by assessing whether adults and children differ in perceiving and detecting temporal statistics in speech using an artificial language learning task (Chapter 2). To overcome limitations of traditional prediction measures, we developed a new metric that captures individuals' real-time prediction during incremental sentence processing by combining simultaneous EEG and eye-tracking with the visual world paradigm (Chapter 3). Applying these real-time prediction metrics, we investigated the relationship between linguistic prediction and learning performance in adults (Chapter 4) and children (Chapter 5). In Chapter 4, we found that the efficacy of updating existing verb biases in skilled language users is associated with 1) real-time predictive processes during learning, 2) predictive ability in a different context, and 3) prediction errors experienced during learning. In Chapter 5, we examined the relationship between prediction and verb bias learning in school-age children, who have developed verb biases but show greater sensitivity to distributional information than adults. We found that children's ability to learn novel combinatorial information about known verbs is closely tied to their prediction skills, potentially even more so than adults. Collectively, these studies further knowledge about the role of prediction in supporting real-time language processing and development, providing novel insights into whether and how prediction occurs over the course of language development and during real-time language processing. Ultimately, these findings shed light on prediction-based learning frameworks and suggest directions for future research in language development. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation examines a century of Chinese dancers' bodily citizenship from the 1920s to the 2020s with emphasis on accounts of dance instruction and artistic exchange at the Beijing Dance Academy through a review of historical dance photo and newspaper archives, data collection of lived experiences in artistic practice, and oral history interviews. Engaging with Dance and Performance theory and through an analysis of bodily movement practices, the research examines Chinese moving bodies in and across national borders through a process of shaping how these bodies are performed with new visibility in the People's Republic of China. As a social group, Chinese dancers residing in urban cities in China disrupted socio-spatial structures of gender through choreography, performance, and interactions during the last century. By utilizing Performance Studies as an approach, this dissertation elevates unheard historical narratives and body performance to re-stage the socialist performing body as a national performance in itself. Highlighted are the observations and voices of ordinary dancing bodies and groups in city spaces where their voices and stories are given value in the research process. How do Chinese dancers participate in national projects and embody bio-diversified movements as props to dwell in urban city spaces? What does it mean for Chinese dancers and their dancing bodies to perform the in-between spaces as a whole? Each chapter presents diverse perspectives that analyze the Chinese body as a process of performance that complicates the conventional notion of a moving body. As the first doctoral dissertation to re-stage Chinese dancing bodies at the Beijing Dance Academy through a first-person account and experience, this dissertation challenges the historical archives, bodily memories, and socialist ideologies and uplifts embodied movement research on scholarship and artistic motion in China. Shifting in and out of this performative process, the research not only aims to understand the Chinese body in a mobile form of moving through different times, spaces, and historical experiences but also serves as a translation of emerging Chinese historical dance accounts and exchanges that occurred between China and the US in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This three-article format dissertation presents a comprehensive examination of the 2017 Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), focusing on its measurement properties across diverse community college student populations. Study 1 centered on the validity of the internal structure of CCSSE. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed evidence to support an eight-factor model of student engagement. This model encompasses dimensions such as personal development, interactions with faculty and peers, and institutional support. This study marks a methodological and theoretical shift, advocating for a multidimensional perspective on student engagement in community college. Study 2 employed multi-group confirmatory factor analysis to examine the measurement invariance of the CCSSE across gender, age, race/ethnicity, and enrollment intensity. The results affirmed the CCSSE's capacity to consistently measure engagement across these groups at configural, metric, scalar, and strict levels of measurement invariance. This verification underlined the survey's reliability in capturing authentic group differences. This study also uncovered lower engagement scores among men and part-time students. Study 3 explored the concurrent and predictive evidence of validity of the CCSSE, investigating how engagement indicators correlate with and predict key student success outcomes. It offered new insights into the complex effects of factors such as interaction with faculty and peers and advising services on academic outcomes. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This study explores using transfer learning in machine learning for natural language processing (NLP) to create generic automated essay scoring (AES) models, providing instant online scoring for statewide writing assessments in K-12 education. The goal is to develop an instant online scorer that is generalizable to any prompt, addressing the current limitations of online writing practice tests for operational assessments, such as those for statewide writing assessment (SWAS). The study leverages Google's BERT, a state-of-the-art NLP transfer learning AI product, to train and build generic essay scoring models which are based on statistical ground of ordinal logistic regression (OLR) via machine learning. Three groups were analyzed: a control group with no additional pre-training, a group further pre-trained on 12,970 ASAP essays (in-domain materials), and a group further pre-trained on 500 SWAS essays (within-task materials). Models were trained with 9th- and 11th-grade SWAS essays and evaluated on 10th-grade essays. Model evaluation metrics included Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK), Mean Absolute Errors (MAEs), accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Results indicated that further pre-training does not necessarily enhance scoring performance. The control group often matched or exceeded the SWAS pre-trained group. In all three groups, the scoring patterns of Language Use are consistent, while the ASAP pre-trained group excelled in scoring the Prompt Task trait. These findings highlight the importance of the pre-training materials' quality and indicate that further pre-training does not necessarily improve model performance for distinct downstream tasks. Future research should use balanced datasets with more essay prompts and explore different experimental designs to find the prerequisites of further pre-training to improve the AES model performance. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation explores the transregional impacts of the 1949 Chinese communist revolution on diasporic Chinese students and scholars in Cold War Asia and Asian America. It argues that higher education was a key site of contestation in the U.S.-China Cold War tensions of the 1950s, where American efforts to contain and isolate communist China produced a series of educational experiments and initiatives to school a new generation of diasporic Chinese youth as Free Asians. At the same time, new Asia-based educational institutions relied heavily on the initiative of diasporic Chinese elites on both sides of the Pacific -- including Hong Kong and U.S.-based refugee intellectuals, wealthy Chinese merchants in the Straits Settlements -- who were important but overlooked protagonists in shaping the cultural Cold War in Asia. As American anticommunism encountered diasporic Chinese energies, they collectively produced new higher educational institutions outside the PRC, forming a transpacific Cold War educational infrastructure in the 1950s. Overlooked in histories of the post-1949 PRC, which stresses the impact of its socialist campaigns, and histories of the Chinese minorities in postwar Southeast Asia and Asian America, which stress localization and equal citizenship, I argue instead that this educational activism of the 1950s was a region-making project which also shaped the nature of American cultural diplomacy in Cold War Asia, and the dynamics of decolonization in the late colonial British empire in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Beginning with the Chinese communist revolution of 1949 and concluding with the founding of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1963) and the reorganization of Singapore's Nanyang (South Seas) University in 1965, this dissertation demonstrates how debates over diasporic Chinese students, scholars, and the provision of Chinese higher education in the diaspora were core to U.S.-China geopolitical rivalries in the early Cold War, even as the diverse goals of students and scholars themselves never fully aligned with superpower agendas. The first two chapters introduce American efforts to aid the stranded Chinese students/scholars in the U.S. and Hong Kong, demonstrating how American humanitarianism was entangled with broader efforts to retain and re-orient these Free Chinese toward Free Asian goals in the Cold War. The next four chapters focus on the ethnic Chinese-majority British colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore as central sites of contestation, as local efforts to discourage students from traveling to China gave rise to a series of educational experiments to "educate the overseas Chinese," culminating in the founding of two Chinese universities in Hong Kong and Singapore as educational hubs for the diaspora. While neither university ultimately catered to the educational needs of all ethnic Chinese youth around the globe, they reflect how ruptured Cold War mobilities produced new sites of reconnection, particularly intellectual circulations and mobilities between diasporic Chinese in Cold War Asia and Asian America. This history of schooling Free Asia thus provides an important context to subsequent debates over a global Chinese diaspora vis-a-vis the Chinese state, Asian and Asian-American connections, and Sino-American rivalries in an era where global higher education is once again a battleground of great powers. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This thesis is to explore the relationship between climate risk and stock returns. In the first chapter, I develop a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model to explore how climate regulatory risk is reflected in cross-sectional asset pricing. The representative household has preferences for low carbon. Greener environmental preference makes the market price of climate policy risk more negative conditional on a low elasticity of substitution between green and brown capital. The quantitative implications of the model can rationalize the recent empirical evidence on positive price of carbon risk. Finally, using textual analysis to measure transition risk from 10K filings, the paper shows that lower transition risk-exposed firms carry a 8.4\% annualized risk premium. Consistent with the model, the price of transition risk tends to be negative when climate awareness is high. In the second chapter, we propose a measure of firm-level climate regulatory exposure based on 10-K filings. Using the 2016 Trump election as an exogenous shock to perceived climate regulatory risks, we identify a positive effect on stock returns for firms with higher climate regulatory exposures; they experience economically and statistically significant higher cumulative returns post-election. In the year following the election, firms with higher climate regulatory exposure experience higher carbon emissions and lower investor attention. Both findings indicate that, post-election, investors become less concerned with climate regulatory risks. Results are robust to physical climate, trade, tax and oil price exposures. In the third chapter, We develop a machine learning framework to extract the text-implied climate risk in the SEC 10K filings for the text-implied price of risk estimation. We exploit both supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms in NLP to accomplish this task. The proposed risk exposure is testable within the Fama-MacBeth framework and has statistical sufficiency. Empirically, this technique could generate a monthly abnormal return on climate risk from 1.2\% to 2.1\%, depending on the specification of the benchmark model. The pricing finding is robust at the firm level for the Fama-MacBeth regression. Additionally, we find that the sufficient text-implied risk exposure is consistent with recent empirical evidence with sensible external validation.

Let-7 microRNA (miRNA) plays a crucial role in the control of cell differentiation and proliferation, which also makes it a suppressor for the occurrence and development of tumors. Pre-let-7 is one of the intermediates in the maturation process of let-7 and two uridylyltransferases - ZCCHC6/TUT7, and ZCCHC11/TUT4 - play essential roles in the downstream processing of let-7 pre-miRNA. In the absence of RNA binding protein Lin28A, they perform 3' mono-uridylation, leading to pre-let-7 maturation. In the presence of Lin28A, they together form a TUT4(7)-Lin28A-pre-let-7 holo-complex and perform oligo-uridylation, which subsequently leads to exonucleolytic pre-let-7 degradation. However, with no full structural information about TUT4/7, especially the lack of a complex structure with pre-let-7, their detailed uridylation mechanism is still a mystery. X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM are the mainstream for structure determination and have been developed tremendously in the past decades. This project combined both techniques for structural study of TUT4/7 in apo or complex forms with pre-let-7 in the presence or absence of Lin28A, in order to unravel the details of the uridylation mechanism at atomic level. With regards to protein purification, I have established and optimized high throughput (HTP) cloning and expression methods for TUT4/7 based on the E.coli system. An optimized two-step purification protocol allows for the purification of both TUT4 and TUT7 in full length or truncated forms. Assays confirm both full length TUT4 and TUT7 are catalytically active. These highly purified proteins are essential milestones on the way to our goal of structural characterization of TUT4 (7) by X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM. In the case of TUT7, I have determined the crystal structure of the TUT7 catalytic module (CM) at 2.6 Å, which can serve as a basis for fragment screening trials aiming for identifying small molecules with oncogene inhibition potential. With cryo-EM, I reconstructed four high-resolution structures. The dynamic TUT7 full length apo structure is resolved at 4 Å, showing an overall "C-shape" model with two nucleotidyltransferase domains (NTDs) connected by flexible linkers. The 3.7Å binary complex of TUT7 with pre-let-7 reveals the mono-uridylation state, in which the pre-let-7 stem locks onto the CM, stabilizing the dynamic active-site cleft, while the pre-let-7 PRE loop region is close to the let-7 interacting module (LIM) but without a direct interaction or the interaction is transitory/dynamic. The zinc finger regions of the LIM are missing in this complex. Finally, two ternary complex structures were obtained from the TUT7/pre-let-7/Lin28A complex, determined at 3.8 Å and 3.6 Å respectively. The zinc finger in the LIM is visualized in both structures, while in conformation-I, the CM is missing, presumably due to the flexible linker regions connecting the LIM and CM, representing a pre-oligo-uridylation state. The other ternary complex in conformation-II reveals the additional densities of CM and a novel structure of zinc knuckle-1, of which the latter binds to the RNA stem, showing a second activated pre-oligo-uridylation state. The four high-resolution structures presented allow a full description of conformational changes from mono- to oligo-uridylation. In the study of TUT4, the TUT4 CM crystalised and diffracted to 4.5 Å, indicating the possibility of obtaining well-diffracting crystals for subsequent fragment screening trials (Li, 2020); while the TUT4 LIM in complex with inhibitory nanobody S2A4 diffracted to 5 Å and is under optimization currently. Using cryo-EM, a 3.7 Å ternary complex of a truncated TUT4 (TUT4_miniF)/pre-let-7/Lin28A was determined, showing a similar assembly to one of the models of TUT7/pre-let-7/Lin28A (conformation-I). Furthermore, the cold shock domain of Lin28A was identified in another TUT4_miniF/pre-let-7/Lin28A model solved at 12 Å. The TUT4 full length protein was purified successfully recently and preliminary cryo-EM trials together with pre-let-7/Lin28A show a different shape compared to TUT4_miniF/pre-let-7/Lin28A and close to structure of the TUT7 ternary complex in conformation-II. The structural work undertaken in this project establishes a strong basis for further understanding the uridylation mechanism at atomic level. This detailed information will provide important details for the rational design and improvement of TUT inhibitors with the potential to improve prospects for cancer patients suffering from a range of malignancies, including some of unmet need.

This thesis contains three essays investigating the effects of common ownership on firms' corporate lobbying activities and environmental performances. In the first essay, we investigate the relationship between common ownership and corporate lobbying activities of US pharmaceutical firms. We find commonly held firms lobby less than non-commonly held firms. This negative effect is more pronounced for commonly held firms with trade association membership, suggesting firms coordinate lobbying efforts as a collective action under common ownership and thus reduce individual lobbying. However, commonly held firms increase lobbying when they apply for FDA's patent approvals and face patent expirations. Overall, we uncover a new channel, 'political lobbying', through which common owners can influence product market outcomes of their portfolio firms. The second essay examines the relationship between common ownership and firms' lobbying activities on climate bills. We show that commonly-held firms' lobbying activities can make climate bills more likely to fail, suggesting their lack of collective willingness to face climate-related challenges. We find a positive relationship between common ownership and corporate lobbying activities on the climate bills that failed but no significant impact of common ownership on passed climate bills. More importantly, corporate political ideologies, i.e., the Republicans vs. the Democrats, drive how commonly held firms engage in climate lobbying activities. In the third essay, we examine how political ideology affects the efficacy of common ownership on firms' environmental performances. We find a negative relationship between common ownership and their portfolio firms' environmental performances. More importantly, the negative relationship depends on the firms' political ideology. Common ownership leads to lower environmental performance only for Republican-leaning firms. We contribute to the literature on ESG issues and the recent discussion of whether institutional investors incorporate ESG issues into their investment decisions as they claim.

Metaheuristics have been extensively studied to solve constraint combinatorial optimisation problems such as vehicle routing problems. Most existing algorithms require considerable human effort and different kinds of expertise in algorithm design. These manually designed algorithms are discarded after solving the specific instances. It is highly desirable to automate the design of search algorithms, thus to solve problem instances effectively with less human intervention. This thesis develops a novel general search framework to formulate in a unified way a range of population-based algorithms. Within this framework, generic algorithmic components such as selection heuristics on the population and evolution operators are defined, and can be composed using machine learning to generate effective search algorithms automatically. This unified framework aims to serve as the basis to analyse algorithmic components, generating effective search algorithms for complex combinatorial optimisation problems. Three key research issues within the general search framework are identified: automated design of evolution operators, of selection heuristics, and of both. To accurately describe the search space of algorithm design as a new task for machine learning, this thesis identifies new key features, namely search-dependent and instance-dependent features. These features are identified to assist effective algorithm design. With these features, a set of state-of-the-art reinforcement learning techniques, such as deep Q-network based and proximal policy optimisation based models and maximum entropy mechanisms have been developed to intelligently select and combine appropriate evolution operators and selection heuristics during different stages of the optimisation process. The effectiveness and generality of these algorithms automatically designed within the proposed general search framework are validated comprehensively across different capacitated vehicle routing problem with time windows benchmark instances. This thesis contributes to making a key step towards automated algorithm design with a general framework supporting fundamental analysis by effective machine learning.

In this thesis, I explore seven novels written by Sydney Owenson, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Charlotte Brontë, all major women writers of the early nineteenth century. I will argue that these women writers, often financially dependent on their pens, strategically created literary characters whose embodied experiences of time, space and motion seek to redefine and reconstruct their relationships with social spaces. I approach the spatial in their works by using Foucault's concept of heterotopia as a critical framework. Heterotopias are Other spaces, off-center in comparison with normal or everyday spaces, possessing manifold meanings. I aim to trace how heterotopias function in different cultural and historical contexts, arguing that heterotopias have the potential to transcend binary power structures and provide a space for otherness, although they fail to overthrow the dominant social order. I will also focus on frame narratives and the liminal space of annotation, following Foucault's notion of textual heterotopias that 'destroy "syntax" in advance', something that allows 'words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to "hold together"'.1 Ultimately, my thesis argues that the spatial is an important critical category to understand these women writers' engagement with a complex mesh of political, cultural and historical concerns. This thesis aims to provide a fresh perspective on the deictic functions of heterotopias in my chosen works. The introduction offers an outline of my theoretical approach, and a discussion of the concept of heterotopia, from its etymology to its literal and metaphorical usage. My main analysis comprises four chapters. Chapter One focuses on cross-cultural contact zones in Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and The Missionary (1811), where the liminal, often shifting identities of the Oriental Other pose a challenge to the assumptions of colonial authority. Following Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha, I explore the concept of hybridity as an interstitial space to deconstruct oppositional discourses of dominance and resistance. The acts and artifice of storytelling form the focus of the second chapter, in which I argue that Shelley's use of frame narratives in Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826) reveals a non-linear understanding of history that contests Enlightenment ideas of progress and causation. Working with Foucault's fourth principle of heterotopias which emphasizes co-existence of diverse times in the same place, I argue that heterotopias arise as a hybrid effect of fiction and reality. Women's protean subject positions under benevolent patriarchy in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814) are the focus of the third chapter. I examine how a heterotopic experience can promote female agency and destabilize binary gender relations, even while women are still restrained by patriarchal controls. In the fourth chapter, I turn to the private, inner world of the female character Lucy Snowe in Villette (1853), arguing that this is a heterotopia that facilitates the formation of a multifaceted self. The conflicted subject position occupied by Lucy reflects her difficult struggle to transcend gender and class boundaries. The Conclusion draws together my findings and argues that the analysis of these physical, psychic and textual spaces through the lens of heterotopias opens up the possibility for imagining a new embodied subaltern subjectivity.

Dams have been built in many parts of the world since the earliest human civilizations, but currently there is a significant program of dam building underway in the tropics. Despite general awareness of the likely detrimental impacts of dams, the limited number of empirical tropical studies means that specific effects of dams on these important but imperilled ecosystems are hard to predict. Although the Functional Flows (FFs) concept is now prominent in the scientific and river management literature, it has been applied only to some very specific cases in tropical areas to guide dam operation (e.g. to support periodic flooding of floodplain areas). In these and many other cases, FFs have been applied retrospectively, to design operational flows for existing dams. The work presented in this thesis concerns development of flow recommendations prior to the construction of a large tropical hydropower dam on Baleh River, Sarawak. Specific objectives of the thesis are to: (i) develop a full statistical understanding of the natural hydrological regime of Baleh River, (ii) identify critical habitat forming discharges (those responsible for coarse sediment entrainment and transport) and relations between discharge magnitude and hydraulic habitat heterogeneity, (iii) to assess the impact of the dam and other land use changes on sediment connectivity, and (iv) provide specific recommendations for dam operation to support sediment entrainment and maintenance of habitat heterogeneity, and for management of lake levels to limit changes in connectivity. The work involved analyses of historical data along with a number of empirical field data collection, modelling and remote sensing approaches. For Objective (i), a 51-year hydrological and hydro-climatological dataset was analysed in order to characterise the natural hydrological regime of the Baleh River. The analyses focussed on understanding the frequency, magnitude, duration, and timing of natural high and low flow events. For Objective (ii), HEC-RAS® models were built for 3 study reaches. These models were used to simulate hydraulic conditions across the range of discharges extending from high to low flows. The output from the hydraulic models was combined with information on critical entrainment thresholds of sediment at the 3 reaches in order to understand which flows are capable of entraining sediment. The focus of these analyses was to understand whether the expected hydropower regime is likely to cause sediment entrainment in the way that occurs currently under the natural regime. The analyses also used HEC-RAS® to evaluate hydraulic habitat heterogeneity at low flow conditions. The HEC-RAS® modelling was integrated with Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT® or ArcSWAT®) to understand flow magnitude in the river under different conditions of hydropower operation and rainfall (which would lead to tributaries downstream from the dam discharging high flows to the mainstem Baleh). In addition, the model coupled with the DEMs was used to look at the extent of exposure of gravel bars during low flow conditions. The SedInConnect model was used to understand patterns of sediment connectivity across the Baleh catchment. This model computes the sediment connectivity index (IC). For the modelling, it was necessary to develop DEMs and collate information on landcover in order to calculate topographic roughness and IC. Information on sediment entrainment was used to make recommendations about flows needed to maintain the geomorphic processes (i.e. bedload transport) post-impoundment that occur currently in the natural river. The low flow analyses were used to understand whether hydraulic conditions became more or less heterogeneous at low flows. The hydrological analyses identified 5 distinct classes of high flow event in the Baleh (defined as 'Event Types'). These types have distinct magnitudes and durations. HEC-RAS® modelling indicated that the smallest of these events led to sediment entrainment of D16 and greater at the study sites, and that larger events resulted in increasing areas of the bed across the study reaches experiencing entrainment. The maximum likely hydropower releases are smaller in discharge magnitude than the smallest of these natural events. The modelling indicated that more or less no sediment entrainment would occur during normal hydropower operations. However, integration of the HEC-RAS® and ArcSWAT® models indicated that when the catchment is wet, tributaries are contributing enough flow to result in sediment entrainment at the study sites that equates to that under some of the higher natural event types. Hydraulic habitat heterogeneity was relatively high during low flows and dropped at moderate and high flows. Moreover, at low flows, gravel bars became exposed at some of the study sites adding to overall habitat heterogeneity. According to the IC models, the impact of historical landcover changes on connectivity between the Baleh and the Rajang has not been pronounced. However, the models predicted that future forest clearance and roads will have observable impacts on the connectivity between the Baleh and Rajang. The models indicated that the construction of the dam would result in a significant impact on connectivity, with the effects of impoundment being greater than those of road and landcover changes, leading to a large portion of the Baleh catchment being almost completely disconnected from the Rajang. The operation of the dam will affect IC upstream of the dam due to the changes in connectivity caused by different lake levels. The HEC-RAS® modelling suggested that over time, in the absence of significant bed entrainment and transport of material, the bed could be expected to become progressively armoured and coarser, as seen in dammed rivers worldwide. However, the modelling also indicated that when the catchment is wet and downstream tributaries are contributing much additional water, flows in the Baleh will greatly exceed turbine releases and appreciable entrainment of bed material can be expected. Recommendations for geomorphic functional flows are made on the basis of these findings. Recommendations are to ensure that hydropower releases using the maximum number of turbines are made during times when the catchment is already wet, to ensure entrainment of bed sediment. Based on analyses of the natural regime, the recommendations include suggestions for timing and duration of such releases. They should last around 20 days, occurring 8 to 15 times per year, predominantly during the wet season. Low flow recommendations were made to occasionally allow dam releases to drop to 1 to 3 turbines to mimic natural low flow events. The recommendation for these events was to allow flow to drop to the natural respective monthly baseflows; these flows should last around 3 days with a frequency of at least 3 times per month during the wet season, and 2 times per month during the dry season. The dam will disconnect a major part of the Baleh catchment from the Rajang. The modelling suggested that the effects of the dam on connectivity will swamp the effects of landcover change and road construction on connectivity. Nevertheless, localised impacts of the road were predicted by the model, with an increase in connectivity on the upslope areas. It is recommended that measures to mitigate this are implemented as part of road construction and management. The model suggested that careful management of lake levels could be used to reduce the impact of the dam on connectivity in the upper part of the basin. The study of functional flows presented in this thesis is of growing importance for sustainable catchment management, particularly in Southeast Asia, where rapid dam construction and vulnerability to the impacts of climate change are prevalent. It is one of few studies globally that has explicitly considered fluvial processes when developing functional flow recommendations. It is also novel in integrating reach scale HEC-RAS® models with catchment scale SWAT® models to help in the design of functional flow recommendations. As far as the author is aware, it is the only study globally to have used the SedInConnect model to understand the combined and interactive effects of damming, landcover change and road construction on structural connectivity at a catchment scale. These approaches can be applied to large rivers in Southeast Asia and other Global South regions, aiding sustainable catchment and water management. It is one of few functional flow studies to have been undertaken before dam closure, allowing us to implement functional recommendations in advance of construction, rather than retrofitting them to a river that has been regulated for some time. It is recommended that a program of monitoring is implemented in the Baleh in order to understand how the river changes in response to impoundment and the success of flow recommendations for maintaining sediment dynamics and habitat heterogeneity. This monitoring will provide the basis for adaptive management.

Internet data traffic within data centre, access and metro networks is experiencing unprecedented growth driven by many data-intensive applications. Significant efforts have been devoted to the design and implementation of low-complexity digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms that are suitable for these short-reach optical links. In this thesis, a novel low-complexity frequency-domain (FD) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) equaliser with momentum-based gradient descent algorithm is proposed, capable of mitigating both static and dynamic impairments arising from the optical fibre. The proposed frequency-domain equaliser (FDE) also improves the robustness of the adaptive equaliser against feedback latencies which is the main disadvantage of FD adaptive equalisers under rapid channel variations. The development and maturity of optical fibre communication techniques over the past few decades have also been beneficial to many other fields, especially coherent light detection and ranging (LiDAR) techniques. Many applications of coherent LiDAR are also cost-sensitive, e.g., autonomous vehicles (AVs). Therefore, in this thesis, a low-cost and low-complexity single-photodiode-based coherent LiDAR system is investigated. The receiver sensitivity performance of this receiver architecture is assessed through both simulations and experiments, using two ranging waveforms known as double-sideband (DSB) amplitude-modulated chirp signal and single-sideband (SSB) frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) signals. Besides, the impact of laser phase noise on the ranging precision when operating within and beyond the laser coherence length is studied. Achievable ranging precision beyond the laser coherence length is quantified.

Background: Depersonalisation disorder (DPD) is characterised by chronic and continuous feelings of detachment from one's self. Perceptual changes, emotional numbing, and memory and attentional difficulties are also often reported (Sierra, 2009). DPD continues to be not well understood, under-researched and under-diagnosed (Sierra, 2009). This review aims to improve the understanding of this disorder by consolidating the common patterns of cognitive functioning and emotional processing within the DPD population. Methods: A systematic review, based on PRISMA guidelines (Page et al., 2021), was conducted on case-control studies investigating cognitive and affective processes within the DPD population. Studies were selected from Web of Science, PUBMED, PsycInfo, SCOPUS, MEDLINE and EMBASE. NIHR case-control quality rating tool was used to evaluate the quality of studies included. Findings: We included 23 papers in this review, with 6 studies investigating the cognitive abilities of DPD, and 17 studies examining emotional processing within DPD patients. People with DPD appear to have normal levels of cognitive abilities, although some differences in memory, attention and visuospatial abilities are consistent with their subjective complaints. Established effects of emotion on cognition such as emotionally-enhanced memory and emotionally-biased reasoning have also largely remained intact in the DPD population, as well as the cognitive aspects of affective processes, like cognitive empathy and emotional recognition despite high levels of alexithymia within the DPD population. Furthermore, DPD's affective response appears to be associated with a neural inhibitory mechanism due to the activation of the prefrontal cortex after the processing of aversion emotions from the insula region, which suppresses the subjective experience of emotion and autonomic markers of emotion. People with DPD also struggle with interoceptive identification and affective experiencing of emotions. Conclusions: It is unclear whether the differences in cognitive abilities noted above are indicative of actual neuropsychological deficits, or if they could be better explained by a reduced working memory and attentional capacity, leading to limited perceptual resources allocated for other aspects of experience. Retention of cognitive aspects of empathy, emotional recognition, and processing of emotional stimuli before inhibitory response may explain the preservation of regular modulation of cognitive functioning by emotion. The limitations of this review include a small number of included studies despite the broad scope, and small sample sizes within many of the included studies. Variable methodology across studies also made quantitative analysis difficult to conduct in this review. More research is needed in this population, particularly around the perceptual capacity of people with DPD and its relationship with excessive symptom monitoring, which is common amongst people with DPD.

This PhD thesis focuses on the study of assaying practices in the post-medieval Europe (c. 14th-17th centuries), especially on silver assaying. Modern analytical chemistry is an offspring of fire assay and cupellation, a method used to quantify the amount of precious metals such as silver and gold in ores, ingots or coins. Small-scale cupellation was used to determine quantitatively the richness of metalliferous ores, and for quality control in metals trade and coin minting. The stringent requirements in the efficiency and accuracy of these quantitative processes are reflected not only in the amount and purity of the silver available in post-medieval Europe, but also in the evolving procedures and materials used to carry out cupellation. This thesis combines a critical evaluation of historical texts describing assaying practice with the analytical study of contemporary archaeological remains, and experimental replications. Particular emphasis is placed on the manufacture of assay vessels (scorifiers and cupels) and the efficiency of the assay methods. The primary case studies include the Royal Mint and Jesuit College in Kutná Hora (Czech Republic), the Jáchymov Mint (Czech Republic) and the Porto Mint (Portugal), but samples from Middelburg (Belgium) and Paris (France) are also examined. The analytical techniques employed include portable X-ray fluorescence, optical microscopy, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry/atomic emission spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectrometry. Compared with ceramic crucibles, made industrially and traded over long distances, cupels were more likely made by the practitioners and therefore show higher variability. The analyses of cupels from the sites have identified three different recipes: bone ash, wood ash, and a mixture of bone ash and wood ash, which is the dominant recipe. These are all recorded in historical sources, but the analytical study coupled with the new experiments allows further insight into regional manufacturing differences, possible reasons behind choices, and the effect of cupel materials on manufacture and performance. While cupels from the Porto Mint are made of a mixture of bone ash and wood ash in similar proportions, cupels from the Czech Republic are richer in wood ash. Using silver loss in cupels as a proxy for efficiency, the operations in the mints appear more standardised than in other workshops. The experimental project helped assess the performance of different cupel recipes and furnace structures reported in historical and archaeological data. Though bone ash is recognised today as ideal material for cupels, the experiments revealed challenges in obtaining reproducible results with these materials when the cupels are made by inexpert users. Scorifiers in this study were used for testing ores. The experiments demonstrated the difficulties in fully refining silver using ceramic scorifiers, hence helping explain the reasons for the historic transition to ash-based assaying vessels. Overall, the reconstruction of assaying practices through archaeological and contemporary technical treatises allows new insight into regional variability in silver metallurgy, the transfer of technical knowledge in post-medieval Europe, and the development of quantitative analytical chemistry.

Over the past decade, lead-halide perovskites (LHPs) have demonstrated significant potential in terms of their performance across a wide range of optoelectronic devices, including solar cells, photodetectors and light-emitting diodes. However, the toxicity of lead and instability issue of LHPs are still concerns for their widespread implementation. These successes, but also the challenges of LHPs have motivated great efforts across multiple disciplines to search for lead-free and stable alternatives that can have similar optoelectronic properties to LHPs, namely 'perovskite-inspired materials (PIMs)'. With the deeper understanding of defect tolerance displayed in LHPs, a large number of PIMs have been identified until now. Among all the identified PIMs, ternary chalcogenides or ABZ₂ materials, are believed to be one of the most promising alternatives so far, owing to their simple fabrication protocols, strong absorption and high stability in air. Particularly, AgBiS₂ solar cells have demonstrated the highest efficiency (9.17%) among all bismuth-based solar cells. Nevertheless, studies into ternary chalcogenides are mostly limited to AgBiS₂ photovoltaics, and the investigations into other potential ABZ₂ materials or broader applications are rare so far. Therefore, this thesis will aim to investigate the optoelectronic properties of another promising while rarely investigated ABZ₂ material - NaBiS₂, and also the potential of AgBiS₂ as near-infrared (NIR) photodetectors. In the first project of this thesis, NaBiS₂ nanocrystals (NCs) have been shown to exhibit extremely strong absorption, along with a comparatively sharp absorption onset. However, optical-pump-terahertz-probe (OPTP) measurements indicated that most free charge-carriers in NaBiS₂ NCs will be localised within a few picoseconds. These localised charge-carriers only exhibited low mobility of around 0.03 cm² V⁻¹ s⁻¹ and could not transport effectively even though they might be rather long-lived in NaBiS₂ and unaffected by intentionally-introduced defects. With help from density functional theory (DFT) calculations, all of these unusual characteristics in NaBiS₂ have been shown to closely associate with intrinsic cation disorder, which was also observed in AgBiS₂. Although post-annealing is effective for improving cation inhomogeneity and enhancing absorption in AgBiS₂, its effect on NaBiS₂ was found to be rather minor, which also indicated that the charge-carrier localisation process in NaBiS₂ could not be significantly mitigated after annealing. Based on the fundamental insights acquired in the first project, the possibility of further improving charge-carrier transport in NaBiS₂ NCs through ligand exchange treatment was investigated in my second project. Using a variety of correlated spectroscopic characterisation techniques, I found that NaBiS₂ NCs treated by inorganic iodide ligands had enhanced sum mobility and surface photovoltage (SPV) signals, which implies an improvement in the macroscopic charge-carrier transport. However, the ultrafast localisation process was still observed in these iodide-treated NaBiS₂ NCs, suggesting that their cation disorder was not greatly changed. At the same time, the defect capture rates were also found to be lower in the iodide-treated NaBiS₂ NCs based on my two proposed models for describing charge-carrier dynamics. As a result, solar cells based on these iodide-treated NaBiS₂ NCs could exhibit a peak external quantum efficiency (EQE) value over 50%, along with a power conversion efficiency exceeding 0.7%. Although this is an order of magnitude larger than previous reports, I found ion migration to be a limiting factor for NaBiS₂ devices from temperature-dependent transient current measurements, where a low activation energy of only 88 meV was extracted. In my third project, AgBiS₂ photodetectors were fabricated and characterised in depth. Aside from the broadband photo-response across from ultra-violet (UV) to near-infrared (NIR) region, AgBiS₂ photodetectors have demonstrated an extremely high cut-off frequency (f-3dB) on MHz order, indicating their great potential in applications requiring fast device response such as optical communications. The mechanism behind this fast response was studied, and a relatively long drift length compared to the AgBiS₂ film thickness is believed to be the key reason. Similar to NaBiS₂ devices, ion migration was also found easy in AgBiS₂ devices with an activation energy of 124 meV, which could lead to their increasing noise currents with time. Importantly, these noise currents could be also effectively suppressed when optimising the AgBiS₂ film thickness, in which a balance between large shunt resistant and cumulative quantity of defects should be reached. Finally, owing to the small bandgap of AgBiS₂ NCs (~1.2 eV), AgBiS₂ photodetectors could effectively monitor the heartbeat rates by probing the transmission change of blood vessels illuminated by NIR light, which has been widely used in the medical field owing to its deeper penetration in tissues. These three projects not only uncovered several remarkable optoelectronic characteristics of ABZ₂ materials, but also investigated possible methods to further alter these characteristics. Although ABZ₂ materials have shown great potential as light harvesters, it can be seen that both cation disorder (or charge-carrier localisation) and ion migration are still limiting the performance. More studies on the root causes of both phenomena, and how to effectively suppress their effects on the materials, would be hence crucial in the future work. With more understandings on this material class, we could expect more efficient, stable, and cleaner optoelectronic devices to be realised in the future.

In this thesis, I consider two broad areas: the generation and verification of entanglement between large masses, and the analysis of causality in quantum dynamics. While the former is an extension of quantum mechanics in hitherto unexplored regimes such as for large masses and gravity, the latter provides a tool to probe quantum mechanics in complex networks. The first part of the thesis introduces a new methodology, namely, "spatial qubits", to the study of non-classicality of macroscopic objects. Essentially, it allows one to treat a continuous variable system as an effective qubit. This offers us a way to detect the entanglement between a spin and a path in a Stern-Gerlach apparatus, which has never been verified to date. We offer a way to observe it. It also enables one to observe the entanglement between two neutral large masses induced by the Casimir interaction. This works in a regime of non-Gaussian states of the two masses, and can evidence the quantum nature of macroscopic forces. As a separate application, we apply the same technique to witness the quantum nature of gravity via a table-top experiment. This approach has the advantage of not requiring ancillary degrees of freedom such as spins, as well as not requiring a precise closure of an interferometer, to evidence the entanglement. However, here we find it necessary to prepare a highly position squeezed state of a mechanical system. The other part of the thesis adopts concepts from classical causal analysis to the quantum regime. In particular, we generalize the notion of Liang-Kleeman information flow to quantum networks. The key feature of this theory is that an intervention is applied to the system and then the resulting changes on the target are observed. Causal influence is then quantified by relevant quantum entropic quantities such as the von Neumann entropy and quantum relative entropy. The presence of entanglement in the quantum domain uniquely manifests itself through some counterintuitive flows of information which we exemplify in small networks.

Chinese-English parallel corpora mainly comprise English source texts translated into Chinese, leaving a significant gap for investigating the Chinese-to-English translation direction. This thesis aims to fill this gap by building a parallel corpus named ZHEN, which contains approximately one million characters of contemporary simplified Chinese source texts aligned with authentic translations into English. The first objective of this thesis is to demonstrate the utility of ZHEN in descriptive translation studies by addressing Chinese-to-English translation questions. Three corpus-driven analyses were conducted. The first analysis compared the Chinese subcorpus of ZHEN with a general non-translated simplified Chinese corpus to investigate the types of Chinese texts selected for translation. The second analysis compared the English subcorpus of ZHEN with a non-translated English corpus to examine lexical and discourse differences between English translated from Chinese and non-translated English. The third analysis used parallel concordances to identify Chinese-to-English translation problems. Several significant findings emerged from the study. Firstly, it revealed significant differences between Chinese external and internal communications, influenced by ideology. Secondly, the use of adverbs and modal verbs differed dramatically between the non-translated English corpus and the translated English corpus from Chinese. Lastly, the study demonstrated that investing in parallel concordances and collocations can assist in translating culture-specific goods from Chinese to English. Overall, this thesis addresses the lack of under-resourced Chinese-to-English translation direction by building a parallel corpus and provides insights into the challenges and opportunities of Chinese-to-English translation.

This study aimed to enhance student engagement in language classrooms by developing a professional learning community (PLC) in the Modern Language Department in a high school. This exploratory study uses a mixed-method design collecting both quantitative and qualitative data through various instruments. Incorporating improvement science, the teachers engaged in an 8-week plan-do-study-act cycle to learn and share instructional practices focusing on student-centered strategies. This study aimed to understand: (1) How do teachers engage in a PLC? (2) How do teachers describe their learning of new instructional practices and strategies and apply what they have learned in their classes? (3) How do students and teachers identify and describe any changes in student engagement after teachers implemented what they learned from the PLC? The methodology included a pre-PLC survey, teacher interviews, exit tickets for PLC meetings, meeting notes, and pre- and post-student surveys on the song project intervention. The findings revealed that veteran teachers could learn and develop knowledge and skills by sharing and discussing with each other within the structured time and space provided by the PLC. Student engagement was enhanced as the teachers used student-centered instructional practice they learned from the PLC. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the impact of participating in a school garden-based project on the sense of social connectedness of urban elementary school students and university service-learning students within the urban community. The study found that the sixth-grade participants experienced improvements in their sense of peer connectedness, non-family member connectedness, and community connectedness during the school garden-based learning project. They formed meaningful connections with members in the gardening group and further developed an interest in community engagement for the common good of the community. For the university service-learning students, who were in their first year of university studies, their previous biases and stereotypes about this urban community were challenged and subsequently transformed as they closely interacted with the sixth-grade students in this project. They reported personal and professional growth that resulted from their service-learning experience in this project. Overall, both the sixth-grade participants and the university service-learning participants built meaningful connections with the school garden-based learning group and developed a sense of social connectedness within the urban community. The findings of this study provide significant information for leaders at public schools, particularly those in low-resourced school districts, faculty of service-learning courses and leaders of civic engagement programs in higher educational institutions, and leaders of community outreach at non-profit organizations. The findings can assist these leaders in fostering effective collaborations to enhance students' academic and social-emotional learning while also establishing meaningful relationships with their communities. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Attaining Advanced proficiency and beyond has been a principal goal for second language learners, practitioners, and researchers. Achieving this level in writing requires producing connected discourse of paragraph-level length and nurturing the ability to arrange various linguistic units to form a unified and cohesive whole. This ability, known as discourse competence, is mainly realized through employing diverse cohesive devices to ensure the logical flow of the propositions in the discourse. The proliferation of Dual Language Immersion (DLI) programs across the United States in recent decades attests to the aspiration of promoting bi-/multilingualism that commits to nurturing Advanced language proficiency in an articulated long-term educational model. However, little is known about how DLI learners, Chinese in particular, demonstrate their language proficiency after elementary education. Building upon reflections on the construct of discourse competence and proficiency measurements and by analyzing 200 samples produced by 50 students, this study investigated the linguistic features exhibited in writing samples produced by high school Chinese DLI learners to examine "what" and "how well" they employed three cohesive devices - connectives, connectors, and frame setters - in constructing their written discourse. The study found that most participants were low-to-mid Intermediate-range writers who produced sentence-level text types. These learners used more simple and compound sentence-level (connectives and frame setters) than inter-sentence-level cohesive devices (connectors). Moreover, the syntactic accuracy was higher than its semantic counterpart for connecting cohesive devices (connectives and connectors). In contrast, framing cohesive devices (frame setters) showed higher accuracy semantically than syntactically. Furthermore, there was a statistically significant difference between Intermediate Low and Intermediate Mid groups in spatial frame setter syntactic accuracy. This study fills an empirical gap in describing secondary Chinese DLI learners' written proficiency attainment. Theoretically, it contributes to a refined understanding of Chinese cohesive devices by using two lenses to analyze cohesive devices: from the perspective of text organization (words-phrases, sentences, paragraphs) and from the cohesive mechanisms (connecting versus framing). The latter lens combines conventional research on connecting devices and insights from Chinese "topics" and a cognitive-functional approach. This synthesis expands the conceptualization of Chinese cohesive devices and text cohesion through a more refined analytical framework. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

A reader's ability to go beyond their surface-level understanding of words and to build a deeper representation of the text in their mind (i.e., reading comprehension) is predicated on a range of reader- and text-level variables that indicate how well a certain reader can read a certain text. The following study evaluates the extent to which the interaction between the reader characteristics of fifty first graders (e.g., decoding and oral reading fluency skill and demographic characteristics) and the textual characteristics of commonly administered, first grade oral reading fluency passages (e.g., text complexity) may impact the participants' reading comprehension of the oral reading fluency passages. It was hypothesized that accounting for superfluous variation in text complexity of oral reading fluency passages (i.e., text complexity effects) would recalibrate participants' oral reading fluency scores, allowing for more valid interpretations student reading skill. Results were mixed and indicated limitations with the study's comprehension recall measure. Conclusions underlined the importance of including basic reading measures such as decodable and sight word fluency particularly for students with low oral reading fluency skills. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

When discussing students' educational experience on campus, including race and racism, previous studies usually discuss domestic and international students separately and use different theoretical frameworks. Previous literature examining international students focused on the individual characteristics of students and how those associated with their personal adjustment to their campus environment (e.g., Andrade, 2006; Khawaja & Stallman, 2011; Ward & Masgoret, 2009). Little attention has been given to critical frameworks that address the international student population, considering not only on students' race and ethnicity as major factors, but also engages international students' direct racial experiences within specific institutional types. This study explores Asian international graduate students' experiences of campus racial climate and resistance strategies in a Minority-serving Institution (MSI) in the U.S. This study uncovers how racialization experiences are shaped by students' own ethnic backgrounds, the history of the U.S.'s racial stratification system, and national and global contexts. My research also raises timely concerns of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. during shifting political climate that occurred simultaneously with the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite facing microaggressions and other forms of oppressions on and off-campus, Asian international graduate students engage in resistance strategies to adjust to and combat microaggressions, institutional invisibility, and academic injustices. This research is guided by a qualitative research methodology utilizing a single case study to focus on an individual's lived experiences. The aim of this research also includes ameliorating oppressive attitudes to Asian international students. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

We reported a short asymmetric synthesis of (±)-N-acetylcolchinol in a greener and stepeconomical route. In this method, all the redox reactions were achieved electrochemically instead of using transition metals or other toxic reagents. We synthesised racemic Nacetylcolchinol in 4 steps employing chemoselective reduction of chalcone and intramolecular oxidative arene-arene coupling in electrochemical cell with an overall yield of 41%. We also accomplished an asymmetric variant of the synthesis in 7-steps, which furnished the desired compound in an overall yield of 33% and 99.5: 0.5 er. Deprotection of p-methoxyphenyl amine was also achieved in electrochemically.

For large eddy simulation, it is critical to choose the suitable turbulent inlet boundary condition as it significantly affects the calculated flow field. In the thesis, the effect of different inlet boundary conditions including random method (RAND), Lund method and divergence-free synthetic eddies method (DFSEM) on the flow in a channel with a hump are investigated through large-eddy simulation. The simulation results are further compared with experimental data. It has been found that turbulence is nearly fully developed in the case based on Lund method, not fully developed in the case based on DFSEM and not developed in the case based on RAND method. In the flow region before the hump, mean velocity profiles in the case applying Lund method gradually fit the law of the wall as main flow moves towards the hump, but the simulation results based on RAND and DFSEM methods cannot fit the wall function. In the flow region after the hump, cases applying Lund and DFSEM methods could relative precisely predict the size of turbulent bubble and turbulent statistics profiles. While the case based on RAND method cannot capture the positions of flow separation and re-attachment point and overestimates the turbulent bubble size. From this part, it could be found that different turbulent inflow generation methods have a manifested impact on the flow separation and re-attachment after the hump. If the coherent turbulence is maintained in the approach flow, even though turbulent intensity is not large enough, the simulation can still predict the flow separation and turbulent bubble size relative precisely. From the results, even if the simulation based on the Lund method and DFSEM have a better performance than the simulation based on the RAND method, the results still cannot agree well with the experimental data. There are some possible reasons that result in the big difference. Firstly, the spanwise width of the simulation domain is relatively small. Additionally, the LES sub-grid scale model has a slight impact on the results according to the previous research. Finally, the DFSEM is sensitive to the surface normal gradient schemes. Beside the choice of the turbulent inlet boundary condition (IBC) methods, the settings of each turbulent IBC method are critical as well. In this thesis, the effect of setting different IBC methods in LES using the Lund method, the divergence-free synthetic eddies method (DFSEM) and the digital filter method (DFM) on the simulation of the boundary layer over a flat plate is investigated. This research also fully explained the influences of different IBC methods on the results of turbulent kinetic energy budget terms, and it is found that the DFM and the DFSEM both have good performance. In addition, for the DFM and DFSEM, the input parameter such as turbulent length scales are hard to set generally without prior knowledge of the flow field. It is found that the simulation results based on these two methods with constant turbulent length scales of 0.4-1.0 times of the value of boundary layer thickness could agree well with the DNS results to a great extent after about 10 boundary layer thickness along the streamwise direction. Overall, it could be recommended that the DFM and the DFSEM can be used in this case with the constant input turbulent length scale about 0.4-1.0 times of the value of boundary thickness.

This thesis investigates the impact of policies on people's mental and physical wellbeing. It highlights the impact on vulnerable people and explores the heterogeneity of impacts for those from different backgrounds. Chapter 1 explores the impact of displacement due to land expropriation on physical and mental health using data on household heads and their spouses from the Longitudinal Survey on Rural Urban Migration in China. The results show that the displaced are more likely to be sick or injured and have higher medical expenditure. At the same time, impacts on the standardised mental health factor and self-rated health status are statistically insignificant. This chapter investigates this further using the time since displacement and finds that the impact on mental health is significantly negative for the recently displaced people, while the impact on physical health is significantly negative for the long-term displaced. In order to understand these results, this chapter also explores effects on other outcomes and finds that displaced people have more years of education, fewer children and are less likely to have medical insurance. Those having more years of education are more likely to care about their health and thus spend more on it. Having fewer or no children can explain the higher possibility of being sick or injured. People without a settled family life are more prone to dangerous jobs and unstable lifestyles. Chapter 2 explores the heterogeneous impacts of forced displacement due to the Three Gorges Dam project (TGDP) on people's mental well-being in China. Using the TGDP survey data on both residents and relocatees, this chapter estimates the average treatment effect on the treated and finds that depression levels increased among the displaced. The impacts for other standardised mental health factors, including anxiety, low mood and low self-esteem, are statistically insignificant. This chapter also finds heterogeneous impacts on mental health considering differences in people's educational level, marital status, moving distance and whether they were displaced individually or with their village. The illiterate individuals became more anxious than those having general education. The divorced were not as severely affected as the married for depression and low mood but were worse for anxiety and low self-esteem. People who moved out of town became much more depressed than those who moved within the town. Finally, people who moved with the village became more depressed than those who moved with their households alone. These results suggest that heterogeneity of the impacts exists, and thus it should be considered when making policy decisions. With an event study approach, Chapter 3 explores the dynamics of the heterogeneous impact of lifting shielding by ethnicity for the clinically extremely vulnerable people in the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no evidence suggesting that the high-risk individuals from a BAME background were more likely to have COVID-19 symptoms once the shielding requirement was relaxed than those from a non-BAME background. However, the impact on the diagnosis of mental ill-health is significantly higher for the high-risk BAME than their non-BAME counterparts after the shielding was relaxed in July 2020. Furthermore, they felt more at risk of catching COVID-19 in November 2020 when the daily infections increased, and the shielding was not required. This negative impact continued in January 2021, when the shielding requirement was reimplemented. In terms of behaviour, when the COVID-19 pandemic deteriorated in November 2020, its impact on the use of trains by the high-risk BAME decreased significantly, showing that the high-risk BAME population were more concerned about catching the virus than the high-risk non-BAME population. This could explain the insignificant difference between high-risk BAME and non-BAME in having COVID-19 symptoms; that is, although the high-risk BAME may live in an environment that increases the chance of getting infected than the high-risk non-BAME, their cautiousness lowered their exposure to the virus.

In an increasingly connected world, it is now more common than ever to learn languages that originate beyond one's own continent. The burgeoning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) industry beyond Europe and the Americas, along with global awareness of economically powerful languages such as Arabic and Mandarin Chinese, is testament to such a trend. Oftentimes, these languages can be 'psychotypologically distant', meaning that the learner perceives them to be dissimilar to other languages in their repertoire. These languages may also come across as particularly challenging to learn, since they require the learner to navigate new and potentially unfamiliar linguistic systems. Although there is widespread consensus on the complexity of learning such languages, existing theory does not yet provide a complete outlook on how to overcome linguistic distance effectively. Firstly, our knowledge of the dynamics of 'psychotypology'-a learner's perceived distance between the target language and other languages known-is still generic at present, and we know little about how psychotypology can function as a strategic learning tool if the learner perceives a target language to be largely distant. Similarly, the growing body of literature on transfer has greatly strengthened our understanding of multilingual processing; however, one would have to identify cross-linguistic similarities for transfer to occur in the first place, which may be challenging to do when exposed to a linguistically unfamiliar language. The potential usefulness of language learner strategies (LLS) and strategy-based instruction (SBI) also remains largely overlooked in such learning contexts. To that end, the Strategy Instruction Programme with Awareness of Psychotypology (SIPPs) was designed and evaluated in this study. Its ultimate goal was to explore how explicit instruction of psychotypological awareness, transfer, and language learner strategies could facilitate the learning of a psychotypologically distant language. The intervention took the form of a three-iteration design experiment, with five learners in each iteration. Set in the context of Taiwan, the programme focused on three groups of adult learners navigating beginner-level reading in Mandarin-a language generally believed to be psychotypologically distant from most other mainstream languages. These learners represented a range of L1 backgrounds (namely, Indonesian, Thai, English, and Spanish) and all of them shared English as a common language. Using reading task sheets, stimulated recall interviews, open-ended questionnaires, and semi- structured interviews, a mixed-methods approach was used to investigate the outcome of the SIPPs intervention in relation to process (i.e., psychotypologically sensitive strategy development), product (i.e., reading scores and factors explaining strategy effectiveness), and perception (i.e., learner thoughts on the guiding theory of the course). To meet the objective of design experiments, theory was revised as findings evolved in each iteration. Key findings revealed that the outcomes of each iteration generally improved over the previous, and the intervention was effective on the whole. Learners' use of strategies diversified across the three iterations, with stronger reflections of metalinguistic knowledge, psychotypology, and monitoring towards the second and third iterations. While not all learners established a continuous improvement trajectory with regard to reading scores in the first iteration, general improvements were seen in the second and third teaching cycles, and the percentage of psychotypologically sensitive strategies increased from iteration to iteration. In a similar vein, attitudes towards the SIPPs in all three groups remained positive, although it was not until the final two iterations whereby learners were able to articulate more nuances of how the course facilitated their development of reading strategies as multilinguals. The intended contributions of this research touch upon both theory and practice. The study delves deeper into the nature of 'psychotypology', an area of applied linguistics that has been relatively under-researched in classrooms since its introduction in 1983. It solidifies the conceptual interconnectedness between psychotypology, transfer, and language learner strategies in the context of reading in a psychotypologically distant language, and further explores the affordances of transfer when cross-linguistic similarities are challenging to identify on the surface. Translating these theories into practice, the study investigates the management of linguistic distance with one's existing multilingual resources, thus providing a concrete pedagogical blueprint for both the teaching and learning of psychotypologically distant languages.

Sierra Leone has been regarded as one of the successful countries with regard to peacebuilding mandates. Peace education focuses on the importance of self-development and building interpersonal relationships, instilling peace-related ideas in the recipients. With the purpose of identifying the role of peace education in the immediate aftermath of the civil war, this research focuses on: 'the role of peace education in post-conflict Sierra Leone since the 2000s'. Particular attention was given to understanding and evaluating the contribution of peace education in promoting peace during the past two decades. Meanwhile, this study also focused on the limitations within peace education itself and its practices. Other research questions, including the explanations across education, conflict, and international relation studies for the cause of the outbreak of the civil war, have been discussed as part of the background to the study and as an original contribution to theorising peace education. Methodologically, with the purpose of exploring the nature of peace education and the role of peace education from the perspectives of the literature and informants through their experiences, a social constructionist approach was adopted as the main approach to analysing and interpreting findings generated from academic literature, primary documents and interviews with key informants. The findings of this study focus on the relationship between the combination of formal and non-formal peace education approaches in Sierra Leone and inequalities that could lead to further grievances. The data suggest that peace education challenges the elitist nature of education by introducing free access to educational opportunities. This study also highlights those structural inequalities, such as underdevelopment in general infrastructure, cannot be fully addressed by peace education. Finally, this study contributes to further peace education and other peace-related practices by offering a rich set of evaluations and analyses on the role of peace education.

Recent studies have documented the expansion of financial activities in urban development, which enmeshes the state in the financial market and leads to the restructuring of governance. This research aims to examine the most recent transformation of financialisation in urban development in China and unpack the role of the state therein. The empirical study is focused on the financial agencies mediating the process of land financialisation, including urban development corporations (chengtou) and land reserve centres. The research is based on mixed methods, including archival research, case studies and semi-structured interviews. Interviews were conducted with government officials, chengtou managers and urban scholars in Shanghai, Nanjing and Jiaxing to triangulate the understanding of local operations and the state-finance relationship. Through the investigation of financial agencies, this study examines the specific processes of financialisation, the restructuring of urban governance and the implications for the state-finance relationship. Empirically, this research provides a concrete analysis of how government agencies are used and transformed to mediate the financialisation of urban development in China. Especially, the corporatisation of Shanghai Chengtou demonstrates the government's capacity for regrouping assets to secure financial operations. Theoretically, this research investigates the salient features of financialisation in China and contributes to the theorisation of financialisation. First, urban governance in China has become increasingly predicated on financial techniques and strategies. For instance, financialised urban governance in Shanghai is embodied in the use of shareholding to reassert government control and solve local financial problems. Moreover, this research contributes to understanding the state-finance nexus by highlighting the complexity of the state actors in financialisation at different times. In particular, the Chinese state has reconfigured the land reserve system to manage financial risks and control the pace of financialisation. In doing so, it internalises financial strategies and mechanisms into the state apparatus, leading to further state restructuring and the financialisation of the state itself.

Taiwan's prevailing motorcycle usage has been widely discussed in relation to urban air quality. As Taiwan's policy-makers seek to reduce mobile pollution sources in cities, the large number of petrol-powered motorcycles within cities have become a major target to be addressed. In addition to promoting public transport usage, the shift of petrol-powered motorcycles to electric ones has been one of the goals that the Taiwan government has vigorously implemented in recent years. Many scholars have studied motorcycle issues in Taiwan, however their suggested directions are mostly top-down promotion methods such as persuading riders to change to electric vehicles, providing subsidies to use lower-carbon transport modes, expanding the public transport system, or encouraging people to change their individual travel behaviours. My research examines the issue theoretically and practically from social science theories of practice and mobility and in-depth interviews with Taipei and New Taipei City motorcycle riders to understand the motorcycle practice from the bottom-up. In light of this, I aim to provide a nuanced understanding of the motorcycle low-carbon transition in Taiwan rather than focus on the top-down promotion of government-led behaviour change. This study uses in-depth interviews to understand the issues, to complement existing discussions on largescale structural change or assessing practitioners' thoughts and needs quantitatively. For the transition process, looking at the practitioners' ideas in-depth and building a diverse discussion of perspectives differing from the direction of existing research and policy trends is crucial and valuable. The theoretical contribution of my research is to provide a different context in the research field of mobility and sustainability, which thus far has mostly focused on cars and their daily use. Since motorcycle usage is relatively popular in Asia, for many Asian countries, motorcycles are a central issue that needs to be faced in the low-carbon transport transition. Practically, my results illustrate aspects that policy-makers need to pay attention to during the low-carbon transport transition for Taiwan's motorcycle riders, such as the significance and influence of the motorcycle culture deeply embedded in Taiwanese society. My findings indicate that a 'tough' approach to transition through laws and regulation, or 'soft' approach through persuasion are both on their own not sufficient. Rather, a low-carbon mobility transition for Taiwan and beyond needs to strategically pay attention to every aspect of the change in practice, respect the meanings of the practice possessed by the practitioners, and handle the inclusion of practitioners carefully during the transition process. Attention to practice is also important to prevent disadvantaged groups of people from being affected by further inequality in the transition process, and to maintain the justice of the transition on the pathway to a low-carbon transportation society.

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is a re-emerging alphavirus transmitted to humans by the Aedes species of mosquito. Infection with CHIKV causes chikungunya fever, which can lead to debilitating chronic joint disease. Despite the rising potential as a threat to global health, no effective vaccine nor antiviral agents for prophylaxis or treatment are available. The CHIKV non-structural protein 3 (nsP3) is essential to the virus lifecycle and is required for genome replication. However, to date, the exact role of this protein remains unclear. In in vitro studies, nsP3 has been shown to bind promiscuously to RNA but the precise nature of such interactions in vivo has not been explored. To investigate this, individual nucleotide UV-crosslinking and immunoprecipitation (iCLIP) combined with next generation sequencing were employed. This analysis revealed that nsP3 preferentially binds to the CHIKV genome, over host RNA. The nature of nsP3 binding to viral RNA also appeared stochastic. Further bioinformatics analyses were then applied to assess how nsP3 is able to recognise target RNA for binding. However, neither a consensus binding motif nor specific preferences for secondary RNA structures were identified, suggesting that these may not be key drivers of RNA binding recognition for this protein. In parallel, this project also aimed to investigate a polyproline motif located in the C-terminal HVD of nsP3 which is important for RNA synthesis and interactions with host amphiphysin in multiple alphaviruses but the relevance in CHIKV has not been fully investigated. To address this, a panel of mutations targeting conserved residues of the motif were generated in both CHIKV sub-genomic replicon and full length infectious virus. Most of the mutants were able to replicate and generate infectious virus in the respective systems, except one mutant (P398A/P401A) which was able to replicate in the subgenomic system but presented reduced replication and a complete inability to produce infectious virus. Further analysis revealed that the mutation responsible for the phenotype was not the intended mutation in the polyproline motif, but instead located to the 3' UTR, which is essential for negative strand synthesis and subsequent genome replication. The results indicate that the polyproline motif is not absolutely essential for the CHIKV lifecycle.

Global concerns on natural resource depletion and environmental degradation have initiated the power grid evolution from one based on large-scale rotating generators to one with many small-scale distributed energy resources. Smart distribution microgrids can combine the advantages offered by the prevalence of power-electronic-interfaced distributed energy resources (DERs) into providing significant controllability and flexibility to end users through the embedded control system. However, the lack of large-scale, high-inertia rotating generators may lead to instability in the events of fast voltage and/or frequency deviation. For microgrids operating in the islanded mode, it is also crucial to govern the dynamics among the DERs whilst maintaining the grid voltage and frequency within the desired specification. Control system of microgrids typically appears in the form of hierarchical structure consisting of primary, secondary, and tertiary control layers, which are distinguished by control bandwidth and technical functionalities. Through the primary layer's decentralised droop control scheme, the active and reactive load powers can be shared autonomously among the DERs in an islanded microgrid. However, it is established that the reactive load power cannot be accurately shared through standard droop control alone. This is because of the voltage discrepancies at the points of DERs connection. Furthermore, it is also well established that voltage and frequency deviations are inevitable in droop mechanism. This has motivated this research thesis to design, develop and implement novel secondary control strategies to improve the voltage regulation and reactive power sharing among the powerelectronic-interfaced DERs for large-area droop-controlled islanded microgrids. Their performance is substantiated by a series of detailed and in-depth simulation studies and analyses. It is hoped that he work in this thesis can contribute to the evolution of conventional power grid towards future mart grid. A practical DIgSILENT-PowerFactory-Python co-simulation platform is established and exploited for control strategies verification. A variety of advanced droop control schemes targeting reactive power sharing improvement reported to date will be categorised and explained further in this thesis. An assessment is carried out on two groups of reactive power focused droop-based schemes, standard droop control with dispatch and virtual-output-impedance (VOI)-based droop control, to establish their merits and demerits. It is found that the latter, which is a relatively new technique made possible by the embedded control system of power-electronic-interfaced DERs, has controller gains to be tuned and that the resulted voltage deviation is slightly higher for the scheme with static-dynamic impedance components. Owing to sparse communication requirement, distributed control structure is highly relevant to large-area microgrids as DERs and loads are sparsely connected across the network. Through the previous assessment, it is found that the standard droop output voltages of all participating DERs converged upon proportional reactive power sharing through VOI-droop scheme. This has prompted its utilisation in distributed consensus control algorithm in conjunction VOI-droop scheme. To begin with, the state-of-the-art consensus VOI-droop control with reactive power is improved by nullifying the static component of virtual output impedance which, in turn, improves the voltage profile. The relationship between DER's reactive power output and virtual output resistance/reactance is established. An operating-point-dependent consensus control tuning guideline is also presented. It is found that virtual-output-reactance-based VOI-droop scheme results in faster correction and dynamic-only, single component (virtual output resistance/reactance) VOI variant is sufficient to realize proportional reactive power sharing with improved voltage profile. These findings, however, raise new research questions on why there is never a need to regulate both virtual output impedance components, and why the virtual output reactance leads to a faster correction dynamic. Accordingly, a novel droop equivalent impedance concept is introduced as an attempt to answer the above questions. From the droop equivalent impedance equation, it is revealed that the reactance component has a more direct impact on reactive power, which explains the faster correction dynamic by the reactance-type control scheme. In addition, it is discovered that upon the convergence of droop equivalent reactance (resistance) through consensus control, the droop equivalent resistance (reactance) converges too. This hints that as far as reactive power sharing correction is concerned, there is never a need to simultaneously regulate both virtual impedance components. In due course, a novel droop-equivalent-reactance-based consensus adaptive VOI-droop control is developed. A systematic tuning guideline is introduced by first establishing the relationship between the droop equivalent reactance and the virtual output reactance. A well-tuned distributed controller with less cascaded PI controllers can certainly improve the practicality and robustness of the secondary control scheme while reducing the tuning effort especially in future large-area microgrids. In the previous standard droop scheme and the reactive-power-focused improved variants of droop control schemes, it is concluded that network bus voltages will deviate due to intrinsic trade off between DERs droop output voltage and reactive output power. Therefore, a computational friendly, power-flow-embedded, centralised secondary optimal control strategy is subsequently designed to address the multi-objective control problem. In this thesis, secondary voltage regulation is categorised into those that regulate DER-buses and those that regulate load-buses. While voltage regulation at DER-buses is widely attempted, voltage regulation at load-buses is considerably challenging. This is due to the fact that information of load-buses (located remotely) is not directly available to the DER control system. However, not only does the voltage regulation in distributed islanded microgrids involves high number of DERs in a much shorter control timeframe, but classical power flow algorithms are also not directly applicable due to the inexistence of slack bus in droop controlled islanded microgrids and the dependence of active/reactive powers on frequency/voltage droop. A non-iterative Decoupled Linearised Power Flow (DLPF), formerly proposed for large-scale power system planning and operation, is exploited as the linear approximation that fits well with the droop behaviour of islanded microgrids. In order to address the conflicting control objectives of voltage and reactive power regulation, standard droop control is preferred over the VOI-droop scheme as its aggregation with DLPF is rather straightforward. The centralised secondary optimal control strategy is proven capable of realising single (optimal reactive power sharing or single loadbus voltage regulation) and multi-objective (optimal reactive power sharing with single/multiple load-buses voltage regulation) controls. In addition, the effectiveness of the optimal control strategy in respecting the practical network constraints is successfully demonstrated. Apart from the reliability issue, it is expected that the computational complexity of a centralised optimal control scheme will increase exponentially as the microgrid scales up. Therefore, a semi-distributed multi-objective secondary optimal control targeting very-large-area droop controlled microgrids is relevant. It is proposed that the very-large-area microgrid's secondary control layer is first segregated into multiple sub-microgrid clusters. The intention is to segregate the large-scale optimisation control problem into multiple sub-problems so that the computational burden can be distributed across multiple control entities. By embedding the consensus control concept into the design, a semi-distributed optimal control strategy is developed. The intra- and intercluster controls enable voltage and reactive power regulation within, respectively, each microgrid cluster and among multiple microgrid clusters. The viability of the semi-distributed control scheme is fully verified using MATLAB simulation. Through extensive simulation proofs, the effectiveness of the semi-distributed control strategy in collectively managing voltage and reactive power tradeoff is fully demonstrated. The control scheme is expected to have a low risk of single-point failure while being highly scalable as the computational effort is distributed across multiple secondary ontrollers. In this thesis, advanced secondary control strategies are designed and implemented for voltage regulation and/or reactive power sharing improvement among power-electronic-interfaced DERs in large-area droop-controlled islanded microgrids. All control strategies are fully verified via extensive theoretical derivation and simulation means. It is hope that the control schemes can benefit the development and motivate the adoption of future smart microgrids.

Originating from string theory, the holographic correspondence provides a dictionary to convert a quantum theory on the boundary of the Anti-deSitter space (AdS) into a theory of gravity in the bulk AdS space. In this thesis we will study the intersection of quantum information and quantum gravity, focusing on methods of quantifying quantum entanglement and chaos in gravity via the AdS/CFT holographic correspondence. Entanglement entropy of a bipartite quantum system on the boundary is equivalent to the area of a minimal surface in the bulk. In both the boundary and bulk pictures, entanglement entropy is divergent, meaning it equals to infinity. Hence we need to renormalise the entanglement entropy to obtain a finite quantity. The variation of the entanglement entropy is related to the dynamics of the bulk spacetime via the first law of entanglement entropy. We will first present a way to express the renormalised entanglement entropy in terms of the Euler invariant of the bulk entangling surface and other renormalised curvature invariants. Then we use this expression and independently derived the renormalised version of the first law of entanglement entropy. In particular, we use the Hamiltonian formalism of holographic renormalisation to derive the integral form of the first law of entanglement entropy. Quantum chaos is characterised by the scrambling of information that increases exponentially in time. The rate of the exponential growth, known as the Lyapunov exponent, can be measured via the out-of-time-ordered correlation function (OTOC). In holography, the OTOC becomes the gravitational scattering amplitude of high energy particles. We investigate a possible correction to the Lyapunov exponent by considering the classical stringy effect in the bulk gravitational scattering. Following the semi-classical shock wave calculation of gravitational eikonal scattering, we obtain the classical string transverse oscillation contribution to the eikonal phase. We conclude such correction is negligible in the high energy eikonal limit, hence satisfying the chaos bound.

High-impact and low-probability extreme events including both man-made events and natural weather events can cause severe damage to power systems. These events are typically rare but featured in long duration and large scale. Many research efforts have been conducted on the resilience enhancement of modern power systems. In recent years, microgrids (MGs) with distributed energy resources (DERs) including both conventional generation resources and renewable energy sources provide a viable solution for the resilience enhancement of such multi-energy systems during extreme events. More specifically, several islanded MGs after extreme events can be connected with each other as a cluster, which has the advantage of significantly reducing load shedding through energy sharing among them. On the other hand, mobile power sources (MPSs) such as mobile energy storage systems (MESSs), electric vehicles (EVs), and mobile emergency generators (MEGs) have been gradually deployed in current energy systems for resilience enhancement due to their significant advantages on mobility and flexibility. Given such a context, a literature review on resilience-driven planning and operation problems featuring MGs is presented in detail, while research limitations are summarised briefly. Then, this thesis investigates how to develop appropriate planning and operation models for the resilience enhancement of networked MGs via different types of DERs (e.g., MGs, ESSs, EVs, MESSs, etc.). This research is conducted in the following application scenarios: 1. This thesis proposes novel operation strategies for hybrid AC/DC MGs and networked MGs towards resilience enhancement. Three modelling approaches including centralised control, hierarchical control, and distributed control have been applied to formulate the proposed operation problems. A detailed non-linear AC OPF algorithm is employed to model each MG capturing all the network and technical constraints relating to stability properties (e.g., voltage limits, active and reactive power flow limits, and power losses), while uncertainties associated with renewable energy sources and load profiles are incorporated into the proposed models via stochastic programming. Impacts of limited generation resources, load distinction intro critical and non-critical, and severe contingencies (e.g., multiple line outages) are appropriately captured to mimic a realistic scenario. 2. This thesis introduces MPSs (e.g., EVs and MESSs) into the suggested networked MGs against the severe contingencies caused by extreme events. Specifically, time-coupled routing and scheduling characteristics of MPSs inside each MG are modelled to reduce load shedding when large damage is caused to each MG during extreme events. Both transportation networks and power networks are considered in the proposed models, while transporting time of MPSs between different transportation nodes is also appropriately captured. 3. This thesis focuses on developing realistic planning models for the optimal sizing problem of networked MGs capturing a trade-off between resilience and cost, while both internal uncertainties and external contingencies are considered in the suggested three-level planning model. Additionally, a resilience-driven planning model is developed to solve the coupled optimal sizing and pre-positioning problem of MESSs in the context of decentralised networked MGs. Internal uncertainties are captured in the model via stochastic programming, while external contingencies are included through the three-level structure. 4. This thesis investigates the application of artificial intelligence techniques to power system operations. Specifically, a model-free multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach is proposed for the coordinated routing and scheduling problem of multiple MESSs towards resilience enhancement. The parameterized double deep Q-network method (P-DDQN) is employed to capture a hybrid policy including both discrete and continuous actions. A coupled power-transportation network featuring a linearised AC OPF algorithm is realised as the environment, while uncertainties associated with renewable energy sources, load profiles, line outages, and traffic volumes are incorporated into the proposed data-driven approach through the learning procedure.

There have been many attempts to define what Anglicanism is, through both "reformations" of the Church of England as well as rewritings of its history. Yet none have proposed a definition that can satisfy all. Instead of searching for one, static Anglican identity, this thesis follows recent scholarly endeavours to highlight the confessional diversity and conflicts that characterised the Protestant English Church, challenging traditional, and yet inaccurate dichotomies, such as puritan/conformist or puritan/episcopalian, to showcase how the very nature of the Church of England was one of struggle and fluidity rather than a definite triumph of specific strains of piety. To break through the puritan/conformist antithesis still prevalent in current scholarship, this thesis adopts a biographical approach to investigate a wide range of puritan contributions to the shaping of Anglican identity. The careers of the four protagonists in this study, William and Thomas Gouge, John Davenport, and Edward Reynolds, demonstrated that not only were the boundaries between conformity and dissent ever-changing, but both conformists and dissenters were active, self-conscious reformers of the Church of England. While scholars in the past often narrate a story of dissent when they explore transatlantic congregationalism and presbyterianism, the four protagonists in this story show that they considered themselves active participants in, rather than opponents of, the national Church, and that even their dissenting activities, in both Old and New England, were tireless attempts to reshape the orthodoxy of the English Church. Pre-war and post�-1662 puritan conformity feature prominently in this story as well, especially in William Gouge's and Edward Reynolds' lives. Both their conformity to the Laudian Church as well as Reynolds' return to episcopacy as Bishop of Norwich in 1660 urge scholars today to rethink puritans' view of episcopacy and better appreciate puritans' legacy on the emerging Anglican identity.

Electron beam welding (EBW) is a joining process that has been widely applied in many modern industrial sectors. However, in order to achieve a satisfactory welding quality for a given material and configuration, a trial-and-error approach is usually adopted before moving to the final production. This procedure is often wasteful, time consuming and expensive when the raw material is at high cost, and greatly relies on the operators' personal experience. To enable a 'smarter' welding process and reduce the inconsistent human factor, this PhD study is to develop a novel method based on statistic modelling, numerical modelling and artificial neural networks to predict the weld profile, which is the main criterion for assessing the welding quality. The models are set up with electron beam characteristics collected through a 4-slits technology to determine the actual focal spot size and power density, therefore the uncertainty caused by beam variation can be reduced. Multi-influences caused by electron beam, machine parameters and process environment are considered, and the predictions cover a wide range of linear beam power ranging from 86 J/mm to 324 J/mm. Finally, a novel simulation tool for predicting electron beam weld shape has been developed with assistance of a 4-slits beam probing technology to reduce the amount of manual work traditionally needed to achieve high-efficiency and high-quality welding joints. Validated by experimental results, the model is able to predict the weld profile with high accuracy and reliability for both partially and fully penetrated welding situations. By combining the numerical model and artificial intelligence, a weld-profile prediction system is to be integrated in current EB welding machines to allow a less-experienced operator to achieve high welding quality.

This thesis investigates plurality and plurality interpretations in L2 English and L1 Chinese. It proposes that plurality inferences associated with plural marking are universal across languages, no matter whether the plural marker is obligatory or optional, and no matter if they are computed in an L1 or L2.

China as a unity community, has stood the test of time for more than 2000 years, despite its periodical collapse, chaos and reunification over time. Not only has a united Chinese community survived the massive nation-building movements in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century, but it has also retained its unity after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the final decades of the twentieth century. By conducting a historiographic research on the first-ever true unification of China in 211 BC, it has been found that war had been the key trigger of China's unification and the genesis of its pre-modern ethnic foundation in the third century BC. Not only had warfare helped establishing a truly united Chinese community for the first time in history, but it had also fostered tremendous social transformation in the Qin state (770-221 BC), which formed the basis for the later Qin dynasty (221-207 BC) - the first Chinese empire that succeeded in uniting all Chinese under a single, centralized Chinese state. Although the Qin's wars of unification (230-221 BC) were the direct cause of China's first temporary unification, Qin's success in its attempt to unify China actually has much broader historical implications. Qin's unification of China had been deeply rooted in the Legalist reforms by Lord Shang, which fostered Qin's advancement in the social, political and economic spheres and had in turn resulted in Qin's strong military competence over its six rival Chinese states. This subsequently led to Qin's military success during its unification of China, which provides a basis for the genesis of China's pre-modern ethnic foundation later on. However, even though the Reforms of Lord Shang, which introduced the Legalist doctrine to the Qin society, had facilitated Qin's unification of China in the third century BC, it was unable to sustain the unity in the post-unification era. The Qin Empire only lasted for fifteen years before it fell into oblivion. This shows the fragility of Qin' unity and the difficulty of sustaining a united but also contested Chinese community. Nevertheless, Qin's socio-political heritage, namely the centralized socio-political system, the standardized written Chinese characters and and the Legalist doctrine, which played a key role in Qin's unification of China, had all been inherited by succeeding Chinese dynasties and therefore facilitated the emergence of China' pre-modern ethnic foundation in the ancient time.

Research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has developed successful theories to understand the condition and to inform intervention. However, it faces challenges regarding efficiently explaining individual differences, comorbidity and certain treatments. The computational movement in mental health research not only opens up new methods to study the phenomena in PTSD but provides new prospects to looking at PTSD. The computational approach is a data-centred research method. Using complex mathematical modelling, the approach seeks new ways to describe and record phenomena in mental functioning (i.e., phenotyping). With big data, the approach aims to discover more robust patterns (i.e., data mining), and ultimately, to build models (i.e., computational modelling) that improve explanatory power and predictive accuracy. Although the computational approach has potential, its application in clinical psychology lacks systematic understanding and theoretical guidance. The thesis aims to explore the computational approach in child and adolescent PTSD research. Four empirical studies were conducted to: investigate symptomatic trajectory and PTSD-depression comorbidity; trauma memory and appraisal; chronic PTSD prediction and risk interpretation; and the long-term impact of early stress on panic disorder. Importantly, all the studies utilized unconventional computational methods, including trajectory modelling, natural language processing, supervised machine learning modelling, interpretable machine learning techniques, and robust variance estimation. The four studies serve as successful implementations of computational methodologies. The advantages of these methods are explained in the context of the necessity for computational phenotyping and the benefits of data mining. The findings address PTSD-specific research questions, concluding that negative trauma appraisals, memory coherence, cognitive avoidance and physiological reactions are critical factors to PTSD symptom development, comorbidity and individual differences. A review of those findings provides the basis for an in-depth discussion of acute stress symptoms, pre-trauma factors, long-term impact and the omission of physiological aspect in the cognitive-behavioural model of PTSD. The thesis concludes by proposing a preliminary computational model of PTSD.

Previous study allowed us to focus on the most effective anti scaling glass composition of 50P2O5 ∙10Na2O ∙ 40CaO (mol%) showing the best anti scaling property with the controlled release of the desired P3O93- and P3O105- phosphates. Achieving anti scaling properties with an increase of more than 1000% in humidifier running time using hard water (ca. 320 ppm), previously broken due to scale formation within 2 months. Primary studies carried out was glass dissolution, where tap and deionized water was used to observe dissolution and ion release in water with presence and absence of ions. Followed by dynamic and static tests to understand how the flow of liquid will effect dissolution and ion release. Extreme temperature and humidity experiments were carried out to test the glass' durability trying to understand how the condition in which the glasses are kept will affect its overall performance. Glass and its following results were characterized with thermal gravitational analysis (TGA), differential thermal analysis (DTA), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive x-ray (EDX), x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and 31P nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) with dissolution properties analysed using ion chromatography, inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). The glass chosen by this thesis showed great durability in extreme temperatures and humidity. Finally, extending on its controlled ion release and anti scaling property; the addition of copper showed antimicrobial property with 50P2O5 ∙10Na2O ∙20CaO ∙20CuO (mol%) showing best performance. Addition of copper decreased P3O93- and increased P3O105- phosphate release showing change in glass bulk structure with addition of Cu2+, making the glass more ideal as it allows for the glass not to excessively release phosphates whilst achieving antimicrobial property. The glass was also pulled into fibres with its possible application into cooperation into filters also showing excellent antimicrobial property. In conclusion, the glasses studied exhibited steady release of anti scaling phosphates in all conditions making it an excellent candidate for industrial uses in all hard water environments with effective antibacterial and antiviral property.

This thesis explores civic administrative literacy of York from 1272 to 1377. Studies of pragmatic literacy argued that the making of documents, preservation of records and use of records were three steps in the development of administrative literacy. However, firstly, the distinction between the first two steps was not explained enough, because what survives were presupposed to be intentionally preserved. Documents can accidentally survive as well. Secondly, individual documents and records played a limited role in explaining contemporaneous concepts of preservation and use. In order to redress the problems, this thesis includes two Parts. Part One exploits royal and religious archives to study the scope of documents made for civic administration and whether civic records were preserved. The research shows that the city government wrote down a massive number of documents, and some records were preserved. However, this preservation was not for a long term. Afterwards, this thesis plans to explain this divergence between making documents and preserving records by studying lay clerks in the city. Part Two focuses on a civic custumal, the first Freemen's Register. It combines methods of manuscript study and historical study to critically review previous ideas about the compilation of this custumal. This thesis proves the usefulness of this custumal in shedding light on the civic documents and records available when the compilation started around the 1360s and 1370s, the use of royal records by the city, and causes behind the compilation. Overall, this thesis has two significant implications. Firstly, the years around the 1360s and 1370s was a key period when the civic administrative literacy developed in York. The earliest civic custumals started to be compiled and an office of clerk was established in the civic government. Secondly, the collection of institutional archives should be studied carefully to assess their role in history.

Strain-hardening geopolymer composites (SHGC) is an alkali-activated material reinforced with randomly dispersed short fibres, which exhibits high ductility and strainhardening behaviour with excellent crack control. Made from industrial by-products including fly ash (FA) and ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBS), SHGC is considered a promising and green alternative to its cement-based counterpart because of low carbon emissions, reduced energy consumption and superior mechanical properties. The incorporation of recycled tyre steel (RTS) fibre can further enhance the greenness of SHGC. Although the fresh and hardened properties of SHGC produced by various precursors have been increasingly investigated in recent years, a systematic study of strain-hardening behaviour and engineering properties of FA-GGBS based SHGC reinforced with hybrid polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and RTS fibres and cured at ambient temperature is still lacking. This thesis aims to develop a hybrid PVA-RTS fibre reinforced sustainable SHGC with desired engineering properties based on micromechanics and fracture mechanics theory and investigate the effects of sand and fibres on the engineering properties of SHGC. Firstly, a series of tests were conducted to explore the effect of sand and obtain the optimum sand content for SHGC with acceptable engineering properties. Then, the micromechanical analysis was undertaken to verify the strength- and energy-based pseudo strain-hardening criteria of SHGC. Afterwards, the effects of PVA fibre and hybrid PVA-RTS fibres on engineering properties of SHGC were studied in terms of flowability, drying shrinkage, static and dynamical mechanical properties, strain-hardening and multiple cracking behaviours, and failure mechanisms. Microstructural characterisation was employed to gain insight into the toughening mechanisms of hybrid fibre reinforced SHGC, including fibre bridging effect, fibre fracture, and fibre pull-out. This thesis provides a comprehensive understanding of the strain-hardening behaviour and engineering properties of FA-GGBS based SHGC reinforced with hybrid PVA-RTS fibre and cured at ambient temperature for civil infrastructure applications.

This thesis investigates the features of dark/difficult heritage sites and their impacts on visitors' engagements with the past. Two former prison sites, Chia-Yi Old Prison and Jing-Mei Memorial Park, in Taiwan are chosen as case studies, and both of them represent two difficult historical periods when Taiwan was governed by regimes from 'outside.' This research examines how Taiwanese citizens visit and interact with these two prison sites, testing the assumption that the use of dark/difficult heritage can be observed not only from the ways that relevant heritage sites are established and managed, but also from the interaction between the heritage and local population. The observed phenomena demonstrate that the public show different attitudes towards the two prison sites and the impacts they bring to them, and the history displayed in the sites provides opportunities and materials for the public to rethink their previous understanding and current society. The two represented histories need to be put in a context to consider the reasons, which the issues of historical distance, comparison between two backgrounds and other potential can together result in the consequence. This thesis is a snapshot of a nation undergoing development and change and heritage performs as epitome of its complex and difficult history. The interactive process illustrates not only the relation of mutual influence between people and dark sites, but also that people become an important medium and potentially influence the society and how the dark sites are understood by the society. It is expectant that in addition to offering a unique example of heritage in East Asia after WWII, this research and the raised case of Taiwan are able to show the crucial role heritage practices play in presenting hidden, uncomfortable pasts and the extent such pasts impact on people's understanding and their society.

Academic help-seeking behaviour is an important learning strategy that helps students succeed when they are unable to solve an academic problem on their own. Educational psychology research has strived to identify which factors predict academic help-seeking and has indicated that self-efficacy is significantly related to academic help-seeking. However, previous studies have neither considered international students nor provided an in-depth exploration of the help-seeking process in the Scottish postgraduate taught context. Thus, the overall purpose of this thesis is to examine and understand what and how PGT academic help-seeking process took place in a Scottish university. Consisting of a main study and a follow-on study, it helps to understand how academic and social self-efficacy and other influential factors influence academic help-seeking behaviour among postgraduate taught students (PGT) and to examine the similarities or differences between British and Chinese international PGT students - and provides insight into how the time-transition figures into PGT students' help-seeking behaviour trajectories. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach was used for this thesis, entailing a quantitative online survey (N = 104) followed by qualitative semi-structured interviews (N = 14) to elaborate on the quantitative findings. The online survey data were analysed using SPSS software and interview transcripts were analysed thematically using NVivo. The interpretation was drawn from both the quantitative and qualitative results. With the onset of the pandemic (2020-), in order to increase the thesis' scope and test the proposed model from the original sequential explanatory mixed-methods study, a follow-on study was conducted using the chosen qualitative visually-guided interview method (N = 8) to explore PGT academic help-seeking behaviour trajectories. The interview transcripts were analysed thematically using NVivo. The final interpretation and conclusions were drawn from both the original study and the follow-on study results. The key findings from this thesis suggest that there is a complex dynamic interaction of demographic, psychological and contextual factors with participants' personal beliefs and attitudes towards seeking academic help. Additionally, some cultural differences emerged, although academic and social self-efficacy were equally important for British and Chinese PGT students' academic help-seeking. By using a combination of Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory and Urie Bronfenbrenner's Bio-ecological Theory as theoretical frameworks, this thesis offers new insight into conceptualising the mechanisms involved in academic help-seeking. The findings of this thesis support and expand on recent work suggesting the inclusion of environmental influences in academic help-seeking, the importance of social interaction, the reflection of academic development, and the need for a comprehensive framework for understanding academic help-seeking in the Scottish PGT context. This thesis also demonstrates the value of mixed-method approaches to understanding PGT students' academic help-seeking behaviour. The implications and limitations of the current research are discussed, highlighting that the academic help-seeking process is more complex than previous research suggests and that multiple environmental influences should be considered.

This thesis explores the housing experiences of 30-somethings in Seoul, South Korea, using the 'housing pathways' framework for understanding how young Koreans respond to housing deprivations and navigate housing practices across their life-course. The work analyses their housing deprivations, limited housing opportunities and housing pathways in the increasingly uncertain socio-economic context of precarious housing and labour markets. Findings were based on a case study of three dimensions of housing disadvantage that young Koreans widely encountered - housing affordability, poor housing quality and stagnated departure from the parental home. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 19 men and 13 women in their 30s. The interview data were analysed using thematic analysis. This thesis contributes to empirical and theoretical knowledge on housing choice and deprivation of young people. The finding documents their experiences associated with inadequate, unsafe and insecure housing over the life-course. It also reveals a lack of a sense of home despite individual home-making practice. Moreover, it identifies the complex decision-making on housing required of young Koreans due to a combination of economic factors, social norms, and individual experiences and perceptions. Their housing choices were also determined by gender or the stage of their life-course. The thesis analyses four types of housing pathway based on young adults' evolving housing qualities and tenures. Marriage was a significant event for entering the 'progressive housing pathway', which delays in life-course were associated with the 'constrained housing pathway'. The 'chaotic housing pathway' was related to homelessness and the 'deferred pathway' to returning to parental housing and co-residence. In conclusion, the thesis challenges the assumption of age as a marker for housing policies. Given increasingly diversified life-courses of young adults, age-based criteria would continue to marginalise their access to housing policy and delivery.

Network synthesis theory originally deals with the problem of realising optimal electrical networks based on the desired system performance. The introduction of a novel mechanical element, the inerter, has completed the electrical-mechanical analogy, allowing network synthesis to be directly applicable to mechanical systems. This method, however, can lead to complex realisations requiring many elements. Compared to electrical systems, the minimal realisation of mechanical networks is much more critical due to practical considerations around alignment, linkages and size. This has motivated our research on developing a network-synthesis-based approach to identify beneficial networks with pre-constrained network complexity. It leads to the design of compact and cost-effective multi-domain vibration suppression systems for a broad range of applications. First, a series of generic networks, which contain the complete topological information of Immittance-Function-Blocks (IF-Blocks), are proposed to characterise connection possibilities of different types of networks. Desired networks will then be systematically enumerated by assigning a certain number of elements into these IF-Blocks. Since IF-Blocks are two-terminal sub-networks, their immittance functions can be represented as the structural immittances. Thus, combined with their mathematical expressions, the obtained networks can be used to identify optimal vibration suppression systems. The proposed generic networks are termed as 1PT1NG, IFL, 2PT1NG, GIFN networks. Three of them include one reaction mass, which can be represented through the use of a notional ground as the mass element does not have a direct electrical equivalent. The 1PT1NG network has one physical terminal (PT) and one notional ground (NG) where the reaction mass is connected to; the Immittance-Function Layout (IFL) network represents networks with 2 IF-Blocks and one reaction mass in between; the 2PT1NG network has two PTs and one NG; the Generic-Immittance-Function-Network (GIFN) is the generic network of all possible three-terminal networks. All these networks contain an arbitrary number of transformerless elements connected in series and parallel. This systematic approach, with its inherent advantages, can be directly used to identify optimal vibration absorbers for various engineering systems. The 1PT1NG network is subjected to offshore wind turbines to suppress their structural vibrations. The IFL and 2PT1NG networks are applied to a three-storey building to reduce its inter-storey drift. The GIFN network is used to design hydraulically interlinked suspensions for vehicles. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is effective in identifying beneficial vibration suppression systems with constrained network complexity compared to the conventional network synthesis methods.

This thesis is primarily focused on the electrochemistry of dioxygen in divalent metaloxygen systems. Chapter 1 introduces energy storage, fundamental electrochemistry, and two distinct metal-air battery systems, using either an aqueous or non-aqueous electrolyte. Chapter 2 discusses all techniques for material characterisation and electrochemical characterisation applied in this thesis. In Chapter 3, a composite electrocatalyst consisting of iron-doped nickel cobalt oxide and activated carbon (Fe0.1Ni0.9Co2O4/AC) was synthesised as the bifunctional catalyst for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in aqueous 6 M KOH electrolytes. Three-electrode measurements were performed to study intrinsic catalytic activity of Fe0.1Ni0.9Co2O4/AC, while zinc-air full cell employing Fe0.1Ni0.9Co2O4/AC was fabricated to study its cyclability and durability. The cell was able to discharge and charge stably for 10 min at 100 mA cm-2, with a maximum power density of 99 mW cm-2 . In Chapter 4, the ORR and OER were studied in non-aqueous electrolytes containing both Ca2+ and tetrabutylammonium (TBA+ ) cations in dimethyl sulfoxide (TBAClO4/Ca(ClO4)2/DMSO). The electrolyte in the absence of TBA+ showed no reversibility at all, indicated by the lack of OER behaviour in the cyclic voltammograms. However, the addition of TBA+ resulted in the appearance and growth of a quasireversible OER peak upon repeated cycling. This OER peak was electrochemically characterised and found to be dependent on the applied potential and the concentrations of both Ca2+ and TBA+ cations. Rotating ring-disc electrode and in situ Raman spectroscopy were employed to investigate the species relating to the observed OER peak in TBAClO4/Ca(ClO4)2/DMSO. Results suggest this OER peak originates from the TBA-O2 species formed at the electrode/electrolyte interface. Based on all electrochemical and spectroscopic investigations, a mechanism is proposed to elucidate the ORR pathway in TBAClO4/Ca(ClO4)2/DMSO electrolytes, where large reductive overpotentials and higher concentrations of TBA+ facilitate the formation of the more reversible redox TBA-O2. In Chapter 5, preliminary evaluation was conducted for the deposition/dissolution behaviour of zinc and calcium. For the zinc experiments, the effects of a flowing electrolyte were illustrated in a homemade microfluidic cell. In the flowing electrolyte, the concentration polarisation was substantially alleviated, as a consequence of the enhanced diffusion of Zn2+ species towards the electrode. A high deposition/dissolution rate of 50 mA cm-2 can be accomplished without short circuit. With respect to the calcium experiments, attempts on the previously reported electrolyte solution using calcium borohydride and tetrahydrofuran, Ca(BH4)2/THF, were not as successful as reported in literature, and the solubility of Ca(BH4)2 salt was found to be low. On the other hand, adding LiBH4 as a co-salt facilitates the reversible plating/stripping of calcium in the Ca(BH4)2/THF electrolyte. A fair Coulombic efficiency of 85% could be attained, suggesting that most of the calcium deposits can be effectively stripped off rather than being deactivated by the passivation layer.

Social robots have great practical potentials to be applied to, for example, education, autism therapy, and commercial settings. However, currently, few commercially available social robots meet our expectations of 'social agents' due to their limited social skills and the abilities to maintain smooth and sophisticated rea-life social interactions. Psychological and human-centred perspectives are therefore crucial to be incorporated in for better understanding and development of social robots that can be deployed as assistants and companions to enhance human life quality. In this thesis, I present a research approach that draws together psychological literature, Open Science initiatives, and game theory paradigms, aiming to systemically and structurally investigate the cooperative and social aspects of human-robot interactions. In Chapter 1, the three components of this research approach are illustrated, with the main focus on their relevance and value in more rigorously researching human-robot interactions. Chapter 2 to 4 describe the three empirical studies that I adopted this research approach to examine the roles of contextual factors, personal factors, and robotic factors in human-robot interactions. Specifically, findings in Chapter 2 revealed that people's cooperative decisions in prisoner's dilemma games played with the embodied Cozmo robot were not influenced by the incentive structures of the games, contrary to the evidence from interpersonal prisoner's dilemma games, but their decisions demonstrated a reciprocal (tit-for-tat) pattern in response to the robot opponent. In Chapter 3, we verified that this Cozmo robotic platform can displays highly recognisable emotional expressions to people, and people's affective empathic might be counterintuitively associated with the emotion contagion effects of Cozmo's emotional displays. Chapter 4 presents a study that examined the effects of Cozmo's negative emotional displays on shaping people's cooperative tendencies in prisoner's dilemma games. We did not find evidence supporting an interaction between the effects of the robots' emotions and people's cooperative predispositions, which was inconsistent with our predictions informed by psychological emotion theories. However, exploratory analyses suggested that people who correctly recognised the Cozmo robots' sad and angry expressions were less cooperative to the robots in games. Throughout the two studies on prisoner's dilemma games played with the embodied Cozmo robots, we revealed consistent cooperative tendencies by people that cooperative willingness was the highest at the start of games and gradually decreased as more game rounds were played. In Chapter 5, I summarised the current findings and identified some limitations of these studies. Also, I outlined the future directions in relation to these topics, including further investigations into the generalisability of different robotic platforms and incorporating neurocognitive and qualitative methods for in-depth understanding of mechanisms supporting people's cooperative willingness towards social robots. Social interactions with robots are highly dynamic and complex, which have brought about some unique challenges to robotic designers and researchers in the relevant fields. The thesis provides a point of departure for understanding cooperative willingness towards small-size social robots at a behavioural level. The research approach and empirical findings presented in the thesis could help enhance reproducibility in human-robot interaction research and more importantly, have practical implications of real-life human-robot cooperation.