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Visual sensors are key to robot perception, which can not only help robot localisation but also enable robots to interact with the environment. However, in new environments, robots can fail to distinguish the static and dynamic components in the visual input. Consequently, robots are unable to track objects or localise themselves. Methods often require precise robot proprioception to compensate for camera movement and separate the static background from the visual input. However, robot proprioception, such as \ac{IMU} or wheel odometry, usually faces the problem of drift accumulation. The state-of-the-art methods demonstrate promising performance but either (1) require semantic segmentation, which is inaccessible in unknown environments, or (2) treat dynamic components as outliers -- which is unfeasible when dynamic objects occupy a large proportion of the visual input. This research work systematically unifies camera and multi-object tracking problems in indoor environments by proposing a multi-motion tracking system; and enables robots to differentiate the static and dynamic components in the visual input with the understanding of their own movements and actions. Detailed evaluation of both simulation environments and robotic platforms suggests that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art dynamic SLAM methods when the majority of the camera view is occluded by multiple unmodeled objects over a long period of time.

Augmented Reality (AR) technology integrates virtual objects with the real-world scene and has been widely used in many applications. 3D point cloud registration is one of the main processes to correctly align virtual 3D objects with real-world scenes in AR. The higher quality of the underlying 3D point clouds with fewer missing and noisy points, the more accurate the 3D point cloud registration. The goal of this thesis is to develop algorithms, computational frameworks and methods to improve the quality of 3D point clouds and in order to further increase the accuracy of 3D point cloud registration for AR applications. To achieve this goal, firstly, a computational framework is developed for recovering dense and high-quality 3D point clouds from mono-endoscopic images captured by mono-endoscopic sensors. This computational framework contains a monocular depth learning network to generate the 3D point clouds from monocular images and a 3D point cloud completion network to recover the missing data from the generated 3D point clouds. The experimental results show that this computational framework can generate dense 3D point clouds of real endoscopic images and recover high-quality 3D point clouds from incomplete point clouds with 60% missing points. Secondly, in order to improve the quality of 3D point clouds from real-world objects, a learning-based neural network (TreeNet) has been proposed. The experimental results show that TreeNet outperforms five state-of-the-art learning-based methods and also shows good generalization on unknown data. TreeNet is also evaluated in the proposed computational framework for endoscopic scenes as an application, which proves the effectiveness of TreeNet for medical data. Thirdly, in order to improve the accuracy of rigid 3D point cloud registration, an unsupervised learning-based network (Iterative BTreeNet) has been proposed. Iterative BTreeNet has been compared with three traditional and six state-of-the- art learning-based methods and outperforms these methods on partial and noisy point clouds without training them. Iterative BTreeNet also exhibits remarkable generalization to unseen large and dense scenes that are never trained. Finally, a learning-based network (Deform3DNet) has been proposed for non-rigid 3D point cloud registration. Deform3DNet shows how deep learning is used successfully in solving the non-rigid registration and correspondence challenges end-to-end with non-rigid 3D point clouds. The experimental results demonstrate improvement in the quality of the non-rigid registration and correspondence by comparing Deform3DNet with seven state-of-the-art non-rigid 3D point cloud registration and correspondence methods across large deformations, partiality and topological noise.

Since the discovery of 2D materials such as graphene and MoS2, they have been ideal candidates to replace the established materials including metal oxides and silicon in various industries such as microelectronics, optoelectronics, and sensors due to their low- cost, flexibility and transparency. Nevertheless, the extraordinary thin materials are susceptible to the miniature modulation in the surrounding environment which may lead to alternation in their mechanical and electrical properties. For example, the coupling of the layered materials with the supported substrate can result in the structural disorder of the materials, which in turn induces mechanical strain or electrical doping and alters the performance of these 2D materials-based devices. Therefore, the understanding the intrinsic mechanics in the layered materials is essential for the device fabrication in flexible electronics, sensors, and polymer composites. In this thesis, an overview of the fundamentals in strain and doping of graphene and MoS2 will be given to illustrate the corresponding deconvolution method based on Raman spectroscopy. Next, a literature review will be demonstrated to introduce various applications of this strain and doping model, including thermal annealing of graphene, modulation of strain and doping by structural defects in graphene and MoS2, textured surfaces, vertical heterostructure, and temperature-dependent strain and doping. These reviews are then followed by experimental sections where the deconvolution method is applied to the investigation of the intrinsic mechanical and electrical properties during the fabrication process of the materials. An investigation on the 2D materials-metal interaction is also carried out by taking graphene/silver nanowire hybrid as an example. The attempt for foreign organic molecules sensing applications using graphene and MoS2 is successfully made by depositing oligoglycine tectomers on 2D materials surface. These outlooks highlight the practical applications in the new field of straintronics and related microelectronics.

This thesis examines how and why did the four post-Cold War American presidents - George H.W. Bush, William Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama - use covert action. It explores the continuity and change in the use of covert action throughout the four administrations, foreign policy and national security-related circumstances and conditions that necessitated the use of covert action, and factors and concepts that influenced these four presidents' respective decisions to use covert action. The thesis employs a qualitative historical analysis method to analyze key policymakers' speeches, statements, interviews, and documentary sources, including declassified documents, archival information, memoirs, congressional records, and other first-hand accounts. The analysis focuses on deconstructing how and why certain key events necessitated the use of covert action, rather than merely describing these key events, and explores the fundamental foundational undercurrents that influenced these four presidents' decisions whether to use covert action.

Homeownership is the most prevalent tenure in most countries. One of the main purposes of households in accessing homeownership is to accumulate wealth. Homeowners are not only found to accrue housing wealth but also own more non-housing wealth than tenants. The patterns of accumulating wealth through homeownership and its socio-economic consequences in modern economies, however, have not been fully understood and examined. Using data from the 2013-2017 China Household Finance Survey and the 2015-2017 Chinese Housing Consumption Survey, this research investigated the relationships between homeownership and wealth and its components. It explored diverse mechanisms derived from different theoretical perspectives and linked homeownership with wealth inequality and housing strategies in urban China. Through a combination of the Differences-in-Differences model, Logit model, fixed-effect model and Tobit model, the empirical results from this thesis suggest that the transition of households from renting to owning is positively related to wealth holdings after controlling for relevant, confounding variables. Households accumulate housing wealth mainly through housing price appreciation and mortgage repayments, with housing price appreciation dominating. With long-term housing price increases, housing wealth accumulation has transformed from relying on saving through mortgage repayments to being more dependent on capital gains. There is a trade-off between mortgage repayments and residual savings. When controlling for socioeconomic characteristics and time-constant variables, homeowners do not own more non-housing wealth than tenants. The widely recognised notion that homeowners own more non-housing wealth than tenants comes from the result of selection. In other words, households who attain homeownership are wealthier before they become homeowners than households who remain in rental markets. Tenants do not compensate for their disadvantage in housing assets by augmenting more non-housing wealth. The favourable status of wealth holdings by homeowners relative to renters, therefore, principally arises from the accumulation of housing wealth through housing price appreciation rather than from the fixed commitments of mortgage repayments, changed saving behaviour and the accumulation of non-housing wealth through homeownership, at least for the time before 2022. Growing home ownership has typically been connected with spreading wealth and reducing wealth inequalities. The results reported in this thesis, however, indicate that associated with housing prices increasing ahead of income since 2015 in China, the accumulation of wealth through homeownership has begun to act as a possible mechanism of increasing wealth inequalities by concentrating more wealth in developed regions which attract more capital, and in the hand of homeowners, multiple-property owners, and older generations. The changes in housing price dynamics and wealth accumulation patterns also promoted the use of speculative strategies among households and, in consequence, housing policies inherited from the savings era may not be best designed to cope with challenges caused by rising housing prices. Corresponding with these findings, this thesis thus proposes policy reforms on housing, land and tax.

The enactment of The Children and Families Act in 2014 represented a significant attempt to create equity for disabled children in England; supporting special educational needs and disabilities (SEND); and promoting family rights to choice and control. This thesis explores the impact of this and other legislation, policies and professional systems on the experiences of disability; specifically for learning disabled-children with complex support needs and their families. It investigates whether families believe they can exercise sufficient choice and control when working with professional agencies to achieve a good quality of life. It also explores whether disability activism founded in theoretical perspectives about embodied disability have been able to challenge successfully societal barriers in progressing the rights of learning-disabled children. Using a social constructionist framework, this qualitative study investigates how families navigate complex professional systems to obtain support to achieve independence, agency and a good quality of life for their learning-disabled children. Family narratives are explored to understand family lifeworld and experiences of, and perspectives on relationships with professionals within the system. Data is analysed using the UK Government wellbeing framework and Nussbaum's central capabilites framework. Analyses of individual Education Health and Care Plans are undertaken to analyse whether they support the best possible outcomes for children. Additionally, the impact of societal constructs of childhood, parenthood and disability are considered. The findings evidence some good, compassionate professional practice, but suggest that families may lack opportunities for co-production with professionals. Families did not believe that they have sufficient choice and control in working with professionals. Consequently, they have learned to develop strategies to better influence the quality of life outcomes they seek. Findings also point towards an increasing dominance of the SEND system within England. This has shifted focus to education outcomes rather than social outcomes; possibly disadvantaging learning-disabled children with complex support needs. Family narratives additionally provide evidence that, despite the rhetoric of human rights legislation and policies, learning-disabled children experience disability discrimination and ableism within professional and societal contexts. Highlighted is how disability theories have been mostly developed in an adult context which does not sufficiently recognise the lack of agency afforded by society to children, or the symbiotic nature of child/parent relationships. To begin to address this, a preliminary child and family disability contextual framework is offered. It is suggested that this provides the basis for future work to build a model that provides understanding of disability in the context of childhood, parenthood and family.

Wheat is hugely important across the globe, providing food and nutrients for millions of people and livestock. Like all crops, it struggles with pressure from multiple diseases, which need to be controlled to preserve both yield and quality. Breeding new varieties with resistance to important diseases is a long process that takes many years and requires trained pathologists to manually score thousands of plots for disease levels. Automating the disease scoring process would free up time for pathologists to work on other important tasks. It also has the potential to improve the accuracy of scoring through multiple applications and eliminating human error. Here we present a dataset of wheat images taken in real growth situations, including field conditions, with five categories: healthy plants and four foliar diseases, yellow rust, brown rust, powdery mildew and Septoria leaf blotch. This dataset was used to train deep learning models to identify and classify the diseases. We collect a quantification dataset of yellow rust images and performed experiments with different score categories to train various models. Finally, we carry out experiments with simulated data for determining the viability of deep learning models for disease quantification. In this thesis we find that deep learning models are capable of classifying complex field images, with accuracies of over 97%. We identify limitations in the data collection for quantification of wheat diseases in the field and provide a method for determining ideal dataset size. These results show the viability of deep learning models for quantifying disease and determine some of the challenges which need to be overcome to develop an automated method for use in the field.

Effective humoral responses rely on the development of high-affinity antigen-specific B cells. However, the naïve repertoire of antibodies usually shows low affinity. B cells need to improve their affinity in secondary lymphoid structures known as germinal centres (GCs) during infections, a process known as affinity maturation. In GCs, B cells undergo iterative rounds of somatic hypermutation in the dark zones (DZs) to diversify BCRs then exit cell cycle and move back to light zones (LZs) for affinity-based selection. In the LZs, it has long been considered that only selected cells could subsequently reenter cell cycle and move back to DZs, a process known as cyclic re-entry. Affinity enhancements are thought to be conferred via T cells providing help to the highest affinity LZ B cells to initiate cyclic re-entry, however, this hypothesis was never directly tested. Using fluorescent cell cycle reporter mice, we found neither T cells depletion nor MHCII deletion abolished the cyclic re-entry initiation in LZ cells and this process was not detectably restricted by general intra-GC competition. Concurrently, using BATF as a marker for recent T-B interactions, we found B cells needed to compete in order to receive T cell mediated refuelling in an affinity dependent manner. However, this process was also limited by B cells' intrinsic ability to acquire antigens. Consistent with the observations above, cyclic re-entry LZ cells were found to be heterogeneous at their BATF levels, further confirming cyclic re-entry initiation and receiving T cell mediated refuelling are two processes regulated independently. Our data is pointing towards a less binary selection mechanism in GCs, which confers proliferative advantage to higher affinity clones while allowing low-affinity cells to mature via more complex pathways so that antibody repertoires are matured for both affinity and clonal diversity.

Education systems across the world are increasingly employing dialogic education to equip students with 21st-century skills. Dialogic education seems to hold promise for promoting students' collaborative, critical and creative thinking. A growing body of research has, therefore, focused on the implementation of dialogic education approaches in different contexts. However, dialogic education in China is a new research area where more research is needed. Science education in China aims to promote students' scientific literacy and employs group work to enhance students' learning outcomes; therefore, science classes provide a natural setting for implementing more dialogic approaches. Science education in China is a relatively newly established curriculum; hence, there is great interest in how to improve the effectiveness of the teaching and learning of science. My study, therefore, focuses on the contextualisation of implementing dialogic education in science classes in Chinese primary schools. Design-based research (DBR) was employed to conduct this study by incorporating an exploratory study and two iterations as part of the iterative design process. A classroom intervention was devised underpinned by design principles based on dialogic education. These principles were derived from a literature review and the findings of the exploratory study. A coding scheme for analysing dialogues in Chinese science classes was developed by employing a Grounded Theory approach based on the classroom observations and interviews conducted during the first iteration. The exploratory phase involved interviews with Chinese science academics, classroom observations and semi-structured interviews conducted in collaboration with the teachers and students of four Chinese primary schools. Interviews with Chinese science academics were carried out to gain a basic understanding of current Chinese science education. Classroom observations and semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed to develop the prototype of the intervention. In Iteration One, seven teachers participated in the process, and six of them carried out three reflective teaching cycles to promote their classroom dialogues. The Teacher Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (T-SEDA) scheme was used to measure the effectiveness of their classrooms, and the results revealed improvements in their classroom dialogues. It was also argued that silence, a phenomenon that is often seen in Chinese classrooms, should be carefully considered in understanding Chinese dialogic education. For a more contextualised analysis, a new coding scheme was developed based on the data collected in the first iteration. In Iteration Two, data were collected from another Chinese city, and six teachers from the same school participated in the intervention and carried out another three reflective teaching cycles. The data were analysed using the newly developed coding scheme which showed gradual improvement in the effectiveness of the teachers' classroom dialogues. The contributions of my study can be summarised from theoretical and practical perspectives. Theoretically, the study demonstrates that constructive silence should be considered as a form of dialogic engagement, especially in the context of education in China. To make the silence constructive, teachers need to employ techniques that help students to make their thinking heard or seen. Further, I argue that introducing scientific terminologies can be vital for widening and deepening dialogic space as it can help with setting the foundation of dialogic space. In terms of practical contributions, the tested design principles for implementing dialogic education in Chinese classrooms can be a guide for future research. In addition, the newly developed coding scheme for analysing classroom dialogues in Chinese science classes can contribute to contextualising dialogic education in the Chinese context. It can be used as a reference for assessing what Chinese science teachers can do to improve the quality of their classroom interactions.

This research project explores the creative and socio-musical relationships that occur when a composer and an amateur ensemble enter a creative relationship. Two separate fields of theoretical enquiry are explored: serious-leisure and community music. The principle aim of my research project is to identify concepts and methods that can inform successful creatively interactive socio-musical relationships between amateur ensembles and composers. The resulting methodology has been applied to several practical projects with contrasting amateur ensembles: a chamber choir, a brass band, a chamber orchestra, a symphony orchestra, and a large scale multi-cultural choral event. Whilst individual compositional technique is an important factor in finding solutions to writing for each of the ensembles, technique is a secondary consideration and is considered against the establishment of successful socio-musical relationships.

Mammalian chromatin architecture appears hierarchically organised and is composed of chromosome territories, compartments, topologically associating domains (TADs), loops and nucleosomes. The study of chromatin architecture has recently become prevalent due to the advancement of chromosome conformation capture (3C) and microscopy-based techniques. Many studies have predicted that TADs display important functional characteristics such as forming tissue and species-invariant regulatory domains, promoting co-regulation and insulating genes from aberrant regulation. Even with the increasing availability of data, the relationship between chromatin structures such as TADs, gene expression and function is still not fully understood. In this thesis, I use publicly available Hi-C data to rigorously assess this relationship. To further investigate the characteristics of TADs I compiled a re-annotated TAD dataset consisting of 13 human and 20 mouse genomes, covering 8 broad tissue/cell type groups. Using this TAD dataset as a foundation, I investigated the functional features of TADs in three main areas: tissue and species specificity, functional annotations, and phenotypic characteristics. Comparative analyses between TADs and randomly placed TADs revealed that there is some evidence that TADs are both tissue- and species-specific, genes which singly occupy a TAD are highly constrained and enriched for developmental functions, and genes sharing a CTCF TAD are not more functionally similar than can be explained by their linear proximity alone. Lastly, using adipose TADs as well as chromatin loops, I investigate the aetiology of genetic variants associated with fat distribution. The comprehensive analyses outlined suggest that contrary to common claims in the literature, TADs display a significant degree of both tissue and species specificity and play a limited role in promoting gene co-expression. These results contribute to understanding the relationship between 3D mammalian chromatin structure and gene regulation which is crucial for dissecting gene regulatory programs.

Over the years as a voluntary piano teacher at the Macau Down Syndrome Association, the most poignant story I heard from the parents there was their difficulties in finding piano teachers willing to teach their children with Down syndrome (DS). One of the key factors behind this phenomenon is that most instrumental music teachers in Macao lack the experience in teaching students with SEND. There also seems to be little literature related to teaching musical instruments to students with learning difficulties. To my knowledge, little has been researched into Macao's population with DS in relation to music pedagogy generally, and teaching the piano specifically. Thus, this study was motivated in recognition of this research gap. Furthermore, perspectives from existing research on DS tends to be dominated by the medical model of disability. Without discarding the medical model, this study includes perspectives from the social model of disability to consider how people with DS should be perceived in today's society. The objective of the research was to explore the teachers', students' and parents' experiences and perceptions relating to piano teaching and learning for students with DS in Macao. It took the form of a qualitative study working within an interpretivist paradigm and adopted a collective case study methodological approach. Through a purposive sampling procedure, four triads of participants were selected to give four case studies, each involving a piano teacher, a student with DS, and one of the student's parents. Several piano pedagogies for teaching students with DS were introduced to the teachers in order for them to select one or more to work with when teaching their own student in this study. Qualitative data were collected from semi-structured interviews, field notes during observation of the piano lessons, and diaries written by the teacher and parent from each case study during a five-week research period. The data within each case study were examined, and the whole data set underwent a cross-case analysis using a thematic approach.

To provide the security of digital data, many applications are using cryptographic algorithms that attackers are infeasible to break since the algorithms are based on hard mathematical problems. However, any single cryptographic algorithm has a limited lifespan due to the limited operational life cycle or increasing computational power of attackers. For many types of digital data, such as identity information, health records, history archives, etc, the security of data needs to be maintained for decades or even permanently, which is much longer than the lifetime of a single cryptographic algorithm. In this PhD thesis, we aim to study the solution for the long-term security of two specific applications: time-stamping services and blockchains, so that their security is not restricted by the lifetime of the underlying cryptographic algorithms. Overall, this thesis is comprised of five papers. The first three papers focus on the long-term security of traditional centralized time-stamping services. In specific, our first work reviews the ISO/IEC standard and discovers several issues that may lead to the failure of designed properties, and we provide a solution to each issue. Since the literature, the ISO/IEC, and ANSI standards only consider the solution of a long-term time-stamping scheme is to renew server-side algorithms, our second work explores a comprehensive long-term time-stamping scheme that addresses the renewal of both client-side hash functions and server-side algorithms. Then we notice that the ISO/IEC and ANSI standards totally specify five types of server-side algorithms, but only the long-term time-stamping schemes based on signatures and hash functions are formally defined and analyzed in the literature. Thus, we fill this gap by formally and analyze the other three types of long-term time-stamping schemes based on MACs, archives, and transient keys respectively as our third paper. The next two papers study the long-term security topic of a blockchain. Based on two existing designs of a long-term secure blockchain scheme, we found that these schemes are not formally analyzed and could be vulnerable to attacks. As one step further, we provide the first security model and construction of a long-term blockchain scheme. Finally, motivated by the decentralized concepts of blockchains, we propose the first long-term timestamping scheme based on a blockchain, which eliminates the trust assumption of a time-stamping authority.

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) equipped with an intelligent object detection system play a vital role in various underwater applications such as marine resource exploitation, marine environment monitoring, and marine cable protection. Deep learning based object detection methods have presented great performance advantages over traditional machine learning based methods. However, these deep learning based methods lack sufficient capabilities to handle underwater object detection (UOD) due to these challenges: (1) underwater images acquired in complicated environments suffer fromsevere distortion which dramatically degrades image visibility, objects in the underwater datasets and real applications are usually small whilst accompanying severe noise that greatly degrade the detection accuracy of UOD tasks. (2) well-annotated underwater data is not sufficient in terms of diversity and amount which highly influences the performance of deep learning models. (3) severely imbalanced data distribution and label noise distribtuion occur in underwater datasets, driving a deep learning model to be more biased towards the majority class. In this thesis, we aim to address all these challenges, and develop robust deep learning systems to enhance and detect objects in complex underwater images. To achieve this goal, we firstly propose novel perceptual enhancement models to enhance the quality of underwater images. Secondly, we propose a novel Sample-WeIghted hyPEr Network (SWIPENET), and a robust training paradigm named Curriculum Multi-Class Adaboost (CMA), to address the noise and small object detection problems at the same time. Finally, to address the class imbalance problem, we propose a factor-agnostic gradient re-weighting algorithm (FAGR) that can adaptively fine tune the gradients of individual classes according to the distributions of their detection precision. We have evaluated the proposed methods by conducting extensive experiments on public datasets. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our methods for underwater image synthsis, image enhancement and object detection.

This thesis explores how children and infant sleep was understood, managed, and experienced by children and the adults around them during the long eighteenth century. While scholarly interest in adult sleep has flourished, children's sleep has been almost entirely overlooked. Examining child sleep and wakefulness offers ways to recover physical and emotional experiences of groups whose voices are often difficult to find. The thesis begins by examining the furnishings provided for infant and child slumber in domestic and institutional contexts, to establish the physical setting of sleep. It then examines how medical authors advised parents to evaluate infant sleep, which offered insight into both infant health and the quality of nursing care. The importance of sleep as a measure of health becomes clearer in a close examination of records of smallpox inoculations in the 1780s. The thesis explores how interruptions to sleep caused by illness and medicine give glimpses of infants' and children's somatic experience, and how other causes of sleep disruption including misbehaviour and disturbances by bedfellows may offer a subtler insight into the subjective experience of childhood, something that is very difficult to access. Similarly, child sleep loss from illness also disrupted their carers' slumber, revealing insights both into how elite households organised care, and nursemaids' experience. It then examines deathbed narratives about four children who died between 1802 and 1826. After developing the question of what deathbed narratives reveal about the physical experience of occupying a bed, it explores end-of-life bed-culture and the ways that terminally ill children and their families spent their time. The thesis ends by examining the link between sleep and death in eighteenth-century culture, and the new eighteenth-century fashion for memorialising dead children as sleeping.

This dissertation explores British non-fiction films and radio broadcasts about the natural world from the 1920s to the 1930s. During the years between the First and Second World Wars, natural history films and radio programmes flooded into Britain's cinemas and its airwaves, at a moment when the relationship between humans and the natural world was undergoing a profound transformation. Meanwhile, new methods of conveying knowledge like film and radio were hailed as potential solutions to the needs of an expanding system of formal education. My dissertation responds to a key historical question that unites historians of science, the media, modern Britain, and its environments: how were people's experiences of the natural world shaped by the types of information that they consumed? The dissertation is divided into two sections. The first three chapters look at natural history films, while the remaining two examine BBC broadcasts. I argue that mass media science in this period was characterised by 'intermediality', with ideas and individuals flowing freely across multiple formats. By exploring the production, circulation, and consumption of different forms of mass media, I also argue that ideas about the natural world were 'co-produced' by a wide range of historical actors and processes: mainstream cinema culture, educational philosophies, scientists, teachers, filmmakers, radio producers, animals, plants, and chemicals all shaped the depiction of nature on screen and on air. Paying close attention to film and radio audiences, in particular child audiences, I show how the popularisation of natural history and biology came to be defined by the appeal to people's 'everyday' experience.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major infective cause of death globally, with the greatest burden falling to those countries with lower socioeconomic status. The World Health Organisation aims to End TB by 2035, but improved point-of-care diagnostics are needed to make this happen. In particular, this will help rural populations in low and middle income countries to access diagnostics easily and more quickly, thereby reducing the spread of the disease. Smear microscopy has been the cornerstone of TB diagnostics for a century but processing techniques, biosafety and the microscopy infrastructure make it difficult to translate directly to the point-of-care. This thesis addresses the development of a novel point of care diagnostic test for the rural, low and middle income region. Three issues have been addressed independently including the improved labelling of Mycobacterium species, a novel filtering lens for use with a smartphone microscope and the design of a new sputum collecting and imaging device. It has been demonstrated that a novel fluorescent stain that is specific for Mycobacterium can label within seconds, without further wash or processing steps. The rate of labelling is dependent on the environment that the Mycobacteria is exposed to, with desiccating conditions resulting in the quickest labelling. The development of an integrated filtering lens, which combines both a lens and filter into one component has enabled fluorescent Mycobacterium to be imaged with a smartphone microscopy system. The designed device, that can capture a sputum sample, process and image it, would negate the need for screening samples to be sent away to microscopy level suites. The design process achieved the designs, incorporated the novel fluorescent stains and the integrated filtering lens. The work demonstrated in this thesis shows a potential solution for TB diagnostics at the POC. While further work is needed in each of the areas discussed, such as manufacturing and iterating the final design, a device similar to the one proposed would disrupt the POC diagnostic space. However, the biggest challenge for all POC diagnostics is integrating technology into healthcare systems and embedding it in local culture so that patients and healthcare providers want to use the test. Collaborating and working in partnership will be the key to any TB POC future success.

Single-use plastic packaging waste is damaging the health of marine ecosystems, and this issue is required to be addressed urgently. This research focuses on applying Product-Service System (PSS) to Reusable Packaging Systems (RPSs) to address the primary food and household products packaging waste, by closing the loop of consumption, to make packaging stay longer in the system. The overall aim of this research is to provide support for packaging professionals to design PSS applied to RPSs. This PhD includes three parts. In the first part, the work has resulted in the creation of a design tool, including a classification system and 15 archetypal models. This creation process also led to the collection of variables that characterise the features of PSS applied to RPSs. The second part of this research aimed to understand how the classification system and archetypal models could support packaging professionals. Both have been iteratively evaluated and refined by a wide range of packaging professionals such as packaging consultants, reusable packaging providers, and NGO professionals to address plastic waste. After these testing activities, the completeness, clarity, usability, and usefulness of the design tool have been established. The third part of the research was dedicated to developing design recommendations to improve the user experience of particular reusable packaging offers. Design recommendations were developed through an iterative process of identifying the user acceptance issues embedded in selected cases, and applying strategies from Design for Sustainable Behaviour (DfSB) to address them. The concluding chapters described how the research outcomes can be integrated, and how the research outcomes can fulfil the knowledge gap. They also proposed a design process, different scenarios of applications, knowledge arising from the comparison with other similar studies, limitations and future research opportunities.

Avian Pathogenic Escherichia coli (APEC) cause extra-intestinal infections in birds, leading to significant welfare issues and economic losses. Multiple lineages of APEC are associated with disease in poultry, and complicate intervention strategies such as vaccines. Genome scale metabolic models (GEMs) are a powerful tool for the analysis and prediction of metabolic capability and gene essentiality. Limited number of GEMs are currently available for E. coli (including APEC). Therefore, this thesis aimed to improve the understanding of APEC, and construct and validate a pan genome-based APEC GEM. In this study, a diverse panel of APEC isolates were genotypically and phenotypically characterised. 114 representative APEC isolates were genome sequenced and used for model construction. Knockout mutants of representative APEC isolates were constructed for metabolic model validation. APEC and chicken commensal isolates showed significant differences in phylogroup distribution (P<0.005), and O78 (17%) and O2 (13%) serotypes were predominant in APEC, and mainly clustered in phylogenetic groups C and B2, respectively. No single or combination of virulence factors were representative for APEC. A pan-genome based GEM representing the 114 APEC isolates (APEC GEM) contained 2923 reactions, 2527 metabolites and 2242 genes. The correlation coefficient between computational prediction and experimental observation of three representative APEC isolates (from phylogroup B2, C and G, respectively) indicated that under same constrained nutrient condition, APEC GEM showed a higher agreement to our APEC panel compared to the E. coli K12 MG1655 GEM. The model accurately predicted lysine as an essential pathway for APEC and a lysA mutant was observed to be auxotrophic for L-lysine. Phylogroup-specific sub-models derived from APEC GEM demonstrated significant potential for distinguishing metabolic profiles between different genotypes of APEC. The studies presented here demonstrate that APEC are a diverse pathotype. The APEC GEM described here can serve as draft for further construction of genotype specific sub-models.

Self-force methods can be applied in calculations of the scatter angle in two-body hyperbolic encounters, working order by order in the mass ratio (assumed small) but with no recourse to a weak-field approximation. This, in turn, can inform ongoing efforts to construct an accurate description of the general-relativistic binary dynamics via an effective-one-body description or other approaches. Existing self-force methods are to a large extent specialised to bound, inspiral orbits. Here we derive the first-order conservative self-force correction to the scattering angle, show its agreement with recent post-Minkowsian results, and develop a technique for (numerical) self-force calculations that can efficiently tackle scatter orbits. In the method, the metric perturbation is reconstructed from a Hertz potential that satisfies (mode-by-mode) a certain inhomogeneous version of the Teukolsky equation. The crucial ingredient in this formulation are certain jump conditions that the (multipole modes of the) Hertz potential must satisfy along the worldline of the small body's orbit. We present a closed-form expression for these jumps, for an arbitrary geodesic orbit in Schwarzschild spacetime. To begin developing the numerical infrastructure, a scalar-field evolution code on a Schwarzschild background (in 1+1D) is developed. Following this, results for the conservative scalar self-force corrections to the scatter angle are calculated. We continue by constructing a Teukolsky evolution code on a Schwarzschild background. This produces numerically unstable solutions due to unphysical homogeneous solutions of the Teukolsky equation at the horizon and null infinity being seeded by numerical error. This can be resolved by a change of variables to a Regge-Wheeler-like field. We then present a full numerical implementation of this method for circular and scatter orbits in Schwarzschild. We conclude with a discussion of the outlook for self-force calculations on scatter orbits.

The deep sea (>200 m) is the world's least explored and largest biome, covering ~65% of the earth's surface, it is increasingly subject to anthropogenic disturbance from fishing. The offshore Greenland halibut (Reinhardtius hippoglossoides) fishery, west Greenland, employs demersal trawl gear at depths of 800-1,400 m. Recent Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification of this fishery highlighted the paucity of knowledge of benthic habitats and trawling impacts. This interdisciplinary thesis employs a benthic video sled to investigate deep-sea habitats and trawling impacts and conducts a critical analysis of the fishery's governance, with reference to the role of the MSC certification. The results provide new insights into this poorly known region of the Northwest Atlantic, including identifying four candidate vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs). Imagery obtained demonstrates that chronic trawling has had extensive impacts on the seafloor, which are significantly associated with the benthic communities observed. Further, trawling effort is shown to have a significant negative association with the abundance of some VME indicator taxa. The governance case study finds an effective system of state-led governance, supported by scientific, certification and industry actors. Outcomes directly attributable to engagement with the MSC certification include the introduction of a management plan and new benthic research programmes. However, questions are raised about the MSC certification, providing case study examples of existing criticisms. Assessments are weak with respect to benthic habitats and overreliant on the definitive, expert judgement of Conformity Assessment Bodies (CABs), whose independence is questioned. The assurance offered by the MSC certification in terms of the sustainability of trawling impacts on benthic ecosystems is found to seriously lack credibility. Findings are of direct relevance to the management of deep-sea fisheries in Greenland and elsewhere. Widely applicable critical insights into deep-sea fishery governance are presented, including into the role of eco-labels as a market-mechanism to promote sustainable fishery management.

In recent years there has been significant scholarship examining implementation and compliance, and the distinction and interplay between 'hard law' and 'soft law'. However, within this discourse less attention has been paid to the practical manner in which soft law is used, by whom and in what contexts. Moreover, the range of soft law 'findings' of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR), namely provisional measures; decisions on individual communications; thematic and country resolutions; recommendations from country missions; advisory opinions; and General Comments, have received limited attention leaving a gap in literature and knowledge. More recently, with the emergence of National Preventive Mechanisms (NPMs), established or designated in accordance with the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, there is a growing group of human rights bodies, operating at the domestic level, also generating a range of findings with the aim of influencing State behaviour. The publications submitted detail the findings from my research to address these gaps in scholarship, and capture the role of new bodies within this discourse. This body of work has examined the use and implementation of the findings of the ACHPR to identify the contexts in which they are used by key actors, and the factors which impact on the extent to which they are applied at the national, regional and international levels. My research has also examined the related theme of how the ACHPR and NPMs have interpreted their role to follow-up and monitor implementation of their findings, and identified the opportunities and challenges for them to apply this role in practice.

In the Mao era, rural cadres served at the basic unit of party organs and administration organizations responsible for governing the life of villagers who constituted about 80 percent of the Chinese population. These cadres remain important players in connecting villagers and the countryside to the state in today's China. Drawing upon previously inaccessible archives, in particular 350 personal dossiers of the cadres, from Hebei province, this thesis explores how male cadres constructed their masculine status in daily work and social life and how they formed tightly-linked groups exerting authority over the village-level bureaucracy in the Mao era. It examines the lived experience of cadres before and during the Socialist Education Movement (SEM, 1962-1966), a campaign that was aimed primarily at them. The campaign resulted not only in the investigation, criticism, and disciplining of more than two million cadres but also in the production of a large number of archives about them. Reading along and against the grain of archival sources allows us to reveal their actions of using local resources and institutions to create and maintain personal connections among themselves and with their superiors, in an attempt to make the collective agricultural system workable. The day-to-day life of the village-level bureaucracy depended on their social relations which helped localize the state's dominance over rural communities. This thesis engages with current debates on masculine status formation, the making of "new class" in socialist regimes, and Maoist state-formation. It makes three interrelated arguments. The first argument is that the cadres' interpersonal relationships, fostered as they were in their daily work and social life, constituted the most politically salient social formation within the village-level bureaucracy of the Mao era. They shaped the authority of the Maoist state and formed part of the mechanism of its rule. The second argument is that male cadres constructed themselves as a new social group through localized dynamics involving the production and reproduction hierarchies of authorities as well as the question of social cohesion. These dynamics included internal competition among cadres, the leveraging of interpersonal relationships, and the display of wealth and authority. The third argument is that local dynamics also produced their masculine status while political campaigns against cadre privileges attempted to undermine those very status. The male-male bonds between cadres were built on the absence of female colleagues. However, the Party viewed many of their masculine social practices as deviant acts and implemented the SEM to discipline and indoctrinate them. The campaign, therefore, rendered their masculine status, based as they were on practices deemed to be outside of Party discipline, precarious.

Antenna design plays a vital role in the next generation communication systems. The enormous improvement in general communication technologies and the growth in application scenarios have driven demand for multi-functional wireless communication in a single device. In this thesis, a novel antenna reconfiguration approach is introduced, which can be implemented in different antenna models. The so-called injection matching technique allows the second port to insert current to the antenna, which offers a direct electronic control to the antenna reconfiguration. Incorporating other antenna design approaches into this method, several performance characteristics, including wideband mode, high efficiency, and frequency tunability, can be achieved. A tunable coherent feeding system for supporting the injection matched antenna is designed based on the phase-locked loop structure. Measured and simulated results with a very good agreement are presented, thus verifying the proposed concepts.

A mobile organism is faced with the challenge of having to decide, moment by moment, its next course of action. Despite extensive efforts in mapping decision-making circuits across many species, the current understanding of neural mechanisms underlying the decision process remains scarce. Fruit flies can perform an odour discrimination task with difficulty-dependent reaction times and choice accuracies, in a framework well-described by a process of evidence accumulation to bound. A subset of third-order olfactory neurons, the αβ core Kenyon cells (αβc KCs), appears to act as a temporal integrator of sensory information, encoding the amount of summed evidence in their subthreshold voltage. However, explicit demonstration of a causal role of these neurons is lacking. Combining molecular cloning, patch-clamp electrophysiology, closed-loop optogenetics, and drift-diffusion modelling, I establish a causal relationship between the neural activity in αβc KCs and the fly's olfactory decision-making. First, I discover that a short motif from AMPA receptors can target the optogenetic activator to the somatodendritic compartment of the cell, enabling the optical injection of small dendritic currents. I also modify the genetic construct of the optogenetic inhibitor such that its expression is restricted to the decision-relevant neurons. Second, the functionality of these tools is characterised by whole-cell recordings of αβc KCs. Third, I bidirectionally manipulate the activity of these neurons during the perceptual task to test for behavioural consequences in speed and accuracy. I find that photostimulation quickens reaction times as a function of odour contrast and light intensity. This is mainly explained by a reduction of the bound height in drift-diffusion models, consistent with the representation of the integrated amount, rather than the momentary level, of evidence in αβc KCs. This work sheds light on the mechanisms by which decision-making is implemented in a biological substrate.

This thesis theoretically and empirically explores firm performance mostly when firms conduct international operation by linking internal, external, direct, and indirect factors, including five-country components including human capital, institution, market competition, cluster development, and market size, export behaviors based on productivity cut-off, horizontal, backward and forward FDI agglomerations, the dynamic effect between FDI and trade, financial constraints in R&D investment, and the "black box" of firm efficiency. This thesis consists of six core chapters (Chapter 2-7) related to micro and macro studies. The study samples used in this thesis include the cross-sectional data obtained from 234 previous empirical studies in terms of firm performance and internationalization during the period 1969-2017 in Chapter 2, the panel data of 208,424 Chinese firms during the period 2005- 2007 in Chapter 3, the panel data of 12,240 Chinese firms during the period 2010-2013 in Chapter 4, the panel data of China's 151 target countries during the 2007-2017 period in Chapter 5, the panel data of 414 British manufacturing firms during the period 2009-2018 in Chapter 6, and the panel data of 123 British listed manufacturing firms during the period 2006-2018 in Chapter 7. Due to the different study purposes in the six chapters, the study III data used in this study are from various data resources and different timelines. Even if this study uses the same database, such as China's Annual Industry Survey Database in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, this study also uses a different timeline because of the non-availability of data for a consistent panel of firms. Furthermore, the analytic methods correspondingly used in this thesis mainly involve the comparative MAR with VWLS, Heckman two-stage procedure with Probit and Tobit models, analytical method of ROC, spatial econometric model, global PCA and system GMM, heterogeneity SFA with one stage, and two-stage (DEA and Tobit) model and three-stage (DEA-SFA) model. There are multiple insight findings in this thesis. In Chapter 2, the five-country components, including human capital, institution, market competition, cluster development, and market size, substantially mediate the I-P relationship. Furthermore, the five-country components exert a positive mediating effect on the I-P relationship in developed countries while negatively mediating the I-P relationship in developing countries. In Chapter 3, productivity is likely to impact on firm's export propensity and irregular export positively. In contrast, it negatively affects the firm's export intensity and does not impact the firm's regular export. Enhancing productivity cut-off is not conducive to the firm's export propensity and regular export while it does not affect the firm's export intensity and irregular export. Productivity cut-off tends to impact on firm's export decision rather than its export scale. Moreover, firms with regular export are more sensitive to productivity cut-off than firms with irregular export. In Chapter 4, the congestion effect (inverted U-shaped relationship) dominates the three types of FDI agglomerations on the local firm's productivity. The congestion effect also dominates the spatial backward and forward FDI agglomerations on neighboring firms' productivity, while a U-shaped relationship dominates the spatial horizontal FDI agglomeration on neighboring firms' productivity. Furthermore, the interaction intensity of backward and forward FDI agglomerations with local and neighboring firms is similar and much stronger than horizontal FDI agglomeration. In Chapter 5, China is more likely to conduct horizontal FDI in developed countries, while vertical FDI in developing countries. There is a dynamic change from the substitution effect of FDI on export to the complementary effect of FDI on export along with the decreasing trend of horizontal motivation and the increasing trend of vertical motivation. In Chapter 6, the firm's financial constraints in R&D have a vital impact on its productivity and future financing uncertainty and show a difference in low, middle, and high-tech industries. Furthermore, the loss of firm productivity is about 20% due to its financial constraints in IV R&D investment. In Chapter 7, the firm's technical, pure technical, and scale efficiencies reach a relatively high level (between 0.93 and 1) while its operational efficiency (between 0.65 and 0.7) and profitability efficiency (between 0.85 and 0.9) have a large room to improve. Moreover, the overall environment has a significant impact on firm efficiency in middle and high-tech industries than that in the low-tech sector. Therefore, the various findings in the six core chapters provide important implications for government policies and firm's domestic and foreign operations.

It is generally accepted that decisions made in early design phases significantly impact the quality of a built project. However, much of the information necessary to assess the validity of early design decisions is not available until later in a project's lifecycle. The impact of early design decisions on project quality suggests that accurate, relevant, and timely information is important at the earliest design phases to improve a designer's ability to make well-informed design decisions. This thesis proposes that because of their active engagement with the built environment, facility managers (FMs) have unique insights that strategically position them to play an essential role in the early phases of building design by providing knowledge and feedback from buildings in use. Because early design sets the foundation for linking strategic and technical decisions, the most significant opportunities for improving overall project results are at the beginning of a project. Facility management and operations (FM/O) involvement in early architecture and engineering (AE) design phases makes it possible to incorporate construction and FM related knowledge into design decisions. This involvement may lead to buildings that are better suited to owners' needs, more attractive, easier to maintain, more cost-effective, and better at addressing occupant needs. However, while research suggests design teams and design processes will increasingly become integrated and multi-disciplinary as advanced automated construction and information management systems become standard, obstacles persist, limiting the sharing of information and knowledge between FM/O and AE-design teams. This thesis evaluates and develops mechanisms and procedures to enhance the sharing of information and knowledge between FM and AE-design teams. With a focus on built environment industries in the midwestern region of the United States (US), data is collected from AE and FM professionals to support the development of a framework that offers solutions for enhancing information sharing between FM/O and AE-design. The developed framework is presented as a design decision support system (DDSS) made up of conceptual design decision support tools (DDSTs). The thesis describes a mixed method, design science research (DSR) strategy, used to develop the conceptual DDSS framework and DDSTs.

While the global life expectancy and number of university students have both increased dramatically since the mid-20th century, previous findings suggest that many older adults and students struggle to live a healthy and happy life. The purpose of this thesis was to explore the interaction of physical activity and personality in the wellbeing of older adults and university students in Hong Kong (HK) and the United Kingdom (UK). Two complementary multiple methods studies were designed, one focusing on adults aged 50 years or above (Study 1), the other on current university students (Study 3). The quantitative components (Study 1A and Study 3A) focused on assessing whether the relationship between physical activity and subjective wellbeing (SWB) would be moderated by any of the Big Five personality traits. In total, 349 older adults (178 from HK; 171 from the UK) and 384 university students (186 from HK; 194 from the UK) participated in the quantitative components through completing a cross-sectional online survey. The qualitative components (Study 1B and Study 3B) used semi-structured interviews and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore how physically active individuals experienced and made sense of their sports participation, personality, wellbeing, and culture. Six older adults (3 from HK; 3 from the UK) and 12 university students (6 from HK; 6 from the UK) who were members of a sport club participated in the qualitative components. To further explore issues not addressed in Study 1 and Study 3, two additional studies (Study 2 and Study 4) were conducted. With access to existing longitudinal data from the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 (LBC1936), Study 2 focused on investigating whether the interactions tested in Study 1A's cross-sectional sample would hold longitudinally in an older sample across a three-year period. Five hundred and twenty Scottish participants were involved in this study. Study 4 was a qualitative, single case study of Fung Ka Ki - HK's first professional footballer with a Master's degree who, unlike those interviewed in Study 3B, studied in both HK and the UK and already finished his student athlete career over a decade ago. Through using IPA, the case study explored how he made sense of himself and his wellbeing through his experiences of having been a highly physically active university student across two cultures. Study 1A found that the physical activity-SWB relationship was moderated by extraversion and by openness - the positive relationship was stronger among older adults with higher levels of these two personality traits. Three themes were reported in Study 1B: 1) older adults in HK and the UK both saw their sport as a conduit for self-expression and mood regulation; 2) the UK participants claimed sport helped them develop as a person; and 3) the HK participants claimed that sport was a mirror of their culture. Study 2 found that while all of the Big Five personality traits predicted SWB across the 3-year period in the expected direction, neither physical activity nor its joint effect with any of the personality traits was a significant predictor of subsequent SWB. Additional analysis based on the cross-sectional data available in LBC1936 showed that physical activity's interactions with extraversion and with openness in SWB found in Study 1A could not be replicated. Study 3A found that the physical activity-SWB relationship was moderated by extraversion and by agreeableness - students who were more extraverted and more agreeable experienced a stronger positive relationship. Study 3B showed: 1) British and HK students both experienced sport as drawing out strength of character and as a therapeutic agent; 2) British participants experienced university as an energising environment, yet competing for their university brought emotional turmoil; and 3) HK participants claimed that sport helped maturation, yet HK's culture was counterproductive to athletic development. In study 4, three themes were derived from Fung Ka Ki's lived experiences. The first theme illustrated how his football-specific wisdom helped him cope with the challenges he experienced in different stages of his student athlete life. The second theme captured the different possibilities of wellbeing he experienced through the combination of sport and scholarship, including possibilities that occurred during and after university. The final theme demonstrated his sense-making around differences between football in HK versus the UK based on his unique bicultural experiences in the two locations. Overall, the quantitative and qualitative findings converge to show how and why personality may influence older adults' and university students' experience of the relationship between physical activity and wellbeing. The results may inform practitioners on how individual differences need to be considered when promoting physical activity and wellbeing for participants of different age groups and cultures. The phenomenological findings highlight the benefits of studying wellbeing as a subjective, lived experience through the perspective of individuals. They also provide insight into how East Asian participants, a relatively under-represented group in the literature, make sense of their sporting experiences.

Recently, airborne particulate matter from outdoor pollution has been classified as carcinogenic substance to humans based on sufficient evidence of epidemiologicaland toxic investigations. Toxicological studies have implicated trace metals in airborne particles as possible contributors to respiratory and cardiovascular inflammation. The exposure data of heavy metals and related health risks were very limited in China, especially in the Yangtze River Delta (SYRD) region. The aims of this study are to: (1) investigate the spatial and seasonal characteristics and sources of trace elements bounded to PM2.5 in the SYRD region; (2) study the bioaccessibility of trace elements bound to PM2.5 in water and simulated lung fluids; (3) investigate size distributions of trace elements and airway deposition fraction of particles in the respiratory system; and (4) perform health risk assessments for adults and children in the SYRD region with the consideration of bioaccessibilities of elements and deposition fractions. Methods used in the study are listed as follows: (1) PM2.5 samples were collected from four representative sites in Hangzhou (LA -rural site and HZ-urban site) and Ningbo city (UN-suburban site and NQ-urban site) from December 2014 to November 2015. Size-resolved samples were collected during haze and non-haze days at an urban site in Ningbo city (NQ) from November 2013 to May 2014. (2) Elemental concentrations were measured by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS) after microwave digestion with acids mixture or sonicated in water and simulated lung fluids (ALF and Gamble's solution); (3) Source apportionments of trace elements were conducted by the methods of enrichment factors, principal component analysis (PCA) and positive matrix factorization (PMF). (4) Deposition fractions of elements were estimated by a Multiple-Path Particle Dosimetry (MPPD) model. (5) Human health risk assessments were assessed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) model. Research results from the study are: (1) The annual PM2.5 mass concentration of 4 sites ranged from 59.73 to 79.12 μgm-3, which exceeded the latest China PM2.5 Class II air quality standard. PM2.5 pollutions were the highest in winter and lowest in summer. Spatially, western sites (LA and HZ) showed higher concentrations of PM2.5, while eastern sites (UN and NQ) showed lower concentrations. Regional transportation was the main reason for the high PM2.5 levels at LA and HZ. (2) The annual mean concentrations of 17 elements (Na, Mg, Al, K, Ca, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Cd and Pb) in PM2.5 from 4 site ranged from 0.378±0.199 ngm-3 for Co to 631±407 ngm-3 for K. Cr and As were well above the air quality standard. All elements exhibited spatial variation with the highest levels at HZ and the lowest at LA. Meanwhile, elemental concentrations showed clear seasonal trends, with higher concentrations in winter and lower concentrations in summer. Meanwhile, the annual mean water-soluble concentrations of 12 elements (Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Cd and Pb) in PM2.5 ranged from 0.152±0.073 ngm-3 for Co to 152±94 ngm-3 for Zn; All elements show spatial variation with the highest levels at HZ and the lowest at LA. Soluble concentration of trace elements in winter were 1.17-3.28 folds higher than that of summer. The total concentrations of 17 measure elements in fine particles (Dp < 2.1 μm) during the haze period ranged from 0.51 ngm-3(Co) to 1.53 μgm −3 (K) with a sum of 5.53 μgm−3. However, the chemical composition of elements in fine particles was changed during the non-haze days, with a range of 0.24 ngm-3 (Co) to 1.52 μgm −3 (Ca) with a sum of 3.49 μgm−3. (3) The enrichment factors (EFs) of Na, Mg, Al, K, Ca, Ti, Mn, Fe and Co in PM2.5 samples based on total concentrations were less than or close to 10; In comparison, V, Cr, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Cd and Pb were enriched in aerosols with EFs higher than 10, suggesting the significant impacts by anthropogenic emissions. Additionaly, the water-soluble fractions of most elements (except Ti and Cr) in PM2.5 showed higher EF values than the total fractions. Five sources including coal combustion (4.1%), industry emissions (16.3%), soil dust (61.3%), heavy oil combustion (3.1%) and traffic emissions (15.2%) were identified for the water-soluble concentrations of 12 elements by PCA analysis and PMF modeling. (4) Regarding the bioaccessibilites of elements in PM2.5, mean bioaccessibilities in water are with the order of Pb (72.0%) > Cd (68.7%) >Mn (63.1%) > Zn (57.6%) > Cu (51.6%) > As (38.5%) > Co (34.4%) > Ni (30.1%) > V (26.8%) > Fe (18.5%) > Cr (10.4%) > Ti (10.0%). In particular, the mean bioaccesibilty in ALF presented a decreasing order as follows: Pb (77.5%) >Mn (77.0%) > Cd (73.1%) > Zn (68.4%) > Cu (61.9%) > As (53.1%) > Co (44.8%) > Ni (44.1%) >V (42.0%) > Cr (36.1%) > Fe (24.7%) > Ti (20.4%). Specifically, the mean bioaccessibilty exhibited a decreasing order of Pb (31.2%) > As (30.3%) > Zn (30.0%) > Cu (29.6%) > Mn (27.3%) > Cd (24.9%) > Co (23.7%) > V (15.0%) > Fe (9.0%) > Ni (8.1%) > Cr (6.9%) > Ti (5.2%) in the Gamble's solution. The results from the MPPD model showed particles in the H region have the highest deposition fraction, followed by the P and TB region. The MPPD modeling results also revealed that the deposition fraction of PM2.5 particles in H region was 0.339 and 0.249 for children and adults, respectively. (5) The integrated non-carcinogenic risks based on the water-soluble concentration of toxic elements in PM2.5 and deposition fraction living in all four sampling sites at the SYRD region are 0.19 (LA) -0.29 (HZ) for adults and 0.088 (LA) - 0.13 (HZ) for children, which were lower than the safe level (=1). However, the integrated carcinogenic risks from three exposure pathways posed by six toxic elements (Cr(VI), Co, Ni, As, Cd and Pb) ranged from 9.61×10-6 to 14.4×10-6 for adults and 9.36×10-6 to 14.0×10-6 for children, which mainly caused by As that emitted from coal combustion. Dermal contact contributed the highest risks, followed by inhalation and ingestion. Among the four sites, HZ had the highest health risks, followed by NQ, UN and LA. Furthermore, health risks assessed with total elemental concentration in fine (Dp < 2.1 μm) and coarse (2.1μm < Dp < 9.0μm) particles. It was found that both non-carcinogenic of adults and carcinogenic risks of adults and children were seriously higher than the safety level. The non-carcinogenic and carcinogenic risks in the coarse particles were 87.4%-96.2% and 108%-117% of that in fine particles, respectively. These results imply that adults and children were suffered from serious carcinogenic risks above the safety level mainly caused by As that emitted from coal combustion in 4 sites from the SYRD region. Therefore, strict controlling stragtagy should be developed to reduce the levels of toxic elements especially for As that emitted from coal combustion.

There is a clear unmet clinical need for innovative approaches to organ reconstruction and regeneration. Allografting, autologous reconstruction and prosthetics have well-known limitations. Although tissue engineering holds promise of biological substitutes for synthetic regenerative implants to replace damaged tissue and to restore its structure and functions, biofunctional scaffolds and accessible cell resources are still lacking. Collagen has been clinically used as scaffolds for tissue reconstruction for many years due its availability in large quantities, biocompatibility, biodegradability. On the other hand, 3D printing has an advantage of producing a scaffold with complex geometry, interconnected pores in varying sizes to promote cell adhesion, proliferation and migration. However, 3D printing collagen scaffolds is not trivial and suffers problems such as a slow gelation time, poor formability and mechanical properties. Adult adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells (ADMSCs) are one of appealing cell resources for tissue regeneration and stem cell therapies due to their availability with less ethical and invasive concerns, and a great capacity of self-renewal while maintaining their multipotency. This project develops versatile collagen and its nanocomposites-based scaffolds as a platform for tissue/organ repair and regeneration through advanced 3D printing technology, especially for cartilage regeneration. A reverse 3D printing technique has been developed to manufacture the collagen and collagen/gelatin/chitosan (CGC) based composite scaffolds and collagen/PCL hybrid scaffolds with ECM-like hierarchical porous structure, enhanced mechanical properties and biological functions. Furthermore, cellular responses of using human dermal fibroblasts (HDF), the viability and chondrogenic differentiation of human adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cell (hADSCs) and rat animal model study on the printed collagen-based scaffold have been systematically studied. The hierarchical interconnected porous structure of the collagen-based scaffolds with enhanced mechanical properties will provide a micro-niche for guiding the adhesion, migration, proliferation and differentiation of human MSCs in 3D in vitro and tissue ingrowth and vascularization in vivo. Overall, collagen-based series scaffold by advanced reverse 3D printing technology hold promises for personalized and biologically responsive soft tissue implants and implantable devices with better mechanical matches and tissue integration.

This thesis investigates the question 'How might The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius influence the writing of poetry?' The creative practice section consists of a collection of poetry written during and after I made The Spiritual Exercises. In Chapter One, drawing on the writing of Roland Barthes, I characterise The Spiritual Exercises as a series of 'texts' rather than a single book. I discuss how the term 'influence' might be understood before illustrating the influence of The Spiritual Exercises on the poetry of Robert Southwell and Gerard Manley Hopkins. I explore how making The Exercises might lead to poetic retellings of biblical stories with reference to Samuel Tongues' concept of poetic paragesis. I then discuss the relationship between poetry and prayer extending Antonio Spadaro's idea of the threshold between poetry and prayer. Chapters Two and Three offer studies of the work of Denise Levertov and Ted Hughes. I argue that The Spiritual Exercises led to shifts in the work of Levertov and Hughes. Levertov did not retell biblical stories in her post-Ignatian poetry, but utilised them as starting points for reflection on her own faith. By contrast I suggest that meditation influenced Hughes to engage with the Bible at a deeper level and to retell stories in surprising ways. The poetry of both poets illustrates the ways in which the threshold between poetry and prayer can be crossed. A final bridging chapter reflects on my creative practice, highlighting similarities and differences between my own experience of writing poetry influenced by The Spiritual Exercises and the work of Levertov and Hughes. I conclude that The Spiritual Exercises, as a process of meditation, influences the writing of poetry. Ignatian meditation leads to shifts in theme and tone of poetry and can support the creation of imagery. The Spiritual Exercises lead to imaginative retellings of biblical stories and enables poetry to cross the threshold between poetry and prayer in both directions.

This thesis is a study of legitimacy and protest policing in contemporary Hong Kong through a framework called the legitimist game. Legitimacy describes power relations that are recognised as rightful. It has become an established concept in criminology, with a growing body of literature within the last two decades. However, the literature has focused almost entirely on quantitative analyses of community surveys of public perceptions of police legitimacy and the implications for public behaviour. Qualitative studies of legitimacy are rare; more crucially, legitimacy at protests remains largely unexplored. My research seeks to fill this gap in our knowledge by exploring the experiences and expectations of protestors as well as their perceptions of police. The data come from the 2016-17 and 2019 research phases, 17 months of field observations and a total of 40 in-depth interviews. Insights from Wittgenstein’s language game (1958) are applied, for the first time, to a criminological analysis of legitimacy. The bodies of literature on social movement and protest policing are reviewed. It is found possible to improve the dialogic model of legitimacy (Tankebe 2013; Bottoms and Tankebe 2012) by using a game metaphor. The findings are presented in terms of 1) games in the field, and 2) experiences and perceptions; these are drawn from the field and interview data respectively. The field data from the two phases are separately discussed to inform us of the situations in these periods. Major roles are observed. Cooperative moves are seen to become aggressive due to both ideology and sentiments. The moves are made according to rules, which are turning from being ritualized to sentimental. The protestors’ experience resonates with Brodeur’s (1983) idea of “high policing” with nationalist elements. There are issues and misunderstandings around their basic expectations. They also gather self-legitimacy through their definition of Hong Kong, charisma, and an intuitive sense of legitimacy. The thesis ends with summaries with respect to research questions and chapters, as well as discussions of limitations, implications and the matter of change.

The firefly luciferase (Fluc) bioluminescence system has been widely studied and used by biomedical researchers for in vitro assays as well as a wide variety of optical imaging applications in small animals. However, Fluc is immunogenic to mice which limits its applications, especially in longitudinal experiments requiring time courses extending over more than four weeks. Murine acyl-CoA synthetases (ACSs) are structurally and functionally similar to Flucs and as native mouse proteins are inherently non-immunogenic. Both ACS and Fluc enzymes are composed of N and C-terminal domains (NTD and CTD). A strategy of hybridisation between Photinus pyralis (Ppy) Fluc and several medium-chain ACSs (ACSMs) was employed with the aim of creating hybrids with minimal immunogenicity whilst maintaining brightness when ultimately expressed in BALB/c mice. Several hybrid variants were created with regions of importance substituted into an ACSM backbone, but all the constructs tested failed to produce any bioluminescence when expressed in E. coli. Hybrids created containing the NTD of Ppy Fluc and the CTD of murine ACSMs 1, 2, and 3 were named PpA1, PpA2, and PpA3 respectively. Light emission of these hybrids was respectively ∼0.9%, ∼0.004%, and ∼0.2% that of WT Ppy Fluc when expressed in E. coli, but PpA1 was ∼10% and PpA3 was ∼0.2% as bright as when expressed in HEK cells. The PpA1 hybrid was selected as the best candidate and was expressed in immunocompromised NSG™ mice, producing ∼45% the light output of WT Ppy Fluc. Further modificationsto PpA1 included a construct which replaced a major epitope in the Ppy Fluc NTD (G160 - V168) of PpA1 with the equivalent sequence from a highly similar luciferase with lower predicted immunogenicity; when expressed in HEK cells this construct was marginally brighter than PpA1, emitting light with λmax 10 nm red-shifted.

The poetry of Wallace Stevens, constructed as it is around the poet's central insight that poetry is an unofficial view of Being, has invited philosophical commentary from critics such as Simon Critchley and J. Hillis Miller who attempt to read Stevens' imaginative engagements with reality as indicative of his continued interest in the most fundamental questions concerning the links between poetic language, epistemology and ontology. Yet, despite Marjorie Perloff's indication that a study of Stevens' poetic vocabulary yields repeated emphasis of the terms "being", "consciousness", "reality" and "truth", no sustained attempt has been made to read Stevens with a philosopher who aligns poetic insight with a reconceptualization of the metaphysical significance of these concepts as defining a new mode of philosophizing. This dissertation will read Stevens' poetry with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in order to examine how both treat poetic writing as more philosophical than philosophical theories, not due to its lack of propositional statements, but because language places us in appropriative proximity with Being in a way which philosophy cannot. To focus Stevens' poetry through Heidegger is also to concretize the poet's incessant inquiry into the relationship 'between phenomenal consciousness and ... external reality that provides the ground for it' (Sahner 65). More than that, it is ultimately to see both philosopher and poet engaged in probing the ways in which the affective language of poetry seizes and unsettles us by placing us in open response to our environment - an 'obscure threshold of sense' (Jean-Luc Nancy "Sense" 83) which replaces the interiority of representation with the mutual appropriation of Da-sein and Being. To the extent that both Stevens and Heidegger understand the act of perception to be more than just a passive observation of an objective world which stands apart from a deep understanding of the human being's interpretive investments in reality, phenomenological engagement is freighted with philosophical weight, for it can never be a simple description of the world as an object of dispassionate observation. Rather, perception is a statement of how the perceiver finds himself in an attitude of comportment towards the world. For both, truth is not a function of correspondence between theory and a state of affairs it attempts to encapsulate, but a deep revelation about the infinite horizon of the world. I will thus argue that it is Heidegger's philosophical arguments about the way the human being is always sustaining himself in a relationship towards Being which provide a compelling theoretical framework through which we can understand how Stevens positions the poetic self. This conjunction allows us to unpack the primacy both Stevens and Heidegger accords to poetic language and the poet, for it is the poet who places us in life-sustaining communion with the world, and in so doing, opens up new ways of approaching subjectivity as being endlessly alive to its imaginative appropriation of reality.

During the pathogenesis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and in subsequent exacerbations, neutrophilic inflammation predominates and contributes to disease progression. Levels of neutrophil-derived microvesicles (NMVs; small extracellular vesicles formed from membrane blebbing in resting and activated cells) have previously been shown to be elevated in COPD patient sputum and in the circulation during inflammation. Evidence of the pro-inflammatory activity of NMVs in several cell types, along with an ability to increase epithelial monolayer permeability, led to the hypothesis that NMVs are released upon neutrophil activation in the circulation and the inflamed airway environment and are subsequently internalised by lung epithelial cells, inducing their pro-inflammatory activation and dysfunction. The overall aim of my PhD was to investigate the role of NMVs in lung inflammation. This was firstly done by characterising circulating MVs in COPD patients as both potential disease biomarkers and as mediators of inflammation using stored plasma samples from two COPD patient cohorts. Subsequently, it was crucial to isolate human neutrophils from the peripheral blood of healthy volunteers so as to generate, isolate and characterise a pure population of NMVs from these cells and to investigate the functional effects of these vesicles using the bronchial epithelial cell line BEAS2B. Finally, to further understand the biological relevance of NMV effects in the lung, C57BL/6 mice were utilised in a series of experiments to explore lung inflammation and NMV fate. Key findings: 1. Plasma MV matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9) content is significantly increased in COPD patients compared with age-matched controls, however, numbers of circulating leukocytederived MVs are not differential between these groups. 2. NMVs from fMLP-stimulated healthy participant neutrophils contain active MMP-9 and can degrade extracellular matrix proteins, but activated and quiescent neutrophils do not produce differential NMV numbers. 3. NMVs are rapidly taken up by bronchial epithelial cells, likely via an endocytic mechanism, with functional effects of NMVs on epithelial activation, barrier integrity and proliferation. 4. In vivo in mice, airway administration of NMVs does not induce or augment lung inflammation, instead, mass uptake and clearance of these NMVs by alveolar macrophages occurs. In this thesis I have shown that MV-associated protein content is altered in COPD, and investigation of these differences will be important going forward in defining the role of NMVs in chronic lung diseases. Degradation of extracellular matrix shown here and epithelial cell activation and permeability induced by NMVs when applied directly to these cells define key pathological events in COPD and indicate a role of these vesicles in epithelial dysfunction. In contrast, NMV uptake by alveolar macrophages was identified as a mechanism of NMV clearance in healthy lung tissue. Together, these findings provide novel insight into neutrophil interactions and activity in the lungs. This work contributed to our understanding of the processes occurring in inflammation and identified several valuable avenues for future investigation to understand more about complex conditions like COPD.

The geodynamo is maintained by turbulent rotating convection in Earth's liquid iron outer core. Core dynamics are inaccessible to direct measurement and our understanding comes from a combination of observations, theoretical arguments, laboratory experiments and numerical simulations. The vast range of spatial and temporal scales present prevent numerical or physical experiments from being able to reproduce the convective state of Earth's core exactly. This motivates systematic studies in which we attempt to understand the fundamentals of convection over the broad range of accessible parameter space with a view to identifying asymptotic behaviour; if such behaviour is found, then this could allow extrapolation to Earth's core values. We present a combined numerical-laboratory survey of hydrodynamic convection to elucidate the role of different boundary conditions, geometries and the influence of rotation over a wide range of parameter space. We focus on transitions in thermal convection with a particular interest in the constraining effects of rotation. The transition from rapidly rotating to weakly rotating convection is hypothesised to be controlled by the thermal boundary layers. Using plane-layer Rayleigh-Benard convection simulations we determine a robust definition of the thermal boundary layer which can be used for non-rotating or rotating convection with different thermal boundary conditions. Different physical regimes of convection are identified in a rotating spherical shell by correlating changes in both local and global flow diagnostics. We identify a regime of quasi-geostrophic turbulence which may be relevant to describing the dynamics of Earth's core. Laboratory experiments and local plane-layer simulations are thought to be analogues for convection in the polar region of a spherical shell and unsurprisingly these modelling approaches do not agree with full spherical shell calculations. In an attempt to unify these different modelling approaches we harvest a fluid region at high latitude and are able to explicitly show good agreement between experiments and local simulations with polar convection. Ultimately this work provides a platform to investigate convection in a regime which bridges that of Earth's core.

This thesis describes investigations of copper-chalcogenide thermoelectrics and the application of advanced structural characterization techniques to explore structure-property correlations. An in-situ cell was designed and developed to study the electrical transport properties and structure of thermoelectric materials. It allows for the simultaneous collection of powder neutron diffraction data and electrical transport data as a function of temperature. An experiment on Cu₂.₁₂₅Ge₀.₈₇₅ZnSe₄ demonstrated that the cell can reliably monitor changes in the structure and thermoelectric properties. The in-situ cell was exploited to investigate n-type thermoelectric materials in the Cu-Fe-S system. A study of CuFeS₂ shows the influence of different structural phases on the Seebeck coefficient. Meanwhile, the origins of anomalies in the electrical transport property data of samples with compositions Cu₉Fe₈S₁₆ and Cu₉Fe₉S₁₆ are revealed. The observed local maximum in the power factors are linked to structural phase transitions over temperatures of T = 425 to 500 K. Total neutron scattering experiments on bornite (Cu₅FeS₄) reveal the nature of the copper and iron ordering within its three structural phases. The transition at ca. 475 K can be described by a partial disordering of the iron and vacancies, the transition at ca. 530 K leads to full disorder of the cations and vacancies. Following this, the thermoelectric performance of bornite was enhanced by introducing small deviations from the ideal stoichiometry. The thermoelectric figure of merit was improved from ZT=0.44 in Cu₅FeS₄ to ZT=0.79 in Cu₄.₉₆₈Fe₀.₉₇₂S₄ at 550 K. The low-temperature structure of the high-performance thermoelectric tetrahedrite (Cu²⁺)₂(Cu⁺)₁₀(Sb³⁺)₄(S²⁻)₁₃ has been determined and the Cu(II) species located within the structure. This has allowed the origin of the magnetic properties of the material to be understood for the first time. This collection of studies on thermoelectric copper sulphides will contribute to bringing us closer to realising low-cost, low-toxicity thermoelectric modules.

This PhD thesis is composed of three chapters on macroeconomics to investigate the aggregate productivity dynamics in Vietnam using plant-level data and focusing on the role of inefficient allocation of resources in an emerging economy. In the first chapter, entitled "Misallocation in the Vietnamese manufacturing sector", we focus on the static misallocation and distortions with an attempt to study the question of resource misallocation in Vietnam during the period 2000-2013 by adopting the framework of Hsieh and Klenow (2009) and the decomposition method of Chen and Irarrazabal (2015) with minor modification. The study is based on data from the annual Enterprises Survey collected by the General Statistics Office of Vietnam. We find significant misallocation of resources in Vietnamese manufacturing. Our results show that the indicator of allocative efficiency, the variation of revenue productivity, obviously surpasses that of the US economy. In the case that all output and capital distortions are eliminated, potential TFP gains could be equal to 89.6–106.7%. In addition, if the Vietnamese manufacturing sector could move to the same level of misallocation as the US, the aggregate TFP could increase by 32.68–44.65%. Besides, about 88% of the TFP growth can be attributed to the changes in efficient TFP and allocational efficiency accounts for 12%.Further, there is an improvement in allocational efficiency, judged by the fact that TFPR distributions became less dispersed. Also, state-owned and collective plants have lower TFPR than private and foreign ones, bigger plants have higher TFPR and older plants have lower TFPR; collective and stateowned plants tend to face output distortions, private plants tend to face more capital distortions; plants of all sizes seem to face the prevailing output distortions and plants of all ages face capital distortions. When studying the plant size distribution, we find that the actual plant size distribution is less dispersed than efficiently sized ones and the efficient plant size distribution becomes less dispersed over time. Compared to efficient size distribution, many plants overproduced in this period and should be reduced to reach their optimum size. Looking into the key forces of misallocation, the decomposition similar to Chen and Irarrazabal (2015) shows that the total allocation gain is primarily led by TFPR variation. In a modified decomposition and an investigation of TFP gain with the absence of each type of distortion, we find that the TFPR variation is driven mostly by output distortions, with capital distortions playing a smaller role. On the other hand, the TFPR variation is determined mainly by the between-group component of different groups of TFPQ. That between-group TPFR variation happens mostly in the lowest and the highest productivity plants. The second chapter titled "Productivity dynamics in Vietnam: an application of dynamic Olley-Pakes productivity decomposition" analyses the sources of aggregate productivity growth and firm dynamics. Using a similar dataset as in the previous chapter, we divide the whole sample into three groups of plants, that of survivous, entrants and exiters. Applying the Melitz and Polanec (2015)'s decomposition, we find that the increase in aggregate productivity relative to that in 2000 is mostly due to the growing contribution of surviving plants in which the improvement in productivity within plants plays a large part. Comparing the productivity of exiters and entrants to that of survivors in the corresponding period, we find a positive contribution of exiters and a negative contribution of entering plants. The positive contribution of surviving plants and the positive contribution of exiting plants are consistent when we use two alternative decomposition methods, such as those of Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan (2001) and Griliches and Regev (1995). Looking deeply into the plant dynamics, we explore the plant's productivity life cycle and find that new plants can learn from market functioning. Precisely, we observe that the group of plants surviving throughout the period of 2000-2013 has the highest productivity and new entrants could not catch up these plants. However, when we relax the definition of incumbents at time t as plants being at both time t - 1 and t, we find that new entrants can catch up the incumbents 3 to 5 years after entering the market. Exiting plants are less productive than the incumbents and the gap in productivity is more pronounced when they are closer to their exit year. Further, we apply the method of Hashiguchi et al. (2015) to analyse the contribution of surviving plants and plant dynamics in some specific groups of plants. We divide our sample according to three alternative criteria: their two-digit industry, their ownership status and their export status. We find that the between-plant component could improve when the industries increase their foreign owners' value-added share. We also record a better market share reallocation for exporting plants during 2010-2013 and for private ownership plants from 2006. The third chapter titled "Markups and Trade liberalisation: the case of Vietnamese manufacturing sector" focuses on the role of markups variation as a source of misallocation. Following the methodology of De Loecker and Warzynski (2012) in estimating plant markup, we firstly investigate the markups characteristics and find that the aggregate markup in Vietnamese manufacturing decreases gradually overtime. That suggests a higher competition between plants and makes plants change their prices to better reflect their costs, therefore benefiting the consumers. Moreover, we observe a lower markup dispersion in 2013 in comparison to 2000, implying a better market share reallocation between manufacturing plants. To better understand the source of the reducing aggregate markup, we decompose it at industry-level into the change of markup within industry, the change in the composition between industries and the joint change in markup and the industry composition. We find that the markup change within the industry contributes mostly to the fall in the aggregate markup. We then decompose the aggregate markup at plant-level using the insight of Melitz and Polanec (2015). Dividing plants into three groups (survivors, entrants and exiters), we find that the decline in markups within plants drives the aggregate markup change. Looking at the relationship between markups and export status, we find that the higher markup for exporting firms is the results of not only the selection process but also the learning-by-doing process. Indeed, plants having prior success (larger size, higher productivity, wagebill and markups) are likely to export. After entering export markets, they continue to charge higher markups. To analyse the reason behind the decrease in markup dispersion, we look at the role of trade reform: the accession into the WTO in early 2007. Following Lu and Yu (2015) in using the difference-in-differences methodology, we find evidence that trade liberalisation reduces markups dispersion measured as the Thiel-index. This effect is more pronounced in the two-digit industries with relatively more state-owned plants.

Almost all mature eukaryotic mRNAs contain a 3′ polyadenosine (poly(A)) tail, which promotes nuclear export of mRNAs, protects transcripts from exonucleolytic decay, and increases translation efficiency. As the poly(A) tail is involved in many steps of gene expression, its length is highly regulated. Poly(A) tail shortening, known as deadenylation, represses gene expression by initiating mRNA decay and inhibiting translation. Deadenylation is required for mRNA homeostasis; moreover, specific transcripts can be targeted for deadenylation, enabling gene expression to respond to external stimuli. In eukaryotes, cytoplasmic deadenylation is mainly carried out by two conserved multiprotein complexes: Pan2-Pan3 and Ccr4-Not. This thesis focuses on the in vitro characterisation of Pan2-Pan3. While Pan2-Pan3 and Ccr4-Not show poly(A) preference, it was unknown how the conserved exonucleases Pan2 and Caf1 recognise poly(A). In Chapter 2, structural and biochemical studies reveal that these DEDD-family deadenylases recognise the intrinsic stacked, helical structure of single-stranded poly(A) RNA. Recognition of this conformation in different biological contexts, enabled by the unique physicochemical properties of adenine, suggests a possible reason for poly(A) conservation. Chapter 3 examines the in vitro activity of Pan2-Pan3 and how it is regulated, particularly by the cytoplasmic poly(A)-binding protein Pab1. These studies elucidate domain requirements and species-specific features of Pab1-dependent regulation of Pan2-Pan3. My experiments further examine how Pan2-Pan3 may be recruited by sequence-specific RNA-binding proteins. Together, these results provide insights into Pan2-Pan3 deadenylation and how this dynamic process could be regulated and thereby influence post-transcriptional gene expression.

This thesis discusses three topics concerned with the corporate use of financial derivatives. The first paper studies the effects of interest rate swaps on firms’ default risk. The second paper examines the relationship between creditor rights and airlines’ hedging behaviour. The final paper investigates how managerial holdings of inside debt (pension benefits and deferred compensation) can impact the decision to hedge via the use of interest rate swaps. The first paper attempts to examine the question of whether the use of interest rate swaps by corporates and the direction of interest rate swaps increase or decrease firms’ probability of default. Our sample consists of United Kingdom (UK) listed non-financial firms for the period between 2001 and 2015. Using a pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model, we document that the use of interest rate swaps reduces the probability of default for both firms swapping into fixed and those swapping into floating. This result is robust when we use a range of econometric methods, including a fixed effects model, a propensity score matching technique, an instrumental variables approach, and a System Generalised Method of Moments model. Additionally, we find that a failure to account for differences between small and large firms can lead to incomplete or misleading inferences of the impact of interest rate swap usage on firms’ default risk. Our results show that whereas the use of interest rate swaps by small firms, irrespective of the direction of the swap, leads to a reduction in their default risk, large firms that swap into floating-rate debt are associated with an increase in their probability of default. Additionally, we show that the negative impact of swapping into fixed rate debt on firms’ default risk remains the same during the period of heightened economic policy uncertainty, whereas the effectiveness of swapping into floating rate debt in decreasing firms’ probability of default is weakened during this period. Moreover, this paper demonstrates that the recent period of zero lower bound interest rates affects the efficacy of swapping into fixed rate debt versus swapping into floating rate debt. Our results indicate that while swapping into fixed rate debt leads to a reduction in the probability of default during the zero lower bound period, the risk-mitigating effects of swapping into floating rate debt are significantly dampened during this period. In the second paper, we use a sample consisting of airlines from 36 countries over the period from 2002 to 2016 to investigate the impact of creditor rights on corporate hedging behaviour, measured by the extent of jet fuel hedging. Using a pooled Ordinary Least Squares model, we find that airlines undertake more jet fuel hedging in stronger creditor rights countries. These results are robust when we employ other econometric methods, such as a Tobit model, a Heckman model, or an instrumental variable technique. Moreover, we identify six creditor rights reforms during our sample period and employ a model that is akin to a difference-in-difference model. The results show that the change that increases the creditor rights index can lead to an increase in airlines’ jet fuel hedging. In addition, we find that the positive impact of creditor rights on the extent of jet fuel hedging is weakened during the financial crisis but strengthened during periods of high jet fuel prices. This study also sheds new light on the role of hedging in ameliorating the adverse effects of strong creditor rights. We show that jet fuel hedging can boost an airline’s leverage. Furthermore, hedging allows an airline to engage in high-risk but potentially value-enhancing investment activities, therefore alleviating the underinvestment problem observed in strong creditor rights countries. The third paper looks at how managerial compensation incentives, measured using data on the chief executive officer (CEO) pension benefits and deferred compensation (commonly referred to as inside debt), affect the decision to hedge via the use of interest rate swaps. Our sample consists of 912 listed United States (US) firms during the periods from 2006 to 2014. Using a probit model, we show that firms with more CEO inside debt are less likely to use interest rate swaps. Moreover, using a pooled OLS model, we find a negative relationship between CEO inside debt holdings and the extent to which a firm hedges using interest rate swaps. In this paper, we attempt to distinguish between protected and non-protected CEO inside debt. Whereas protected CEO inside debt is funded and secured, the non-protected one is not. Our result suggests that the negative association between CEO inside debt and hedging by interest rate swaps only exists if the CEO inside debt is non-protected. These results are robust when we employ a range of different econometric methods, including a Tobit regression model and an instrumental variables technique. Furthermore, we show that the negative impact of non-protected CEO inside debt is weakened when firms are financially constrained or during periods of heightened interest rate uncertainty. Finally, we document that non-protected CEO inside debt can have negative effects on firms’ default risk. However, our further analysis indicates that the negative effects of non-protected CEO inside debt on firms’ default risk are dampened when firms hedge using interest rate swaps, which can explain why firms with large CEO inside debt holdings hedge less with interest rate swaps.

This thesis is the result of 1.5 years of participant observation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, PRC, and analyses Chinese ‘Cultural Construction’ policies among Xinjiang’s ‘Torghut Mongols’. It explores the complex social and political negotiations that transformed an officially recognized ‘epic’ (The Heroic Epic Jangar) as cultural product into the representative ‘culture’ of Mongol dominated Hoboksar County—but ‘culture’ understood within the narrow officialized discourses of Chinese culture-politics and policy. This dissertation engages ‘anthropology of policy’, arguing that ‘policy’ and authoritative political discourses in China may be productively analyzed as aspects of ‘ritualization’. This thesis attempts to bring ritual theory in anthropology into intercourse with topics as diverse as genre theory, rhetoric, exemplarity, and performance, arguing that Chinese political discourse is far more than mere sloganeering. Instead, this thesis attempts to show how these discourses act as mechanisms to shape space for autonomous action. Specifically, this dissertation illustrates how a long-form narrative poem, now known as the ‘The Heroic Epic Jangar’ is discursively constructed as a central aspect of ‘local traditional culture’ among some Hoboksar residents. The first part of this thesis provides ethnographic context and theoretical parameters by examining local narratives surrounding the ‘epic’ and the historically implicated ‘sensitivity’ of the region and its social and political consequences. Here, this thesis proposes that authoritative political discourses work as border-producing mechanisms through which highly strategic ritualized deployments of political setphrases shape space for autonomous action. The second part begins by describing the complex intertextual generic relations between set political formulations that produce a ‘scientific’ outlook, and ‘objective’ research and analysis relating to the Xinjiang Mongol ‘Heroic Epic Jangar’ that at once constructs an ‘epic’, but also situates it within acceptable official narratives of the natural progression of a unified socialist state. It then examines the processes by which Jangar comes to be deployed as a central aspect of Hoboksar’s developmental agendas through the uniquely Chinese interpretations of ‘Cultural Heritage’ politics. Informed by the theoretical discussions developed throughout this thesis, this dissertation concludes by describing how a rigid normative regime has developed that both informs and restricts the environment in which practices and performances of Hoboksar’s Jangar as ‘cultural heritage’ are articulated. Here, this dissertation shows how such work facilitates both national and local goals by way of creative, yet often confusing and ‘formalistic’ means by elaborating on the complex negotiations of ‘correct’ political practice ‘in form’, and how through a perceived responsibility to properly reproduce set scripts of speech and behavior regarding ‘culture’ and ‘cultural development’, the ‘cultural spirit’ of Jangar becomes an ‘awkward exemplar’ as it is forcefully discursively connected to numerous and often contradictory cultural narratives and political interests.