Open Research Exeter - University of Exeter
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Code supporting "Amygdala GABA Neurons: Gatekeepers of Stress and Reproduction in Female Mice"
No full textThis is the code for data analysis and computational modelling carried out in the manuscript:Amygdala GABA Neurons: Gatekeepers of Stress and Reproduction in Female MiceAbstractStress can disrupt menstrual cycles, impair fertility and cause reproductive disfunction. The posterodorsal medial amygdala (MePD) integrates stress signals and regulates the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) pulse generator through a dense network of GABA and Urocortin-3 (UCN3) neurons, yet the mechanisms underlying the circuitry remain poorly understood. Here, we combine in vivo mini-endoscopic calcium imaging, optogenetics, clustering analysis, and computational modeling to investigate the MePD circuitry. We uncover two anti-correlated GABA subpopulations in the MePD that are involved in the response to restraint stress and UCN3 neuron stimulation. Computational modeling suggests that mutual inhibition between these GABA groups drives their anti-correlated activity and predicts how these interactions shape downstream responses to stimulation of GABA and UCN3 neurons. In vivo optogenetics confirms that GABA neurons are critical for transmitting UCN3 signals to regulate luteinizing hormone (LH) pulse frequency. Together, our findings reveal amygdala GABAergic circuit mechanisms that mediate stress effects on reproductive health, linking emotional processing and neuroendocrine control. The manuscript is accepted for publication. The preprint is available at: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.06.631361v4The source data to reproduce the figures for manuscript is available in ORE: https://doi.org/10.24378/exe.31021447</p
Prefiguring Truth: The Limits of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry
No full textPublic inquiries operate as privileged instruments of sense-making, defined by a series of epistemological and methodological commitments. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry was established to uncover the truth of the fire in which seventy-two people died. This article interrogates the truth-seeking and truth-producing practices of the Inquiry. These shape the contours of the account of the fire that it has produced: predisposing it to particular forms of explanation, whilst excluding others. We describe this as a process of prefiguration in which the scope and form of the Inquiry circumscribes and foreshadows its findings. This invites us to see the Inquiry as productive of the social reality it seeks to describe, raising important questions about how the Inquiry operated and its role in shaping public understanding of truth, accountability, and justice in the aftermath of the fire.</p
Writing the Protected Landscape: Authenticity, the Creative Economy and the New Nature Writing
No full textIn this thesis I examine the professional discourses of England’s protected landscapes and their relationship to fiction, nature writing and poetry. The research for this thesis has been conducted at a time when protected landscapes are under increasing threat from a multitude of pressures; housing development, organisational cuts in governmental funding and questions about their value to the nation are being asked. This thesis is timely in its thoughtful analysis of the way documents are used to articulate a ‘protected’ designation and provides new analysis of how these documents use literary techniques to advocate for such landscapes.
The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the importance of authenticity to these protected landscape designations. The effect of authenticity generates revenue for the creative economy, but there is also a social and political benefit that contributes significantly to making a defensible case for protecting the landscape. I approached this research with a rich understanding of working in the environmental sector and used a geographical methodology to define the fiction, nature writing and poetry that I analysed alongside business texts of protected landscapes. I began my research with reading the work of Sarah Brouillette, a Professor of English at Carleton University, whose academic research examines the creative economy, and from there I questioned authenticity in heritage and aesthetics of authenticity in the discourses.
The results of this thesis demonstrate the challenges in defining a business text outside of a literary genre, because they are so often constructed in a way that behaves like a literary text. My research shows that new nature writing, and the business texts of protected landscapes, are often interwoven in their purpose and the effect of authenticity is a clever yet necessary tool to demonstrate the importance of the intangible and subjective concept of natural beauty.
My research concludes with a recognition that the complexity of the purpose of these narratives makes it hard to separate business texts using literary techniques and literary texts acting as business texts to promote a landscape and create a sense of place. The interesting interplay between these discourses, protected landscapes, and the creative economy contributes new and original ideas which, with shifting political sands, become more relevant and poignant as time goes on.</p
‘We should be colliers’: Coal, contagion, and the Elizabethan theatre
No full textThis article evaluates the significance of the collier's presence on the Elizabethan stage. Through analyses of plays including Damon and Pythias, Like Will to Like, The Devil and His Dame, and A Knack to Know a Knave, I trace the intersecting cultural and theatrical associations that stage colliers acquired for early modern audiences. I critique the geographically, racially, religiously, and socially prejudicial links contemporary authors drew between colliers and contagion, while also assessing the potential environmental implications of representing the coal trade at a time of rapid urban expansion and increasing atmospheric pollution. In conclusion, I argue that, for some playgoers at least, the stage collier's presence could have evoked both the social and the environmental price of Elizabethan England's growing reliance on coal and charcoal to fuel industrial, domestic, and even theatrical activity.</p
Mapping applications of computer simulation in orthopedic services: a topic modeling approach
No full textOrthopedic services are characterized by high patient volumes, long elective waits, unpredictable emergency
demand, and close coupling with other hospital processes. These present significant challenges in meeting
operational targets while maintaining quality of care. In healthcare, simulation has been widely used
for addressing such challenges. Topic modeling is used to identify and analyze academic papers using
operational-level simulation for orthopedic service delivery. We analyzed 37 papers over twenty years,
combining a structured analysis with topic modeling to categorize and map applications. Despite widespread
recognition of its potential, simulation remains underutilized in orthopedics, with fragmented application and
limited real-world implementation. Recent trends indicate a shift toward system-wide approaches that better
align with operational realities and stakeholder needs. Future research should aim to bridge methodological
innovation with collaboration and practical application, such as hybrid and real-time simulation approaches
focusing on stakeholder needs, and integrating relevant operational performance metrics.</p
Revealing (in)security: Scandals, guilty secrets, and the promise of counter-forensics
No full textMaking (in)security public often occurs through the frame of scandal, which reveals failures as individuated malpractice or malfunction but forecloses acknowledgement of systemic and structural harms. Drawing on British public inquiries (including Bloody Sunday, the Iraq War, and Grenfell Tower), the paper explains how this foreclosure occurs through reliance on methodological individualism and the exposure of individual responsibility (“guilty secrets”) as a way of staging credibility. An alternative form of making security public is found in civil society “counter-forensics” groups. Using the interactions between the Iraq Body Count (IBC) and the Iraq “Chilcot” Inquiry as a case study, the paper shows how counter-forensics reveal patterns of socially mediated and preventable harm. This approach can expand societal acknowledgement of security practices and their harmful effects, providing an alternative register to reveal, debate, and contest (in)security.</p
'The monuments of the dead are not intended to perpetuate the memory of crimes, but to exhibit patterns of virtue’: the rehabilitation of an eighteenth-century roué
No full textThe parish church of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, is famous chiefly for its medieval monuments to the Cockayne family and for Thomas Banks’s effigy of Penelope Boothby. It also boasts, however, a wall tablet by Sir Richard Westmacott commemorating George Errington, senior (died 1769) and junior (died 1795), barristers of the Inns of Court, erected by the latter’s son George Henry Errington. Both of the men commemorated left clear instructions requesting a simple funeral. This article examines the lavish funeral which was nevertheless ordered by the younger George Errington’s executors and explores George Henry Errington’s motivation for commissioning the monument commemorating his father and grandfather. Family papers allow us to reconstruct the detailed expenditure on what was by any standards an extremely expensive funeral and to draw comparisons with similarly ostentatious funerals of the period discussed by scholars. The article will argue that both the funeral and the monument represented an attempt to restore the family’s reputation which had been damaged by the younger George Errington’s irregular personal life which had attracted public attention. By commemorating his father and grandfather together George Henry Errington may have hoped to focus attention on his grandfather’s distinguished legal career and draw attention away from his father’s more chequered life. The ties of association of the Errington family, in London and in Derbyshire, illuminate the social networks of a professional family and lend their experience a wider interest. The article also looks at the wall tablet within the context of Westmacott’s career and oeuvre and uses Errington family correspondence to suggest a revised date for the commissioning of the monument.</p
Digital Transformation Chatbot (DTchatbot): Integrating Large Language Model-based Chatbot in Acquiring Digital Transformation Needs
No full textMany organisations pursue digital transformation to enhance operational efficiency, reduce manual efforts, and optimise processes by automation and digital tools. To achieve this, a comprehensive understanding of their unique needs is required. However, traditional methods, such as expert interviews, while effective, face several challenges, including scheduling conflicts, resource constraints, inconsistency, etc. To tackle these issues, we investigate the use of a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered chatbot to acquire organisations' digital transformation needs. Specifically, the chatbot integrates workflow-based instruction with LLM's planning and reasoning capabilities, enabling it to function as a virtual expert and conduct interviews. We detail the chatbot's features and its implementation. Our preliminary evaluation indicates that the chatbot performs as designed, effectively following predefined workflows and supporting user interactions with areas for improvement. We conclude by discussing the implications of employing chatbots to elicit user information, emphasizing their potential and limitations.</p
After COVID: Between biosecurity and political security in China’s urban governance
No full textThis article traces the lasting transformations in China’s urban grassroots governance system wrought by three years of zero-COVID policy: increased information-gathering and surveillance activities conducted by Residents’ Committees, as well as their integration into the hierarchical bureaucratic system. To demonstrate these transformations, we employ a Foucauldian lens to distinguish between emergency policies introduced during the pandemic that govern public health, which we term biosecurity, and longer-term policies whose object of governance is public order, which we term political security. Using in-depth fieldwork data alongside analysis of relevant legislation, we show that the winding down of biosecurity measures in early 2023 have laid bare an enhanced political security framework, which now forms essential parts of RCs’ daily governing toolkit. We situate these political security measures within two broader changes to China’s post-COVID administrative structure: the delegation of governance tasks from RCs to grid workers, cementing RCs within the administrative hierarchy; and the creation of the Society Work Department of the CCP Central Committee, placing focus on regular home visits and conflict prevention. We conclude that a major legacy of pandemic governance in China is a more powerful system of grassroots bureaucracy capable of the micro-governance of citizens’ private lives.</p
A future capabilities agent for tactical air traffic control
No full textEscalating air traffic demand is driving the adoption of automation to support air traffic controllers, but existing approaches face a trade-off between safety assurance and interpretability. Optimisation-based methods such as reinforcement learning offer strong performance but are difficult to verify and explain, while rules-based systems are transparent yet rarely check safety under uncertainty. This paper outlines Agent Mallard, a forward-planning, rules?based agent for tactical control in systemised airspace that embeds a stochastic digital twin directly into its conflict-resolution loop. Mallard operates on predefined GPS-guided routes, reducing continuous 4D vectoring to discrete choices over lanes and levels, and constructs hierarchical plans from an expert-informed library of deconfliction strategies. A depth-limited backtracking search uses causal attribution, topological plan splicing, and monotonic axis constraints to seek a complete safe plan for all aircraft, validating each candidate manoeuvre against uncertain execution scenarios (e.g., wind variation, pilot response, communication loss) before commitment. Preliminary walkthroughs with UK controllers and initial tests in the BluebirdDT airspace digital twin indicate that Mallard’s behaviour aligns with expert reasoning and resolves conflicts in simplified scenarios. The architecture is intended to combine model-based safety assessment, interpretable decision logic, and tractable computational performance in future structured en-route environments.</p